Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 877

Witnessing the Iowa caucus madness: Trump fanatics, protesters, candidate rallies and media onslaught turn heartland into outrageous political spectacle

Across Iowa, people have been gathering in churches, living rooms, their local Pizza Ranch. They come to voice their fears and hopes to neighbors and strangers and members of the press. For Iowa, the caucus is more than a night, it is a season when the corn-fed heartland is the hot-blooded heart of American politics. And for months Iowans have been our pulse. “I love all of it,” said James Payton at a recent rally for Donald Trump. “I love going to the events, I love the ads, I love the whole experience and everything about it. I’m disappointed it’s ending, everyone’s going to leave, and then it’s going to be over. We’re another fly-over state that nobody cares about.” Last week, I attended a caucus training for Trump supporters in the town of Toledo, Iowa. When pundits talk about the importance of a ground game, they mean events like this that draw people out of their homes and make them committed caucus-goers — and a major question has been whether Trump’s ground game is any good. “I idolize this man,” said the facilitator, Frank Moran, about Trump. Moran owns a GNC at the local mall and claims to have spent 80 percent of his savings volunteering for Trump. Thirty of us sat in the community room of the State Bank of Toledo under fluorescent lights, noshing on homemade bars and drinking coffee. Moran asked each of us to offer a testimonial explaining why we support Trump. “I’m so tired of people calling us a bigot,” said a man who didn’t give his name. He came with his Filipino wife, who he’d met on the Internet. As if to explain why he’s not a bigot, he told a story. “It started out just by accident,” he said. “Two years ago I didn’t know what a Muslim was. I would see one and I would smile and say 'hi.' It was like I was a ghost, they couldn’t see me. It turned into a little project. Every time I got done with work I’d go down to the strip mall, seek out Muslims, say 'hi' and smile. I did this to over a hundred Muslims, nobody would even smile.” He returned, then, to Trump. “When he says that this” —Muslim immigration to the US — “could be a Trojan horse, he’s holding back. He knows damn well it’s a Trojan horse. They’ve got these seed cells all over America, and they are not coming here to abide by us.” People in the room agreed. They nodded their heads, uttered exclamations. The potent sense in the room was that we in white America are in imminent danger— and not only from the Muslims. A middle-aged man named Tom explained. “Before we moved here we lived near a town of 7,200 people, predominantly white. O.K.. Meat-packing house is there — large — they employ 3,200 people. The town now is over 80% Hispanic. Most of the whites have moved out, the town looks like a ghetto.” Tom’s anecdote and the earlier man’s story of his Muslim “project” are examples of the archetypal Trumpian narrative: things used to be good (i.e. white); now they are bad (i.e. non-white, ghetto). It has proved a narrative fit for the zeitgeist. The trick for Trump will be to get its partisans out to the caucus Monday night. That was Moran’s task. “We’ve been here 40 minutes,” he said. “Basically, on caucus night, you’re going out the door. This is pretty painless. Other than writing Trump’s name on a piece of a paper, this is basically what it is.” If the candidates have come to Iowa steadily since August, this past week they and their surrogates and their volunteers and their ads have bum rushed the state. The hotels are all booked. Small talk permits no other topic. On Thursday morning, at the Gateway Market in Des Moines, I asked Carol Simms-Davis whether she was following the caucuses. “Yeah,” she said, laughing. “I’m an Iowan.” Simms-Davis, a mental health therapist, was drinking coffee and poring over her heavily annotated King James Bible. She is an evangelical Christian and studies the Bible for personal edification as well as to teach groups of men. This morning she was reading the Book of Proverbs on wisdom. “‘Be not wise in thine own eyes,’” she said, quoting Proverbs. “Donald Trump,” she continued. “He’s out for me.” She considers herself a Republican and believes in the party’s platform, “but not so much the candidates.” Trump? “Scary, a Johnny-one-note, an egotist, and not presidential.” Ted Cruz? “I didn’t like when he shut down the government. He’s volatile.” Marco Rubio? “Still wet behind the ears.” Ben Carson? “I need to figure out who he is as far as Christianity is concerned. He says he is a Seventh-day Adventist, they have some different doctrines. I wouldn’t vote him, even though he is black and I’m black. Doesn’t mean a thing.” All in all, she said, the Republican candidates “suck.” She laughed. “Excuse my French.” She plans to vote for Hillary Clinton. John Zeller — another Gateway Market regular — sat at the next table, studying Italian. “Oh yes,” he said, “I love to caucus. It’s fun. At least the Democratic ones.” At the Democratic caucus, voters gather according to who they support, but if their candidate fails to reach 15% of attendees, they have to disband and support another candidate. This is when the Iowa caucus gets wild, because supporters, say, of Sanders and Clinton will attempt to convince  Martin O’Malley supporters, in real time, to come to their side. For Zeller, the fun is in forcing others to convince him. In 2008, Zeller and his twin brother began with Bill Richardson, knowing he would be unviable, so that others would have to convince them. They believed that the media, particularly, Zeller said, “Japanese TV,” would find the spectacle of the obstinate twins compelling. “You could just tell that the crowd hated us,” he said. “We were just, you know, basking in our glory. Just making them sit there for another half an hour.” Without apparent irony, he concluded, “It’s a long evening.” Where will he end up tonight? He said that, despite his attraction to Bernie Sanders, he’s eager to see “that the Democrats win and we don’t have the Republicans put three troglodyte Supreme Court justices in. So I’ll hold my nose and vote for Hillary.” Neither Simms-Davis nor Zeller were at the Gateway Market that morning for the main event: breakfast with Rick Santorum — a man as well known for being a former Pennsylvania senator as for lending his name to a byproduct of anal sex — who many, even in Iowa, had forgotten was running. The event drew 25 people, 10 of whom were journalists, which meant every attendee was interviewed multiple times. (During caucus season, people in Iowa are so accustomed to speaking to journalists at political events they often begin unprompted by spelling their surnames for the voice recorder.) William and Rose Yost are devoted Santorum supporters. Several months ago they hosted him for an event in their home. “What was supposed to be 45 minutes,” said Mr. Yost, “turned into three hours.” Mrs. Yost fed everyone “two and then three times.” At the end of the night, they loaded up Santorum’s crew with “stacks of Italian cookies.” “That’s Rose,” said Mr. Yost. “She has to feed everyone.” That morning Santorum fed us. We listened to him defend his candidacy over plates of cinnamon rolls and Denver scramble. The night before, anyone who was interested had the chance to see Rubio, Carly Fiorina, and Cruz speak back-to-back-to-back at three events within six miles of one another in the suburbs west of Des Moines. Rubio presented his stump speech at Wellman’s Pub to a well-heeled crowd of business professionals as they sipped glasses of wine or local microbrews. According to The New York Times, middle-class, college-educated suburbanites ages 30 to 45 are the Rubio campaign’s target demographic, and they were in ample evidence at Wellman’s.   Fiorina spoke in the back room of Rube’s Steakhouse. At Rube’s, a diner has the option of selecting her own raw steak and cooking it herself. Fiorina made her pitch, but with technical difficulties — a detail that resonates with the struggles of her campaign. As I left, her microphone quit working and she was speaking loudly to the elderly attendees, asking if they could hear her.   Down the road, Cruz drew an impressive, standing-room-only crowd for an endorsement-studded pro-life rally. To find parking, SUVs hopped curbs and sedans squatted at the edges of intersections. Inside, supporters in red, white, and blue Cruz sports jerseys jockeyed their way into a position to see him. But first, we listened to remarks from Congressmen Steve King and Louis Gohmert, Gov. Rick Perry, and evangelical leaders Bob Vander Plaats and Tony Perkins. When Cruz rose to speak, the crowd erupted with religious fervor.   “One hundred and nineteen hours,” said Cruz, counting down until the caucus. He structured his speech around what he called “seven times for choosing,” selecting a number with Biblical echoes of the apocalypse. Whether it was immigration, gun rights, or the Affordable Care Act, Cruz was alone, in his narrative, on the right side of history. He closed by asking us all to pray between now and November “for Christ to pull us back from the abyss”— the abyss, apparently, of his potential electoral loss.   It is Trump, though, who draws the biggest crowds — and who raises the biggest question. Half the people I spoke with at a recent Trump rally in Iowa City came for the spectacle, or to protest. Early in Trump’s speech, a young man threw two tomatoes at the stage, missing Trump wide left. After that, protesters repeatedly interrupted Trump by blowing shrill whistles, forcing him to cut his remarks short.   Annie Ventullo, a family and child therapist, organized the protest. “If this fascism continues in this country,” she said, “I don’t want to say I didn’t do everything I could to stop. So I’m spreading peace and love.”   But I spoke to many others who support Trump, and — while all white — they surprised me with the diversity of their professions: kindergarten teacher, aspiring animator, computer systems analyst, hospital freight clerk, the owner of Iowa City’s Café Vape, purveyor of electronic cigarettes. Will these people, many of whom have never caucused before, caucus tonight? Are there more Trump supporters than we think, or fewer? These are the questions that pollsters, pundits, and the rest of us are waiting now to find out. The race couldn’t be closer. At the time of writing, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has Trump’s odds at 47%, Cruz’s at 40%.   The owner of Café Vape told me that he knows “a lot of people that wouldn’t come to this” — the Iowa City rally — “because they don’t want to be depicted as Trump supporters. Because it’s depicted as negative.” Will these ashamed Trumpeteers cast their votes? James Payton, the man who loves everything about the Iowa caucus, represents a final, and crucial, demographic: “I consider myself a Trump Democrat as there were Reagan democrats,” he said. “And I think there’s more people out there like me than people realize.” He suspects Trump will win handily. It’s time to find out if he’s right. Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College.  Across Iowa, people have been gathering in churches, living rooms, their local Pizza Ranch. They come to voice their fears and hopes to neighbors and strangers and members of the press. For Iowa, the caucus is more than a night, it is a season when the corn-fed heartland is the hot-blooded heart of American politics. And for months Iowans have been our pulse. “I love all of it,” said James Payton at a recent rally for Donald Trump. “I love going to the events, I love the ads, I love the whole experience and everything about it. I’m disappointed it’s ending, everyone’s going to leave, and then it’s going to be over. We’re another fly-over state that nobody cares about.” Last week, I attended a caucus training for Trump supporters in the town of Toledo, Iowa. When pundits talk about the importance of a ground game, they mean events like this that draw people out of their homes and make them committed caucus-goers — and a major question has been whether Trump’s ground game is any good. “I idolize this man,” said the facilitator, Frank Moran, about Trump. Moran owns a GNC at the local mall and claims to have spent 80 percent of his savings volunteering for Trump. Thirty of us sat in the community room of the State Bank of Toledo under fluorescent lights, noshing on homemade bars and drinking coffee. Moran asked each of us to offer a testimonial explaining why we support Trump. “I’m so tired of people calling us a bigot,” said a man who didn’t give his name. He came with his Filipino wife, who he’d met on the Internet. As if to explain why he’s not a bigot, he told a story. “It started out just by accident,” he said. “Two years ago I didn’t know what a Muslim was. I would see one and I would smile and say 'hi.' It was like I was a ghost, they couldn’t see me. It turned into a little project. Every time I got done with work I’d go down to the strip mall, seek out Muslims, say 'hi' and smile. I did this to over a hundred Muslims, nobody would even smile.” He returned, then, to Trump. “When he says that this” —Muslim immigration to the US — “could be a Trojan horse, he’s holding back. He knows damn well it’s a Trojan horse. They’ve got these seed cells all over America, and they are not coming here to abide by us.” People in the room agreed. They nodded their heads, uttered exclamations. The potent sense in the room was that we in white America are in imminent danger— and not only from the Muslims. A middle-aged man named Tom explained. “Before we moved here we lived near a town of 7,200 people, predominantly white. O.K.. Meat-packing house is there — large — they employ 3,200 people. The town now is over 80% Hispanic. Most of the whites have moved out, the town looks like a ghetto.” Tom’s anecdote and the earlier man’s story of his Muslim “project” are examples of the archetypal Trumpian narrative: things used to be good (i.e. white); now they are bad (i.e. non-white, ghetto). It has proved a narrative fit for the zeitgeist. The trick for Trump will be to get its partisans out to the caucus Monday night. That was Moran’s task. “We’ve been here 40 minutes,” he said. “Basically, on caucus night, you’re going out the door. This is pretty painless. Other than writing Trump’s name on a piece of a paper, this is basically what it is.” If the candidates have come to Iowa steadily since August, this past week they and their surrogates and their volunteers and their ads have bum rushed the state. The hotels are all booked. Small talk permits no other topic. On Thursday morning, at the Gateway Market in Des Moines, I asked Carol Simms-Davis whether she was following the caucuses. “Yeah,” she said, laughing. “I’m an Iowan.” Simms-Davis, a mental health therapist, was drinking coffee and poring over her heavily annotated King James Bible. She is an evangelical Christian and studies the Bible for personal edification as well as to teach groups of men. This morning she was reading the Book of Proverbs on wisdom. “‘Be not wise in thine own eyes,’” she said, quoting Proverbs. “Donald Trump,” she continued. “He’s out for me.” She considers herself a Republican and believes in the party’s platform, “but not so much the candidates.” Trump? “Scary, a Johnny-one-note, an egotist, and not presidential.” Ted Cruz? “I didn’t like when he shut down the government. He’s volatile.” Marco Rubio? “Still wet behind the ears.” Ben Carson? “I need to figure out who he is as far as Christianity is concerned. He says he is a Seventh-day Adventist, they have some different doctrines. I wouldn’t vote him, even though he is black and I’m black. Doesn’t mean a thing.” All in all, she said, the Republican candidates “suck.” She laughed. “Excuse my French.” She plans to vote for Hillary Clinton. John Zeller — another Gateway Market regular — sat at the next table, studying Italian. “Oh yes,” he said, “I love to caucus. It’s fun. At least the Democratic ones.” At the Democratic caucus, voters gather according to who they support, but if their candidate fails to reach 15% of attendees, they have to disband and support another candidate. This is when the Iowa caucus gets wild, because supporters, say, of Sanders and Clinton will attempt to convince  Martin O’Malley supporters, in real time, to come to their side. For Zeller, the fun is in forcing others to convince him. In 2008, Zeller and his twin brother began with Bill Richardson, knowing he would be unviable, so that others would have to convince them. They believed that the media, particularly, Zeller said, “Japanese TV,” would find the spectacle of the obstinate twins compelling. “You could just tell that the crowd hated us,” he said. “We were just, you know, basking in our glory. Just making them sit there for another half an hour.” Without apparent irony, he concluded, “It’s a long evening.” Where will he end up tonight? He said that, despite his attraction to Bernie Sanders, he’s eager to see “that the Democrats win and we don’t have the Republicans put three troglodyte Supreme Court justices in. So I’ll hold my nose and vote for Hillary.” Neither Simms-Davis nor Zeller were at the Gateway Market that morning for the main event: breakfast with Rick Santorum — a man as well known for being a former Pennsylvania senator as for lending his name to a byproduct of anal sex — who many, even in Iowa, had forgotten was running. The event drew 25 people, 10 of whom were journalists, which meant every attendee was interviewed multiple times. (During caucus season, people in Iowa are so accustomed to speaking to journalists at political events they often begin unprompted by spelling their surnames for the voice recorder.) William and Rose Yost are devoted Santorum supporters. Several months ago they hosted him for an event in their home. “What was supposed to be 45 minutes,” said Mr. Yost, “turned into three hours.” Mrs. Yost fed everyone “two and then three times.” At the end of the night, they loaded up Santorum’s crew with “stacks of Italian cookies.” “That’s Rose,” said Mr. Yost. “She has to feed everyone.” That morning Santorum fed us. We listened to him defend his candidacy over plates of cinnamon rolls and Denver scramble. The night before, anyone who was interested had the chance to see Rubio, Carly Fiorina, and Cruz speak back-to-back-to-back at three events within six miles of one another in the suburbs west of Des Moines. Rubio presented his stump speech at Wellman’s Pub to a well-heeled crowd of business professionals as they sipped glasses of wine or local microbrews. According to The New York Times, middle-class, college-educated suburbanites ages 30 to 45 are the Rubio campaign’s target demographic, and they were in ample evidence at Wellman’s.   Fiorina spoke in the back room of Rube’s Steakhouse. At Rube’s, a diner has the option of selecting her own raw steak and cooking it herself. Fiorina made her pitch, but with technical difficulties — a detail that resonates with the struggles of her campaign. As I left, her microphone quit working and she was speaking loudly to the elderly attendees, asking if they could hear her.   Down the road, Cruz drew an impressive, standing-room-only crowd for an endorsement-studded pro-life rally. To find parking, SUVs hopped curbs and sedans squatted at the edges of intersections. Inside, supporters in red, white, and blue Cruz sports jerseys jockeyed their way into a position to see him. But first, we listened to remarks from Congressmen Steve King and Louis Gohmert, Gov. Rick Perry, and evangelical leaders Bob Vander Plaats and Tony Perkins. When Cruz rose to speak, the crowd erupted with religious fervor.   “One hundred and nineteen hours,” said Cruz, counting down until the caucus. He structured his speech around what he called “seven times for choosing,” selecting a number with Biblical echoes of the apocalypse. Whether it was immigration, gun rights, or the Affordable Care Act, Cruz was alone, in his narrative, on the right side of history. He closed by asking us all to pray between now and November “for Christ to pull us back from the abyss”— the abyss, apparently, of his potential electoral loss.   It is Trump, though, who draws the biggest crowds — and who raises the biggest question. Half the people I spoke with at a recent Trump rally in Iowa City came for the spectacle, or to protest. Early in Trump’s speech, a young man threw two tomatoes at the stage, missing Trump wide left. After that, protesters repeatedly interrupted Trump by blowing shrill whistles, forcing him to cut his remarks short.   Annie Ventullo, a family and child therapist, organized the protest. “If this fascism continues in this country,” she said, “I don’t want to say I didn’t do everything I could to stop. So I’m spreading peace and love.”   But I spoke to many others who support Trump, and — while all white — they surprised me with the diversity of their professions: kindergarten teacher, aspiring animator, computer systems analyst, hospital freight clerk, the owner of Iowa City’s Café Vape, purveyor of electronic cigarettes. Will these people, many of whom have never caucused before, caucus tonight? Are there more Trump supporters than we think, or fewer? These are the questions that pollsters, pundits, and the rest of us are waiting now to find out. The race couldn’t be closer. At the time of writing, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has Trump’s odds at 47%, Cruz’s at 40%.   The owner of Café Vape told me that he knows “a lot of people that wouldn’t come to this” — the Iowa City rally — “because they don’t want to be depicted as Trump supporters. Because it’s depicted as negative.” Will these ashamed Trumpeteers cast their votes? James Payton, the man who loves everything about the Iowa caucus, represents a final, and crucial, demographic: “I consider myself a Trump Democrat as there were Reagan democrats,” he said. “And I think there’s more people out there like me than people realize.” He suspects Trump will win handily. It’s time to find out if he’s right. Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College.  

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I’m a server, not your sex toy: Some advice to the next dude who wants to comment on my looks

Recently, a young man walked into the bar where I was working, sat down, and told me that I was pretty. It just flew out of his mouth by accident; he’d obviously had a few. His vibe wasn’t slimy or aggressive. He just seemed excited to discover that a woman he found attractive would be opening his next beer. Convention suggests that the most normal and appropriate response from me would be a display of gratitude, but I wasn’t thankful. I just felt instantly beleaguered in a very familiar way.

I blankly responded that his thoughts on my appearance were not interesting to me and asked him what he’d like to drink. He stood there, drunk and caught off guard by his own boldness as well as my reaction. He tried to focus, knowing that the next move was his, his face reflecting the hazy fear that any dude who is at least trying to come correct feels when facing one of modern courtship’s classic gambles: I really do not want to be "that guy" versus this might just be crazy enough to work. He chose to hedge both ways and began slowly trying to dig himself out, struggling to enunciate and choose his words carefully but choosing the wrong ones. He bumbled between a handful of partially formed apologies before announcing that he felt awful, because I was clearly annoyed and he “would hate to offend such a pretty girl.”

I was so flattered that I instantly got super wet. Just joking! I was disgusted. It was 1 a.m. and I was tired. I wasn’t feeling combative enough to tell him to get lost immediately, especially knowing that he wouldn’t necessarily see the straight line between his actions and the punishment. But I also wasn’t in the mood to rah-rah a drunken stranger toward a potential enlightenment. Attempting diplomacy, I gave him a beer and put him in time out, instructing him to take 10 minutes to think about why even just his final statement was offensive. He wandered to the end of the bar and sat there in a fog.

After a little time had passed, I noticed his posture straighten and I turned to face him. His expression was solemn as I walked toward him, expecting at the very least an unconvincing performance of contrition. Instead, he stood up, took out his wallet, and tried to give me $10—not for drinks but because “sometimes you just have to pay for things.” Yes, this person had spent his time-out arriving at the conclusion that 10 whole dollars was enough to compensate me for feeling exposed, trapped, degraded and simultaneously invisible and on display at my own dumb job. I felt like a human sigh. “Just leave, please,” I said, and then he left.

As I step back and consider the way this story ended, my own generosity embarrasses me. I’m certainly not always that kind. But maybe I’m framing what I’m about to tell you with that particular anecdote to prove that I’m generally down to let a well-meaning dude off the hook if he acts right. When I was younger, I would sometimes even rescue these kinds of men from their own lingering discomfort by being sweet, because women are trained to reward men for all sorts of things by being sweet. I don’t do that anymore, because I’ve realized that smoothing it over with a stranger who has made me feel degraded usually feels more degrading than the actual offense and placating men in this way is a waste of my time. I should have known better than to even try with this dude, because I have already wasted so much of my time in parallel situations; every woman you know has wasted so much of her time.

I totally understand that it’s difficult to know when it is an appropriate time to give women sexual attention. The modern woman is baffling. We are on Tinder and we ball whoever we want and nobody is really allowed to judge anymore and we are feminists and we are easily angered by perceived degradation and we have a lot of feelings about words like "consent," which make your dick scared and we also might want you to pull our hair when we fuck. I imagine it feels impossible to know how and when to express your interest without offending women. It is a minefield, the stakes are high and nobody is safe.

Telling a woman that you think she is beautiful can seem very innocuous; sometimes it is. Sometimes, it will make her day. All this depends on context and I cannot explain when it is and is not OK, because that is like trying to explain intuition. Intuition about what will and won’t offend women is really just a set of odds, based on your lizard brain tabulating and comparing the outcomes of many similar previous interactions. But it’s important to recognize that these odds are skewed because women so often swallow their discomfort or indignation in order to keep the peace—especially if they are at work. Obviously all women have different boundaries and I’m not trying to slide into some essentialized decree about what women do and don’t want, but I think that a lot of mutual discomfort could be avoided if dudes would generally try to figure out whether a woman is interested before trying to figure out how to fuck her.

Although these situations are too nuanced and contextual to come down to do’s and don’ts, there are certain things to consider before giving sexual attention to a female bartender or server. Consider the power dynamic: Women will make more money if their patrons like them; often, their managers will scold them if they react negatively to what we have collectively deemed to be acceptable attention. Where does that leave the woman? She is expected to smile and say thank you, even if she feels mildly affronted, even if she finds you disgusting—although you would likely never detect this as she is forced to suspend these opinions at work. 

Imagine you have a boss who repulses you, and one day, in front of a group of your peers, he presents you with a gift. It isn’t your birthday, but you have been singled out. “Open it,” he implores, beaming. “It’s just for you. You are going to love it.” You open it slowly, as everyone watches. You know that you are going to hate it, because you hate your boss, and you can feel yourself shrinking as you prepare to degrade yourself by pantomiming gratitude. You remove the final layer of tissue, and underneath it is a porkpie hat. A porkpie hat, made of leather. “Yay,” you say. “I totally love this.” You go home and drink a lot. You know you don’t deserve it, but you kind of hate yourself.

Across professional and personal contexts, women are beginning to articulate why we often feel dehumanized by the kind of sexual attention that might have seemed benign 10 years ago; we’re getting better at creating boundaries that work for us. But as we’ve become increasingly vocal about how things actually make us feel, the whole scene has become rightfully terrifying for the people trying to bag us. Dudes who are trying to respect and maybe fuck us are now in a double bind in which these two agendas seem very difficult but necessary to merge. The inverse of this, as I’ve experienced it, at least, is equally paradoxical: How am I supposed to reconcile wanting men to be attracted to me with not wanting to be objectified?

When I was younger, I couldn’t understand how to make this equation work. In my early 20s, I pretty much wanted all guys who weren’t my relatives or Nazis to want to fuck me, because that was the same as wanting them to like me. Playing into that dynamic generally felt like garbage, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I just knew I couldn’t figure out how to get what I wanted and feel respected.

Consider the way that this whole setup warps young women: Many women learn that they are most useful as bodies and that their bodies are most useful for sex before they even hit puberty. Most women I know learned that their sex parts were different than the rest of their bodies because boys or men put their hands or eyes or words all over those parts of us before fuck meant anything but a bad word.

I’ve always been tough, but it has taken me a long time to realize how much of that toughness grew on me as a coping mechanism; how much of that toughness is damage. Men have fucked with my dignity since I was a child, but the things that have happened to me have happened to all of us. When the bad things that happen are normal, you become tough. It’s devastating how tough I am.

So, as a 30-year-old woman who has been through a range of horribly exploitative sexual and emotional experiences—you know, just like pretty much every woman you know—I really don’t want to know anymore if a stranger finds me attractive. Not right out of the gate. Hell no. There are so many more interesting things about me than my body. Do you even care about them? This is why I cherish my friendships with straight dudes who would never try to fuck me even if we are trashed, and is probably part of why I hang out with a lot of queer people. 

This is why I’ve gone home in tears after someone I respect says they think I’m smart and funny and interesting and they’d like to have a drink and rap about the world, and then just tries to fuck me after I patiently dodge their advances all night. Were they not even paying attention? Did they even want to rap about the world with me? I am still, as a grown woman, trying not to mentally respond to that situation by thinking: “Well, that person just wanted to fuck you. Maybe you are not really that smart or interesting.” That precise feeling is one that I don’t really think straight dudes can fully relate to: You are invisible, but they still want to fuck you. They do not see you or hear you. They still might rape you. This is why somebody putting their eyes all over me or immediately telling me they like the way I look is no longer flattering. Because it makes me feel fucking invisible.

I know this is confusing. Assholes have wrecked the whole concept of spitting game, and there is no longer a blueprint for how to hit on women. As far as expressing your interest in a woman while she’s working, I’m not saying it’s impossible to do this respectfully, but consider the stakes before you impose your desire on another human being. Receiving sexual attention from a stranger just affirms that everyone is clocking us every moment and deciding how much we matter based on whether or not they like what they see. If you’re going to holler at somebody while they’re working, try to gauge her interest in your interest before you put it on her. If you’re working really hard to make her see how great you are, she is probably working even harder to escape the conversation without hurting your feelings. If she seems to be down, try building rapport in the same way that you would with anyone you don’t care about seeing naked. Talk about things you like to talk about and ask her what she thinks. Perhaps mention a thing you are doing in the coming days and leave room for her to invite herself. My favorite male bar patron stealth game is someone saying “I’m thinking about leaving soon,” and then trailing off with casual implication.

As a baseline, in any context, treat women like people you are not engaging with primarily because you might get to put your dick inside of them. When you are out in the world--at a bar, at a show, making time with a lady--and you realize you’d like to get down with her, put your game on pause and feel out her vibe. It is very likely that this woman can detect your interest. Try laying back. The process of you getting laid should not feel like you are angling for victory in a war of attrition. You getting laid should not require lengthy negotiations, disingenuous angles, or both of you getting blotto enough to just cave already. If you’re feeling her, look at her like an individual with a mind and a voice, and then, guess what? You might see parts of her you never would have seen otherwise, and she will be happy that you took the time to see her, and then maybe you guys will be so happy to see each other that you fuck each other's brains out.

Recently, a young man walked into the bar where I was working, sat down, and told me that I was pretty. It just flew out of his mouth by accident; he’d obviously had a few. His vibe wasn’t slimy or aggressive. He just seemed excited to discover that a woman he found attractive would be opening his next beer. Convention suggests that the most normal and appropriate response from me would be a display of gratitude, but I wasn’t thankful. I just felt instantly beleaguered in a very familiar way.

I blankly responded that his thoughts on my appearance were not interesting to me and asked him what he’d like to drink. He stood there, drunk and caught off guard by his own boldness as well as my reaction. He tried to focus, knowing that the next move was his, his face reflecting the hazy fear that any dude who is at least trying to come correct feels when facing one of modern courtship’s classic gambles: I really do not want to be "that guy" versus this might just be crazy enough to work. He chose to hedge both ways and began slowly trying to dig himself out, struggling to enunciate and choose his words carefully but choosing the wrong ones. He bumbled between a handful of partially formed apologies before announcing that he felt awful, because I was clearly annoyed and he “would hate to offend such a pretty girl.”

I was so flattered that I instantly got super wet. Just joking! I was disgusted. It was 1 a.m. and I was tired. I wasn’t feeling combative enough to tell him to get lost immediately, especially knowing that he wouldn’t necessarily see the straight line between his actions and the punishment. But I also wasn’t in the mood to rah-rah a drunken stranger toward a potential enlightenment. Attempting diplomacy, I gave him a beer and put him in time out, instructing him to take 10 minutes to think about why even just his final statement was offensive. He wandered to the end of the bar and sat there in a fog.

After a little time had passed, I noticed his posture straighten and I turned to face him. His expression was solemn as I walked toward him, expecting at the very least an unconvincing performance of contrition. Instead, he stood up, took out his wallet, and tried to give me $10—not for drinks but because “sometimes you just have to pay for things.” Yes, this person had spent his time-out arriving at the conclusion that 10 whole dollars was enough to compensate me for feeling exposed, trapped, degraded and simultaneously invisible and on display at my own dumb job. I felt like a human sigh. “Just leave, please,” I said, and then he left.

As I step back and consider the way this story ended, my own generosity embarrasses me. I’m certainly not always that kind. But maybe I’m framing what I’m about to tell you with that particular anecdote to prove that I’m generally down to let a well-meaning dude off the hook if he acts right. When I was younger, I would sometimes even rescue these kinds of men from their own lingering discomfort by being sweet, because women are trained to reward men for all sorts of things by being sweet. I don’t do that anymore, because I’ve realized that smoothing it over with a stranger who has made me feel degraded usually feels more degrading than the actual offense and placating men in this way is a waste of my time. I should have known better than to even try with this dude, because I have already wasted so much of my time in parallel situations; every woman you know has wasted so much of her time.

I totally understand that it’s difficult to know when it is an appropriate time to give women sexual attention. The modern woman is baffling. We are on Tinder and we ball whoever we want and nobody is really allowed to judge anymore and we are feminists and we are easily angered by perceived degradation and we have a lot of feelings about words like "consent," which make your dick scared and we also might want you to pull our hair when we fuck. I imagine it feels impossible to know how and when to express your interest without offending women. It is a minefield, the stakes are high and nobody is safe.

Telling a woman that you think she is beautiful can seem very innocuous; sometimes it is. Sometimes, it will make her day. All this depends on context and I cannot explain when it is and is not OK, because that is like trying to explain intuition. Intuition about what will and won’t offend women is really just a set of odds, based on your lizard brain tabulating and comparing the outcomes of many similar previous interactions. But it’s important to recognize that these odds are skewed because women so often swallow their discomfort or indignation in order to keep the peace—especially if they are at work. Obviously all women have different boundaries and I’m not trying to slide into some essentialized decree about what women do and don’t want, but I think that a lot of mutual discomfort could be avoided if dudes would generally try to figure out whether a woman is interested before trying to figure out how to fuck her.

Although these situations are too nuanced and contextual to come down to do’s and don’ts, there are certain things to consider before giving sexual attention to a female bartender or server. Consider the power dynamic: Women will make more money if their patrons like them; often, their managers will scold them if they react negatively to what we have collectively deemed to be acceptable attention. Where does that leave the woman? She is expected to smile and say thank you, even if she feels mildly affronted, even if she finds you disgusting—although you would likely never detect this as she is forced to suspend these opinions at work. 

Imagine you have a boss who repulses you, and one day, in front of a group of your peers, he presents you with a gift. It isn’t your birthday, but you have been singled out. “Open it,” he implores, beaming. “It’s just for you. You are going to love it.” You open it slowly, as everyone watches. You know that you are going to hate it, because you hate your boss, and you can feel yourself shrinking as you prepare to degrade yourself by pantomiming gratitude. You remove the final layer of tissue, and underneath it is a porkpie hat. A porkpie hat, made of leather. “Yay,” you say. “I totally love this.” You go home and drink a lot. You know you don’t deserve it, but you kind of hate yourself.

Across professional and personal contexts, women are beginning to articulate why we often feel dehumanized by the kind of sexual attention that might have seemed benign 10 years ago; we’re getting better at creating boundaries that work for us. But as we’ve become increasingly vocal about how things actually make us feel, the whole scene has become rightfully terrifying for the people trying to bag us. Dudes who are trying to respect and maybe fuck us are now in a double bind in which these two agendas seem very difficult but necessary to merge. The inverse of this, as I’ve experienced it, at least, is equally paradoxical: How am I supposed to reconcile wanting men to be attracted to me with not wanting to be objectified?

When I was younger, I couldn’t understand how to make this equation work. In my early 20s, I pretty much wanted all guys who weren’t my relatives or Nazis to want to fuck me, because that was the same as wanting them to like me. Playing into that dynamic generally felt like garbage, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I just knew I couldn’t figure out how to get what I wanted and feel respected.

Consider the way that this whole setup warps young women: Many women learn that they are most useful as bodies and that their bodies are most useful for sex before they even hit puberty. Most women I know learned that their sex parts were different than the rest of their bodies because boys or men put their hands or eyes or words all over those parts of us before fuck meant anything but a bad word.

I’ve always been tough, but it has taken me a long time to realize how much of that toughness grew on me as a coping mechanism; how much of that toughness is damage. Men have fucked with my dignity since I was a child, but the things that have happened to me have happened to all of us. When the bad things that happen are normal, you become tough. It’s devastating how tough I am.

So, as a 30-year-old woman who has been through a range of horribly exploitative sexual and emotional experiences—you know, just like pretty much every woman you know—I really don’t want to know anymore if a stranger finds me attractive. Not right out of the gate. Hell no. There are so many more interesting things about me than my body. Do you even care about them? This is why I cherish my friendships with straight dudes who would never try to fuck me even if we are trashed, and is probably part of why I hang out with a lot of queer people. 

This is why I’ve gone home in tears after someone I respect says they think I’m smart and funny and interesting and they’d like to have a drink and rap about the world, and then just tries to fuck me after I patiently dodge their advances all night. Were they not even paying attention? Did they even want to rap about the world with me? I am still, as a grown woman, trying not to mentally respond to that situation by thinking: “Well, that person just wanted to fuck you. Maybe you are not really that smart or interesting.” That precise feeling is one that I don’t really think straight dudes can fully relate to: You are invisible, but they still want to fuck you. They do not see you or hear you. They still might rape you. This is why somebody putting their eyes all over me or immediately telling me they like the way I look is no longer flattering. Because it makes me feel fucking invisible.

I know this is confusing. Assholes have wrecked the whole concept of spitting game, and there is no longer a blueprint for how to hit on women. As far as expressing your interest in a woman while she’s working, I’m not saying it’s impossible to do this respectfully, but consider the stakes before you impose your desire on another human being. Receiving sexual attention from a stranger just affirms that everyone is clocking us every moment and deciding how much we matter based on whether or not they like what they see. If you’re going to holler at somebody while they’re working, try to gauge her interest in your interest before you put it on her. If you’re working really hard to make her see how great you are, she is probably working even harder to escape the conversation without hurting your feelings. If she seems to be down, try building rapport in the same way that you would with anyone you don’t care about seeing naked. Talk about things you like to talk about and ask her what she thinks. Perhaps mention a thing you are doing in the coming days and leave room for her to invite herself. My favorite male bar patron stealth game is someone saying “I’m thinking about leaving soon,” and then trailing off with casual implication.

As a baseline, in any context, treat women like people you are not engaging with primarily because you might get to put your dick inside of them. When you are out in the world--at a bar, at a show, making time with a lady--and you realize you’d like to get down with her, put your game on pause and feel out her vibe. It is very likely that this woman can detect your interest. Try laying back. The process of you getting laid should not feel like you are angling for victory in a war of attrition. You getting laid should not require lengthy negotiations, disingenuous angles, or both of you getting blotto enough to just cave already. If you’re feeling her, look at her like an individual with a mind and a voice, and then, guess what? You might see parts of her you never would have seen otherwise, and she will be happy that you took the time to see her, and then maybe you guys will be so happy to see each other that you fuck each other's brains out.

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“The point of having f**k-you money”: We’ve seen how the economy broke down in ’08 — Showtime’s “Billions” shows us why

HBO's 2011 film “Too Big to Fail” is not even the second-best film about the 2008 financial crisis—Adam McKay's Oscar-nominated "The Big Short" and 2011's "Margin Call" would probably take those two spots. But “Too Big to Fail” is, like "The Big Short," an attempt to tell a true story, admittedly with significantly less punchy results. Cynthia Nixon plays real-life Assistant Secretary Michele Davis, who in 2008 worked in the Department of the Treasury as a close adviser to then-Secretary Hank Paulson. The film attempts to tell the story of not how the housing-bubble financial crisis occurred, but how Paulson wrangled Congress, Wall Street and the regulators in order to bail out the banks and avert a recession that would have been, by some predictions, worse than even the Great Depression. "The Big Short" is a sublime exercise in tone switching, from swagger to devastation, and it builds to an ending with Steve Carrell dining al fresco on the Upper East Side that is all the more poignant for its apparently tranquil setting. "Too Big to Fail" doesn't have quite the same moments. But perhaps because it's a film about politicians, not stockbrokers, there's a throwaway moment in the middle of the HBO film that struck me as a stark moment of realization even to the non-banker, non-economist, non-politician viewer. Davis is trying to strategize her statement to the press, and has to figure out how to translate the intricate failures of collateralized debt obligations and credit-default swaps into language that the American people might understand. Her co-workers help her as best they can, explaining how the credit-default swaps are all being called in at the same time, because all those loans are defaulting—and how, too, merely the insurance for these risks creates a hundreds-of-millions industry that can tumble. “It all comes down,” says Neel Kashkari (Ayad Akhtar), one of Paulson’s high-ranking aides who would eventually oversee TARP. There’s incomprehension on Davis’ face. She asks, half-expecting the answer to be “no”: “The whole financial system?” The silence she hears in response answers her question. Kashkari and Jim Wilkinson (Topher Grace), Paulson’s chief of staff, work with her a bit on softening the language of what happened. But the immensity of it cannot really be sugarcoated. With "The Big Short" making waves in advance of this year's Oscar ceremony, the 2008 housing crisis has come back to demand to be examined. Andrew Ross Sorkin, a finance reporter for the New York Times, wrote "Too Big to Fail" as part of that first attempt to examine the crisis; this winter, as accolades for "The Big Short" were rolling in, Showtime debuted another Andrew Ross Sorkin product: “Billions,” a drama about the ultra-wealthy of the finance world and the U.S. attorney tasked with keeping them honest. Sorkin co-created the show, along with Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Where “Too Big to Fail” is almost airless, crowded with jargon and with very recognizable actors playing very recognizable names (notably, Paul Giamatti as Ben Bernanke and Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner), “Billions” is indulgently frothy—kinky sex, lush interiors and unabashed finance-bro dick-measuring. But while “Too Big to Fail” might do a better job explaining how the financial crisis happened to confused observers like Michele Davis, “Billions,” I think, does a better job of explaining why. I cannot say that the Showtime drama is necessarily brilliant, but it is getting at a human impulse that is implied but rarely stated throughout pop-culture and Wall Street, alike—the cloying, addictive power of wealth. It's a follow-up to what Gordon Gekko did for the ‘80s. Michael Douglas won an Academy Award playing Oliver Stone’s iconic villain in 1987’s “Wall Street,” with the unforgettable catchphrase of “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” He was supposed to be the bad guy. But Gekko was so cool—so slimy, so rich and so venomously powerful—that at least according to reports from Douglas, Stone and costar Charlie Sheen, he became an inspiration for untold numbers of stockbrokers and finance bros. Stone had intended to create a monster, but Gekko turned out to be an inspiration, and "Wall Street," a  handbook for a certain kind of rapacious elitism. In hindsight, Gekko was a warning sign that we didn’t quite understand. It wasn’t just that guys like Gekko existed and became filthy rich at the expense of the American economy, as Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser made clear. It was that despite their machinations and their greed, they appealed to the audience. Stone had intended to create a monster, but as David Chase, Vince Gilligan and Matthew Weiner all discovered when they created Tony Soprano, Walter White and Don Draper, the monsters became unexpected folk heroes. "Billions" comes into its narrative aware of this possible dynamic. Damian Lewis plays Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, a fund manager worth, well, billions—a kind of all-American hero, having miraculously escaped 9/11 by not being in the office that day and then pivoting from his working-class background to a life of preternaturally sharp market intuition. Axe lives in Connecticut with his beautiful wife (played by Malin Akerman) and their two blond children; they live in yuppie suburban prosperity. Axe’s whole life is a playground of opportunity; in the pilot, he swoops in to rescue his favorite childhood pizza parlor and impulsively decides to buy a $83 million mansion in the Hamptons—in both cases, mostly because he can. “What’s the point of having fuck-you money,” he says to the U.S. attorney, Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), “if you can’t say fuck-you once in a while?” He proceeds to deliver the epithet to Chuck, who is obviously fuming. But Axe has a point; he doesn’t need to compete with sophistication, because he can afford to be blunt and ruthless—to buy and discard battleaxes, every day, for the next thousand years. Showtime being Showtime, the drama eagerly delves into the sexual undertones of both men; Rhoades' sense of humiliation and inability to measure up, compared to Axe’s barely masked obsession with being the alpha male, the guy with the biggest metaphorical dick in the room. It’s reductive, but frankly, it’s not so reductive that it doesn’t make a kind of sense, too. With all of that money fanning Axe’s ego, he becomes pure id—lavishly providing for his family, seeking comfort, and winning dogfights, just because that’s where his instincts take him. “Billions"' creators are concerned with cronyism and corruption, and one of the most interesting revelations of the pilot is that Chuck’s wife, Wendy, is a high-ranking employee in Axe’s firm (just as Paulson was the former CEO at Goldman Sachs, and Michele Davis went on to work for Morgan Stanley). But Axe’s lifestyle is just as repugnantly attractive as Gordon Gekko’s was in 1987. In one particularly inspired scene in the second episode, “Naming Rights,” Axe uses an extra $100 million to punish the grandson of a man who once docked him a tip when he was working as a golf caddy. There’s a kind of poetic justice to it, as Axe delivers a dressing-down in a symphony orchestra’s single nice conference room, clearly reserved for donors. But there’s a kind of insanity to it, too, a sense of privilege running amok. Most of us have to get over the times we’ve been treated poorly; most of us have had to learn that the world isn’t fair. Axe gets the satisfaction of seeing every jerk in his past get their due, but he loses, perhaps, an ability to gain some greater understanding or empathy about the world. But as he would probably say: Why does understanding matter, when you can buy victory? And to be frank, I would not entirely know how to answer. “Billions” is indulgent. But in the landscape of Hollywood, it's surprisingly self-aware. Witness “Empire,” one of the most successful TV shows currently airing, about an infinitely wealthy family of record moguls. Or director Nancy Meyers’ oeuvre, populated by the affluent and set in their unbelievably beautiful houses—so much so that Vogue and Elle, among others, have pieces that guide the reader on how to “shop the look” of these interiors. "Billions" is crowded with photo-worthy set pieces, but it also justifies every expensive kitchen and bourgeois affectation with its subtext, like Showtime’s other drama, “The Affair.” It understands the physical presence of wealth and luxury; the ego-affirming perks of being able to wield it. It buys into the rich’s glamour and romance in order to demonstrate the breadth of the fantasy; it knows how hard it is to avoid the seductive call of billions.

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“It’s not a guilty pleasure”: “American Crime Story” faces the complexities of the O.J. trial head-on

Cuba Gooding Jr. was watching the New York Knicks take on the Houston Rockets in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, when it happened. Sterling K. Brown was watching the big game too, but he was in St. Louis. Sarah Paulson remembers being at a friend’s house in Brooklyn Heights. “It was this sort of funny thing … whatever we were watching, it kept interrupting,” she recalls. David Schwimmer watched it in his Los Angeles apartment. “That whole chunk of time was an unusual time for me personally,” he recalled. “I was living in L.A. and highly aware of the tension here, but just got one of the biggest breaks of my career: We’d just shot the ‘Friends’ pilot. So it was this crazy experience of entering the dizzying world of first real celebrity … while also being very attuned to the real world.” Most people, including the stars of FX’s “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” remember where they were when Simpson – football legend, Hall of Famer, actor and Hertz pitchman -- led cops on a low-speed freeway chase in a white Bronco. Days after his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found stabbed to death outside of Nicole’s home, Simpson was charged with two counts of murder and had agreed to turn himself in. Instead, on June 17, 1994, Simpson fled while threatening to kill himself with a gun. His best friend Al Cowlings drove the vehicle for hours as police maintained a safe distance behind them. Some 95 million viewers tuned in to watch the pursuit live, filmed from helicopters hovering above the highway. The incident interrupted that year’s NBA Finals, along with all other previously scheduled national programming. Ultimately it would change television forever. “There was no way to know what was going to happen,” Paulson says, “and what this was preparing the country for, this sort of inception of tabloid television.” We now know that the case ended up being about so much more than that. O.J. Simpson’s murder trial dominated news headlines for more than a year, touching off heated discussions about race relations, fame and privilege, domestic violence and a biased justice system. These elements play out within “The People v. O.J. Simpson’s” 10 episodes, the first of which premieres at 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX. But the series also explores other hot-button topics such as gender and cultural bias in the workplace, as well as intraracial tension the case provoked within the African-American community. “That’s what’s sort of remarkable about the case, that there are these issues sort of vying for dominance,” observes Nina Jacobson, one of the series’ executive producers. “Of course, issues of race ended up trumping all the others. But the other issues were quite present, and we tried to explore all of them.” “The People v. O.J. Simpson” is the first installment in FX’s new “American Crime Story” anthology franchise, with Jacobson producing along with Ryan Murphy and Brad Simpson. The idea of “American Crime Story” is to examine modern historical turning points through a scripted narrative. (The second installment reportedly will look at Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.) Here, intimate portrayals of the O.J. Simpson trial’s better-known personalities are woven together, resulting in an incredibly addictive story – one largely based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book “The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson.” This being a Ryan Murphy production—albeit one executed with a restraint not typical of his other productions -- an all-star cast was recruited for the key roles. Prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden are portrayed by Paulson and Brown; defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Robert Kardashian and Robert Shapiro are played by Courtney B. Vance, David Schwimmer and John Travolta, respectively. Gooding embodies the role of O.J., ably capturing his emotional peaks and valleys as the trial wears on. What most Americans knew about the prosecutors, defense attorneys and others tangential to the case was based upon the images filtered through tabloid articles or edited news footage. To the average person, these men and women were playing fascinating roles in an unscripted drama that was more exciting that any fiction on daytime television. Taking that notion a step further, “The People v. O.J. Simpson” transforms them into complicated characters dealing with personal challenges at home while navigating each other’s outsize egos and reputations in public. The goal, Brad Simpson explains, was to humanize them more than live new coverage ever did. “First you hear where people were during the Bronco chase. Everyone tells you that. Then everyone tells you who they hated,” he says. “If you watched the case, if you lived through it, there was someone who drove you crazy. People hated Chris Darden. People hated Marcia Clark. People hated Johnnie Cochran. “Our hope for the show is that if you watch it, and if you’re one of those people who really hated Johnnie Cochran, you come out with him contextualized,” he continues. “If you don’t love him, you at least understand who he was. And that’s the same for every character.” This is the reason that Paulson found herself taking tremendous care in portraying Clark, who was relentlessly vilified in the press. “I remember sort of buying into this notion, and this idea that I was being fed by the media, about …what kind of woman she was,” Paulson said. “Strident. Overly earnest. Bitch. Just all sorts of negative, rather hideous ways of describing what I now have come to believe is a very powerful, strong woman who was under more scrutiny than I think anyone should be expected to survive.” The writers depict Clark as a driven woman balancing the demands of being a top prosecutor in the district attorney’s office with being a single mom navigating a poisonous divorce. Of course, those who followed the trial’s coverage all those years ago may recall the cruel commentary about her personal style, urging her to change her hair and her clothes. She eventually did, with disastrous results. “I had developed quite a brain crush on her, just revering her and not really being able to fathom how she managed, dealing with that ex-husband and that public custody trial, and raising those 3- and 5-year-old boys. You know, I just think it was a very Herculean task,” Paulson says, later adding, “It rained in her bedroom the entire time during the trial. She was always so sick. There was so much stuff we couldn’t even put in. But yes, she was run ragged.” Brown also wanted to do right by Darden, a lesser-known figure before the Simpson trial, surmising, “I believe he was one of the more traumatized people at the outcome and the acquittal, probably even more than Marcia. He’s a black man, a proud black man who loved his community greatly, and who no longer felt welcome in that community.” Citing a media poll conducted at the time, which revealed that a majority of African-Americans viewed Darden as a “sellout,” “It was heartbreaking,” Brown says. “And to hear him talk about it on Charlie Rose, and I’ve heard him talk about it on Oprah as well … that specter sort of hung over him for quite some time, if it’s not even still hanging over him today.” While “The People v. O.J. Simpson” was filming, producers banned the actors from contacting any of the people their characters were based on until the production had nearly ended, to prevent them from overly influencing their performances. Once the ban was lifted, Paulson did manage to spend time with Clark. Brown reached out to Darden twice, but received no response. Gooding chose not to visit Simpson in the Nevada prison where he’s serving out a 33-year conviction, for a robbery he led in 2007. “I didn’t want that man’s psyche to affect my performance,” he explains. “I’m playing him at a time when he was charismatic, arrogantly egotistical, flamboyant, not only a movie star but a marquee sports figure superstar. And that’s the physical demeanor that I had to try to capture.” In some cases, of course, meeting the real person was impossible: Robert Kardashian died in 2003, and Johnnie Cochran passed away in 2005. Schwimmer did speak with Kris Jenner about Robert, expressing gratitude that her input helped him find a way into portraying a man most of us knew next to nothing about. Beyond, that is, being O.J.’s best friend who reactivated his license to serve on his defense team as well as being the father of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney and Rob. “In a way, the whole thing is about hubris,” Schwimmer observes. “And Robert’s the only person who had nothing to gain. … You know, Jeffrey [Toobin] and I have met a few times. And after doing my research and talking to Kris and thinking about Robert, I took issue with how he portrays Robert in the book. He doesn’t talk about him a lot, but the little he does, it feels like it was a little self-serving. “In talking about it with him, years later, [Toobin] realizes …that was probably unfair, because he didn’t really know about who Robert was or what his motivations were,” Schwimmer adds. “But who knows?” Vance faced a similar challenge in building the role of Cochran. Although he and his wife, Angela Bassett, met the attorney at a party at the attorney’s house more than a decade ago, he said they didn’t interact very much. But he says the image we have of Cochran based on the trial – a man given to flamboyant suits and speeches delivered, at times, as if from a pulpit – tells only a sliver of the story. “I didn’t know he’d cut his teeth on these police brutality cases, and that his main guy… was Mayor Tom Bradley, who funneled a lot of police brutality cases to his firm,” Vance said. “So by the time this case came up, you’re talking about the right person at the right time for the right moment. There was nobody but Johnnie Cochran.” Robert Shapiro, meanwhile is alive and well and hawking LegalZoom on TV. Even so, Travolta declined to meet him. “I could have if I wanted to, but I was advised not to for a few different reasons. I did get a letter from him at one point, saying he was very happy I was playing him.” Which leads one to wonder, why did John Travolta choose to return to television after such a long time, for this particular role? “I loved that [the script] had many messages,” he said. “It was an essay on the legal and judicial system. It was an essay on racism. It was an essay on fame. It was essay on the media, the 24-hour news cycle, reality television – it was all of this. So I knew it was more significant, and not a guilty pleasure.” “And let’s face it,” he adds, “it is a questionable concept when a lawyer wants to get famous from a case, versus serving a case. I find that they were all guilty of that … I have to use lawyers to help me survive. I don’t want them to use my tragedy to become famous. So that’s an interesting thing that we had to explore: Who are these people that would put themselves in this position?” Beyond these characterizations, the producers and actors in “The People v. O.J. Simpson” each hope that viewers can appreciate the story’s relevance in the context of race relations today. “It is a before and after moment, in terms of our ability to consume tragedy as entertainment as a culture. Certainly we hope people will talk about that,” Jacobson said. “But if you thought that you could be over hearing people having complicated conversations about race, about gender, about class -- about all the things that have or haven’t changed – well, it would feel like an incredible accomplishment if just we got people talking.” Gooding also hopes a central element in the story won’t be overlooked. “There was a day I wept in my trailer, because of my embarrassment and guilt at feeling jubilation for the ‘not guilty’ verdict. Not because I felt that [O.J.] is guilty now, but it was more about, these two families lost their loved ones.” “I just felt like, ‘Shit…how could I get so caught up in race relations when this violent crime happened?’”Cuba Gooding Jr. was watching the New York Knicks take on the Houston Rockets in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, when it happened. Sterling K. Brown was watching the big game too, but he was in St. Louis. Sarah Paulson remembers being at a friend’s house in Brooklyn Heights. “It was this sort of funny thing … whatever we were watching, it kept interrupting,” she recalls. David Schwimmer watched it in his Los Angeles apartment. “That whole chunk of time was an unusual time for me personally,” he recalled. “I was living in L.A. and highly aware of the tension here, but just got one of the biggest breaks of my career: We’d just shot the ‘Friends’ pilot. So it was this crazy experience of entering the dizzying world of first real celebrity … while also being very attuned to the real world.” Most people, including the stars of FX’s “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” remember where they were when Simpson – football legend, Hall of Famer, actor and Hertz pitchman -- led cops on a low-speed freeway chase in a white Bronco. Days after his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found stabbed to death outside of Nicole’s home, Simpson was charged with two counts of murder and had agreed to turn himself in. Instead, on June 17, 1994, Simpson fled while threatening to kill himself with a gun. His best friend Al Cowlings drove the vehicle for hours as police maintained a safe distance behind them. Some 95 million viewers tuned in to watch the pursuit live, filmed from helicopters hovering above the highway. The incident interrupted that year’s NBA Finals, along with all other previously scheduled national programming. Ultimately it would change television forever. “There was no way to know what was going to happen,” Paulson says, “and what this was preparing the country for, this sort of inception of tabloid television.” We now know that the case ended up being about so much more than that. O.J. Simpson’s murder trial dominated news headlines for more than a year, touching off heated discussions about race relations, fame and privilege, domestic violence and a biased justice system. These elements play out within “The People v. O.J. Simpson’s” 10 episodes, the first of which premieres at 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX. But the series also explores other hot-button topics such as gender and cultural bias in the workplace, as well as intraracial tension the case provoked within the African-American community. “That’s what’s sort of remarkable about the case, that there are these issues sort of vying for dominance,” observes Nina Jacobson, one of the series’ executive producers. “Of course, issues of race ended up trumping all the others. But the other issues were quite present, and we tried to explore all of them.” “The People v. O.J. Simpson” is the first installment in FX’s new “American Crime Story” anthology franchise, with Jacobson producing along with Ryan Murphy and Brad Simpson. The idea of “American Crime Story” is to examine modern historical turning points through a scripted narrative. (The second installment reportedly will look at Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.) Here, intimate portrayals of the O.J. Simpson trial’s better-known personalities are woven together, resulting in an incredibly addictive story – one largely based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book “The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson.” This being a Ryan Murphy production—albeit one executed with a restraint not typical of his other productions -- an all-star cast was recruited for the key roles. Prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden are portrayed by Paulson and Brown; defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Robert Kardashian and Robert Shapiro are played by Courtney B. Vance, David Schwimmer and John Travolta, respectively. Gooding embodies the role of O.J., ably capturing his emotional peaks and valleys as the trial wears on. What most Americans knew about the prosecutors, defense attorneys and others tangential to the case was based upon the images filtered through tabloid articles or edited news footage. To the average person, these men and women were playing fascinating roles in an unscripted drama that was more exciting that any fiction on daytime television. Taking that notion a step further, “The People v. O.J. Simpson” transforms them into complicated characters dealing with personal challenges at home while navigating each other’s outsize egos and reputations in public. The goal, Brad Simpson explains, was to humanize them more than live new coverage ever did. “First you hear where people were during the Bronco chase. Everyone tells you that. Then everyone tells you who they hated,” he says. “If you watched the case, if you lived through it, there was someone who drove you crazy. People hated Chris Darden. People hated Marcia Clark. People hated Johnnie Cochran. “Our hope for the show is that if you watch it, and if you’re one of those people who really hated Johnnie Cochran, you come out with him contextualized,” he continues. “If you don’t love him, you at least understand who he was. And that’s the same for every character.” This is the reason that Paulson found herself taking tremendous care in portraying Clark, who was relentlessly vilified in the press. “I remember sort of buying into this notion, and this idea that I was being fed by the media, about …what kind of woman she was,” Paulson said. “Strident. Overly earnest. Bitch. Just all sorts of negative, rather hideous ways of describing what I now have come to believe is a very powerful, strong woman who was under more scrutiny than I think anyone should be expected to survive.” The writers depict Clark as a driven woman balancing the demands of being a top prosecutor in the district attorney’s office with being a single mom navigating a poisonous divorce. Of course, those who followed the trial’s coverage all those years ago may recall the cruel commentary about her personal style, urging her to change her hair and her clothes. She eventually did, with disastrous results. “I had developed quite a brain crush on her, just revering her and not really being able to fathom how she managed, dealing with that ex-husband and that public custody trial, and raising those 3- and 5-year-old boys. You know, I just think it was a very Herculean task,” Paulson says, later adding, “It rained in her bedroom the entire time during the trial. She was always so sick. There was so much stuff we couldn’t even put in. But yes, she was run ragged.” Brown also wanted to do right by Darden, a lesser-known figure before the Simpson trial, surmising, “I believe he was one of the more traumatized people at the outcome and the acquittal, probably even more than Marcia. He’s a black man, a proud black man who loved his community greatly, and who no longer felt welcome in that community.” Citing a media poll conducted at the time, which revealed that a majority of African-Americans viewed Darden as a “sellout,” “It was heartbreaking,” Brown says. “And to hear him talk about it on Charlie Rose, and I’ve heard him talk about it on Oprah as well … that specter sort of hung over him for quite some time, if it’s not even still hanging over him today.” While “The People v. O.J. Simpson” was filming, producers banned the actors from contacting any of the people their characters were based on until the production had nearly ended, to prevent them from overly influencing their performances. Once the ban was lifted, Paulson did manage to spend time with Clark. Brown reached out to Darden twice, but received no response. Gooding chose not to visit Simpson in the Nevada prison where he’s serving out a 33-year conviction, for a robbery he led in 2007. “I didn’t want that man’s psyche to affect my performance,” he explains. “I’m playing him at a time when he was charismatic, arrogantly egotistical, flamboyant, not only a movie star but a marquee sports figure superstar. And that’s the physical demeanor that I had to try to capture.” In some cases, of course, meeting the real person was impossible: Robert Kardashian died in 2003, and Johnnie Cochran passed away in 2005. Schwimmer did speak with Kris Jenner about Robert, expressing gratitude that her input helped him find a way into portraying a man most of us knew next to nothing about. Beyond, that is, being O.J.’s best friend who reactivated his license to serve on his defense team as well as being the father of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney and Rob. “In a way, the whole thing is about hubris,” Schwimmer observes. “And Robert’s the only person who had nothing to gain. … You know, Jeffrey [Toobin] and I have met a few times. And after doing my research and talking to Kris and thinking about Robert, I took issue with how he portrays Robert in the book. He doesn’t talk about him a lot, but the little he does, it feels like it was a little self-serving. “In talking about it with him, years later, [Toobin] realizes …that was probably unfair, because he didn’t really know about who Robert was or what his motivations were,” Schwimmer adds. “But who knows?” Vance faced a similar challenge in building the role of Cochran. Although he and his wife, Angela Bassett, met the attorney at a party at the attorney’s house more than a decade ago, he said they didn’t interact very much. But he says the image we have of Cochran based on the trial – a man given to flamboyant suits and speeches delivered, at times, as if from a pulpit – tells only a sliver of the story. “I didn’t know he’d cut his teeth on these police brutality cases, and that his main guy… was Mayor Tom Bradley, who funneled a lot of police brutality cases to his firm,” Vance said. “So by the time this case came up, you’re talking about the right person at the right time for the right moment. There was nobody but Johnnie Cochran.” Robert Shapiro, meanwhile is alive and well and hawking LegalZoom on TV. Even so, Travolta declined to meet him. “I could have if I wanted to, but I was advised not to for a few different reasons. I did get a letter from him at one point, saying he was very happy I was playing him.” Which leads one to wonder, why did John Travolta choose to return to television after such a long time, for this particular role? “I loved that [the script] had many messages,” he said. “It was an essay on the legal and judicial system. It was an essay on racism. It was an essay on fame. It was essay on the media, the 24-hour news cycle, reality television – it was all of this. So I knew it was more significant, and not a guilty pleasure.” “And let’s face it,” he adds, “it is a questionable concept when a lawyer wants to get famous from a case, versus serving a case. I find that they were all guilty of that … I have to use lawyers to help me survive. I don’t want them to use my tragedy to become famous. So that’s an interesting thing that we had to explore: Who are these people that would put themselves in this position?” Beyond these characterizations, the producers and actors in “The People v. O.J. Simpson” each hope that viewers can appreciate the story’s relevance in the context of race relations today. “It is a before and after moment, in terms of our ability to consume tragedy as entertainment as a culture. Certainly we hope people will talk about that,” Jacobson said. “But if you thought that you could be over hearing people having complicated conversations about race, about gender, about class -- about all the things that have or haven’t changed – well, it would feel like an incredible accomplishment if just we got people talking.” Gooding also hopes a central element in the story won’t be overlooked. “There was a day I wept in my trailer, because of my embarrassment and guilt at feeling jubilation for the ‘not guilty’ verdict. Not because I felt that [O.J.] is guilty now, but it was more about, these two families lost their loved ones.” “I just felt like, ‘Shit…how could I get so caught up in race relations when this violent crime happened?’”Cuba Gooding Jr. was watching the New York Knicks take on the Houston Rockets in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, when it happened. Sterling K. Brown was watching the big game too, but he was in St. Louis. Sarah Paulson remembers being at a friend’s house in Brooklyn Heights. “It was this sort of funny thing … whatever we were watching, it kept interrupting,” she recalls. David Schwimmer watched it in his Los Angeles apartment. “That whole chunk of time was an unusual time for me personally,” he recalled. “I was living in L.A. and highly aware of the tension here, but just got one of the biggest breaks of my career: We’d just shot the ‘Friends’ pilot. So it was this crazy experience of entering the dizzying world of first real celebrity … while also being very attuned to the real world.” Most people, including the stars of FX’s “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” remember where they were when Simpson – football legend, Hall of Famer, actor and Hertz pitchman -- led cops on a low-speed freeway chase in a white Bronco. Days after his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found stabbed to death outside of Nicole’s home, Simpson was charged with two counts of murder and had agreed to turn himself in. Instead, on June 17, 1994, Simpson fled while threatening to kill himself with a gun. His best friend Al Cowlings drove the vehicle for hours as police maintained a safe distance behind them. Some 95 million viewers tuned in to watch the pursuit live, filmed from helicopters hovering above the highway. The incident interrupted that year’s NBA Finals, along with all other previously scheduled national programming. Ultimately it would change television forever. “There was no way to know what was going to happen,” Paulson says, “and what this was preparing the country for, this sort of inception of tabloid television.” We now know that the case ended up being about so much more than that. O.J. Simpson’s murder trial dominated news headlines for more than a year, touching off heated discussions about race relations, fame and privilege, domestic violence and a biased justice system. These elements play out within “The People v. O.J. Simpson’s” 10 episodes, the first of which premieres at 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX. But the series also explores other hot-button topics such as gender and cultural bias in the workplace, as well as intraracial tension the case provoked within the African-American community. “That’s what’s sort of remarkable about the case, that there are these issues sort of vying for dominance,” observes Nina Jacobson, one of the series’ executive producers. “Of course, issues of race ended up trumping all the others. But the other issues were quite present, and we tried to explore all of them.” “The People v. O.J. Simpson” is the first installment in FX’s new “American Crime Story” anthology franchise, with Jacobson producing along with Ryan Murphy and Brad Simpson. The idea of “American Crime Story” is to examine modern historical turning points through a scripted narrative. (The second installment reportedly will look at Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.) Here, intimate portrayals of the O.J. Simpson trial’s better-known personalities are woven together, resulting in an incredibly addictive story – one largely based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book “The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson.” This being a Ryan Murphy production—albeit one executed with a restraint not typical of his other productions -- an all-star cast was recruited for the key roles. Prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden are portrayed by Paulson and Brown; defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Robert Kardashian and Robert Shapiro are played by Courtney B. Vance, David Schwimmer and John Travolta, respectively. Gooding embodies the role of O.J., ably capturing his emotional peaks and valleys as the trial wears on. What most Americans knew about the prosecutors, defense attorneys and others tangential to the case was based upon the images filtered through tabloid articles or edited news footage. To the average person, these men and women were playing fascinating roles in an unscripted drama that was more exciting that any fiction on daytime television. Taking that notion a step further, “The People v. O.J. Simpson” transforms them into complicated characters dealing with personal challenges at home while navigating each other’s outsize egos and reputations in public. The goal, Brad Simpson explains, was to humanize them more than live new coverage ever did. “First you hear where people were during the Bronco chase. Everyone tells you that. Then everyone tells you who they hated,” he says. “If you watched the case, if you lived through it, there was someone who drove you crazy. People hated Chris Darden. People hated Marcia Clark. People hated Johnnie Cochran. “Our hope for the show is that if you watch it, and if you’re one of those people who really hated Johnnie Cochran, you come out with him contextualized,” he continues. “If you don’t love him, you at least understand who he was. And that’s the same for every character.” This is the reason that Paulson found herself taking tremendous care in portraying Clark, who was relentlessly vilified in the press. “I remember sort of buying into this notion, and this idea that I was being fed by the media, about …what kind of woman she was,” Paulson said. “Strident. Overly earnest. Bitch. Just all sorts of negative, rather hideous ways of describing what I now have come to believe is a very powerful, strong woman who was under more scrutiny than I think anyone should be expected to survive.” The writers depict Clark as a driven woman balancing the demands of being a top prosecutor in the district attorney’s office with being a single mom navigating a poisonous divorce. Of course, those who followed the trial’s coverage all those years ago may recall the cruel commentary about her personal style, urging her to change her hair and her clothes. She eventually did, with disastrous results. “I had developed quite a brain crush on her, just revering her and not really being able to fathom how she managed, dealing with that ex-husband and that public custody trial, and raising those 3- and 5-year-old boys. You know, I just think it was a very Herculean task,” Paulson says, later adding, “It rained in her bedroom the entire time during the trial. She was always so sick. There was so much stuff we couldn’t even put in. But yes, she was run ragged.” Brown also wanted to do right by Darden, a lesser-known figure before the Simpson trial, surmising, “I believe he was one of the more traumatized people at the outcome and the acquittal, probably even more than Marcia. He’s a black man, a proud black man who loved his community greatly, and who no longer felt welcome in that community.” Citing a media poll conducted at the time, which revealed that a majority of African-Americans viewed Darden as a “sellout,” “It was heartbreaking,” Brown says. “And to hear him talk about it on Charlie Rose, and I’ve heard him talk about it on Oprah as well … that specter sort of hung over him for quite some time, if it’s not even still hanging over him today.” While “The People v. O.J. Simpson” was filming, producers banned the actors from contacting any of the people their characters were based on until the production had nearly ended, to prevent them from overly influencing their performances. Once the ban was lifted, Paulson did manage to spend time with Clark. Brown reached out to Darden twice, but received no response. Gooding chose not to visit Simpson in the Nevada prison where he’s serving out a 33-year conviction, for a robbery he led in 2007. “I didn’t want that man’s psyche to affect my performance,” he explains. “I’m playing him at a time when he was charismatic, arrogantly egotistical, flamboyant, not only a movie star but a marquee sports figure superstar. And that’s the physical demeanor that I had to try to capture.” In some cases, of course, meeting the real person was impossible: Robert Kardashian died in 2003, and Johnnie Cochran passed away in 2005. Schwimmer did speak with Kris Jenner about Robert, expressing gratitude that her input helped him find a way into portraying a man most of us knew next to nothing about. Beyond, that is, being O.J.’s best friend who reactivated his license to serve on his defense team as well as being the father of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney and Rob. “In a way, the whole thing is about hubris,” Schwimmer observes. “And Robert’s the only person who had nothing to gain. … You know, Jeffrey [Toobin] and I have met a few times. And after doing my research and talking to Kris and thinking about Robert, I took issue with how he portrays Robert in the book. He doesn’t talk about him a lot, but the little he does, it feels like it was a little self-serving. “In talking about it with him, years later, [Toobin] realizes …that was probably unfair, because he didn’t really know about who Robert was or what his motivations were,” Schwimmer adds. “But who knows?” Vance faced a similar challenge in building the role of Cochran. Although he and his wife, Angela Bassett, met the attorney at a party at the attorney’s house more than a decade ago, he said they didn’t interact very much. But he says the image we have of Cochran based on the trial – a man given to flamboyant suits and speeches delivered, at times, as if from a pulpit – tells only a sliver of the story. “I didn’t know he’d cut his teeth on these police brutality cases, and that his main guy… was Mayor Tom Bradley, who funneled a lot of police brutality cases to his firm,” Vance said. “So by the time this case came up, you’re talking about the right person at the right time for the right moment. There was nobody but Johnnie Cochran.” Robert Shapiro, meanwhile is alive and well and hawking LegalZoom on TV. Even so, Travolta declined to meet him. “I could have if I wanted to, but I was advised not to for a few different reasons. I did get a letter from him at one point, saying he was very happy I was playing him.” Which leads one to wonder, why did John Travolta choose to return to television after such a long time, for this particular role? “I loved that [the script] had many messages,” he said. “It was an essay on the legal and judicial system. It was an essay on racism. It was an essay on fame. It was essay on the media, the 24-hour news cycle, reality television – it was all of this. So I knew it was more significant, and not a guilty pleasure.” “And let’s face it,” he adds, “it is a questionable concept when a lawyer wants to get famous from a case, versus serving a case. I find that they were all guilty of that … I have to use lawyers to help me survive. I don’t want them to use my tragedy to become famous. So that’s an interesting thing that we had to explore: Who are these people that would put themselves in this position?” Beyond these characterizations, the producers and actors in “The People v. O.J. Simpson” each hope that viewers can appreciate the story’s relevance in the context of race relations today. “It is a before and after moment, in terms of our ability to consume tragedy as entertainment as a culture. Certainly we hope people will talk about that,” Jacobson said. “But if you thought that you could be over hearing people having complicated conversations about race, about gender, about class -- about all the things that have or haven’t changed – well, it would feel like an incredible accomplishment if just we got people talking.” Gooding also hopes a central element in the story won’t be overlooked. “There was a day I wept in my trailer, because of my embarrassment and guilt at feeling jubilation for the ‘not guilty’ verdict. Not because I felt that [O.J.] is guilty now, but it was more about, these two families lost their loved ones.” “I just felt like, ‘Shit…how could I get so caught up in race relations when this violent crime happened?’”

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The time Dave Stewart got a new soul: “I’d had this near-death experience … and I came out of it a completely different person”

Has anyone in rock music had more fun than Dave Stewart? To a lot of people, he’ll always be the quiet half of Eurythmics. But Stewart has been a kind of Zelig of pop and rock music, working with Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, Damian Marley, Joss Stone and plenty of others. His new memoir, “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” chronicles his own career and includes appearances by Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, as well as a great scene of his first meeting with future bandmate Annie Lennox. (The two, who were in a band called the Tourists before they formed Eurythmics, were romantically involved during some of their collaboration, but not all of it.) Stewart, who grew up in the Northeast of England, started out as a young guitarist who loved British folk and American blues artists like Mississippi John Hurt. He even stowed away in the van of a progressive folk band called Amazing Blondel. He went from music that was committed to rock’s roots to becoming a pioneer of synth-pop, one of rock's most proudly artifice-driven styles. Salon spoke to Stewart, who comes across as cheerily low-key, from his home in Los Angeles. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. You seem to have worked in music for decades without getting jaded. What’s your secret? I wasn’t jaded until I started writing the book and realizing all the different episodes and escapades — it aged me five years, I think. It’s going backwards. I think – and it’s the answer to your question – I never look backwards, so I’m always excited about a new artist, a new project… And how do we help music stay as a relevant commercial thing when everyone’s using it all over the place for free. And working on all sorts of projects. So I’m always looking forward at them. That keeps me excited about music and motivated. And working with a lot of new artists – I just produced five new artists in the last 18 months. Brand-new artists, as well as in between working with more normal or legend artists. I think that balance is good. If you stay, all the time, in the world of the elite, and the rock ‘n’ roll royalty, you can forget about the excitement of music. But if you’re with new artists all the time, they are incredibly excited – that rubs off on you, and your experience rubs off on them. I think that’s what it is. You’re most famous for being in Eurythmics, but you’ve been all over the place musically. Were there other periods of your career that were as exciting? In the book, Eurythmics takes up a large chunk. Being with Annie, living together, being in a band together – that took nearly 20 years. But obviously before that, I was this young kid that ran away in the back of a van. And when we arrived at our location, the roadies discovered me at 6 in the morning, all bleary-eyed. That was my first escapade of running away – begging them to let me stay and then ringing my dad. They let me stay and taught me a bit about what they were doing, with amplifiers and going to play gigs. That kind of escapade was thrilling – being 16 and away from home with a bunch of guys who were living off playing their music. And living and sleeping on the floor with a painter, an artist, where the whole room was just empty and full of paint everywhere. Just that diving into, “Hey, there are people called artists, and all they do is this stuff, and they don’t care if they’re starving or if they make anything – they’re just doing it anyway.” That was a great lesson. And Annie and I went through a period with eight pounds a week between us – that’s like $12 a week between us – living in a squat. That’s where someone takes over a house and don’t pay rent – it’s illegal. Do you recommend being romantically involved with bandmates? Sounds tricky. I think we were one of the few in the world who made it work. Mostly, it’s a recipe for disaster and breakup. But Annie and I were a couple before we were a band – we were just living together. We didn’t even write a song each or between us in the Tourists. Then when we formed Eurythmics and decided we would separate as a [couple] people were like, “What? You can’t do that. That’ll never work.” But actually we wrote about 140 songs. So in that way, it was highly recommended. Because the source of material never runs out. It’s such a well of material. I decided to be a photographer for a few years, and met the whole art world that was beginning to break in England – Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin… They’d all be hanging around my apartment. It was a little bit like having a David Bowie lesson or an Andy Warhol lesson…. I had many adventures that would never have happened if I hadn’t jumped off head first. Bowie makes a brief appearance in your book. What did his music mean to you? His music was such a mind-blowing experience when I was a kid. One time when I was in London, I was playing “Hunky Dory,” and these Jehovah’s Witnesses rang the doorbell. Most of the time people don’t let them in. And I was so excited about this – “Life on Mars” and other tracks – that I brought them in. And I said, “Actually, I’m David Bowie.” They had no idea who we was. I played all these weird songs, and they said, “OK, we’ve had enough – nice to meet you.” I met him many, many times… We went to see Big Audio Dynamite at the Ritz, sometime in the ‘80s. Talked about many things. You’ve spent your life with musicians, some of whom had rough patches, and you had some very nasty bouts in the hospital. Are musicians more self-destructive than other people? There has been a survey, in Australia, on artists in general, and their suicide rate is way higher than average – off the chart. Being an artist is tricky, because you don’t have schedule, you don’t have weekends off, you don’t have anything that relates to a regular existence, because it’s not a job. It’s a thing that’s going on in your head and it won’t stop. So everybody who’s an artist is terribly insecure as well. It can manifest in an amazing David Bowie performer with lots of different characters. Or it can manifest in a Nick Drake way – it’s a tricky business. Were the ‘80s the most decadent period for you? Right when [Eurythmics] became huge, we’d broken up, and I was single for the first time in my life. Luckily, I’d stopped taking drugs. If I’d been single and taking drugs and hugely successful and wealthy, right at that point, it might have been a different story. But I’d been through all that when I was poor… Annie helped me get away from being addicted to speed. I was transformed. I’d had this near-death experience where I was on a hospital table, for surgery, and I came out of it a completely different person. I wrote a graphic novel about the experience and called it “Walk In.” A walk in is where somebody’s heart stops beating of another soul or spirit sneaks into the body. You got a new soul? Yeah – I got a different, more alert… Before I was always stoned. I could play the guitar great… But suddenly I woke up and had almost a mission implanted in me. Annie couldn’t believe it. I bought some gear, and was making all these electronic sequences nonstop for 12 hours, without thinking about getting a cup of tea. How old were you at this point? I think I was 26 or 27. Everybody noticed the transformation: “Whoa, what’s happened to Dave?” You mentioned the difficulty of music as a commercial possibility these days. How frustrating is that change to the digital world? Now [digital companies] just want to put all our music up there, and we’ll sort it all out later. Of course, it’s not sorted out still. The food chain looks ridiculous when you look at the artist’s compensation on one end, and where the money is being sent, back and forth and around about and up and down. I even made a funny tape where I rang YouTube and somebody asked, "Why are all these people uploading my music, all over the world, with billions of views, and I don’t see anything coming back to me on a statement? And every time I try to put up my own music, YouTube tells me to put it down." It’s a mess. You seem to get along with everybody. Have you ever worked with a musician you couldn’t stand? I’m never a gun for hire – usually I meet people, have dinner or drinks, become friends, then try a few tracks to see what they sound like. But a couple times I’ve given in when a publisher has said, “You gotta meet this person and write a song.” Which I find really weird – how do you meet somebody and just sit down and write a song, when you don’t know anything about them. And those are usually a disaster. I usually come out of the room after half an hour yelling, “Help! Help!”Has anyone in rock music had more fun than Dave Stewart? To a lot of people, he’ll always be the quiet half of Eurythmics. But Stewart has been a kind of Zelig of pop and rock music, working with Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, Damian Marley, Joss Stone and plenty of others. His new memoir, “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” chronicles his own career and includes appearances by Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, as well as a great scene of his first meeting with future bandmate Annie Lennox. (The two, who were in a band called the Tourists before they formed Eurythmics, were romantically involved during some of their collaboration, but not all of it.) Stewart, who grew up in the Northeast of England, started out as a young guitarist who loved British folk and American blues artists like Mississippi John Hurt. He even stowed away in the van of a progressive folk band called Amazing Blondel. He went from music that was committed to rock’s roots to becoming a pioneer of synth-pop, one of rock's most proudly artifice-driven styles. Salon spoke to Stewart, who comes across as cheerily low-key, from his home in Los Angeles. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. You seem to have worked in music for decades without getting jaded. What’s your secret? I wasn’t jaded until I started writing the book and realizing all the different episodes and escapades — it aged me five years, I think. It’s going backwards. I think – and it’s the answer to your question – I never look backwards, so I’m always excited about a new artist, a new project… And how do we help music stay as a relevant commercial thing when everyone’s using it all over the place for free. And working on all sorts of projects. So I’m always looking forward at them. That keeps me excited about music and motivated. And working with a lot of new artists – I just produced five new artists in the last 18 months. Brand-new artists, as well as in between working with more normal or legend artists. I think that balance is good. If you stay, all the time, in the world of the elite, and the rock ‘n’ roll royalty, you can forget about the excitement of music. But if you’re with new artists all the time, they are incredibly excited – that rubs off on you, and your experience rubs off on them. I think that’s what it is. You’re most famous for being in Eurythmics, but you’ve been all over the place musically. Were there other periods of your career that were as exciting? In the book, Eurythmics takes up a large chunk. Being with Annie, living together, being in a band together – that took nearly 20 years. But obviously before that, I was this young kid that ran away in the back of a van. And when we arrived at our location, the roadies discovered me at 6 in the morning, all bleary-eyed. That was my first escapade of running away – begging them to let me stay and then ringing my dad. They let me stay and taught me a bit about what they were doing, with amplifiers and going to play gigs. That kind of escapade was thrilling – being 16 and away from home with a bunch of guys who were living off playing their music. And living and sleeping on the floor with a painter, an artist, where the whole room was just empty and full of paint everywhere. Just that diving into, “Hey, there are people called artists, and all they do is this stuff, and they don’t care if they’re starving or if they make anything – they’re just doing it anyway.” That was a great lesson. And Annie and I went through a period with eight pounds a week between us – that’s like $12 a week between us – living in a squat. That’s where someone takes over a house and don’t pay rent – it’s illegal. Do you recommend being romantically involved with bandmates? Sounds tricky. I think we were one of the few in the world who made it work. Mostly, it’s a recipe for disaster and breakup. But Annie and I were a couple before we were a band – we were just living together. We didn’t even write a song each or between us in the Tourists. Then when we formed Eurythmics and decided we would separate as a [couple] people were like, “What? You can’t do that. That’ll never work.” But actually we wrote about 140 songs. So in that way, it was highly recommended. Because the source of material never runs out. It’s such a well of material. I decided to be a photographer for a few years, and met the whole art world that was beginning to break in England – Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin… They’d all be hanging around my apartment. It was a little bit like having a David Bowie lesson or an Andy Warhol lesson…. I had many adventures that would never have happened if I hadn’t jumped off head first. Bowie makes a brief appearance in your book. What did his music mean to you? His music was such a mind-blowing experience when I was a kid. One time when I was in London, I was playing “Hunky Dory,” and these Jehovah’s Witnesses rang the doorbell. Most of the time people don’t let them in. And I was so excited about this – “Life on Mars” and other tracks – that I brought them in. And I said, “Actually, I’m David Bowie.” They had no idea who we was. I played all these weird songs, and they said, “OK, we’ve had enough – nice to meet you.” I met him many, many times… We went to see Big Audio Dynamite at the Ritz, sometime in the ‘80s. Talked about many things. You’ve spent your life with musicians, some of whom had rough patches, and you had some very nasty bouts in the hospital. Are musicians more self-destructive than other people? There has been a survey, in Australia, on artists in general, and their suicide rate is way higher than average – off the chart. Being an artist is tricky, because you don’t have schedule, you don’t have weekends off, you don’t have anything that relates to a regular existence, because it’s not a job. It’s a thing that’s going on in your head and it won’t stop. So everybody who’s an artist is terribly insecure as well. It can manifest in an amazing David Bowie performer with lots of different characters. Or it can manifest in a Nick Drake way – it’s a tricky business. Were the ‘80s the most decadent period for you? Right when [Eurythmics] became huge, we’d broken up, and I was single for the first time in my life. Luckily, I’d stopped taking drugs. If I’d been single and taking drugs and hugely successful and wealthy, right at that point, it might have been a different story. But I’d been through all that when I was poor… Annie helped me get away from being addicted to speed. I was transformed. I’d had this near-death experience where I was on a hospital table, for surgery, and I came out of it a completely different person. I wrote a graphic novel about the experience and called it “Walk In.” A walk in is where somebody’s heart stops beating of another soul or spirit sneaks into the body. You got a new soul? Yeah – I got a different, more alert… Before I was always stoned. I could play the guitar great… But suddenly I woke up and had almost a mission implanted in me. Annie couldn’t believe it. I bought some gear, and was making all these electronic sequences nonstop for 12 hours, without thinking about getting a cup of tea. How old were you at this point? I think I was 26 or 27. Everybody noticed the transformation: “Whoa, what’s happened to Dave?” You mentioned the difficulty of music as a commercial possibility these days. How frustrating is that change to the digital world? Now [digital companies] just want to put all our music up there, and we’ll sort it all out later. Of course, it’s not sorted out still. The food chain looks ridiculous when you look at the artist’s compensation on one end, and where the money is being sent, back and forth and around about and up and down. I even made a funny tape where I rang YouTube and somebody asked, "Why are all these people uploading my music, all over the world, with billions of views, and I don’t see anything coming back to me on a statement? And every time I try to put up my own music, YouTube tells me to put it down." It’s a mess. You seem to get along with everybody. Have you ever worked with a musician you couldn’t stand? I’m never a gun for hire – usually I meet people, have dinner or drinks, become friends, then try a few tracks to see what they sound like. But a couple times I’ve given in when a publisher has said, “You gotta meet this person and write a song.” Which I find really weird – how do you meet somebody and just sit down and write a song, when you don’t know anything about them. And those are usually a disaster. I usually come out of the room after half an hour yelling, “Help! Help!”

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Why Iowa matters: A Donald Trump victory in Monday’s caucus would make him virtually unstoppable

The importance of the Iowa caucuses is often overstated. Political media spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Iowa because it's first, and because the candidates themselves spent most of their time there. The coverage is typically overblown, though. In 2012, Rick Santorum won in Iowa, followed closely by Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won easily in Iowa. But neither Santorum nor Huckabee lasted very long after their early victories; it earned them some headlines and perhaps a few more donations, but that's about it. This year feels different, however. The dynamics on the Republican side are such that a Trump victory in Iowa on Monday, which is more than possible, could dramatically impact the race. And Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are terrified about that. Politico spoke with several GOP operatives last week and their comments reflect a growing concern within the party. “If Trump wins in Iowa,” said Mike McSherry, a GOP consultant and former executive director of the Republican Governors' Association, “I don't know how you'd stop him. All these guys are going to be chewing each other's throats out for second place.” An anonymous staffer of another Republican candidate warned: “If Donald Trump wins Iowa, I think he has won – period. Ted Cruz is supposed to win Iowa. If Trump wins, he'll be on a trajectory to come out of the SEC primaries [March 1] with close to triple the delegates of anyone else.” Ted Cruz's entire pitch to Iowa voters is now basically vote for me or Trump is our nominee. “If Donald wins Iowa,” he told a supporter recently in Des Moines, “he right now has a substantial lead in New Hampshire [the second primary]; if he went on to win New Hampshire as well, there is a very good chance he could be unstoppable and be our nominee.” It's hard to argue with the math or logic here. The map sets up perfectly for Trump, particularly if he pulls off a coup in Iowa, a state that traditionally favors more socially conservative candidates. If any primary voters are still unsure about Trump's long-term viability, a win in Iowa would remove all doubt. The so-called establishment candidates are panicking as well. Trump has held a double-digit lead in New Hampshire for months, and he still leads Kasich 31 to 12 in the latest polls. If Kasich finishes second in New Hampshire, that only complicates things in the GOP establishment lane. Kasich has no chance of winning the nomination (he's not even carrying his home state of Ohio). Someone like Rubio — or Jeb Bush — needs a strong showing in New Hampshire to blunt Trump's momentum and convince voters he's a credible alternative to Trump. Which is why a Trump victory in Iowa could effectively end the race: Rubio may be the only non-outsider candidate who can unite enough wings of the party to stop Trump. If he loses handily in Iowa and New Hampshire, his electability argument starts to fall apart. And with Cruz failing in Iowa, where he's invested so much of his resources, Trump's path to the nomination looks wide open. So this is where things stand on the Republican side. A Trump upset in Iowa will almost certainly be followed by a landslide victory in New Hampshire. Next up is South Carolina and Nevada, where Trump is – and has long been – comfortably atop the polls. It's no wonder Republicans are beginning to accept the inevitability of Trump. At this point, there's not much else the other candidates can do, in terms of strategy and tactics. The attack ads have aired, Trump has offended damn near every demographic in the country, including minorities, Veterans and women, and none of it has mattered. He even skipped a debate because he can, because he's above the process. Frankly, he's already unstoppable. A win in Iowa will just shatter whatever hope establishment Republicans still have that Trump will disappear.The importance of the Iowa caucuses is often overstated. Political media spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Iowa because it's first, and because the candidates themselves spent most of their time there. The coverage is typically overblown, though. In 2012, Rick Santorum won in Iowa, followed closely by Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won easily in Iowa. But neither Santorum nor Huckabee lasted very long after their early victories; it earned them some headlines and perhaps a few more donations, but that's about it. This year feels different, however. The dynamics on the Republican side are such that a Trump victory in Iowa on Monday, which is more than possible, could dramatically impact the race. And Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are terrified about that. Politico spoke with several GOP operatives last week and their comments reflect a growing concern within the party. “If Trump wins in Iowa,” said Mike McSherry, a GOP consultant and former executive director of the Republican Governors' Association, “I don't know how you'd stop him. All these guys are going to be chewing each other's throats out for second place.” An anonymous staffer of another Republican candidate warned: “If Donald Trump wins Iowa, I think he has won – period. Ted Cruz is supposed to win Iowa. If Trump wins, he'll be on a trajectory to come out of the SEC primaries [March 1] with close to triple the delegates of anyone else.” Ted Cruz's entire pitch to Iowa voters is now basically vote for me or Trump is our nominee. “If Donald wins Iowa,” he told a supporter recently in Des Moines, “he right now has a substantial lead in New Hampshire [the second primary]; if he went on to win New Hampshire as well, there is a very good chance he could be unstoppable and be our nominee.” It's hard to argue with the math or logic here. The map sets up perfectly for Trump, particularly if he pulls off a coup in Iowa, a state that traditionally favors more socially conservative candidates. If any primary voters are still unsure about Trump's long-term viability, a win in Iowa would remove all doubt. The so-called establishment candidates are panicking as well. Trump has held a double-digit lead in New Hampshire for months, and he still leads Kasich 31 to 12 in the latest polls. If Kasich finishes second in New Hampshire, that only complicates things in the GOP establishment lane. Kasich has no chance of winning the nomination (he's not even carrying his home state of Ohio). Someone like Rubio — or Jeb Bush — needs a strong showing in New Hampshire to blunt Trump's momentum and convince voters he's a credible alternative to Trump. Which is why a Trump victory in Iowa could effectively end the race: Rubio may be the only non-outsider candidate who can unite enough wings of the party to stop Trump. If he loses handily in Iowa and New Hampshire, his electability argument starts to fall apart. And with Cruz failing in Iowa, where he's invested so much of his resources, Trump's path to the nomination looks wide open. So this is where things stand on the Republican side. A Trump upset in Iowa will almost certainly be followed by a landslide victory in New Hampshire. Next up is South Carolina and Nevada, where Trump is – and has long been – comfortably atop the polls. It's no wonder Republicans are beginning to accept the inevitability of Trump. At this point, there's not much else the other candidates can do, in terms of strategy and tactics. The attack ads have aired, Trump has offended damn near every demographic in the country, including minorities, Veterans and women, and none of it has mattered. He even skipped a debate because he can, because he's above the process. Frankly, he's already unstoppable. A win in Iowa will just shatter whatever hope establishment Republicans still have that Trump will disappear.

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How to defeat the Koch brothers: Here’s what it could take to end their right-wing stranglehold

Over the last decade, the Koch brothers have taken an increasingly important role in American politics. Recent reporting as well as academic research suggests that the Kochs now control a network that will likely outspend the Republican National Committee in 2016, and has sophisticated data analytic capacities, as well as a surveillance operation. The Kochs fund organizations that create model bills, run get-out-the-vote operations and recruit candidates. That is, the Koch network shares all of the things a traditional party does, without being accountable to voters. The remedy, say two political scientists, is to shift the campaign finance landscape to strengthen parties. But any reform must include public financing. The rise of the Kochs Though they have been involved in politics for more than four decades, the Koch brothers only recently began participating directly in electoral politics. However, their operations have expanded quickly. A recent Politico report finds,

Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO’s analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network.

At the same time as the Koch brothers have expanded into electoral politics, traditional party organizations have become weaker. Political scientists Theda Skocpol and Alex Hertel-Fernandez, who have studied organizations on the left and right extensively, find funding non-party organizations have increased dramatically on the right while the Republican Party has become weaker (see chart).   Hertel-Fernandez tells me,

“Political resources are now far less likely to flow through the official Republican committees than they were a decade ago. Instead, contributions are increasingly likely to go through outside groups. By far, the most prominent of these extra party funders is the array of groups directed by the Koch brothers.”

Their research aligns with extensive work by journalists. In his 2014 book, "Big Money," Kenneth Vogel writes of the Koch network,

“Intentionally or not, this new system has eroded the power of the official parties that have rigidly controlled modern politics for decades… The result is the privatization of a system that we’d always thought of as public-a hi-jacking of American politics by the ultra-rich.”

Dan Balz notes that,

“When W. Clement Stone, an insurance magnate and philanthropist, gave $2 million to Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 campaign, it caused public outrage and contributed to a movement that produced the post-Watergate reforms in campaign financing. Accounting for inflation, that $2 million would equal about $11 million in today’s dollars.”

In 2015, the Koch brothers revealed a spending goal of $889 million for their network, nearly 81 times more than Stone, and far more than the $657 million that the Republican Party spent in 2012. In her book "Dark Money," Jane Mayer argues that this has long been a goal for some on the right, writing that Karl Rove “had long dreamed of creating a conservative political machine outside the traditional parties’ control that could be funded by virtually unlimited private fortunes.” But Rove’s goal may soon become a nightmare. While most people have focused on the part of the GOP's post-election autopsy that worried about its overwhelmingly white base, a more important nugget may well be its discussion of the increasing power of donors. The document reads,

“The current campaign finance environment has led to a handful of friends and allied groups dominating our side’s efforts. This is not healthy. A lot of centralized authority in the hand of a few people at these outside organizations is dangerous for our party.”

Take the Medicaid expansion, which has been stunted by powerful political interests, despite rather strong public support. Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol and Daniel Lynch find that while GOP governors and business groups were favorable to the Medicaid expansion, Koch-backed groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and AFP (Americans for Prosperity) fought vigorously against it (I’ve discussed this work here). As the Koch brothers grow stronger, there will be more fights between the GOP and this increasingly powerful and unaccountable family. Meanwhile, Ken Vogel reports that in 2014, the Chamber of Commerce “considered wading into the 2014 Republican primary in a major way.” Their goal: “ousting tea party conservatives and replacing them with more business-friendly pragmatists.” Vogel cites Club for Growth president Chris Chocola who criticizes former Gov. Haley Barbour because,

“Haley wants every Republican to win, regardless of how they vote for office. The Club for Growth PAC helps elect candidates who support limited government and free markets. Unfortunately, the two goals coincide less often than the Republican Establishment cares to admit.” [emphasis mine]

Quotes like this indicate that there will be increasingly fraught relationships between outside groups and the GOP establishment. Could the solution be stronger parties? What, then, can be done? In their book, "Campaign Finance and Political Polarization," political scientists Brian Schaffner and Ray La Raja use a vast amount of state-level data to argue that stronger parties lead to less ideological candidates. As the chart below from their book shows, the distribution of party money favors more moderate candidates, while issue groups like the Koch network favor more extreme candidates, and business groups favor the right. It’s also worth noting that these data suggest an asymmetry in the parties, with Republicans more likely to support candidates further to the extreme than Democrats (thus the rightward tilt of the “party money” graph). Their extensive analysis of state-level data, over a long historical period, suggests, “In states where parties face more restrictive campaign finance laws, legislators are further from the center than in states where parties are financially unconstrained.” Although La Raja and Schaffner focus on polarization, a recent report by Daniel Weiner and Ian Vandewalker of the Brennan Center for Justice makes a different argument: Stronger parties could actually strengthen democracy. They write,

“Targeted measures to strengthen political parties, including public financing and a relaxing of certain campaign finance regulations, could help produce a more inclusive and transparent politics.”

Their core argument is that parties are accountable to voters, while donors are not. They compare two of the biggest spenders in 2014: the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), a party organization, and the Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC. They note that,

“the Senate Majority PAC. The DSCC took in 44 percent of its contributions from small donors of $200 or less, while Senate Majority PAC received less than one tenth of one percent of its funds from small donors.”

Further,

“Of the $46 million that Senate Majority PAC spent in total, $36 million came from just 23 donors who each gave half a million dollars or more, according to FEC data.”

They also note that parties are more transparent than PACs, so stronger parties would bring more sunlight to the democratic process. Though they approach the argument from different angles, the Brennan Center Report and the La Raja/Schaffner book share in common the proposal that public financing should be available to parties and that limits on party contributions to candidates should be reduced or eliminated. Brian explained his thinking to me thusly:

“While the Mitch McConnells and John Boehners of the world are certainly not moderates, they are not nearly as polarized or uncompromising as super PAC funders like the the Kochs and Adelson. And it's the fear of backlash from those outside forces which is working against any kind of compromise in Washington."

He adds, "The Koch network now has many of the aspects of a political party -- GOTV, complex data analytics, candidate selection -- without the accountability to voters." Political scientist Seth Masket notes that the proposal to strengthen parties had quite a bit of support at a Brookings event he attended. He argues for a system in which parties can funnel public money to preferred campaigns. However, political scientist Lee Drutman is highly skeptical, at least of the idea that unlimited funding would decrease polarization. He argues that there are t0o few competitive districts and little incentive from parties to run moderates if there were. He also notes, correctly, that it’s unlikely small donors would increase political polarization. Conclusion Because the current composition of the Supreme Court makes reform difficult, progressives have good reasons to be supportive of proposals to strengthen parties, but also good reasons to be wary. The reason to support such a campaign is, somewhat ironically, that as the Republican Party has become weaker, even more right-wing forces have become stronger. The rise of extreme candidates like Trump can certainly be explained in part by the weakness of the GOP compared to outside donors. The negative side is that the Democratic Party has never been particularly kind to economic progressivism, and that big money is inherently anti-democratic, whichever channel it flows through. On the issue of public financing, there is mutual agreement: La Raja tells me, “I think reformers should be focused more on how the money is raised than on how it is spent. That is why some form of public financing makes sense.” He argues that campaigns should be seen as a public good (because they raise awareness, knowledge and mobilization) and therefore supported by public funds. Empowering small donors means empowering average Americans and bolstering independent political power for progressives and people of color, who currently make up a vanishing share of the donor class. Even more fundamentally, it’s obvious that tackling economic inequality is essential to tackling political inequality. As Louis Brandeis writes (in a quote Jane Mayer uses for the epigraph of her book), “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.”

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Our terrified hyperpatriots: Here’s what Palin, Trump and anti-Muslim extremists fear most

In times of racism, there is no such thing as a neutral articulation of culture. In fact, the practice of everyday culture becomes inherently threatening. The victim of racism cannot partake of even simple rites of identity without the racist interpreting those rites as proof of the victim’s inferiority. This phenomenon has played out in the United States for centuries around forms of black and Native music, phenotype, dialect, fashion, language and spirituality. We now see it in paranoid and sometimes violent reaction to anything that signals Arab-ness, which itself, against the realities Arabs actually inhabit, signals a singular and immutable Islam. A man in Philadelphia was recently beaten for speaking Arabic. A few months earlier, two Palestinians were prevented from boarding a flight at Chicago’s Midway Airport because another passenger heard the same terrifying sounds. After raising a fuss, the men were finally allowed on the plane. A skittish flier demanded to know what was in a box they carried, so the two men popped open the baklawa and a planeload of people (minus two, presumably) entered the sky full and happy. On Martin Luther King Day, Delta removed “a random brown person” from a flight after a customer expressed apprehension. After his removal, surely a moment of terrible humiliation for him, a flight attendant thanked the passenger who had complained—an ideological act, no doubt, but one also intended to assuage potential guilt or discomfort. These gestures normalize the hierarchies that allow only the majority to access safety and dignity. Arabs, and those who might be mistaken for one (however implausibly), have less to worry about from the Transportation Security Administration than they do from fellow travelers eager to fulfill their patriotic obligations. People have been kicked off airplanes for speaking Arabic, holding the Quran, wearing strange regalia, reading Amin Maalouf’s "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes," or simply being brown. This discrimination is troublesome on its own, but consider: Which hijacker in the history of air travel announced his ill intentions by flaunting the same imagery everyone around him is conditioned to fear? American racism has always rendered itself indispensable by transforming the mundane into something spectacular or sinister. The cultural artifacts of Arab-ness (themselves media inventions) would be inconsequential, at worst an exotic curiosity, if they didn’t illuminate the distressing fact that some people are incapable of becoming real Americans. Why else do hyperpatriots regularly harass or assault women wearing hijab? They detest such dangerous symbols. The perception of danger is a byproduct of the hyperpatriot’s underactive imagination, which makes him even more apt to act on his angst. The hijab is the most brazen of the garments that trigger a vision of the future in which imperiled white Christians are subject to the barbarism of a new majority. The hyperpatriot isn’t threatened by theocracy, per se, for his own political idols implement theocratic laws in the United States. It is the prospect of a theocracy in which he isn’t cosseted as exceptional that so enrages him. There is also the spectacle of confusing Sikhs with Muslims and in turn attacking them, a uniquely American phenomenon. In 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page, thinking they were Muslim, murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, one of the gravest examples of modern American terrorism. Despite endless discussion of terrorism in the United States, Page is virtually forgotten. The same media that hesitated to call him a terrorist reinforce the notions of an undifferentiated foreign threat that informed Page’s confusion. The hijab, the dastar, and the hatta simultaneously obscure and intensify the hyperpatriot’s gaze. He sees ominous cultural mysteries in the unseen. That Sikhs are so easily conflated with Muslims is only the start of widespread racial confusion in today’s United States. In some ways, “Muslim” has become a catchall slur, applied to everybody from the president to undocumented workers—and, thanks to one persistent imbecile, the prime minister of Canada and the prince of Wales—but the slur can conceal other forms of racism whose articulation isn’t always so explicit. We shouldn’t parcel racism into discrete categories despite its unevenness. The conflation of anything undesirable with “Islam” has deep antecedents in U.S. slavery and colonization, but Middle Easterners and South Asians are capable of replicating earlier epochs of racism even as they suffer the consequences of its continued existence. To untangle these complexities, we have to extricate ourselves from notions of racism that elide the ruling class and its stooges. We’ll get nowhere if we reproduce the imperatives of people invested in our confusion. The Arabic language makes the hyperpatriot anxious, but it’s not the origin of his anxiety. Humanizing the Arab, then, is impossible if we ignore the conditions that demand the Arab’s inhumanity. Those conditions produced the America for which hyperpatriots are so nostalgic. In the meantime, it’s useful to remember that a society afraid of cultural practices incompatible with crude nationalism isn’t worth saving. Transforming the innocuous into an existential dilemma is stupid, yes, but it’s also horribly boring. By criminalizing or brutalizing the simple actions that define our humanity, hyperpatriots essentially force us not to speak, not to clothe ourselves, not to seek spiritual peace—the perfect manifestation of neoliberal privation. If some folks are intent on outlawing un-American vernacular, then other histories are worth remembering: the boarding schools of North America where Native children were beaten for using their own languages; centuries of forced assimilation through strict application of what Sarah Palin calls “speaking American”; the reduction of countless African linguistic groups to the master’s tongue; the colonial practice of educating local elites in the conqueror’s lexicon. Most of the world now speaks English. It didn’t overtake the globe through lullabies and sweet nothings. The words that hyperpatriots lionize actually comprise, by no small coincidence, the world’s most dangerous language.In times of racism, there is no such thing as a neutral articulation of culture. In fact, the practice of everyday culture becomes inherently threatening. The victim of racism cannot partake of even simple rites of identity without the racist interpreting those rites as proof of the victim’s inferiority. This phenomenon has played out in the United States for centuries around forms of black and Native music, phenotype, dialect, fashion, language and spirituality. We now see it in paranoid and sometimes violent reaction to anything that signals Arab-ness, which itself, against the realities Arabs actually inhabit, signals a singular and immutable Islam. A man in Philadelphia was recently beaten for speaking Arabic. A few months earlier, two Palestinians were prevented from boarding a flight at Chicago’s Midway Airport because another passenger heard the same terrifying sounds. After raising a fuss, the men were finally allowed on the plane. A skittish flier demanded to know what was in a box they carried, so the two men popped open the baklawa and a planeload of people (minus two, presumably) entered the sky full and happy. On Martin Luther King Day, Delta removed “a random brown person” from a flight after a customer expressed apprehension. After his removal, surely a moment of terrible humiliation for him, a flight attendant thanked the passenger who had complained—an ideological act, no doubt, but one also intended to assuage potential guilt or discomfort. These gestures normalize the hierarchies that allow only the majority to access safety and dignity. Arabs, and those who might be mistaken for one (however implausibly), have less to worry about from the Transportation Security Administration than they do from fellow travelers eager to fulfill their patriotic obligations. People have been kicked off airplanes for speaking Arabic, holding the Quran, wearing strange regalia, reading Amin Maalouf’s "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes," or simply being brown. This discrimination is troublesome on its own, but consider: Which hijacker in the history of air travel announced his ill intentions by flaunting the same imagery everyone around him is conditioned to fear? American racism has always rendered itself indispensable by transforming the mundane into something spectacular or sinister. The cultural artifacts of Arab-ness (themselves media inventions) would be inconsequential, at worst an exotic curiosity, if they didn’t illuminate the distressing fact that some people are incapable of becoming real Americans. Why else do hyperpatriots regularly harass or assault women wearing hijab? They detest such dangerous symbols. The perception of danger is a byproduct of the hyperpatriot’s underactive imagination, which makes him even more apt to act on his angst. The hijab is the most brazen of the garments that trigger a vision of the future in which imperiled white Christians are subject to the barbarism of a new majority. The hyperpatriot isn’t threatened by theocracy, per se, for his own political idols implement theocratic laws in the United States. It is the prospect of a theocracy in which he isn’t cosseted as exceptional that so enrages him. There is also the spectacle of confusing Sikhs with Muslims and in turn attacking them, a uniquely American phenomenon. In 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page, thinking they were Muslim, murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, one of the gravest examples of modern American terrorism. Despite endless discussion of terrorism in the United States, Page is virtually forgotten. The same media that hesitated to call him a terrorist reinforce the notions of an undifferentiated foreign threat that informed Page’s confusion. The hijab, the dastar, and the hatta simultaneously obscure and intensify the hyperpatriot’s gaze. He sees ominous cultural mysteries in the unseen. That Sikhs are so easily conflated with Muslims is only the start of widespread racial confusion in today’s United States. In some ways, “Muslim” has become a catchall slur, applied to everybody from the president to undocumented workers—and, thanks to one persistent imbecile, the prime minister of Canada and the prince of Wales—but the slur can conceal other forms of racism whose articulation isn’t always so explicit. We shouldn’t parcel racism into discrete categories despite its unevenness. The conflation of anything undesirable with “Islam” has deep antecedents in U.S. slavery and colonization, but Middle Easterners and South Asians are capable of replicating earlier epochs of racism even as they suffer the consequences of its continued existence. To untangle these complexities, we have to extricate ourselves from notions of racism that elide the ruling class and its stooges. We’ll get nowhere if we reproduce the imperatives of people invested in our confusion. The Arabic language makes the hyperpatriot anxious, but it’s not the origin of his anxiety. Humanizing the Arab, then, is impossible if we ignore the conditions that demand the Arab’s inhumanity. Those conditions produced the America for which hyperpatriots are so nostalgic. In the meantime, it’s useful to remember that a society afraid of cultural practices incompatible with crude nationalism isn’t worth saving. Transforming the innocuous into an existential dilemma is stupid, yes, but it’s also horribly boring. By criminalizing or brutalizing the simple actions that define our humanity, hyperpatriots essentially force us not to speak, not to clothe ourselves, not to seek spiritual peace—the perfect manifestation of neoliberal privation. If some folks are intent on outlawing un-American vernacular, then other histories are worth remembering: the boarding schools of North America where Native children were beaten for using their own languages; centuries of forced assimilation through strict application of what Sarah Palin calls “speaking American”; the reduction of countless African linguistic groups to the master’s tongue; the colonial practice of educating local elites in the conqueror’s lexicon. Most of the world now speaks English. It didn’t overtake the globe through lullabies and sweet nothings. The words that hyperpatriots lionize actually comprise, by no small coincidence, the world’s most dangerous language.

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The porn industry is a lot less lucrative than you might think

Being a porn star isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sure, most of us can point to a few big names who have made it mainstream, but working in the industry isn't quite as lucrative as movies like Boogie Nights would have you think. In fact, performer pay rates are now at an all-time low. Increasingly, stars are starting to rely on alternative streams of revenue like product endorsement deals, snapchat requests, camming platforms and escorting to get by. According to a recent report by CNBC, the average male porn actor earns around $500-$600 per scene. More established stars get around $700-$900. "Superstars” can expect wages around $1,500. Some say gay scenes pay better. Popular performers can make upward of $5,000 for a shoot, which might help explain the “gay-for-pay” phenomenon. It's one of the few industries where women generally start out at a higher rate. Steven Hirsh, owner of the hugely profitable Vivid Studios, told CNBC, “When the girls first get into the business and they’re new, I think they can command additional money for different sex acts." “Initially they make more money, then it depends on how popular they become,” he added. According to the report, the average actress gets paid somewhere between $800 and $1,000 for “traditional” sex scenes (aka between a man and woman). Big-name actresses can reel in around $1,500, sometimes $2,000. Newcomers with a “bad reputation,” however, might earn as little as $300. Those looking for higher wages are often encouraged to participate in more trying scenes. According to the report, the “most extreme” stunts can go for $1,800 to $2,500 (double anal, anyone?). For those with a large enough fan base, feature dancing might be the way to go. One actress/dancer told CNBC that she regularly earns $7,000 to $10,000 per appearance, which can last two days. Then there’s the behind-the-scenes staff, which includes the directors, camerapeople, sound technicians, producers, writers, photographers, makeup artists and all the other people it takes to put a scene together. Out of this group, the directors come out on top. In general, a director of a porn film will earn $1,000-$1,500 per day. In the event they are “required to do dramatically more than direct,” that rate can jump as high as $3,000, though CBNC notes that few studios are actually willing to pay that amount. Writers earn considerably less. Their paycheck falls in the ballpark of $250-$400 per day, and most shoots only last a day or two. Tentpole porn films can take just four to eight hours. Camerapeople generally make around $500-$700 (those with their own cameras are more likely to fall on the higher end of that scale), Sound technicians earn $300-$400 while production assistants can expect to take home $100 to $250 per day. Makeup artists do fairly well, earning around $500 for working a full day on set. Those who don’t feel like hanging around all day can charge between $100 and $150 per person. The report reads, “Ultimately, assuming they have a decent agent, a performer’s salary comes down to three things—two of which are in their control: Their work ethic and frequency, their entrepreneurial spirit and their popularity.” There is, however, another factor to consider: their longevity. The report adds: “Porn is an industry that regularly chews up and spits out performers. Many quit after just one scene or after a few months. Some stick around for a few years, but then disappear. But a select few have chosen to make this a true career — and as in the mainstream world, those are the ones who tend to pocket the most.” Being a porn star isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sure, most of us can point to a few big names who have made it mainstream, but working in the industry isn't quite as lucrative as movies like Boogie Nights would have you think. In fact, performer pay rates are now at an all-time low. Increasingly, stars are starting to rely on alternative streams of revenue like product endorsement deals, snapchat requests, camming platforms and escorting to get by. According to a recent report by CNBC, the average male porn actor earns around $500-$600 per scene. More established stars get around $700-$900. "Superstars” can expect wages around $1,500. Some say gay scenes pay better. Popular performers can make upward of $5,000 for a shoot, which might help explain the “gay-for-pay” phenomenon. It's one of the few industries where women generally start out at a higher rate. Steven Hirsh, owner of the hugely profitable Vivid Studios, told CNBC, “When the girls first get into the business and they’re new, I think they can command additional money for different sex acts." “Initially they make more money, then it depends on how popular they become,” he added. According to the report, the average actress gets paid somewhere between $800 and $1,000 for “traditional” sex scenes (aka between a man and woman). Big-name actresses can reel in around $1,500, sometimes $2,000. Newcomers with a “bad reputation,” however, might earn as little as $300. Those looking for higher wages are often encouraged to participate in more trying scenes. According to the report, the “most extreme” stunts can go for $1,800 to $2,500 (double anal, anyone?). For those with a large enough fan base, feature dancing might be the way to go. One actress/dancer told CNBC that she regularly earns $7,000 to $10,000 per appearance, which can last two days. Then there’s the behind-the-scenes staff, which includes the directors, camerapeople, sound technicians, producers, writers, photographers, makeup artists and all the other people it takes to put a scene together. Out of this group, the directors come out on top. In general, a director of a porn film will earn $1,000-$1,500 per day. In the event they are “required to do dramatically more than direct,” that rate can jump as high as $3,000, though CBNC notes that few studios are actually willing to pay that amount. Writers earn considerably less. Their paycheck falls in the ballpark of $250-$400 per day, and most shoots only last a day or two. Tentpole porn films can take just four to eight hours. Camerapeople generally make around $500-$700 (those with their own cameras are more likely to fall on the higher end of that scale), Sound technicians earn $300-$400 while production assistants can expect to take home $100 to $250 per day. Makeup artists do fairly well, earning around $500 for working a full day on set. Those who don’t feel like hanging around all day can charge between $100 and $150 per person. The report reads, “Ultimately, assuming they have a decent agent, a performer’s salary comes down to three things—two of which are in their control: Their work ethic and frequency, their entrepreneurial spirit and their popularity.” There is, however, another factor to consider: their longevity. The report adds: “Porn is an industry that regularly chews up and spits out performers. Many quit after just one scene or after a few months. Some stick around for a few years, but then disappear. But a select few have chosen to make this a true career — and as in the mainstream world, those are the ones who tend to pocket the most.”

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The radical left has Bernie Sanders all wrong

For the most part the far left—those whose identities are wrapped up in being socialist, anarchist and other shades of left activists—do not understand the real significance of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Clinging to their ideologies and principles, they see plenty of reasons why Sanders is insufficient: he doesn’t call for workers owning the means of production; he doesn’t advocate national control of key industries; he will centralize the state with big government. (For radicals, Hillary Clinton is not even worth the argument—she’s so corrupt, hawkish and capitalist.) I’ve read and heard predictable refrains from radicals about why they are not excited about the political revolution that Bernie Sanders proposes: “I don’t want another white man in office”; “I don’t want to vote for another boss of the American Empire”; “He’s justifying the system”; “He’s sold himself to the Democratic Party, which is a bourgeois party”; “He will co-opt our social movement”; “He won’t be able to do that much inside the system”; “Democratic socialists repressed the left after the First World War”; Then, of course, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about Bernie upholding white supremacy by not supporting reparations. Sure. Fine. He’s not as radical as the radical activists. Coates is largely correct in his logic. But they are missing the point. Let me point out some of what these folks neglect: Bernie Sanders is publicizing two main messages: 1) the economy is rigged and 2) our politics is corrupted. Millions of people have heard that message more clearly from him than they ever would have heard before. These millions who are feeling the Bern are not just critiquing Republicans, which Hillary does so well, but are widely critical of the Democratic Party, the corporate media and union bosses. At the last Democratic Party debate, the moderator asked Sanders about his book, where he wrote that Democrats and Republicans were not that different from one another. Leftists have been trying to spread these kinds of messages for decades. Bernie’s supporters became more fired up over the hostile attack by the DNC after the data breach than anything else. Only Clinton raised money for the party, Sanders raised none. Bernie Sanders is spreading these messages on national television and reaching tens of millions of people—breaking a series of corporate taboos. He is raising expectations. What the radicals don’t get is that Bernie is opening a crack in an iron wall. This opening—glasnost is the Russian translation—can lead in many different directions. Ultimately, his policy proposals are not half as important as the shift in social power that his election will effect. His reforms will encourage social movements that are, ultimately, beyond his control. Indeed, when you look at all revolutionary change in retrospect, it accelerated in the face of reforms, openings and half-revolutions that preceded any radical break. In the spring of 1789 French elites held the Third Estate months before the storming of the Bastille prison. The Haitian slave insurrection took place when the establishment was in civil strife over reforms. In March 1917, the creation of parliamentary democracy preceded the Bolshevik seizure of power. For more recent examples, just think about how anti-segregation protests in the South in the mid-1950s widened into national protests against patriarchal-capitalist-heteronormative-white supremacy only a decade later. There is a direct line between Rosa Parks’ success and the prominence of Malcolm X and Angela Davis. The historical examples are manifold. Remember a generation ago the glasnost in Russia led to mass protests and the fall of the USSR. In South Africa, the apartheid reformer de Klerk negotiated an end to that regime. Gorbachev and de Klerk had only intended to reform "the system." Perhaps it’s worth recalling that President Lincoln was insistent in his inaugural address that he would not free any slaves in slave states. His election accelerated a struggle that was already in existence. Lincoln’s election tilted the balance of power toward emancipation when half a million slaves ran to the Union army’s lines, and the war became about slavery and not just preserving the Union. The idea of an opening against corporate hegemony could also be called a "national reckoning." Coates has stated that reparations are principally a means toward such a national reckoning, even more so than a distinct proposal of financial transfer to descendants of slaves. Bernie Sanders would be the only president to have said that the country was founded on racist principles. On national TV he explains how a policy of covert and overt regime change have been detrimental to this country and the world. Radicals miss the fact that Bernie represents exactly this national reckoning even if they don’t agree with his every stance. When talking about the right wing, radicals like to stress how the likes of Donald Trump give the green light to street violence against black people, Mexicans and Muslims. Yet, they don’t ask how left politicians may give the green light to social movements they are sympathetic to. For instance, Bernie supported DREAMers on hunger strike. Bernie became critical of Rahm Emmanuel echoing Black Lives Matter demands. Bernie lent public support to CUNY workers’ rights before they voted to strike. Sanders’ political revolution would require mass mobilization of exactly these constituencies: African-American, Latinos and workers. Sanders calls for street mobilization as part of the political revolution. Radicals argue that the masses get co-opted by elections. This just doesn’t line up with lived experience. They point to the enthusiasm around Obama’s 2008 victory as proof that politicians simply manipulate voters. That may be true, but it is untenable to say that social movements were co-opted by Obama. Since Obama’s election this country has witnessed a steep rise in social movements. Disappointment after Obama raised expectations may have partly fueled such a movement to the streets. Occupy Wall Street was unprecedented. The growth of Black Lives Matter and the DREAMers movement developed principally in the years since Obama came to office. The idea of electoral co-option sounds theoretically plausible, but it is simply a theory without standing in our reality. One socialist website even makes it seem that Bernie will undermine the revolutionary working class’s aspirations for syndicalist control of the economy. This kind of thinking is the result of a mind-body split. These radicals are clearly not experiencing the embodied world around them. Instead they seem to be using deductive logic based on theory, not sound history. It is worth noting that 1936 and 1946, in the midst of the New Deal—which much of Bernie’s platform alludes to—had some of the largest mobilizations of strikes in American history. People were not co-opted by the New Deal; they were emboldened by it. Lastly, the radicals’ critique that Bernie won’t change much as president and that it’s the whole system that needs to change only echoes Bernie’s own comments. He explicitly critiques Obama for demobilizing the campaign after his election. Bernie repeats in speech after speech that no president is powerful enough to take on Wall Street alone. Radicals and social movements would do better to think of Bernie as an ally. In a privileged position, indeed the most powerful position in the world, Bernie Sanders would work for the causes dear to the left. He would not be in the trenches, but he would at least create the sorely needed space activists need to create the change they yearn for. Arguing that he can’t change the system alone not only repeats the candidate himself, but it also assumes (as the co-option argument does) that the populace cannot understand the political dynamics. As a historian, I can’t help also reminding folks of the Democratic primary in 1944, when party bosses picked Harry Truman over the widely popular, desegregationist, left-leaning Henry Wallace. Subsequently, Truman dropped the atomic bomb, led the country into the Cold War, and drastically escalated the conflict in Korea. Wallace was part of the radical wing of the New Dealers, and his most famous speech rejected the idea of an "American Century" and advocated the "Century of the Common Man." In retrospect, activists would smartly place their efforts in supporting Henry Wallace for a few months on the campaign trail. Without Sanders’ political revolution, we can rest assured that we’ll have another four years of cycles of repression, resistance and left critiques of politicians who they now say make no difference anyway. It’s hardly deniable that a few months of activism devoted to Bernie could enable more change than years of screaming at the corporate iron wall.For the most part the far left—those whose identities are wrapped up in being socialist, anarchist and other shades of left activists—do not understand the real significance of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Clinging to their ideologies and principles, they see plenty of reasons why Sanders is insufficient: he doesn’t call for workers owning the means of production; he doesn’t advocate national control of key industries; he will centralize the state with big government. (For radicals, Hillary Clinton is not even worth the argument—she’s so corrupt, hawkish and capitalist.) I’ve read and heard predictable refrains from radicals about why they are not excited about the political revolution that Bernie Sanders proposes: “I don’t want another white man in office”; “I don’t want to vote for another boss of the American Empire”; “He’s justifying the system”; “He’s sold himself to the Democratic Party, which is a bourgeois party”; “He will co-opt our social movement”; “He won’t be able to do that much inside the system”; “Democratic socialists repressed the left after the First World War”; Then, of course, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about Bernie upholding white supremacy by not supporting reparations. Sure. Fine. He’s not as radical as the radical activists. Coates is largely correct in his logic. But they are missing the point. Let me point out some of what these folks neglect: Bernie Sanders is publicizing two main messages: 1) the economy is rigged and 2) our politics is corrupted. Millions of people have heard that message more clearly from him than they ever would have heard before. These millions who are feeling the Bern are not just critiquing Republicans, which Hillary does so well, but are widely critical of the Democratic Party, the corporate media and union bosses. At the last Democratic Party debate, the moderator asked Sanders about his book, where he wrote that Democrats and Republicans were not that different from one another. Leftists have been trying to spread these kinds of messages for decades. Bernie’s supporters became more fired up over the hostile attack by the DNC after the data breach than anything else. Only Clinton raised money for the party, Sanders raised none. Bernie Sanders is spreading these messages on national television and reaching tens of millions of people—breaking a series of corporate taboos. He is raising expectations. What the radicals don’t get is that Bernie is opening a crack in an iron wall. This opening—glasnost is the Russian translation—can lead in many different directions. Ultimately, his policy proposals are not half as important as the shift in social power that his election will effect. His reforms will encourage social movements that are, ultimately, beyond his control. Indeed, when you look at all revolutionary change in retrospect, it accelerated in the face of reforms, openings and half-revolutions that preceded any radical break. In the spring of 1789 French elites held the Third Estate months before the storming of the Bastille prison. The Haitian slave insurrection took place when the establishment was in civil strife over reforms. In March 1917, the creation of parliamentary democracy preceded the Bolshevik seizure of power. For more recent examples, just think about how anti-segregation protests in the South in the mid-1950s widened into national protests against patriarchal-capitalist-heteronormative-white supremacy only a decade later. There is a direct line between Rosa Parks’ success and the prominence of Malcolm X and Angela Davis. The historical examples are manifold. Remember a generation ago the glasnost in Russia led to mass protests and the fall of the USSR. In South Africa, the apartheid reformer de Klerk negotiated an end to that regime. Gorbachev and de Klerk had only intended to reform "the system." Perhaps it’s worth recalling that President Lincoln was insistent in his inaugural address that he would not free any slaves in slave states. His election accelerated a struggle that was already in existence. Lincoln’s election tilted the balance of power toward emancipation when half a million slaves ran to the Union army’s lines, and the war became about slavery and not just preserving the Union. The idea of an opening against corporate hegemony could also be called a "national reckoning." Coates has stated that reparations are principally a means toward such a national reckoning, even more so than a distinct proposal of financial transfer to descendants of slaves. Bernie Sanders would be the only president to have said that the country was founded on racist principles. On national TV he explains how a policy of covert and overt regime change have been detrimental to this country and the world. Radicals miss the fact that Bernie represents exactly this national reckoning even if they don’t agree with his every stance. When talking about the right wing, radicals like to stress how the likes of Donald Trump give the green light to street violence against black people, Mexicans and Muslims. Yet, they don’t ask how left politicians may give the green light to social movements they are sympathetic to. For instance, Bernie supported DREAMers on hunger strike. Bernie became critical of Rahm Emmanuel echoing Black Lives Matter demands. Bernie lent public support to CUNY workers’ rights before they voted to strike. Sanders’ political revolution would require mass mobilization of exactly these constituencies: African-American, Latinos and workers. Sanders calls for street mobilization as part of the political revolution. Radicals argue that the masses get co-opted by elections. This just doesn’t line up with lived experience. They point to the enthusiasm around Obama’s 2008 victory as proof that politicians simply manipulate voters. That may be true, but it is untenable to say that social movements were co-opted by Obama. Since Obama’s election this country has witnessed a steep rise in social movements. Disappointment after Obama raised expectations may have partly fueled such a movement to the streets. Occupy Wall Street was unprecedented. The growth of Black Lives Matter and the DREAMers movement developed principally in the years since Obama came to office. The idea of electoral co-option sounds theoretically plausible, but it is simply a theory without standing in our reality. One socialist website even makes it seem that Bernie will undermine the revolutionary working class’s aspirations for syndicalist control of the economy. This kind of thinking is the result of a mind-body split. These radicals are clearly not experiencing the embodied world around them. Instead they seem to be using deductive logic based on theory, not sound history. It is worth noting that 1936 and 1946, in the midst of the New Deal—which much of Bernie’s platform alludes to—had some of the largest mobilizations of strikes in American history. People were not co-opted by the New Deal; they were emboldened by it. Lastly, the radicals’ critique that Bernie won’t change much as president and that it’s the whole system that needs to change only echoes Bernie’s own comments. He explicitly critiques Obama for demobilizing the campaign after his election. Bernie repeats in speech after speech that no president is powerful enough to take on Wall Street alone. Radicals and social movements would do better to think of Bernie as an ally. In a privileged position, indeed the most powerful position in the world, Bernie Sanders would work for the causes dear to the left. He would not be in the trenches, but he would at least create the sorely needed space activists need to create the change they yearn for. Arguing that he can’t change the system alone not only repeats the candidate himself, but it also assumes (as the co-option argument does) that the populace cannot understand the political dynamics. As a historian, I can’t help also reminding folks of the Democratic primary in 1944, when party bosses picked Harry Truman over the widely popular, desegregationist, left-leaning Henry Wallace. Subsequently, Truman dropped the atomic bomb, led the country into the Cold War, and drastically escalated the conflict in Korea. Wallace was part of the radical wing of the New Dealers, and his most famous speech rejected the idea of an "American Century" and advocated the "Century of the Common Man." In retrospect, activists would smartly place their efforts in supporting Henry Wallace for a few months on the campaign trail. Without Sanders’ political revolution, we can rest assured that we’ll have another four years of cycles of repression, resistance and left critiques of politicians who they now say make no difference anyway. It’s hardly deniable that a few months of activism devoted to Bernie could enable more change than years of screaming at the corporate iron wall.

Continue Reading...