Democracy's Defender: Jamie Raskin

January/February 2022

DO HOUSE DEMOCRATS REALLY HATE ONE ANOTHER? GRACE SEGERS

THE GOP SENATOR THE DEMOCRATS WOULD LOVE TO BEAT

DANIEL STRAUSS

DEMOCRACY ’S DEFENDER

HOW JAMIE RASKIN BECAME THE MAN FOR THIS HISTORICAL MOMENT

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NATION OF THE STATE

Life of the Party

Lefties have a seat at Biden’s table.

And they’re having a blast while they’re at it.

By Kara Voght

Illustration by Bijou Karman

ONCE A MONTH, in the latter, vaccinated half of 2021, denizens of D.C.’s progressive ecosystem flocked to a bar in Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood for a happy hour hosted by the pollster and think tank Data for Progress. December’s gathering took place on an unseasonably warm evening,

perfect weather for the youngest members of the Beltway left to network and drink.

Staffers from the Sunrise Movement sipped cans of Narragansett beer as they mingled with aides to Representatives Jim McGovern and Maxine Waters. A contingent from the Omidyar Network, a top progressive investor, stood in a circle near the bar. People were excited to spot Matthew Yglesias, the Vox co-founder who took his vexatious brand of liberalism to Substack—if only because

they seemed eager to dunk on his tweets in person. By 8:30, I’d had two tequila sodas and as many conversations retreading grievances against Neera Tanden, a White House senior adviser and establishment bogeyman among the Bernie crowd.

The White House held its Christmas tree lighting ceremony that evening, so the pair of President Joe Biden’s press aides who’d attended the previous month’s gathering were absent. So was the cadre of regulars

from Senate Democratic offices—“too busy trying to make into law all that shit people talk about at those happy hours,” one senior aide texted me. Even so, roughly 100 members of the Beltway’s progressive sphere had crammed onto the rooftop by the evening’s peak, generating a din that drowned out the bar’s early aughts pop playlist.

Sean McElwee, Data for Progress’ executive director and uncompromising leftistturned-pragmatist, spent much of the night holding court near a high-top table close to the center of the crowd, pounding what would be the first of many nonalcoholic beers. “It’s about discipline,” McElwee told me, referring to both his newfound teetotaler status and his general wish for the progressive movement. He keeps pointing me to Marcela Mulholland, Data for Progress’ 24-year-old political director, for all official statements. (We’re both deep into the Huma Abedin memoir, so we gossip about that instead.)

McElwee’s weekly New York happy hours were among the most documented artifacts in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. His East Village guests were “really left people, not party hacks,” an attendee told FiveThirtyEight in December 2018. By the time New York profiled the events four months later, the magazine observed, “Democratic politicians in nice clothes Uber in to kiss McElwee’s ring and gain the trust of New York’s young socialist power elite”— held up as proof that the American left was ascendant as the country chose its next president.

Before the Biden administration, McElwee’s D.C. satellite happy hours had been low-key affairs. Now, the outsiders are closer to the inside—and there’s a lot more of them. Data for Progress is in the White House’s regular rotation of pollsters. The climate activists who once pressured the Biden campaign now sip beer as employees of the departments of Energy and Transportation.

Washington is a town where progressives are often the skunks of the party, rarely the hosts of well-attended, quasi-professional networking events. But that was before Joe Biden, noted centrist and policy agnostic, wrestled the White House away from Donald Trump. When victory came, he had a party to heal, a White House to staff, and an agenda to write. There were few better ways to hit those notes than to welcome progressives, the primary keepers of the wonks, the policy, and—perhaps most crucially—much of the Democratic Party’s bad blood. While Politico’s Playbook notes who is spotted from

Biden’s inner circle lingering at Georgetown soirees, there’s an enlivened alternative scene in D.C. these days: a younger, rowdier crowd of White House aides, congressional staff, and activists who likely voted for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, gathering on rooftops over cheap beer. Their candidate didn’t win—Washington belongs to Biden. But the left is taken seriously these days. And they’re having a lot more fun along the way.

THAT LEVEL OF INFLUENCE didn’t exist for progressives who were around for the last Democratic administration. (Most of the people on that Adams Morgan rooftop were not.) At its best, Barack Obama’s White House showed apathy: Phone calls went unanswered, letters unread. At worst, it was openly hostile—as when Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, in a 2010 interview, accused the “professional left” of being so “crazy” that its members “ought to be drug tested.” A tightly managed coalition of palatable liberal organizations—such as MoveOn and the Center for American Progress—had regular meetings with White House officials in a capacity blogger Jane Hamsher dubbed “the veal pen,” a phrase borrowed from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X, that describes a generation trapped in a cubicle until slaughter time.

That dynamic has changed, thanks to a pandemic and a Democratic primary that left the party in need of unifying. Not to say there isn’t still a “veal pen” in the Biden era. The leaders of D.C. progressive groups attend a meeting every other week convened by Deirdre Schifeling, a top aide in the White House’s political shop who cut her teeth in progressive organizing. In theory, it’s a place for lefties to stay in the loop on White House news. In practice, “it’s a meeting where people let off steam,” in the words of one frequent attendee.

The real measure of influence is honestto-goodness access, which these activists now have in spades. That’s due in no small part to the fact that certain activists and wonks now serve in the roles they antagonized in past administrations. That shift was on full display at a meet and greet happy hour that Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, held at his home in October. Green has periodically hosted networking gatherings on his rooftop, where a regular rotation of left-flank operatives mingles with the Democratic establishment and reporters in front of a street art mural of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that Green had painted along

DEMOCRACY WATCH

On a scale of 1-10, how concerned are you that the U.S. will become more authoritarian over the next five years?

Sherrilyn Ifill

President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Every day the Senate fails to pass voting rights legislation pushes up the number for me. I’m somewhere around 6 or 7 right now. If by the end of January we don’t have passage of new voting rights legislation, I’m at 9.

Aziz Huq

University of Chicago Law School 8—Democracy’s losing both its popular and institutional supports: Republicans are unwilling to see electoral loss as explicable or acceptable; Democrats too splintered to advance even basic reforms. Up high, a conservative Supreme Court building tools to allow the reversal of electoral results. Combined, all this leaves few reasons for optimism.

Mehdi Hasan msnbc host

11 out of 10. One of our two major parties has given up on democracy and openly embraced voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering, and election subversion. Oh, and white supremacy, too. The result? We are in the midst of a slow-moving, rolling coup while the American polity heads in the direction of authoritarianism, if not full-blown fascism.

Rachel Kleinfeld

Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

I am concerned about harm to liberal democracy at a 9. Particularly security institutions that lean towards one party or fail to enforce laws equally, which are pernicious. Far-right protests have become more violent in the U.S. in the last year—but police interventions have gone down. Meanwhile, homicide rose almost 30%. Internationally, greater violence often leads to demands for law and order, allowing a backlash of more authoritarian laws and enforcement.

the back wall of his patio. Many of those regulars reappeared that October evening to mix with a crew of Big Tech critics who now have key jobs in the administration, such as Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission; and Tim Wu, the White House’s policy adviser on technology and competition.

The Biden era has also offered progressives long-rare opportunities to celebrate victories, albeit fleeting ones. In late October, UltraViolet co-founder Shaunna Thomas and progressive angel investor Leah HuntHendrix hosted a happy hour planned on the heels of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ momentary success in keeping the fates of the infrastructure bill and Biden’s Build Back Better bill tied together. The shindig was a celebration for Mike Darner, the CPC’s executive director. Darner, aptly described in the invitation as “quiet and humble,” had one request: Hold the happy hour soon, before progressives ran out of things to celebrate. (He would be correct, as the House voted for the infrastructure bill alone two weeks later.)

On a balmy evening, a veritable “who’s who” of the Beltway left congregated on Hunt-Hendrix’s rooftop. Representatives Mondaire Jones and Jamie Raskin made brief appearances—as did Ilhan Omar, who plopped down on a wide, cushioned patio chair next to an aide. Cori Bush wasn’t present, but a contingent of her aides were. Staffers from lefty activist groups, such as Indivisible and the Justice Democrats, caught up with leaders of progressive think tanks. Guests politely sipped wine from clear plastic cups until the gathering reached its fourth hour and supplies ran dangerously low. Around 9 p.m., someone offered me a

hard seltzer they’d quietly procured from a friend’s purse (and, like the dutiful millennial I am, I accepted).

So, are progressives having more fun in Biden’s Washington? “I don’t know if I’m having more fun,” Green said, hinting at exhaustion. “But when it comes to having impact, it is a better time to be a progressive.”

ALONGSIDE THE RISE in revelry has come newfound mainstream media attention. Some of that began after the arrival of “Squad” members such as Ocasio-Cortez and Omar. “The press is paying attention to us! I like this!” Pramila Jayapal, chair of the CPC, exclaimed at a press conference after the 2018 midterms. But often that attention devolved into the unwanted kind—an uproar over the Squad’s defense of Palestine or a kerfuffle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Now, “because we have power, reporting is more focused on the work we’re doing and how it relates to the administration,” said Jeremy Slevin, Omar’s communications director. “I keep hearing from reporters telling me: I just got hired to cover progressives for AP or Reuters.” But Slevin isn’t sure that all the attention has led to savvier coverage. “There’s still a deficit in understanding the left and the dynamics in the party,” he said. “Some of that was borne out in Build Back Better—I think a lot of mainstream outlets did not understand it was progressives who were defending Biden’s agenda.”

The distance between the White House and the Beltway left isn’t what it used to be, but proximity hasn’t necessarily guaranteed results. Not since LBJ’s Great Society have so many aggressively liberal ideas made their way into law, but the boldest of them—the ones that progressives helped craft and that earned Biden comparisons

to FDR—have been sold for parts in the slog of legislative sausage making. The Senate is evenly divided, and plenty of lefties serving in the administration remain skeptical. One progressive operative pointed to Biden’s principal advisers who continue to describe the soaring ambition of his domestic agenda as a middle-class tax cut. “This beautiful state-of-the-art home they built is being sold by a Realtor with a wide tie and [who] specializes in ranch houses,” the operative said.

“It’s not enough to just pass Build Back Better, we need to win the win,” said Mulholland, Data for Progress’ political director. “The White House should specify the provisions of the bill and universalize its benefits so that voters across the country know that Democrats are behind their lower childcare and electricity bills.” But when I asked her about the White House’s framing, she replied with an air of pragmatism. “The median Senate seat is 7 points to the right of the median voter,” she texted, “so it’s important to message BBB using language that works in red and purple states, too.”

D.C. is still a divided town, even among liberals. The light beer–drinking twenty- and thirtysomethings who packed onto that Adams Morgan rooftop aren’t on the invite lists for “This Town” festivities in Georgetown, where the elite, regardless of ideology, find common ground. I asked McElwee whether he’d ever been to Café Milano, the longtime power broker restaurant that transitioned over the past year from a Trump-era hot spot of Ivanka and Jared into one where you are now likely to spot White House chief of staff Ron Klain. “I’m not sure,” McElwee replied, with an air of confusion suggesting he lacked the context to know what the question was really asking.

Kara Voght is a reporter at Rolling Stone

In the Pipeline

Joe Biden wants to remove lead from drinking water. But can an infusion of money save Benton Harbor, Michigan?

By Derek Robertson

Illustration by Sébastien Thibault

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES tweeted its first story in October about the elevated levels of lead in the drinking water of Benton Harbor, Michigan, it noted the similarities to “nearby Flint.” It was a typical bit of the publication’s coastal myopia: Benton Harbor is about as far from Flint as the Times’ offices are from Providence, Rhode Island. But it’s hard to blame the paper for the geographic error, considering it’s not a categorical one.

Both Benton Harbor and Flint are majorityBlack, postindustrial Michigan cities where decades of divestment, neglect, and institutional decay led to public health crises. In early October, state officials told Benton Harbor residents to use bottled water for drinking, brushing teeth, cooking, and making baby formula, out of “an abundance of caution.”

It seems like a rerun of Flint, as Benton Harbor’s poorest residents’ lives are

upended by a practically medieval issue. But where the Flint saga was a dramatic, prefab morality tale that featured outsize characters, moments of glaring symbolism, and national protest, what’s happening in Benton Harbor has been decidedly more muted. Flint was already a city synonymous with national decay, and its lead problem arose from a rash, misguided decision by a state-appointed emergency manager. Benton Harbor’s problems developed slowly over time, in a manner that’s far more common and insidious.

Its lead concerns date as far back as late 2018. Why it’s taken three years to hit the headlines and inspire major action is a bleak story about what happens when a city’s physical and civic infrastructures disintegrate simultaneously. It’s playing out in cities across the country, but especially the upper Midwest: In July, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council revealed that the 10 states with the most lead lines per capita are mostly clustered in the region. Nearly 500,000 lines might

still be in use in Michigan; Ohio has 650,000, a lower-bound estimate. Chicago alone is estimated to have 350,000, more than any other city in America.

President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which became law in November, makes a massive investment to fix the problem in Benton Harbor and elsewhere. The law sets aside $15 billion to replace lead pipes and service lines. An additional $10 billion could come in Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which, as of this writing, Congress is debating. If the $25 billion total comes to fruition, it’d amount to nearly half of the high-end estimate of $60 billion that activists say is necessary to replace every lead pipe in the country.

Lead is especially harmful to children and pregnant women, because it can lead to behavioral and learning issues or harm the growth of a fetus, among other complications. It can also cause “high blood pressure, joint and muscle pain, difficulty with memory or concentration, and harm to reproductive health” in adults, according to a report from the nrdc.

But federal money alone is not enough to fix lead water issues: Experts say that the more money and labor needed to replace those pipes and create a cleaner water system, the heavier of a lift it is for already-beleaguered local governments. Even eight years after the beginning of the Flint water crisis, the city is just now nearing the end of its own pipe replacement. “The funding is not just for digging up the pipes,” said Erik Olson, a director with the nrdc who has worked closely on lead issues in Michigan. “It’s also for technical help, to help the community figure out how to do it.”

For all the uproar and media attention, life in Benton Harbor, pre-infrastructure bill, was identical to what it looks like today, and what it will tomorrow, and likely for years to come. Other cities are earlier in the process of discovering their rotten infrastructure, much less pulling it out. Just as Flint taught the nation about glaring racial and structural inequalities in America’s cities, the slow start in Benton Harbor offers its own, separate lesson about the grinding, pitfall-laden process of actually resolving the tainted water issue.

IN AUTUMN 2018, roughly four years after the beginning of Flint’s crisis, officials first urged Benton Harbor residents to test their water, after eight out of 30 homes tested for lead showed elevated levels. After

more testing showed consistently high lead content, the city handed out filters and testing kits, and introduced a corrosion control agent to the city’s water supply, meant to prevent lead from leaching out of corroding pipes and water fixtures.

When Benton Harbor’s erstwhile major employer, the appliance company Whirlpool, announced the closing of its last plant there in 2010, the financial hit to the town left the city government flat-footed. Sharpening Benton Harbor residents’ awareness of the poor civic hand they’ve been dealt is its counterpart city St. Joseph, just across the river of the same name that divides the two towns.

The two cities have roughly similar populations of just under 10,000, but the resemblance stops there: St. Joseph is

WHO SAID IT

overwhelmingly white, where Benton Harbor is Black; rich where the latter is poor; leisure-minded where the latter has to fight for its barest institutions. In his 1999 book, The Other Side of the River, which explored the divide through the lens of the 1991 drowning of a Black teenager, which many suspect was murder, journalist Alex Kotlowitz wrote, “For the people of St. Joseph, Benton Harbor is an embarrassment. It’s as if someone had taken an inner-city neighborhood … and plopped it in the middle of this otherwise picturesque landscape.”

“There’s this long history of racial segregation, redlining in the community school system, issues with segregated schools, and just a whole history of racial inequality in Benton Harbor,” Olson said. “That, compounded with just the disinvestment

Dr. Rand Paul or Dr. Spaceman?

Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci foe and Covid skeptic, is a licensed ophthalmologist. An equally bewildering fact: In the universe of 30 Rock, Chris Parnell’s Dr. Leo Spaceman is treated as a real medical authority. See if you can spot which quote comes from which “doctor.”

1. “Between my medical practice and this job, I’m pulled in every direction.”

2. “I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

3. “I never, ever cheated. I don’t condone cheating. But I would sometimes spread misinformation. This is a great tactic. Misinformation can be very important.”

4. “I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.”

5. “Science is whatever we want it to be.”

6. “When is modern science going to find a cure for a woman’s mouth?”

7. “I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.”

8. “We have no way of knowing, because the powerful bread lobby keeps stopping my research.”

9. “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best for everyone.”

in the community by the authorities, has resulted in this really serious problem with lead contamination.”

In late October, I sat down with Kim L. Smith Oldham, a native of nearby Van Buren County. As volunteers in a cavernous warehouse unloaded pallets of bottled water, milk, and peaches to needy residents, Oldham—who has the quintessentially Midwestern combination of geniality with a total unwillingness to tolerate nonsense— discussed her work for the nonprofit Southwest Michigan Community Action Agency over the past 25 years. She described the solidarity its residents have developed, and the almost supernatural level of patience and cooperation it takes to respond to an ever-growing level of need.

“It’s still a work in progress. You’re always fine-tuning it to see if we can do it this way, better.… At the end, we all have the same goal,” Oldham said. “It takes a bigger team than just one entity.”

That need for a collective lift has been glaringly apparent in the Benton Harbor government’s inability to respond to the crisis effectively. Of the residents I spoke to who were collecting water at the smcaa warehouse, none of them could recall being contacted by the city regarding potential lead in their home; rather, they made the switch to bottled water out of the same combination of fear and mistrust that residents in Flint have described now for years, even as its own water supply has been mostly repaired.

“I wasn’t really paying attention to it until they started talking about it,” said Reginald Lewis, an older resident who wore an oxygen tube while waiting in line. “I don’t think I’ll be OK [drinking the water] for a while.”

RESTORING LEWIS AND his fellow Benton Harborites’ trust is a tall order, almost as much as the actual pipe replacement. The strength of civic institutions has been dwindling in Benton Harbor for decades. The city’s local government has both overseen its long slide into dereliction and agitated relentlessly for outside assistance.

In November, the nonprofit news outlet Bridge Michigan said that in the 14 months following the initial reports of lead, “the city, lacking enough money or staff to quickly comply, had sought extension after extension.” A state memo said the city rejected offers for assistance with public messaging; the city’s water system was already in a cycle of debt that its mayor compared to payday lending, even before the discovery of lead.

“To be honest, these should have been replaced years ago, and we shouldn’t even be in the position that we’re in, but we are,” Elizabeth Hertel, head of the state Department of Health and Human Services, told The New York Times in October.

Benton Harbor’s mayor, Marcus Muhammad, is the city’s first democratically elected leader since the first emergency manager was appointed by the state in 2010, a move similar to the takeover in Flint before its own water crisis. Both were meant to bring the financially derelict cities into solvency, at any cost. The extreme austerity dragged the two cities painfully into “normal governance,” but also left them even more institutionally hobbled than before in dealing with a problem that vexes even relatively flush and functional cities like Chicago. “The problem is a lot of those communities just don’t have the expertise; a lot of them don’t even know that money is available,” said the nrdc’s Olson.

With nothing but an emailed statement from Muhammad to show for several weeks of trying to reach the mayor, I decided to drop in on City Hall in person. I walked

into a modest, silent brick building tucked away just a block from Main Street, up to the second floor, where I pressed a buzzer for admittance to the office of the city manager, Ellis Mitchell. His friendly secretary knocked on his door and stepped into his office. I heard muffled voices as she explained my request, and she soon popped back out, asking again which outlet I represented. She shut the door, continued her conversation with Mitchell, and in a few moments stepped out. The city manager couldn’t speak with me after all. Nor could Mayor Muhammad, who had just happened to step out of the office.

Benton Harbor’s population has been slowly but surely dwindling since its peak in the postwar era, and the loss is palpable. The Modern Plastics plant on Empire Avenue, a hub of industrial-era middle-class culture in the city—and which employed the mother of Eric McGinnis, the Black teenager whom Alex Kotlowitz wrote about more than two decades ago—appears abandoned, covered in dead foliage as if its staff simply walked off one day. When I visited at peak commuting hour, the city’s

downtown was eerily quiet, with just a few people shuffling out of its Main Street’s low-slung, humble offices and a legal cannabis dispensary.

The city’s comparatively small size can be a curse when it comes to many issues, but it also might be a small blessing when it comes to that pipe replacement program. The city has between 3,000 and 6,000 lead service lines, compared to the nearly 30,000 that Flint has merely inspected.

Post-infrastructure bill, Benton Harbor’s government will at least have plenty more money to throw at its problems. That’s good. But the more any given place looks like Benton Harbor, the more likely it is that acquiring that money will bring into a sharp, painful relief the history of deprivation, racism, and bureaucratic haplessness that led the city to fail its citizens’ most basic needs in the first place. If there’s any lesson for the Benton Harbors-in-waiting across the United States, it’s how those problems take a hell of a lot more than a quick infusion of cash to fix.

Free? Or Not So Free?

Freedom in the 50 States is one of the most comprehensive and definitive sources on how public policies in each American state impact an individual’s economic, social, and personal freedoms.

The Cato Institute’s 2021 edition improves on the methodology for weighting and combining state and local policies to create a comprehensive index, including a new section analyzing how state responses to COVID-19 have affected freedom since the pandemic began.

Derek Robertson is a writer and contributing editor at Politico magazine.

Back to Work

Under Jennifer Abruzzo, the nlrb is finally acting on what it was created to do.

By Timothy Noah

ON JANUARY 20, 2021, after President Joe Biden was sworn in on the West Front of the Capitol, and about the time Amanda Gorman finished reciting her inaugural poem, Peter Robb received an email from the new president telling him to clear out his desk by 5 p.m. This was unusual. Robb was general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, and while incoming presidents frequently dismiss their predecessors’ appointees, they don’t typically muck around with independent agencies like the nlrb. Robb, a Trump appointee, still had about 10 months left in his term. But a statutory quirk allowed Biden to fire Robb, even though no one could remember such a thing happening before.

Presidents seldom come into office knowing what it is an nlrb general counsel does, much less who holds the job. The anodyne title belies the job’s importance. Biden, the most pro-labor president since Harry Truman, understood that whoever was nlrb general counsel would exercise tremendous power—more power, arguably, than anybody else in government—to carry out his administration’s labor policies. Clearly Robb, a management partisan who helped Ronald Reagan break the air traffic controllers’ union, had to go. Less than one month after Biden pushed Robb out, he nominated Jennifer Abruzzo to replace him. She arrived at the agency in July after a party-line Senate confirmation.

The nlrb is a quasi-judicial panel that hears cases, makes rulings, and sets binding precedents about what does and doesn’t constitute a violation of labor law (committed usually, of course, by management). The nlrb’s general counsel is effectively the agency’s prosecutor. The general counsel sets the nlrb’s agenda by choosing which cases on appeal from the agency’s 26 field offices the Washington-based board will hear. That gives Abruzzo enormous influence over what the federal government’s rules

will be about how managers in the private sector may or may not treat their workers. The general counsel also supervises those field offices, where claims of unfair labor practices are investigated and, in most instances, resolved.

Under Trump, nlrb enforcement withered. Robb settled, for a pitiful $172,000, an ambitious case brought by his Democratic predecessor that documented widespread labor violations at McDonald’s franchises in which the corporation was plainly complicit. Robb tried (unsuccessfully) to demote the regional directors en masse. Morale cratered, with surveys recording rapidly growing employee dissatisfaction. During Robb’s first two years, the nlrb staff shrank by 13 percent. This all reflected the administration’s wider anti-union agenda. Trump decried on Twitter “Dues Crazy” unions that “rip-off their membership.” He harassed federal employee unions through executive orders and weakened worker safety protections.

Biden and Abruzzo are trying to reverse as much of this as they can. Abruzzo, a Queens native from a large Roman Catholic family, worked at the agency for almost 23 years, starting as a field attorney in Miami and ending up as the deputy general counsel during the Obama administration. When I first met her five years ago at a dinner, she displayed a lively wit, but when we met again for an interview last fall at the nlrb’s offices in D.C.’s Capitol Riverfront neighborhood, she was poker-faced and all business, in the preferred style of official Washington. In an email, she later described herself as a “voracious reader and an enthusiastic elliptical rider” who typically does both simultaneously.

During Robb’s reign of terror, she joined the staff exodus. “Elections have consequences,” she told me, “and that was one of them.” Abruzzo, who’d spent the interim working as special counsel at the Communications Workers of America, pronounced herself delighted to return. “It’s my family, right?” she said. Immediately, she set about bringing the agency back to life.

In September, Abruzzo laid down a marker on the controversial question of whether college sports players are employees. In a memo, she argued they were, citing the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in ncaa v. Alston, which expanded colleges’ ability to compensate athletes. “If by word or by deed they are led to believe they really have no rights,” Abruzzo told me, “then that’s a violation in and of itself of our statute.”

What Abruzzo called “our statute” is the Wagner Act, the 1935 law, formally known as the National Labor Relations Act, that created the nlrb and remains the principal law governing management-labor relations. Abruzzo was citing the rights all private-sector employees enjoy under the Wagner Act to form a union or engage in other “concerted” (i.e., collective) activity to improve working conditions.

Abruzzo’s memo was basically an invitation to college players and other interested parties to sue. In November, Michael Hsu of the College Basketball Players Association took her up on it. Hsu filed a complaint in the nlrb’s Indianapolis office alleging that the ncaa interfered with the exercise of college players’ right to self-organization. Whatever the administrative law judge in that region decides will surely be appealed, and Abruzzo will almost certainly bring the matter before the board to decide, a process likely to take a year or two from start to finish.

“They’re statutory employees,” Abruzzo told me. That these players receive no wages, Abruzzo said, is irrelevant under the Wagner Act. From her view, all that matters is that these workers “perform services for their university or college, and that university or college controls, or has the right to control, much of their daily lives.”

Abruzzo is also recommitting the nlrb to protecting the right of immigrants to organize regardless of their immigration status—a low priority under the Trump administration. In a November memo, she ordered nlrb officials not to collect Social Security or taxpayer identification numbers from witnesses giving affidavit testimony

Photograph by Lexey Swall

against an employer; that these witnesses be assured no inquiry will be made into their immigration status; and that when witnesses don’t wish to enter a federal building, affidavits should be taken in a “neutral” setting.

A little-discussed provision in the Build Back Better bill, which as of this writing awaits Senate approval, would greatly expand the nlrb’s ability to penalize employers. Since its establishment, the nlrb has lacked authority to level any monetary fine beyond requiring employers to furnish back pay to dismissed workers. Consequently, employers don’t lose a lot of sleep over violating labor law (as opposed to, say, violating antidiscrimination laws, under which workers can collect substantial damages). The BBB bill would change that by allowing the nlrb to impose fines of up to $50,000 per violation, and up to $100,000 per violation if the business is a repeat offender. These fines would usually be imposed on businesses, but in egregious cases they could be imposed on individual managers as well. “Employers would certainly think twice,” Abruzzo told me, if such fines became possible.

Abruzzo noted in a September memo that the Biden board had already suggested back pay could include health care expenses; fees on credit card debt that the fired employee could no longer pay; and the cost of losing a

car or home. If an undocumented worker won a case against their former employer, Abruzzo wrote, that person could demand additional compensation if wages were depressed by the person’s immigration status. In cases where the nlrb throws out the results of a union election because the employer engaged in unfair (that is, illegal) labor practices—as, for example, the agency did regarding last spring’s vote to organize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama—Abruzzo said the board might want to require the employer to pick up the cost to the union of running a second election campaign. Take that, Jeff Bezos!

A Trump-era drop in caseload is partly attributable to declining union membership, but another factor, Abruzzo noted, is that during GOP administrations, workers and unions are less eager to file charges lest they risk creating anti-labor precedent. Stare decisis doesn’t cut much ice at the nlrb; precedents swing madly back and forth, depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House.

One of the more ludicrous examples concerns whether graduate students at private universities who are paid to teach or assist research may join unions. Under President Richard Nixon, the board said yes in 1970. Then it said no, they may not, in 1972 (Nixon again). An even firmer no again in 1974

(Gerald Ford). Then, in 2000, the board said sometimes yes, sometimes no (Bill Clinton, of course). No once more in 2004 (George W. Bush). Then yes, in 2016 (Barack Obama).

The Trump board tried to kill grad student unions by issuing a regulation, but rulemakings take time, and the regulation wasn’t completed before Trump left office. So Biden scuttled it. Graduate students at Columbia, Brown, NYU, Stanford, and every other private university in the United States remain free to affiliate with unions. For now, anyway.

Perhaps, Abruzzo said, the Biden board will attempt regulations of its own to resolve such disputes on a more permanent basis, but “that takes a lot of time, and it’s resource-intensive.” It’s also outside the general counsel’s purview. For her part, Abruzzo said the Wagner Act “should be broadly construed to cover as many workers as possible.” The Wagner Act is not neutral on the question of whether the nlrb should work to increase union representation. “I think that gets lost,” Abruzzo told me. If workers “can actually engage with their employer with or without a union and actually feel like they can improve their lot in life, it’s only going to help all of us.”

Timothy Noah is a staff writer at The New Republic

DEMOCRACY’S DEFENDER

By Michael Tomasky

Photographs by Greg Kahn

How Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin became the man for this historical moment

Representative Jamie Raskin was trapped in the U.S. Capitol during the riot on January 6, 2021. He now sits on the House panel that is investigating the events that day.

MOST EVERY NIGHT, just after he slips into bed, Jamie Raskin picks up a volume of the collected works of Shakespeare, thumbs through it, and reads a few pages before sleep takes him. He is not, he admits, a big reader of fiction; doesn’t have the time. But he loves his Shakespeare, he told me one October night as we sat in his kitchen. Two days later, I asked him for a quote from the Bard that sums up our times. He squinted his eyes and looked downward. ¶ “I mean, um … ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’?” He smiled cheekily at the line, spoken by Ariel in The Tempest, referring to sailors jumping off a burning ship; no elaboration was needed in either of our minds about who these “devils” of today might be. Then he gave the matter more serious thought. “I think about Macbeth all the time…. Lincoln was obsessed with Macbeth, and so was John Wilkes Booth, who had played Macbeth.” Contemplation of Macbeth led him to settle on his more considered answer: “I’ve thought a number of times of ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’”

Raskin stands in the office of Maryland Representative and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, where Raskin’s daughter and son-in-law took refuge during the insurrection on January 6.

The line opens Macbeth’s soliloquy toward the end of Act I, as he contemplates murdering King Duncan. The soliloquy showcases not just Macbeth’s malevolence, but his awareness that he may be setting off a series of events that he will not be able to control: “we but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.” It is from this speech that we get the phrase “poisoned chalice,” from which the instigator of dark events will himself one day be forced to drink.

Donald Trump, who has poisoned our republic’s chalice arguably more thoroughly than any other figure in U.S. political history, has not been forced to drink from it. But then, we’re only (alas) in Act III of the Trump tragedy. The climax lies ahead. Whether Act V ends with Trump victorious, the republic in ruins around him, or with Trump vanquished and the republic saved and vindicated, remains to be seen. But if the latter, history may well note that no one—save, obviously, Joe Biden and his campaign team—did more to secure that end than Jamie Raskin.

Yes, he’s “just” a congressman, serving only his third term; in days gone by, when the Old Bulls laid their mighty girths across the House of Representatives, a third-termer like Raskin would still be an unknown, being told (probably by some segregationist) to wait his turn. But the modern Congress makes a bit more room for talent to rise to the top, and so Raskin rather quickly became a star. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he questioned Robert Mueller; later, during the first Trump impeachment, the Ukraine one, his arguments about the Founders’ rationales for impeachment reflected his history as a constitutional law professor and scholar. It was clear then—this was late 2019—that the guy had some chops. So many members’ questions during main-event hearings are really ill-disguised speeches, delivered for editing and dropping into campaign ads; with Raskin, you could tell he was actually going somewhere. But those performances were mere prelude to the second impeachment, over the January 6 insurrection, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi put Raskin in charge. He and his team of managers are widely considered to have presented a masterful case against Trump and defense of the rule of law, and indeed, even though the Senate did not convict Trump, the vote was the most bipartisan Senate support for conviction in the country’s history.

All that unfolded just weeks after the suicide of his only son, Thomas Bloom Raskin, whose lifeless body Jamie discovered in their home on the last morning of 2020. Tommy’s death was shattering for Jamie and wife Sarah and their two daughters, Hannah and Tabitha. And it was hardly less shattering for the army of admirers Raskin, whom I first met in 2019 when I interviewed him for a documentary film, had amassed through three decades of teaching, organizing, campaigning, legislating, and handing out his business card, the one with his personal email address on it, to any constituent who approached him. To watch him make those icily logical yet passionately democratic opening and closing arguments knowing that he had recently buried his 25-year-old son—and then, the day after burying him, lived through the trauma of January 6 with daughter Tabitha and son-in-law Hank Kronick, Hannah’s husband, who both literally thought they were going to die—well, it was to witness an astonishing act not just of personal courage but of civic ardor. California Representative Adam Schiff, who chaired the Ukraine impeachment, told me that as he and Raskin walked through the Capitol’s Statuary Hall to have lunch together before the second trial, Schiff had asked how

he was holding up; he wanted to know whether the memory of his son would be a strength to him: “And he said that it would be, that Tommy loved the Constitution every bit as much as he did.”

Now, Raskin is out with a book, Unthinkable, which chronicles the impeachment trial, some parts of Raskin’s background, and Tommy’s death (and his life). The congressman is, in addition to everything else, a really good writer. The blow-by-blow of January 6 is riveting (see the excerpt in this issue on page 22). The passages about his son, and his own pain, are sometimes searing: Raskin writes that he had always assumed he’d be cremated, but after they buried Tommy, he and Sarah bought the plots straddling their son’s, so he “could be buried next to [his] boy for eternity,” he explains, so “we could talk philosophy and politics and make jokes forever, starting as soon as I got there to be with him—and sooner rather than later, I hope, I remember adding darkly in my mind.”

In recent months, he has crawled out of that abyss to some extent, in no small part because he knows he has a job to do, a job his son would have wanted him to do, a job he carries on now as a prominent member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. That job, put simply, is to defend the Constitution he loves, even as he grapples with its, and its authors’, many complicating downsides (not least the Electoral College, and, of course, slavery). “My mother refers to him as ‘that Constitution guy,’” Yvette Lewis, the chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, told me. I think maybe it’s not an accident that the fates saw to it that Raskin and Donald Trump were both elected to federal office on the same night in 2016: that just as certain dark forces sent to Washington democracy’s destroyer, a man who would have appalled the Founders with his dishonesty and proud ignorance and naked self-dealing, other forces sent democracy’s defender—an admirer of Thomas Paine and William James and the social movements that have pushed this country to live up to its stated principles, an utterly incorruptible public servant, the epitome of the kind of person the Founders envisioned running our government. Said Vermont Representative Peter Welch: “There’s a moral character to him. You just feel you want to be like Jamie.”

On February 12, during the Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Raskin and Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, depart the U.S. Capitol.

Whether Act V ends with Trump victorious or vanquished remains to be seen. But if the latter, history may well note that few did more to secure that end than Jamie Raskin.

THERE ARE MINISTERS in Congress, and physicians and dentists and software executives and airline pilots and much else, but there is only one professor of constitutional law. So, on the morning of January 6, right after Tommy’s funeral, Jamie Raskin stepped out onto the front porch of his home in Takoma Park, Maryland, the Washington, D.C., suburb where he lives with Sarah and their two dogs, ready for work. The front porch, he writes in Unthinkable, resembled “one of those makeshift memorials on a highway to someone lost in a car accident”: flowers, letters, notes, packages, stacks of books. The trauma of his tragedy was everywhere around him. But it was January 6: an important day. He had to be there. “The public servant is there in the midst of this deepest, darkest tragedy that any family can really imagine,” marveled his friend Mark Medish, co-founder of Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit group. Tabitha tried to convince him not to go, but he said it was his duty. Deciding he shouldn’t be alone, Tabitha came along, as did his son-in-law, Hank.

Julie Tagen, Raskin’s chief of staff, drove him to the Capitol. For blocks along North Capitol Street, nothing unusual. Then, south of the New York Avenue intersection, about a dozen blocks north of the Capitol, tremors: “maga hat–wearing protesters flowing in from all directions toward the Capitol,” Raskin recalls in his book. Farther down, don’t tread on me flags, a Confederate battle flag, a woman with a sign that said fuck your feelings. They made it to the south side of the building, the House side, where the three House office buildings sit. Raskin’s office is in Rayburn. He sat down and worked on the short speech he was to give to rebut Republican challenges and argue that the election was over. Around 11:45 a.m., shortly before Trump started speaking at his rally, Raskin and Tagen headed over to the Capitol, where they were to meet Tabitha and Hank. They waited in a room numbered H-219, in the southeast corner of the building, near the House floor. It’s the Capitol “hideaway” office of the majority leader, who happens to be fellow Marylander Steny Hoyer.

Everyone knows what happened next. On a gorgeous day in October when the House was in recess, Raskin took me to the Capitol and walked me through, as nearly as could be approximated in a near-empty building, what his January 6 was like. The House chamber that you see on television is in the south side of the Capitol, on the second floor. It is surrounded by four hallways. From the vantage point of the chair looking out, on the right-hand or northern side is an entrance to the floor that is the common

reporters’ “stakeout” for Democrats, because that entrance leads to the Democratic side of the chamber. On the left-hand or southern side is the entrance that leads to the Republican seats. In the middle, in the corridor nearest the Rotunda, is another entrance; this is the one presidents use for State of the Union addresses. And opposite it, behind the chair, is a hallway called the Speaker’s Lobby—more ornate than the other halls, with three chandeliers and about 16 portraits punctuating the 80-or-so-foot-long corridor, the speaker’s office tucked in there behind the hall. At all entrances now, because some Republicans have threatened to carry their guns into the chamber, are metal detectors.

Raskin was on the floor that day. Other members who weren’t so central to the proceedings were up in the visitors gallery, which is accessed through the third floor. Before 1 o’clock, Jamie, Tabitha, and Hank were together in Hoyer’s hideaway. “Steny was really nice because he offered me this office basically like for that week, because he knew that I was being mobbed by people, reporters and stuff,” Raskin recalled. “And then he said, ‘If you’re going to bring the girls or whatever, you can use this office.’” Sometime around 1 p.m., Raskin went to the floor, and guards escorted Tabitha and Hank up to the gallery.

Right around then, two things happened. Mike Pence released his letter affirming that he would certify the count, which was the first moment that Democrats understood that the election would not be stolen; but at the same time, the first rioters breached the barricades on the Capitol’s west front, facing the mall. At 1:10, Trump finished his speech, and a much larger crowd marched toward the Capitol. A short time later, Raskin delivered his speech; some instinct told him not to utter the sentence that goes, “This is the peaceful transfer of power we celebrate and a model for a grateful world.” He sat down. Tragicomically, the next speaker was Lauren Boebert, the QAnon devotee who the people of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District have decided belongs in the House of Representatives. At right around 2 p.m., Raskin got his first sense that something was amiss from his friend Alyssa Milano, the actress, who was watching it all unfold on television and texted him to ask if he was safe. At 2:09 came another text, this one from the Capitol Police: “All buildings within the Capitol Complex, Capitol: External Security Threat No Entry or Exit.” The text advised members to “shelter in place” and “stay away from exterior windows or doors.” Members started getting texts with photos of the rioters. Liz Cheney, to whom Raskin has grown close, recalled to me: “Jamie and I were both sitting on the aisle in the chamber, he was on the Democratic side, right on the aisle,

and I was on the Republican side, right on the aisle. And as the reports were coming in of the mob, getting closer to the chamber, and we were being given directions about what to do, there was a moment where Jamie was looking at his phone, and he sort of looked up from his phone, and he said, ‘Oh my God, Liz.’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘There’s a Confederate flag flying inside the Capitol.’”

Tabitha and Hank had been up in the gallery, but at some point they left. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic congresswoman from Virginia, remembers a moment when Raskin looked up for them and didn’t see them. “The look on his face as they were trying to contend with what was happening on the floor, and it wasn’t immediately apparent where his daughter was, was pretty extraordinary,” she told me. Raskin called Tagen, and she said she was with Tabitha and Hank in H-219. On that October day, Raskin showed me the room—the three locks on the door, the chair they slid in front of the door as they listened to the chaos, screaming, and a few gunshots just on the other side of it (this is also very near where the QAnon-believing rioter Ashli Babbitt

was shot, at the entrance to the Speaker’s Lobby). The windows look out on the west front, so they had a skybox seat from which to observe the hundreds of rioters storming the Capitol.

The three of them stayed in H-219, a room I’d say is about 10 by 20 feet or so, for around three hours, with no food and only some orange juice from Hoyer’s small refrigerator. Once the rioters were dispersed, members were led in large groups down to the basement and eventually back to the House office buildings. The experience was terrifying. “Nobody took out an AR-15 and started mowing everybody down, but that’s what everybody was thinking was going to happen,” Raskin said. And beyond being terrifying, it was horrifying. After he was reunited with Tabitha, Hank, and Julie, Raskin went on c-span to assure the country that the certification would continue, but he stopped to note what a hideous moment this was: “Attacks on the Capitol didn’t even happen during the Civil War. You have to go back to the War of 1812 to find something like this, and that was a foreign power that attacked us. There was no Confederate attack on the Congress. So we’re going to complete the count if we have to stay

The Rotunda was among the parts of the U.S. Capitol through which the insurrectionists marched.

here all night or even all day tomorrow. We’re going to swear in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on January 20th. This violence is intolerable, lawless, and unacceptable, so we have to finish the job we were sent to do.”

IF RASKIN TOOK JANUARY 6 a little more personally than most members, it was partly because of his respect for our democratic customs—and partly because the nation’s capital is his hometown. He was born in 1962 in George Washington University Hospital; his Takoma Park home is less than 10 miles away. (His full name is Jamin Ben Raskin; his parents named him after his paternal grandfather Benjamin, who’d been a plumber, playfully reordering the syllables of the first name.) “My dad used to say that everybody wants to fly like a bird or just stand like a tree, and some people are bird people, and some people are tree people,” he said. “I’ve always been a tree person.”

The dad in question was Marcus Raskin, a formidable intellectual who would go on to help found the Institute for Policy Studies, which at its peak was Washington’s top left-leaning think tank. At the time of Jamie’s birth, he was on staff at Kennedy’s National Security Council. “His first day of work was the Bay of Pigs,” Raskin recalled. His mother, Barbara, was a journalist and novelist; her most successful novel, Hot Flashes, spent five months on The New York Times’ bestseller list. His maternal grandfather, Samuel Bellman, was the first Jewish person elected to the Minnesota state legislature (from the St. Louis Park area, famed as the home of Al Franken, Norm Ornstein, Thomas Friedman, and the Coen brothers).

Jamie Raskin grew up in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C., in a house full of politics, books, art, intellectual thrusting and parrying. Dr. Benjamin Spock popped around, and George McGovern and Ralph Nader. As if that weren’t enough, Marcus was also a concert-level pianist. “He taught Philip Glass how to play the piano, which a lot of people say explains everything you need to know about Philip Glass,” Raskin joked.

In 1968, during the Vietnam War, Marcus, who died in 2017, was indicted along with Spock and others for illegally counseling young men to evade the draft. He was acquitted, but the indictment played “a defining a role in the formation of my political consciousness,” Raskin said. It was a time of turmoil in Washington. Jamie was one of two white students in his public school class, and things got a little dicey at school for him after the 1968 riots, so his parents moved him against his wishes to Georgetown Day School, founded in the 1940s as the district’s first integrated school. He went off to Harvard when he was just 16. He laughed: “That was a form of subtle child abuse to get rid of me. When I got there, everybody was off getting drunk and losing their virginity. And I was looking for the chess club with my Star Wars lunch box.”

After Harvard Law and a short stint as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, he decided he wanted to teach, and, lo and behold, he landed a job at the American University Washington College of Law in the very town in which he grew up, where he taught until he joined Congress. Sarah eventually became a staffer on the Senate Banking Committee. Hannah was born, then Tommy, then Tabitha. Meanwhile, Jamie was involved in politics both national and local. (Takoma Park is an affectionate punch line on the left, akin to the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.) They were a close, loving family (“My sister says that the Raskins say ‘I

love you’ when they call 411,” he told me) living a great life. Then suddenly, in early middle age, Raskin decided to enter politics. “I didn’t have any kind of grand plan, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, but when the moment presented itself, I knew it was the right thing for me to do,” he told me.

The moment took the form of a seat in the Maryland state Senate. He decided to challenge a longtime incumbent, Ida Ruben, who had been wobbly on opposition to the Iraq War. It was 2005; the race was the next year. Montgomery County today is as liberal as the Upper West Side. But it wasn’t like that then. From 1987 to 2003, the county was represented in Congress by a moderate Republican, Connie Morella. David Moon, who was Raskin’s campaign manager, recalls that the campaign took a poll, “and I remember the poll results came back, and it was like 50–50 on the death penalty, 50–50 on the ICC, a controversial highway project.” That argued for caution. But Raskin, said Moon, “was like, no, that doesn’t make sense to me. That doesn’t make sense for how we’re going to win, or why I’m gonna run.” He was the underdog. Ruben outspent him two-to-one. He won by two-toone. “He has a touch,” said Hans Riemer, a Montgomery County Council member. “He makes people feel great, and you could see in his candidacy, he exudes enthusiasm and optimism and love and excitement.”

His friend Brian Frosh recalled that when Raskin joined him on the state Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee, landmark bills on marriage equality and gun safety were passed—measures Frosh said he couldn’t get through until Raskin joined the fight. Raskin did two other big things as a state senator. First, his constituent work was ferocious. Takoma Park Mayor Kate Stewart said that Raskin can remember where her children go to college and what they’re studying. Second, he made it a point to groom diverse successors. Moon, now a state legislator, is Asian American. Ditto Susan Lee, now in the state Senate. And state Senator Will Smith, who is Black, holds Raskin’s old seat. Aside from the legislation, Smith told me, “For the district and for the county, his legacy, if you look at [District] 20 now, it’s the most diverse legislative delegation

Raskin and his wife, Sarah, live in Takoma Park, Maryland.

In the hearings for Trump’s second impeachment, to watch Raskin make his icily logical yet passionately democratic opening and closing arguments was to witness an astonishing act not just of personal courage but of civic ardor.

in the county.” And Lee told me that Raskin fought hard against Trump-era policies that cost some Americans of Chinese descent their jobs in the stem sector and held a hearing on the matter.

In 2015, Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic representative for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, called Raskin to let him know he would be running for Senate. Raskin decided on the spot to run for Van Hollen’s seat: “I said, ‘Not only do I support you, Chris, I’ll run for your seat.’ And that was my full deliberative process.” Again, he was the underdog in a crowded Democratic primary. The favorite was Kathleen Matthews, a well-known and well-liked local TV newsperson, and wife of then-Hardball host Chris Matthews. There was also David Trone, a liquor store magnate who spent millions, and six other candidates. I remember thinking at the time that, because of Matthews’s notoriety and Trone’s money, Raskin might finish third. He got 34 percent to Trone’s 27 and Matthews’s 24. He cruised to victory in the general, but it was of course a bittersweet moment, because Trump won: “It could have been one of the most enjoyable nights of my life, but it became a really despondent night.”

The first two years, in the minority, were tough. But after the Democrats took the House in 2018, Raskin got a subcommittee chair right in his wheelhouse, the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The presidential election came; Biden won it, and all of Trump’s despicable-but-hapless legal maneuvering failed. On December 15, the electors met and validated Biden’s win. As 2020 drew to a close, Raskin had many reasons to feel optimistic. On the night of December 30, it was just him and Tommy at home. They watched an episode of Family Guy. Tommy decided to turn in early, so Jamie hugged and kissed his son good night, and told him he loved him.

TELL ME, I finally worked up the gumption to say at our fourth meeting, about Tommy. It was a glorious fall Saturday afternoon. He had just finished speaking and glad-handing at an outdoor event in Friendship Heights, a posh-ish Maryland neighborhood right on the district line. We walked down the street to an Italian restaurant I like. It was around 3:30, so not crowded; some of the outside tables were occupied, but Jamie and I were the only people in the inside dining room. I ordered some brussels sprouts. Jamie—like his son, a vegan, but, unlike his son, a vegan who occasionally sneaks some goat cheese—stuck with orange juice, his go-to beverage.

He took about 30 seconds to gather his thoughts. “Tommy,” he said, “was someone whose thoughts and feelings were literally too good for the world as it is.” Most of us, he explained, can read about the war in Yemen or the famine in Sudan and feel it for a few moments and then go on with our day. “That’s not what Tommy was like,” Raskin said. “These things stayed with him.”

At the same time, Tommy was both brilliant (he was in his second year at Harvard Law) and funny. He made everyone laugh. He loved Sacha Baron Cohen, especially Da Ali G Show—on which, as fate would have it, Marcus Raskin once appeared, making his grandson proud, because he cottoned on to the hoax of it quickly. He wrote poetry, long poems, which he could recite by memory over up to half an hour, his father said. He was repulsed by the slaughter of animals, which he believed inured us to violence more generally; this is the topic of one of his poems of which his father is most proud, called “Where War Begins.” He was intellectually restless. In the book, Raskin tells the story of a time when Sarah and Tommy were driving from Maryland to Boston while Tommy was in college. Around Baltimore, Tommy finished reading an academic’s article to which he objected, concerning animal rights. He emailed the professor to challenge him to a debate. The professor emailed right back, saying he wouldn’t debate anyone who wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal. Tommy asked his mother what a peer-reviewed journal was. Still in the car, he wrote an essay, submitted it to various online peer-reviewed journals, got it accepted by one, and scheduled a debate with the professor. But it was around that time, in his early twenties, that depression started to consume him.

In the book, Raskin calls Tommy his “intellectual soul mate,” and he reflects, as any parent would, on what more he could have done. He told me at the restaurant: “He had said to me, maybe just a few weeks before, that he didn’t know if he could ever be happy. And I immediately started talking too fast and saying, ‘When you’re happy, you can’t imagine being sad. When you’re sad, you can’t imagine being happy. When you’re healthy, you can’t imagine being sick. When you’re sick, you can’t imagine being healthy; that this is just a passing thing and so on.’ And it was a lot of words. And I think he just looked at me, and when I look back on it now, I think maybe he had already made up his mind.” Tommy left a note, which the police found: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”

Raskin paused. He was close to tears. I asked about his daughters. He started telling me about them; a couple of minutes later,

These next three years will test our democracy in ways it hasn’t been tested since the 1860s, or maybe ever.

as if on cue, Hannah, who now lives in Nevada with husband Hank, called. He perked up, told her he loved her, and turned back to our conversation. “It’s been hard for the girls,” he said. “And hard for all of Tommy’s cousins. If something happens like this, you’re so drowning in despair and agony that you become very self-referential. And as I’ve been able to catch my breath a little bit, it’s only now that I’ve begun to recognize how devastating it was for everybody else.”

He paused again, and stared down at the table. Again, he was holding back tears. I felt like one of those awful television reporters who holds a vigil on the front lawn of the home of grieving parents, waiting for them to step outside for the newspaper so they can ask them how they feel. Frank Sinatra’s indifferent rendition of “For Once in My Life” oozed out over the sound system. I apologized and suggested we change the subject. He stared down at the table again and whispered: “There is no other subject.”

EARLIER THAT DAY, at the Friendship Heights event, I observed roughly the ten-thousandth person come up to him in my presence to thank him, and I mean really thank him, for what he’s doing for democracy and tell him how proud they are to be his constituent. And I said to him: You know, Jamie, I notice that no one ever comes up to you to complain about their Social Security or gripe about potholes. Well, he instantly replied, that’s because I have such a great district staff, led by Kathleen Connor, whom I must insist you speak to (I did, and she’s great; she’s known Raskin since her son Jack and Tommy were in kindergarten together). I said, I’m sure that’s true. But somehow I don’t think that’s really the reason.

These next three years will test our democracy in ways it hasn’t been tested since the 1860s, or maybe ever. The scenario is pretty straightforward. The Republicans retake the House in the midterms. Immediately, any chance of Biden passing meaningful legislation is dead, but that’s the least of it. The GOP will launch hearing after hearing, issue subpoena after subpoena; they will find some flimsy rationale on which to impeach Biden, and they will stretch it out as long as possible. Trump will run—as Raskin put it, “for psychological, political, and financial reasons”—and he will be the GOP nominee, Raskin has little doubt. Assuming Biden seeks reelection, the election will probably be close, because elections just are these days. If Biden wins by a matter of several thousand votes in a few states, as he did in 2020, the Trump machinery will kick into gear to steal the election. Republican election commissioners and state legislators and even some governors will put forward pro-Trump electors. The House of Representatives will not vote to certify Biden’s win in

January 2025, which will toss the election to the House, which will make Trump president. (When a presidential election gets thrown to the House, under the Twelfth Amendment, the vote is by state delegation, so North Dakota has the same voting power as California; Republicans now control, and will likely in 2025 still control, a majority of state delegations, and Liz Cheney will probably be gone, meaning that Wyoming will go pro-Trump.) For the second time in the history of the United States, the other time being 1824, Congress will have installed as the president a candidate who did not win a plurality of votes in either the Electoral College or the popular vote.

“Donald Trump has now converted every formerly ministerial step of the process into a moment for partisan rumble and contest,” Raskin told me. “So when we’re talking about the certification of the state popular vote, the governors’ certification of the electors, the electors meeting, and then the January 6th joint session receipt of the electors … all these phases of the process have now been turned into yet another opportunity for partisan combat.” There is no question in Raskin’s mind that this is what Trump and his supporters will try to do.

The select committee on January 6 ties in directly here. Aside from trying to get to the bottom of who did what before and on the infamous date, Raskin wants the committee to try to take steps to safeguard democracy from attack by Trump or any future Trump wannabe. “Our select committee, I believe, should do whatever it can to reform the Electoral Count Act, to make it conform as much as possible to the popular will,” he said, referring to the 1887 act that spells out—confusingly, ambiguously, contradictorily—the presidential election certification process.

That obviously won’t be possible if Republicans retake the House. In the majority, the GOP will likely do all it can to subvert democracy and preemptively make people distrust the electoral process. In that case, Raskin will become an even more important voice in the Democratic Party than he is now. As his friend Representative Don Beyer of Virginia put it: “I think we all recognize that the most eminent constitutional scholar in the Congress is Jamie.”

Toward the end of my reporting for this story, I contacted four scholars to ask them if they knew of a quote from James Madison or Thomas Jefferson—Raskin’s favorite Founders, after Thomas Paine—that summed up Jamie Raskin. Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the National Constitution Center, invoked Federalist 57, perhaps written by Madison: “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.” Raskin, Rosen emailed me, “is exactly the kind of representative Madison had in mind, one governed by reason rather than passion, and devoted to the public good rather than to partisan interests.”

William Antholis, a political scientist who heads the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, quoted from a letter Jefferson wrote in 1822 to William T. Barry: “Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that will require unremitting vigilance.” Nancy Isenberg, on behalf of herself and husband and co-author Andrew Burstein, suggested a short Madison essay that ends: “Those are the real friends to the Union, who are friends to that republican policy throughout, which is the only cement for the Union of a republican people; in opposition to a spirit of usurpation and monarchy.” And Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told me: “Jamie Raskin approaches leadership in a spirit that Jefferson and Madison spoke of as ‘liberality,’ unswerving in principle but undogmatic, broad-minded, humane in the exact sense. In his resistance to doctrine as well as his intellect, no one today comes

closer than Jamie does to the revolutionary generation’s ideal of a public servant.”

Raskin is an admirer of the American pragmatist school of philosophical thought. Pragmatism, he told me, “is essentially democratic political experimentation for the common good. That to me is the promise of democratic politics—developing projects to try to make life better for people and transform the human condition.” He concludes Unthinkable with a meditation on this through Tommy’s eyes, a meditation that reveals that the book’s title doesn’t refer solely to what happened on January 6: “Tommy Raskin dared to think the unthinkable also when it came to transforming the human condition…. He dared to think about not only what was unthinkably dreadful in the human experience but also what might be unthinkably beautiful in our potential future….” It’s a very Raskinesque sentiment: that the unthinkable can also be good.

Raskin stands outside the U.S. Capitol, on the side of the building occupied by the House of Representatives.

Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic

“And then—boom!”

From the forthcoming book UNTHINKABLE: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin. Copyright © 2022 by Jamin Raskin. Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

UP TO THIS POINT, Raskin has described how, at right around 2 p.m. on January 6, 2021, members on the House floor began to get a sense, largely from friends who were watching on television and texted them that they might be in danger. At 2:09 p.m., members received a text from the Capitol Police that said, in part: “All buildings within the Capitol Complex, Capitol: External Security Threat No Entry or Exit.” Someone texted Raskin “the now-iconic photo of the invading insurrectionist casually carrying the Confederate battle flag in the Rotunda, a three-minute walk from where we sit.”

Raskin went to the House that day with his daughter Tabitha and his son-in-law, Hank Kronick, who is married to his older daughter, Hannah. He picks up the narrative from there:

ALL I CAN CONSIDER now is Tabitha and Hank. I am worried sick for them—they may be the only children of members in the Capitol today—and for Julie, my chief of staff. I call Julie. She says my daughter and son-in-law are okay where they are, behind a locked door, barricaded with furniture in Steny Hoyer’s office. Tabitha and Hank are hiding under Steny’s desk.

“Tell them I love them. Guard them with your life,” I tell Julie. I will learn later that Julie finds a fire poker in Steny’s fireplace and wields it above the door, vowing “I’m not letting these motherfuckers get away with this.” “She definitely got her Philly on,” as Tabitha would explain.

I am picturing them under Steny’s desk and I’m about to call Tabitha to hear her voice—

And then—boom!

Boom!

I hear the sound I will never forget, a sound like a battering ram, the sound of a group of people barreling up against the central door with some huge, hard, thick object, hell-bent on entering the House chamber. The members nearby press furniture up against the door, and a number of us farther away run to the door to help protect it, but we are then quickly told to

knows where we’re going? Where will any of us find safety on January 6?

A bloodthirsty mob of hundreds has entered the building outside the metal detectors and with no security check. Who knows what weapons they are carrying? It is hard to displace a thought I have rooted in the images we all carry from the recent Walmart shooting in El Paso; from the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh; from the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. What if one of the rioters is carrying an AR-15? Many of us are thinking the same thought.

“get back” by Capitol Police officers, who rush in and defend the entranceway with their guns drawn. The pounding at the door accelerates, and we can hear the sound of angry, macho chanting out there, too.

Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!

And: We want Trump! We want Trump! Someone official calls upon us to evacuate right away, calmly. Everyone moves, some people run, to the Speaker’s lobby, carrying their gas masks. I look up to the gallery again to see our colleagues, who have been frozen in place on the Democratic side, now awkwardly crouching and sliding through the rows to make their way over to the gallery above the Republican side. I see New Hampshire Rep. Annie Kuster and California Rep. Sara Jacobs, who is only in her fourth day on the job, crawling their way over. When we escape and are reunited later, a colleague will tell me they decided to cross over to the GOP side because they thought a mass shooter who entered would be less likely to aim at the Republican side of the House. Meantime, the officers up there have locked all the doors to keep the rioters from breaking in but will now presumably unlock them to get our colleagues out. I feel strange about leaving them up there, but then again, who

A handful of officers and young Pelosi staffers—Emma Kaplan, who wrangles members for voting on the floor, is the one I know best and am now looking to for help—leads us higgledy-piggledy down some stairs and into the Capitol tunnels. The members talk madly on their phones. I catch up to Emma and tell her we need to get Tabitha, Julie, and Hank out as quickly as possible. She agrees. She writes a text; she says she will do whatever she can. In the tunnels now, near the tram that runs between the Capitol and the Rayburn House Office Building, we hear shouting, chanting, running, the nauseating buzz of the activated gas masks no one really knows how to work except for some of the military and national security veterans, like Ruben Gallego, Abigail Spanberger, and Jason Crow, who are helping people. Most of the members from the gallery have made it down the stairs and have joined our rapid stream of exit and descent. I hear a southern Republican congressman I know yelling into a phone, “You screwed it up, y’all screwed it all up!” A member tells me that our colleague Raúl Grijalva is having a hard time moving and will be pushed in a wheeled office chair. I look back but don’t see him. I am borne along.

My mind fills with swirling questions as we enter the Longworth Building.

Have we entered a violent power struggle? On our side of the aisle, we have staked everything on popular sovereignty and the mechanisms of democratic election, but Trump and House GOP leaders have been acting on the dictum of the right’s favorite philosopher, Carl Schmitt, who said, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” We have come to the exception. Trump and his enablers have forced us into a politics in extremis, a place where the rule of law is trampled and violence redefines the terrain of struggle to make an authoritarian deviation from the rule of law possible. If the violence of Trump’s own incited mob gets out of hand, he can easily declare a state of siege and impose martial law by activating the Insurrection Act. Will this be his “Reichstag moment,” as General Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is apparently wondering too?

We Democrats are in love with the rule of law (which is the control of official abuse of power by formal institutional rules) and with voting and the channels of popular participation to ensure democratic self-government. We have thus looked away from a very old threat suddenly staring us in the face again, the threat that Alexander Hamilton warned us of in Federalist No. 1: the threat of an opportunistic demagogue unleashing a violent mob and primitive impulses against the Constitution to override the political and constitutional infrastructure of representative democracy. The demagogue panders to the negative emotions of the crowd, pretending to be the champion of the people, to wage war against the Constitution, the legal order, and the democratic political process that belong to the people. He starts as a “demagogue,” one who knows how to whip up the crowd into a mob frenzy, but ends as a “tyrant,” a ruler who uses his power to oppress the people, Hamilton said. This scenario is literally in the first Federalist Paper.

enemy—racist mob violence—is how our constitutional democracy can prevail over Donald Trump’s party, which operates like a religious cult and couldn’t give a damn about the Constitution or democracy. They are working all the levers of control and violent coercion to keep their leader, his family, and his sycophants in power.

Every part of my past is converging—this struggle will be my life now. As a Maryland congressman who resides in neighboring Montgomery County, I live closer to the Capitol than any other member of Congress (except for my friend Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting

But, now, I am driven by the memory and spirit of my lost son, who wanted far more from our democracy, not far less. He expressed dread of fascism and what it had done to humanity in the last century and horror for Nietzschean politics based only on “force and fraud and the will to power,” as he used to mutter every time he read the newspaper. He wanted government as the active instrument for promoting the general welfare of not just all human beings but all living beings, and he wanted morality to replace violence as the essence of government power.

I wonder where all this chaos is taking us; whether Tabitha, Hank, and Julie are safe and will be rescued soon; whether I should try to turn back and find officers; whether these insurrectionists have firearms; whether Donald Trump’s allies plan to escalate the violence; whether Sarah, Hannah, and Tabitha’s boyfriend, Ryan, are all right; whether we are facing an insurrection, a coup, or even a civil war; whether we will finally impeach the traitor for setting loose the dogs of war upon us or perhaps invoke, at last, the unsung Twenty-Fifth Amendment; whether dear America will survive this appalling head-first descent into political madness.

And when I say we have overlooked the potential strategic collaboration of mobs and demagogues to demolish our institutions with insurrectionary violence, I mean I. I have overlooked it. How could I have been caught so off-guard? All the clues were staring me in the face. I will face plenty more opportunities in coming days for self-recrimination.

But the question now, as we flee the Capitol from American democracy’s old

delegate) and I know Washington better than all but perhaps a handful of other members of Congress. We must secure the Capitol and defend our government. We must stop the insurrection, arrest the coup, and punish the lawless—from the inside operators in the corridors of power to the street-level brawlers.

As a professor of constitutional law for three decades, an observer of the separation of powers and civil liberties, and someone who reveres liberal democracy and hates fascism and racism, I have the motivation to fight. I have taken big bipartisan groups of incoming House members to the U.S. Holocaust Museum for a tour before their first session begins, to emphasize the essential stakes of liberal democracy. I send everyone to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian to learn about the centrality of slavery, racism, and white supremacy in shaping American politics and defining the American experience.

I feel curiosity, anger, resolve; but there is one thing I do not feel as we travel down, down, down—“Faster, please hurry,” an officer exhorts us—into the dark complex basement passageways of the Capitol, one thing I don’t sense as we are jostled this way and shepherded that. There is one emotion I have not experienced at all on this persistently gloomy and objectively terrifying day and that I will not experience all through the night: fear.

I feel no fear. I have felt no fear today at all, for we have lost our Tommy Raskin, and the very worst thing that ever could have happened to us has already happened. But I am still in the land of the living, and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. He is occupying my heart and filling my chest with oxygen. He is showing me the way to some kind of safety.

My beautiful son is giving me courage as we flee the U.S. Capitol Building for our lives.

My trauma, my wound, has now become my shield of defense and my path of escape, and all I can think of is my son propelling me forward to fight.

On January 6, 2021, congressional staffers at the U.S. Capitol held up their hands as Capitol Police secured the floor.

House Democrats Are Not in Disarray. Mostly.

The House Democratic Caucus is often accused of being a quarrelsome bunch. But is this just what politics looks like?

By Grace Segers

THE WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING, House Democrats gave President Joe Biden a victory to be grateful for: passage of his signature bill, the Build Back Better Act, a massive package of social spending, tax, and climate legislation. In a crisp white blazer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi presided over the vote, smiling as she announced the final results: 220 in favor, 213 against. On the floor, Democratic lawmakers erupted into cheers. Some members embraced one another; others broke out into little celebratory dances. A horde clustered around the speaker as she stepped down from the dais, chanting “Nancy! Nancy!”

The victory was a temporary one: The bill now needed to survive the crucible of the Senate, where it will be modified to conform to the needs of the upper chamber. But it was a moment of desperately needed progress for Democrats, whose triumphant

Illustration by Sean McCabe

mood was mixed with no small amount of relief. The vote occurred after weeks upon weeks of tense, sometimes bitter negotiation; at points, it seemed uncertain whether the bill would pass the House at all, stymied as it was by policy disagreements, personal frustrations, and procedural hurdles.

If you listen to the pundits, such turmoil is endemic, and suggestive of deep, irreparable divisions in the party. Democrats don’t merely disagree on key policies and principles, they don’t merely quibble over legislative details, they aren’t merely straining to contain a diverse coalition within their purportedly big tent—they are in full “disarray.” In fact, the turn of phrase is so common that it has become its own genre in political journalism, not to mention a rhetorical thorn in the side of Democratic leadership attempting to hold a fractious caucus together. The stakes for the

putative disarray are high: The party holds 221 seats in the House of Representatives, and just 50 in the Senate. In the midterm elections, Democrats’ tenuous control is likely to be wrested back by Republicans in at least one chamber, if not both. And while party leaders argue publicly that they can keep the House, enough Democrats have announced plans to retire that the prospect does not seem particularly plausible. Privately, many acknowledge that the coming year may be the only chance they have for a while to enact their priorities.

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders nurture their own pet phrases. Anyone who regularly tunes into press conferences by Pelosi or others in charge will hear that the caucus is a “family,” that it relies on “unity,” and, in a description favored by Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, that Democrats are a “coalition,” not a “cult.” These words act as signals not only to reporters but to caucus members: No matter how much members may disagree, they will—they must—stick with their own.

Are the Democrats in disarray, or are they an unruly but ultimately cooperative family, as they want the world at large to believe? The vote on the Build Back Better Act suggests a reality that contradicts the conventional wisdom: The current House Democratic Caucus is more unified than it seems. In my interviews with more than a dozen members of the caucus, as well as several staffers, strategists, and former members of Congress (conversations that were mostly conducted before the passage in the House of the Build Back Better Act), there was consensus that far less tension exists than is generally assumed. In the task of everyday legislating, House Democrats have largely voted as a bloc. “We’re always going to have differences of opinion on specifics, but I think we’re remarkably unified,” Representative John Yarmuth said. An early example of that unity was the passage of the American Rescue Plan in March, a massive coronavirus relief measure. Only one Democrat in the House, Jared Golden, defected. “We’ve been passing our legislation routinely with the thinnest of margins,” agreed Representative Gerry Connolly. “I think we’ve shown a great deal of cohesion.”

The dissension that does occur, most of the Democrats I spoke to maintained, is a normal and predictable result of a slim majority and a diverse coalition. “The media wants to say, ‘It’s the moderates versus the progressives,’ and ‘Those Democrats

are so dysfunctional.’ This is actually really functional,” argued Representative Madeleine Dean. “When you’re going for transformational change … it takes a lot of work.”

But the functionality rests on a razor’s edge. Democrats may soon be out of power, and some of the recently elected progressive members may find life in the frustrated minority an unwelcome shock. Younger members of all ideological leanings will likely feel the same. And while Pelosi has impressed the importance of unity upon her caucus, she has no obvious heir apparent; when she retires, her successor may have difficulty filling her high-heeled shoes.

These swirling factors formed the tumultuous political backdrop to the House passage of the Build Back Better Act. House Democrats held together this time. But how long can the harmony last?

THE SENATE passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at revamping the country’s physical infrastructure, in August, but in the House, the road to the bill’s passage—and to the passage of the Build Back Better Act—was significantly bumpier. For months, progressives insisted that they would not vote for the smaller—but still significant—infrastructure bill until after the much larger social spending bill was approved. They were worried that once the more modest bill passed, moderates would balk at voting for the bigger one. By insisting on their preferred time line, they said, they were ensuring the success of Biden’s full agenda.

The process leading up to the votes wasn’t pretty. “I feel something stronger than frustration,” Representative Ilhan Omar, the whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said ahead of the infrastructure vote. “It is hard to be in deliberations and negotiations with people who are not looking at this with the lens of benefiting and serving their constituents.” Moderates, meanwhile, resented progressives holding back a bill that would represent a bipartisan victory for Biden. Stephanie Murphy, in her capacity as cochair of the more conservative Blue Dog Coalition, said in October that her group was “extremely frustrated that legislative obstruction of the [infrastructure bill] continues,” thanks to “a small number of members within our own party.”

At times, it could be difficult to distinguish which tensions were driven by ideology and which were merely a function of clashing personalities. “Everybody across the breadth of opinion in the Democratic party knows that Josh Gottheimer is a pain in the ass,” said a progressive Democratic member who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, referring to a leader of the movement to pass the infrastructure bill first. (When asked to comment on this characterization of him, Gottheimer said, “If you mean fighting for the families and children that I represent, then damn straight I am.”) Sometimes, the progressive member said, it was just “personal pique” that made people “want to swim against the Pelosi tide.”

In November, the votes on the two bills were finally and irrevocably split, as a group of five moderate Democrats refused to vote on the Build Back Better Act without an official score from the Congressional Budget Office, which issues reports determining the cost of legislation. Pelosi announced that the House would vote on the bipartisan bill and the “rule” for the Build Back Better Act, which set up the parameters for debate and the final vote for the second bill later in November. After furious behind-thescenes negotiations, the five moderates— Gottheimer, Murphy, Kathleen Rice, Kurt Schrader, and Ed Case—agreed to a vote on the social spending bill by the week of November 15. Six progressive members, including Omar, voted against the infrastructure bill, but the loss of those members was offset by the 13 Republicans who supported it. It passed, and every single Democrat voted for the rule on the Build Back Better Act.

Although the months of squabbling evidenced some disorder among House Democrats, the intense negotiations also highlighted alliances. The literal eleventhhour agreement to vote on the infrastructure bill in early November was reached through negotiation, supervised by President Biden and Pelosi, nudged along by Majority Whip James Clyburn and the Congressional Black Caucus, and ultimately negotiated and agreed to by members of the Progressive Caucus and the five moderates. “It was organic,” Representative Mark Pocan later said. “Leadership had nothing to do with the groups getting together.”

And despite the “no” votes from Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib,

(X10)

The vote

on the Build Back Better Act

suggests a reality that contradicts the conventional wisdom: House Democrats are more unified than they seem.

Jamaal Bowman, and Omar, the discord did not calcify. “We’re going to trust each other,” Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Progressive Caucus, told reporters shortly before the vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, appearing before the cameras with Gottheimer.

That trust was rewarded. Pocan, the former co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, told me shortly before the successful House vote on the Build Back Better Act that stories saying that Democrats were in disarray were “dumb.” Like Dean, he felt that they were driven by the needs of the media ecosystem—an argument that is not uncommon among lawmakers, who tend to feel, fairly or not, that their work is misrepresented by the press.

I focused my reporting on excavating tensions in the House, but ultimately, the greatest roadblock to passing Biden’s agenda lies in the Senate. Democratic priorities that have passed in the House have fallen by the wayside in the upper chamber, blocked by the filibuster. To pass the Build Back Better Act, Democrats are attempting to use the reconciliation process, thereby dispensing with the need for Republican votes in the Senate. But reconciliation requires support from all 50 Democrats, and at least two, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have been reluctant to sign on. Manchin has signaled opposition to the bill’s cost and key provisions, giving him, in effect, a veto, and thus the strongest voice in dictating the bill’s final form.

Manchin and Sinema command a great deal of attention because they depart from consensus in significant ways. Their outsize visibility and power can obscure the fact that in the Senate, too, more agreement exists than not. Nevertheless, it’s almost certain that whatever is passed in the House will get changed in the Senate, and House Democrats will again struggle to reach unity on a bill that may no longer reflect their key priorities, likely testing whether they can maintain the accord they’ve reached.

“We have people who represent a tiny minority of the population who have far too much power in the Senate,” Representative Sean Casten told me. “That’s the challenge of where we are right now. It’s not a party issue. It’s a structure of the Senate issue.”

NOT LONG AFTER the Great Recession, on March 21, 2010— 502 days after Barack Obama was elected president, and 226 days before Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in an overwhelming defeat—the House approved the package of bills that made up the Affordable Care Act, overhauling the nation’s health care system. The legislation was, at the time, thought to be Pelosi’s crowning achievement as leader of the House Democrats.

Despite a strong Democratic mandate— for the bulk of the 111th Congress, the party held 255 seats in the House, and 59 seats in the Senate—the efforts to pass these bills were fitful, thanks to internal disagreements and firm opposition from a Republican minority. Thirty-four House Democrats voted against the ACA, along with every Republican. Political calculations were further complicated in 2009 by demoralizing losses in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, failures that forced Democrats to question whether they should be pursuing such an ambitious legislative agenda.

History has, if not repeated itself, then certainly rhymed. A Democratic majority in Congress, swept into power with a new president of the same party, is attempting to advance massive legislation in the wake of a nationwide crisis. Having passed large relief measures, congressional Democrats now press forward with legislation based in large part on the campaign promises that had propelled them into office. A loss in the Virginia gubernatorial race and a near-loss in New Jersey have Democrats anxiously looking toward the midterms.

Yet the similarities end there. In the years since ACA was passed, the nation has become even more polarized, to the point that a not insignificant minority of the public, egged on by a former president prone to destructive petulance, considers the Biden administration entirely illegitimate. If she wants her legislation to succeed, Pelosi no longer has the luxury of losing nearly three dozen Democrats; she’s limited now to three. And Congress is far more diverse than it was in 2010: younger, less white, and edging closer to gender equity. It is, put simply, a different caucus, functioning in a remarkably different context.

Not least among the changes is that ideas that were once divisive are now commonplace. “I think there’s very little disagreement on the … larger picture,” said Don Beyer, who represents Northern Virginia. “A generation ago, there were probably a lot of anti-abortion Democrats still in the house.” The progressive Democratic member who spoke with me on condition of anonymity agreed. “It’s unfortunate that we’ve got a 50–50 majority, so to speak…. But we’ve got 98 percent or 99 percent consensus.”

A second progressive member questioned whether all House Democrats have the same priorities, such as “a collective goal of making sure that … the basic human rights of people are set and maintained.” Yet even this lawmaker insisted that members didn’t feel “tension”; the relationships merely required “a lot of work”: “And with that comes disagreements, with that comes a lot of conversations, and a lot of strategy.”

Tom Perriello, a former congressman from a swing district in Virginia who lost his seat in the 2010 midterm elections, told me that Democrats have learned the lesson that sticking with the president is more likely to help them politically than harm them. Perriello, who campaigned on his support for the ACA and other elements of Obama’s agenda, lost his seat only narrowly. “They are all aware that trying to destroy Biden’s legacy and policy

agenda is going to screw everyone in the party,” Perriello said. “If you’re going to lose, and lose anyway, there’s a lot more value in having used your time and power to do something really good for the world.”

THE EFFORTS TO pass Biden’s agenda demonstrate the power of the coalitions within the larger Democratic caucus. One of the most influential factions, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is at a zenith, comprising nearly 100 members of the Democratic caucus. Thirty years after it was first chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders, then a congressman, it is a formidable bloc within the House that can obstruct or allow passage of critical legislation.

The upsurge in its influence is partly due to a series of rules and structural changes adopted in late 2020 that, while controversial among some of its members, helped to consolidate the group’s priorities. The goal was to make the caucus a more cohesive unit as it entered a period in which Democrats held both houses of Congress and the White House. Previously, the Progressive Caucus functioned more like a “social club,” said Omar, the caucus whip. “We believed ... with the growing number of members who were asking to be part of our caucus, that we could actually have real influence if we were to organize ourselves in a way that made us more productive.” These reforms require members to vote with the Progressive Caucus two-thirds of the time when the group has taken an official position and to attend a specific number of meetings. The two co-chair positions were consolidated into one. Jayapal told me that she has three strategies to make the Progressive Caucus more effective: build relationships to “get people invested in the vision,” communicate with members so that they “see the caucus as being beneficial,” and “winnow” its priorities. “Usually, we have a laundry list of like 100 things,” she explained. “And then we’re not able to focus, and then we end up losing.” Even as the Build Back Better Act was steadily whittled down, progressives continued to insist that their primary priorities remained in it.

The Progressive Caucus has often been compared to the Freedom Caucus, a bloc in the House Republican conference that was ascendant after the 2010 midterms. But the Freedom Caucus was willing to block legislation supported by most of its

conference, a trait that so far does not seem to be shared by the Progressive Caucus. Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which often works with progressives in Congress, argued that progressives had not let issues such as Medicare for All fall off the table, but rather purposefully set them aside for now. “That wasn’t progressives trimming their sails,” Green said. “That was progressives being strategic.”

But because the bloc wants legislation to pass, it can swallow compromises that may rankle outside supporters. Someone like Manchin can walk away from the negotiating table at any time, significantly undermining progressives’ leverage. “If your faction does not want to get anything done, that gives you enormous power,” a longtime Democratic strategist told me. “The problem for progressives who are affected by this most is that they sincerely want to do good things for their constituents.”

The Progressive Caucus has multiple members who belong to other caucuses, including several in the New Democrat Coalition, which is almost exactly the same size and has about the same amount of power, and is considered to be more moderate and pro-business. (Each has a capable leader from the Washington state congressional delegation; Representative Suzan DelBene is the chair of the New Democrats.) In one of the most dramatic examples of caucus overlap, Representative Steven Horsford, who represents a critical swing district in Nevada, is a member of the Progressive Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition, and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, which boasts Gottheimer as its co-chair. Horsford told me that his membership was informed by the demographic and geographic diversity of his district, which spans 52,000 square miles. “It was important to me to participate in caucuses here on the Hill that reflect different viewpoints,” he said.

A far smaller but still influential faction of the party is the Blue Dog Coalition. But the Blue Dogs do not have the sway that they once did. Many were voted out of Congress in recent years, as they represented conservative districts that chose to elect Republicans instead. During the fight over the ACA, numerous Blue Dogs voted against the health bill. “Back in the early days of my career ... there was, I think, a fair amount of difference about the attitudes

about how far government should go and what government should be involved in and what it shouldn’t be,” reflected Yarmuth, who was elected in 2006 and is retiring at the end of his current term. “I don’t think that that’s the case right now.”

Beyond the ideological caucuses, there are identity-based caucuses such as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and the Congressional Black Caucus, which has always played a central role in Democratic Party politics. (Clyburn, a powerful member in the powerful caucus, endorsed Biden ahead of the influential South Carolina primary, and is largely credited for giving him the momentum to win that race.)

Even as these disparate factions disagree, they’re nonetheless often able to cooperate. Pennsylvania Representative Conor Lamb, a moderate running for Senate who has said he is a “normal” Democrat, has teamed up with Jayapal and other progressives to advocate for lowering the age for Medicare. Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia moderate who has clashed with her colleagues over election messaging and argued that “nobody elected [Biden] to be FDR,” wrote an oped with other moderates calling for lower prescription drug prices. And throughout the fall, a host of Democratic members of all ideological leanings have filtered in and out of the White House, discussing the legislative agenda with the president.

“In the end, the only way we jointly accomplish things is by listening, coming together,” DelBene told me. “You have to have 218 votes in the House. You have to have 50 votes in the Senate for us on this. So the only thing that matters is how you build support to get there.”

ANY DISCUSSION OF the functioning of the House Democratic caucus is incomplete without mentioning Pelosi, its leader for nearly two decades. She is 81 but shows her age neither in appearance nor attitude. She almost never looks tired. She almost always wins, and if she doesn’t, she and her allies in and out of Congress will immediately try to spin defeat as victory. She has been able to maintain her grip on her caucus in part due to her accessibility and her willingness to communicate regularly with members. “She takes the time to take every

House members’

relative

ignorance of one another’s districts may help explain the semblance of disunity.

single one of our calls or texts,” Dean said. “She’s just that kind of a leader.”

The speaker is famous for rarely bringing a bill to the floor unless she knows she has the votes. “She’s a vote counter, and so am I,” Jayapal told me. This approach means risking embarrassment if she sets a deadline for a vote that is subsequently missed. At both the end of September and the end of October, she wanted the House to vote on the infrastructure bill without a companion vote on the Build Back Better Act. Both times, she met insufficient progressive support, and the vote had to be pushed back. But Pelosi’s allies argue that even when the goalposts are moved, deadlines help her to pressure members. “She’ll impose deadlines ... when she thinks she’s just got to get the sides to quit delaying,” said Steve Israel, a former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “If she thinks an agreement just isn’t baked yet ... she’ll expand and extend the time.”

Even those who don’t always agree with her recognize the effectiveness of her tactics. Representative Katie Porter, a second-term Democrat who represents a swing district and is the deputy chair of the Progressive Caucus, said that “there’s a lot of respect for the speaker’s ability and willingness to be a fair leader to all of her caucus.” The second progressive Democratic member who spoke to me anonymously, who has voted against Pelosi’s wishes in the past, said that Democratic leaders and staff are open to discussion. “If we disagree on something, I’m able to talk to them about why.” However, this member said, those conversations do not always translate to meaningful action.

Given Pelosi’s viselike grip on the caucus and her prodigious fundraising ability, few members are willing to criticize her on the record. But an undercurrent of generational tension runs within the caucus, particularly among its youngest

and most left-wing members. Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most visible progressives in the House, have occasionally traded barbs. “One of the shocking things to me is the fact that Pelosi and AOC don’t have a close relationship,” the first progressive member who spoke to me anonymously said. “I mean, Pelosi was the AOC of her time. And you could view AOC as the Pelosi of her time.” But a source familiar with the relationship between the two women said that it had “definitely grown stronger in the last year,” and that Pelosi had “welcomed” Ocasio-Cortez’s participation in the congressional delegation to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this fall. Pelosi also appointed Ocasio-Cortez to the Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth.

Although it is unclear if or when Pelosi will retire, a younger cohort is ascendant. Representative Ro Khanna said that the “groundwork” was being laid for a new generation to take over. Sharice Davids, who represents a swing district in Kansas and in 2018 was one of the first Native American women elected to Congress, said that the diversity of new members showed a “resetting of expectations” about who can be a lawmaker: “The trajectory we’re on is to have a Congress that really does reflect what the country not just looks like, but experiences.”

EVEN AS Democrats argue that the unmistakably changing House is more cohesive than it is generally painted to be, room for improvement remains, and there’s a sense among members that their relationships would be strengthened by visiting one another’s districts. “If I talk to Joe Jones about what I found over at John Doe’s district, and which may be similar to his, it’s food for thought for people to know what’s going on in other areas,” Clyburn told me. Sometimes, Khanna reflected,

politicians can get disconnected from “the average person’s aspirations”: “And then when you go to districts and you meet people, it just reminds you of where people are coming from.” Cindy Axne, a Democrat representing a critical swing district in Iowa, said members may not recognize that the problems faced by rural communities are similar to those in urban areas. Axne’s district spans a large chunk of southwestern Iowa, reaching from Des Moines to the borders of Nebraska and Missouri; as of 2019, its population was not much larger than that represented by Hakeem Jeffries, whose district encompasses just a chunk of Brooklyn. “It’s really important that as we make decisions for the American public, that we fully understand the difficulties that people are facing, no matter where they live, and not make assumptions.”

House members’ relative ignorance of one another’s districts may help explain the semblance of disunity; one representative’s opinion on what is best for their constituents—or conversely could harm them—may differ greatly from that of another. “We’re always going to have differences in priorities,” Yarmuth told me. “You don’t draft a bill and everybody says, ‘Oh, that’s great, let’s all vote for it.’ It’s not going to happen that way.”

This is the argument Democrats make again and again when questioned why they struggle to reach agreement on critical issues. And, given the eventual House passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and Build Back Better Act after months of disagreement, it is not without its merits. At the beginning of November, a reporter asked Pelosi whether she worried that the confusion made it “look like the Democrats can’t get out of their own way.” Pelosi replied that she did not. “Welcome to my world,” she said. “This is the Democratic Party. We are not a lockstep party.”

Grace Segers is a staff writer at The New Republic

T he SHOCK T ROOPS of the NE XT BIG L IE

How the Christian nationalist movement’s well-funded strategists are aiming at voters in Virginia and beyond for 2024

By Katherine Stewart

Illustration by Matt Mahurin

On a stretch of verdant land just north of Sycamore Canyon Road in Montecito, California, the homes of the merely rich give way to the homes of the truly rich. There, within shouting distance of the 18,000-square-foot home that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle purchased from a villainous Russian oligarch, you will find the residence of Joan Lindsey and her husband, James B. Lindsey, an heir to a Pepsi fortune. “It’s part private park, part sanctuary,” a write-up in Forbes pants. “Altogether, it’s a compound for the ages.” Mira Vista—an estate of this caliber naturally has a name— was recently listed for sale at $72.5 million.

But Mira Vista is something more than a home. It was also listed as the address of the James and Joan Lindsey Family Foundation. A search of the foundation’s public reports appears to turn up, proportionally speaking, little of the kind of community-centered philanthropy characteristic of other wealthy locals. Instead, the records show a vast and steady flow of contributions to leading organizations in America’s Christian nationalist movement. Every year over the past decade, the Lindsey Foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations such as the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, WallBuilders, and a faith-based media company called Mastermedia International, and lesser amounts to other groups like the Council for National Policy, a networking group for movement leadership.

“We are a Christian country. And the Founders were— definitely—and our founding documents were written under prayer each day of the writing,” Joan Lindsey has said. On the eve of the 2020 election, she announced that “this election will either preserve faith’s sacred place in our country or destroy it.”

From 2019 to 2020, the Lindsey Foundation funneled at least $500,000 to a new organization, Faith Wins, intended to mobilize pastors at conservative churches to bring out the pro-Trump Republican vote. Faith Wins is part of a Lindsey-backed coalition called The Church Finds Its Voice. In many respects, the Lindseys’ investment in Faith Wins and The Church Finds Its Voice follows a long-standing pattern in the Christian nationalist movement of backing projects to turn America’s network of tens of thousands of conservative churches into a powerful partisan political machine.

But there is also something novel in the Faith Wins project, and it sheds much light on the direction of the movement in the aftermath of the Trump presidency. Unlike pre-Trump get-out-thepastors projects, Faith Wins has made concerns about “elections integrity” a central part of the message for its target audience. The pretense is that this is intended to shore up public confidence in elections. The reality is that the group is consciously helping to lay the foundations for the next iteration of the Big Lie. If Trump runs again, and if the Big Lie works next time around in securing him the presidency, Faith Wins and its collaborators will have played a critical role in making it happen.

CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA, SITS ON the edge of Fairfax County, a prosperous, D.C.-adjacent region pocketed with residential subdivisions. On a Thursday morning in late September, at the Community Baptist Church, a midsize church built in the 1990s, a crowd of about 50 individuals, mostly pastors, most of them men, breakfasts on Chick-fil-A sandwiches. A Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates is there to work the room, as is a representative of the campaign of Glenn Youngkin, the previous co-CEO of the Carlyle Group who went on to upset Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election.

Chad Connelly bounds onto the stage bursting with energy. “We are in the middle of doing over 40 cities, just like this, in 16 states between Labor Day and Thanksgiving,” he says breathlessly. He rattles off some statistics from an earlier leg of his “American Restoration Tour”: 89 meetings with 2,965 pastors across the country who command flocks totaling 741,000 potential voters.

A former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party and director of faith engagement under Reince Priebus at the Republican National Committee for four years, Connelly is both a political veteran and a key player in the Christian nationalist movement. He serves on the Council for National Policy, where he sits on the board of governors, and where Joan Lindsey is a Gold Circle member. The council was founded by Paul Weyrich, Tim LaHaye, and others at the dawn of the Reagan era. Today, it is the apparatus connecting the “doers and the donors,” as the father of Betsy DeVos’s husband, Rich DeVos, put it, of the Christian nationalist and conservative political machine.

“You’re about to hear a presentation that’s going to elevate your ability to understand what’s going on, and it’s also going to inspire you to say, ‘I’m not doing enough,’” Connelly says, his voice cheerful but firm. “Everybody you know needs to have voted. Everybody you know needs to go vote early. Every church you know needs to do voter registration. Every pastor you know needs to make sure 100 percent of the people in their pews are voting and voting biblical values.” As in most Christian nationalist gatherings, “voting biblical values” is a transparent euphemism for voting Republican.

Connelly happily makes clear that his work owes much to the generosity of Joan Lindsey and her family foundation. “Joan

Lindsey just started talking to me about this,” Connelly tells the crowd. “So a couple years ago we really started this thing called The Church Finds Its Voice.” He nods. “If y’all have ever seen Christian leaders on television, Joan Lindsey’s likely trained ’em. She’s a media guru. An expert.”

There is a part of Connelly’s message, both here and in his social media presence, that will be familiar to anyone who has taken in a minimum dose of Christian nationalist rhetoric. “This is a crucial time in our nation’s history,” he says, striking the first chord in a well-rehearsed song about the existential necessity of electoral victory. “Is this our 1776 moment, or is it 1944?” he says. “I’ve never voted for a pro-death person. Never voted for anybody of any stripe that was OK with killing a baby in a mommy’s tummy.” In Christian nationalist circles today, every election is a contest against absolute evil, and the consequences of failure almost too dire to imagine.

Inevitably, the persecution narrative follows closely on the apocalypse narrative. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Faith Wins wrote, “government leaders decided—in their flawed wisdom—that church gatherings were not ‘essential’ to society. You heard that right.” In religious right circles, Christian conservatives are often cast as the most persecuted group in American society and may soon be arrested for their beliefs.

The refrain of this familiar song contrasts dire circumstances in the present with the golden age of yore. “This place has been ordained by God,” Connelly said in a September 2020 podcast episode, “when the Founders determined that of course they were reading the Bible and they were believers of the word of God. And so America became unique and special because the Founders understood that the founding had to tie into God.”

As in most versions of the song, the transition from the Christian nation myth to radical free-market doctrine is seamless. According to Connelly, the second reason for America’s uniqueness and specialness “is the free-market system, which of course is God’s biblical economy.” Next comes the fear and loathing. “There’s a far left now that doesn’t believe in God, they’re godless completely. They believe the state is the supreme being,” Connelly says on the podcast. “It’s actually a godless, communistic, Marxist style of government.”

Within the Christian nationalist movement in general, there is little curiosity about the political opposition, and still less effort to understand it on its own terms. Democrats are simply—and sometimes literally—represented as demonic. “You are losing freedoms every day in this nation. They’re being taken away like crazy,” Connelly tells the Chantilly crowd. “The Constitution has been discarded and tossed aside very quickly. And when you lose the little freedoms, you already lost the big ones and didn’t even recognize it. And it’s happening at a record pace.”

The bottom line for Connelly—hardly surprising given his past as a Republican Party operative—is to harvest votes. More precisely, his goal is to get the pastors present to harvest the votes. The Faith Wins website encourages attendees of the events to take a “Faith Pledge,” which includes voting in the upcoming election, and instructs its people to “inform fellow Christians about issues that impact our faith and families” and “encourage fellow Christians to vote their values on Election Day.” Pastors are given a QR code, along with an online form, which lead to a suite of tools and messaging materials, including voter guides, voter registration resources, and videos they can use to activate their congregations.

Running through Connelly’s Chantilly presentation and his media appearances, however, is the new defining theme in the

Chad Connelly, a key player in the Christian nationalist movement, prayed with pastors at a 2014 gathering in Westminster, Colorado.

The Faith Wins website encourages attendees at its events to take a “Faith Pledge,” which includes voting in the upcoming election, and instructs its people to “inform fellow Christians about issues that impact our faith and families” and “encourage fellow Christians to vote their values on Election Day.”

post-Trump era: “elections integrity.” The point, of course, is to convey the frightening but entirely unsubstantiated belief that vast plots are afoot to steal Republican votes. The same theme is also showing up in some of the newer state-level conservative organizations such as the Virginia Project, which describes its mission as “leading the charge to uncover evidence of election manipulation, irregularities, and voter fraud in Virginia,” and has referred to Democrats as “rats.” Vote early, the group’s mailings insist—because that way “your name is marked as voted and no one can claim to be you and steal your vote.”

Connelly hits all the key message points in his talk. “We cannot sit on the sidelines and let ourselves get kicked in the teeth, and guess what, it’s happening. Like November the fourth,” he says in Chantilly, alluding to the 2020 election. By “kicked in the teeth,” it is clear from his expression that he doesn’t mean that Trump was defeated; he means that Trump was cheated.

FOLLOWING CONNELLY at the podium is Tim Barton, son of David Barton, founder of the WallBuilders organization and one of the Christian nationalist movement’s most influential activists. WallBuilders presents itself as “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built—a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.”

In Chantilly, we are told that David Barton has taken ill, but his son Tim disposes himself in a manner that would make his father proud, offering the usual litany of Bartonesque half-truths and misrepresentations of U.S. history. America’s Founders were one and all “believers,” according to Tim Barton, and the Constitution comes straight from the Bible. And an Advanced Placement U.S. history course for high school students, Barton adds for good measure, is just liberal propaganda aiming to undermine America’s godly heritage.

Tim Barton is particularly keen to emphasize a certain, idiosyncratic aspect of Christian nationalist mythology. His father, David Barton, has long been obsessed with the image of America’s Colonial-era priests tearing off their robes, becoming soldiers, and leading their congregations out into military battle. He and WallBuilders created group of activist conservative clergy called the Black Robe Regiment. “I can go down the list of dozens of pastors who led their congregations to oppose the British because they open fired on us, they declared war on us,” Tim Barton says. Referring to the battles of Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Concord, he adds, “Almost every one of these early battles, it was nothing more than pastors leading their churches in the battle.”

The concern with masculine military virtue, though always a part of the movement, has become a signature feature of the Trump and post-Trump era. For example, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, has recently formed a partnership with retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who formerly served at the Central Intelligence Agency and has played a role in nurturing Christian nationalist networks in the military and among “disaster relief” NGOs abroad. The pair have helped lead a men’s ministry called Stand Courageous to help men “make commitments that will move men closer to God’s good purpose and design—men who will Stand Courageous!” At Stand Courageous gatherings across the country, masculinity, patriarchy, and militarism are the name of religion itself. “We need men to be men, tough with compassionate strength, bent toward justice without compromise, locking arms and standing,” the group’s materials declare. “We need to be the men God created us to be; warriors for all that is right, true, and just.”

In the pre-Trump era, reporting on this kind of military rhetoric was inevitably greeted with a shrug and the excuse that it was, after all, merely rhetoric. After January 6, 2021, it’s difficult to hear it in the same way.

BEFORE INTRODUCING the next speaker, Connelly urges members to steep themselves in Barton’s work and ideas, “So you can erase this nonsense we’re hearing out there from school boards, that nobody want God to be involved.

That’s insane.” He continues: “This time we cannot sit back. I know y’all are doing a phenomenal job in Loudoun County of saying to the school board ‘enough’s enough.’” No doubt, Connelly is referring to the aggression and chaos that right-wing activists have brought to school board meetings in Loudoun County, Virginia, and beyond—a continuation of the right’s long-standing effort to undermine public education. “If you have not been to a school board meeting, you should be,” Connelly says.

Hogan Gidley, who worked as the deputy press secretary in the Trump White House and is represented as an “elections expert,” is the final featured speaker of today’s presentation. It is his presence on the agenda that brings the subtext of the meeting out into the open. “The Center for Election Integrity that Chad mentioned, it’s nonpartisan,” Gidley announces. Then he promptly offers the kind of misinformation that passes for wisdom in the Trumpist incarnation of the Republican Party. “You saw the stuff in Arizona, you’re going to see more stuff in Wisconsin; these are significant issues, and they can’t be dismissed out of hand anymore, the facts are too glaring,” he says.

Remarkably, he is referring to the circuslike, GOP-backed audit of votes in Arizona’s largest county, which, after discrediting itself with its bizarre antics, managed only to confirm that Biden won Arizona by more votes than previously thought. But the narrative of persecution is too valuable in activating the base to discard simply because it’s not true. “Any officeholder who allows it to happen should be held accountable, not to mention the fact that if we find someone committing fraud, they’ve broken the law, and they have to face a penalty as well,” says Gidley. In time, he launches into a well-worn conspiracy about the so-called cemetery vote. He says: “About two million dead people are listed on voter rolls right now.... We saw something new in this last election. Dead people didn’t just vote. They requested mail-in ballots, filled them out, and somehow got them into the drop box.”

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the Chantilly experience is the crowd’s response. Murmurs of outrage punctuate the room as they seem to take in the misinformation. “This last year was rough … if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. You’ve gotta be in the room,” Gidley says, wrapping up his talk. On the way out, he takes a swing at other targets of right-wing grievance and ties them to the election fraud myth. “We’ve seen this with critical race theory,” he nods sagely. We are given to understand that perverting the minds of schoolchildren comes just as

naturally to Democrats as stealing elections. But Gidley chooses to end on a high note: “I have never seen people more engaged than they are right now.”

THE QUESTION THAT Trump’s attempted coup raises is how such a seemingly improbable event was even possible in the first place. During the Watergate crisis, after all, the country and both major parties united against a president whose alleged crimes would hardly have made the news over the past five years. How is it that in 2020 a president could refuse to accept a clear electoral defeat and face no consequences from his supporters, his party, or the legal system? How could so many people embrace such a transparent lie in the face of so much publicly available evidence? What could possibly motivate some members of Congress to exonerate an attack that not only was instigated to subvert the electoral process but also put some of their own lives in danger?

There are of course many overlapping explanations for the recent transformation of American political life. But the one that remains underappreciated in the present moment is the role of the Christian nationalist movement in establishing the necessary preconditions for the kind of coup that Trump attempted.

The essential precondition—more important than money, more important than media, more important even than willing liars in high public office—is the existence of a substantial base of supporters primed to embrace a big lie. Without leaders’ coordinated efforts to indoctrinate such a base, no lie can take hold. To create such a base, four key steps are necessary.

Step one is to build an information bubble within which the base may be maintained in a state of fact-denial. Much attention has correctly been placed on right-wing media in creating such a safe space for conservatives, but not enough attention has been paid to the conservative networks that supply the backbone of the Christian nationalist movement. Organizations like Faith Wins aim at pastors because they know that, for their target voters, pastors and religious communities are often the most trusted sources of information.

Step two is that this base must be conditioned to expect an imminent, cataclysmic event that will threaten everything it values. The apocalypticism and the persecution complex of the movement are perfectly suited to the task.

A third step is to transfer the perceived source of political legitimacy from democratic processes like elections to “higher” authorities that allegedly represent the “true” spirit of the nation. This of course is the device through which a minority of the country can come to believe that it has a providential role

David Barton is one of the Christian nationalist movement’s most influential activists.

MICHAEL MULVEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

in ruling the whole. As Steve Bannon said at a rally in support of Glenn Youngkin, which was held on October 13 in Richmond, Virginia, “We’re putting together a coalition that’s gonna govern for 100 years.”

The final step is to do what Trump did starting in 2019: undermine at every opportunity public confidence in the results of the next election. In a sense, the coup attempt began on national television during the first presidential debate, when Trump made clear that he would not accept the results of the election if he lost. At Bannon’s rally for Youngkin, Trump called in and said, “We won in 2016. We won in 2020—the most corrupt election in the history of our country, probably one of the most corrupt anywhere. But we’re gonna win it again.”

In the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt that began with Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in November 2020, it appeared to many outside observers that the Christian nationalist movement faced a quandary. If they recognized the actual results of the election and supported the orderly transfer of power in our constitutional democracy, they would also have to acknowledge that “God’s President” was a liar and a plotter.

This proved to be a tough decision for at least a few religious right leaders, and the movement at first appeared to divide and waffle. The prominent evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, for instance, acknowledged in an opinion piece for Fox News that it appeared Joe Biden would become the forty-sixth president of the United States and urged his followers to pray for him. A larger number, however, played along with the Big Lie.

Mat Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel, said, “What we are witnessing only happens in communist or repressive regimes. We must not allow this fraud to happen in America.” Michele Bachmann called Biden’s win a “delusion”; and Richard

Antall, writing for Crisis magazine, a conservative Roman Catholic publication, likened reporting on Biden’s win to a “coup d’état.” In response to news of the election outcome, Kenneth Copeland laughed derisively. “Yeah, he’s going to be president, and Mickey Mouse is going to be king,” he said.

Trump’s attempt to subvert the certification of the Electoral College results by inciting an attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 at first appeared to amplify the quandary. Right-wing preachers, such as Greg Locke and Ken Peters, played a significant role in riling up the crowd in the days and hours preceding the riot, and Christian nationalist symbolism was all over the event. Movement leaders now had to decide whether their cause would get behind an armed attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.

From a distance of a year, though, it has become clear that the quandary was a mirage. Christian nationalist leaders are, if anything, even more committed to Trumpist politics than they were in January 2021. My Faith Votes, a faith-based voter mobilization organization, for example, launched an initiative called “Election Integrity Now.” The group issued a prayer guide with a seven-point plan for asking God “to protect American elections and deliver trustworthy results.”

At a minimum, the leadership of the movement is committed to denialism: There was no Big Lie, there was only honest concern for elections integrity misrepresented by the liberal media. This denialism, however, has proved to be merely a cover for the endorsement of Trump’s coup attempt and a commitment to anti-democratic politics.

The more blunt-spoken leaders of the movement have not hesitated to make the position clear. At the June 2021 Road to Majority conference in Kissimmee, Florida, an annual gathering of the movement’s key activists, strategists, and politicians, movement

Audience members listened to Donald Trump at the July 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. ANDY

There are many overlapping explanations for the recent transformation of American political life. But one that remains underappreciated is the role of the Christian nationalist movement in establishing the preconditions for the kind of coup that Trump attempted.

thought leader Eric Metaxas let it be known that the real victims of the January 6 event were the good people who ransacked the Capitol. Speaking of GOP leaders, he fired, in his words, “an arrow across their bow”: “Any Republican that has not spoken in defense of the January 6 people to me is dead. They’re dead.”

The right-wing political commentator and activist Dinesh D’Souza echoed the sentiment. “The people who are really getting shafted right now are the January 6 protesters,” he said in conversation with veteran religious right strategist Ralph Reed. “We won’t defend our guys even when they’re good guys.”

At the Conservative Political Action Conference that took place in Dallas in July 2021, January 6 was even reconceived as a possible Democratic plot. “[The Biden] administration is about tyrannical rule. They don’t want to follow the Constitution,” said Allen West, former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, before he recast events driven by far-right extremists as bizarre and possibly Democratic conspiracies. “On January 6, the sergeant-at-arms had turned down, on behalf of the speaker, having the National Guard there to help protect the Capitol. Why did that happen? You think they were setting things up? Well, I do.”

THE UNSPOKEN BUT operating assumption among leaders of the religious right at present seems to be that Donald Trump will run again for president in 2024. All appear to assume that, if he runs, he is likely to be the Republican nominee. They further seem to take for granted that he will spend much of the 2024 campaign complaining that the 2020 election was stolen and that 2024 is at risk of being stolen, too. It follows that his best shot at winning is to use that lie, if necessary, to steal the election for himself. Since the alternative, in their view, is to turn the nation over to the demonic Democrats for permanent destruction, these assumptions have locked movement leadership into a straightforward strategy in the run-up to 2024. They will prepare the rank and file to embrace the “Big Lie II,” as it were, in the hopes that this time it will work.

Will they succeed? We can’t know for some time, of course, but we will be able to get a better sense of the direction of our politics if we pay attention to the right sources. For most of the public, Big Lie II will play out in sound bites on right-wing television, Twitter feeds, and Facebook posts. But the part of the operation that matters more will take place out of view of most media. Movement leaders will leverage their organizations to prime the base for the Big Lie. Working through organizations like Faith Wins and The Church Finds Its Voice; through militant, often hypermasculine

groups like Stand Courageous; or through “parent activist” groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, they are cultivating a cadre of activists prepared to use the threat of disruption, chaos, and perhaps even violence to “protect” the desired election results. Because if God tells you in advance who is supposed to win every election—and then the other candidate wins—the only acceptable explanation is that the election was stolen, and stolen against the wishes of God.

As the event winds down, Byron Foxx, one of the evangelists touring with Chad Connelly, takes to the stage. “It is not time to be complacent,” he intones. “The church is not a cruise ship, the church is a battleship.”

As far as can be determined from her sporadic posts and the letters she signs as a member of the Council for National Policy, Joan Lindsey is proud of the movement she has helped to finance. Conservative pastors, she wrote on the website for The Church Finds Its Voice, are “already leading the way back to God’s way for us. A tremendous number of you have led voter registrations and are speaking truth about our duty as men and women of faith to support Godly governance.”

She may also draw comfort from the fact that she doesn’t have to look far to find an heir for her mission. Her daughter, Kielle Horton, a graduate of Pepperdine University, vice president of Lindsey Communications, and president of the Lindsey Foundation, seems equally invested in her parents’ agenda.

A blog post, cowritten by mother and daughter in August 2020, warned that “the opposition desires to rewrite our nation’s entire founding and purpose” and “has plans to destroy what we hold most sacred.” It seeks “the attempted eradication of the Church as we know it, likely replaced by the state.”

Joan’s son Patrick may be in line to carry the mission forward as well, though he presently seems preoccupied. His Twitter feed describes him as “Pilot of Gulfstreams & Porsche’s. Husband and Believer.” Responding to the recent news of the iconic New York City restaurant 21 Club’s pandemic-related financial woes, he tweets, “Daaaaaaannng!!! This place was so awesome. De Blasio & Cuomo can sukkit long and hard. #reopenNOW”

With multiple holdings in addition to their $72.5 million home, including stakes in Cal-Pepsi Inc. and the Pepsi Cola Bottling Co of Bakersfield Inc., the Lindseys are not likely to run out anytime soon of the money they need to promote “Godly governance” in the United States. Whether American democracy can outlast their good fortune remains to be seen.

Katherine Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

THE LIB-TROLLING TRUMP SYCOPHANT IS AT THE TOP OF MOST DEMOCRATS’ 2022 LISTS. HE’S CERTAINLY BEATABLE. BUT THAT’S WHAT EVERYONE THOUGHT IN 2016, TOO.

CAN THE DEMOCRATS TAKE OUT RON JOHNSON?

BY DANIEL STRAUSS

BY DOUG CHAYKA

ON AN AUTUMN DAY IN 2009 at the Winnebago County Courthouse in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Ron Johnson took the stage in front of a crowd of hundreds of tea partiers. Johnson, a millionaire CEO of a successful plastics company in the state, was a political unknown. He had never run for office before and wasn’t particularly prominent in Wisconsin Republican circles. Yet here he was, sounding like a candidate and speaking alongside then–Tea Party grassroots icon Joe the Plumber.

“I’m here as a producer, and we’re under attack,” Johnson said during his speech. Johnson addressed what would become the core themes of his Senate candidacy: Democratic government would lead to the apocalypse; Obamacare is the worst single thing to ever be conceived anywhere in the universe; government spending was beyond out of control; career politicians had become the cancer killing America.

“What we don’t need is a bunch of politicians spending money they don’t have, trying to figure out new ways to tax us and, in their spare time, arrogantly attempting to take over the finest health care system in the world,” Johnson said in the same speech. “And now, in their efforts to convince us we need them to save our health care system, they are demonizing doctors and our health care providers.”

Bashing Obamacare was in high fashion among conservative grassroots and Tea Party types—and boy, did Johnson have just the story to tell. Johnson’s daughter Carey was born with a serious heart defect. She was saved by a team of doctors. His argument was that Obamacare would menace the health care system to such an extreme point that those doctors couldn’t have saved Carey if the law had been in effect. Obamacare, which was working its way through Congress at the time, “will destroy our health care system,” Johnson would tell Politico in a 2010 interview. “I am totally convinced of that.”

Spoiler alert: Obamacare didn’t wreck the American health care system. But Johnson’s spiel helped him appeal to tea partiers in Wisconsin, which helped him win the Republican nomination for Senate, putting him in an unusual spot. Johnson, a political novice, had never run for office and had few credentials and little experience— especially compared to then-Senator Russ Feingold, a 27-year veteran of Wisconsin and national Democratic politics. His speech was the beginning of a chain reaction of support. He won over radio host Charlie Sykes, who helped expand Johnson’s visibility. Then Johnson wowed activists at the state convention, which helped lead him to the nomination for a U.S. Senate seat—a rare rise for a first-time Senate aspirant.

In 2008, Obama had wiped the floor with John McCain—by 14 points. Democrat Jim Doyle was beginning his second term as Wisconsin governor. Democrats took back the state legislature as well. It seemed unthinkable that anyone short of a seasoned politician who would appeal to both moderate Republicans and Democrats could compete against let alone defeat Feingold, on most issues a crusading liberal within his party.

But this was the 2010 campaign cycle, where the Republican grassroots energy eclipsed everything else. Feingold himself would admit throughout the campaign that his chances of reelection weren’t ideal. Johnson would capitalize on that hunger among the Tea Party base, arguing that he was a “citizen legislator” who abhorred politics, rather than a career politician. When the result came in, Johnson won by just under 5 percentage points.

Johnson benefited from the Tea Party wave in that first election. Six years later, most political operatives expected Democrats to pick up Senate seats—including Johnson’s, with Feingold running to retake it—and for Hillary Clinton to become president. But Donald Trump beat Clinton in Wisconsin, and Johnson fended off Feingold, this time by 3.4 points.

Now, 2022 is shaping up to be another good year for Republicans. Johnson has spent the last year in the Senate questioning the efficacy of vaccines amid a global pandemic, indulging in conspiracy theories about border security, and eschewing the traditional steps a candidate takes ahead of an election—as of this article’s writing, he hadn’t announced whether he would run for reelection, as most senators do.

But assuming Johnson runs, he’ll be doing so under pretty favorable conditions. Early indications are that Republicans will retake control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, depending on the caliber of candidates running. True, Democrats have made gains in the state recently: Joe Biden beat Trump, they won back the governor’s mansion, and they grabbed a Senate seat now held by Senator Tammy Baldwin. But Johnson, with his wild conspiracies and constant troll-the-libs talk, is especially irksome to Democrats in Wisconsin and nationally. Indeed, it’s fair to say that, of all Senate GOP incumbents up for reelection next year, there’s none the Democrats would rather beat than Johnson.

IVISITED WISCONSIN in early October. Driving past farms and small towns as the leaves were just beginning to turn brown and red, I saw very little hint in the bucolic scenery of the divided electorate that has driven close election outcomes and sometimes bitter political fights in the state. The current enmity goes back a decade now, to former GOP Governor Scott Walker’s contentious tenure. But the Badger State has always had a divided political soul: After archreactionary Senator Joe McCarthy died in 1957, the state’s voters elected the quite liberal William Proxmire to fill his seat.

Today, Democrats control the governor’s mansion, the lieutenant governor’s

office, and the secretary of state’s office. But the GOP controls the state legislature. Robin Vos, the state Assembly speaker, has gained a level of notoriety usually reserved for firebrand federal lawmakers. His legislative identity centers on fighting just about anything and everything Governor Tony Evers does. Vos, at times, has also been the target of Donald Trump’s wrath for not indulging in the former president’s debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. But at other times Vos has sought to placate the former president. In early 2021, he ordered an investigation of the 2020 election in Wisconsin and, after spending a day with Trump, promised to keep him updated on the findings.

At the same time, the state’s junior senator, Tammy Baldwin, is an ideological and temperamental opposite to Johnson. Elected in 2012, Baldwin is a former member of the Wisconsin Assembly who ran for Senate after serving seven terms in the House of Representatives. She is one of the more liberal members of the Democratic caucus. In 2019, she introduced legislation to expand Obamacare through a public option. Johnson, of course, has made a career out of warning of the perils of the health care law.

Baldwin is the first to admit, however, that her election doesn’t mean the state has any fewer Republicans. “Wisconsin is a fairly evenly divided state in statewide races,” she told me in an interview over lunch in Washington, D.C. “Wisconsin has elected Republicans and Democrats, so it becomes about, you know, turnout.”

Wisconsinites I talked to would often cite the differences between Baldwin and Johnson to illustrate the political inconsistency of the state. Sometimes it elects liberal Democrats. Sometimes it elects fire-breathing Republicans. “In statewide elections, Wisconsin can swing either way, depending on the political environment,” Scott Manley, the chief lobbyist for the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce business association, told me.

If there’s any illustration that Wisconsin’s electorate is passionately divided, it’s found in how the state has handled Covid. By the beginning of December, Wisconsin was in the middle of states in terms of the percentage of the population who had been vaccinated—better than nearby states like Michigan and Ohio, but far worse than the most successful states, Vermont and Rhode Island.

That was on display during my four days there. I noticed that in Milwaukee, people wore masks inside restaurants and followed masking rules. Vos and Evers have skirmished over vaccine mandates virtually since the pandemic began. Johnson himself has helped fuel unnecessary hesitancy toward vaccinations. In mid-November, the senator’s YouTube page was, for the second time, temporarily suspended for violating the website’s rules on spreading misinformation about Covid. Johnson, who has had Covid, has been a fierce opponent of mask mandates. After he tested positive for the virus, his opposition to mask mandates did not change.

WHEN HE WAS FIRST ELECTED, JOHNSON SEEMED TO BE JUST ANOTHER FISCAL HAWK REPUBLICAN. NOW HE’S A PERFECT ENCAPSULATION OF THE TYPE OF REPUBLICAN WHO DIVES DEEP INTO MISINFORMATION AND DEBUNKED SCIENCE.

He’s helped fuel skepticism nationally and within Wisconsin about Covid vaccines.

“First of all, the mounting data shows that they’re not working or are as safe as we all hoped and prayed they would be,” he said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo in October 2021. The overwhelming evidence is that the vaccines do work, but that’s never stopped Johnson from publicly appealing to the sliver of voters who fully embrace debunked arguments on the 2020 election, immigration, and vaccinations. He’s demanded investigations into allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election, contra other Wisconsin Republicans: Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, for example, has said Joe Biden’s win was “entirely legitimate.”

In the last few years, Wisconsin has seen contentious fights for state Supreme Court seats that have been used as tea leaves for which way the state is leaning. Republicans and Democrats lately have been in a fierce gerrymandering battle and have moved to court over the congressional maps. Nothing about this state is simply Democratic or simply Republican.

The state is also gearing up for a contentious gubernatorial election. Democratic Governor Evers won his first election in 2018 by less than 2 percentage points. This time, however, Republicans have had trouble coalescing around one candidate. Former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch was an early entrant into the Republican primary, under the

assumption that she would run essentially unopposed. Former Vice President Mike Pence came down to meet with her at one point, a tacit sign of support. But in mid-October, Trump publicly urged former U.S. Representative Sean Duffy to run. In a statement, Trump said, “He would be fantastic! A champion athlete, Sean loves the people of Wisconsin, and would be virtually unbeatable.” Duffy was receptive and began considering it openly.

Polling shows a general dissatisfaction with the state’s top elected officials. A Marquette University Law School poll from November found Johnson’s favorability rating at 35 percent, around the lowest it’s ever been. But the poll also found Evers’s approval rating down, to 45 percent from 50 percent in August. Those numbers fall in line with a larger trend among the American electorate: dissatisfaction with the current crop of officeholders, or with inflation, or supply chains, or Covid, or all of the above.

JOHNSON RAN AS a “citizen legislator” rather than the career politician he relentlessly accused Feingold of being. But his mark as a senator has not been for any specific piece of legislation or policy brokering. Instead, it’s been his penchant for engaging in outlandish theories and fringe positions.

Even within the Republican Party, Johnson is known for his

disdain for authority and the establishment. This partially stems from the final few weeks of the 2016 Wisconsin Senate race, when it seemed as if Feingold was actually going to retake his old seat. At that time, it looked as though Republicans across the country were on the verge of losing a lot of races: Hillary Clinton would win the presidential race and have a Democratic majority in the House and Senate at her back. In the final weeks of the Wisconsin Senate race, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm for senators, canceled $800,000 worth of advertising. Johnson had already lost some air cover from a super PAC tied to the Koch brothers canceling $2.2 million worth of ads earlier that summer. More forebodingly, polling showed Feingold beating Johnson. He was effectively left for dead by some of his allies.

“Mitch [McConnell] and him do not get along,” said Keith Gilkes, a Republican strategist who helped run Scott Walker’s presidential campaign. Gilkes compared that to Johnson’s relationship with Senator Rick Scott, the current chair of the nrsc, which is somewhat better. “Rick Scott and Ron Johnson probably can have a conversation and not hate each other,” Gilkes said.

Other fixtures within the party stepped in to help Johnson in that race. The Chamber of Commerce went back into the race with more advertising after other entities pulled out. The conservative grassroots group the Club for Growth did the same. “We helped resuscitate the campaign when the rest of D.C. said it was over in August,” a chamber official recalled.

After Johnson won, he continued to nurture a grudge against then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, technically not the head of the nrsc but effectively the final word on those decisions. Johnson has at times ticked off Republican Senate leadership since then, as when he announced he was undecided on an Obamacare repeal and replace bill. He’s also bucked his own party on an overhaul of the tax system, citing how the Senate and House versions treated certain businesses. It was just another headache from Johnson for Republican leaders.

Democratic hatred toward Johnson has nothing to do with any of that. It has mostly to do with what comes out of his mouth.

Notably: After the January 6 insurrection, Johnson said he wasn’t scared by the mob, but he would have been scared if they were Black Lives Matter protesters.

“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said in an interview with a local radio host. “Now, had the tables been turned—Joe, this could get me in trouble—had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.” Johnson has also hypothesized that the mob attack was fueled by “fake Trump protesters.” Similarly, he has questioned whether the FBI withheld information ahead of the attack on the Capitol. Like most other Republicans, he opposed setting up a January 6 committee to investigate the riot.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he has been one of the most high-ranking officials in Congress to elevate and push conspiracy theories about vaccines. He’s floated that Ivermectin was being suppressed in order to help boost pricier drugs with the same benefits. He’s pushed hydroxychloroquine as a viable alternative to Covid vaccines.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Johnson twice blocked proposals that would have distributed $1,200 stimulus checks to Americans. He has called climate change “bullshit.”

When he was first elected, he seemed to be just another fiscal hawk Republican. Now he’s a perfect encapsulation of the type of Republican who dives deep into misinformation and debunked science.

Generally, Republicans shrug off Johnson’s antics as his brand. “He is asking questions. He’s challenging conventional wisdom. He’s sort of out there trying to get to the bottom of things instead of just accepting what is gospel in D.C. I think that resonates at people,” said veteran strategist Gilkes.

But when pressed, Republicans privately roll their eyes at Johnson. They concede that his statements on Covid are nonsensical and dangerous, but they also see him as seeking approval mainly from the activist and oftentimes fringe base of the Republican Party.

It’s also not clear how much of what Johnson says he actually believes. After the

2020 election, while he often publicly said there were voting irregularities in his state and elsewhere that had to be investigated, he was secretly taped in August defending Joe Biden’s win in Wisconsin.

Johnson has allowed his public image to change over time. Initially, his raison d’être was that he was a ticked-off businessman worried about the deficit and governmental largesse. But more recently he’s focused on matters in which he has no professional background: the science of Covid and the pandemic, conspiracy theories about the CIA and FBI colluding to undermine Trump, and border security. On all these subjects, he’s entertained some of the most crackpot theories floating around the conservative right. In the case of Covid, doing so helps spread misinformation about vaccines and doubts about the actual available remedies to the virus. His office maintains he is not anti-vaccine; he’s just asking questions.

Johnson’s willful denial of the January 6 insurrection deserves attention, too. He’s gone beyond just downplaying it. He attempted to block Matt Graves, the Biden administration’s pick for U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. In that role, Graves oversees prosecutions of the January 6 rioters. Johnson also used his former chairmanship at the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to float that the CIA and FBI could have been trying to take down President Trump. It’s not clear if Johnson was drawn to do this to keep his activist base happy or if he actually believes it. And it hardly matters. Either way, he’s playing with fire.

THE FIELD RUNNING for the Democratic nomination for Johnson’s seat is wide, but four candidates are regarded as in the top tier: Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes; state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski; Milwaukee Bucks senior vice president Alex Lasry; and Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson. Then there’s a larger pool of lesserknown candidates, seven of them. Republicans are hoping for a divided primary where all the candidates try to outflank one another by moving to the left. In the process, Republicans hope, the eventual Democratic nominee will emerge from an extended primary bruised up and poorer than might have otherwise been the case. The primary will be held

THE LIKELY TOP DEMOCRATIC CHALLENGERS

on August 9, just a few months before the general election. “Regardless of whether or not Ron runs,” a veteran Republican operative with extensive campaign experience in the state told me, “whoever [the Democratic nominee is] is going to come out in August broke and bloodied up.”

Ben Wikler, the state’s current Democratic Party chairman, has been working to change that. Since he was elected to the chairmanship in 2019, part of Wikler’s vision for the state party was to ramp up its year-round organizing. “My goal was to really put jet fuel on that organizing program and expand into digital organizing and more intensive communications and to rewire our internal structure to empower staff to build a more diverse and deeper and more talented team,” Wikler explained in an interview. “We’re doing year-round voter protection work, year-round organizing work with the year-round coalitions team.”

Everyone expects the primary to be tight right up to the end. “If everyone wanted to drop out, I’d be happy for it to end now. But I would say it will probably go till August would be my guess,” Lasry predicted over lunch one day in Milwaukee. “You’re not going to see Tammy [Baldwin] or Tony [Evers] or anyone else jump in and start to try to move people. I think this is going to be a close race.”

The early days of the Senate primary have not been defined by vicious Democratic infighting. For the most part, the candidates have eyed one another and

looked to peacefully garner support. Yet some identities have emerged. Barnes started out with a strong national profile, winning support from Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Jim Clyburn, among others. He is African American, and while Black voters are not a huge bloc in the state, they may be big enough in a Democratic primary context to make a difference. Godlewski, the state treasurer with extensive personal funds (who was unfamiliar with the common campaign parlance for fundraising when we talked), is the only woman in the top tier and has the backing of Emily’s List. Lasry, the son of billionaire Marc Lasry and a senior vice president of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team (which his father owns), has used TV advertising earlier than the rest of the field, a sign that he plans to wage an aggressive campaign for Senate. Nelson was endorsed in November by the Sunrise Movement, the left-leaning climate change political action organization. Nelson is arguably the most liberal candidate, although in truth every candidate in this primary wants to be identified as a progressive who can get things done. Republicans are hoping the primary could pull the eventual nominee too far to the left to appeal to moderates, and that’s not an impossible situation.

If there is any uniting theme among the dozen or so candidates in the Democratic primary field, it’s in their assessment of Johnson. All argue that the key to beating Johnson is to frame him as a changed

man. They say that, in the last two election cycles, Johnson won partially because he ran as an Average Joe businessmanturned-politician. He was very conservative, but his beliefs were still within the realm of reason, these Democrats argue. Now, they say, Johnson has gone off the deep end, with his outlandish claims of election fraud and the same bogeyman tactics on border security and the nonsensical imagined menace of illegal immigrants that all Trumpian Republicans love to engage in.

When I sat down with Godlewski at a coffee shop in Madison, she described the different versions of Johnson over the years. “I mean, I think that we’ve all seen that the Ron Johnson we’ve seen the last two terms in office was Ron Johnson 1.0, but more recently we’ve seen Ron Johnson 2.0, where he has been all in on Trump and things that Wisconsinites don’t even recognize,” Godlewski said. “He didn’t support the American Rescue Plan, he’s perpetuating junk science, he’s spending his Fourth of July in Russia. These are not things that Wisconsinites want their senators to be doing.”

Johnson has suggested openness to running for governor or not seeking reelection at all. But his opponents, when I interviewed them, didn’t see it. “I don’t get that he’s doing this to seek some other office at some point to raise his profile,” Barnes said. “I think he sees himself as a person who needs to go out there and

Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes

State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski Milwaukee Bucks senior vice president Alex Lasry

Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson

quote-unquote tell the truth. I see that as a personal objective to tell people or make people think differently about things. It’s all wrong, it’s all false. It’s all steeped in something very dangerous.”

Johnson used to be viewed as a sort of “Chamber of Commerce Republican who was good on the deficit, wanted low taxes—a business guy,” Lasry said, adding, “Trump brought out his true colors.”

But painting an incumbent senator as an extremist isn’t a surefire way to oust him. Democrats saw that playbook fail in late 2021 when Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe tried to frame GOP opponent Glenn Youngkin as a Trump acolyte. That didn’t work, and it shows that a winning message, especially in a cycle where even weaker candidates are expected to benefit from a “red wave” of Republican victories, will have to include something beyond attacking Johnson as a hard conservative. Voters already know Johnson is an at times rebellious Republican. The case for voters to choose someone other than Johnson will have to be both a rebuke of Johnson and an alternative that appeals to Wisconsinites’ nature of picking mavericky lawmakers.

JOHNSON SPENT most of 2021 saying he was sincerely undecided about running for reelection. During his reelection campaign in 2016, he said he would serve only two terms at most. In 2021, he suggested he was leaning toward not running for a third term. But he also began saying that “political pros” have advised him that he’s well positioned to win another term.

“The fact of the matter is my preference would be to go home, but because I ran in 2010 because I was panicked for the direction of this country, a country I dearly love, I’m more panicked now,” Johnson said in November. “So the question I have going through my mind right now as I’m asking everybody else to gear up and fight to preserve this nation: Can I just leave the field and give up on the fight, go home just to protect myself, my family? I’m not sure I can do that.”

If he runs, he’ll be running in a context like that of his first race in 2010—a year when the sitting Democratic president is unpopular, and Republicans are expected to enjoy a wave election. The conservative base of the GOP is visibly energized,

while Democrats fret that their base is tired and depressed. These are favorable conditions for a senator, like Johnson, who has been working to appeal to the right wing of his party.

Johnson’s chances will be even better if Wisconsin Republicans get their way in pulling off a plan, first floated around Thanksgiving by Johnson himself, that would allow Republican state lawmakers to run the state’s federal elections on their own. Under the plan, Wisconsin Republican lawmakers would take over the administration of federal elections in the state from the Wisconsin Election Commission—which itself was originally set up by Republican lawmakers—and thus be able to operate even with any intervention from Governor Evers. It’s not clear since the proposal surfaced how supportive Wisconsin Republicans are of Johnson’s plan, but it’s an ironic push for a senator whose main obsessions have been improving how elections have been conducted around the country.

Still, everyone expects the outcome to be close. That’s generally been a given in the state in recent years. Something else everyone expects is an insanely expensive race. “I’d be surprised if [the spending on] this Senate race was less than half a billion dollars,” Scott Manley, the Wisconsin lobbyist, said. “I mean I bet $500 million is probably the minimum.” That would be massive, even among the most historically expensive races. And while Manley was spitballing to an extent, his point is one shared by other operatives in both parties:

The final candidates in this race won’t want for money.

To push back on arguments that Johnson has only survived in office because he ran in wave elections, Republicans point out that he outperformed Donald Trump in Wisconsin in 2016. Incumbents generally have a small cushion over a primary challenger, so it’s not unreasonable to expect Johnson to retain that support if he runs again.

In the event that it’s a bad year for Democrats, as 2022 is shaping up to be, Wisconsin doesn’t have to be a disappointment for liberals. Democrats have shown in recent years that they can win statewide offices and oust some of their most reviled opponents in the Republican Party (read: Scott Walker). Republicans will defend Johnson in a reelection campaign, but privately, some Republicans would fret only so much if he were ousted. He has managed to annoy the party’s leadership more than once.

But for Democrats the race is paramount. It could bring about a second woman senator from Wisconsin or the first African American senator from the state. It could also be the race that helps them keep control of the Senate. Where most other states have hardened their political leanings in recent years, Wisconsin remains one of the swingier ones, where a sincere progressive or fiery conservative can win without compromising principles. It’s an unusual state, one where Ron Johnson could win reelection decisively—or lose decisively.

Daniel Strauss is a staff writer at The New Republic

“I’D BE SURPRISED IF [THE SPENDING ON] THIS SENATE RACE WAS LESS THAN HALF A BILLION DOLLARS,” SCOTT MANLEY, A WISCONSIN LOBBYIST, SAID. “I MEAN I BET $500 MILLION IS PROBABLY THE MINIMUM.”

Only Connect

The significance of Peter Thiel does not lie in his personality—but in his networks.

By Moira Weigel

WHEN SILICON VALLEY premiered on HBO in 2014, people said one of its main characters, Peter Gregory, had to be Peter Thiel. On the show, Gregory is a famous venture capitalist who gives a ragtag crew of developers their first seed funding. Socially graceless and often inscrutable, in one episode he keeps panicked founders waiting to hear whether he will grant them a $15 million bridge loan. He stares at a stack of burger buns while ruminating on the life cycles of cicadas in Myanmar and Brazil, before sharing the fact that he has decided to buy Indonesian sesame seed futures. Would the founders like an advance on the windfall he expects? It was the kind of long-winded macroeconomics riff that Thiel has been known to deliver. But Peter Gregory was not based on a real person, the showrunner, Alec Berg, insisted. “The honest answer,” Berg told Business Insider, “is we didn’t even really know who Peter Thiel was when we did season one.”

By 2014, it was becoming less and less plausible for anyone with even passing contact with the tech industry to deny knowing who Peter Thiel was. Not only was Thiel the former CEO of PayPal, but the first outside investor in Facebook, and an adviser to Mark Zuckerberg. In 2010, the vulpine, graying CSI alum Wallace Langham played Thiel as a cutthroat mentor in Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Social Network

The following year brought the launch of the Thiel Fellowship, which offered kids under 22 $100,000 if they would forgo college to found startups, a stunt that eventually landed Thiel on the cover of Newsweek. His 2014 book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, written with Blake Masters, was a blockbuster. To date, it has sold over three million copies worldwide.

In the years that followed, Thiel came to represent a side of Silicon Valley to which national media were only beginning to pay attention. He funded the lawsuit by pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that bankrupted Gawker Media in 2016. He spoke at the Republican National Convention that year. After the election, he joined Trump’s transition team and, among other things, brokered a meeting with the CEOs of several major tech firms at Trump Tower. If Steve Jobs had been regarded as the patron saint of computing technologies in an era of widespread optimism about their democratizing effects, in the Trump era, Thiel became known as the opposite. Not that he minded. He would “rather be seen as evil than incompetent,” he famously quipped.

Max Chafkin’s biography of Thiel, The Contrarian, arrives well into the cultural moment that has come to be called the “tech backlash.” It follows a number of

other critical books about major tech CEOs by beat reporters who have reframed their subjects as villains, rather than model leaders: Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork, Brad Stone’s Amazon Unbound, and Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. All feature a close-up of the anti-hero CEO’s face, partly obscured by text or cropping or both on the cover—a sly update to the cover of Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography, Steve Jobs These books, along with studies like Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, have helped to bring about a new wariness toward tech firms.

Chafkin, too, takes a critical stance toward his subject, as he expertly tracks Thiel’s rise, his money, and his influence. It turns out to be a curious strength of The Contrarian that Chafkin never got to talk to Thiel on record. Other writers have criticized Thiel for his apparent inconsistencies—for being a libertarian who is in the business of selling nation states software and consulting services, for instance. And other reviewers have faulted Chafkin for not pressing harder on Thiel’s political theory. But, whether by design or not, the limitations of this biography enable it to capture the key thing about Thiel: His significance does not lie in his unique genius. Who cares what Peter Thiel thinks about Carl Schmitt or Leo Strauss or René Girard, except to the extent that an intellectual air has bolstered his reputation, as he has built payment systems used across the world and data analytics software adopted by police and health departments, the military, and ICE? Who Peter Thiel is does not really matter. What matters about Peter Thiel is whom he connects.

THIEL WAS BORN in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967. The next year, his parents, Klaus and Susanne, moved to Cleveland, so that Klaus could attend graduate school at Case Western Reserve University. The city was burning that summer; a four-hour gun battle between the police and a group called the Black Nationalists of New Libya led to days of looting, fires, and further police crackdowns near campus. Klaus kept to his studies in engineering. After he had earned his master’s degree, the family moved around. They spent time

in Johannesburg in South Africa, then Swakopmund in South West Africa (present-day Namibia), where Klaus worked on the construction of a uranium mine.

Chafkin sketches a peripatetic childhood. There is the scene where the strict German father, like a character out of a Michael Haneke movie, tells little Peter, “Death happens to all animals. All people. It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you.” (The boy had asked him a question about their cowhide rug.) There is the horrifying fact, according to a 1992 report Chafkin cites, that at the uranium mine, white employees handed out weekly pay to Black migrant workers from behind glass, apparently to avoid exposure to radiation. The workers, the report claimed, were “dying like flies.”

Although childhood passes in a few pages, Chafkin gives the reader inclined to armchair psychoanalysis plenty with which to work. It is not difficult to imagine how this boy might grow up to be an intense and awkward man, still determined to win admiration, if not love, for the sheer coldness of his intellect. Later in the book, Chafkin characterizes Thiel as unable really to believe in any basis for human connection other than power, or in relationships that do not boil down to transactions. “As far as I could gather in my reporting for this book,” he writes, “Thiel’s life has been full of important relationships, but few that seem to transcend money or power.” Visitors to Thiel’s mansion in San Francisco tell Chafkin there were no photographs or items of sentimental significance on display. “Thiel’s homes,” one tells Chafkin, “look like stage sets, and it’s hard to tell someone actually lives in them.”

The story really takes off when Thiel enters Stanford University in the mid-1980s and begins to develop the persona of a provocateur—as well as the social network that would set up his career. He does not seem to have pursued popularity. Chafkin speaks to classmates who recall behavior that ranges from merely weird and obnoxious to aggressive. One student remembers him ostentatiously taking his daily vitamins in front of a public fountain, “as if intent on showing his classmates that he was, in every way, superior to his hungover peers.” Chafkin also writes that on “at least two occasions, he told peers that he thought their concern about apartheid was overblown.” (Chafkin’s book includes a statement from Thiel’s spokesperson that Thiel had “no recollection of a stranger

As Thiel learned in his campus war days, controversy is a highly effective way to get attention. And even negative attention has consistently benefited him.

demanding his views on apartheid,” and that he had “never supported it.”) “He was a strange, strange boy,” one classmate tells Chafkin. But by the mid-1980s, there was a strong and well-funded conservative movement ready to welcome—and weaponize—students like him.

Since at least the America First movement of the 1930s, right-wing activists had complained that federal regulations tilted the media against them. William F. Buckley’s 1951 bestseller, God and Man at Yale, established a genre of similar complaints against elite college campuses. People who knew Thiel in the 1990s said that he saw himself as “a Buckley-like figure.” But conservatism had changed since Buckley’s heyday. After Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, the right-wing movement and right-wing media activism had become stronger nationally—and less genteel. In the late 1960s, Republicans began to mainstream what had formerly been a far-right talking point about “liberal bias.” And donors working through think tanks and nonprofits funded a network of college clubs, newspapers, and conferences, inspired by their New Left counterparts, to counteract the liberal influence on campus and to break the monopoly of colleges on knowledge production and credentialing.

These structures helped Thiel build the first part of his network. In 1987, Thiel co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative campus paper, with grants from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which supported papers like it across the country—Dinesh D’Souza’s Dartmouth Review, for instance, and Ann Coulter’s

Cornell Review. (Coulter and Thiel would become close friends.) Complaining about liberalism on elite college campuses was emerging as a recognizable career path: After Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind became a blockbuster success in 1987, various foundation-funded books like Roger Kimball’s 1990 Tenured Radicals and D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education would follow. In this moment, minor adjustments to the “Western Civ” curriculum at Stanford, specifically, attracted national media attention. In addition to running on ISI grants, The Stanford Review would scare up donations by sending letters to wealthy alumni about the scandal of new classes being offered on subjects like Black hair.

If Thiel hated Stanford, he loved hating it. He stayed for law school, and well into his third year was still hanging out with undergraduates and writing for The Stanford Review. After a few years away—during which time he worked at the prestigious corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and interviewed for, but failed to secure, clerkships with Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia—he returned to Palo Alto. By the time he got back, he was already at work on a culture war screed, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, which he co-wrote with fellow Stanford Review alum David O. Sacks.

A conservative Bay Area think tank called the Independent Institute published the book in 1995. The John M. Olin Foundation, the conservative nonprofit dedicated to nurturing a “counter-intelligentsia,” which had also supported D’Souza, gave

the Independent Institute a $40,000 grant to publicize it. The Young America’s Foundation, the conservative youth movement that groomed Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, among others, promoted the book, as did Thiel himself—he handed out copies from a giant stack to anyone who wanted one as they walked by the Stanford student union. The Independent Institute helped Thiel and Sacks find a national platform: They placed op-eds in National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as appearing on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and on right-wing radio networks that were rapidly growing in the wake of Reagan-era deregulation.

As Thiel moved up in the world, he never outgrew the campus culture wars; he kept many allies from that era close. And throughout his career, Thiel would be drawn to figures who deployed culture war tactics like those he’d learned at Stanford. In 2007 and 2011, he donated to Ron Paul’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination—supporting a fringe libertarian figure known, before the Tea Party movement, for his newsletters, which used Stanford or Dartmouth Review–esque strategies to whip up controversy. Among other things, the newsletters referred to MLK Day as “annual Hate Whitey day” and called the end of South African apartheid the “destruction of civilization.” At a conference at the conservative Claremont Institute in 2010, Thiel ran into Chuck Johnson—then a student at Claremont McKenna College, who was already making a name for himself in conservative circles.

Johnson, who would go on to write for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller and Breitbart, connected Thiel to key figures in the emerging alt-right. In 2016, Johnson introduced Thiel to Milo Yiannopoulos, then the tech editor of Breitbart, and to the Clearview AI founder Hoan Ton-That. After Google employee James Damore wrote a memo decrying the “ideological echo chamber” among his colleagues in July 2017, Johnson hosted him and other disaffected Google employees at Thiel’s house. And, when Thiel decided to attend the RNC in 2016, he asked Johnson to secure him a place as a Trump delegate.

Thiel was cultivating connections with a rising faction in the Republican Party. He was impressed by an ambitious young lawyer, who would later be a fellow enemy of Google: Josh Hawley, who happened to be a former contributor to The Stanford Review. He gave $300,000 to Hawley’s

2016 campaign for attorney general of Missouri and donated to his 2018 campaign for U.S. Senate. And in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Thiel moved in the orbit of Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who, according to Chafkin, would become Thiel’s main link to the Trump White House.

THE NATIONAL RIGHT-WING campus movement gave Thiel his political start. But Stanford also opened other, distinctive doors. The differentiating feature of Stanford—over, say, Dinesh D’Souza’s Dartmouth or Ann Coulter’s Cornell— was its status as a feeder for Silicon Valley. Through its electrical engineering and computing research, the university had enjoyed close ties to the military industrial complex of the Cold War and, by the 1980s, to new forms of financing that would rise as the Cold War state funding wound down. Sand Hill Road, the iconic seat of venture capital, was separated from campus only by a golf course. Professors and even ambitious undergraduates crossed it regularly.

When Thiel was starting his first hedge fund, he maintained his Stanford connection, lecturing on entrepreneurship and continuing to network on campus. This was how, in the summer of 1998, he met an important collaborator. Max Levchin— who had graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a computer science degree a few years after Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape—was in the habit of finding random classrooms to spend days in, because it was summer and the friend’s apartment where he was crashing did not have air conditioning. On one of these jaunts, Levchin stumbled upon Thiel’s talk. When he saw that there were only a few other people

in attendance, he decided that it would be too rude to nod off, as he usually did. Levchin approached Thiel after the talk and struck up a conversation. They met for breakfast at Hobee’s, a Palo Alto diner, the next morning.

The rest would become Silicon Valley legend. Levchin would go on to develop the fraud detection software that was the core of PayPal. And the two men gathered a clique that did much to shape the culture of venture capital and founder-focused startups as the global consumer internet truly took off.

A Fortune magazine photo shoot in 2007 captured the core group. The photographer styled Thiel, Levchin, and their friends like gangsters from a Scorsese film, in outsize sportswear, leather blazers, and silk shirts, hanging out at a San Francisco Italian restaurant, Tosca. Elon Musk skipped the shoot. With only one exception, those pictured were graduates of the schools Thiel and Levchin had attended. There was Thiel’s college friend and former running mate for student government, Reid Hoffman (Stanford 1990), who founded LinkedIn. Thiel’s co-author, David O. Sacks (Stanford 1994). Keith Rabois, who graduated with a B.A. from Stanford in 1991 and would have earned his law degree there in 1994, if blowback after a free speech prank had not led him to leave for Harvard. (According to Sacks and Thiel, who described the episode in their book, Rabois stood outside of the room of a resident fellow one night and yelled, “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of aids!”) Luke Nosek (UrbanaChampaign, 1996), Premal Shah (Stanford 1998), Ken Howery (Stanford 1998), and Roelof Botha (Stanford MBA 2000) were joined by Yelp co-founders Jeremy Stoppelman (Urbana-Champaign 1999) and Russel Simmons (Urbana-Champaign 1998), and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim (UrbanaChampaign, 2004). Members of this crew formed Founders Fund in 2005, which would make billions founding and investing in other companies.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin Penguin Press, 400 pp., $28.00

The Fortune article described Thiel as possessing the “relaxed self-confidence of Michael Corleone.” I am not sure “relaxed” is the adjective I would use to convey the tensile, murderous calm of Al Pacino’s performance in that movie. But as an act of branding, it worked. The photo was a way of signifying with The Godfather that these men were renegades. The moniker that Fortune gave the group in their headline stuck: “the paypal mafia.”

The PayPal Mafia resembled and yet differed from the Bay Area social networks of an earlier era, which had brought together military and industrial research scientists with tinkerers and hobbyists, and commune dwelling with computation. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner describes the group that coalesced around Stewart Brand, an older Stanford graduate, and the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s. After early involvement in social movements, Brand embraced his libertarian tendencies, and the Whole Earth network promoted free expression, free stuff, free love, and the freedom to found new communities where you could live these ideals. They translated the values and practices of the commune counterculture into a cyberculture that created (and commercialized) online communities and tools of self-expression. Friends and employees of Brand’s would go on to build major elements of Amazon and Facebook; Steve Jobs often described Brand’s catalog as an inspiration for Apple.

Thiel and his cohort would invest in companies whose leaders cited Brand as an influence. But, even if the PayPal Mafia shared libertarian leanings with the Brand network, its core philosophy was profoundly different. Thiel was not Brand. He was never a hippie, and he is not really technical; he was a finance guy who got to pick the engineers. These Revenge of the Nerds types did not drop out to tune in; they dropped out to raise a Series A. It was a new kind of California dreaming for the era when greed was good. Members of Thiel’s network came together in the anti-identity politics that the culture wars turned into a movement of its own, in an environment where venture capital and newly globally networked computers would create possibilities for dizzyingly rapid growth.

CHAFKIN MOVES AT a brisk pace through the stories of companies that Thiel built with members of this clique. When Thiel and Levchin started PayPal in 1998, the company was called Confinity. (The joke was, their “confidence” was “infinite.”) This is where Thiel’s standard operating procedure and philosophy began to crystallize. PayPal seized on the method of losing money to literally buy market share: Wall Street investors were valuing companies based on number of users, rather than profitability, and PayPal realized that they could pay people to join, and the stock market would support them.

Confinity soon found itself in competition with a rival payments startup, Elon Musk’s x.com. The two companies hemorrhaged money trying to compete with each other until they merged in 2000, with Musk as CEO. The move almost certainly saved Confinity, but Thiel and Levchin were unhappy. Musk and Thiel could not seem to work together. A mutual acquaintance: “Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.” While Musk was away on his first honeymoon, Thiel’s allies staged a coup against him and brought Thiel back as CEO. One of the first things Thiel did, Chafkin writes, was propose “that PayPal turn over all its cash to Thiel Capital, his hedge fund.” Chafkin reports that the board shot this suggestion down, irked that a CEO would risk his company’s “limited cash on speculation—particularly speculation that had the potential to enrich the CEO personally.” Then, right after selling the company to eBay, Thiel abruptly left.

Thiel would be similarly unpredictable at Facebook. He became an investor in Mark Zuckerberg’s social network in 2004— a move that brought fantastic wealth—but he was not always a booster for the company. In 2012, Thiel gave a notorious speech to Facebook employees (“My generation was promised colonies on the moon,” he said, after being introduced by Zuckerberg. “Instead we got Facebook.”) and dumped much of his stock at $20 per share immediately after the IPO. (Chafkin notes that the stock would trade at $300 per share in March 2021.) Especially shocking was his investment in Clearview AI in 2017: The company that Hoan Ton-That created scraped Facebook profile photos and took advantage of Facebook’s real name policy in order to develop a real name database to sell to the police. It was a direct affront to a company that many of Thiel’s contacts in Congress and the Breitbart universe accused of anti-conservative bias. (Thiel would later distance himself from Clearview, and Founders Fund passed on investing in it.)

Palantir, which Thiel co-founded in 2003, took its inspiration from the business opportunity that Thiel saw in the war on terrorism. In the wake of 9/11, Thiel recognized that the various government and military agencies needed better methods to clean and synthesize their data on security threats. PayPal had developed software to track financial fraud in its systems; could Palantir develop software to track terrorists?

Thiel recruited his former Stanford law classmate, Alex Karp, as CEO of the new company. (Thiel himself is Palantir’s chairman.) In 2010, forward-deployed engineers at Palantir pitched the software to Michael Flynn, who responded, Chafkin writes, by “making an urgent request to the Department of Defense to buy enough Palantir licenses for the entire force in Afghanistan.” H.R. McMaster, who would replace Flynn as Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, was “an enthusiastic Palantir user and champion.” Still, in 2016, Founders Fund valued Palantir “40 percent lower than the official $20 billion figure.”

CHAFKIN FOLLOWS THE Thiel story through the first year of the pandemic. A lot of this has been previously reported, including by Chafkin himself. But by putting things together, in order, Chafkin makes some important patterns clear.

One is Thiel’s skill in attracting media attention. Some of the puff pieces Chafkin digs up are cringe-worthy in retrospect. See: a 2007 profile in which the writer Kara Swisher called him “Silicon Valley’s most interesting venture capitalist and all-around great character” and told him, “I gotta say, Peter, you got class!” In recent years, journalists have framed him as more villainous than quirky. But that works for Thiel, too. As he learned in his campus war days, controversy is a highly effective way to get attention. And even negative attention has consistently benefited Thiel. When Palantir IPO’d in the early fall of 2020, Bloomberg ran an article with the menacing headline: “palantir knows everything about you.” On the one hand, the privacy concerns sound off-putting. But on the other, they give the impression that Palantir is all-seeing and possesses more power than it really does. This impression cannot have hurt Palantir’s valuation, which reached over $40 billion by January 2021.

Another pattern that emerges from The Contrarian is related: an unconventional approach to lawsuits. Thiel backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. And in 2016, Palantir sued the U.S. Army. Under a 1994 law, designed to prevent government overspending, Chafkin explains, the U.S. Army is “required to consider cheaper, commercial products” instead of simply accepting the prices offered by big defense contractors. Palantir’s lawyers argued that the Army had failed to allow it to submit a bid for its big software database. The

Thiel is not an inventor, but an investor, and, for the most part, he prefers to remain behind the scenes.

lawsuit shocked the defense community. But it paid off. The Army gave Palantir the opportunity to “build a prototype system and present it to a panel of soldiers.” It was, Chafkin writes, “exactly the kind of contest that Palantir had called for in a lawsuit a few years prior.” In 2019, Palantir won an Army contract worth “as much as $800 million.” Its business with the U.S. government has continued to grow. Since the onset of the pandemic, Palantir has won contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and with health agencies of numerous other countries for tracking Covid.

The Contrarian is primarily plot-driven. But the analogies that it suggests between contrarianism as a media strategy and contrarianism as a business strategy may be crucial to understanding the cultural logic of our time—not to mention the origins of the Silicon Valley culture wars out of which Thiel has emerged as the bestknown figurehead. Like the structure of contemporary media, the structure of contemporary venture capital rewards increasingly extreme behavior. The investor is not avoiding risk, but managing it: Out of every 100 bets, 99 will be wrong, but the one that is right will scale globally, and this can pay for the rest and more. Note that this structure incentivizes more and more outrageous bids: This startup will reinvent water. That startup will reinvent pooping. (The digital marketer behind the Squatty Potty did in fact work on Thiel’s Ron Paul super PAC.)

In both the culture wars and investing, contrarianism is presented as heroic. But in both cases, if he plays his cards right, the contrarian protects himself from risk. Pull outrageous stunts; they may backfire; but when one works, you can use it to leverage the social capital you have as a Stanford

student into a national platform. At worst, the classmates who dislike you still dislike you. So what? The failure is priced in.

CHAFKIN RETURNS AT various points throughout The Contrarian to the question of what Peter Thiel really thinks. “What exactly, I wondered, did Thiel actually believe?” he starts. And later wonders, “Did he believe in anything?” A biographer can hardly avoid these questions, especially when his subject has staked so much on styling himself as a philosopher king. But in the end, I think they are the wrong ones, or at least they are the wrong way to identify Thiel’s real significance.

Sure: It may be useful to point out his hypocrisies. Here is an anti-elitist who says college is a scam and that students should skip it, yet who has built his whole career on the network he created by loudly hating his elite college. Here is a libertarian who nonetheless is building software for multiple nation states. A proponent of life extension who has expressed disdain for Covid lockdowns. Yet these views are not exactly inconsistent. To tell young people to forgo college, and give the ones you like direct access to your own college network, is to take over the gatekeeping power of colleges. To disparage the state, while building a business that sells billions of dollars’ worth of services to it, is to take over state prerogatives. What could be a more consistent expression of the will to power than wanting eternal life for yourself, and dismissing concerns about a global pandemic as overblown?

Thiel has exerted a fascination to writers like me, and to readers looking for a main character in an era when both political and technological powers are shifting. But, upon closer inspection, our stories may not be doing what we think they are. Criticisms of Thiel reinforce a narrative

in which he boldly opposes and, more to the point, outfoxes common wisdom. Exposés double as advice. In summer of 2021, ProPublica revealed that Thiel had used a Roth IRA, a tax instrument designed to help the middle class save for retirement, to shield billions of dollars’ worth of tech stocks. The report condemned Thiel. But within days, The Wall Street Journal had published a follow-up explaining to its readers how to do the same: “If business titan Peter Thiel’s $5 billion tax-free individual retirement account has you jealous, here’s a way to build a pot of tax-free retirement savings without paying much in taxes: A mega-backdoor Roth conversion.”

Thiel presents a special trap to the liberal arts graduate—or professor—who wants to feel relevant. A Silicon Valley billionaire is talking about René Girard! His friend, the CEO of Palantir, wrote a dissertation on Theodor Adorno! But to engage too long with these ideas, as ideas, is not only to miss the point. It is to keep this small handful of men—and the occasional woman—at the center of every conversation, and to let them pick the subject.

The tech backlash has created an appetite for new kinds of questioning and critical narratives about the industry— and that is a good thing. But replacing heroes with anti-heroes does little to alter the narrative about how a handful of geniuses have changed the world through their insuperable intelligence; the genre continues to trade on a deep desire to make myths about the men behind the machines. And in the case of Thiel, specifically, to focus too much on him as an individual precludes understanding, much less contesting, the nature of his power.

Thiel is not Jobs or Musk, a charismatic CEO associated with a particular invention. He is not an inventor but an investor, and, for the most part, he prefers to stay behind the scenes. He leverages his network—or, more precisely, his status as a node between several networks that were not previously densely connected. To understand his influence, we have to track how his ideas and his practices have traveled and, where they have become a kind of social glue, the people they join together. To do that, we will need to look at the PayPal Mafia and the machines their money has built from outside, below, within.

Moira Weigel is an assistant professor at Northeastern University, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School, and a founding editor of Logic magazine.

The War Racket

What turned a star of the Marine Corps into a critic of U.S. foreign policy?

spent most of my time being a highclass muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

These are the quotations that will send the Chomsky enthusiast scurrying into the stacks of the university library. Meanwhile, at the Library of the Marine Corps at Quantico, Butler’s anti-war writings are isolated from his memoirs and other texts about him—in a separate bookshelf for radical thought that includes the works of Marx.

By Patrick Iber

THERE ARE SOME figures whose place in the story of the American past is so central that schoolchildren cannot help but know them: George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or Rosa Parks. But there is also a group of people who have not passed into national legend, and perhaps whose lives are not considered fit to explain to children. They are most likely to be encountered, if they are encountered at all, in the institutions that often engage the attention of young people between the ages of 18 and 22. Among those, there is probably only a single person who will be discovered almost exclusively by two generally nonoverlapping groups: avid readers of the corpus of Noam Chomsky, and members of the Marine Corps. That man, standing lonely astride the lens-shaped center of a peculiar Venn diagram, has the unlikely name of Smedley Darlington Butler.

The name reflects Butler’s Pennsylvania Quaker heritage—his father, Thomas Butler, was a congressman in the seat once held by his wife’s father, Smedley Darlington. Both were prominent families, but the young Butler would not pursue a career in politics. He was 16 years old when the Spanish-American War broke out. The United States promised it was entering the fight to free the remaining Spanish overseas colonies from tyranny. In spite of the Quaker tradition of pacifism, Butler believed in the mission. “I clenched my fists when I thought of those poor Cuban devils being starved and murdered by the beastly Spanish tyrants,” he wrote later. When he read of the explosion of the USS Maine in the

Havana harbor in 1898—which the “yellow journalism” of the era painted as a Spanish attack—he decided to enlist in the Marines. His military career would take him from Cuba to China to Central America, where he became a legend in the Marine Corps, representing martial valor and virtue. Famous in his day, the subject of fiction and film, he retired with two Medals of Honor and a greater number of nicknames—Old Gimlet Eye, the Leatherneck’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker—that testified to his place in the culture.

In the countries he helped occupy, a different memory of Smedley Butler lingers. In Haiti, he was simply known as “The Devil.” In Nicaragua, mothers used to quiet their children with the claim: “Hush! Major Butler will get you.” Butler’s time in the Marines coincided with its transformation from a Navy auxiliary to having its own identity and purpose as a colonial infantry. This might be enough to explain why Butler would make an appearance in the anti-imperialist writings of Noam Chomsky. But it isn’t the reason. In retirement in the 1930s, Butler had a second successful career as a public speaker. He told stories of his military service. And he did so from a remarkably critical—even confessional—point of view.

Writing in the socialist magazine Common Sense in 1935, he put it this way:

I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps.… And during that period I

If you missed your youthful window for Butleriana—either by not being a member of the Marine Corps or by not devoting a shelf in your dorm room to the collected works of Chomsky—Jonathan M. Katz’s engaging new book is an opportunity to correct for the omission. In Gangsters of Capitalism, Katz follows Butler through the archives and on foot, retracing Butler’s path across the globe: from Cuba to the Philippines, to Nicaragua, to Haiti. Sometimes Katz’s visits to Butler’s grounds reveal the ways in which empire has hardly relaxed its grasp. Sometimes they reveal how dramatically the world has changed. Together, they show the force of Butler’s critique, and some of its limitations.

WHEN BUTLER LANDED in Cuba, he arrived at Guantánamo Bay. The U.S. Army’s short campaign of ground combat was already essentially over, and Spain was forced to relinquish its claims to Cuba. For propaganda purposes, the United States attributed victory to its own troops, and ignored the much longer struggle of Cubans for their own independence. The U.S. intervention was soon directed at curtailing the social changes for which Cubans had been fighting along with their independence. President McKinley, who had tried to purchase Cuba from Spain in 1897, interpreted “stability” in Cuba to mean that property relations would stay largely intact. The country’s poet-martyr José Martí, who was killed in combat in 1895, had foreseen such impositions, asking, “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive it out?”

Nevertheless, the authorization for war from Congress prohibited the United States from acquiring the territory outright (as the country would do to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands). Instead, the United States essentially made Cuba a protectorate, insisting on the inclusion of the “Platt Amendment” in Cuba’s constitution. That amendment granted the United States the

right to intervene for the purpose of “the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” And it further required the lease of land that could serve as a coaling or naval station: Guantánamo Bay. It was precisely this legally ambiguous quality of being controlled by the United States but not being part of it that, 100 years later, made Guantánamo attractive as the war on terrorism’s most notorious prison and black site.

Butler’s next destination was the Philippines. Like the Cubans, Filipinos had been fighting for independence from Spain and for social change. But unlike the case of Cuba, no U.S. law prohibited the islands from direct territorial incorporation. McKinley reasoned that Filipinos were unfit for self-government, and the islands might easily be lost to another power. In his mind, the United States had no choice but to take the islands and “uplift” their residents. But the U.S. military ended up in protracted guerrilla warfare. Caught in a

frightening quagmire, U.S. troops employed abuses that would reoccur in essentially every conflict with similar dynamics in the years since. Fearful and failing to tell the difference between insurgents (who were also, in this case, independence fighters) and civilians, U.S. forces attacked villages, creating new enemies. And they employed torture—like the “water cure” learned from the Spanish, which involved forcing open the mouth and pouring pails of water down the throats of supine victims until they would “swell up like toads.”

Part of the enthusiasm for holding Philippine territory came from the belief that it would open up access to the great Chinese market, and China proved Butler’s next destination. There, the United States was intervening in the Boxer Rebellion as part of an eight-nation alliance to put down the anti-foreign movement. Butler was shot twice—once in the thigh and once in a button that saved his lungs. Promoted to captain, he was still only 19 when he represented the First Marines as they marched

into the Forbidden City. Troops looted and killed Chinese residents of Beijing indiscriminately. “I suppose we shouldn’t have taken anything, but war is hell anyhow and none of us was in the frame of mind to make it any better,” Butler later wrote. This era’s imperialism was fueled by a sense of civilizational and racial superiority. On the gentler end of the spectrum, this justified patronizing control, and at the brutal end, it justified killing and dehumanization. But the costs of occupation generated discontent: Reports of U.S. conduct in the Philippines and in China horrified some in the United States. Mark Twain, for one, soured on U.S. empire and wrote in 1901 of the satirical “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust” that the United States offered. He imagined the colonial subject, described as the “Person Sitting in Darkness,” as thinking: “There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.” Or, as one African American soldier wrote simply of the Philippine War: “All this never would have occurred if the army of occupation would have treated [the Filipinos] as people.”

America’s particular version of “uplift” was largely commercial. Marines found themselves building infrastructure and undertaking public health initiatives that would allow the smooth functioning of international commerce. But “commerce” was frequently represented by concrete business interests. In the next decades, Butler would find himself in Panama, which the United States helped break away from Colombia so that it could build a canal there. He intervened in civil conflicts in Nicaragua and Haiti, leading to long U.S. occupations of both countries. The era’s “dollar diplomacy”—a policy of trying to pull private U.S. banks into the management of the finances of poorer countries—was supposed to replace Philippine-style wars of occupation by “substituting dollars for bullets.” But it required plenty of bullets, too, since it was often Marines who ended up defending U.S. property and investments. The United States seized customhouses without increasing revenue, and directed repayment to U.S. banks, starving governments of funds for development.

Butler frequently found himself dealing with financial and corporate interests that were lobbying the U.S. government for action. He resented it. Butler’s letters

home in the 1910s contain the beginnings of the anti-imperialist sentiments he would famously express in the 1930s. In Nicaragua, where Marine intervention helped put in place a conservative government that would accept U.S. financial management, he wrote, “What makes me mad is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wild cat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a Government which will declare a monopoly in their favor.” Sometimes, these sentiments were seasoned with overt racism toward the people of the countries to which he was sent. “It is terrible that we should be losing so many men fighting the battles of these d---d spigs—all because [the Wall Street bank] Brown Bros. have some money down here.” In Haiti, Butler himself was responsible for institution of corvée labor for roadbuilding, which was an unpaid labor draft that was enforced with violence, including killing those who tried to escape. “Is that not slavery?” asked one survivor.

GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM is not only a biography of Butler. The long-dead Marine also serves as Katz’s Virgil, leading him on a journey around the world and through the inferno of empire’s afterlife. Katz himself learned about Butler as a reporter for the Associated Press in Haiti. Based in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince during the earthquake in 2010, Katz reported on the disaster, which killed at least 100,000 people; he escaped from the house that served as the AP bureau not long before it collapsed. Haiti’s poverty—the starkest in the hemisphere— unquestionably compounded the natural disaster of the earthquake into a human tragedy. (Chile had a higher magnitude quake the same year, and the deaths numbered in the hundreds.)

And Haiti’s poverty is inextricable from its punishing treatment by the rest of the world, including the United States. In the eighteenth century, it had been France’s wealthiest colony, with an economy that depended on slave labor to produce sugar, coffee, and other tropical commodities. Its revolution of 1791 to 1804, which took the form of a slave revolt, made it the first Black republic in the world. Its abolition of slavery terrified slave owners throughout the Americas. The newly independent country faced decades of imperial retaliation. Through gunboat diplomacy, France forced Haiti to agree to an enormous indemnity in exchange for recognition. Years later,

the United States also intervened, on the grounds that it aimed to prevent European powers from occupying countries in the Western Hemisphere to collect debts. More than half of Haiti’s gold reserves were whisked away to New York in 1914, and occupation followed from 1915 to 1934. Haiti’s final indemnity payment was made in 1947, not to France but to National City Bank of New York—today’s Citibank.

Like most imperial powers, the United States described its occupation as altruistic. But its idea of altruism placed U.S. business interests and political “stability” first. Those who rose in rebellion were brutally suppressed. The United States insisted on changes to the constitution to allow foreign ownership of land, which required the dissolution of Haiti’s legislature at gunpoint. U.S. occupying forces worked with local elites to impose their vision of social order, locking in existing inequalities and dismantling mechanisms through which they might be addressed. Long after U.S. troops have left, these legacies remain.

As Katz follows Butler around the world, he finds that memories of U.S. interventions are complex. In Panama, graffiti calling for the expulsion of the United States from Latin America is painted by street gangs that use the names “Iraq” or “Pentagon.” The mayor of Balangiga in the Philippines, the site of a deadly attack on U.S. troops that led to widespread and brutal reprisals, tells Katz about his own brother’s service in the U.S. Marines. When Katz tries to sum up the mayor’s views as “You have to remember and forget at the same time,” the mayor instantly agrees.

Some of Katz’s visits produce more compelling evidence of ongoing legacies than others. Butler was part of an occupation of the Mexican city of Veracruz in 1914, which

U.S. oil companies had encouraged to protect their investments during the Mexican Revolution. But to connect that occupation to the current Mexican president’s nationalist energy policy requires a lot of dots. In other places, the dynamics of repression have been inverted. In Nicaragua, the government of Daniel Ortega uses the history of U.S. imperialism to justify authoritarian rule. And in China, a group of scholars speaking to Katz are not eager to answer his questions about whether China—whose behavior toward nearby islands and its financial pressure on allied governments would be recognizable to Butler—could act as an imperial power, too.

BUTLER’S FORMAL RETIREMENT from the Marine Corps came in 1931. He had spent some years in the 1920s as Philadelphia’s director of public safety, when he took a hard line against vice while trying to disrupt protection rackets operated by corrupt police officers. He saw it all as part of a broader fight against “gangsterism.” By the late 1920s, his children were in college, and he needed supplementary income. He soon realized that there was an audience for his stories. Sometimes they got him in trouble: He was placed under house arrest after he told a story about Mussolini running over a child. But his private observations soon became part of the public conversation in a country experiencing the Great Depression and watching the development of fascism and militarism in Europe.

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

by Jonathan M. Katz St. Martin’s Press, 432 pp., $29.99

In the United States, Butler stood against their spread. In 1934, he testified before Congress that he had been approached by Wall Street bankers to organize a fascist coup against Franklin Roosevelt. Whether this “Business Plot” had advanced to the point of being a serious threat remains unresolved, but Butler had certainly witnessed businesses changing a government they found disagreeable many times in his career. “My interest,” he said, “is maintaining a democracy.” In 1935, some of his more popular speeches were compiled into a pamphlet called War Is a Racket, which characterizes military conflict as something “conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.” It was, as Katz puts it, “a jeremiad for a mass audience” that he hoped would stop the next war.

Butler died in 1940, and faded from public prominence. But Katz makes the case that the life of Smedley Butler is one that we should remember. As if to reinforce the

point, while Gangsters of Capitalism was in press, the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan, ending a 20-year war that brought more prosperity to Northern Virginia than it did to Afghanistan itself. In September, the Border Patrol pushed back a group of Haitians seeking refuge at the U.S. border. At the same time, the Biden administration sought to find a private contractor to hire Creole-speaking guards to operate a migrant detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, probably for Haitians apprehended at sea. All of this makes Butler as relevant as if he were writing yesterday.

Part of the challenge of assessing Butler’s legacy is that he has been remembered in very different ways by different people. A young Marine might learn of the Butler who held out as a courageous serviceman and who was an early theorist of counterinsurgency. This Marine-in-training would like to be assured that if they are called to risk their life, they will be doing so for national defense, and that they will be able to be proud of what they have done. They might be inclined to dismiss the anti-war Butler as a bitter crank.

At the same time, they should know that many veterans are drawn to the hidden texts of Butler as they try to understand their experiences of deployment. They might recognize in Butler a warning about the inherent limitations of placing tasks of state violence in the hands of frightened young people, however brave they may be. That, even with the best of intentions, the primary concern of U.S. government will never be the welfare of people occupied— it will always be that of Americans, and this will produce resentment. They might recognize that U.S. presence shifts the internal balance of power in societies, often toward authoritarianism. Americans so often take for granted their own good intentions, that they struggle to understand resistance to their attempts to control and change the world.

Butler’s explanation for this, of course, is that business interests are pulling the strings, manipulating foreign policy to their advantage. These are the “racketeer for capitalism” lines often quoted by the anti-imperialist Chomsky, who so admires Butler the dissident that he once placed a bumper sticker of Butler’s words on his office door. According to this way of thinking, the U.S. military provides the shock troops of global capital, in a conspiracy to ensure the profitability of U.S. corporations. Try to find the lie, if you like, in

The problem is not just that U.S. foreign policy is greedy and that its intentions are bad; it is that even when its intentions are good, it can produce disasters, too.

Butler’s statement, “I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912.” There isn’t one.

But there are limitations to that worldview, too, and Butler, however well-positioned, did not see everything. He was right that the wellbeing of the U.S. economy, and of U.S. corporations, has an important place in U.S. strategic thinking. But the U.S. government consists of many overlapping departments, and when actions are taken abroad, they aren’t just obeying a single logic. Geopolitics, ideology, and domestic considerations often intersect: Woodrow Wilson, in ordering the occupation of Veracruz, was lobbied by U.S. oil companies; he also acted to stop the arrival of a shipment of German arms to Victoriano Huerta, the ruler who represented the restoration of dictatorship in Mexico. In events outside of Butler’s time, there is the example of the United Fruit Company prodding the CIA to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954 when it faced nationalization of its land. But for what it is worth, the former head of Guatemala’s Communist Party thought “they would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas.” As the United States deepened its war in Vietnam, there were no U.S. businesses of significance.

Butler’s model does produce insights. U.S. businesses do push for U.S. foreign policy to meet their needs, and the fate of U.S. property is given disproportionate deference. But reducing U.S. foreign policy to a “Business Plot” can produce a kind of cheap anti-imperialism, in which bad behavior is simply the result of hidden lobbies or interests. Its simplicity sometimes crowds out the more complex situations

that also arise. A history of the occupation of Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, written by the scholar Michel Gobat, revealed that it benefited small farmers and frustrated elites. It showed how seriously the United States took the task, by the late 1920s, of overseeing fair voting in the countryside. It trained an elite military force, which it intended to oversee elections and fight the leftist rebellion of Augusto Sandino. And yet, after the U.S. military left Nicaragua, the head of the elite force it had trained seized power in the country. His family held it for most of the next four decades in a brutal dictatorship. It wasn’t the intended outcome; it was, as Gobat puts it, one of the “illiberal effects of liberal imperialism.” This is a deeper and more challenging critique than Butler offers. The problem is not just that U.S. foreign policy is greedy and that its intentions are bad; it is that even when its intentions are good, the nature of its presence can produce disasters, too.

But if there are moments that require more sophistication, it is remarkable how far a little bit of vulgar Butlerism will take you. Butler was paid for rousing speeches, after all, not for a dissertation. In one of his journeys on the Butler trail, in Haiti, Katz is speaking to construction workers near an industrial park, which is in turn near to the grave of a man assassinated by Marines in 1919. When Katz explains his book project and that most Americans have no idea that their country ever occupied Haiti, most of the workers laugh. One is incredulous. “I don’t believe Americans don’t know about that!” he shouts. “How is that possible?” Sometimes the world is a vulgar place, where others pay the price for American ignorance.

Patrick Iber is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America

Fanatics in Freedom

How Emerson and Thoreau glorified the individual

By Sarah Blackwood

ON THE TITLE page of my paperback copy of Walden, an echo of a former self greets me. My name, written in loopy adolescent script, and the date: August 12, 1993. I was 17 when I bought the Vintage Books/ Library of America edition at Waldenbooks in the Bridgewater Commons Mall, using proceeds from a summer job. I dutifully read it in those final weeks of summer, with pen in hand, underlining here, making embarrassing marginal comments there. One late afternoon, I was sitting alone at home, working my way through the book, when my boyfriend stopped by unexpectedly. I couldn’t have planned it better. I had

wanted to be seen just so: dim room, puddle of light from a lamp, reading Thoreau.

So goes a story about the Transcendentalists and my world. Reading Thoreau signaled, for me, the kind of intellectual loftiness

I desperately longed for as a child of the uncultured American suburbs. You might have a story like it, whether animated by love, torment, certainty, or ambivalence. The Transcendentalists (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and assorted others) are both a loose collection of white, mid–nineteenth-century New England writers who shared similar beliefs about the self, divinity, and nature and

also, together, a generalized idea—about America, about literariness—that continues to have an outsize conceptual, aesthetic, and emotional influence on American culture.

Today, this influence feels stronger than ever. Transcendentalist ideas, once radical and experimental, have long since been stripped of a singular ideological or political orientation. The broad tenets that many of these writers outlined in the nineteenth century—a faith in the sacred divinity of the individual and a generally distrustful stance toward public institutions—continue to animate American life and belief systems. Both libertarian anti-masking advocates and “resistance” liberals might conceivably trace their intellectual and emotional roots to insights articulated by American Transcendentalist writers. Many of us continue to feel moved by an idea that we might learn, as Thoreau put it, how to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” even as those desires have become fully corporatized (#wellness). Transcendentalism tapped into an elemental American stew of naïveté, individualistic self-love, and longing that has never really loosened its grip.

All this talk of individualism, perhaps paradoxically, sprang from a tightly entwined, interdependent group of thinkers, living close by one another in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s this locale that interests the historian Robert A. Gross in his hefty new book, The Transcendentalists and Their World. With his focus on a single town between 1825 and 1850, Gross hopes to show that Emerson’s and Thoreau’s widely disseminated ideas—their calls to “seek inspiration in nature” and view of each person as a divine soul of infinite potential—stemmed somewhat less than has been assumed from each man’s intellectual iconoclasm than they did from Concord’s shifting social values, which were drifting away from communal rituals. In Gross’s telling, this story is about how people in the mid-nineteenth century tried to make sense of a rapidly changing society. It’s also—though less clear from his account—a story about their refusal to make sense of their past.

TO START, I should be clear that by “world” Gross means “town.” Both Gross’s first influential book, The Minutemen and Their World, and this new one are detailed microhistories of Concord in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. The level of detail Gross brings to The Transcendentalists and their World is its most enjoyable and

also occasionally its most overwhelming feature. From butter consumption habits, to the formation of Concord’s trendsetting ornamental tree society (“reputedly the first in the region”), to gossip about the time 62-year-old Abiel Heywood abandoned his Colonial-era knee breeches in favor of new, modern trousers, the narrative washes over its reader with wave after wave of minutiae. Here are people—a lot of them—in their full glory, both coming together in a building social spirit and also chafing at the social worlds they cannot escape.

The “Transcendentalists” of the title are, specifically, Emerson and his “disciple and protégé” Thoreau. Thoreau was five years old in 1823, when his father, John Thoreau, moved the family to Concord, to take over his brother-in-law’s floundering pencil manufacturing business. Emerson would settle in 1834, after a peripatetic youth in Boston and Cambridge. His father had died when he was eight, and his mother supported her large family by running a boardinghouse, ferrying the children between rentals in Boston. Emerson entered Harvard at 14 on a scholarship, was ordained as minister of Boston’s Second Church and married at 26, widowed at 27, and famously resigned from the ministry at 29. He was 31 when he moved back to Concord, where his grandfather, the Reverend William Emerson, had been the town minister.

By the time Thoreau and Emerson struck up their friend/mentor relationship in the fall of 1837, Concord was in the throes of an unprecedented transformation. The town had long been a bastion of tradition, where everyone attended the same church. When Emerson’s grandfather died in 1778, his successor, Ezra Ripley, both took on the leadership of the First Parish Church and married the elder Emerson’s widow. At the helm of the church for 63 years, Ripley fashioned himself a “liberal,” who favored calm deliberation. He presided over what Gross describes as a sort of paradox in terms, “a rational, orderly awakening,” in the early 1810s, as the rest of the country experienced passionate, fiery “full-fledged revivals.” Life in Concord at that time often tended toward the complacent. As Gross puts it, between 1796 and 1825, whenever Concordians “were offered the chance to change, they largely stuck with familiar ways.”

But churchgoing changed radically between 1825 and 1850. In 1826, a group of parishioners—featuring Thoreau’s aunts Elizabeth, Jane, and Maria—split off with a group of others to establish the

more conservative, orthodox Trinitarian Congregational Church. The dissenters were not merely after stricter principles. Rather, what they wanted—desired, we might even say, with a hot sensuality hard to come by in Concord—was emotional intensity. Ripley couldn’t bring himself to understand this desire: He had a “confidence in free inquiry” and believed that Concord was enjoying “the ‘forward march of intellect’ and the ‘higher cultivation of moral powers’” that he had “always anticipated from the progress of liberal principles.” Ripley’s loosening grip, Gross establishes, is a story of liberalism’s insufficiency, its tendency—despite its claims to clear-sighted rationality—to remain blinkered regarding values and desires it wrongly assumes everyone else shares.

A similar longing for emotional intensity became a generative force of Transcendentalism—a dissatisfied desire for something more. In “The American Scholar,” a Phi Beta Kappa address Emerson delivered in 1837, he expressed his longing to live in an “age of Revolution” in which a man might “plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide.” In the 1842 lecture “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson aligns the movement with a kind of religious dissent, “The Transcendentalist … believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy.” Thoreau himself sought out extreme emotional experience, and some vivid veins of dissent coursed through his family, especially its women. Thoreau treasured being disliked and cultivated the feeling of frisson it created: Writing in his journal, he notes that “there is some advantage in being the humblest, cheapest, least dignified man in the village, so that the very stable boys shall damn you. Methinks I enjoy that advantage to an unusual extent.” Church, or at least First Parish, was not the place where a person in Concord could find this kind of frisson.

While church membership cratered and splintered, Concordians were building other institutions that would uphold the emerging culture. The “collective ends” for which Revolutionary soldiers fought and that had once bound residents of Concord together were gradually being rejected, as values of “greater individual freedom, voluntary association, economic innovation, social mobility” replaced them. The civic energy of this era suggested a town waking up, like Rip Van Winkle, from a decades-long nap. Committees of townspeople formed

to plan the founding of a social library, debating club, and lyceum, and to establish new regulations for the town’s common schools (what we’d today call public school). A well-regulated common school education, the committee averred, would “qualify us for the greatest usefulness in the world” and “the greatest possible happiness.” A lyceum would allow community members to learn from one another. The curators of the first season of lyceum talks noted that “there is scarcely a man among us of any intelligence, who is not better acquainted with some one or more subjects than his neighbors.”

At times, The Transcendentalists and Their World reads like an elegy for an era when towns in the United States worked. There is something marvelous in reading about exactly how a town came together to establish not just a social library but also a debating club and lyceum—three totally separate material, civic forums for the sharing of ideas in public! These forums helped to establish Emerson’s and Thoreau’s public identities as writers and honed their sensibilities, even when they bristled against them. The debating club could get discordant, and Thoreau would later mock the stock figure of “the orator” in Walden: The orator, Thoreau asserts, “speaks to the mob before him,” while the writer “speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind.” But Thoreau also presented portions of what would become Walden—an arguably unneighborly text—at the Concord Lyceum in 1847 to very positive reviews from his neighbors (“an uncommonly excellent lecture,” Prudence Ward reported).

Likewise, Emerson was a persistent and present voice around town—at the Lyceum (where he was one of its most regular speakers) and also at various town commemorative celebrations. Emerson often addressed young people—he was a regular on the commencement address beat—and Gross digs up a number of gems capturing the often impassive reactions of the youth Emerson was so keen to kindle: Teenage Caroline Healey (who would go on to become a writer and chronicler of Transcendentalism) heard him speak often and found him “incomprehensible,” “extravagant and unsafe,” exhibiting a “selfish abstraction from society,” while a young John Shepard Keyes, later a Massachusetts state senator, went from finding Emerson’s language “the most beautiful illustration” to despairing of what he’d heard. Emerson’s 1841 lecture “The Poet,” Keyes wrote, “disappointed me excessively,

and made me feel so utterly and completely untranscendental.”

Emerson may not have landed with all the youth of Concord, but he did with Thoreau. Emerson, 14 years older than Thoreau, called the younger man “my protestor,” welcomed him into the Transcendental Club—whose members included Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker, and which met at Emerson’s home— and encouraged Thoreau to submit work

War No More

—trans. verb

by Rickey Laurentiis

I have no mother. I have no friend. I have no father.

I have no lover. I have no mention. I have no future.

I have no sister. I have no land. I have no other.

I have no equal. I have no gypsum. I have no ether.

I have no supper. I have no army. I have not ransom enough.

I have no trust. I have no enemy Because I have no friend.

Gods cannot sit equal Among men, where men have fire

I gave them. I have no water Left. I have no ground

to The Dial, in the magazine’s short-lived Transcendentalist forum. Emerson saw in Thoreau—in his antisociality and disobedience—a living example of his ideals of self-reliance. The year after his 1841 essay “Self Reliance” was published, Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: “I am sorry that you, & the world after you, do not like my brave Henry any better … I admire this perennial threatening attitude, just as we like to go under an overhanging precipice.”

Thoreau found in Emerson a type of solid, soothing presence that enabled his prickly oppositional reflex.

Their creative and emotional dependence on each other, Gross argues, was ironic, given both men’s “fierce insistence upon independence and self-reliance.” A similar kind of ironic discord, however, echoed across the town in this era for anyone attuned to the peculiarly American wavelength of wishful thinking, and to how very much the Transcendentalists engaged in it. By some accounts (notably Emerson’s own), the Transcendentalists’ inspiring principles of individual freedom and progress were sweeping away the webs of the past. Yet, the past continued to haunt Concord and its residents, unwilling as they were to face the cracked foundation of the American experiment they were eagerly pushing forward as Emersonian “fanatics in freedom.”

HALF A CENTURY after the American Revolution, Concord was still shrouded in this event’s overdetermined expression of “freedom.” For Concordians, freedom was something they had won in battle and aimed to defend, rather than a partially and unequally realized promise. While Concordians were hemming and hawing over an event to commemorate the heroism of the Revolutionary War, nearby Bostonian David Walker was composing and figuring out how to secretly distribute his insurgent 1829 pamphlet David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which powerfully exposed the racist hypocrisies baked into the U.S. experiment by close reading and repurposing its founding documents. Likewise, indigenous dispossession was ongoing in the region and time under study. In 1835, William Apess, a Pequot minister and writer, published Indian Nullification, an account of the 1833 Mashpee revolt against white settlers in Cape Cod.

Left. I have no sound. I have no image. I have no sex

Left. I gave you all I I could gat Me to a lecturing hand; and still

You realed me burn. I will live. But is this, are these

Ashes Yours—

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy With Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize.

One can see the weight of the town’s self-image, and its power to occlude insight, in “A Historical Discourse,” the 1835 speech Emerson gave on the occasion of Concord’s bicentennial. In it, Emerson provides a sweeping view of his town’s history to celebrate the triumph of “open democracy,” representing the Puritan errand into the wilderness as divine and beautiful, and romanticizing the brutal practices of indigenous dispossession that were not even remotely in the past: “The red man may destroy here and there a straggler, as a wild beast may; he may fire a farm-house,

or a village; but the association of the white men and their arts of war give them an overwhelming advantage, and in the first blast of their trumpet we already hear the flourish of victory. I confess what chiefly interests me, in the annals of [King Philip’s War] is the grandeur of spirit exhibited by a few of the Indian chiefs.”

Gross remarks that, in his 1835 speech, “Emerson’s ideal of local democracy was a fantasy about the past.” Though Emerson was well aware of Concord’s entanglement in a system of violence and oppression, he excluded those facts from his narrative. He preferred not to dwell on “the oppression of native people during King Philip’s War” 160 years earlier and, as Gross puts it, “ignored slavery in New England altogether, despite … the presence of Black faces in the crowd.” Emerson’s idea of transcendence depended on imagining a consenting, selfdetermined man finding expression in what he describes as “the pleasing features of the American forest,” a landscape whose time of contestation was past and healed, the way forward clear for new feeling. A year later, he published “Nature,” with its lofty and beautiful immateriality: “The world is emblematic.… the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?” that essay asks. Why, indeed.

Thoreau’s evasions of the past are just as determined. Thoreau wrote about his stay in the Walden Woods as if he were venturing into new territory—both in physical space and within himself. But between the late 1770s and 1822, the Walden Woods was home to multiple free Black households (scholar Elise Lemire tells many of their stories in her excellent 2009 book, Black Walden), and somewhat later a number of Irish laborers lived there. The land Thoreau took up residence on was no pristine wilderness; it was still marked by the presence of these people—their cellar stones, wells, and the lilacs and strawberries they’d cultivated.

When Thoreau encounters these features in the landscape, he is mystified. In the chapter of Walden titled “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” Thoreau, quoting John Milton, imagines the discussions on “fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute” that these previous villagers likely had but that had been lost to time. He wonders: “this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground?” It’s a strangely ingenuous question: Did Thoreau really have no idea of the differences between

The Transcendentalists and Their World

by Robert A. Gross Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 864 pp., $40.00

the impoverished and marginalized people who had lived in the wood and himself? He writes like someone pretending to see no difference between eking out an existence in the woods of necessity, and someone freely choosing to travel there (and famously sending his laundry home).

Thoreau’s desire to “live deliberately” is a part of the long American history of what scholar Philip Deloria has termed “playing Indian.” Nathaniel Hawthorne recognized this in their time, describing how Thoreau was “inclined to live a sort of Indian life among civilized men,” casting “Indian” as an idealized metaphor for a more authentic experience of life. The end of the famous second chapter of Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived for,” is both moving and disquieting, as Thoreau frames his experiment quite literally as one of possessive extraction from land stolen several times over: “My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the diviningrod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.” Thoreau lays claim not just to the land itself but to the ideas about the land that have driven white American thought and politics for generations.

Though Gross offers critiques of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s evasions, The Transcendentalists and Their World does not capture the extent of the mid–nineteenth-century Black or indigenous experience that the Transcendentalists excluded from their thinking. Gross attends carefully to how the white residents of the town came to support abolition, in part due to the activism of the members of Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, and provides probably the most detailed account to date of Emerson’s excruciatingly slow windup, between

issuing his first tepid public anti-slavery statement in 1837 and the stronger, more moving public commitment to the abolitionist cause he makes in his 1844 address “... on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.” But a reader of The Transcendentalists and Their World can go through this entire book and come away with little idea that the era, and region under study, was abounding with Black- and indigenous-led resistance to the practices of enslavement, unequal treatment, and settler violence.

Without these voices present in the book, it is hard for readers to fully grasp how, in their attempts to transcend the past rather than face it, both Emerson and Thoreau fit into a long tradition of American disavowal of that past. Transcendentalism’s longing individualism did more than just upend communal traditions: It soothed the very people who were enacting the harm and served as cover for this harm’s ongoing existence.

In a 2019 poem titled “Inhabitants and Visitors,” poet Robin Coste Lewis uses Thoreau’s own language to suggest the existence of different histories, different stories still waiting to be told. The poem is an erasure poem, created by taking the text of Thoreau’s “Former Inhabitants” chapter and blacking out some of its lines and phrases. Paring back Thoreau’s presence, Lewis brings Black Walden to the fore:

Civil speech carmine, curled up by use—

The last symbol a dim garden over-run

With Roman beggar-ticks.

My dent in the earth, This site

These dwellings: buried cellar stones—

The place where a select few have always been able to “live deliberately” is also “a dim garden over-run.” As inventive and inspiring as Emerson and Thoreau often were, their zeal for “individual freedom” has curdled into a socially destructive force. As Lewis does in her poem, perhaps it’s time to take what is salvageable from the Transcendentalists and their world, and leave the rest.

Sarah Blackwood is an associate professor of English at Pace University and author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States.

His Favorite Murder

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s love-hate relationship with true crime

By Jennifer Wilson

IN THE MID-1860S, Russia was in the throes of a true crime craze. Among Czar Alexander II’s sweeping reforms—including, most notably, the abolition of serfdom—were overhauls to the criminal justice system and greater freedom of the press. The introduction of a jury system and the opening of courts to the public turned criminal trials into a new kind of theater, and newspapers— suddenly abundant—were keen to commentate on the show. Russians curious about how justice would be meted out in this new era bought papers like Glasnyi Sud (Open Court) and read court stenographers’ reports as if they were lines from a play. Sections like “The Criminal Chronicle” became a regular feature of daily newspapers, introducing new social types like the charismatic defense attorney. One publisher went so far as to say that trials were “superior to novels” in offering insight into human nature. The reading public would not have to choose; detective fiction and the crime novel were quick to emerge out of the swirl of grisly reporting. In the 1860s, to turn the pages of a periodical in Russia meant you were likely to get blood on your hands.

Few people consumed these stories more voraciously than novelist (and ex-convict) Fyodor Dostoevsky. In September 1865, he was staying in the German spa town and gambling resort of Wiesbaden, where he

ILLUSTRATION

BY NICOLE RIFKIN

lost nearly all his money at the roulette wheel. He could not pay his hotel bill, and the dining staff had been instructed to stop bringing him dinner. To keep hunger at bay, Dostoevsky decided he would limit the amount of physical energy he exerted.

One day, stationary in his room, he read the story of a man who murdered a cook and a washerwoman by bludgeoning them to death with an ax. The newspaper said he was a raskolnik, a schismatic who had rejected Western reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not long afterward, Dostoevsky sent a note to his editor in Saint Petersburg, Mikhail Katkov, telling him he had an idea for a story:

A young man, expelled from the university, petit-bourgeois by social origin, and living in extreme poverty, after yielding to certain strange, “unfinished” ideas floating in the air, has resolved, out of lightmindedness and of the instability of his ideas, to get out of his foul situation at one go. He has resolved to murder an old woman, a titular counselor who lends money at interest.

That young man—a university student who intellectualizes his egoism with the aid of “unfinished ideas” (Western concepts that the nationalist Dostoevsky did not like)— would be given the name Raskolnikov, and what Dostoevsky first conceived as a 90-page story would eventually sprawl into an entire novel that is set in motion by a pawnbroker and her sister having their skulls cracked open with an ax. The specifics of the contract could be worked out later, Dostoevsky told his editor. For now, he needed 300 rubles immediately to pay the hotel.

The religiously devout ax murderer that Dostoevsky read about is not the main subject of Kevin Birmingham’s The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece. That would be Pierre-François Lacenaire, a poet and serial killer whose 1835 trial had been extensively covered in the French press and captivated the likes of Balzac and Stendhal. Lacenaire was handsome (throngs of women crowded the public gallery in the courtroom), an intellectual (he read Rousseau as he lay in wait for his victim), and not only declined to show remorse but professed an open disdain for morality itself. He was indifferent to his own depravity, and it was electrifying. “I

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham Penguin Press, 432 pp., $30.00

love to see men like that,” Flaubert said of him, “like Nero, like the Marquis de Sade.”

As he unspools the story of how Dostoevsky first encountered the villain Lacenaire, Birmingham places the author in a culture brimming with tales of criminal intrigue and moral transgression—some Dostoevsky had gathered from his time in a Siberian prison, but many he came across as a voracious consumer of what we might now call true crime. As such, Birmingham’s book reads mostly as a biography of Dostoevsky from his youth through the writing of the novel, one that traces how the author’s views on crime were forged between his time in prison for insurrection and his eventual release into a new literary scene that was—by his estimation—dangerously aestheticizing the kinds of criminals he had seen up close and in the mirror.

CRIME SOLD. A dead body, sexual impropriety—or ideally both—moved papers. That Dostoevsky’s editor commissioned Crime and Punishment on the strength of such an opaque proposal was no doubt partly driven by the fact that readers were rabid for all things crime: “The first wave of Russian crime writing was cresting,” Birmingham writes, and “the public was hungry for tales of lurid offenses.” Dostoevsky assured Katkov that the plot “is not at all eccentric,” pointing to recent cases in a similar vein. “He informed Katkov,” notes Birmingham, “that he had heard about an expelled Moscow University student who resolved to kill a postman” and mentioned other criminals he had read about in newspapers, like “that seminarian who murdered the girl in the shed … and so on.”

In fact, just before the first chapters of Crime and Punishment were to be published, newspapers began to report details of a strikingly similar murder case. In Moscow, Birmingham recounts, “a law student named Danilov murdered a pawnbroker in

his apartment.… As he was ransacking the place, the pawnbroker’s servant unexpectedly arrived, so he murdered her, too.” In the novel, Dostoevsky places Raskolnikov, both as a writer and reader, into the media landscape of the era. The detective on the case questions him about an article, titled “On Crime,” that he had published in a student journal months before the murder. In it, Raskolnikov argues that there are certain men—great ones—who exist above morality and for whom the act of murder should be sanctioned. Elsewhere in the novel, Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov rush into a tavern looking for a copy of the most recent newspaper, excited to read about his handiwork in the crime pages. But it takes him some time to finally find the story. The criminal world of Saint Petersburg had been busy that week, it turns out.

Even amid a glut of gory tales, the Lacenaire spectacle stood out for Dostoevsky. He first heard the name Lacenaire in 1861, while looking for crime stories to use in the literary journal he published, Time. Leafing through a French collection of criminal profiles, he saw an illustration of Lacenaire’s infamous double murder of a mother and son. In the picture, the finely dressed Lacenaire brandishes an ice pick at the old woman, shown, Birmingham describes, “cowering in her bedclothes, looking up, eyes wide.” The next year, Dostoevsky encountered Lacenaire again, this time in the pages of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Les Misérables—which mentions Lacenaire by name (and many felt the character Montparnasse was no doubt inspired by the genteel killer). Dostoevsky started developing plans to write an article “about instincts and Lacenaire,” but never finished. Lacenaire, with his inchoate, vaguely republican politics— which seemed to exist as a kind of ex post facto justification for his crimes—was a type Dostoevsky believed to be emerging among Russia’s youth: the student terrorist.

The outlines of modern-day terrorism— small, isolated cells of insurgents using violence as propaganda—are said to have emerged in Russia in the 1860s. By the end of the century, terrorism was referred to by those throughout the world—including Karl Marx—simply as “the Russian method.” Universities had been locus points in radical organizing; among the disaffected youth were some who believed the reforms of Alexander II did little to stem poverty and rampant social inequality, and that the country had to be shocked into change. What was needed, they believed, was “a

Dostoevsky had served side by side with murderers in prison and could not abide a simplistic view of crime.

bloody and pitiless revolution, a revolution which must change everything down to the very roots,” declared a pamphlet that landed on Dostoevsky’s doorstep. Many were inspired by a writer and journal editor, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose 1863 novel, What Is to Be Done?, was regarded as a kind of bible by its radical adherents. The novel glamorized the lives of self-sacrificing revolutionaries, whose readiness to accept martyrdom made them romantic heroes. Such a blueprint had also been set, notes Birmingham, by Dmitri Karakozov, a university student from a poor provincial family who in 1866 fired a gun at Alexander II as he strolled through the Summer Garden in Saint Petersburg. The attempted assassination of a czar, the first such attack in Russia, may have failed, but—more importantly—the story made the papers. Karakozov wanted, Birmingham explains, “to reset all of Russia’s political machinery with one jarring act of violence and a manifesto amplified by the mass media.”

The power of the press to create celebrities out of criminals was not lost on Dostoevsky, and indeed it figures in Raskolnikov’s psychology after the murder. Political criminals, whose transgressions had the potential to reorder the foundations of society, would become a major subject in Dostoevsky’s later fiction, namely in his novel The Possessed (1872), in which he would try to expose, as he had in Crime and Punishment, what he believed were the misguided and egotistical motivations undergirding the new radicalism.

Was he speaking from experience? Dostoevsky had been arrested in 1849 for his participation in an underground salon whose members read banned works and discussed French Utopian socialism. He had spent the next four years in prison, where he had undergone a political conversion, abandoning the radicalism of his youth to become, on many issues, a conservative. Yet, what incensed Dostoevsky

above all about Chernyshevsky was his blind faith in scientific explanations for human behavior. Chernyshevsky became known for a theory he called rational egoism. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham and English Utilitarianism, Chernyshevsky claimed that human behavior was rational in that it was guided by self-interest. If poverty were to be eliminated, he conjectured, crime would all but cease to exist.

Dostoevsky had served side by side with murderers in prison, “sharing tables and latrines with them, hauling bricks with them, sipping water from the same ladles,” writes Birmingham, and could not abide this simplistic view of crime—and by extension of human nature. People were unpredictable, irrational, and often did things that worked against their own interests—this was ugly, but also beautiful, because it was the essence of freedom. Indeed, this is why Crime and Punishment became a crime novel in which the whodunit is answered straight away, leaving the rest of the novel for questions of motive or—more accurately in the case of Dostoevsky—the muddled mess that is human motivation in the first place.

The Lacenaire case was the perfect foil to Chernyshevsky’s theory, because his crimes defied any logical explanation. Spectators were at a loss to understand what propelled a well brought up and highly intelligent young man to stab an elderly woman in the face while his accomplice slit her son’s skull open with an ax. The immediate motive was money, of course. “But that,” writes Birmingham, “did not explain his ruthless indifference, or why he intended to kill people when robbery would suffice.” Lacenaire gave a number of explanations, which just introduced more inconsistency. He claimed to be overcome by “a fixed idea to resist,” but in his memoirs (which were published ahead of his execution) he wrote: “I come to preach the religion of fear to the rich for the religion of love has no power over their hearts.”

The French press seized on the political undercurrents in Lacenaire’s pronouncements. His distaste for authority and for the ruling classes was used to dredge up fear over revolutionary elements in French society. “If one could kill a king for one’s country, then why not kill a banker?” as Birmingham sums up the rhetoric: “Lacenaire’s crime spree was captivating because it seemed to be the revolution’s next rational step.” This was a reach. In attributing Lacenaire’s crimes to politics, the press was imposing an uncomplicated narrative on what Dostoevsky would have recognized as the chaos of human ego and the mysteriousness of our actions.

IN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Dostoevsky used the public’s appetite for crime stories as a kind of Trojan horse, a way to launch a polemic under the guise of titillation. Dostoevsky denies Raskolnikov the glamour of a martyr and presents him instead as an angry and confused young man, humiliated by poverty and acting out of shame. Or at least that is what he thought he had done. In something of a plot twist, following the success of Crime and Punishment, defense attorneys in nineteenth-century Russia began comparing their clients to Raskolnikov in an attempt to garner sympathy with the jury.

Raskolnikov and his crimes continue to bleed into real life. Once, during a study abroad trip in Saint Petersburg, my teacher encouraged me to go on the Crime and Punishment walking tour. One of the attractions, she explained, was the apartment building where Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker. It was and is a very popular tour, but I was confused—“none of this actually happened,” I thought. I went and got lunch instead.

I have never quite gravitated to books promising to uncover the “true stories” that inspired great works of fiction. If anything, I am more fascinated by moments when fiction starts to infect reality, when characters we read about on the page start to shape what we expect out of one another off it. I think Birmingham would agree. Lacenaire makes up far less of his narrative than one might expect. Instead, he shows us that Dostoevsky is both the “sinner” and the “saint,” a repentant political criminal who wanted his characters to inspire not fervor but fear—of our worst instincts.

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing essayist at The New York Times Book Review and a contributing writer at The Nation

Franco’s Remains

In Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodóvar reckons with the legacies of fascism.

What I hadn’t recalled about Live Flesh, a characteristically bright-colored, poppy, lurid confection of sexual obsession and revenge, based on a Ruth Rendell novel, was that it begins under Franco. It’s 1970, and a “state of exception” restricts freedom of speech and association. In one shot, the bus Cruz is on when she goes into labor pulls away to reveal graffiti on a wall that reads libertad / abajo el estado de escepción! (Liberty, down with the state of exception!)

By Lidija Haas

THE FIRST TIME I saw Penélope Cruz’s face, contorted and weeping, was during the brief opening sequence of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1997 film, Live Flesh. Cruz plays a sex worker who gives birth at Christmas (to a boy who will be the movie’s protagonist) on a bus in the middle of the night. Hollywood hadn’t yet typecast her as a manic-dreamy Spanish sex symbol, and I

remember being struck—then, and again in Almodóvar’s 1999 masterwork, All About My Mother—by her odd, disarming configuration of flesh and bone. With her big sad eyes, long nose, and jutting lips, she looked awkward and almost comically defenseless. Cruz could have been a major star in the silent era—she can crack you up or break you open with a look.

Such direct references to history and politics have been relatively rare in Almodóvar’s work. Having grown up in mid-century conservative rural Spain, he emerged as part of La Movida, the transgressive cultural flowering that took place in Madrid after Franco’s regime ended with his death in 1975. Amid a scene that mixed alternative theater, punk rock, and porn, Almodóvar began making super-8s and then features in the vein of directors like John Waters. In frantically paced, anti-realist, anti-patriarchal, and often farcical early movies, he sought out every possible taboo to bust, appropriated and inverted Franco-era Spanish kitsch, and blended it all with the tropes of classic melodrama and noir. (The Roman Catholic Church is a favorite target, but there’s also Matador, in which a serialkilling woman brandishes her hairpin as a weapon in the style of a bullfighter.)

If Almodóvar’s anarchic, sensual early work has often been interpreted as a response to Francoist repression, his emphasis on social and sexual freedoms, hedonism, and psychological idiosyncrasies nonetheless tended to be received as apolitical. That held true as Almodóvar developed a richer, more melancholic and emotionally sophisticated mode, and secured his place as the most internationally famous filmmaker of La Movida (and probably Spain as a whole). Still, many of his films unfold in an almost aggressively fluid and feminine world, in which the interests and pleasures and difficulties of women, and femmes in particular, determine everything. (By the same token, you might sometimes detect an edge of misogyny in reactions to his work, both positive and negative—an assumption of unseriousness, indiscipline, morbid aestheticism, fantastical inwardness.) In that sense, his preoccupation with performance and artifice feels more like an examination of the conditions of everyday life than a retreat from them.

Almodóvar’s new film, Parallel Mothers, is both a departure and a return. It closes with a quotation from the Uruguayan leftist Eduardo Galeano about the persistence of the past within us, and takes the legacies of fascism in Spain as an explicit subject. The film begins when Penélope Cruz’s character, Janis, a middle-aged photographer, is sent to profile a handsome forensic archaeologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde). In the course of the assignment, she seeks his help in exhuming and identifying the remains of her murdered great-grandfather, one of the more than 100,000 missing Spaniards dumped in mass graves during the civil war. Their detailed discussion of this history unapologetically takes up a big chunk of the movie’s opening, before Almodóvar sends Janis into more familiar terrain: An affair with the married Arturo leaves her pregnant, and at the clinic where she gives birth, she befriends another single mother-to-be, an unhappy teenager named Ana (Milena Smit), whose own mother is mostly absent, preoccupied with the late and sudden flourishing of her career as a stage actress.

Arturo continues his quest to uncover Janis’s great-grandfather’s remains, but most of the film’s run time is devoted to a version of a classic Almodóvarian formula: women building alternate family structures together as they contend with various soapy plot developments.

Although the movie’s effects feel remarkably not reliant on these developments, I won’t spoil them here. Suffice it to say that there ensue romantic disappointments; secrets, deceptions, and mistaken identities; intergenerational conflicts and sufferings; a tragic death that compounds the impossibility of emotional resolution; semi-incestuous–seeming sexual entanglements in which painful legacies must be worked through.

The decision to draw such a clear connection between the personal troubles of individuals and families and the ills of an entire country is a bold one that can’t help but cast a strange light back on some of Almodóvar’s earlier works. His Hitchcockian interest in intergenerational trauma, compulsive repetition, secrets festering for years—sometimes pretty much out in the open yet insistently unacknowledged—may now seem to take on a more nationally specific valence. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist comes to mind, as the great model for a cinematic mapping of fascism’s psychosexual pathologies. I also think of an interview from a few years ago in which Almodóvar cited the director Luis García Berlanga as one of the two great wellsprings of Spanish cinema (the other and far more internationally celebrated being the surrealist Luis Buñuel): He praised Berlanga’s 1963 The Executioner for the delicacy with which it eluded the censors’ grasp, the “amazing sleight of hand” it must have taken to make such a film under Franco, presenting a sharp treatment of the death penalty as a “comedy of manners.” This admiration for appealingly disguised political courage is intriguing, coming from a master of the sex comedy. Of course, Almodóvar has no censors to fear, and yet throughout his exuberantly noisy body of work, the theme of something coded or long unspoken recurs with striking regularity—as if constitutive to a sensibility forged in his particular time and place.

POLITICAL ALLEGORY IS tricky to pull off. It can feel preachy or manipulative. Or it can simply risk removing any sense that something urgent is at stake, when an audience is invited to understand the action primarily at the level of metaphor. Does anyone feel much for the denizens of Animal Farm? And I might have been able to relax more into the genre pleasures of Tom McCarthy’s recent drama, Stillwater, had I not been distracted by the suspicion that

the movie was positioning itself as some bien-pensant statement about U.S. foreign policy. In the case of Almodóvar, I also feel a reflexive resistance to the idea of having to reread him too thoroughly through this historical lens—as if that would confirm the concerns of his theatrical femme-world as trivial, not worth representing after all; as if our fights and illnesses and rapes should always double as an analogy for something more significant.

Yet, while I actually watched Parallel Mothers, none of that unease seemed to kick in. I did sense that I was seeing the trappings of melodrama without its usual function. The suspense that such plots generally rely on feels unnecessary here— you can guess some of the revelations in store before they happen, and that doesn’t ruin anything; in fact, it sharpens the tragic irony. The film’s most striking accomplishment is that its conceit allows its historical and more intimate strands to heighten and enrich one another. That’s a credit to Cruz, whose performance anchors both these dimensions.

But it appears as well to be a sign of Almodóvar’s belief in and commitment to his own metaphor—his conviction, perhaps, that this isn’t just a device he happens to have chosen, but a part of Spain’s everyday reality. During a pivotal argument, Janis confronts Ana over her complicity in her family of origin’s insistent blindness to Spain’s shameful history: You have to understand what kind of country you’re living in, the older woman says, with evident feeling, implying a personal, intimate necessity as well as a moral obligation. So many thousands are still “missing,” leaving families unable to comprehend their own histories; only in 2019 were Franco’s remains removed, over considerable objections, from the Valley of the Fallen, where they had become an unofficial far-right shrine. Political amnesia, in other words, is an active, ongoing project in which whole societies participate. Parallel Mothers would seem to suggest that fascist legacies continue, in unpredictable ways, to deform people’s lives over decades and generations—the descendants of the immediate victims, and everyone else as well, down to their private lives, their psyches. It’s an alarming idea. And while it needn’t alter your interpretation of Almodóvar’s other works, it may help explain their eerie, painful resonance.

Lidija Haas writes on film for The New Republic She is an editor at The Paris Review

The Biography Trap

Vivian Maier’s genius is on film, not in her life story.

By Jeremy Lybarger

UNTIL 12 YEARS ago, the photographer

Vivian Maier was largely unknown. Though she shot incessantly from 1950 until about a decade before her death in 2009, she hid her pictures, literally locking them away. Often, she didn’t even bother to develop her rolls of film. She made money as a live-in nanny for families in New York and Chicago (briefly working for talk-show host Phil Donahue). As she got older, she rented storage lockers to house her overwhelming accumulation of books, magazines, newspapers, and other miscellany. The contents of those lockers were auctioned off in 2007 after she fell into arrears, which is how then-26-year-old John Maloof, a former art student, began purchasing the bulk of Maier’s archive: more than 140,000 images, most of them undeveloped and unprinted. A couple of years later, he uploaded some of the pictures to a street photography group on Flickr to immediate acclaim.

The images arrived already imbued with the aura of permanence. They sometimes evoke the wanderlust of Robert Frank’s photos, the wry self-deprecation of Lee Friedlander, or the grubbiness of Weegee, but they’re not derivative. Attentive to plaintive or absurd interludes in American life, primarily in New York City and Chicago, Maier made a piecemeal record of the sudden encounters and furtive gestures that turn any street into a guerrilla theater. She captured politicians on the campaign trail (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, LBJ); celebrities at premieres or out in the wild (Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn); laborers and commuters; drunks, criminals, and down-and-outs; flaneurs and well-coiffed women in furs. She cataloged the textures and cast-offs of the urban environment: graffiti, fire escapes, signs, garbage, shadows, abandoned newspapers, half-demolished buildings. She easily switched between registers, from gentle wit—as in a 1975 photo of an elderly trio crossing a Chicago street in rhyming yellow apparel, or a 1960s photo of an imperious dog loitering beneath a pay phone—to almost ethnographic sincerity, as in her photos from a six-month solo voyage around the world in 1959. She often photographed children, particularly when they were aggrieved or lost in adultlike introspection. Above all, she made images of casual lyricism, as in her celebrated 1957 photo of a woman in white drifting through a dark Florida night. Maier’s are the kinds of photos about which you can only say: These are the real deal

The fact that Maier was dead by the time she became famous has proved a boon for her posthumous renown; in her absence, the mysteries around the photographernanny became irresistible hooks for editors and curators. Maloof has been entrepreneurial about marketing her story. At least half a dozen monographs have appeared in the last decade, bolstered by numerous exhibitions and a steady chorus of press. In 2015, Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary that Maloof co-directed, was nominated for an Oscar and burnished Maier’s legend further. If she’s not quite in the canon yet, she’s certainly wait-listed.

Maier has also been the subject of two notable biographies. The first, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, by Pamela Bannos, was released in 2016. The second, Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, by Ann Marks, exemplifies the allure and risks of writing about the enigmatic Maier. Marks, a former marketing executive at Dow Jones, began to dig into Maier’s life after watching Maloof’s film. She kicks off her biography with a brassy sales pitch: “By book’s end, key questions will be answered, including the one everyone asks: ‘Who was Vivian Maier, and why didn’t she share her photographs?’ Mystery solved.”

Well, maybe, maybe not. Treating Maier like a riddle makes for good jacket copy but can also turn her into a kind of Rorschach: One sees in her whatever the critical mode du jour demands. Circa 2011, she was “the best street photographer you’ve never heard of,” to quote Mother Jones. Today, she is an aerosol of neuroses and quirks, the lonely spinster who shampooed with vinegar and slathered Vaseline on her face; who wore men’s size 12 shoes; who dumped drippings from a roast pan into a glass and drank them. As Marks describes Maier’s eccentricities, she starts to play the amateur clinician, marshaling hypotheses from medical experts whose secondhand diagnoses foreground a story of trauma and unwitting victimhood. Commercial publishers require a takeaway, and so Maier becomes here something she would have detested: an inspiration.

MAIER IS A tricky subject for a biographer. She spent the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s as a nanny, shuttling between families, or sometimes enjoying the reprieve of stable employment. (Her longest post was 11 years.) Whenever she moved, she locked her room and forbade anyone from entering. She seems not

Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny by

Ann Marks Atria Books, 368 pp., $40.00

to have had romantic relationships, and had few personal ties. She left behind little by way of diaries or letters. Marks bases part of her portrait of Maier on the recollections of people who knew her glancingly, who remember her as an “extraterrestrial” figure. “She was … a very foreign presence in Highland Park,” recalls a friend of the Gensburgs, the family that employed Maier the longest. Marks’s physical rundown suggests why:

[Maier] dressed formally; her everyday attire consisted of a tailored suit or crisp Peter Pan–collared blouse paired with a calf-length skirt. She still wore old-fashioned rolleddown stockings, unable to make the transition to pantyhose. It was all covered up with oversize men’s coats in beiges and grays and topped with a trademark floppy hat.

Adding to the sense of foreignness was Maier’s brusqueness and penchant for French expressions. She presented a stern image that seemed at odds with the sensibility of her photos: The strict disciplinarian who insisted that her young charges address her as “Mademoiselle” and who sometimes slapped the children in her care also created a portfolio rife with humor and tenderness. More puzzling still, the woman who once traveled the world alone, who frankly espoused her opinions, and who seethed with ambition spent most of her adult life in the suburbs, anonymously plying her art. Marks begins her book with an epigraph of dichotomous terms acquaintances used to describe Maier, among them: Caring/ Cold, Feminine/Masculine, Jovial/Cynical, Passionate/Frigid, Social/Solitary, Mary Poppins/Wicked Witch.

Despite her outward formality, a streak of playfulness runs through her photographs. In her more than 600 self-portraits, she

finds ingenious ways to use mirrors and storefront windows to reflect her plain intensity, or else manifests as a kind of negative presence, as in more oblique shots of her shadow against sidewalks and walls. A self-portrait from the 1970s depicts her shadow against a laborer’s mud-spattered behind; another shows her shadow hovering amid a patch of buttercups (an image later used on a dress displayed in Bergdorf Goodman’s storefront). Other self-portraits are more direct: Maier reflected in a car mirror, her face neutral, aloof. According to Marks, Maier almost never let anyone else take her picture. How are we to understand these paradoxes?

In Marks’s telling, Maier inherited a split sense of self. Maier’s mother, Marie Jaussaud, was born in France in 1897, the illegitimate daughter of a teenage fling. “The baby girl was welcomed into a world where she officially didn’t exist,” Marks writes, noting that this shame “set into motion three generations of family dysfunction.” By 1919, Marie had immigrated to New York City, where she married an alcoholic steam engineer named Charles Maier. The couple gave birth to a son, Carl, in 1920, and to a daughter, Vivian, in 1926. The Maiers’ marriage was unhappy, and in 1932 Marie and Vivian fled to France, leaving young Carl behind. Mother and daughter returned to New York in 1938, where Maier eventually lodged with a widowed family friend, and found work in a doll factory (perhaps accounting for some later shots of dolls discarded in trash cans).

In 1950, Maier again returned to France. It was there she began taking photographs with a box camera: panoramas of the Alps, studies of the region’s working class, portraits of family. “It is clear from her early negatives and prints that Vivian possessed a great deal of confidence,” Marks writes. “She typically covered her subjects with just one shot, an approach that would become a trademark.” In the spring of 1951, Maier returned to New York, where she continued shooting, and even flirted with the idea of launching a picture postcard business. Most importantly, Maier revolutionized her practice by purchasing a Rolleiflex camera, which allowed her to literally shoot from the hip.

Marie almost entirely disappears from the biography after this point. “[She] stands out as disturbed and mentally unstable, even among a group of troubled individuals,” Marks writes of Maier’s mother. A doctor who examined the family records

for this biography suggests that Marie had narcissistic personality disorder. She rarely held a steady job and was allergic to housework. She fabricated medical ailments, and in a letter to an officer about Carl’s care, she strikes a paranoid tone, lamenting that everyone had “plotted against” her. Although Marks acknowledges that it’s impossible to accurately diagnose Marie, this doesn’t stop her from premising the whole biography on such drive-by psychologizing. Indeed, the book is a case study for what responsible biographers shouldn’t do.

Some of Marks’s theories are more credible than others. It’s likely, for example, that Maier was a hoarder. By the time she died, she had crammed more than eight tons of possessions into storage lockers. (Her hoarding cost her at least one nanny job.)

At other times, though, Marks’s hypotheses are purely speculative. “Physical and sexual abuse can contribute to trauma,” she writes, “and Vivian’s behavior suggests that she may have endured this type of exploitation.” The behavior in question— Maier’s distaste for physical intimacy, her fusty wardrobe, and her cautioning young

girls against sitting on men’s laps—doesn’t strike me as compelling evidence of childhood sexual abuse so much as the traits of a reserved woman with old-fashioned notions of propriety. “[Maier’s] brother was definitively diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her mother almost certainly had a history of some sort of mental illness,” Marks writes. “Many felt Vivian’s grandfather Nicolas Baille may have also, based on his antisocial behavior and extreme paranoia.” (Marks doesn’t specify whom she means by “Many.”) She asks the same doctor who diagnosed Maier’s mother to take a crack at Maier herself. The verdict: Maier was perhaps a “classic case of schizoid disorder.”

Marks uses the fact of Carl Maier’s schizophrenia to prop up this diagnosis. One of the assets of her largely lackluster biography is the gumshoe work she does chasing down Carl’s records and filling in his story. (The book’s multiple appendixes, including one devoted to “genealogical tips,” suggests that building out a family tree is Marks’s real passion.) Carl was imprisoned at age 16 for tampering with the mail and forging a check. He joined the military but was dishonorably

Everything Lies in All Directions

by Hua Xi

Death is the same in both directions. It wants to go somewhere. It wants to come back.

Once I came back through a grass. Purple coneflowers floated there, attracting bees. The whole field was humming. Once I came back through the dead. This roughly translates to something my mother lived through in Chinese.

My mother said, “I don’t read. It’s too tiring.”

It’s true—people who wrote things lied to her. Once I came back through a poem. Time refused to pass there, and loneliness drifted down past my window like snow.

Alone, I did not move. Worlds changed around me.

Everything beautiful lay both forwards and backwards. Everything translated into butterflies, which billowed into a breath of tall summer. They blew out of the past and into a future. Was it yours or was it mine?

Then, I was a child. Once, my mother was. This is how you learn that nothing ends unless it has to.

discharged for a drug-related offense. He bounced in and out of psychiatric hospitals as an adult and died of an aortic thrombosis at a rest home in 1977, at age 57. He and Maier had little contact with each other, although Marks portrays them as heirs to a common bloodline of mental illness. Marks takes Carl’s diagnosis at face value, despite how often the label schizophrenia was slapped onto criminalized bodies at mid-century, particularly among institutionalized drug users. Still, let’s grant that Carl had some kind of genetic psychological disturbance— what does that mean for Maier?

It means that her creativity, her art, is inextricable from mental illness. That’s a generic enough argument, but in Marks’s hands, it turns cloying. Her interpretations of Maier’s work sometimes take unfortunate cues from clinical analyses. She quotes a father-son duo of Freudian therapists who posit that “the negative themes that surface in Vivian’s portfolio—including death, violent crime, demolition, and garbage— represent subconscious reflections of her low self-esteem.” Name any worthwhile photographer—any worthwhile artist—and you’ll encounter “negative themes.” This is vapid psychoanalysis and even worse critical writing.

AS I READ, I was increasingly irritated by this reductive and patronizing portrayal of Maier. (This is underscored by how Marks refers to Maier as “Vivian.” “I use her first name throughout because this is how most people know and speak about her,” Marks writes by way of explanation. She doesn’t consider that Maier, who worked in a service capacity all of her life, was unlikely to be addressed by her surname.) “With immense strength of character and perseverance,” Marks writes, “Vivian developed compensatory qualities and coping mechanisms, like photography, to manage her mental health issues.” In Marks’s account, Maier is a mentally ill woman who took photos almost as a therapeutic tic rather than a full-fledged artist with (perhaps) a mental illness. Maier’s self-portraits, according to Marks, are simply ways to substantiate herself in the world—signposts of a woman who was forever unmoored. Even Maier’s prolificness is evidence of a compulsion, as if her taking pictures was of a piece with her hoarding of newspapers. Marks never considers that perhaps Maier just enjoyed being a photographer, and that the act of framing a shot was itself creatively fulfilling. Would anyone point

Hua Xi’s poetry has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

to a writer’s pile of false starts and trashed drafts as signs of a mental disorder?

Just because Maier often didn’t develop her rolls of film and rarely produced prints (and almost never exhibited them) doesn’t mean that her creative practice was somehow stunted or insular. That’s a careerist view of how a photographer should operate. Maier was undoubtedly a serious, dedicated, and consummate artist, largely self-taught, who honed her craft over decades. As Marks herself notes, Maier was more than a hobbyist, even from the beginning: “Altogether, the thousands of early images … confirm how intensely Vivian worked to master the basics of photography during her time in [France].” In New York, Maier sought out “colleagues to learn from, collaborate with, and engage in shoptalk.” She assiduously cropped images and experimented with color film. Even by the end of her career, Maier was known to leave precise instructions for the technicians entrusted with developing her images. But by pressing her into a queasy Hallmark narrative of a woman triumphing over her demons, Marks’s biography unintentionally undervalues

Maier’s achievement. Photography wasn’t a “coping mechanism” but her life’s work.

“I’m sort of a spy,” Maier once told someone who asked about her profession. She was being cheeky, but the remark indicates how she saw herself: as a witness and a trespasser, a woman interested in momentary revelations of truth, no matter how painful or embarrassing or fraught. Her photographs represent a vast album of American street life across five decades, and, parallel to that, a chronicle of Maier’s own place in that landscape. It’s a body of work that’s simultaneously objective and subjective, in which Maier is both the author and a recurrent, ambiguous protagonist who lends the entire undertaking a kind of self-referential weight. Contrary to Marks’s argument, I see no meaningful distinction between the photographer and the world in Maier’s work. She doesn’t appear to me as an isolated woman trying to fix her coordinates in a universe from which she was somehow estranged. She looks, instead, like a woman who was profoundly and intuitively present.

If you read enough biographies, you realize that the genre has a fatal flaw, a system

error: Every person is unknowable, not least of all to themselves. There is, in everyone, some small cinder of truth that never sees the light of day. Biographers pretend that this cinder can be revealed, and that order can be imposed upon an unruly life. That’s a lie. Ann Marks hasn’t solved the mystery of Maier—why would we want her to? The photographer’s mystery remains intact, suffusing the thousands of indelible images she left behind in those storage lockers. It’s better to look there for the truth of her life, in those pictures of the world that she put away, as if she saw, and understood, what the rest of us never would.

Jeremy Lybarger is the features editor at the Poetry Foundation.

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