Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 786

“There’s nothing worse than a white liberal who thinks they’re doing the right thing”: Sherman Alexie on Hollywood diversity, “The Revenant” and why he’s “not the proper kind of Indian”

It’s no secret that the publishing world does not focus enough on books by diverse authors—and it’s even more problematic when it comes to books for kids. The award-winning writer Sherman Alexie (author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” as well as 23 other books, and a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation) is about to release his first picture book for younger children next week. “Thunder Boy Jr.” (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, May 10, $17.99), illustrated by Caldecott Honor winner Yuyi Morales, is a moving story about identity. Thunder Boy Jr. wants to stand out from his dad and have his own name. “I want a name that sounds like me,” Thunder Boy Jr. says. “I want a name that celebrates something cool that I’ve done.” The tale that unfolds is one of a powerful bond between a father and son.

I spoke with Sherman Alexie earlier in the spring about the inspiration behind this book, on not being a “proper kind of Indian,” and why contemporary TV is much better than movies.

How did you come up with the idea for “Thunder Boy Jr.”?

Its beginning, its genesis, even though I hadn’t thought of it as a book back then, was my dad’s funeral and seeing the tombstone. I’m Sherman Alexie Jr., so seeing a tombstone with my name on it really just kicked off all sorts of personal shit.

Was that recently?

2003, so no. Thirteen years ago, but it’s been brewing ever since. I’ve written poems about that moment and nothing ever really coalesced in written form. I talked about it on stage during my performances because it’s a really powerful moment, when I get to give shit to men for their patriarchal bullshit, ego, naming their kids after themselves, and that’s when I lecture the young men who don’t have kids yet. Don’t name your fucking son after yourself. All that stuff was in me, the pressure. I mean, being the son of a father who’s pressured anyway, and then to have the same name, it’s madness. So that concept, the pressure of being named after your father, of being so meshed and identified with this man that you have his name, was always with me. Then combined with me being from a tribe, with all the tribal pressures.

Were there also books you were thinking of from childhood?

I hadn’t even thought about it in those terms, but now that you ask that question, my favorite picture book of all time is “The Snowy Day.” The reservation library had a book sale and I bought the one I read when I was 4. I have the copy from my youth now. I had checked it out 50 times. I mean that book is about a kid going out on his own; he spends the whole day alone.

So that really inspired you?

Subconsciously, yeah, a little brown boy on his own.

But that’s what books do for us, right?

Yeah, they can [become] a part of your DNA.

“Thunder Boy Jr.” is about traditions. How important are traditions to you?

One thing that really bugs me about Native writing for kids, whether written by non-Natives or Natives, is how corny it is. It’s just the same old talking bears… and maybe there are Indians who live their lives that way or talk that way. I don’t know them. I know a lot of Indians, and no Indian I know talks that way. Like in the other culture, we’ve evolved…. I wasn’t going to have some silly Native book. It was going to be utterly contemporary, but using traditional ideas.

What was it like collaborating with Yuyi Morales?

When they said let’s find an illustrator, I said “Send me a bunch of brown people. Men and women.” So it was Asian, Latino, a bunch of African-Americans, just a bunch of different ethnic folks, because I wanted somebody brown. Who would bring that particular perspective to it? And Yuyi, as soon as I saw her art I knew. It had this playfulness to it, and her boys felt like boys, her drawings. And I since learned she has a son…

Is he an inspiration to her?

Yeah, yeah. And just this energy coming off the page, I felt it, I knew she knew boys. So I picked her. But then I kind of stayed out of the way. She read the text and then went with her stuff and her being a mother, and me being a father, and working mostly independently and came to this middle place, which is the book. So she brought in things… One of my favorite images is the mom by the motorcycle with the flower skirt. That’s her completely. As soon as I saw it I went “That’s so perfect!” There’s stuff I commented on that got changed. But by in large it’s all of her original work.

Had you already written the complete story?

When you hire somebody to do the illustrations, [you] just let them work. I loved her art, so let her be the artist. Also, I’m the beginner. She’s got quite a few books under her belt. I let the illustrator do her wonderful job.

This is your first children’s book. What were the particular challenges to writing in this genre?

I’ve been thinking a lot about that because I knew I’d have to talk about it. The difficulty is that you’re writing the book about 70 percent for the kid and about 30 percent for the adult that’s going to read it to them. How do you write for a kid without being condescending, because they’ll sniff that out immediately? How do you write something that has multiple meanings, that will sustain not only the kid’s interest but the adult’s interest as well? So I think it’s not just the surface that’s difficult, it’s layering in multiple meanings, which is what I wanted to do, which is in any literary work what you try to do. I think that’s what made it so difficult to me, was layering in multiple meanings for multiple audiences.

Did you test it out on your own kids?

My own kids, a lot of kids. My friends’ kids. A lot of watching them…

How did they react?

I tried 20 or 30 ideas before this idea. And one I went really far along with, but I couldn’t unlock it. I still wasn’t sure about this one until I actually performed it at readings of my adult work. I said “Let me read this to you.” Because I thought, if I can get this audience of adults to go for it then maybe there’s something there?

What were their reactions?

Oh, they loved it. The political-social subtext of independence. Part of the subtext is about dealing with authority and they immediately caught all that.

And that’s something every human can relate to.

Yes. I think that’s one of the reasons “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” is so popular among kids, because it’s about a kid finding himself. But that’s in a dysfunctional, horrible tragic way. So I wanted to write something about a strong family unit. This kid is finding his own identity but he’s being supported, which is important to me. A couple of reviewers have noted that the father gives him the name, instead of the kid picking it on his own. And I went back and forth on that one, writing it, whether the kid would be operating under his own agency. But I thought it’s important to have a strong, empathetic Native father in this book that would see his son in turmoil and do what he could do to address it. And not punish him. In fact…

Allow him to flourish.

Yeah, so a brown father being the kind of father I wanted to be.

I know you’ve participated in the We Need Diverse Books campaign. In your opinion, how has the literary landscape changed in just the last couple of years?

I don’t know the numbers. There’s a lot more talk about it but I don’t really see more books. There’s a lot of talking. I remember the first time I went through with the meetings selling “True Diary,” about 90 percent of the people in there were white, which is fine, but as soon as I met somebody that was brown, they had the edge. Especially when it ended up being my editor Jennifer Hunt. She and I had similar backgrounds — she grew up the only brown kid in a white community, like the characters. So there was a connection immediately and I wonder, to get more diverse books you have to have more diverse editors. I don’t think that’s happening. I have a brown editor again, but I don’t know that that’s the experience of very many brown writers. There’s a fundamental change that I don’t know if that’s happening. But that’s where it needs to begin.

In addition to changing the publishing landscape, how can readers make a difference?

Well, you have to make the conscious decision to read outside of your own experience. And writers have to say it. You have to challenge yourself.

Do you see more people doing that?

Well, I know they do it in the adult world.

Is it more problematic when it comes to kids’ books?

I think there tends to be more conservative, and I don’t mean Republican, just conservative attitudes towards kids’ literature and what can or cannot be read by a kid. Your kid or anybody else’s kid. I think one of the unstated reasons why my book is banned so much, is not because of masturbation or sexual references. It’s because of the politics. It gets parents uncomfortable.

A banned book is the sign of a very good book!

Oh, I’m completely happy to be banned. Please ban me. Somebody start a nationwide effort… The thing is the people who are offended by me, are almost always offended by me, because I’m not the “proper kind of Indian.” They expect this noble, talking-animals guy or they expect a certain kind of writer.

They don’t have room for irreverence.

They don’t want the human being who created the work. And I’m a sloppy, inappropriate, crazy, impulsive mess.

And the reading public is so happy for that! (Laughs.) It makes for good art. Hollywood is even worse with representation. What do you think needs to be changed in the movie industry in order to reflect the stories of a variety of Americans?

It’s even deeper than [publishing]. Hollywood are cowards.

I’m also thinking of “The Revenant” being the top movie this year, and the controversy over…

What, the serial killer in space doc? (Laughs.) The mass murderer of Indians that it’s based upon. Leo DiCaprio getting up [to accept his Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama, when he gave a speech] about honoring and respecting Natives, well then, why the fuck did you play this guy? Why did you whitewash his past? There’s nothing worse than a white liberal who thinks they’re doing the right thing. And Hollywood is filled with white liberal arrogance.

There’s no room for error in that, really…

Right. Their liberal intentions are always “pure.” But it’s combined with enormous sums of money and the fear of losing money. So you got white liberalism and the fear of losing money. And it’s a deadly combination for brown-skinned artists in the movie business.

How do we change that?

I don’t know, I don’t know. And the thing is it’s gotten worse in a lot of ways because it’s so hard for any movies to make money now because of the Internet and because of culture changes, that it’s an even a bigger gamble to bet on.

And we also see people of color in stereotypical roles. We don’t see them breaking out of that a lot.

Yeah. I mean TV is a lot better now, TV is enormously better.

What are some examples?

Something like “Scandal.” Even minor roles are better. The Indian dude in “Fargo” [Zahn McClarnon] does a pretty good role. And the great thing is brown people are getting to do the good guys and the bad guys. It’s the wide range of roles. On “Scandal” they get to be the scheming… And brown people get to have sex, they get to have normal sex, which is awesome. So TV is better.

Why do you think TV is better? Why is it happening there and not in Hollywood?

Less money, and also everybody watches TV. I think the TV industry realizes it. Also because it’s been so impossible for anybody of any race to make a movie now and it’s much easier to make TV. I think better minds are in TV. “Breaking Bad” [Vince Gilligan], he would’ve been making movies in the ’70s. That would’ve been “Taxi Driver.” But studios don’t do that anymore and TV will. And the stakes are lower. They are lower to be a success in TV. So you want more brown people, you’ll have to make less money.

I mean, I don’t work in Hollywood. I have in the past. I go on various pissed-off breaks. I knew eventually I’d go on a break that … because they always brought me back. I would quit and then somebody would call me with a project. And nobody’s calling me now. I think we have a mutual break now.

Do you want to work in Hollywood again?

Because they’ve been after “True Diary” since it came out. And I’ve almost signed deals and in the end I couldn’t, it’s too personal. I knew that I would have to fight for every ounce of authenticity.

It’s not really yours once you sign that paper.

No, and what I remember vividly, screenwriter friends of mine had made a movie. It had filmed and they had written it and it was a very personal story. And I was there at the press conference, just accidently, by happenstance. Screenwriters weren’t answering questions, they were in the audience with me. And the director was up on stage and somebody asked him a question about the movie and he proceeded to answer as if he had lived that experience.

So, cultural appropriation!

Life appropriation. Pain appropriation. And I just cannot even imagine having to hear some director answer a question about my life story. So I always, in the end, ended up saying no, and I just said no again recently.

In the book world you have more power!

Yeah, I have enormous power in the book world. I’m one of the few brown people that do. But I mean I’ve been doing this a long time.

Who are some younger writers of color that you are mentoring or you want to see their names everywhere?

There are a bunch of Native poets who are incredible. Sherwin Bitsui, Natalie Diaz, whose star is really rising. She doesn’t need my help at all. Although I’m trying to get her to write fiction. I’m peer-pressuring her.

Who are some of your favorite writers in general?

A lot of the writers I like of color and not of color, are students. I work at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I’m not going to say any names because they’re babies. Some are older than me, but they’re babies in terms of writing. There’s a few that are already ready, so we’re inching along toward a book. But in terms of everybody? What do I have with me? I got Richard Price’s new book. It’s new in paperback, “The Whites.” I’ve always loved his work. I’d love to write a giant, Native urban crime book like he does. Where the Indians are the cops and the criminals. I’ve had ideas over the years and never went through with it.

Do you think you might?

Well, I’m reading “The Whites” for a very specific reason. And I’ve been rereading him. I also have with me a book of poems by Dennis O’Driscoll, a poet who passed away. Beautiful. Published posthumously. It’s funny people thought “after reading all those poems last year, did you stop reading poems?” No. A poet I love is Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Beautiful. My favorite books of all time, Leslie Marmon Silko — “Ceremony.” James Welch’s “Winter in the Blood,” Joy Harjo’s “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window.” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Emily Dickinson’s collected poems, James Wright’s “The Branch Will Not Break.” “The Great Gatsby.” “Tristram Shandy.” What ends up appealing to me most is funny. I need a book with wit, and morbid wit.

I’ve become my hoarder mother: How my kids turned me into a pathological packrat

“Thanks for offering me your baby stuff,” my pregnant friend Emily said during Sunday brunch at our apartment. “Can I take it home today?”

With 4- and 1-year-old daughters, and my baby-making business closed for good, I should have been eager to donate the motor swings, elastic-band pants, nursing pillows and pump bags. Instead, I stalled.

“My back hurts too much to dig it up. How about next weekend?”

I stuffed a bagel into my mouth, repulsed by my hanging on. What was I doing, acting like my hoarder mother?

It started a few weeks earlier when I startled myself with a reluctance to throw away Zelda’s bejeweled paper plates and scraps of hand-tracings. Now my clutching was to furniture, anonymous equipment. Could I be exhibiting my mom’s pathological tendencies? I needed to toss this stash, but parting seemed painful.

My mother, born on my grandparents’ flight from the Nazis, was a refugee before knowing what home was. Years later, her house became her protective nest, and she filled it copiously, afraid her things would be taken from her. Mom purchased bargain school supplies in quantities suitable for a school. She recorded every movie to grace 1980s TV and lined the basement with her meticulously marked videocassettes. She kept each piece of my clothing, offering stained onesies (in entirely flammable polyester) when Zelda was born. As a child, I’d felt physically and emotionally blocked from her by her piles. I couldn’t fit onto the sofa; there was no room to snuggle in and watch “Thirtysomething” alongside her. I was anxious and felt unseen and unsettled in the surrounding chaos in which my school notes and bat mitzvah gifts had been lost. As a teenager, I was ashamed of the mess. I projected the ugliness onto my own body. I feared intimacy with others.

I spent my adulthood opposing Mom and decluttering, dreaming that sans objects, I’d be confident, attractive and open to love. Mom was a moody bohemian poet with stuff; I tried to be an aloof biochemist with nothing. I shunned coffee tables and ottomans and put only white clothes on my kids’ (extremely short) gift registries.

My extreme behaviors were often to my detriment. I was confused by molecular theory, and spent years figuring out what I really wanted to study and pursue as a career. I had trouble getting close to people and was once dumped for not having throw pillows (“You’re just not comfortable” my boyfriend told me). My cleaning obsession sometimes blinded me to my daughters’ needs, as when I’d wet-wiped the floor instead of rocking Zelda to sleep, or when I focused on scrubbing the broccoli-yam mash that trickled down my kitchen chair leg (and my own leg) instead of on her outstretched hand, her gleeful desire to feed me. As a child, I’d been nervous and embarrassed inviting friends over to my overly cluttered home, dreaming that a minimalist abode would make me a magnanimous host. Only once I had a white-walled, white-sofa-ed apartment, I found it impossible to entertain without staring at my guests’ sticky hands, or the jiggling menisci of the red wine in their glasses.

But until now, my problems had always stemmed from being Mom’s opposite. Not her mirror.

“I’ll dig up the baby stuff,” my husband offered, all helpful.

Oh no.

“I’ll do it!” Zelda cried, adding pride to my horror. She was the boisterous, feisty kid I hadn’t been. A warrior, not a worrier.

I looked at the special ballet-slipper napkins on the table that Zelda and I had laid together that morning (“not this side up, Mommy,” she’d sighed and corrected my placement). Would I even have trouble tossing these serviettes streaked with memories?

Lurking inside was the threat that I too was a hoarder, that the disorder of disorder was lodged in my genes, waiting to express itself. Compulsive hoarding is a mental illness that affects a staggering 4 percent of the American population (and think of the ripple effect, of all the spouses, children, siblings and domestic partners that suffer too). Hoarders amass and hold on to things, often unread newspapers, old utensils, sometimes animals. Hoarding is frequently coupled with other conditions: anxiety, severe depression, paranoia, an addiction to shopping. Researchers don’t as yet know exactly why this disease emerges nor what sets it off (it does not always manifest in reaction to deprivation), but many hoarders share characteristics: they have trouble letting go and difficulty making decisions, and they tend to prioritize and find value in things in ways that most of us would deem skewed. Hoarders are often suspicious of other people, and are highly creative perfectionists, who see endless potential, who sense the myriad different functions for each object. (Part of their reluctance to get rid of them.) Compulsive clutterers usually do not have insight about their illness; they are not aware that their relationship to their stuff and surrounds is extreme. Indeed, they often have a system underlying their collection, like my mom’s shelving units for her (ironically) stashes of organizational supplies, or her collection of laundry baskets, all stacked together on the living room sofa.

There’s no blood test to determine whether one is a hoarder; amassing is considered to be the symptom of an illness when the amasser’s daily life, self-care and social relationships are affected or endangered. But many of us share hoarders’ traits. We shop, collect, surround ourselves with objects, and even hang on to ridiculous red denim cut-offs in the hopes that we might one day fit into them again, or they might one day fit into fashion again, or because they remind us of a particularly thin and happy summer past.

Now I heard Zelda laughing, as Billie stumbled into my legs and clutched my knees. Motherhood had caught me by surprise. I hadn’t wanted kids, fearing I’d had no role model for mothering, resentful that I’d never had a carefree childhood myself, that I’d spent my youth suffocated by stuff and had wasted energy trying to clean it up. But parenthood turned out to be gloriously grounding. I’d created the loving family and organized household I’d always craved, with bedtime routines, to-do lists, tidy toy shelves, large windows, open spaces in which my children could play. I hated to imagine the emptiness I’d feel when they left me.

Suddenly I saw how for decades I’d thought of my mother’s junk as a blockade, but perhaps it was a connection. Her stockpiled Fisher-Price miniatures and Raffi LPs were tied with love and hope. My daughter’s craft scraps and old sweatshirts marked her growth, my fortune, reminding me of those newborn months when our bond was basal, solid, the anchor of my existence. I finally understood the desire to hang on to remnants of these good times; who knew when they’d come again?

Jon and Zelda returned, schlepping a mound of stuff — body pillows, size zero diapers — which they dropped by the door. “I hope you aren’t starving Emily,” Jon said, pointing at the heaps of food I’d laid out on our teak table.

“Judy ordered only a dozen bagels today — she was holding back,” he mocked my over-catering. Suddenly I recalled my early years when Mom hosted get-togethers, the very same teak table overflowing with whole schools of smoked fish and flocks of Danish.

I checked the clock, thinking of the baby’s nap, Zelda’s snack. I was hyper-organized, and still, mapping out each moment of two kids’ lives was an administrative feat. If I let Zelda’s room go un-tidied for a day, it was chaos. How hard motherhood must have been for my overwhelmed mom, raised as a refugee, whose mind wasn’t organized to begin with.

I recalled old Sundays where I’d wait all day for Mom to call me, checking my phone, growing resentful even though her withdrawal was due to her depression.

But now, I knew, I’d just phone her.

I’d worried so much about how my childhood would affect my parenting, never considering how my parenting affected how I was as a child. Being a mom made me a better daughter.

My toddler climbed into the baby napper. It toppled over. She was way too big. I braced myself for her wail, but instead she babbled “ma-ma.” Our connection is taking on new forms, I thought, glimpsing Zelda sweeping down the table, flinging every crumb. She was so different from me, and so similar.

“I hope your baby likes pink mobiles,” I said to Emily, gesturing at the mound that I’d be passing on.

Then my hand grazed a rattle, soft and smooth. I stashed it in my pocket.

 

 

What moms get in return: The unexpected enlightenment of parenting while female

This essay is excerpted and adapted from “Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder and Radical Amazement of Parenting,” which is now available from Flatiron Books.

A lot of things get thrown into a blender when we have kids – our logistics, our finances, our priorities, probably our sanity a little bit. And for most of us, our identity – our very sense of selfhood – also gets taken for a spin. You know? Suddenly what you want and what you need gets put on the back burner, and who you are and have been in the world shifts dramatically. The baby’s hunger at two a.m. takes priority over your exhaustion. Her seven thirty p.m. bedtime means that you’re probably going to say no to that night out with friends (at least most of the time, given what baby-sitters cost these days). Your love of travel is at odds with the fact that your vacation days now cover the times when school or daycare is closed. Simply put, when you become a parent, so often, it’s not all about you anymore. Or hardly at all.

This is, at least in part, a wonderful thing. The love we feel for our children can pull us out of our self-involvement, and sometimes the generosity and compassion that are fostered with our kids can spill out to all – or many – areas of our lives.

But, of course, it’s also hard. This extreme shift in focus isn’t necessarily easy for every parent, or something that all embrace comfortably. One recent study found that a majority of new mothers described themselves as lost, lonely, and/or bewildered. Another study found that a majority of mothers felt as though they had lost their identity after having a child; many missed going to work, and most found it difficult to adjust to the fact that they couldn’t just go out whenever they wanted to anymore.

A lot of spiritual practices talk about the renunciation of the self – the “ego,” it’s usually called, the impulse to make everything about me, me, meeeeeee. Mastering that impulse is considered one of the great achievements in pretty much every religious tradition. For example, the kabbalists talk about bittul ha-yesh, the nullification of one’s “somethingness,” that which makes us who we are. It’s a means of putting God in the center of our thoughts and actions – not ourselves.

As the eighteenth-century kabbalist Issachar Baer of Zlotshov formulated it, “The essence of serving God… is to attain the state of humility, that is, to understand that all your physical and mental powers and your essential being depend on divine elements within. You are simply a channel for the divine attributes… You have no independent self and are contained through the Creator.”

Issachar Baer is saying that when we serve as a channel for something else – for God, for love, for giving, for service, for care – that “independent self” falls away. And we do this through actions that emphasize humility. From a spiritual perspective, this is a good thing, because that need to make it all about me all the time interferes with understanding that we are, ultimately, a small part of the great interconnected everythingness.

This should be great news for parents, right? Every day we’re given a crash course in quenching our ego and our desires, in extending ourselves in the care of another. As the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray once put it, “The path of renunciation described by certain mystics is women’s daily lot.” Mothering is synonymous with giving over the self, with humility. So we should be in fantastic shape, spiritually, then, right?

Except that it’s more complicated than that. As Carol Lee Flinders points out in her masterwork “At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst”:

“Formulated for the most part within monastic contexts, [precepts of spiritual practice] cancel the basic freedoms – to say what one wants, go where one likes, enjoy whatever pleasures one can afford and most of all, to be somebody – that have normally defined male privilege. That is, men in any given social class have always possessed these liberties to a far greater degree than women of the same class. To the extent that he embraced these disciplines, therefore, a man entering the religious life would have experienced a dramatic and painful reversal of status: hopefully, an all-out assault on ego. Yet no one around him would have been in any doubt that he had undertaken that reversal voluntarily. Women, on the other hand, have not been in a position to renounce those privileges voluntarily because they never had them in the first place…”

That is, women have historically been – and perhaps are still – raised with the message that they shouldn’t have desires in the first place, that they should, well, be self-sacrificing and giving and put their needs second to those of their children, their partners, their employers, their families.

A couple of years ago, an ad went viral that talked about “the world’s toughest job.” Prospective candidates were told about what was “probably the most important job,” and described work that involved standing constantly, with no breaks, no vacations, no sleep, and no pay – and then, the big reveal: This is a job description for moms! Moms work so hard, for free!

It is telling that, even in 2014, the ad felt it necessary to clarify that we were talking about moms – not dads, not parents in general. However much actual parents are dividing labor around the house (and, of course, plenty of families have two moms or two dads or only one parents of whatever gender), our culture continues beeping out the same old messages. I saw something similar on Pinterest recently: “A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.”

These messages run so deep that we often don’t see how we’ve internalized them. It’s not for nothing that a major book on gender and salary negotiation is called “Women Don’t Ask.” Men have been, by and large, raised to feel comfortable – entitled – to ask for more money in negotiations. To sit with legs sprawled wide apart, taking up plenty of room on the subway. To have a certain kind of an agency and, yes, selfhood, as they move through the world. The spiritual practice of annulling the ego is a healthy and productive way to address that sense of entitlement.

But for a woman who was told her whole life that she should diet because she’s more attractive when she takes up less space, and who has received a million different cues large and small that her career, her ideas, and her contributions to the world will be taken less seriously than those of a man, this is fraught terrain. When Irigaray said, “The path of renunciation described by certain mystics is women’s daily lot,” she was being sarcastic. Male mystics made a fuss about giving up freedoms and serving humbly because, for them, it was a countercultural move that produced radical effects. For women, it was just business as usual.

So where does that leave those of us who parent while female? Where does that leave our ego, our sense of selfhood, our real, actual love for our kids, our perhaps sometimes desperate desire to get out there in the world and, you know, do taxes or something, anything to reclaim our sense of being someone other than Mommy? What does it mean for our ego – and our spiritual potential – when we enter the crucible of self-sacrifice that is motherhood?

And what if there were another way? That is to say: What if our acts of selflessness can actually support the self, in a deep, authentic way?

When Tracey was in the sixth grade, she got a horrible case of head lice. In order to spare her long, beautiful hair, her mother, Ella, had to comb it out thoroughly – a time-consuming process – twice a day. It was hardly how Ella fancied spending her time, not with the millions of other things that needed to happen each morning and evening in a family of four with two working parents.

And yet Ella found that this extra time, set aside to help her child with yet another task, had an unexpected consequence. It had been a rough year for Tracey and Ella – as adolescence often is between girls and their mothers. But, Ella reflected, “there, in all the mayhem of making her do her homework, dealing with her hormonal storms, and everything else, there was a twenty-minute span where I just touched her in helpful ways, and she liked being touched in those ways, and we were quiet together.” And in this quietness, not only did Tracey and her mom create something of a détente and help themselves find each other amidst the difficulties of the year, but it created a space of calm togetherness that Ella discovered she herself badly needed. “Head lice, those horrid little buggers,” she reflected, “became a reminder of our simple human connectedness and the possibility of peace.” That possibility infused her days, offering her powerful nourishment.

The work of parenting has the potential to both develop our selfhood in healthy ways and to encourage us to grow in empathy, generosity, caring, and connection. In fact, rather than being an all-or-nothing proposition as far as our ego and self goes, parenting might bolster that ego; it might help us get someplace new entirely.

In contemporary culture, self-sufficient autonomy is often considered the marker of maturity – existing as an isolated, independent self (whose ego can then get broken down in contemplative practices, as the dominant narrative around spiritual development tells it). The psychologist Dana Jack, however, suggests a different model, one of the relational self in which our selfhood and our interpersonal connections actually support one another. In this model, she writes, “intimacy facilitates the developing authentic self and the developing self deepens the possibilities of intimacy.” The more we give to others, the more we can be our true selves. The more we are able to live authentically, the more we have to give.

And even more than that, philosopher Sara Ruddick suggests that we can’t even fully see the other people in our lives if our selfhood is not intact. She argues that we need to be able to let go of our egocentrism in order to make space for a true encounter with another, but, paradoxically, that work has to come from a place of security. That is, you need to be in a solid place in order to let go of yourself to fully encounter someone else. Real empathy, she suggests, involves finding another without looking for yourself in there – seeing who they are as themselves, not as a projection of your own stuff. You need to know who you are in order to be able to do that effectively.

I don’t know about you, but there are a few people in particular in my life – my partner, some cherished friends, my brother – who I feel really, actually see me. And when I’m with one or more of these people, I feel able to be the best, brightest, shiniest version of myself. And at the same time, these are the people who kick my butt, both explicitly and not, to be better than I am. When I feel seen, I feel more whole, and that enables me to be more giving, because empathy and compassion are in the driver’s seat. The kind of giving I’m able to do when I’m full up on love isn’t the exhausting, boundary-less, somewhat indiscriminate doing for others that I sometimes get sucked into – you know, the kind that makes you want to tear your hair out and say, “Why didn’t I just say no to this?!” Giving just feels different when it’s offered from a rooted place of selfhood and connection.

And with my kids, well, more than anyone else they force me to really see myself. There’s no bigger clarification of my priorities and values than having to communicate to these small human beings in formation. I can decide how Yonatan and I talk about the presidential election, about the homeless man on the street, about the contents of his kiddie Bible. His questions to me – Why doesn’t that man have a house? Why would Abraham do that to his son? – push me to better understand my own perspective on the world, and ideally make me more thoughtful about what I want to download into someone else’s brain. When I’m able to really be present with my kids, it fills up my batteries with love and connection. It regrounds me in who I am, and from there, it becomes easier to remember what it is I am meant to be doing in my own actual life, and gets me out of the house of mirrors that is others’ ideas about (or my perception of their ideas about) who I am and what I’m supposed to be.

Ella didn’t originally consider the act of combing out her daughter’s lice as a purposeful gesture aimed at fostering intimacy; it was just yet another task that she had to perform in her role as mother. But as she entered into it, she found heartfelt quiet at its center. When we go looking for that connection, when we give out of love and the desire to see another – even, or perhaps most especially, our own children – we often find that it helps to nurture our own sense of selfhood on levels that we might not anticipate.

In what ways do we give that deplete our selfhood? And in what ways do we give that fill us up, that foster something fundamental? What does parenting look like when we give purposefully?

Because it’s true that “becoming zero,” in the manner of the mystics, is one path to the awareness of our interconnectedness with everything. But living through and into that interconnectedness is, I believe, also a means of getting there. We can experience our interdependence with others – most especially with our families, most especially with our kids – in ways that also serve to nurture our selves, and that even help us to grow.

In Pirkei Avot, a first-century collection of Jewish wisdom, the great sage Hillel asks three questions that, I think, get to the heart of the paradox of parenting and selfhood: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

Pentagon quietly sends troops to Yemen to fight al-Qaeda — which U.S. strengthened by backing destructive Saudi war

The Obama administration has quietly deployed troops to help fight in Yemen over the past two weeks, with little public attention.

Yemen now joins a series of other Middle Eastern countries in which U.S. troops are on the ground without declaration of war and approval from Congress, combating extremist groups that have benefited from U.S. policies.

The military did not reveal until Friday, May 6, that it had sent troops to Yemen. The Pentagon refused to say what kind of forces it deployed or how many U.S. troops there are, only describing it as a “very small number.”

The Pentagon says it is intervening to support its ally the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, in its fight against what is widely recognized to be al-Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate.

Yet the destructive Saudi-led war the U.S. has backed for more than a year is the reason al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have grown so quickly in the country.

In March 2015, a coalition of Western allies led by Saudi Arabia and armed and supported by the U.S. and U.K. began a brutal bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.

Extremists groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS have exploited the chaos this war has created in order to grow.

As Salon has frequently reported over the past year, U.S. military officials as prominent as Secretary of Defense Ash Carter were warning as early as April 2015, less than one month into the war, that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, had “seized the opportunity of the disorder there and the collapse of the central government.”

Reuters published a report in April detailing how the U.S.-backed Saudi-led “war in Yemen has made al-Qaeda stronger — and richer.”

A prominent journalist warned in a recent column that AQAP was the ultimate winner of the disastrous U.S.-backed Saudi war in Yemen, describing it as “Iraq all over again.”

Al-Qaeda has created what is effectively a mini-state on the south coast of Yemen, where it controls a 340-mile area in which it reigns over the local population and collects taxes.

AQAP is one of the most extreme branches of al-Qaeda. It took responsibility for the January 2015 attack on the Paris office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

ISIS has also capitalized on the chaos of the war and carved out its own territory in Yemen.

Almost exactly one year after the New York Times published the article “Al Qaeda Is Capitalizing on Yemen’s Disorder, U.S. Warns,” the Obama administration deployed troops to fight the very same extremists who have benefited from its policies.

“U.S. counter-terrorism efforts have been undermined by Yemen’s civil war,” Reuters acknowledged in its report. “Prior to the Mukalla offensive, AQAP was estimated to have become more powerful than at any time in its history.”

A Pentagon spokesperson told a news briefing on Friday that the U.S. forces in Yemen are filling a variety of roles, providing aerial refueling, security, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, planning, medical support and more.

Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said “AQAP remains a significant security threat to the United States and to our regional partners and we welcome this effort to specifically remove AQAP from Mukalla and to degrade, disrupt and destroy AQAP in Yemen,” Reuters reported.

Since April, Yemeni and Emirati troops have been fighting AQAP in the southern port city Mukalla.

The U.S. military has also deployed an assault ship and two destroyer ships off the coast of Yemen to provide support.

Emirati forces effectively invaded Yemen in 2015. The Western-backed coalition of which the UAE is a part hopes to restore the Saudi-backed government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and is combating Yemeni Houthi rebels and militias loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

In its report, AFP claimed the Houthi rebels are “Iran-backed,” repeating an unsubstantiated myth much of the media has uncritically echoed for months. Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has debunked claims that the Houthis are armed by Iran.

Human rights organizations have accused the Saudi-led coalition of war crimes, and the U.N. says it is responsible for two-thirds of civilian casualties in Yemen.

The U.S.-backed coalition has bombed hospitals, weddings, residential neighborhoods, schools, an Oxfam humanitarian aid warehouse, a refugee camp and more.

Saudi forces have dropped widely banned U.S.-made cluster munitions on civilian areas in Yemen.

More than 6,000 Yemenis have been killed, roughly half of whom were civilians, including nearly 1,000 children, in a very conservative estimate from the United Nations.

A U.N. report found that an average of six Yemeni children have been killed or injured every single day, for more than year.

The war has completely ravaged impoverished Yemen, pushing millions to the brink of famine. At least 14 million Yemenis, more than half of the population, face hunger, according to the U.N.

For more than nine months, humanitarian organizations have warned that more than 21 million Yemenis, 82 percent of the population — almost half of whom are children — need urgent humanitarian assistance.

Another at least 2.4 million people, 10 percent of the population, have been displaced

The U.S. and U.K. have done many billions of dollars of arms deals with the Saudi monarchy billions in recent years, selling many of the weapons that have been dropped on Yemeni civilians.

American and British military forces are providing intelligence and support to the Saudi-led coalition, and are physically in the command room with Saudi bombers, with access to a list of targets.

In early 2015, with war breaking out, the U.S. withdrew its military forces from Yemen, which had been deployed there to help fight what was then a much weaker AQAP.

The Pentagon also revealed on Friday that it had carried out at least four more bombings in Yemen since April 23, which it says were targeting AQAP.

For years, the U.S. has waged a secretive drone war in Yemen. Many scholars, journalists and even former military officials have warned that the little-acknowledged civilian casualties of the U.S. drone war has only fueled extremism in the region, not weakened it.

U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were killed in CIA drone strikes in Yemen in 2011, extrajudicially assassinated without a trial.

Elites are completely hopeless: They still can’t acknowledge the real reason Donald Trump happened

The media’s mea culpa season is in full bloom this spring as analysts and commentators step forward to concede that with Donald Trump effectively seizing the Republican nomination, they were often very wrong in predicting his political demise.

Convinced that he was an outlier fluke who couldn’t sustain his popularity — let alone nail down a major party nomination — the Beltway media consistently missed the Trump surge for months, and often did so in bold fashion:

*”Why no one should take Donald Trump seriously” (Washington Post)

*“Donald Trump’s surge in the polls has followed the classic pattern of a media-driven surge. Now it will most likely follow the classic pattern of a party-backed decline.” (New York Times)

*“No, he won’t win the Republican nomination for president.” (ABC News)

Credit now goes to journalists who have stepped forward to admit their mistakes and offer news consumers some guidance as to why commentators likely misread the Trump campaign.

Some reasons offered up include, Republican elites failed to effectively coalesce around an anti-Trump candidate. The news media essentially sponsored Trump’s campaign with an unprecedented amount of free exposure. And Republican voters didn’t penalize Trump for his obvious policy flip-flops.

Note that there’s nothing inherently wrong with being incorrect about campaigns, assuming predictions are made in good faith. And this Trump misfire isn’t going to, nor should it, stop pundits and prognosticators from trying to peer into the future.

But there is a problem if the media’s elite class doesn’t understand how one of America’s two major parties functions today. It’s problematic if the GOP’s gone through an ugly transformation, which produces a Trump nominee, and the political press is too timid or too detached to accurately document that radical makeover.

And in the case of Trump that denial seems to have been widespread. For instance, much of the data pointed to a Trump win for a very long time. “Trump was a stronger candidate than anyone wanted to admit,” the Huffington Post recently noted. “He skyrocketed to the top of an incredibly crowded pack soon after announcing he was running.”

Resisting those hard facts, many journalists clung to the idea that Trump was simply too out-there to become the nominee; too extreme, reckless, and garish for a major party nominee.

And that’s still the problem today. Lots of media analysts continue to ignore a central reason for why they missed the Trump surge, and they’re still not acknowledging what’s driving his success: The truly radical nature of today’s Republican Party and its right-wing voter base.

Y’know, the conservative movement that cheered Glenn Beck when he called the president of the United States a “racist“; that supported right-wing claims that president Obama was a tyrant who needs to be impeached. (And that he was foreign-born.) The movement that revolves around Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that if Obama weren’t black he’d be working as a tour guide in Hawaii, not sitting in the Oval Office, and who insisted Obama ran for office because he resents white America and wants to score some payback.

And it’s a Republican Party that has essentially shut down the U.S. Congress, rather than legislate with Obama. It’s a party today that refuses to hold hearings for the president’s highly qualified Supreme Court nominee.

That’s what the Republican Party has become in recent years, but the press has mostly held its tongue about the nasty makeover. And in the process, the press missed the Trump surge, which rode that radical GOP wave.

The collective, years-long turning of a blind eye indicates to me just how important it is for the Beltway press to maintain a symmetrical balance between Democrats and Republicans. It shows how the press remains married to the idea that the two parties are simply mirror images of each other, occupying different ends of the political spectrum. That for however far to the edge Republicans move, Democrats are sure to reciprocate. It’s the Both Sides Are To Blame syndrome, basically.

And there’s great comfort in that for the press. Because if you call out Republicans as radical, or note that the ugly nature at the base of the GOP could easily propel Trump to a nomination victory, that means the press has to break from the safety of the Both Sides narrative. That then opens the press up to “liberal media bias” denunciations from the right.

So which is worse, being taunted with claims of liberal bias, or misreading a presidential campaign season for ten months?

Why the 2016 election cycle could be the start of a totalitarian strain in U.S. politics

Over the course of the presidential primaries leading up to the 2016 election, there have been many articles condemning Donald Trump for engaging in demagoguery or encouraging authoritarian thinking. While both might be true, the more pressing concern is that no matter what the results are for this election cycle, Trump’s success in the primaries has exposed a potential shift in U.S. politics toward totalitarian thinking. Many Americans are now openly admitting that they are willing to give absolute power to one person, as long as this power is used to persecute people that they see as enemies.

At first glance, this seems like the opposite of Trump’s message, which is about the problems of government and how politics has led the U.S. in the wrong direction. However, when we take a closer look at his message and the underlying resentment among some citizens that it represents, we can see many similarities with the totalitarian leaders of the past. Ignoring rule of law is a classic sign of Totalitarian thinking, and many of Trump’s proposed solutions would likely violate both the Constitution and International Law.

Such methods of doing whatever is necessary to achieve national glory are classic signs of Totalitarian thought. While Totalitarian regimes present themselves as harbingers of a better future, they do so by appealing to the perception of a glorious past that has since been lost due to the mismanagement of the existing politicians. Thus Hitler referenced a Wagnerian vision of Germany as the source of two of the world’s great Reichs in order to present his Third Reich as a continuation of German greatness. Similarly, Mussolini invoked the orderliness and domination of Ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy in order to restore an ancient pride that would lead to a new prominence on the world stage. Such leaders follow a common pattern, in which they blame any failures of their society on the incursion of Others, who lack the purity of the true members of the nation-state.

While the details differ, the call to action carries a consistent refrain: the totalitarian leader promises to make the country great again, to return it to past glories that have long since been lost.

Nationalism always plays a large part in such movements, gaining effectiveness by appealing to a distorted history in which one’s own nation was once at the pinnacle of human achievement, only to be undermined by a loss of traditional values. Citizens today, according to the totalitarian leader, have forgotten the core virtues that once made the nation great. The solution is a return to these purer times, before immigration distorted the populace and introduced conflicting visions of the good life. The appeal is to a romantic vision of the past in which the national culture was both unified and unique.

This message appeals most strongly to people who feel lost and forgotten in the present society. They find that the culture around them no longer fits their view of the world. Many people willing to follow totalitarian leaders have suffered financial setbacks and are looking for answers. They seek a strong leader to steer the country in a direction that makes them more comfortable. Part of the reason that Totalitarianism arose most prominently in the 20th Century is that history suddenly sped up. Many people found themselves seemingly left behind in a modern world where progress was so rapid that in a single lifetime, the world they saw in middle age no longer resembled what they remembered from their youth. The same turbulence affects us today.

Such frenetic change can lead us to look for stability and wonder why things no longer seem so simple. We might be unable to understand why we are facing certain hardships, even as we remember a time when the factors that produce them did not exist. William Ophuls puts this point well: “People strongly impelled by an inner void to restore the coherence lost when they were stripped of all supporting myths and folkways are therefore very likely to look outside themselves for a devil to whom all their ills can be attributed” (Ophuls, 1997, p. 209). This devil could take the form of the next generation, who bring new ideas and are more comfortable with newer technologies. Or it might come from blaming groups that you do not remember existing when you were young, either because they did not or because a child’s world is fairly narrow.

In any case, the totalitarian movement plays on these feelings of isolation and fear. This is especially well noted by Hannah Arendt, an insightful critic of Totalitarianism. In examining the thoughts and trends that led to World War II, Arendt writes:

“What prepares men for the totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality” (Arendt, 1951, p. 478).

In other words, totalitarianism thrives when the kind of isolation that normally applies only to people outside of mainstream social life is felt by an increasing number of people in a society. Groups that were once privileged majorities either lose that privilege or are made to feel unworthy of it. Consider how Germans, after the first World War, must have seen their lives when compared to their parents, or even their own childhood. As inflation ran amok and the world continued to punish them for the part they played in the war, the Nazi party was able to sell a return to the days when the future promised glory rather than shame.

Now consider the U.S. today, still feeling the lingering effects of the largest recession since the Great Depression (an event that played a part in the suffering of Germany and Italy before WWII). White, middle-class Americans no longer enjoy the privileges they held in the past. Younger generations are bombarded by articles suggesting that they are inferior to their predecessors or overly entitled, even as globalization and technology changes put them in a uniquely difficult situation for finding meaningful work. At the same time, wages remain so flat  that those who find work often still struggle.

Many Americans find themselves wondering where their opportunities have gone. In the last 10 years, the number of Americans who see themselves as middle class has declined, while the number who self-identify as poor or working class has risen. The tendency to measure success in terms of material goods remains a strong part of our culture, for better or worse, but many people view themselves as living on the wrong side of growing inequality.

As a result, a large segment of America is desperate to matter, to have an identity that can be a source of pride. They look at their own history, filled with white, middle-class men who were able to take pride in their lives, to look back and call themselves the Greatest Generation, and wonder where it all went. In today’s world, they see themselves as vilified, as the one group that does not need protecting, but remains the reason others need protection. They cannot be part of a special interest group. They are not a minority; they are not a persecuted sexual orientation. They are the average against which others measure themselves, and even though being a white man carries more privilege than any other group in the U.S., it is a privilege that is dissolving, and rightly so. However, the people losing that privilege are often scared because it is not being replaced by anything that can give their lives meaning.

Suicide rates and drug addiction are on the rise among white, middle-class men and women. Studies refer to these as “despair deaths,” and note that the less educated are especially affected by a sense that their lives may have lost meaning in the modern world. Lack of proper healthcare and economic woes play a role as well.

All of these factors play well with Trump’s supporters, who are looking for someone who will identify the source of their problems and promise to solve them by any means necessary. In such desperate circumstances, Rule of Law seems less important than raw survival. As Arendt noted, Totalitarian governments engage in authoritarianism, demanding absolute control of the state in order to fix it. As Matthew MacWilliams points out, the single strongest predictor for whether someone supports Trump is belief in authoritarian thinking. Whether he knows it or not, Trump is playing to the fears of his supporters, who are willing to give absolute power to someone who will fix their problems, whatever they might be.

This is why Trump supporters talk about the “Others” so much. “They” are ruining America. The pronoun is vague enough that you can insert your own demons, vilify whatever group you currently see as wronging you personally, and then extend that feeling of persecution to all of your fellow supporters. In a Trump rally, certain people feel a sense of belonging again, and in a world that increasingly rejects them for not having a college education, or not being part of a civil rights movement, or even for being historically associated with oppression, having a place where you see yourself as making America better, making it great again, can have a special pull to it.

In many ways, calling Trump supporters an analog to the rise of Nazi Germany is too easy, and far too dismissive. However, there is this one obvious similarity. Hitler and the Nazi party appealed to a people who believed that their Golden Age was past them, and that the world was moving on without them. The appeal of the nationalism that was offered was that it would allow a return to greatness, a necessary repeal of all of the policies, both externally imposed and internally permitted, that had led to their fall. Trump offers a very similar message, and he couches it in a way that allows his followers to fill in the blank. Whatever version of the good life they believe existed in their parents’ or grandparents’ day, that is the world that Trump plans to recreate. It is a compelling narrative, because it is their own narrative, and each individual gets to tell his or her own story while simultaneously believing that everyone else around them is thinking the same thing.

For many, there is no price too high to pay for such a utopian vision.

Ron Miscavige’s life in Scientology: “It was inhuman as far as I’m concerned”

What’s it like to have a son drift away from you? What’s it like to be virtually imprisoned in an abusive facility? And what’s it like to see a religion you believed in turn into what you feel has become a nasty cult? Those all are things Ron Miscavige describes in his new book, “Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me.” His tale is one of the most extreme examples of “disconnection” – the absolute breaking of ties between a Scientologist and a friend or family member — made even more extreme because the leader of Scientology is the son he raised in the church.

Except for a chilling prologue, the book starts innocently enough. Ron raises his four children, gets drawn into something that seems like a kind of self-help movement, and moves his family to a small town in England to get to know it better. According to his account, he gradually begins to see through the church at the same time he observes his son becoming vicious and calculating. Ron also describes escaping Gold Base – the church headquarters in the California desert – and leaving the church completely in 2012. Ron, who served in the Marine Corps and worked for decades as a professional jazz trumpeter, makes a likable narrator.

The book’s publication, however, has been met with protest from Scientology and David Miscavige — lawyers have sent letters to the book’s British and American publisher warning of a lawsuit for defamation. A statement from the Church calls the book “a sad exercise in betrayal” and claims that “Ronald Miscavige was nowhere around when David Miscavige ascended to the leadership of the Church of Scientology, mentored by and working directly with the religion’s founder L. Ron Hubbard, and entrusted by him with the future of the Church.”

Salon spoke to the Milwaukee-based writer from New York, where he was touring behind the book. The interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

It’s important to understand what the appeal of Scientology was for you and other people. What made you want to get involved with the church?

Years ago, I got involved with a multi-level marketing scheme called Holiday Magic. We had an opportunity meeting and there were some people there; one of them was a guy by the name of Mike Hess. He happened to mention to somebody that he was a Scientologist, and I heard this and I kind of pinned him down and said, “What is that?” I made him tell me about it for about 30, 40 minutes. It just interested me right off the bat. He told me of a Scientologist who used to have meetings at his cafeteria every Tuesday or Wednesday night and I started going to them. I found it interesting that you could apply some of this data on an everyday basis and it helped you, such as in communication or maybe interpersonal relationships, and that’s how I got interested.

How drastically has the church changed since you got involved?

It’s a 180. That’s how drastic it is. In ’69 and ’70, it was kind of very laissez-faire. You could go to an organization, referred to as “orgs,” and you’d go in there and find people were friendly; you could do courses that just were immediately helpful. It was like a self-help movement. It’s hard to explain how nice it was to go there. Everybody was there for the same purpose and you met a lot of friends, and it was reasonably priced.

Today, basically the prices are aimed at people who are very affluent or wealthy. It’s not accomplishing any of the purposes that I thought it was set out to do in the ’70s. In those days, what you were trying to make is “auditors.” An auditor is a person who counsels another person and brings them to a greater awareness of life and how they are, and maybe get over some of their failings and some of the things that upset them. These days, most of the emphasis is on raising money to buy new buildings, which is not the same as it was then.

Do you think the church should lose its tax-exempt status?

I don’t see how belonging to the Church of Scientology is going to do the same thing as just maybe a normal mainline religion like Catholicism or being a Protestant or whatever. Because the one thing that you’d find, I think, in people having a religion, is someplace where they can go and find some [solace] to some of the sufferings or the upsets they have in life.

I know with the Catholic Church, I was raised that way, they had confession. You could go tell a priest your sins and kind of get it off your chest and he’d give you some little penances to say and you’d do that and feel better. You go to Scientology and you go to a confessional and anything you say in there is recorded and written down. There’s a documented record of it and they will use that against you if you were to leave them or be critical of the church. The Catholic Church doesn’t do that. Scientology does it as a matter of course. Because of that, in [that] definition of a church I just don’t see how they can qualify.

Tell us about The Hole, which you describe in the book, and what kind of an effect it had on the environment.

The Hole was started as a “handling” to the marketing area of Scientology being reduced in effectiveness. L. Ron Hubbard said if management destroys or knocks out marketing, they should all be disbanded, taken off post, and marketing should be built up again. That’s the central marketing unit. That happened, and David took all those executives and put them into these trailers and that’s how The Hole started. They spent all day in there writing up their transgressions, or supposed transgressions, and questioning each other. They lived sequestered from the rest of the base. They would march down to our mess hall for their meals sequestered from the rest of the base. They’d go as a group and take a shower down in the garage.

It was like a little prison within the bigger prison of the base. Because the base itself turned into that, where you were sequestered from life. You usually couldn’t leave that place and go to a store or call on your own. You didn’t have cell phones; all of your phone calls went through an operator; people listened in on the calls; your mail was checked before it came in and before it went out. But The Hole was even lower than that, and these people were on their own, put in that place to kind of rehabilitate them as very bad sinners. It was destructive, as far as I’m concerned, to the people who lived there, because they became shells of their former selves.

When did you get the sense that your son was changing?

First of all, he was a terrific little kid. I’d get along with him great. A lovable little kid; he had a great sense of humor. We had a lot of fun together. When he joined the Sea Organization he was 16 years old. He really wanted to do that and I allowed him to do it because I felt if he wants to do this and this is his life’s purpose, why stop him? Because even prior to that he trained to be an auditor and he was a very good auditor.

Then I joined the Sea Organization about nine years later, and one day I’m at the base and I’m coming out of the music studio and I saw him walking with his entourage about 30 yards away from me. I shouted out, “Hey, Dave!” And he turned and gave me a look that I knew that I would never do that again. I then realized that I was not his father on that base, but I was another staff member. I think that particular moment was when I sensed there’s something that’s gone different than prior in his life with his relationship with me. I firmly believe the statement that Lord Acton made, that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I guess it turned out I was right, because the more power he got, the more alienated he became to me, as a father-son relationship. As a matter of fact, on the base, he never referred to me as “Dad;” he called me “Ron.”

And you started to hear and see things that he was doing to the whole base; it wasn’t just his relationship with you.

Oh yeah. We had a torrential rainstorm that had a mudslide and it almost crushed these buildings, and he took us into our eating area, which was a big hall, and for 30 minutes just said that it was [the staff] that caused that to happen. Not an act of God, but it was our bad wishes and our bad thoughts, and we were just a nothing after that point. That was in the ’90s and we never recovered from that. That day stands out in my mind as a day that I didn’t think things would ever change for the better after that. As it turned out, I was right.

You’ve described David developing a whole range of antisocial tendencies.

One of them is not caring for another person. That’s almost like you have no conscience. You can just do something to somebody and just walk away and you’ve done it.

I’ll give you an example. We were on the Freewinds, which is the ship that Scientology has for their uppermost level, and we had a performer there who said something onstage that he shouldn’t have said and it embarrassed David. The band was sent to the bilges as a punishment. The bilges in a ship, the temperature down there is between 125 and maybe 135 degrees. I was in my 60s, and prior to this I had somewhat of a heart condition, and he knew this but I had to go down there with the rest of the guys in that heat. It was inhuman as far as I’m concerned.

There are a lot of examples like that in your book of people being punished in harsh ways.

Oh yeah, absolutely. There’s just no concern for the person. Yet they will say that it’s totally the opposite, that he’s a kind and compassionate person, which just couldn’t be further from the truth. I personally know people who he punched, like Mark Fisher, like Tom De Vocht… I’m not going anonymous on any of these guys. There’s their names. They’ll go on camera and tell you what happened. Yet when it comes to anybody in the church who’s an official making their presence known and going on camera and being interviewed, they won’t do it.

Was this book painful for you to write? To recount all of these painful events and have your son drift away from you must be really hard to take.

You know the story about the PI’s, when they saw me grabbing my chest? Thought I was going to have a heart attack and they called… A few minutes later, David, or a person who identified himself as David Miscavige, got on and said, “Listen, if it’s his time to die, let him die. Don’t intervene. Don’t do anything.”

Even after I heard that—which was very painful for me, devastating as a father; I changed his diapers when he was a kid for Christ’s sake—even with that, I wasn’t going to do anything. I figured, alright, let me get in communication with him, and I called and I couldn’t talk to him. An attorney for the church got on the phone and said to me, “David won’t talk to you because he doesn’t feel he can trust you.”

He said that to me. After two PI’s getting paid $10,000 a week followed me around for a year and a half recording everything I did from eight o’clock in the morning to eight o’clock at night. That’s the convoluted type of thinking that goes on. But I said, “OK, then just tell him, ‘Don’t have people follow me anymore.’ I don’t like it, and just don’t do it.” I was going to let it slide.

So then I took the opportunity to go down to Florida with my wife in October of 2014 to talk to my daughters and see if I could repair the relationship, because by then they had stopped talking to me. So I went to my daughter Denise’s home and her husband came to the door, Jerry, and I said I want to talk to Denise and he says, “Well you can’t talk to her, she’s not here.” But she probably was there. After about 20 minutes of tap dancing with me, I said, “Hey Jerry, what’s the story here? Are you through with us?” And he said, “Ron, Denise and I are through with you and Becky forever.” That was the moment I decided to write the book.

Yes, it was not easy to sit down and do it, but I felt I had an obligation to do it. Not just for myself, but for the hundreds of other people who have been the subject of disconnection. People who no longer talk to their children, who no longer talk to their parents, friends of decades no longer talk to them. I felt somebody had to do something about it and I knew that I could get pretty good attention because of who I was. That’s why I wrote the book.

Once I started it, it just rolled out of me. Because I didn’t sit down at a typewriter or a computer. I tried doing that, but my fingers couldn’t keep up with my thoughts. I tried voice to text, but you spend 90 percent of your time correcting the words. So I got together with this friend of mine, Dan Koon, and we sat down at my house and he asked me questions. That book is a spoken narration of what happened and he took the recording and he put it into book form. That’s how it happened.

Once I got into it I knew that I was doing the right thing. Not only for my own self, but for the sake of a lot of people that I felt it might help. Will it help? Will it end disconnection? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: I couldn’t not do anything after that conversation with Jerry saying that they were through with me forever.

Who is your favorite trumpeter?

[Laughs] That’s a good question and it’s easy for me to answer it. There were two of them. One was Doc Severinsen and the other one was Louis Armstrong.

The sharing economy will screw us all — and it’s retirement we have to be really worried about

Meet Howard and Jean, an older couple I know, who like so many Americans of the “greatest generation” plugged into the New Deal world that promised a secure lunch pail for the middle class. Howard is a World War II veteran who became a mechanic; when he was younger he worked on automobiles for a local Chevy dealership, and then on commercial airliners for United Airlines out at the airport. Jean was a housewife and part-time sales clerk. They worked hard, saved their earnings, bought a house, opened passbook bank accounts for their five kids to save their dimes, sent all five of those kids to college. As the years stretched on, they began to prepare for their retirement. But something bad happened along the way to their retirement plans.

A university education is expensive (especially in the United States), and other rising living expenses began to nibble away at Jean and Howard’s middle-class lifestyle. As with so many of their fellow working-class Americans, their wages didn’t rise as fast as prices for a couple of decades, nor as fast as for other Americans enjoying a wealthier life. So at a certain point, Howard and Jean decided to take out a second mortgage on their home. It seemed like a perfectly good idea, lots of people were doing it. Their bank’s loan officer actually encouraged them; indeed, the friendly loan officer suggested they add on tens of thousands of dollars more beyond the value of their home just so they would have a bit of a cushion for themselves. Interest rates were reasonable, and the value of their home had been increasing in recent years. The loan officer showed them the charts—of what the value of their house had been, what it was now, how much it had increased recently, and where it likely would be in . . . five years, ten years. Heck, it almost seemed like free money, this second mortgage.

Indeed, it was free money, their own personal ATM . . . until it wasn’t. When the housing market crashed in 2008, so did Howard and Jean’s retirement plans. They had sunk most of their savings into their home since, like many Americans, their home was also their piggy bank. Across the nation, the collapse of the housing market in 2008 and the subsequent loss of approximately $8 trillion in housing-based wealth amounted to a direct hit on the nation’s retirement security. Like millions of other Americans, the value of Howard and Jean’s house plummeted, and while it has recovered some of its value, it is still worth less today than the mortgage they owe on it. They are what is known as “underwater,” a graphic but accurate term for their plight, which is shared by nearly 10 million Americans—almost a fifth of all homeowners—who are still financially drowning. Their house, which had been a big part of their retirement future, was now a lead stone around their necks, with the water rising.

Besides owning their own home, Howard and Jean had been thrifty and managed to save a modest amount of money—about $55,000—which they had invested into a 401(k) retirement plan through Howard’s workplace. But like the small number of other middle-class Americans fortunate enough to save a bit— three-quarters of workers nearing retirement have less than $30,000 in their 401(k)—they had invested that small nest egg into several mutual funds. Unfortunately, the amount of their savings was nearly cut in half by the stock market collapses of 1999–2000 and 2008–2009. In a matter of a few years, their retirement plans had been shipwrecked as a result of the depreciation in value of both their home and private savings. As they readied for retirement in 2010, their financial prospects had been deluged by a flood of bad news.

Fortunately, Howard and Jean had another unshakeable asset to depend on—Social Security. They had paid into the Social Security fund all their working lives, not always sure what this 6.2 percent deduction from their paycheck was good for, and they were susceptible to arguments from fiscal conservatives that Social Security should be turned into private retirement accounts so Howard and Jean could keep more of their wages in their pockets. But suddenly, in the depths of their financial flooding, Howard and Jean understood exactly why Social Security was important— it created a buffer between them and the whirlpool threatening to suck them down.

While Social Security was their thank-God life jacket, as a life jacket it is rather small. By design, Social Security is only supposed to replace about 30–40 percent of your wages at retirement; yet most financial advisors say you will need 70–80 percent of preretirement earnings to live comfortably.  So Howard and Jean really had to tighten their belts, and their middle-class standard of living took a big hit. But at least they did not end up destitute or homeless. Theirs is not a happy story, but the ending of that tale could have been far worse.

Howard and Jean are not the only older Americans in this situation. Many baby boomers, seniors, and soon-to-be’s are facing similar circumstances, particularly in the aftermath of the worst economic collapse in the United States since the Great Depression. But what has become known as the Great Recession was just the latest disruption to show that the working life can be a precarious one.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, any Americans who started their working careers in the mid-1960s have witnessed seven recessions—in 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, and 2008—and have lived through inflation, stagflation, oil shocks, oil rationing, the stock market crash of 1987, the savings and loan collapse, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the stock market crash of 2008. Add to that the real-estate and leveraged-buyout implosions of the early 1990s; the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies in the early 2000s; the meltdown of Lehman Brothers; the bailout of AIG, the financial industry, and the auto companies; the issuing of IOUs by the nation’s largest state, California, to cover its debts; and a spotty recovery following the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. In addition, working Americans have seen the national unemployment rate climb above 10 percent twice, and all this during a time that has seen virtually no wage growth for the vast majority and a decline in traditional retirement pensions.

Even in the midst of this Superman-sitting-on-Kryptonite economic recovery, the Chinese bubble collapse in August 2015, which led to a huge stock market sell-off around the world (ignominiously named the China Syndrome), showed how fragile the global stock markets remain—how could any sane person possibly suggest the markets as a suitable target for investing your life’s savings? The last several decades have been one hellacious roller-coaster ride, with casualties scattered all across the pockmarked landscape in which 145 million working Americans are toiling away. For all but the most well off, navigating the ups and downs of the economy has not been easy.

Since the 1930s, Americans of all political stripes were lucky that they had not only Social Security but also other government programs to fall back on. Howard and Jean are not the only Americans who, when faced with a tough situation that threatened their and their family’s economic vitality, reached out and grasped the “visible hand” of government. Hundreds of millions of Americans over the last three-quarters of a century have benefited from the New Deal society that was forged decade by decade, law by law, in the aftermath of the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt embraced the unique capacity of government to pull people together and create pools of social insurance that shielded all Americans against the risks and vicissitudes that we all face in common. Besides Social Security, other federal laws and national programs—a long alphabet soup of policies that FDR and successor presidents passed—have shaped the world in which all Americans alive today grew up. These include Medicare, Medicaid, the Family and Medical Leave Act, student financial aid, the Federal Housing Administration, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, Equal Employment Opportunity, the Civil Rights Act, laws against discrimination, and laws for the environment and consumer protection.

Our understanding of who we are as a people is inseparable from these policies—yet we don’t always recognize it, and many Americans today who are most dependent on these programs like to gleefully bash and deride government. Forty-four percent of Social Security beneficiaries say they have never used a government program; so do 60 percent of recipients of the federal home mortgage interest deduction, 43 percent of unemployment insurance recipients, and 40 percent of Medicare recipients.  Each of these programs and laws were passed, with painstaking effort, because they responded to specific situations and conditions in which many Americans—including the most vulnerable, such as the elderly and children—ended up in tough circumstances through no fault of their own, but because of the roller-coaster swings of the economy.

But the New Deal system wasn’t created by the wealthy and patrician Roosevelt, and the political and business leaders of the time, merely as an act of charity or compassion for the “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” (as President Roosevelt described our country in his famous Second Inaugural Address). Following the devastation of the Great Depression, it was also a way of remaking the broader macroeconomy into one that was more stable, and of using government’s levers of fiscal stimulus, popularized by British economist John Maynard Keynes, to grow the economic pie. That in turn fostered a broadly shared prosperity, which gave rise to the middle class, which became the consumer engine that purchased the goods and services produced by America’s businesses. It was a virtuous circle, and while the system wasn’t perfect, it worked—it created the highest standard of living for more people in human history. That in turn made the United States the envy of the world, with the middle-class dream becoming an important part of our nation’s allure to people everywhere, which gave America more clout on the global stage.

But beginning in the 1970s, the United States engine started losing some of its steam. The plight of the middle class grew more tenuous, resulting in stagnant wages, less job security, the decline of health benefits and the safety net, and the cracking of Americans’ nest eggs when their savings and homes deflated after the collapse of the stock and housing bubbles. Over the last three decades, the US economy has more than doubled in size, but most of the benefits from that growth have gone into the pockets of a fortunate few. Corporate profits are at their highest level in at least eighty-five years, while employee compensation is at its lowest level in sixty-five years. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances found that the top 10 percent of families own 75.3 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the share of wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of families has fallen to just 1.1 percent. Income inequality is now as bad as it was in 1928, just before the Great Depression, with the top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans—a mere 160,000 families—now owning nearly a quarter of the nation’s wealth, a share that has doubled over the last few decades. Incredibly, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent is no higher today than during our grandparents’ time. It’s as if the New Deal had never existed.

And future prospects do not look much brighter. Even as corporations have seen a 30 percent rise in profits since the Great Recession in 2008, wages as a share of national income fell to their lowest point since after World War II. Real median household income is now 8 percent lower than it was in 2007.  Many of the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession of 2008 were what used to be considered “good jobs”—they offered decent pay, health care, retirement, and a comprehensive safety net, with a measure of job security. Now, nearly a fifth of the job growth since the recession ended has been in temporary jobs, and nearly half of the new jobs created in the so-called “recovery” pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Six years into the recovery, the economy had nearly 2 million fewer jobs in mid- and higher-wage industries than before the recession and 1.85 million more jobs in lower-wage industries. Three-fourths of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck, with little to no emergency savings to rely on if they lose their job. The fears of the middle class, which the Tea Party and politicians like Donald Trump have exploited masterfully, are not paranoia. Their standard of living is in fact eroding.

Yet as bad as the impacts of the Great Recession have been, it did not create the retirement crisis by itself. Rather, the causes are rooted in the larger fundamental economic shifts of the last thirty years. Deregulation, deindustrialization, automation, and hyper-financialization of the economy have all contributed to this mudslide over the cliff. Looking ahead, the shape of the future is coming increasingly into view, and it’s clear that other long-term trends warn of additional risks for the middle and working classes.

A 2015 survey from the Freelancers Union and Upwork found that more than one in three Americans—54 million workers— did freelance work in the past year. Other estimates predict that within ten years nearly half of the 145 million employed Americans—60–70 million workers—could well find themselves on shaky grounds, turned into so-called “independent workers,” working part time and cobbling together multiple jobs as contractors, temps, gig-preneurs, and contingent workers.  Even an increasing number of regularly employed, part-time workers are subjected to conditions like “just-in-time scheduling” in which employers dictate the daily work schedule with no employee input or even advance notice, putting these workers on permanent call (and making it impossible for them to plan their lives, hire babysitters, schedule doctor appointments, and more). Increasingly, all of these different categories of workers have little job security, reduced wages, and a deteriorating safety net— including inadequate retirement resources. So-called “sharing economy” companies like Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Upwork, and Instacart are allegedly “liberating workers” to become “independent” and “their own CEOs,” but in reality workers are being forced to take ever-smaller jobs (“gigs,” “micro-gigs,” and “nanogigs”) and wages while the companies profit handsomely. Even many full-time, professional jobs and occupations are experiencing this precarious shift.

Indeed, in the gigs of the sharing economy, working for these app- and web-based companies, some contractors, rabbits, taskers, day laborers, and freelancers have multiple employers in a single day. The sharing economy’s app- and web-based technologies have made it much easier to hire and fire freelancers and contractors, so why would any employer hire full-time workers anymore? We are at the initial stages of the impacts of these new “job brokerage” technologies and how they will affect the labor force over the next several decades. Set to replace the crumbling New Deal society is the darker world of a “freelance society” in which, in the words of one new economy visionary, “companies want a workforce they can switch on and off as needed”—just like a faucet or a television. Hardly a “sharing” economy, it’s more correctly described as a “share the crumbs” economy.

Consequently, for Howard and Jean’s children and grandchildren, the ground looks even shakier than it does for Howard and Jean. Their future is still infused with that age-old American hope and expectation of a generational inheritance, but economic opportunity and fairness are fading for the younger generations. The New Deal society is slowly disappearing, melting away like the polar ice caps. And that in turn will be greatly destabilizing to the broader macroeconomy. For at the end of the day, if not enough people have sufficient income in their pockets and bank accounts to buy up all the products and services that US companies produce, the economy could reach a dangerous disequilibrium. Seventy percent of the economy is driven by consumer spending, but what happens if consumers’ capacity to buy starts shriveling up? We could well face the prospect of an “economic singularity,” the tipping point at which our economy implodes from too little consumer demand because the wealth has been captured by a small number of powerful economic players who extract the best of our nation for their own private use. Everyone else will be left to scramble for the scraps via the share-the-crumbs economy.

Considering the nation’s future, we can see that the American middle and working classes, as well as the poor, are occupying increasingly shaky ground. Only affluent Americans have emerged in better shape than before. But for more and more of their fellow Americans, the dream of a secure and stable life, including their retirement prospects, is becoming increasingly dim.

The Shape of the Retirement Crisis

When our current retirement system was conceived after World War II, during the years when Howard and Jean came of age, the foundation for old-age security was understood as a “three-legged stool.” The three legs were (1) private, employer-based retirement, like pensions and (much later) 401(k)s; (2) Social Security; and (3) personal savings centered around homeownership. But as we will see, private-sector pensions now are rare, and the number of public-sector employees (and their pensions) has declined. With the housing market crash in 2008, combined with increasing volatility in the stock market and flat wages for all but the wealthiest people, private savings for most Americans hasn’t kept up with the need. In the alluring narrative of the American Dream, homeownership has been not only a means for providing a secure domicile, but also a core element of household savings and retirement plans. The collapse of the housing market and the subsequent loss of approximately $8 trillion in housing-based wealth amounted to a direct hit on retirement security. Some of that has recovered, but the economic prospects of many Americans have not.

Thus, two of the three legs of a stable retirement have been gravely compromised. For far too many Americans, Social Securityis the only leg left. Three-fourths of Americans depend heavily on Social Security in their retirement years. Indeed, Social Security has been the most effective antipoverty program ever enacted in the United States. Almost half of elderly Americans today would be poor (incomes below the federal poverty line) without Social Security. The program lifts nearly 15 million elderly Americans out of poverty. For nearly two-thirds of elderly beneficiaries, Social Security provides the majority of their cash income. For more than one-third, it provides more than 90 percent of their income. For one-quarter of elderly beneficiaries, Social Security is the sole source of retirement income. Besides retirement security, Social Security also has contributed significantly to in come assistance for orphaned children and disabled workers. To those Americans covered under its safety blanket, Social Security has provided a guaranteed living allowance, month by month, when no other income was available. Where will these people turn if the politicians are successful in cutting back the last stable leg of retirement security?

Reliance on Social Security increases with age, as older people are less likely to work and more likely to have depleted their savings. Among those aged eighty or older, Social Security provides the majority of income for 76 percent of beneficiaries and nearly all of the income for 45 percent of beneficiaries. Social Security is particularly important to women and racial and ethnic minorities, who have historically earned lower wages than their white male counterparts because of discrimination. Social Security provides 90 percent or more of income for 55 percent of elderly Hispanic beneficiaries, 49 percent of blacks, and 42 percent of Asian Americans, but for only 35 percent of elderly white beneficiaries. And women constitute 56 percent of Social Security beneficiaries aged sixty-two and older and 67 percent of beneficiaries aged eighty-five and older, and they receive nearly half of Social Security benefits, despite the fact that women pay only 41 percent of Social Security payroll taxes. Millions of Americans are substantially if not wholly dependent on Social Security to keep the snapping jaws of poverty at bay.

However, it’s not just lower-income people or women and minorities who have something at stake here. In fact, it is little recognized that middle-income and upper-income households benefit the most from Social Security, in terms of dollars and cents. Since those individuals make more income throughout their lives, they actually receive a higher monthly payout than lower-income people. The average Social Security retirement payout in 2015 was $1,334 per month, or $16,008 per year. So a retired couple each receiving the average amount would get over $32,000 together (if they began taking their benefits at full retirement age, which is sixty-six). On average, a sixty-six-year-old man has about seventeen more years to live, and a woman, about twenty. That means their total take from Social Security would be nearly $600,000 over the course of their lives (adjusted for inflation). In other words, that couple would need a private nest egg of $600,000, reaped from their own individual investment and savings efforts, to match the same amount of income they will receive from Social Security.

And what about the more affluent? A retired couple who earned at or above the payroll tax ceiling ($118,500 per year in 2015) their entire lives would each receive the maximum benefit of around $2,660 per month, or $32,000 each per year—nearly $64,000 a year together (if they begin taking their benefits at sixty-six). If that couple lives to the average age, Social Security would provide them a $1.2 million nest egg (again, adjusted for inflation) for their retirement. That’s a lot of money that this couple would have to replace by rolling the dice, that is, by investing their savings in the casino of the stock market. Good luck.

American workers deserve a good and secure retirement. There are many reasons that the working life can be a risky one. Some workers make low wages throughout their lives and can never save enough; others never had a pension or 401(k) benefits through their job, or maybe they were laid off and had to spend their savings to stay afloat until they found a job. Maybe they became ill, or a family member became ill, and they had to stop working; or maybe the company they work for, such as the corporate giants WorldCom or Enron, went belly up; or maybe the stock market crashed and wiped out half of their 401(k) or the value of their home, which ended up underwater.

Those sorts of unfortunate circumstances have always plagued our economic destinies. Amidst all the headline splashes today about everything from the Kardashians to Game of Thrones to the Super Bowl, it’s easy to forget why we have a program like Social Security in the first place. Prior to its launch in 1935, many elderly people, as well as orphaned children and disabled workers, lived a life of dire poverty. At the time, older citizens had the nation’s highest poverty rate. They were a major part of the one-third who were ill housed, ill clad, and ill nourished. Now seniors have the lowest poverty rate of any age group.  More than any other government program, Social Security has been a crucial part of raising up the condition of the lowest, the weakest, and the meekest.

It’s also easy to forget that Social Security is an insurance program. It’s not a government handout; we all pay into it as a way of insuring ourselves against the risks and roller-coaster vagaries of life. With the collapse of two out of the three-legs of the retirement stool, Social Security is the last remaining protection against that risk for millions of Americans. Every worker pays for it, paycheck after paycheck, depositing money into the fund. Indeed, Social Security is wage insurance—it keeps wages rolling in when we are too old to work. It is also universal insurance—that is, it insures all of us against the universal risks we all face.

Not only that, but once you retire and start receiving your monthly check, the amount is adjusted each year to keep up with inflation, unlike a savings account or investments in stocks and bonds. Private employers don’t adjust wages for inflation, and the federal government has left the minimum wage stuck at the same level since 2009. So this unique cost-of-living feature of Social Security is a godsend to many a retiree. Finally, the government administers it very efficiently; the program costs less than one cent of every dollar to administer. PBS NewsHour’s Philip Moeller, a retirement expert, says Social Security’s cost structure is so efficient that it “would be impossible for any private company to match” it.

Ideology versus Reality

Our political leadership is failing to adjust the US retirement system either to the recent tide of damaging economic events or to the unfavorable shifts of the past several decades. And the nation’s future retirees are wholly unprepared for the challenges of the new, high-tech economy. Part of what’s preventing us from making the necessary transition is that Americans have this deep-seated perception of ourselves as self-reliant individualists and a “republic of property owners.” Yet all the evidence shows that older Americans are more dependent than ever on publicly provided retirement income (primarily Social Security) and health care (Medicare). Americans live inside a schizophrenic disconnect between their view of themselves as Jefferson’s sturdy, self-reliant yeoman farmer, and the actual reality that their standard of living depends increasingly on an interconnected web of social supports, with government at the center. It’s time to connect the dots so that Americans understand this national reality.

Beyond the sometimes mind-numbing details of specific policy discussions, the debate over the US retirement crisis has become high stakes because it’s a tug-of-war over what kind of society we are going to be. A simple example illustrates the baggage of old thinking. Currently any earned income above $118,500 is not subject to the Social Security payroll tax deduction. And income acquired from investments via capital gains and dividends isn’t taxed at all for Social Security purposes (and at only half the usual rate for income tax). As a result, a secretary making $35,000 a year pays a 6.2 percent Social Security–dedicated payroll tax (with the employer paying another 6.2 percent, for a total of 12.4 percent)—but a lawyer making $500,000 a year in salary pays less than 1.5 percent. Taxed on the full salary, that lawyer would be paying another $24,000 per year in payroll taxes.

But it gets worse. Millionaire investment bankers pay a paltry 0.73 percent, if you just assume all of their income comes from a salary; but if you include wealth obtained through capital gains and dividends, those bankers and other wealthy people pay a much lower percentage of their actual income—much lower than their secretaries, chauffeurs, and domestic servants. The secretary is paying at least eight times the percentage of the banker for Social Security retirement. If the banker paid his or her full share, it would mean $55,000 more per year in payroll taxes—over eight times the current payment. So not only is Social Security’s payroll tax very regressive, but it becomes increasingly regressive as one ascends the income scale, even advantaging the mega-wealthy over the merely wealthy.

Moreover, with inequality having increased dramatically nationwide, and with the ranks of the wealthy swelling, that means an ever-greater share of the national income sucked up by millionaires and billionaires is not subject to Social Security’s payroll tax—and is therefore contributing nothing to the Social Security Trust Fund (which is the account where all the payroll deductions reside). Melissa Favreault, an expert at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, says that three decades ago, 90 percent of the  nation’s wage earnings were taxed for Social Security purposes; that proportion has now shrunk to 83 percent, making an already regressive tax even more so.  That slippage might seem small, but it results in a loss of tens of billions of dollars every year from the Social Security fund. Just in 2014, about $60 billion should have gone into the Trust Fund, but instead it was pocketed by the wealthiest Americans. So when you hear that Social Security is going to run short of money sometime during the 2030s, this is a big part of the reason why. Wealthy people are no longer required to contribute their fair share into the nation’s retirement system.

The logic for capping the level of income that is subject to Social Security contributions flows out of the fact that this is an insurance system, not a welfare handout. Social Security in effect is insurance against our loss of wages when we retire (or are disabled), and if wealthy people are not eligible to receive a much higher payout, then, some people believe, they should not have to contribute more. That logic has prevailed for decades, but only for Social Security—when it comes to income, property, or sales taxes, no one asserts that if you pay higher taxes, you should be privileged with a claim for more benefits. With the nation’s retirement infrastructure increasingly rickety and unstable like a tottering bridge, it’s urgent that we revisit this attitude. Removing the income cap and taxing all income brackets equally—a flat tax, in other words—not only would be fairer but in one bold swoop it also would shore up any long-term financing shortfalls and ensure funding for the Trust Fund beyond the 2040s.

Many conservatives have espoused a flat tax on income, but when it comes to Social Security, suddenly a flat tax is ridiculed as a bad idea. Yet opinion polls have demonstrated that most Americans across the political spectrum think that if they pay Social Security tax on their full salary, others should as well. So removing the payroll cap and making all income levels pay according to the same rules would be the fair and financially wise thing to do, and it would be very popular as well.

And yet the US Congress, even when there has been a Democratic majority, has done little to shift its thinking. Politicians in recent years have had virtually no response to the impending retirement crisis. They have refused to remove the payroll cap and tax all income levels the same, or to take other steps to stop the longer-term deterioration of Social Security’s funding. Stuck in the rigid ideology of years past, Beltway politicians are obsessively focused on a “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” austerity regimen. As part of that attitude, leaders in both political parties have advanced plans for cutting Social Security even further than the cuts that were passed on to future generations by the Greenspan Commission in 1983. In another sign of our nation’s split personality, even as Americans like Howard and Jean have come to depend increasingly on Social Security, Medicare, and other pillars of a government-sponsored safety net, the attacks on those “entitlements”—a curse word in US politics—have become increasingly furious and shrill.

Lifting the payroll cap is just one example of how a relatively simple tweak to the system can take us a long way toward solidifying the US retirement system and making it better adapted to the realities of today’s economy. Other tweaks that will be discussed in this book will take us further down the right road.

Most Americans realize what is at stake in this battle over Social Security. It’s reflected in the worry that most Americans feel over their personal finances, including their retirement future. A poll from March 2015 by the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) found that nearly 75 percent of Americans are “highly anxious” about their retirement outlook, and 73 percent agree that the average worker cannot save enough on their own to guarantee a secure retirement. Nearly half of Americans worry that they will have to sell their homes to be financially secure in retirement, with 81 percent saying it is getting harder to prepare for retirement.  A poll in August 2015 commissioned by the senior advocacy group AARP found that nearly two of every three respondents expressed concern that Social Security won’t provide enough to get by, especially if they have a major health-care expense that drains them financially. Given all that anxiety, it is hardly surprising that nearly seven in ten people fear that they will not have enough savings to last their whole lifetime.

That’s what Americans are feeling—but are the politicians listening? The talented generation of American politicians and business leaders in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s tackled head-on the challenge of forging a new deal for the country in the face of a paralyzing economic crisis and devastating second world war. But the current crew of politicians and business leaders have watched helplessly, or even worse have passed one bad policy after another, as the recent national collapse accelerated decades-long trends that are taking major parts of our economy backward to pre–New Deal conditions. Given the worrisome direction of the national economy, and the safe harbor provided for millions of Americans by Social Security, you’d think our nation’s leaders would be trying to figure out how to improve the program, and build up on it. Build upon what works, right?

Wrong. After all, why should members of Congress worry about the nation’s retirement plans when the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2013, over six hundred former members received their own federal government pension that averaged anywhere from $42,048 to $71,664 per year (depending on how long ago they retired). They’ve got theirs, and it appears they have pulled up the drawbridge.

 

Excerpted from “Expand Social Security Now! How To Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve” by Steven Hill (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press. All rights reserved.

They’re still not telling the real story: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and the analysis you won’t hear on cable news

After every presidential primary, we were treated to a new round of conventional wisdom about what things mean for both parties going forward. Yet, there’s every reason to be deeply skeptical of these discussions among people who never saw either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders coming. They represent a chattering class that both expected and normalized a “war of dynasties” between Bushes and the Clintons, then marveled at the “depth” of the Republican bench, and spent months obsessing over whether Joe Biden would run, as if he were a figure of mythic proportions.

You can laugh, if you want, but the out-of-touch nature of these treasured campaign narratives now lives on in a new form: an obsessive focus on this election cycle, when, if anything, the one thing it has to tell us is that much larger, long-range changes are afoot, and have been creeping up on us, below the radar, for quite some time. If you’re going to cover politics almost exclusively as a horse race, it makes perfect sense, of course. But that narrow-minded focus is an integral part of the very system that voters are furiously struggling to reject.

More than ever, we have to ask, why should the conventions or the elections be the framework for all we think? Even if Trump’s presidential run ends ruinously in November, Trumpism will remain, along with the GOP’s profound vulnerability to the forces Trump has unleashed. Similarly, even if Sanders fails to overtake Clinton’s delegate lead, his voters clearly represent the future of the Democratic Party, and Stan Greenberg, pollster for both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, seems justified in his warning last October that it’s a mistake for Democrats to run for Obama’s “third term.” “That’s not what the country wants. It’s not what the base of the Democratic Party wants. The Democratic Party is waiting for a president who will articulate the scale of the problems we face and challenge them to address it,” he said.  

So party leaders on both sides—as well as bipartisan media figures—are simply whistling past the graveyard, perhaps with a slightly different tune just now, but still deeply devoted to reporting, analyzing and discussing things in a way that avoids as long as possible the profound changes that are clearly under way, and the equally profound changes that people are hungry for.   

If past looming disasters we’ve ignored can teach us anything, it’s that this is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. We need to be thinking as clearly and explicitly as we possibly can about the change process under way in our political system—including the objective realities driving it, as well as the deep socio-cultural and psychological forces at work, forces so deep that they are even reshaping how we think of terms like liberalism and conservatism.

At the satellite overview level, theoretical-biologist-turned-human-history-data-analyst Peter Turchin told Salon last November about long-term cycles of increased competition pushing civilizations to peaks of instability, followed by swings back toward greater cooperation. “When the elite are prosocial, when they’re cooperative, the society is governed well; and when the elite eventually become less prosocial, that’s when all kinds of troubles happen,” Turchin said. “In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020,” he added.

Societies run on cooperation, but that means that the question of who counts as a member can be crucial, which helps explain the stakes in the very different politics of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sanders’ call for a broadly cooperative turn is unambiguous—the more so as he’s expanded his platform to include a strong social justice platform in response to early Black Lives Matter protests. His support for immigration reform and respect for Islam—even Palestinian rights—are further reflections of his inclusive universalism. 

But Trump’s cooperative argument is complicated by the central concern of conservatives down through the ages—the question of group privilege. This includes the full range of sub-questions: who calls the shots, who’s included in the social compact, how it’s policed and who is excluded, even demonized. While Trump may cross a lot of lines drawn by today’s tottering conservative elite establishment, he is undeniably focused on these underlying core conservative concerns, and as Corey Robin has pointed out, redefining what conservatism means at moments of high stress is a typically conservative move.

Thus, the question on the left is can Clintonian incrementalism possibly deliver the kind of sweeping reorientation that Turchin’s study of history sees coming, while the question on the right is what’s driving Trump’s redefinition of conservatism, and what chance is there for different sorts of resolution to the tensions fueling that redefinition. Whatever happens this election cycle can only raise these questions, not answer them.

We got an early taste of the forces behind Trump from political scientist Richard M. Skinner last September. He wrote a post at the Brookings Institute’s FixGov blog looking at five long-term factors contributing to Trump’s emergence, and I interviewed him for a story here exploring them at greater length. The factors were: authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, lack of ideology, distrust and negative partisanship. While there’s been some scattered mention of other factors, the most focused attention has  been on the role of authoritarianism, epitomized by Amanda Taub’s superb article “The rise of American authoritarianism,” which places Trump’s emergence into an historical context of long-term worldview evolution and partisan polarization (as described in the book “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics” by political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler), and combines that dynamic view with a detailed snapshot via a Morning Consult poll on the subject.  As Taub described Hetherington and Weiler’s findings:

Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

In their book, they describe authoritarianism as a worldview capable of organizing and orienting a variety of different issues:

By worldview, we mean a set of connected beliefs animated by some fundamental, underlying value orientation that is itself connected to a visceral sense of right and wrong. Politics cleaved by a worldview has the potential for fiery disagreements because considerations about the correct way to lead a good life lie in the balance. Specifically, we demonstrate that American public opinion is increasingly divided along a cleavage that things like parenting styles and “manliness” map onto. We will call that cleavage authoritarianism.

And in a 2009 discussion forum on their book, they described how its influence as a worldview spread across issue domains over time:

That evolution started with race and ‘law and order’ in the 1960s, continued with the emergence of feminism and differing approaches to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, and hardened following the rise of gay rights, terrorism, and immigration as high-profile issues in the 1990s and 2000s.

In the end, Taub suggests, “the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.” In her final paragraph, she writes:

For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.

I believe this is a real possibility, but I don’t believe it’s due to authoritarianism alone. The other factors Skinner pointed to are implicated as well. First, there’s a close relationship between authoritarianism and ethnocentrism, which has been observed statistically for decades. In my article discussing Skinner’s analysis, I wrote:

[E]thnocentric voters oppose spending on means-tested programs such as welfare and food stamps, which they (mistakenly) perceive as primarily benefiting minorities not like them [chart], while supporting spending on Social Security and Medicare, which are seen quite differently as benefiting a truly deserving white middle class [chart].

Trump appeals to such voters in ways that “true conservatives,” scheming to end Social Security and Medicare, obviously cannot, even as he is much more forceful than they are in castigating Muslims and immigrants.

Second, there’s a similar synergy with a long-term dynamic of declining trust, the subject of another book by Hetherington, “Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism.” As the publisher’s description explains:

As people lost faith in the federal government, the delivery system for most progressive policies, they supported progressive ideas much less….

Growing distrust feeds into a more threatening worldview, which in turn feeds into authoritarianism. They are distinct, but clearly related phenomena, and declining trust fits snugly into Turchin schema. “Cooperation is unraveling at several multiple levels,” he told Salon in November. “First of all there is much less willingness to cooperate between the rulers, and the ruled, you can see that expressed in the declining measures of the public trust, for government, and similar things.” Turchin also saw it reflected in higher levels of elite anti-social behavior, and here Trump has been pushing the envelop in both respects, turning distrust onto everyone standing in his way—Fox News, Pope Francis, whoever—even as he claims to be a unifier. But again, he’s only advancing a logic that’s been growing in force for decades.

Third, there’s the dynamic of negative partisanship—another phenomena reflecting increased elite competition in Turchin’s framework. Skinner cited Trump’s identification with birtherism, and his attacks on Obama as “other” as a key to establishing his Republican identity, regardless of his past affiliations and transgressions. “Today, the issues all the fall on the same divide, you see major cultural divisions in society fall along the same divide, race, religion, and so on,” Skinner told me. “And that seems to be accentuating the sense of the other party being not just mistaken, but really just alien.”

However, there’s another consideration influencing how negative partisanship works: the asymmetry between conservatives/Republicans and liberals/Democrats described by political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, which has other significant impacts on the race as well.. As Grossman explained, “[T]he Republican Party is based on an ideological movement, around conservatism, as a set of broad ideas and principles, and the Democratic Party is much more a coalition of social group that have specific concerns, and usually have particular policy goals that they want to try to achieve.” Hence, pragmatic compromise is second nature to Democrats, while refusing to budge on principle is second nature to Republicans. This, in turn, fuels profound misunderstanding, as Ezra Klein put it:

Democrats tend to project their preference for policymaking onto the Republican Party — and then respond with anger and confusion when Republicans don’t seem interested in making a deal. Republicans tend to assume the Democratic Party is more ideological than it is, and so see various policy initiatives as part of an ideological effort to remake America along more socialistic lines.

Ever since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, Democrats have been touting their pragmatism and eagerness to work across the aisle with Republicans and those aligned with them, patterning their market-oriented neoliberalism more along the lines of Ronald Reagan than any Democratic predecessor, only to be relentlessly attacked by Republicans in return. Negative partisanship inhibits any Republican gestures toward compromise, rewards intransigence, and helps move the GOP to the right. But, over the long run, negative partisanship moves Democrats right as well, inhibiting criticism from the left on the ground that it “helps Republicans.” The fighting spirit critics exemplify is perceived as Republican-friendly as well.  Such arguments preempt serious consideration of the substantive criticisms being made, further consolidating the Democrat’s rightward drift. We’re seeing this dynamic once again in how Sanders’ criticisms of Clinton are being dismissed, not just by her campaign, but by the broader establishment she represents. Thus, negative partisanship has helped shift the entire political spectrum to the right, while increasing the importance of fighting over that of actually governing effectively.

But negative partisanship has also brought us to a crisis point, as the GOP’s ideological grounding in conservatism has brought it to a crisis point of near collapse. Social conservatism has failed to return us to the 1950s, as gay marriage so forcefully underscores, while economic and foreign policy conservatism brought us the signature failures of the Bush administration: 9/11, the Iraq War and the Great Recession. Denial has risen sharply as the failures have mounted, but it can only hold out for so long. Conservatism desperately needs reinvention, as does the GOP, since it’s so much of a conservative party.

This brings us to the last factor Skinner pointed to, which he described as “lack of ideology,” but which actually turns out to be something far more subtle. Skinner pointed to the classic work of Philip Converse, who found that only a very small fraction of voters (about 3 percent) reasoned about political issues in ideological terms—terms that serve to organize the political world in terms of what goes with what. Trump appeals to the large mass of less politically sophisticated voters for whom the rules of ideology are virtually unknown, and do not apply—or so I thought, when I wrote that piece.

Since then, however, I’ve come across the work of Stanford sociologist Amir Goldberg (here and here), who used 20 years of polling data from the American National Election Survey to study how people’s opinions aligned. Goldberg used a sophisticated technique, relational class analysis, which revealed three distinctly different patterns of how people organize issue orientations:

[T]he American public is composed of three groups, each characterized by a different structure of beliefs: ideologues [33 percent of the population], whose organization of political attitudes on all issue domains is consistent with the prevalent liberal-conservative polarity; alternatives [40 percent of the population], who dissociate between moral and economic conservatism by adopting what are normally considered liberal views on moral issues and conservative views on economic and civil rights issues, or vice versa; and agnostics [27 percent of the population], whose political beliefs are only weakly associated with one another. This division has been consistent throughout the 20-year period under investigation.

 Goldberg’s approach disentangles questions of how people intuitively see the world from questions of political sophistication.  There are plenty of ideologues who are not that sophisticated—10 times more than the 3 percent identified by Converse. That’s not to say that education more broadly is irrelevant; it’s just one of a range of demographic variables Goldberg uses to explore the distribution of these views. His approach reveals that a much more nuanced view of public opinion is called for. Libertarians, who are socially liberal and economically conservative, are precisely the opposite of Trump’s prime targets, ethnocentrics who are socially conservative and economically liberal, but both groups structure their beliefs according to the same “alternative” logic. That logic is less tightly interconnected than the standard logic, but it is systematically coherent on its own terms. GOP elites are predominately conservative—both socially and economically—but they do include a significant libertarian minority. Trump’s voter base has nothing in common with them. For him to reshape the party it would mean a massive replacement—or else conversion—of the party’s existing elite, which would have far-reaching ramifications.

So what would that outcome look like?

Long-time Salon contributor Michael Lind recently penned a piece for the New York Times looking ahead to a possible political realignment, “Trumpism and Clintonism are the Future,” which has some interesting thoughts on the subject but is notably not a response to what’s been happening this election cycle. In fact, his analysis is basically unchanged from his earlier views on realignment, here in 2014, for example. In that analysis, he began with the observation that younger millennial voters were far more socially liberal than earlier generations, and predicted the eventual withering away of social conservatism, leading to “a dramatic realignment in American politics… likely to reshape the two major parties” based on “public philosophies or political worldviews.”

With social conservatism dropping out of the picture, Lind argues, there wouldn’t be any significant number of today’s conservatives, or what he calls “populists”—economically liberal social conservatives. Only liberals and libertarians would remain, but Lind gives them new labels, “populiberals” and “liberaltarians,” and attaches associations that suggest something more going on, particularly when he argues for a partisan-ID reversing geographic/demographic fit: Populiberals (whom he identifies with support for universalist programs like Social Security and Medicare) fit well with “Republican-leaning red suburbs, exurbs, and rural regions,” he argues, while liberaltarians (whom he identifies with means-tested programs like Food Stamps and welfare) fit more naturally with “Democratic-leaning blue urban areas.” It could happen, I suppose. After all, today’s Democratic “blue states” represent the GOP’s original 1860s strongholds, while today’s GOP has the stronger claim on the once-Democratic “Solid South.” But Lind accomplishes the switcheroo far too easily, without even acknowledging that something a bit unusual is going on.

Lind’s New York Times piece goes a bit further: Donald Trump fills the role of populiberal avatar, while Hillary Clinton is the liberaltarian champion.  It’s easy to see why he gives gives Bernie Sanders short shrift: he’s devised a new political typology where Sanders doesn’t fit, even though the initial logic seems to point straight at him—he’s certainly more of social and economic liberal than Donald Trump ever dreamed of being.

While I applaud Lind’s willingness to think in such large-scale terms, two major flaws jump out immediately. The first is his confusion about the nature of “social conservatism.”  He sees it in terms of a specific package of issues, which genuinely do seem to be in decline with younger voters. But the essence of conservatism, as I mentioned above, is how  it deals with questions of group privilege—who calls the shots, who’s included in the social compact, how it’s policed and who is excluded, even demonized. “Social conservatism” is a huge slice of  all this, and it’s not going away overnight just because some of the specific lines of who’s in and out have to be redrawn, along with some new explanations of why. That’s what Donald Trump is doing right now, in a manner that aligns with decades of authoritarian evolution, as well as the other factors previously cited—ethnocentrism, distrust, and negative partisanship. So long as structures of social privilege, who’s in and who’s out, are being defended social conservatism is still very much alive.

The second problem with Lind’s analysis is more subtle. It rests on a failure to recognize Amir Goldberg’s category of “alternatives,” who operate on a logic that puts libertarians at one pole and ethnocentrics (culturally conservative economic liberals) at the other. Among ideologues, it might make sense to simply lop off one category, reducing the more complex category of conservatives to simply being libertarians. But among alternatives it simply won’t work. The categories are fundamentally dyadic/oppositional: you get rid of one and you get rid of its opposite as well. We may not yet have a very good understanding of the “alternatives,” but the simple fact of their existence is a warning sign that we need to be much more careful in characterizing how different people think.

Still, whatever problems Lind’s analysis may have, it is certainly the kind of thinking we need to have much more of. He’s absolutely right that the weakening of the social conservative agenda among younger voters is a foretaste of likely major changes yet to come. But we’re only just beginning to gain an understanding of the full range of cross-cutting forces at work. Trump has begun trying to redraw the lines for what social conservatism may look like, and it remains to be seen if others will step up to try to draw lines differently.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side—as I’ve noted repeatedly, here, here, here and here—Sanders represents a revitalized New Deal-style social democratic vision, characterized by universalist programs like free public education, Medicare and Social Security, in which the fruits of a successful economy are broadly and equitably shared by all. It represents the kind of fundamental shift in logic to a broadly cooperative social order that’s exactly what we need to reverse our current trend toward social instability, even crisis.

In contrast, Clinton argues for updating 1980s “New Democrat”-style improvements within a capitalist meritocratic system, expanding opportunities for the most successful individuals of formerly excluded groups, but leaving the underlying logic of selective individual success in place, with narrowly-tailored means-tested programs purported to serve those left furthest behind. The game of musical chairs can be improved significantly, Clinton argues, if only everyone is allowed to play and “compete equally,” but Sanders points out that the game is rigged: a shortage of chairs is the whole point of the game.

Horse-race coverage has reinforced Clinton’s repeated efforts to blur the differences between their different visions. A shift to a more extended framework would serve to help sharpen public understanding of the profound differences involved, so don’t expect to see it any time soon. Within the political establishment today, it’s not in anyone’s short-term interest to look out for the public good. That’s what a rigged system is all about. Which is why Sanders’ campaign could be perfectly justified in writing its own rules. They are waging a battle for the soul of the party and the country. Anyone who thinks it will end in a few weeks or months is missing the big picture. Which is just what the establishment is hoping for… still.

Andrew Sullivan is in denial: America’s elites brought this on themselves

I haven’t checked to see who in the chattering classes is oohing and ahhing over Andrew Sullivan’s yuuge (and yuugely read) anti-Trump jeremiad, “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic: And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.” But I do know that, like Tony Blair’s equally magisterial rhetoric about the villains of 9/11, Sullivan’s slightly Tory-ish rhetoric (he grew up a British Catholic conservative) about Trump is pitched perfectly for its nervous, would-be upper-middle-class New York Magazine readers who probably swooned over the Royal Wedding and Downton Abbey and snarked at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park five years ago.

These readers include a few wavering Trumpsters, and Sullivan will make them think twice by blaming Trump’s rise on “too much democracy”—and not, as he should, on the kind of elitism that drives “the people” toward a mobocracy and then turns up its nose at them while pretending to keep its hands clean. While there are compelling half-truths about this right-wing populism in Sullivan’s argument, there are a few things dangerously wrong in it. Beyond just defeating Trump, strengthening the American republic against his successors will depend on correcting Sullivan’s misrepresentations about the role of money in elections and the role of Bernie Sanders in this one.

Sullivan edited several of my articles for The New Republic in the 1990s; his Daily Dish blog kindly referenced some of my writing elsewhere and I have no reason to accuse him of bad faith here. I’ve had my say about the tragedy of right-wing populism in my own yuuge essay on Trumpism and in the interview it prompted on NPR. I won’t repeat that here, but I do want to emphasize that, although I’ll vote for Hillary Clinton in November, neoliberal elites in her corner who not-very-secretly despair of democracy have lost the ability and credibility to govern even themselves, let alone the people they’ve actually helped to degrade and about whose desperation and myopia they’re now shaking their heads, just like Sullivan.

Whether out of cupidity or cowardice, the Democratic Party establishment and its enablers have done as much as Republicans to saddle Americans with arrangements that have produced Trumpism, with a regime of casino-like financing and predatory, degrading marketing that is illegitimate, unsustainable, delusional, and destructive in all the ways unfolding now before our eyes. Say what you will about the inevitability of disruptive globalization and technological revolution, our elites have been surfing these currents instead of navigating and even channeling them with anyone in mind but themselves. Their double tragedy is that now they’re paying the price in Trump.

Sullivan nevertheless claims, as these neoliberals do, that “the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultra-rich has been mostly a dud”—i.e. a non-factor. And he writes that, “Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise—and their facile conflation of that with corruption—is only playing into Trump’s hands.”

Not even half-right on both counts. Regarding campaign financing, has Sullivan forgotten that in 2008 Obama—who he says “was propelled by small donors and empowered by the internet [and] blazed the trail of the modern-day insurrectionist”—actually turned down public campaign financing in order to raise huge donations from elite neoliberals who adored him for perverse reasons that always push neoliberals toward conscience-easing gestures? I esteem Obama for reasons too numerous to mention, but a corrector of corrupt capitalism he was not, either in his 2008 fundraising or in his appointments of Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers.

More important, Sullivan doesn’t mention that the ultra-rich, such as the Koch brothers, fund a lot more than presidential elections, with far darker consequences; even before Citizens United opened the floodgates for them, they were virtually writing laws that facilitate the illegitimate arrangements I’ve just mentioned. Their consultants draft bills for bought-and-paid-for state and federal legislators, sometimes literally sitting in committee rooms where the bills are finalized.

A few years ago, a propane deliveryman installing a new tank to replace an old rusted one told me the new one was really junk because the government had written substandard regulations on its size and composition. “Who do you think really wrote those regulations?” I asked. “Your own employer wrote them, through a national association of propane dealers.” A fleeting look of surprise and then understanding crossed his face. He’d probably been watching too much Fox News. But what had neoliberal Democrats done to prevent such corruption?

Sullivan is also wrong to dismiss Bernie Sanders as a demagogic counterpart to Trump as he does at one point, for telling the truth about the Democratic establishment as well as the Republican. Yes, truth can be hard, and maybe one must be young and not-yet-fully bound up in the system to hear it fully. Even New York Magazine readers who fear Trump may not want to face the whole truth about their own unwitting but objective complicity in what spawned him—a complicity I explain in my essay about him. To suggest that telling the unpleasant truth about Clintonite corporatism plays into his hands is a truism in politics: Democratic socialists who told the truth about Stalinism were accused of strengthening McCarthyism, as perhaps they did. Should they have left it all to Senator Joe?

Clintonite neoliberalism won’t work any better than conservative Republicanism has done because both enable the go-go economic growth that grows inequality, destroying civic trust and hollowing out and hardening hearts. Nor will neoliberal diversity grace notes work. Clinton’s vows to break glass ceilings and curb racist and xenophobic policies are absolutely necessary to our society’s renewal, but they’re also insufficient: Breaking glass ceilings (cue Margaret Thatcher, Carly Fiorina, Marine Le Pen) doesn’t improve a building’s foundations and walls unless wholly different challenges are posed to the structure itself. Nothing in Clinton’s record proves she can or will work to curb the national-security mania, the militarist juggernaut and the predatory marketing and lending that have trapped us like flies in a spider’s web of 800-numbered, sticky-fingered pick-pocketing machines that are pumping so much heartsickness and violence into our daily lives.

Trump is the terrifying consequence of what both party establishments have done to this country. Sanders is quite right to have steered clear of them, even while working with them strategically, as a mayor and in Congress. Even as a Democratic candidate, he has kept telling truths that Trump won’t tell about our national-security mania, militarist juggernaut, and predatory marketing and lending, which are dissolving our republican virtues and even sovereignty almost mindlessly instead of using whatever remains in the United States’ power to reconfigure these arrangements, in concert with others.

I’ll write and work and vote for Hillary Clinton against Trump this fall, but not because I’ve been told that corporate money in elections and the marketization of everything aren’t dissolving our citizenship and democracy, and not because I’ve been told that Sanders is a demagogue like Trump for saying so.