Zippererstrasse January 2017 by John Zipperer

Interim Captains of the U.S.S. Titanic

onald Trump has staged a hostile takeover of one of the country’s major political parties, and his opponents within the party are even more powerless than his opponents outside of it. In still-functioning republics, strongmen are frowned upon. But in political parties,

let’s make a case for strongmen, or at least some powerful party elders in smoke-filled rooms who can rein in the overly bumptious or actively troublesome people who seek to upset the party’s apple cart. If that sounds overly vague, let’s make it clear: The Republicans need someone who can con-

trol the crazies. Unfortunately, the people who are paid to do so—House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and recent party chairman Reince Priebus—failed completely. When, during the recent awful campaign, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump finally changed course and endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s reelection on August 5,

zipperer strasse THIS TIME (continued on page 3)

JANUARY 2017

EIGHT DOLLARS & eighty cents

The magazine of political reality

trump l’oeil master of deception Democrats and democracy at risk WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

PLUS: GOP millennials • election post-mortem • late-night politics • Eric Larson

A Good Word. Politics is boring. Politicians are sellouts. People who are interested in politics are weird. Politics is a bad word. That’s what people say. We disagree. Welcome to Zippererstrasse, the magazine of political reality. To us, politics is a matter of great importance. A matter, even, of life and death. It’s not entertainment—but that’s not to say we don’t find it frequently entertaining. Join Zippererstrasse for an ongoing exploration of politics, politicians, and the people who pick them.

zipperer strasse Learn more at www.weimar.ws

The magazine of political reality

zippererstrasse January 2017

this time it was hard to figure out who was the winner in the political testosterone contest. Trump had just come off one of the worst weeks for a presidential candidate in living memory. He had gotten into an ill-advised (assuming he accepts any advice) backand-forth with the parents of a U.S. war hero; he was fending off accusations that he was at best an unwitting tool of Russian autocrat Putin (and at worst a witting tool thereof); he claimed to have seen a nonexistent video of an American plane delivering cash-for-hostages to Iran; he kicked a baby out of a rally; and polls showed that Hillary Clinton had pulled ahead with a double-digit lead nationally and in some swing states specifically. Trump said about his (nonexistent) relationship with Speaker Ryan, “We will have disagreements, but we will disagree as friends and never stop working together toward victory. And very importantly, toward real change. So in our shared mission, to make America great again, I support and endorse our speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.” Editorial wags are encouraged not to correct “importantly,” because that would distract us from the robo-written statement that was as natural to Donald Trump as kittens and Bibles. Also troubling for party elders is that Paul Ryan was not in any better shape than Trump. Though he was being endorsed by the party’s radioactive candidate just as other Republicans were increasingly distancing themselves from, un-endorsing, and even denouncing Trump, the entire charade underscored the fact that could no longer be ignored: Paul Ryan is a weak leader whose party won’t follow him. Neither the tea party revolutionaries nor the GOP establishment gives him any room to maneuver, so his earlier endorsement of Trump meant nothing, and his inability to get Trump to behave and be at least a little less racist and outlandish was no more successful than if he had invited John Belushi as his prom date to meet his parents. The 46-year-old Wisconsin congressman has posed as the party grown-up. After dragging his feet and saying he just wasn’t ready to endorse Trump, he endorsed him. Then, when Trump was getting across-thespectrum lambasting over his spat with the Khans—the parents of the war hero and the instigators of a wave of affection for

Ryan PHOTO: Tony Alter; Priebus and McConnell photos: Gage Skidmore

this time (continued from cover)

Above: Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. Right: Former GOP Chairman and now Trump Chief of Staff Reince Prebus. Below: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

the Constitution after Mr. Khan accused Trump of not having read the founding document—Speaker Ryan released a photo of himself holding a pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution. What his office did not release was a statement condemning Trump and giving direction to his party on how to avoid contamination by the radioactive candidate. It is telling that he did not

release such a statement, and it is no surprise that he didn’t. If he had done so—if he had tried to exert power given to him by his high party office—he would have found out what his very inaction had already demonstrated: He’s a paper tiger, powerless to affect his party’s drift into chaos. On the other side of the Capitol, there’s Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose main claim to fame has been his determination to stop Barack Obama from being reelected. Having obviously failed at that task, he has nonetheless retained his leadership role and accomplished—well, squat. He has not rallied his party—not even just his party’s senators—around a coherent plan or philosophy. He was not even particularly visible this past election cycle, even though his party had enough vulnerable senators that even in a moderately successful Democratic presidential year could have threatened its hold on the chamber. When Trump was plumbing the depths of polling and Clinton was on a roll, McConnell had nothing to offer his party, other than presumably a plan to change his title to minority leader in January. Then there’s the man who was tasked with formally running the Republican Party, Reince Prebus. Like Ryan, Prebus is a Wisconsinite who ascended to the heights of the GOP and has clung there despite a lack of any accomplishments. At a time when the Grand Old Party needs visionaries and this time (continued on page 17) WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

inside this issue

zipperer strasse The Magazine of Political Reality January 2017 Volume 1 • Number 2 www.weimar.ws Editor & Publisher John Zipperer jzipperer@gmail.com Art Direction & Design John Zipperer political cartoonist Lyle Lahey Printing Issuu.com MagCloud

“My case to the Republican Party is if you want to win the next generation—who are 25 percent of the electorate— we need to modernize on some of these issues.”

—Margaret Hoover, Republican Strategist

FEATURES 23 Zippererstrasse Interview: Margaret Hoover The political strategist talks about the Republican Party’s challenge with Millennials, makes the conservative case for LGBT rights, and more. 28 The Last Prime Minister David Cameron gambled with his party’s future and lost an empire

BOOKS, ARTS & CULTURE 34 A War of Distraction Erik Larson’s latest tells the tale of U-20, the imperial German submarine that sunk the Lusitania and helped usher the Americans into the First World War. 36 Worth a Look Capsule reviews of books, films, and other media of interest 37 Centuries of Conflict, with Little Understanding Tom Holland’s look at the history of Islam raised the ire of some, but it showed many reasons for peace between the major faiths 38 Prime Time for Political Satire We examine how the late-night political satirists are doing at this pivotal time—they didn’t stop Donald Trump, but they provide some delicious commentary.

zippererstrasse January 2017

Thanks this issue to: Melissa Caen, Dorothy Crain, The Commonwealth Club of California, Jennifer Granholm, Margaret Hoover, Marina Times, Michelle Meow, Gage Skidmore, and Kin Tso.

39 A Summer Frankfurter Everyone Can Enjoy Jakob Arjouni’s Frankfurt-based detective Kemal Kayankaya shouldn’t be overlooked in the United States. 40 Roman Dynasty Tom Holland examines the Caesarian section of the ruling families of imperial Rome.

ON THE COVER: So this gentleman—we must be nice—who attacks women, doesn’t pay contractors, insults foreigners and handicapped and other people Jesus said to love, is our next president. God help us. Image by DonkeyHotey.

DEPARTMENTS

CONTENTS PAGE PHOTO: VectorOpenStock

3 This Time How the Republican Party’s leaders have failed the party and the country. 5 Week to Week Jennifer Granholm and Melissa Caen explain what happened in the November election and what to expect in a Trump administration. 7 The Big Picture President Obama visits the Holy Land. 8 The Record Humor. Donald J. Trump on Dr. Jill Stein. 9 The Point Dealing with a President Trump; plus, the Russia connection, the conventional wisdom on conventions, gun control, sanctuary cities, how to be a successful opposition, Erdogan’s Turkey, and more. 16 Lyle Lahey The GOP’s internal struggle. 42 Drawn and Quoted

Zippererstrasse is published by John Zipperer. This is issue Volume One, Number Two. Other than photos by third-party photographers and illustrations by Lyle Lahey, all content is copyright © 2017 John Zipperer, except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction of any part is strictly forbidden without written permission. Zippererstrasse accepts no responsibility for unsolicited submissions, but if they are submitted, they will be considered and, if necessary, returned. All articles in this issue are written by John Zipperer, unless otherwise specified. All images reproduced here are in the public domain or are used with required restrictions. Address all communications to Zippererstrasse magazine, including letters to the editor and business queries, to jzipperer@gmail.com or john@ weimar.ws.

WEEK TO WEEK Part Political Discussion, Part Lamaze

A post-election town hall brings questions, fears, and hope. Well, no hope.

photos: ellen cohan

Left: Jennifer Granholm. Below: Melissa Caen (background, John Zipperer.)

“It wasn’t until I saw Nate Silver’s projection go from 65-percent likely to like 5 percent that I realized.”

ess than two weeks after the shock outcome of the November presidential election, the Week to Week political roundtable series brought together former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and CBS San Francisco political analyst Melissa Caen to tell a sold-out audience what happened, why it happened, and what happens next. They gathered at the nonpartisan Commonwealth Club of California in downtown San Francisco. Lots of folks, Republicans and Democrats and independents alike, were surprised and shocked by the election results. As moderator and Zippererstrasse editor John Zipperer told the audience, they needed to keep a level head by taking a breath—breathe in, breathe out. “Tonight’s program is going to be part discussion and education, and part lamaze class,” he said to audience laughter.

Trump was going to win the election? JENNIFER GRANHOLM: Like many people, I was at the Javits Center in New York on election night. I was merrily doing my thing, going on TV at 9 o’clock at night [saying], “Oh yeah, we’re still gonna win, Michigan’s looking good.” And it wasn’t

until I saw Nate Silver’s projection go from 65-percent likely to like 5 percent likely that I realized [it]. Well, we lost Florida; I figured, you know, we can still do this. When we lost North Carolina, well... [and] when we were having trouble in Virginia, I was really getting nervous. But it was at that Nate Silver moment—even though Nate Silver got it wrong, too! [laughter]—that I realized, “Oh, my god, this is actually happening. I was not the only one who realized it at that moment. It wasn’t like there were some secret internal polls that showed she was going to lose. We knew it was going to be closer than it would’ve been before that [FBI Director] Jim Comey letter, the second [one]. But it was that night, realizing that the tinfoil confetti or whatever it was that was supposed to be the facsimile of the glass coming down was not going to come down. It was a really—and I’m sure for many of those in this room—it was a really hard and harsh realization. ZIPPERER: Melissa Caen, you are part of the liberal media establishment; I’m sure you got all of the secret information— MELISSA CAEN: “Blamestream media.” ZIPPERER: When did you first realize

JOHN ZIPPERER: I want to start this conversation by asking for your reactions, your thoughts about what happened last week. Let’s start with you, Governor Granholm. When did you first realize that Donald WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

what was happening? CAEN: I was in the newsroom, and the results start coming back, and it’s commonly the case that the initial results are skewed more conservative, right, because the places that count [their votes] quicker basically are smaller towns and more rural places that often are able to get those results in quicker. So it is not uncommon to get some sort of rightward-leaning results that come in first. So it starts happening in the newsroom, and everyone’s looking at me, “What’s going on?” I’m like, “Ah, it’s fine. The cities haven’t weighed in yet, and when you get to the larger places with more people, it just takes longer to count; it’ll be fine.” So it’s going— and Virginia’s looking close, North Carolina’s looking close, and Pennsylvania is even looking close. Actually on-set—it was myself and Phil Matier and the two anchors—we were chatting about what’s happening and here’s the results that are coming in. And as they’re coming in, we get word that Wisconsin has now been called, and that was it for me. At that point, she needed Wisconsin and Michi-

gan, and without Wisconsin, that was kind of it. I actually said that without Wisconsin, there is almost no way to do this. And about two seconds later [Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta comes out, so we immediately cut to Podesta coming on stage at the Javits Center saying, “Everybody go home; the fight’s not over.” So then we start chatting about that and just like immediately after that the anchor next to me—and we’re on TV live—said, “And we’re just getting word that Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump to concede the race.” Trying not to betray anything like surprise was a little difficult, but it was a crazy thing to see the dominoes fall the way that they did, when all night we had been thinking as soon as the urban areas come in it will turn, but it didn’t. ZIPPERER: [Governor,] you know Hillary Clinton personally. Do you think she knew up to the last minute, or— GRANHOLM: I think honestly, we were all totally stunned. I mean really. I was the co-chair of the transition team—

and don’t even get me started about Donald Trump’s transition— ZIPPERER: We’ll get there. CAEN: Yes, let’s. [Laughter.] GRANHOLM: We were totally—and I was moreso in the mindset “We got this” because I had been focused full-time on what would be happening after the election. My primary focus was how to set up a government after the election. We just did not know [what would happen in the voting]. We knew it might be closer than what all my team had been hoping—you know, initially we were hoping to take the Senate, there was a moment where we fantasized we might be able to take the House, too; that was before that Comey stuff, but nonetheless we thought it was going to happen and we thought we would be taking the Senate as well, but... ZIPPERER: It did come down to where we all—whether you’re watching Fox or MSNBC or CNN—were watching Michigan and Wisconsin, which is great because I’m from Wisconsin, she’s a former governor of Michigan. [Laughter.] When you are watching how they start breaking down “Well, this county is [voting one way]” and “this one has [voted that way],” did all of that ring true that the talking heads—[to Caen] sorry—on TV were at least pointing to the right things? GRANHOLM: They were absolutely pointing to the right things. Wayne County, which is the county in which Detroit sits, always comes in last. It’s always overwhelmingly Democratic. I was talking to my people on the ground, you know, “How does it look? Are there lines? What are you feeling?” My sister-in-law was doing these drive-arounds in Detroit. She says, “I see lines. I feel good about it.” She said, “But the campaign manager told me just to be a little bit cautious in telling you to be super-positive about the numbers coming out of Detroit, because we’re just a little tentative.” I was talking to her just before I was going on the air, because I didn’t want to be like, “Oh, we’ve got this!” [Laughter.] So I said, “Well, the numbers are looking a little slow. We’ve seen the reports of the Wayne County numbers being down, the numbers in Detroit being down.” It turns out that [Hillary Clinton] got 77,000 fewer votes in Wayne County than Barack Obama got in 2012. They’re still counting in Michigan, and it’s around 12,000 that she lost the state by. She got that 77,000 fewer votes—it’s not that those votes went to Donald Trump. They just didn’t show up. So there’s a lesson there for Democrats, I think. Another piece of Michigan of course was the overwhelming surge in the rural counWeek to Week (continued on page 21)

zippererstrasse January 2017

official white house photo by pete souza

the big picture

President Barack Obama visited the crypt believed to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ during a 2013 trip to Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the West Bank.

WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

the record HUMOR

Why I Hired Jill Stein

In a special guest column, President-elect Trump explains his surprising cabinet choice

hear you. People say, why did Trump select Jill Stein—Dr. Jill Stein, the failed Green Party presidential candidate—to be in his cabinet? It’s a big question. Only I can answer it, so Zippererstrasse gave me this space to explain. Only the best people will serve in my cabinet, and that’s why I reached deep into the basket of depl—I mean basket

of availables to find Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Linda McMahon, and Ben Carson and the other guys to lead my government agencies. I followed a very simple rule when choosing people. If they knew what they were doing, then they get the Treasury or Transportation cabinet positions. Everything else is a Mad Max III wild scramble, and I like watching

people fight. What can I say? Ben Carson might barely be able to finish a sentence without putting his audience and himself to sleep, but he won’t cause me any problems at our board meetings. Jeff Sessions is there mainly to make me look like an NAACP activist by comparison. NAACP stands for National Association for the Advancement of the Colored Peoples, by the way. And Rick is there to make me look like a Mensa member. And the others—Betsy will save us tons of moolah by closing public schools; Linda will put those kids to work at small businesses, like dry cleaning and mining. Linda—I like Linda. She donated $6 million to my campaign and other conservative political causes, so it will be great to have her in my cabinet. I know how important it is to keep a close eye on your investments, so she’ll never miss a board meeting. Nikki Haley’s the smart one, though. And she’s got scruples. She could cause trouble if I let her get too close to the others. That’s why I’m sending her to the UN in New York. She can blah, blah, blah all day and no one will ever hear from her again until the day she quits to go hike the Appalachian trail or whatever it is that South Carolina

photo: gage skidmore

governors do. But Ji l l Stein? She’s a doctor, a real one, not a fake one like Doctor Who. Plus, she is sort of my “team 8

zippererstrasse January 2017

of rivals” cabinet member, like when Obama put crooked Hillary and crazy ol’ Biden on his team. I know, I hear that some people are angry because she’s a Green Party wacko, and I’m the only sane person in this country. Will she try to stab me in the back? Will she twist my policies around so they sound insane? I say don’t worry. Actually, I say DON’T WORRY. I got this. Jill Stein couldn’t get even 2 percent of voters in November. There were fewer people who voted for her than the margin of victory crooked Hillary had over me in the popular vote. Plus, she’s wack-a-doodle. Mark my words. Jill Stein is wack-a-doodle. I’m going to look like Thomas Jefferson or Albert Einstein compared to this wack-a-doodle. I should have called her wack-a-doodle Jill during the campaign. She would have liked the attention, at least; maybe she would have gotten 1.8 percent of the vote that way. Oh well, there’s always 2020. Anyway, I can’t have Ivanka be the only one talking to me about climate change and being nice and not being not-nice and all that. Now, every time a journalist asks me why we outfitted our Olympic athletes in baby seal fur or are fracking for oil in downtown Chicago, I can force Jill to explain the official White House line. Maybe for punishment I’ll force her to go lay the first tracks for the XL Pipeline. Just kidding. I need her for cover with the wack-a-doodles. Good word. Wack-a-doodle. Besides, if I don’t like the job she does, I don’t have to pay her. zs

the point our own quisling regime

To Russia with Love Putin’s putsch

Photo: gage skidmore

FOUR novembers

Our New President Steps Out from the Shadows

The Trump era begins—with high anxiety, low expectations.

lmost no one saw it coming. Right up to the evening when exit polls were being matched with the first results from the states, Democrats and Republicans alike expected that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be America’s 45th president. Instead, impresario and person of low repute Donald Trump shocked the world by beating one of the best political machines of modern times, not to mention one of the most deserving candidates of modern times. While we gird our loins for at least four years of President Trump, it is not a minute too late for intelligent liberals to look at what went wrong and how to move forward. Moving forward will be imperative and it will require the smartest minds the party can bring to bear, because the party is flat on its back, in one of the weakest positions in which it has ever found itself. Republicans control the House with a solid majority, the Senate, the White House, and—because of all of that—they control the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court for possibly the next generation. The GOP also controls the majority of statehouses across the country. Democratic leaders have been discussing how they should go forward, both in terms of how to respond to the authoritarian threat of President Trump and how to reconnect with their natural base, the white working-class voters who betrayed the party because they felt betrayed by it; that those same voters are the ones who will be most betrayed by the plans of Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan to end Medicare, privatize Social Security, and scrap Obamacare makes for some snappy social media memes, but it’s not a plan for dealing with a serious situation. First, the Democrats need to get over the histrionics. the point (continued on page 10)

merica has a tradition of interfering in other countries’ elections; if the results don’t please us, we have occasionally overthrown the victors. Latin America knows this first-hand, and we did it in the 1950s in Iran with spectacularly awful longterm effects. But now the shoe is on the other foot. The evidence and consensus from our national security agencies is clear: Russia interfered in the U.S. presidential election, ultimately to ensure that the hawkish Hillary Clinton lost and the authoritarian-friendly Donald Trump won. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long sought to undermine the U.S.–Europe alliance, NATO, and the European Union. Now Germany has blamed Putin’s cyber-soldiers for attacks on German government computers, and Germany and France expect a Putin lift for the far-right parties in national elections in both countries in 2017. The stakes are high. We now have a president who openly disdains our most important military alliance. And he was placed in office with the help of a foreign adversary. We don’t expect help from Republicans in Congress. They barked at Trump during the campaign, but once he was elected, they rolled over and showed their bellies. Democrats need to stiffen their spines and prepare to wage a hard-fought and lengthy battle to call Trump on every Putin-friendly action, litigate every illegal move by the new administration, and campaign with the bravery and gusto that they seem to have forgotten. Because everything is at stake.

WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

inside magazines

In-Depth, Fun, & Informative Review of the Magazine world! Special publication: If you’re anything like us, you love magazines—the good, the bad, and the downright outrageous. So read Magma, the “magazine industry review,” and learn about the inner workings of Condé Nast, what Bob Guccione left behind, an interview with Carr D’Angelo, a post-mortem on Starlog, plus opinionated reviews, complaints, and ideas.

MAGMA Get free digital edition or purchase print edition at weimar.ws

zippererstrasse January 2017

the point (continued from page 9)

To deal with Donald Trump in the White House, they will need to rediscover how to play grown-up, sharp-elbows politics. They will need to grow a thick skin to ignore the lies and accusations the Republicans will throw at them when they try to obstruct Trump’s agenda, and they will need to learn to communicate to that white working class base that is declining in power in the country but that still can swing a national election. “He’s not my president” declare a million Facebook posts. So what? He actually is, even if it was achieved via Russian meddling and hoodwinking of voters. That’s politics. That’s how democracy works. It doesn’t mean you get the best decision, it means that everyone has a chance to help make that decision, even if it’s completely crazy. So when confronting Trump and Trumpism in Congress, Democrats need to know when to pick their fights (either winnable fights or fights that they win by losing), when to lose, and when to throw down the gauntlet and threaten to shut everything down. Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare are life-and-death matters for millions and millions of people. Particularly the first two are election gold, because voters are comfortable with them and know how they rely upon them. Democrats should not give an inch on either of those two, and on Obamacare they should accept helpful changes and otherwise make sure the Republicans own the political fallout from any messing up with the system. They should expect the Republican far right, which is about to achieve many of its long-sought goals of privatizing or ending mass public social benefits, to be absolutely

ruthless in undermining them and deceiving voters. (If we sound cynical, that’s just because we’ve been paying attention for the past few decades.) Democrats need to be ruthless as well. They should also expect Trump to continue to be unpredictable and unconventional. Democrats will need to become more nimble and politically shrewd to win the political battles ahead. In the November 12-13 edition of the Financial Times, Francis Fukuyama wrote: “Today, the greatest challenge to liberal democracy comes not so much from overtly authoritarian powers such as China, as from within. In the U.S., Britain, Europe, and a host of other countries, the democratic part of the political system is rising up against the liberal part, and threatening to use its apparent legitimacy to rip apart the rules that have heretofore constrained behaviour, anchoring an open and tolerant world. The liberal elites that have created the system need to listen to the angry voices outside the gates and think about social equality and identity as topdrawer issues they must address. One way or the other, we are going to be in for a rough ride over the next few years.” That is a call to action and a map to the promised land for the Democrats and liberals. Issues of income inequality and political freedom are theirs to own, if they care to and can. If they respond intelligently and shrewdly, they stand to reclaim control of the federal government and can reset us on a better course. If they respond with mindless protests and violence, or by withdrawing from the political fight, then the dismal four years we envision before us will last far longer than just four years.

PRIME TIME

The Great National Charade

What the party conventions have to do with the campaign

ack in July, both political parties held their national conventions to nominate their presidential candidates and launch them into their general election campaigns. And, simply by occurring and concluding, they couldn’t help but perform those basic duties. After that, people usually forget about the conventions; this year, it is worthwhile to remember them. In a year in which the Republican Party nominated an honest-to-goodness (a term that includes two words not usually associated with him) reality television star, the four-day spectacle should have been a slam dunk for the GOP. Instead, we were treated

to a weak floor fight that in its very weakness amplified the utter defeat of the Republican establishment. Even the high point of spirit on the floor—Senator Ted Cruz getting booed off the stage after he refused to endorse Donald Trump—was an exercise in futility. Ultimately the entire convention was an exercise in futility; Trump didn’t put on a good showing for himself or the party, and he failed to unify the party. But the convention nominated him and then it concluded, so there’s that. The Democrats gathered in Philadelphia and demonstrated two things: They know how to reach out beyond their base in an at-

tempt to attract more centrist general election voters, and the Bernie-or-bust-brats were unbearable. When the unconquered Bernie babies (judging from the TV views of them, mostly white people) tried to shout down civil rights heroes giving speeches at the podium, they had done enough to be escorted out of the building and have their credentials removed. But of course the party didn’t do that, so it was left with repeated instances of this rudeness (heavily represented by the California delegation). They booed generals. They shouted down Leon Panetta. They even booed Bernie Sanders himself in

appearances at state delegation meetings. They perfectly embodied the image of entitled left-wing fundamentalists who were as much dedicated to the health and success of the Democratic Party as is Ted Cruz. But the rest of the convention went well. Clinton took the successful convention on the stump, building on her convention polling bump. Trump, meanwhile, squandered his bump so badly he induced fantasies among observers that he was actually trying to lose. Were that so. The conventions showed us the real candidates. The election showed us the real voters.

weaponry

Politicize It, Part II Just to be clear about this

s it a little presumptuous of a two-issue-old magazine to pledge an ongoing campaign? To paraphrase Star Wars’ Han Solo, we never ask that question until after we’ve done it. This is a campaign that needs to be fought, and this is one little way we will do it: Every issue, we will include at least one item in our The Point section urging the country to come to its senses and impose sensible regulation on its out-of-control weapons industry. We originally hail from the northern Midwest, where hunting is a natural pastime and many people have a handgun in a drawer for personal safety. Neither of those bothers us (though we suggest they put their weapons where children can’t find them). Guns are nothing more than objects that can be used to harm or kill others. They are not romantic

things that spur the muses to write poetry (or what horrid poetry that would be); they are not the bedrock of republican freedoms. They are metal or plastic objects that can be used to kill. And a radical reading of an amendment to the Constitution has given generations of people an increasing belief that their guns are more important to them than are freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, or freedom not to have your child massacred by a fanatic with an automatic weapon. So regulate them more stringently. There is no need for weapons of mass murder to be in the hands of citizens, so let’s ban— permanently—assault weapons, and define that broadly. More to come.

immigration

Sanctuary Under the Microscope The West Coast killing that drew national attention

rom San Francisco City Hall to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, lawmakers are responding to public dismay over the apparently random killing of a woman in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant. The death of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle at the hands of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez angered many, because Lopez-Sanchez has been deported five times before and has been convicted of seven felonies, yet before the killing he had been released by the San Francisco Sheriff ’s Department under the sanctuary city policy that deters cooperation with federal immigration officials (via Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or

ICE). Critics say if ICE had been notified as they had requested about Lopez-Sanchez’s release, Lopez-Sanchez would have been on his way back to Mexico and Steinle would be at home with her family. In 1989, San Francisco approved a sanctuary policy that keeps city employees from cooperating with federal immigration authorities regarding investigations and arrests unless required by law or a warrant. There are many so-called “sanctuary cities” across the country, and the roots of the movement go back to the refuge from deportation provided by some churches in the 1980s to people fleeing the brutal civil wars raging in

Central American countries. Justification for the sanctuary policies has evolved in more recent years to focus on protecting undocumented immigrants from being deported and thereby separated from their families, as well as concern that immigrant communities will be reluctant to cooperate with police on criminal investigations if they are fearful of having to reveal their immigration status. Critics of the policies argue that they are politically motivated efforts by Democrats to court Hispanic voters, and that they protect potentially violent criminals—and they see the Steinle murder as an all-too-obvious confirmation of their fears. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while she was seeking the Democratic nomination for president, defended sanctuary city policies that protect undocumented immigrants from deportation when they are involved in minor infractions, such as traffic violations. But she strongly distanced herself from the more expansive policies followed by San Francisco. “The city made a mistake not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported,” she told CNN. “I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on.” Local politicians have largely continued to defend the sanctuary city policy, even as they direct the focus toward San Francisco’s thenSheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who was unpopular with many politicians and even his own staff of deputies throughout his time in office. (He eventually lost his reelection bid.) “The public safety of San Francisco residents unequivocally comes first,” said San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell. “Our sanctuary city law has been a pillar of public safety policy for decades in San Francisco, but unfortunately this sheriff has implemented additional ideological policies that fly in the face of not only our local laws but federal law as well, and it must come to an end.” In late July 2015, Farrell put forward a package of proposed reforms, including legislation confirming the Board of Supervisors’ support for the city’s sanctuary city policy while calling for Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi to “immediately rescind his department-wide gag order banning any communication with federal immigration authorities”; a request for the city attorney to require the sheriff to get confirmation from the district attorney that the office will prosecute any outstanding warrant before it transports prisoners to San Francisco from other jurisdictions; and a letter of inquiry to the sheriff asking why the sheriff held Lopez-Sanchez in jail after he should have been released. Mayor Ed Lee also reiterated his support for the policy and said it was necessary for WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

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good policing. He added that the city needs to balance its responsibilities to civil liberties and public safety, “which is why … I promised to veto any legislation that completely eliminated the sheriff ’s ability to make a case-by-case determination about honoring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers. Our sanctuary policies should not create a safe harbor for convicted, violent felons,” Lee said in a statement issued by his office. “I am concerned about the circumstances that led to the release of Mr. Sanchez. All agencies involved, federal and local, need to conduct quick, thorough, and objective reviews of their own departmental policies and the decisions they made in this case.” Those reviews might take place at all levels, but the one that was the most watched across the country was the one done in San Francisco, where Sheriff Mirkarimi faced intense scrutiny about whether he and his office followed proper procedures. On the federal level, critics in Congress pushed to deny funding for sanctuary cities, and the issue became a political punching bag for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who made opposition to immigration policies a centerpiece of his campaign. That this all happened in San Francisco, long a target of the conservative movement, only fueled the temptation by some to use it as an opportunity to talk about how left-

wing and out of touch the city is. Conservative Fox news personality Bill O’Reilly sent a camera crew to San Francisco City Hall to catch on-the-run city officials with questions about the Steinle killing and the sanctuary city policy. They managed to make some folks look silly, but it sprang back in their face when Supervisor Scott Wiener told the film crew, “Fox News isn’t real news,” and the phrase became a rallying cry for defenders of the city and its sanctuary policy. Wiener later quipped in an online comment, “They didn’t like that much.” Despite the rallying around the policy, it is likely to be reigned in in the future. “Donald Trump, Fox News, and everyone else who sought to take political advantage of the recent tragedy should be ashamed of their behavior,” said Supervisor Farrell. “Nevertheless, we cannot be afraid to examine our existing laws and policies and look at common-sense reforms. “I believe this is a public safety question, not an immigration issue, and it is time we re-framed the discussion,” stated Farrell. “Regardless of the specific charges, it makes zero sense to transport an individual in custody outside of our jurisdiction back to San Francisco, only to have the district attorney immediately dismiss the charges, and the sheriff release the individual onto our city streets.”

party line

More, not Fewer, Superdelegates

The Democrats learned exactly the wrong lesson from Sanders

eft-wing intellectual and provocateur Dr. Cornel West sat in the coveted third seat of Bill Maher’s Real Time panel in late July and talked about his hopes for the presidential race. West, who had been a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders and was even placed by Sanders on the platform committee for the Democratic National Convention, was aggressively arguing in favor of the woman he now wanted to become U.S. president. No, not Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, but Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein. During the Democrats’ quadrennial gathering this July in Philadelphia, Senator Sanders’ most ardent supporters made clear that they didn’t give a damn about Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party. They wanted Bernie Sanders’ promised revolution, and if they couldn’t get it, they were ready to kill the messenger, even if that messenger were their erstwhile messiah. When California delegates met for breakfast one morning early in the convention, Sanders addressed them to make his case that they needed to rally be-

hind Clinton and stop Donald Trump from becoming president. The booed him. Yes, Bernie Sanders was not Bernie enough for Bernie activists. The ill-behaved Sanders delegates (hailing significantly from California, by the way—a state Clinton carried easily in the June primary) made sure that people outside the breakfast meeting knew they weren’t going to go quietly into the real world. They created a ruckus on the convention floor whenever someone with whom they disagreed was speaking. Military leaders got that treatment. Hillary Clinton got some of it. And would someone please explain to us why these largely white Sanders supporters thought they were in any way entitled to try to shout down actual civil rights heroes such as representatives John Lewis and Elijah Cummings? If there was any worse “visual” than entitled California white left-wingers shouting over the speeches of people who had fought and bled for civil rights, only the Sanders people could delivery it.

They also had star power on their side. Actress Susan Sarandon was in town to demonstrate her consistency. During the primary campaign, she had made a widely ridiculed statement to the effect that if Sanders did not win the Democratic nomination, then perhaps it would be better if Trump beat Clinton because Trump would bring on the revolution that Sanders had so promised. Shortly before the convention, she declared Clinton “more dangerous than Trump.” Think about that. (Sarandon also reportedly got into a screaming match with a Clinton supporter at the Nevada caucuses earlier this year. If you are wondering what Hollywood actress Sarandon was doing at the Nevada party caucus, then you’re beginning to see the problem.) In one of the most precious moments of the convention, a group of Sanders supporters (but what’s in a name—are you still a supporter if you boo the person you allegedly support?) left the convention hall and marched over to the media to stage a protest. As Maya Rhodan wrote in Time, “The scene was a mix of despair, anger and surrender. Their goal, said Erik Molvar of Wyoming, was to occupy the media tent. The media, Molvar said, was guilty of skewing coverage in favor of the just-named Democratic nominee for president. The group held hands and swayed, singing ‘This Land Is Your Land.’” Where is the grounding in reality? Where is the understanding of process? The media, far from favoring Clinton, had largely given Sanders a free ride through the primaries, doing very little critical reporting on the downsides of his shoot-for-themoon economic plans, very little looking at his wife’s golden parachute after running a private school into the ground, no gotcha reporting on his far-left political views. He got to present himself as a kindly grandpa who wanted us all to share more. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton had every controversy real or imagined given headline treatment in countless media outlets, had her integrity questioned at every step of the way (and sometimes it was hard to tell if the critiques were coming from Sanders supporters or Trump operatives), and was rarely given the benefit of the doubt. In the end, that’s fine; Clinton is an adult and she’s tough. If she can’t take some unfair media coverage and political sharp elbows, then who could expect her to take the attacks from Vladimir Putin and other challengers if she had assumed office? But the comparison does highlight that the most hardcore of the Sanders supporters refused to see their opponent as what she was and instead believed the worst about her, and then they confronted terror when the writing on the wall about Sanders’ prospects was validated by the del-

egate votes in Philadelphia. These Sanders supporters also failed to realize just how much Sanders had won in his effort. The party platform largely reflected his desires; Clinton’s camp clearly bent over backward to make sure his camp knew it was being listened to and had representation on the platform committee. It didn’t matter. One of the big gifts of the Clinton camp and the Democratic Party establishment to Sanders was to agree to do away with about two-thirds of superdelegates. These delegates (a small minority of the total delegate count) are Democratic governors, members of Congress, former presidents, and other party dignitaries who are able to vote for whomever they choose; they do not have to abide by the party voters of their state. Superdelegates are a firewall against the capture of the party’s nominating process by factions of the party that would engineer the nomination of an unelectable candidate. They were first instituted in a wave of party reform in the early 1980s and have remained a part of the Democrats’ presidential nominating system—with some tinkering—ever since. Sanders, exactly the type of far-left candidate the superdelegates were designed to ensure did not become the party’s nominee, railed against the superdelegates during his doomed campaign for president. Then, toward the end of the primary season that had shown him rejected by the majority of Democratic primary voters, he began to toss out the hope that superdelegates would switch from Clinton to him. That didn’t happen. In the end, as we all know, Hillary Clinton won a solid majority of the rank and file of primary voters and an overwhelming majority of the superdelegates, and she got the nomination she deserved. So why did the Clintonites capitulate to the Sanders camp and agree to dramatically reduce the number of superdelegates? Sanders supporters have long claimed that Hillary Clinton is a duplicitous and untrustworthy candidate who says anything that will get her

votes. Frankly, we would prefer that that be the reality here and that she intends to rewrite the rules once again after she is elected president. Superdelegates helped stabilize the party—1984 was a lost cause with a popular Republican president and an economic boom, but 1988 was a winnable election and 1992 inaugurated a new era of centrist Democratic success, one in which we’re still living—and doing away with this mechanism is at best a bad omen, at worst it’s greasing the slide to activists who don’t care about downballot losses in the pursuit of supporting an unelectable movement candidate. The term “superdelegates” sometimes is also used to describe certain delegates in the Republican system, but it’s not the same. They are more hamstrung in their votes. But with the GOP currently in flames and listing heavily to port as a result of its violent assault by Donald Trump and his troops, that party would do well to institute either a Democratstyle superdelegate system or some other mechanism to restrain the portion of its supporters who want a wish-fulfillment candidate who could sink the entire party boat. Senator Sanders is not Trump. There is every reason to believe that Sanders cares deeply about our country and its people. That is what drives his crusade, not a lust for fame and money. Our criticism of Sanders is not with him personally; we disagree strongly with many of his views and we think he would have been a terrible choice for Democratic presidential nominee, but that is an argument about policies and tactics. However, Sanders doesn’t have a commitment to the party; he is returning to the Senate as an independent, not as a Democrat. He joined the party simply to get extra mileage out of his quixotic campaign. If the superdelegates system is indeed to be permanently degraded, then perhaps party elders could add a new clause: Presidential candidates must have been active party members for at least a decade to qualify for the party’s nomination.

CONGRESS

Planning for a New Congress How Democrats should fight

entucky is a land of uncertainty. Or explicit certainty. Either is exemplified by comments Kentucky’s U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell made in mid-August regarding the makeup of the United States Senate after the November election. McConnell, who is currently the chamber’s majority leader, said “I may or may not be calling the shots next year.” Well, every single person on this planet

could truthfully have made that statement, if we are to be literal. But to the ultimate political game-player McConnell, it was a way to rally his voters to get to the polls for him. Then again, at the time of his making that comment, it looked like Democrat Hillary Clinton was rolling toward a big win in November; the Republicans were in disarray, and nominee Donald Trump threatened WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

to take down the party for a historic loss that many observers believed would likely leave the Democrats in control of the Senate. (There were even glimmers of hope for recapturing the House, but that was a pipe dream.) With the election over and lost, what should the Democrats do with their power or powerlessness? Well, they should go on a power trip. By that, we don’t mean they should abuse underlings and steal office computers. They should look at their power pragmatically and act accordingly. The GOP spent the last eight years shamelessly obstructing the agenda of our president at almost every move; Democrats, as former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm points out in this issue, should learn to love the filibuster if they want to prevent some of the worst of President Trump’s promises from becoming reality. With Harry Reid’s retirement, the role of Senate minority leader has been handed off to New York’s Charles Schumer. With the Democrats outgunned in the House, Schumer’s willingness to filibuster and play hardball with the GOP will be crucial. A respected party leader, Schumer nonetheless was threatened with intra-party exile when he bucked the White House on the Iran deal. Trump is less critical of Netanyahu’s Israeli government than Obama was, so that particular issue might not rear its head again. But it does raise questions about how much of a party loyalist and how much of a party agenda shaper he will be. What is not in question is his political skill, and he will need all of his arm-twisting and vote-counting abilities to be a successful minority leader. House Democrats reelected California’s Nancy Pelosi as their leader, despite an attempt to challenge her. Pelosi runs a tight ship, keeping her caucus in-line and incheck. Like Schumer, she will find those skills essential to keeping her minority caucus in step, but at least she can count on a slightly increased number of caucus members after the 2016 election. They have two years to remake the party, defeat Donald Trump, and prepare for 2018 elections. The Democrats’ chances in the Senate are dismal in 2018, thanks simply to the seats that are up for election. In the House, if they play their cards right, they should be able to come within striking distance of taking back power, because not only does the party in power tend to lose House seats in midterms but Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are pushing a far-right economic agenda that is sure to hurt the very people who put them into power. If the Democrats can’t make the Republicans pay the political price for those policies, then they don’t deserve to be the opposition. 14

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foreign affairs

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ankara?

Turkey’s leader Erdogan looks to cement his authoritarian role

hen Turkey and Russia teamed up in late December to push through a cease-fire in war-torn Syria, it made some people in the West worried that the United States had been sidelined. To others, it was a matter of just-desserts: The two countries that had played the biggest roles in fomenting the ultra-violent civil war in Syria should take responsibility for ending it, shouldn’t they? And to still others, and probably to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it was a sign of his continuing rise to power. At the same time as reporters were watching the cease fire’s messy implementation, some were also reporting on a draft bill in the Turkish parliament that would change the constitution to give Erdoğan even more power to run the country he has ruled with an increasingly authoritarian bent since 2003. The changes include eliminating the position of prime minister, letting him form a government independent of parliament, and removing certain political restrictions currently in place on the president. The bill’s passage is not certain, because his party’s parliamentary majority, though large, is not large enough to ensure enactment. But if it fails, it will not be the end of Erdoğan’s drive for power, nor of moves to change the nature and role of this ancient nation. There are many views of what Turkey wants to be in the future. A leader in the Islamic world. A counter-weight to Israel in the Middle East. A member of NATO. A member of the European Union. A democratic country. An autocratic country. A modern country. An ancient country. But there is one thing that no one in Turkey wants their proud country to be: a failed nation. That’s what makes this summer’s coup and its aftermath so troublesome. When news broke on July 15, 2016, that Turkish military units were taking over government locations in the country’s capital, airports had closed, and the country’s elected leaders were possibly imprisoned or indisposed, it was difficult to figure out what was happening. Was the country returning to its sad 20th-century tradition of alternating democratic governments with military juntas? Why would the military think, after all of the years of Erdoğan being

in power and strengthening his grip on the government, the economy, and the military, that they would succeed? What was not a surprise was how Erdoğan reacted after the coup was crushed. He amped up his criminalization of the opposition, arresting and removing from their positions tens of thousands of people in the military, media, and academia. It’s not a surprise because it is what he’s been doing on a smaller scale for years. When Turkey (and its frenemy, Greece) went through serial coups-to-republics-tocoups cycles during the long Cold War, it seemed to be the norm for that region. If democracy ever took root, that’d be nice, but it didn’t look like the roots go very deep. Besides, occasional military governments could at least be expected to keep their countries strong and oppose the Soviet threat. Today, poor-but-troubled Greece and rich-but-troubled Turkey appear to have more stable republican forms of government. The Soviet threat has disappeared, but it has been replaced by a twin threat to the West of Russian irredentism and Islamic terrorism. Turkey’s performance regarding both of these new threats has been less than reliable, and the person responsible for that unreliability (we’re using a kind word there) is President Erdogan. He has cozyied-up to Putin, copied some of his heavy-handed attacks on political opponents real and imagined, has been accused of either being late to opposing or having actively helped ISIS and other militants, subverting all else to Turkey’s violent suppression of Kurds in and around Turkey. Erdoğan is part of a global trend, from Maine Governor Paul LePage and Donald Trump to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte to Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and onward; conservative nationalist populists are having a revival, and they are doing it via the institutions and in the guise of democracy. The great international competition between Western liberal democracy and Eastern communism is not being replaced by competition with Islamic terror; in fact, the threat of global terror networks is one of the things encouraging cooperation within the Western alliance and

Smart & Lively Political Insight

Meet the antidote to political polarization: Week to Week, the political roundtable program from The Commonwealth Club of California, hosted by Zippererstrasse editor/publisher John Zipperer, where we feature journalists & academics with differing views discussing current politics with intelligence, humor, & civility. Come to our roundtables (complete with a social hour) in San Francisco, or listen to the free podcasts on The Commonwealth Club’s podcast feeds on Google Play and iTunes.

WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

Lyle Lahey

POLITICAL CARTOON

The Party of Lincoln Logs

It’s getting harder to convincingly say no to their own agenda

n 2010, the GOP was united against one man: President Barack Obama, the centerleft Democrat who had wrenched the country back from the brink of a depression. Mitt Romney had a pretty good chance to win the 2012 presidential campaign, and he was a pretty decent exemplar of the establishment GOP: conservative, experienced, a decent man (forget the dog on the car roof and think about his many charitable donations and actions), and intelligent. But he had to run as a Republican, where decent and intelligent conservatives don’t call the shots—the tea party does. Romney lost. After the tea party wing of the Republican Party swept into office in the 2010 elections, the national agenda increasingly became theirs. Their congressional supporters—a minority of Republican House and Senate mem-

zippererstrasse January 2017

bers, but a group that acted with Leninist discipline and single-mindedness—held sway in the U.S. Congress. The Obama revolution was over; the tea party revolution had begun. Just as no one is hurt more by Islamist terrorist than other Muslims, no one was hurt and hobbled and humiliated more than fellow Republicans by the tea partiers’ insistence on populist right-wing orthodoxy. It helped do in Romney; it drove House Speaker John Beohner into early retirement; and it drove numerous GOP elected officials into unemployment when they were primaried by tea partiers. This year, the tea party has been co-opted by the Trump phenomenon, which will complete the job of destroying the GOP establishment. Democrats might laugh, but they still have to deal with these folks. zs

between West and East. So we will be dealing with the Erdoğans and the Putins for a while, even as their movements spread. But that shouldn’t stop us from lamenting what Erdoğan and his party have turned Turkey into. It is increasingly a

place where dissent is met with prison, where the press is forced to serve the party in power, and where political power is accumulated by the man at the top. Frankly, soon it won’t be much different than if the military had taken over.

And another thing ...

Final Thoughts

ow low can you go? A petition at WhiteHouse.gov demands a constitutional amendment to allow people under the age of 35 to become president. “These citizens are leading social change. They are creating billion dollar companies. They are at the forefront of medical advancement. And they must be heard,” the petition states. “It’s clear that individuals under the age of 35 have been revolutionizing our country for centuries, and are just as capable as an older candidate.” It just convinces us that not only shouldn’t people under 35 be allowed to become president, they shouldn’t be allowed to create any more petitions.

e note without conclusion the erosion of Southern control over the White House. For decades, it was believed that to win, the Democrats needed a southerner either as presidential or vice presidential nominee. Obama broke that string, and regardless of which candidate won this November’s election, it was proven again, as both parties nominated northern candidates.

et’s address the case against Hillary Clinton. From the left and the right, this has largely been based in fantasies of the GOP hit machine. She’s been labeled everything from a Wall Street sellout to a murderer. Susan Sarandon said Clinton was a bigger threat than Trump. But here’s the rub: Anti-Clinton campaigns that have been cooked up in the war rooms of the Republican Party for the past quarter century are a poor substitute for knowing a candidate’s real substance. If she was the wanton crook these people believed, certainly she would have been tripped up and convicted by any the many GOP-led (and taxpayer-funded) investigations over the past couple decades. And yet $100 million (of, again, taxpayer money, so constitutional crime committed, but by Team GOP) spent on these prosecutions has yielded nothing. Her emails? Boring and not criminal. Her murderous rampage through Washington? Nonexistent. Her selling of her soul or her votes to Wall Street? No evidence exists that her votes were shifted by her affiliations or paid speeches. Benghazi? Please,

multiple Republican inquisitions have concluded she wasn’t at fault. The prosecution rests, the defense rests, the judgment stands. Hillary Clinton is not, as Bill Clinton pointed out, the cartoon her opponents have drawn of her. But that so many people—including Democrats themselves—believed at least some of these charges shows that the Russians didn’t need to hack the Democratic Party. The Republicans have already successfully done it.

n November, San Franciscans decided you can never be too young to vote, so they passed a referendum giving 16-yearolds the right to vote in local elections or, if they follow the example of their elders, the right to stay home and not vote but to complain about politics anyway. Statewide, voters approved a proposition to make recreational marijuana legal, which was a selfserving move that will help many of them weather the next four years.

ew York magazine’s Jonathan Chait lost it last year when responding to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s anti-Trump comments, calling it “a crucial marker of our political institutions’ progress (or regress) toward complete polarization.” Chait also wrote: “And if you consider the norm completely unimportant, and would feel perfectly comfortable with Supreme Court justices roaming convention floors decked out in elephant or donkey gear, barnstorming the country with their preferred candidates, urging their election in 30-second ads, then Ginsburg has merely brought your ideal closer to fruition.” Drama much?

ver in The Philippines, the country’s president, a Mr. Duterte, has boasted about personally killing suspected drug dealers. So far, the number of dead is more than 2,000, and reports are that vigilante groups and probably drug dealers themselves are using the freedom to murder as an opportunity to kill off their competitors and other people who annoy them. zs

homeless (continued from page 3)

strong leaders to script a plan for the future, it is being led by feckless, clueless, and powerless men. Yes, the Republicans ended up scoring a huge win in the November election, scraping back some Senate seats (Indiana, Wisconsin) that had looked like easy Democratic pickups, and of course installing a thoroughly unfit man in the White House. It is a victory brought about not by these party leaders, but by Russian interference in our sovereign election, aided not a little by FBI Director James Comey. There still exists a previous generation of party elders, but they too have proven to have zero power to move the party’s base: disgruntled high-school-educated white voters. During the primaries, the party’s previous nominee Mitt Romney gave what was billed as a major take-down speech about Trump, and it had absolutely no impact. George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush couldn’t get son and brother Jeb Bush even deep into the primaries, much less the nomination, much much less the November victory. The party’s 1996 nominee and former Senator Majority Leader Bob Dole told NPR, “I mean, what am I gonna do? I can’t vote for George Washington. So I’m supporting Donald Trump.” A profile in courage, that was not. The insiders don’t know what to do. Trump’s success will continue even if he doesn’t enact much of his agenda; he has transformed the party by surfacing what has been only alluded to in the past: coded racial politics have been replaced by blatant white nationalist racism and violent threats. The party itself could have had a good moment if it had lost the presidential election. It just might have pushed it yet again to look into the mirror and reevaluate its policies and practices. However, the win not only gave them a sense of false achievement, it gave Trump the ability to install his own party leaders, pulling Priebus from his GOP post to serve as his chief of staff. If the party had outwitted him and denied him the nomination at its July convention, his populist supporters would have wreaked havoc, making the tea party insurrection look like a real tea party compared to the violent rave they would have unleashed. With Trump’s nomination and dirty win, his warriors are now seeded throughout the party; the people who should have stopped them—especially Ryan, McConnell, and Priebus—have been shown to be made of papier-mâché. When the Republican Party faced chaos under Richard Nixon, a number of GOP senators stepped up and sided with country over party, thereby saving the party. There is no savior visible now. zs WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

Week to Week (continued from page 6)

ties and the out-state counties. Obviously, Macomb County, we knew was going to go to Donald Trump. But this is the other delta that is troubling and it’s replicated both in Wisconsin and in Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s the fact that in 2012, Barack Obama lost the non-college-educated white voters by 19 points; so we didn’t win them, we lost by 19 points. Donald Trump won them by 39 points, so there was a 20-point delta. So those two things—them not showing up and the fact that we lost those white non-collegeeducated voters by so much—that is the explanation in the upper Midwest. ZIPPERER: I don’t have as many contacts in Wisconsin, as I wasn’t a governor [laughter]. But I’m actually from Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is kind of in a swing county in a swing state, and they went for Trump. My mother ran a pulling station at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, and she said that they normally get 300 people and they had 800 people— GRANHOLM: Wow. ZIPPERER: Out of something like 1,031 potential [voters], and that didn’t include the mail-in and early going. So they had a surge of voting there, and it certainly ensured [Trump won the county]. GRANHOLM: That’s interesting, too, because the early voting—Michigan, for example, doesn’t have early voting, but it has early absentee voting, but you have to have a reason why you’re not showing up polls; it’s not no-reason absentee, unless you’re a senior. Nonetheless, they have a lot of them out, and Democrats had by far swamped Republicans in the early voting, and that is true even in Iowa, and we lost Iowa by such a huge amount. So it was deceptive, all the early voting stuff, and there’s a question about whether we cannibalized the vote by having it go early, rather than on election day, but all the indications were not what the result was. ZIPPERER: One of the questions from the audience I want to put to you: When people look at these big cities and areas where you would expect the African-American vote and the Hispanic vote to come out. And since then they have been asking, “Okay was this voter suppression? Did all these lack of ‘motor voter’ laws and registration requirements, did that keep down the vote in certain areas? CAEN: It may have to a small degree, but I’m not sure it did to an extent that the vote would be different. There were a lot of lawyers standing by on 1-800 lines. Both parties had like 1-800-REPUBLICAN, 1-800-DEMOCRAT basically to call and report irregularities at the polls. We do know that there 18

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“While we did get reports of problems, nothing has risen to the level of changing the outcome.” was some confusion in places like Connecticut and Texas, which have new voter ID laws, so that was being reported. Had there been something that was so overwhelming that it would have changed the direction of the election—the winner would become the loser—I think we would’ve heard of it, because in the end there was a lot of resources on both parties put to this. And while we did get some reports of some confusion and problems, nothing has so far risen to the level of actually changing outcome at this point. GRANHOLM: I totally disagree. [Laughter.] CAEN: Good. GRANHOLM: There’s so many complicated factors, right? And I don’t know whether it would have changed the electoral vote, because in North Carolina, for example, we do know that the early voting was cut off by a week, they reduced the number of polling stations, they finally opened it up [and] there was a big surge, but you don’t know how many were [left out]. But in the states that used to be monitored under the Voting Rights Act, there were 868 polling sites that were shut down; 868 polling sites. So if you’re not hugely motivated— huuuugely motivated—then you might decide [not to make the effort to vote]. I think

especially for students, if it’s not easy, and they don’t have transportation, and there’s a lot of reasons, it becomes really tough. In Wisconsin, she lost by 27,000 votes. I don’t know what the numbers were out of Madison, etc. Obviously 27,000 wouldn’t have been overcome by that much. But this incremental carving away or making voting difficult in all of these states has an impact, and it is wrong, it is anti-democratic, it is anti-American to deny people the ability to exercise the franchise. CAEN: To be clear, what I was talking about was unlawful activities, like actually people being prevented from voting by people at the polls. ZIPPERER: And there were worries about that leading up to it, that there were going to be the armed monitors, if you will. I don’t recall seeing any reports of that actually happening. Did either of you? GRANHOLM: I don’t think so; both sides have poll watchers that sort of [watch out for trouble]. ZIPPERER: Back to hopes and fears. I think many people had mostly fears lately since the election about what is going to happen, what could happen. There’s a long list of them. Some of them came up during the election—

“This raises an issue for Democrats. Do you fully cooperate, or do you dig in your heels and say no?” issues of treatment of women, worries about registration of Muslims, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, and such. So let’s talk a bit about this. Let’s start with you [Governor Granholm], because you’ve run campaigns—your own or you’ve been involved in other campaigns, and even obviously observing and commenting on politics for a long time. How much of what Trump said during the campaign about all of these things do you think will carry through to actual implemented policies and how much of it was “I’ll say whatever I need to do to get out the vote”? GRANHOLM: I hope none of it carries forward, but I worry that his supporters are going to hold him to it. And there’s a lot of members of Congress that are among the anti-immigrant, for example, ”deport people” crowd. Did any of you see the Lesley Stahl interview [on 60 Minutes] on Sunday night? He tried to come across as much more of a moderate or whatever. But you know underneath it all, he was basically saying we are going to deport people with criminal convictions; there’s no distinction there that some people may have criminal convictions, [but] the criminal conviction is just coming across the

border and that’s the conviction, as opposed to someone murdering somebody or something like that—I don’t think any of us would have a problem with [deporting them]. But what if your only conviction is coming across, then what’s going on here? I’m sure that there are many in this room who have family or friends that are in the population of undocumenteds. This is really existential. All of these kids who are in schools who are crying; my daughter works in a bilingual school—I can’t even talk about it really, because it’s so upsetting. She’s so upset for these kids and for the staff and for everybody who feels like “Oh my god, I’m going to be ripped out or my parents are going to be ripped out of their home,” it’s so horrible. Anyway, I don’t need to recite all of the parade of horribles. I’m just saying that I worry that he’s got to follow through on a couple of these things. I hope that he doesn’t follow through on almost anything he pledged during the campaign. ZIPPERER: How many of you are concerned about Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act? That’s something they’re already promising to do something about, and Congress has jumped on that. Do you know what we can expect from that? What can be

done and what’s realistic? CAEN: There are a couple of things. There’s what politically he can do and what actively he could do. Right now there’s a lawsuit pending in a circuit court, where Congress sued President Obama saying the executive order authorizing federal incentives for some insurance companies is illegal because it was through an executive order and not through Congress. The Congress basically won at the lower court and then President Obama appealed it. Now President Trump could come in and just drop the appeal, and all of a sudden you have imperiled some federal funding, federal subsidies to insurance companies. So it can be as easy as that, as filing a “Hey, we’re dropping our appeal,” and it can be as complicated as trying to phase out Obamacare and trying to phase in something a little more palatable. I was listening to this one expert on NPR this morning who was saying that we won’t see any real changes until 2019, that we have the funding structure in place that’s going to carry us through, unless the Republicans are really interested in just throwing a lot of people off of insurance, which I think even Donald Trump isn’t, then they’ll start moving in a different direction in 2019. So we’re probably pretty safe that something resembling Obamacare will be in place until then. GRANHOLM: And politically they don’t want to do anything before the 2018 midterms that would make it look like they were heartless or something. [Laughter.] CAEN: Exactly. You can imagine the stories that would come out. So it can be as quick as day one, filing a “Hey, we’re not appealing anymore,” to a gradual implementation. I think they will probably opt for a gradual implementation, because even people who don’t like Obamacare like some parts of it that they want to try to keep together. That raises an interesting issue for Democrats. Do you fully cooperate on that, or do you dig in your heels and say “No changes”? That is something the Democrats in the Senate at least will have some ability to do, because Republicans don’t have a filibusterproof majority over there. GRANHOLM: The Democrats were proposing to make some changes to shore up Obamacare. There’s always some stuff you can do to make it better. But what kills me is they want to keep the candy and get rid of everything else, but it doesn’t hold up that way. You can’t have young people stay on your health care until they’re 25 and you can’t have everybody with pre-existing conditions stay on without having a big pool of people to pay for that, right? And the mandate is what creates the big pool of people. So you can’t have your dessert without your vegetables. WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

Other than saying they want to eliminate the geographic barriers of states so you can buy insurance across state lines, which doesn’t get you to what you need to get in terms of the size of that actual pool if you’ve got competition. They haven’t said what they would do to replace it, because it’s hard. ZIPPERER: One thing that could affect us here in San Francisco, specifically fairly significantly on the financial side, is the controversy over sanctuary cities. These are promises that [Trump] had made during the campaign; one of them was to end federal payments to cities that were sanctuary cities. San Francisco, of course, famously is one, as are Chicago, New York and many others. It is, what, about a billion dollars that San Francisco could lose? I think one of the other cities has like $5 billion dollars that they could lose. Are those too big of numbers for him to go through with that threat, do you think? Or is that too juicy that he can’t stay away from it? GRANHOLM: I honestly think his predilection [is that] he’s an authoritarian figure. If you’re an authoritarian—meaning that you like a police state, like authority, right, that’s what building the wall, that’s what making sure that we’re all about law and order and all of that, building up a big military—I think that eliminating sanctuary cities goes right in the heart of that. And a lot of the sanctuary cities are in Democratic-leaning areas, so who cares, right, if you’re them? However, there is this really important thread inside of the Republican Party, which is very much a federalist thread, of allowing states and localities to do what they want. This is one of the risks I think inside of the Republican Party that we’re going to see be played out: How do you have for example the libertarian strand of the Republican Party coexist with the authoritarian strand of the Republican Party? They’re inside of the container that makes it easily very unstable, and that’s going to be a series of arguments playing out over the next four years. ZIPPERER: How do you think San Francisco will respond, specifically to sanctuary cities? CAEN [to audience]: Uh, how do you guys think we’d do if Donald Trump said or his administration said, “You guys gotta start turning people over”? Here’s the thing—um, how do I say this? [Pause.] GRANHOLM: Say it! [Laughter.] CAEN: Okay. Immigration is a federal authority. There’s a lot of law to establish that that’s their bag and you can’t deputize our cops into your ICE-enforcers. There’s a lot of cases that say that. The federal government can’t rely on sheriffs to do their job. So if you ask Mayor Lee or [former San Fran20

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cisco Mayor] Gavin Newsom, they’ll tell you that we’ve written our sanctuary city laws to make them very specifically conform to the requirements that we just do enough and not really more. So on the one hand, maybe he wants to teach a lesson. But on the other, it’s kind of a mess. It’s not as easy as “We’ll just rip away the federal funding.” It really is kind of com-

much, what does the mayor say if faced with a loss of the billion dollars—if that’s really the amount and presumably that might leverage some others? What does he say, do you think? CAEN: Our budget is about $9 billion, so that is not insignificant. GRANHOLM: The loss of a billion is a big chunk.

“A lot of the sanctuary cities are in Democraticleaning areas, so who cares, right if you’re them?” plicated, it can result in tons and tons of lawsuits. So if he can achieve what he wants to achieve in terms of locating criminals and deporting them at least to the extent that gives his voters an example of what they want without messing with sanctuary cities and getting into that beehive of what’s constitutional, blah blah blah, I think he might go for that. Unless the cities really start giving the finger to the Trump administration—which I think we’ve kind of already started doing— I don’t know that he’s going to want to get into it. But if he does want to, that certainly is a lever he can start trying to pull. But I don’t know that he’s eager to jump into that fight if he can achieve what he wants without it. GRANHOLM: I’m just curious, because I don’t know the inner workings here so

CAEN: Actually, so far the money that they have threatened to keep from us is about a million. It’s federal grants— GRANHOLM: Oh! CAEN: I know! It’s like, “What?” GRANHOLM: That’s a rounding error. CAEN: It’s like our Post-It budget. ZIPPERER: “We’ll give you that.” CAEN: Because usually it’s not like all funding is going to get pulled. Usually the threat is that you’re going to pull grants from the federal government for law enforcement. So the grants that we get from the federal government for law enforcement is about a million dollars for San Francisco; that number is far larger for the state of California as a whole. So the state may have a different issue. There’s legislation at the state level that they may want to tinker with, because they might have a bigger loss at the state level. But at our

local level, it’s only a mil’. If he were really willing to pull all federal funding completely, that would be significant, but again they’d wade into some very powerful legal issues. ZIPPERER: If I were a Muslim woman, should I be scared? GRANHOLM: Yes, if you are a Muslim you should be scared, because of this push to register people. I think that is another example

dent-elect who is not willing to get up and make a really affirmative statement—as opposed to just answering a question—making an affirmative statement of who we are as a nation and “this is not acceptable.” It is not acceptable to bully people; is not acceptable to go after people. If you’re really a leader of all of us, it seems to me, it would be really wise for him to get up and make a

“It’s violating the norms of allowing us to see what’s really happening so we can evaluate it.” of the authoritarian state. And I think if you are a woman you should be scared, because he’s going to appoint a Supreme Court member who is going to overturn Roe vs. Wade. I hope that the Democrats filibuster and say that’s not acceptable, it’s established law. But not every Democratic member of the Senate is going to be standing up to that, perhaps. So I think if you’re a woman or a Muslim, there’s reason to be afraid. CAEN: It also seems like from the reports we’ve been hearing that there’s been an increase in assaults on Muslims, on Muslim women in particular. Some people feel emboldened by the victory of Trump, they feel like they can be more public with their feelings, now that they know that millions of others feel like they do. GRANHOLM: And in schools. This is what’s so disturbing about having a presi-

speech about how important it is to respect all Americans, respect all people who live in our borders, instead of passively allowing this to happen, especially in light of the appointment of Steve Bannon as his chief strategist. That sent the signal as well. ZIPPERER: You know who could give that speech really well? Barack Obama. [Laughter.] Along those lines, someone in the audience asks, “If any type of registration is attempted to be instituted, would flooding that system work to neutralize it?” There actually have been folks saying that if they try to do it, everyone should go in and say “I’m Muslim.” GRANHOLM: That’s awesome! I love that. I’m going to do that. I love that idea. ZIPPERER: We’ve given you one useful thing to do tonight— GRANHOLM: It makes me happy thinking

about that. ZIPPERER: Some people have raised the specter of Trump as Hitler. Is that going too far or does it represent a real fear? GRANHOLM: I understand people seeing these signals, including the appointment of people who have these tendencies, to have that reaction. But I think the authoritarian nature of his candidacy and how his presidency—I would just look at what he’s said he will do. It does cause you to worry, not that he’s going to be Hitler, but that there is going to be a very heavy-handed state. When he attacks the media, for example, and when people come up to the media pen [at his rallies] and yell “Lügenpresse,” which means “lying press” in German, it’s what Hitler used to create a state-run media as opposed to a free press; you can understand why people are concerned. [And] when you see a lot of the language that’s used at those rallies. Now, hopefully, that is all behind us. But I am concerned about what appears to be a willingness to violate what are norms of democracy. For example, the fact that for 40 years we have had presidents turn over their tax returns. Now I know everybody has been talking about that forever, but now he’s in the office, and you know that he’s got 400 companies across the globe, and the conflicts of interest that are embedded in that—the potential, anyway—is just so enormous and yet the lack of transparency—they’re basically saying that you’re never going to see his tax returns. This thing about the audit is a ruse. So the fact that there’s no transparency and you don’t know whether the foreign policy is for sale are not, that’s disconcerting to me. The fact that there may be some nepotism involved in the appointments [Laughter], that’s in violation of rules. What is happening? Or that [his] children may be getting super top-secret clearance, and they’re running the business. All of that is really icky. To me, when I say it’s violating the norms, it’s violating the norms of allowing us to see what’s really happening so we can evaluate it. Maybe there’s nothing there, but then it leads us all to fantasize about what is happening without that openness. ZIPPERER: How is Hillary doing? GRANHOLM: I have not spoken with her personally, but a good friend of mine who is a good friend of hers spoke with her two days ago. As you can imagine somebody going on your life, their whole life toward this moment —twice—and losing, it is a really, really hard thing. ZIPPERER: Do you think she would do it again? GRANHOLM: No. ZIPPERER [to Caen]: How’s Donald Trump doing? [Laughter.] CAEN: Well, I don’t know. I’ll text him. WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

ZIPPERER: Check Twitter. [Laughter.] We have had a number of questions from the audience around the matter of what does the Democratic Party do going forward? I want to add to that the Democratic Party had a pretty bad day [on Election Day]. GRANHOLM: An understatement. ZIPPERER: They control how few state governments? They did gain a couple seats in the U.S. Senate, and of course they have to look forward to losing a bunch in 2018. Did they do a net gain in the House? CAEN: Yes, they picked up six, seven? ZIPPERER: Are they a strong enough opposition for Trump to even care about? Or will we see mayors and city councils making statements saying they’re going to [stand up for their values instead of waiting for national party leaders]? You certainly know the Democratic Party. What will the party itself do? GRANHOLM: We’re going through our evaluation. One of the things that we must be aware [of]: A, we’ve got to be really strong in making sure we stand up for all people, that’s got to be really clear—it’s ours, America. That piece cannot go away from us. We’ve also got to listen to the economic despair that is in much of America, but it’s just so acute in towns that have been killed by trade. That’s just so utterly real to people. Can I tell a story? In Michigan, we’ve got a lot of those towns [where they do] manufacturing—manufacturing vehicles and auto parts and other stuff; we have the largest manufacturing footprint of any state in the country in terms of percentage of the economy. 22

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At one point in my governorship, we lost a massive refrigerator factory, Electrolux. It was in a little tiny town called Greenville; the town had 8,000 people, and 3,000 of the 8,000 people worked at the factory. Even though we put every kind of incentive on the table to try to keep them—zero taxes, help build a new factory, you name it, the UAW that represented the workers offered massive concessions—the management of Electrolux said to us, “There is nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we can pay $1.57 an hour in Juarez, Mexico, and so we’re going.” On the last month that the last refrigerator came off the assembly line, the employees had this gathering that they called the Last Supper. It was like a huge community mourning. I went to this, even though I wasn’t invited, because I was so obsessed by this notion of what can we do to keep these good-paying jobs here. It was packed; everybody sitting around tables eating out of box lunches, a band playing sad music. I went up to the first table and this guy stands up. He says, “Governor,” and he pulls his two daughters next to him. He says, “I want you to meet my girls. I am 48 years old, and I have worked at this factory 30 years. My father worked at the factory; my grandfather worked at this factory. All I know is how to make refrigerators.” And then he puts his hand on his chest. “So, guv, tell me who is ever going to hire me?” That question was asked by everybody in that room that day and by everybody in one of the 62,000 communities that have lost factories since the beginning of the cen-

tury. This is real for people whose identity and dignity are pulled out from under them through no fault of their own, and it is something that Democrats—I say this about my party—have got to be serious about. We can negotiate trade agreements that keep jobs in America, we can fight to keep jobs here. We can fight and hold our trading partners to standards that we hold ourselves to. We need to listen to the voices of those who just want the dignity of a good-paying job in America, and that to me is the opportunity for Democrats to be broadly inclusive—and that means including those working class people who feel like we haven’t listened to them. [Applause.] CAEN: I will say this about the Democrats in Congress. Every couple years, the Senate flips and then the party that’s in power complains about the filibuster rule. So now we’re going to have a couple years of the Republicans complaining about how unfair the filibuster rule is, and the Democrats saying “This is a totally legit, normal thing that we’re going to use like every day.” [Laughter.] They have enough to filibuster in the Senate. Now, we have seen in the past, and might in the future as well, times when the Republicans need Democrats to get stuff passed. So if you think of things like an infrastructure bill, which Trump has said he would like to pass, it may take someone like Nancy Pelosi whipping up as many Democrats as there are, to get some of those more populist or Democrat-friendly pieces of legislation passed. They can still exert power that way. zs

zippererstrasse interview President Herbert Hoover’s great-granddaughter explains how the GOP is blowing it. BY MICHELLE MEOW and JOHN ZIPPERER

T Margaret Hoover: Generational Generational Politics Politics with Margaret Hoover

photo: charles bogel

President Herbert Hoover’s great granddaughter explains how the GOP is blowing it.

he election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has caused a lot of soul-searching, rethinking, double-thinking, and finger pointing (see preceding article) on the left and the right. But while partisans on the left worry about having lost connection with white working-class voters, the Republican Party’s disconnect with the large Millennial generation is even more troubling for that party. In this interview, conducted before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, Republican strategist and commentator Margaret Hoover talks with Zippererstrasse editor John Zipperer and Michelle Meow, host of The Michelle Meow Show on the Progressive Voices Network, about her strategy for changing conservative minds on LGBT issues as well as her generational concerns about her party’s problems with Millennials. JOHN ZIPPERER: You wrote on CNN that the Republican Party was beginning to get same-sex marriage, they were starting to see it as a matter of personal liberty, so despite their own personal views perhaps they were kind of seeing that same-sex marriage rights were something everyone should have. That was in June or July of 2014. Give us an update. What you think is happening? Has there been further evolution? MARGARET HOOVER: Republicans, like everyone else in the country, have been waking up to where the country is going. I mean, sadly Republicans have lagged the exponential change we’ve seen on LBGT freedom across the country; and it truly has been exponential. I mean, if President Obama can evolve, we have to have I think a little bit of patience for Republicans to evolve, too, especially when President Obama wasn’t actually evolving. We know that in 1996 he WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

photoS: John Zipperer

“You don’t have to make the pull-the-heartstrings appeal; it was a question of whether they could politically survive.” signed a petition saying that he was in favor of same-sex marriage and then for political reasons didn’t have the courage to stand for his convictions when he ran for office. He wasn’t able to politically evolve; we know in his heart he probably didn’t evolve. I don’t know; who knows what’s in his heart? I’m assuming it was a political decision, which is what it is frankly for most people. I worked on the effort to pass marriage in New York State, which was the first state to pass marriage— ZIPPERER: At the legislature. HOOVER: A Republican legislature. And [when] we were lobbying these legislators, the majority of them got it. Even the ones who couldn’t vote for it got it. You don’t have to make the pull-the-heartstrings appeal; it was a question of whether they could politically survive. I’m sorry it’s not as inspirational as one would like it to be, but it is just the real sort of how the sausage gets made in politics. You’ve got to convince these legislators and these elected leaders that they’re going to be able to survive to see the next political fight if they take that courageous stand. ZIPPERER: Right. HOOVER: And that’s what we’re trying to do with the American Unity Fund, an organization I run. Frankly the data is just so strongly in favor of [same-sex marriage]. You know, 50 percent of Republicans over the age of 50 are in favor of freedom to marry; more ... Republicans are in favor of recognition rights and nondiscrimination. ZIPPERER: And at the same time, there is an extremely stubborn wing of the GOP that finds same-sex marriage just to be—I think to them, it’s so far out of what they ever expected to see in their lifetimes. HOOVER: Yes, and let’s be clear about who they are. They are white evangelical Protestants. Frank Bruni had a great column two weeks ago in The New York Times, where 24

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basically he said if you take that segment out of the Republican primary, out of identified through Republican primary goers or Republican caucus goers, you actually have a party that’s far more evenly divided on these issues than disproportionately— ZIPPERER: Far more libertarian. So what do you in your position then say to that wing, the white evangelical folk? HOOVER: We are tactical and strategic. We’re trying to win nondiscrimination in red states. That’s what we’re focused on now, because we figure if we win enough red states we’ll be able to win at the federal level, too. And that’s sort of the next play. I mean, we are hoping—although we’re not going to get ahead of the court—but we’re certainly hoping that the court will make an affirmative and final decision on marriage by the end of this session. If that is the case, that challenge for me as a Republican in this space, LGBT freedom, is educating Republicans that the issue isn’t over just because marriage is settled. You can get married in the state of Arizona, for example, and then go home post on your Facebook page and be fired the next day simply for being gay. MICHELLE MEOW: Exactly. I spoke to Gregory Angelo, the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, last week and he mentioned that when he was there at CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference], there was a good number of Millennials there. You touch a little bit on the Millennials, and how you know Millennials can actually help change the Republican Party or the future of it. What are your thoughts on young people today or young conservatives—are they really the future of the Republican Party? HOOVER: Thank you for asking. I wrote this book called American Individualism, and the subtitle is How A New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Par-

ty. What the book was really about is, Who is this Millennial generation, the largest generation American history? They’ve just outnumbered the Baby Boomers. Who are they? What are their sensibilities? The argument I make is that they’re sort of my kind of conservative. You want to fight over what the word is; I’m a fiscal conservative. I care about a strong national defense, but I’m not a social conservative. That is entirely consistent with being this party or these principles of individual freedom. The Millennials sort of subscribe to that. But they cannot stand the anti-gay bigotry. So my case to the Republican Party is if you want to win the next generation—who are 25 percent of the electorate in the next presidential election, for example—we do need to sort of I would say modernize on some of these issues. CPAC, however, it’s funny; I did my radio show out of CPAC, and I did it really begrudgingly because I’ve boycotted CPAC since 2012 when GOProud was kicked out. They invited Log Cabins, but they gave them the back bench, the back of the bus. They said, “You can come, but you can only talk about Russia.” They didn’t get to talk about marriage, they didn’t get to talk about nondiscrimination, they didn’t get to talk about anything gay. They had to sit in the back of the line and sort of follow these certain rules. They were total second-class citizens at CPAC. So I made a big stink about doing my radio show from there, not boycotting it but trying to highlight that the conservative movement contains and continues to allow these strains of bigotry in it. And that it’s just totally not okay. And by the way, there aren’t young conservatives. If you look at the Millennial generation, more than 50 percent—if you look at the Pew numbers, and Pew is the one who’s done research on all the really intensive drilldown polling on Millennials—52 percent self-identify as independent, unaffiliated. Something like 30 percent are Democrats, and less than 20 percent self-identify as Republican. Now within that Republican cohort, whether they identify as conservatives is this other question. But the people that you get there at CPAC, I think they’re largely pro-gay. I think they’re largely pro-freedom,

because that’s just who their generation is. But they’re also in bed with the devil on that issue. And they’re not standing up to it [or] aware that the American Conservative Union, which sponsors CPAC, is basically sponsoring bigotry. ZIPPERER: I’ve got to ask you a question, because I think a lot of times when folks come across someone like you, a very outspoken and pro-gay Republican, they often want to throw out all these anti-gay comments made by Republicans. I’m more interested in how did you not end up that way? You come from one of the premier Republican conservative families in the country. How did your views not conflict with what you were taught? Or were you taught this way? HOOVER: No, I was deeply influenced by my great-grandfather, Herbert Hoover, who I never met. I read all his writings. He was a Quaker— ZIPPERER: I didn’t know that. HOOVER: One of my passions is reeducating Americans about Herbert Hoover, because people know nothing about him. What you think you know about him is like a modicum of it and it’s probably incorrect, and it’s just like a sliver of a 90-year life. But he was the first president to invite an African-American to the White House, openly. Teddy Roosevelt had had Booker T. Washington, but he had him in secret. There was a major scandal called the DePriest Incident when Hoover first got into office. My great grandmother [Lou Hoover] made the grave mistake of inviting all of the wives of Congress to the White House, one of them being an African-American woman who was the wife of an African-American congressman, [Oscar] DePriest. It enraged the Virginia delegation; they boycotted the tea, they sent a big letter to the White House. Herbert Hoover came home and Lou said, “I’m so sorry I screwed this up for you,” and he said “Are you kidding me?” And he issued an invitation directly to Congressman DePriest to come meet with him in the White House office. He didn’t have an Oval Office at the time; it was actually in the residence; the West Wing was configured differently. So Hoover was ... totally consistent with

“I think they’re largely pro-freedom, because that’s just who their generation is. But they’re also in bed with the devil on that issue.” the sort of political philosophy I was educated with growing up. I think the Republican Party has sort of ruefully and sadly moved away from this rugged individualism— which by the way doesn’t mean every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost; it means we’re this country and a society based on individuals, but individuals who do things within the context of their community, and that’s what American individualism is about. Rugged individualism is a term that Herbert Hoover coined, and it’s just totally consistent with the sense I have of the organizing principles of being sort of a center-right person. ZIPPERER: You’re in what might be called a mixed marriage: you’re Republican, your husband is not. HOOVER: He is not a Republican, he is not Democrat, either. I gave him a lot of pushback when we were first married. I said “If you’re not a Democrat, you’re not a Republican, you’re nothing.” [Laughter.] He’s what the majority of Americans are, he’s unaffiliated. They don’t think they have to buy into Brand A or Brand B in politics, and that’s what the Millennials are, too. They by the way have more consumer choices than anybody else. Why would they have to pick A or B in their politics, right? And so you know we really do approach it differently. I don’t think partisanship is terrible. I think hyper-partisanship can become a disease, and I think it has. So we quibble over the details, but I think in terms of core principles and values we’re pretty aligned. As are most Americans. MEOW: You brought up something that I so want to talk to you about, which is the nondiscrimination laws. There are these bills that are popping up all across those red states, and just this month we heard from places like North Carolina and Arkansas who are successfully passing bills that limit freedoms for LGBTQ people, especially in the work-

place. It doesn’t feel like we’re winning at all. It feels like for people who believe in freedom of all Americans, it’s a direct attack. What are your thoughts? HOOVER: It is a direct attack, and you’re not wrong about that the places where they’re thriving are in the American South and somewhat in the American West. But they are red states, and this is why the effort with Republicans is so critical, because your typical LGBT organizations who have fought these fights for so long, so meritoriously, and successfully have a reputation for being grounded in the progressive movement and don’t have as much credibility going into a red state talking to a red state governor or red state legislators on these issues. So I think what’s really fascinating is you’re seeing this transformation in the LGBT movement nationally toward truly an authentically bipartisan strategy that really focuses on how do you make these arguments—compelling arguments—that will win both at the ballot box—Heaven forbid you have to go there but you’re going to have to in some places, it’s just if you’re a tactician and a political strategist like me it’s a way more expensive way of winning, but it is necessary in key places. I mean we needed to win in Maine and Maryland and Minnesota and Washington. You needed those wins at the ballot box to demonstrate that we could win at the ballot box, right? To your point about nondiscrimination, there are people who are concerned about court cases and concerned about the marriage case because of backlash. They sort of liken it to Roe v Wade—if the Supreme Court rules broadly on marriage, will there be backlash? I think the answer unfortunately is yes. I think we need to be aware of that and prepare for it. By the way, the Arkansas, North Carolina initiatives popped up without it. [Anti-gay forces] mishandled [the Arizona] one so WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

“This sort of snuck up on them, because the activists on the other side are organized and they’re striking while the iron’s hot.” badly, because it was such a broad discrimination law. It wasn’t just about gay people, it was about basically anybody, because for any reason you could justifiably discriminate. They overreached, and there was a backlash against that. They’ve gotten smarter. So what they’re doing is they’re creating Religious Freedom Restoration Acts all over the country, which is really the final frontier of the political gay rights movement in this country in terms of achieving full political freedom and equality. That’s what the next four years is going to look like, especially if the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage. It’s a massive education effort in these red states. For example, I was just on the phone with a bunch of activists from Arkansas, and they swear their state is way more libertarian than you would think but the numbers are terrible there and businesses are against it. The state legislators and electeds when they learn about it are against it, but this thing sort of snuck up on them because the activists on the other side are organized and they’re sort of striking while the iron’s hot. I think this is really going to be a serious battle over the next four to six years. Our goal is to have LGBT incorporated into the nation’s civil rights laws federally by 2020. ZIPPERER: So as you’re doing this, name some of your Republican allies in doing it. Who are some of the names that maybe people don’t realize are actually helping out in these fights. HOOVER: There’s a ton of people in the state that are working. I mean, for example, there are 230 Republican state legislators who have voted for the freedom to marry in their state legislatures and not lost their seats because of it. There is a really broad coalition of Republicans from state to state who by the way learn from each other, like when the battle comes to their state legislators from the state who have passed it are able to share their experiences with other legislators and 26

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say, “Hey, you know you can take this vote. You know the polling and trust this organization helping you. They helped me.” So you really, really have to be tactical and smart to teach it as a movement in this next phase. In Congress, we’ve gone from like one to 13 or 14 members of Congress, senators and U.S. House members, who are fully in favor of the freedom to marry. The latest example is this court case that the Supreme Court is going to consider; several senators and members of Congress [have backed it]. ZIPPERER: And I believe David Koch is one them—though he’s not a Republican, of course. HOOVER: And David Koch signed it, too. MEOW: When I’m looking into 2016 and there are some rumors of some potential presidential candidates, obviously people are talking about Hillary Clinton, people are throwing Jeb Bush in there. It’s interesting [that] Jeb Bush has hired an out gay conservative communications person. HOOVER: Full disclosure, [it’s] somebody I’ve worked with and know pretty well MEOW: What are your thoughts? Is that the result of a new party forming, of new ideas being inclusive of LGBT people? Or is this all a strategy? HOOVER: I wouldn’t say it’s as sinister as being a strategy, except for that he’s an incredibly excellent communications person. So to the extent that that’s a strategy, you want to hire the best people. Look, Jeb Bush isn’t a bigot, either. It’s an important thing to remember when we talk about all these Republicans; even if they’re not fully in favor of the freedom to marry yet, my tactic as a Republican is to support them on the journey toward evolution. Right? You never want to call out Obama for being a bigot for not being for marriage yet; you just helped him get there, and then eventually he got there. There are Republicans like Jeb Bush; you

know, they’re traditionalists, they’re Catholic, their faith really informs them, and it’s a process. It’s really a process. We continue to support and help them on that process, and not call them a bigot and force them into their corner, [but] hope that they’ll eventually get there. Certainly Bush’s public comments have gotten much better. I think they have reflected frankly the change in the country and the change of heart the country has had. As people know more and more people get married, they realize the institution of marriage is getting stronger not weaker with gay people getting married; they realize it is sort of “no harm, no foul.” In fact it’s probably getting better, all things being equal. So I think there’s hope for Jeb. There’s hope for everyone, frankly. I don’t want to say there’s no hope for Rick Santorum; maybe there is hope for Rick Santorum. But you know I’d probably put my money on Jeb over Rick Santorum. ZIPPERER: Did you see the story about the Log Cabin Republicans here in California finally being recognized by the state GOP? I guess they were the first state GOP to actually recognize them as an official group. HOOVER: I didn’t hear that story. It’s great. It was a recent development? The California Republican Party, I hate to sort of throw stones or call a kettle black, because the New York Republican Party—it’s just an absence, almost. But it’s crazy, some of these big states that had robust Republican traditions like New York and California that really, really depend on a modernized Republican Party just recently recognized the Log Cabin Republicans? Seems a little bit behind the times, but I’m delighted they’ve done it. MEOW: I know that you’re a new mom, so do you think [son] Jack will grow up to be a Republican or Democrat? HOOVER: Jack is going to make his own decision. But you know he’s going to be fully informed, he’s going to have all of the [information]. We’re going to go through liberal and progressive philosophy and ideology as well as conservative and sort of American individualism philosophy. We’re going to introduce him to everything and then let him find his way. zs

WAY-BACK MACHINE

Herbert Hoover, Millennial #1

Hoover eulogizes her great-grandfather as a proto-youth Having a former president as a relative hasn’t launched many people into successful political careers, but Margaret Hoover, the greatgranddaughter of President Herbert Hoover, has made a good career as a political commentator, author, and Republican strategist. She is also worried about the future of her GOP if it can’t build connections to the Millennial generation. An excerpt from her July 26, 2011, speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. ••• ho are the millennials? I’m just going to go to three things that we should know about them. First, they have a positive view of government. They think government should work and can work. Consider the following question—agree or disagree: When something is run by the government, it is usually managed inefficiently and wastefully. Forty-two percent of millennials agree; 58 percent think that the government is really good at running things. That means that Reagan’s “government is the problem” line simply isn’t going to work. Incidentally, invoking Reagan generally isn’t going to work, either. The oldest millennials were eight years old when he left office. So that visceral reaction that people who saw the Reagan revolution get when we invoke Reagan isn’t going to work for this generation. Second, when it comes to social issues, millennials are the least-traditional generation in America. They adhere least to traditional family structure. They have been raised with more single-parent households. They are the least religious generation. Only a quarter of them identify with organized religion, though 67 percent of them say they pray every day and they consider themselves very spiritual. And they are the only generation where a majority believes in same-sex marriage. They just couldn’t be bothered at all by sexual orientation as an issue. It doesn’t even faze them, and that is an important generational difference. Also, the culture wars of the ’90s with women’s rights and abortion rights is not a third rail in politics for them. It just isn’t going to rally them to the polls one way or another. They’ve basically arrived at an organic consensus about abortion. They believe it’s morally wrong, but they don’t believe it should be illegal. Third, their politics are pragmatic, not

ideological. So 40 percent of them call themselves moderate, only 29 percent liberal, 28 percent conservative. But they pride themselves on being pragmatic. I think this is why Barack Obama’s rhetoric really appealed to them. Barack Obama was about not red states or blue states but the United States of America. He was about a government that worked. Given these three things, the issue for Republicans is how we communicate with them in a way that is going to get traction. For the conservative movement and the Republican Party, the way forward for 2012 is to focus not on social issues but on economic issues and fiscal issues. [Millennials] are 37 percent unemployed or underemployed. While President Obama is still personally popular—therefore [blaming] him personally isn’t going to work—we can make the case for a pro-growth economic agenda and describe what that means, and then we have some real traction. They’re not working; they’re open to this idea. In these debates about debt and deficits, we should be talking in terms of generational theft, because the spending that is going on—every dollar that the government has spent is a dollar that you, me, and my peers are going to have to pay back, with interest—is nothing more than generational theft. No one my age thinks we’re going to get Social Security or Medicare. The Republicans are the ones who have represented the real hope and change and not Washington politics as usual, because we have not punted. The Republicans are the ones who have taken the fiscal future of the next generation seriously, by offering real alternatives and turning the ship around in Washington in the last 12 months. When I began to think about how to connect millennials to the Republican Party, I realized that Herbert Hoover embodied much of the ethos of the millennial generation 80 years before the first of them were born. He was a technologist. He pioneered and regulated radio waves so that radio could be a thriving commercial industry in this country. He was the first individual— not president—ever to appear on television. In his mining career, he developed several mining technologies, which at the time was a cutting-edge career that he actually learned in the heart of the Silicon Valley, at Stanford. He was a globalist. The millennials are more connected internationally and more globally

oriented than any generation before them. Herbert Hoover, before he was president, had circumnavigated the globe five times, before the advent of aviation, had worked on four continents, visited six. He was truly the most global president that the country had ever seen. Also dedicated to public service. He was the great humanitarian. This generation, 83 percent of them have volunteered at least once in the past year. They value public service. And he believed that government could work [and] be part of the solution. He wanted to try to inoculate the United States from trying on the fad of “isms” that Europe was experimenting with—Bolshevism, communism, socialism. He tried to reverse-engineer America, crystallize it down to its essence. He decided that the “ism” in America was individualism, an individualcentered society that was tempered by the notion of equality of opportunity. He knew that his story, because of that ideal, wasn’t possible in any other country in the world. He was born a frontier orphan of no means. He gave a speech [in 1928] here in California called “Rugged Individualism.” He said America had a choice of two futures: choose between “the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines, doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. … Every step of bureaucratizing of the business of our country poisons the very roots of liberalism—that is political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press and equality of opportunity. It is not the road to more liberty, but to less liberty.” I am struck by how relevant that is to our debates today. These are the themes and the riffs that we hear in the gatherings of the Tea Party. This is the theme and the riff that we hear in the financial regulatory reform debate, that the over-bureaucratizing and regulation of business saps individual initiative and saps economic opportunity. If this is the choice in 2012, we can make the case in a way that millennials will choose the system of Herbert Hoover’s individualism over the alternative. WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

zippererstrasse JANUARY 2017

The Last Prime Minister

David Cameron gambled on Brexit, and he lost a kingdom.

hen you have had centuries of prime ministers, it can be a challenge to select the best and the worst. Since Sir Robert Walpole kicked off his career in that role (if not with that title) by cleaning up a messy financial and slavery scandal in 1721, Great Britain has had the guidance of prime ministers with a wide range of views, talents, and problems. But David Cameron will go down in history as the prime minister who be a pipe dream, but it means Cameron’s successors will spend much of their time running around putting out regional fires instead of grand national scheming. The economic fallout also started immediately, and it will continue longer than the political. Stock markets around the world went on a see-saw for several sessions after the Brexit vote, first diving then reviving then diving and reviving. More troublesome for the UK is the longer-term economic decision-making that will take place as businesses—especially financial services firms, but not exclusively those businesses—either freeze, scale back, or abandon altogether their activity in Great Britain, opting instead for calmer environments elsewhere, especially on the European continent itself. On the social side, much has been made about the now artificially shortened horizons of the UK’s young people. It was younger generations who had made use of the free movement across Europe to go to school, make friends, find jobs, or just vacation. Should they head back to Old Blighty or should they apply for citizenship in Berlin or Madrid? And then there is the effect of the UK’s decision on its partners in Europe and North America. WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

photo: Limojoe

invited his people to dismantle the nation. They obliged, he resigned, and Great Britain became less great. With a significant 71.8 percent voter turnout for the June 23 referendum, the “leave” camp beat the “remain” camp 52–48 percent, which is a convincing margin of victory, and which has surely played a role in swatting down calls for a rerun of the referendum. The breakdown of the country’s vote helps delineate the ongoing breakdown of the country itself; according to the BBC, England voted to leave (53.4–46.6 percent), as did Wales (52.5–47.5 percent); Scotland strongly voted to remain (62–38 percent), as did Northern Ireland (55.8–44.2 percent). The bulk of the population is in England, so its vote carried the day. The political fallout for the UK was immediate. The ruling Tories, the main opposition Labour, and the right-wing UK Independence Party all underwent leadership upheavals in the days following the vote. The future of the very nation is at stake, with Scotland eager to remain in the European Union and more than happy to reconsider remaining in the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland also began talking about united with Ireland proper; it might

In happier times: (left to right) Lord Coe, chair of the London Organising Committee of the 2012 Olympic Games, with Boris Johnson and Prime Minister David Cameron.

From Downing Street comes reassuring talk about all things being okay, everything’s under control, we’ll manage it all, we’ll keep calm and stagger on. But Cameron’s gift to his country has ensured that that is only empty talk. This was a historic mistake that the UK will rue for years to come. End of the Isles Considering Great Britain’s future in perspective offers reasons to calm down and to worry. First, the good news. Brexit does not mean the death of England, nor Great Britain (however generally that is defined). Britain will continue; it will remain one of the stronger economies in the world; it will be a liberal democracy and a member of the Western alliance. But that does not mean Brexit won’t hurt the United Kingdom. The Bank of England cut interest rates to a miniscule 0.25 percent in a probably futile attempt to prevent a recession, and the country lost its coveted AAA credit rating. Various UK companies, such as airline Ryanair, reported expectations of a hit to their businesses from the Brexit vote. And on the social scene, the country got a black eye from the immediate rise in racist and xenophobic attacks, including the August 27 murder of a 40-year-old Polish man 30

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Britain will continue to be a liberal democracy and a member of the Western alliance. in Essex. The increasing numbers of attacks drew rebukes from the United Nations and from the country’s own Equality and Human Rights Commission. German officials reported that there were thousands of British ex-pats applying for German citizenship. Officials from at least two of the country’s major parties were talking about allowing post-Brexit Brits to hold dual citizenship, something the country has been loath to do for non-EU countries. Frankfurt is looking to cash in as at least some of the euro-denominated banking moves from London to the continent, once the “passport” that allows UK financial services firms to deal in the eurozone is lost. And, perhaps most galling of all, the United States has been shifting its “special relationship” from the UK to Germany for years; that will only accelerate in the wake of Brexit. Germany itself stands to both win and lose in this situation. The country was strongly in favor of the UK remaining in the EU; right before the vote, major newsweekly Der Spiegel even published a special bilingual edition with a reduced cover price begging the UK to vote to stay. Germany’s postwar presence in Europe was stabilized by its partnership with the United States, which established an interna-

tional defense system that allowed Germany to not fear for its borders (nor to dream of foreign intervention). Politically its European anchor was its new friendship with France, and the two formed the—forgive the term—axis of a more unified and peaceful Europe. As the two helped build up the common market (which later grew into the EU), the relationship had economic benefits to both. But in the new century, the economic trajectories of the two neighbors have diverged, with Germany retooling its business and labor laws powering ahead while France dithered (remember the 35-hour work week?) and fell behind. (In 2012, thenPresident Sarkozy famously said he wanted France to be more German, something not likely to have been uttered in the previous century.) This growing economic distance between the two close allies isn’t dangerous; but it did mean that Berlin came to rely on London as a free-market counterweight within the EU to offset the French and southern European penchant for industrial policy and backroom deals. With the UK to be out of the EU within a few years, if negotiations proceed on schedule, Germany and a few other smaller northern European states will find themselves more isolated in their efforts to impose budget discipline on an economically inter-

CULPABILITY

Time to Blame Helmut Kohl? Europe’s problems are not without fathers

linked but politically separated EU. It is the ironic end of centuries-old British policy in Europe. London had long sought to ensure that no hegemon arose on the continent. (That is more legend than literal reality, because of course the continent saw many hegemons, from the Habsburgs to the Russians to the Soviets to the Americans, but still, it was their policy.) Now Germany is increasingly being forced to play openly what it had preferred to avoid or to play quietly: it is the main power in the EU. No

photos: John Zipperer

photo: WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

few years ago, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl took to task current Chancellor Angela Merkel for her handling of the European debt crisis. “She’s destroying my Europe,” Der Spiegel quotes him as complaining. Kohl later disowned some of the comments he’d made and clarified, “It is true that I—like many people—am worried about the development in Europe and of the euro. I also see it as urgently necessary that the supposed euro crisis isn’t regarded and discussed as a structural crisis of the euro per se, but as what it is: The result of homemade mistakes and challenges for both sides—Europe and the national states.” The British press in particular likes to display great impatience with the way the fiscally responsible states (led by Germany, but also including smaller northern European nations) have dealt with the—there’s no kind way to put it—disastrously fiscally irresponsible states. The answer seems to be that the responsible states should just take on the burdens created by the irresponsible ones, without forcing the bad apples to rectify the structural problems that led to this disaster in the first place. Merkel has been slow and, yes, unimaginative, but she has also been largely correct: She has staked her reputation and political future on saving the eurozone, but she is also dedicated to forcing Greece, Italy, and others to learn to live like adult countries and not like teenagers who’ve just scored their parents’ credit card for the weekend.

But we are still left with the ungenerous conclusion that Kohl himself should shoulder much of the blame. He, with France’s then-President Francois Mitterand, cooked up the euro scheme as a way of mollifying European nations (Italy and France among them) that were worried about German reunification. The aging World War II generation still feared Germany, despite its decades of performance as an exemplary democracy. It wasn’t all a matter of that, because the European Union had been growing and solidifying for years, extending a zone of prosperity and law across a continent that had been destroyed countless times by conflict. So a common currency was a likely development at some point. But it’s early introduction was intended to tie Germany closely enough to its neighbors that it theoretically would not go off marauding through the neighborhood again. As such, it wasn’t a bad idea. An unnecessary one, perhaps; there is absolutely zero appetite in Germany for fighting wars. But still, an understandable idea nonetheless. What is not understandable is how Mit-

one seriously thinks modern Germany is a threat to the union or to its neighbors; but neither Germany nor its neighbors want the Fatherland to be seen as throwing around its weight, which these days is primarily economic, cultural, and political. From the U.S. point of view, Brexit will matter less than it matters to the UK. The British had been the Americans’ conduit into the EU, but President Barack Obama found a reliable partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is the undisputed leader of

terand and Kohl, two veteran politicians who supposedly learned from the mistakes of the past, could concoct a system that is structurally illogical. Economic union without some sort of political union to enforce it is a recipe for disaster. In fact, it is a recipe for the disaster that actually happened, with Greece, Spain, Ireland, and others needing hundreds of billions of euros to bail them out, but with no federal budget authority to rein them in. It could lead to large countries forcing their policies down the throats of smaller countries, which is what Merkel is being accused of doing by trying to get the poor performers to reform their economies and politics to make themselves competitive; or it could lead to poor countries overspending and expecting the rich countries to bail them out, which is the situation that has happened and that Merkel tried to rectify. Merkel is trying to clean up the mess that Kohl created. If the euro was the first price Kohl and Germany paid to get reunification, then Greece, Ireland, and Italy have just presented the official invoice.

the EU (for all of its problems). The UK has been looking less and less like a stable partner for years, with existential votes on Scottish independence and now on leaving the European Union; the latter was followed by the complete disarray within the country’s political parties. Meanwhile, the Germans continue to be boring but stable and wellbehaved. Though the Wikileaks release of stolen U.S. government communications revealed that top American leaders considered Angela Merkel to be boring and unimaginaWEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

IS THIS COUNTRY FOR SALE?

Why Brexit Didn’t Deliver a President Donald Trump But something else did

resident-elect (as of this writing) Donald Trump chortled that his brand of anti-establishment populism had gotten a shot in the arm in late June when the UK voted to leave the European Union. According to the Washington Post, Trump addressed the press the morning after the vote and drew connections between Brexit and his candidacy: I think I see a big parallel.... A lot of people are talking about that, and not only the United States, but other countries. People want to take their country back. They want to have independence, in a sense, and you see it with Europe, all over Europe. You’re going to have more than just—in my opinion, more than what happened last night, you’re going to have, I think many other cases where they want to take their borders back.... They want to be able to have a country again. So, I think you’re going have this happen more and more. I really believe that, and I think it’s happening in the United States. It’s happening by the fact that I’ve done so well in the polls. You look at the recent polling, and you look at the swing states and you see how I’m doing, and I haven’t even started my campaign yet, essentially. That statement contains so much of what you need to know about Trump, so you can make an informed guess about events in Europe and the United States. Trump realizes, as do extremists on the left and the right from France to Hungary to America, that the number of people who have been excluded, impoverished, and punished

tive, she has proven to be sober and a levelheaded leader in Europe right at the same time that other countries seem to be losing their heads. Right-wing proto-authoritarian governments of one sort or another have popped up in Hungary and Poland, and Ukraine remains a burning tire fire right on Europe’s front porch. British prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher on have made themselves occasional thorns in the side of continental Europeans who wanted ever-closer cooperation. 32

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in this era of globalization is vast, and it doesn’t even matter if the proffered solution (Brexit or Trump’s rich-friendly grabbag of economic ideas) helps or further hurts those people. That has people asking whether Brexit was a harbinger for Trump to surprise everyone here with a victory in November. It’s debatable. First of all, Brexit immediately resulted in remorse and second-guessing in the UK. The pro-Brexit campaigners were not clear (some would claim they flatout lied) about Brexit’s costs, but now they were becoming clear and real. Towns that had been major recipients of EU money and had few immigrants but still voted by more than 60 percent for Brexit and to “take their country back” are going to be seriously worse off. The leaders of Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU, are talking about another referendum to leave the UK so they can stay in the EU. Another less-likely breakup is threatened in Northern Ireland, whose leaders have talked about union with Ireland. People who thought they were making a cost-free protest vote found themselves looking at years of paying the cost of that vote. Young people—strong supporters of the EU but not big on the whole idea of actually voting—face serious pain, with fewer professional and personal opportunities. Finally, let us look at Trump’s last paragraph. He said he is doing well in recent polling—though it has been quite bad, with him consistently trailing Hillary Clinton. But the more telling statement is “and I haven’t even started my campaign yet, essentially.” Clinton has. Even while she was fending off Senator Sanders, she had been But they had a voice, they had a role, they got economic benefits, and now they will have none of that. Germany’s long-time paramour France is facing perhaps its second presidential election of modern times in which one of the two top-polling parties will be the populist, right-wing, nationalist, anti-immigrant National Front, now led by the savvy Marine Le Pen, daughter of that party’s founder. “Two very different women hold Europe’s future in their hands—and neither of them

battling Trump. While Trump was having one of the worst couple weeks of his campaign— fighting fraud allegations about Trump University, battling with the GOP, dealing with his under-staffed and intra-feuding campaign, and mishandling the Orlando massacre—Clinton was doing the job of a pro: She ran ads and made speeches and lined up ever-more supporters and she was defining Trump. She pounded him with big ad buys in those swing states, she unleashed blunt attacks on him through her surrogates, and she pulled in high-profile endorsers (the Obamas, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and others) who immediately went after Trump. While Trump was sitting around thinking he hadn’t even begun the race, Clinton was ensuring that he had already lost it. Except he didn’t. The only winner in all of this is Putin’s Russia, which really is the difference. Putin (and, well, the FBI) tipped the scales in Trump’s favor, so Trump won despite the Brexit backlash, despite the Clinton machine, despite a strong economy and everything else that should have ensured an eight-year Clinton presidency. is Theresa May,” wrote The Guardian’s Natalie Nougayrède in early September, referring to Le Pen and Merkel. Attack of the Cons The Brexit vote will go down in history as one of the most needless shots-in-the-foot a nation made. There has been much spoken about how this was a massive protest of the have-nots against the haves, the outs against the ins. If that is the case, then this whole debacle was a double tragedy.

photo: UK HOME OFFICE

First, it didn’t need to happen. To address the concerns of the have-nots and the outs, political leaders should have crafted policies to meet their needs, to ensure that a wider range of the people in the UK were benefiting from the wealth created by globalization and economic modernization. Now, if they decide to address their concerns, they will have fewer economic resources and less trading potential to create new wealth to get more economic resources, so they now have a smaller pie to share with the disgruntled masses. Other European leaders seem to have gotten that lesson from Brexit; what at first shock threatened to touch off a firestorm of Brexit-fueled populist revolts across the EU has instead sobered up establishment parties and made them realize that these fringe issues, these protest votes, have

This was David Cameron taking the country’s entire prosperity hostage for political gain. In soccer parlance, it was an “own goal.” real consequences that could make them go down in history as losers. Second, this was David Cameron taking the country’s entire prosperity hostage for personal political gain. He made his promise to hold an EU referendum in an attempt to shore up his and his party’s place in power, but it backfired. He failed. It was an “own goal,” in soccer parlance. Writer Jonathan Freedland described it thusly in The New York Review of Books in August of this year: It was, chiefly, an exercise in party management. In 2013 the Tory right was restive, fearful that UKIP was threatening to eat into its vote. Cameron had just legalized same-sex marriage in England and Wales, against the wishes of both his own hard-liners and the nostalgists and social conservatives who have long formed UKIP’s core. Anxious to placate his Tory critics and to halt any momentum for UKIP, he gave them what they wanted: a pledge to hold an in/out referendum on Europe by 2017. That way, he calculated, they could be neutralized in time for the general election of 2015.... But Cameron did not bargain on the most popular politician in the country—the former mayor of London Boris Johnson—deciding, at the last moment, to campaign for Leave rather than Remain. ... Nor did Cameron reckon sufficiently with the midterm syndrome by which British voters traditionally use

any ballot that is not a general election to flip a finger at the government of the day. That is how we came to the odd moment in which a prime minister who had won a decisive reelection victory, who was enjoying the effects of a rebounding economy, who was a smart and agile politician, nonetheless found himself suddenly out of a job. In his final question time in Parliament, Cameron accepted congratulations from MPs, including opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. He quipped that “apart from one meeting in the afternoon with the Queen, my diary is remarkably light.” He was rewarded with good-natured laughter, but his colleagues must have been gobsmacked by the size of the self-inflicted wound. David Cameron is no slouch, no sadsack buffeted about by the winds of popular opinion. If it weren’t for Brexit, his list of achievements (from legalizing same-sex marriage to a host of other modernizing moves) would be his memorial. He was also good at the on-your-feet battle required of British politicians. In his thrust-and-parry with his Labour opponents in Parliament, Cameron showed himself to be a talented verbal swordsman, skewering Labour’s under-siege leader Jeremy Corbyn even as he acknowledged his own political doom in the wake of the Brexit vote. About two dozen members of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet had resigned in protest of his weak leadership following the Brexit debacle, leading

Cameron to welcome a new Labour member of Parliament to the chamber, and good naturedly ribbing her: “I think I’d advise her to keep her mobile phone on; I think she might be in the shadow cabinet by the end of the day.” Rubbing salt in the wound of Corbyn’s cabinet implosion, Cameron then added “and I thought I was having a bad day.” In another parliamentary exchange, Cameron reacted to a suggestion from Corbyn— in which the Labour leader tied the EU referendum’s results to worries about increased poverty—by attacking Corbyn’s own lackluster efforts for the Remain camp. “I know the honourable gentleman says he put his back into it. All I’d say, I’d hate to see him when he’s not trying.” And he wasn’t done. “If he’s looking for excuses about why the side he and I were on [lost] the referendum, frankly he should look somewhere else. And I have to say to the honourable gentleman, he talks about job insecurity with my two months to go. It might be in my party’s interest for him to sit there. It’s not in the national interest. I would say: For heaven’s sake, man, go.” Zippererstrasse probably isn’t the most Anglophile publication in the world, but we would dearly love to see American politicians with that wit and dead-on aim engage in such verbal combat. Cameron is clearly a talented politician, but when he needed to draw upon that talent for the country’s good, he stumbled fatally, harming his country, his party, and his people. But now Cameron is out of office, replaced by Theresa May as the new Tory leader and the prime minister. When he announced his resignation, it was greeted as an appropriate move for someone who had gambled so broadly on his country’s future and had lost. Right at the end of June, with the UK still in shock from the Brexit vote, Lord Chancellor and justice minister Michael Gove announced that he would seek to replace David Cameron as Tory leader (and thus prime minister), and Boris Johnson promptly announced that he would not seek to succeed Cameron. “Party before country” should be a sin everywhere; here, it threatened to deliver unto us Boris Johnson. If there is good news for Britain and its allies alike in this entire story, it is that they were spared the experience of having Johnson move into 10 Downing Street. Cameron paid with his career (and definitely his legacy) for his decision to hold a vote on the UK’s European Union membership, so it is indeed appropriate that he resigned so quickly. The only better time for him to have resigned would have been the day before he made the decision to hold the referendum. zs WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse

photo: bain news service

books, arts, & culture

WORLD WAR I

A War of Distraction

Erik Larson goes to great depths to find Germany’s weapon of choice

f, thousands of years from now, popular historians remember American transportation in terms of our successes in space, the Germans deserve to be remembered for two things, each quite distinct from each other. First, airships—zeppelins, giant flying bags of hot air that are dramatic and majestic but that failed to catch on in the jet age. The second contribution travels far below: submarines. Germans did not invent submarines, but they made the U-boat a signature German weapon of war in an attempt to compete with British and American superiority at sea. For every American who watched Das Boot to see how the Germans fought World War II, there is a good argument to

be made that they can get the same experience by reading Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Erik Larson’s retelling of the German U-boat that sunk the Lusitania, one of the major events that eventually drew the United States into the maelstrom of the European Great War. One of the historical niceties of the modern age is that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany for the first time in its entire history was completely surrounded by allies, friends, or at least non-belligerents. But it is hard to look at Germany’s position in World War I and not see it as a loser from the start. It had arrayed against it the biggest powers on the continent, while its allies were the ailing powers of the continent (and

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indeed, imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Ottoman empire would all be swept away by the war). The seas were controlled by the British, and on land Germany was hemmed in by Russia and France. What Germany had in its favor was a strong economy, a burgeoning population, the world’s best scientists, a prolific and popular cultural, and its military. Still, looking at the players during that war, the advantage would have to go to the anti-German allies, and that meant Germany saw its only way of victory to be through unconventional actions and strategies. Larson is smart not to try to explain the entire war, its aims, and how Europe got there. His

books typically take a fairly tight focus on individuals involved in one aspect of a much larger occurrence. His groundbreaking 2003 book The Devil in the White City illuminated the rapid changes happening in big-city Chicago and the social and behavioral changes people were experiencing at the time; but he didn’t essay an overall report on the 1893 World’s Fair. Instead, he focused on the architects of the fair and on a murderous doctor who took advantage of newcomers to the city at the time. Both helped us learn more about what was changing and why it was changing in the bigger scheme of things, but it was done on a very human and detailed scale. (A good companion book is Karen Abbott’s 2008 book Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul.) With Dead Wake, published 100 years after the Lusitania sunk, Larson once again gives us a day-by-day and at times hour-by-hour account of the incident, starting before the vessels left their respective ports and ending after the deadly deed has been accomplished. Aboard the Lusitania are the rich and famous and the poor and struggling, and before you start worrying that you’re getting a prose treatment of James Cameron’s Titanic, you can relax knowing that Larson sticks more closely to the historical record in his retelling of the people on the ship. Unlike Titanic, Dead Wake gives both sides of the story (well, assuming you aren’t interested in an iceberg’s tale of destruction). Larson does a great job fleshing out the life and motivations of Walther Schwieger, the 30-year-old captain of U-20, the sub that killed the Lusitania, as well as the rationale and practices of the German navy’s lead-

image: the illustrated london news

Left: German submarines at Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, on February 17, 1914; U 20 is one of the subs in the image. Above: “Sinking of the Lusitania,” an engraving by Norman Wilkinson published in The Illustrated London News, May 15, 1915. ers. Schwieger himself, though one of the most successful of the Kaiser’s sub captains, would not live to see the end of the war; he died in 1917 when another sub he captained hit a British mine. About 1,200 people drowned in the Lusitania’s sinking, 128 of them Americans. Though a passenger ship, the British-flagged vessel was also carrying munitions, a fact to which Germany would point in defending its action. One of the phrases schoolchildren learn when studying World War I is “unrestricted submarine warfare,” which was —depending on your view—either a war crime or Germany’s only chance of fighting the war on the seas. Starting in 1915, Germany targeted any and all

ships in its declared naval war zone around Britain, even neutral ships. The sinking of the Lusitania did not draw America into the first world war; it would be a couple more years before that happened. But the official U.S. reaction to it did pressure Germany into effectively suspending unrestricted submarine warfare. It would resume the policy in 1917 as the country’s war position became increasingly dire; it was that resumption that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson used as one of the reasons for entering the war. An historical article on the U.S. State Department’s website recounts it: “On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson cited Germany’s violation of its pledge to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and its attempts to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States, as his reasons for declaring war.”

Within a few days, the Senate and then the House granted the president’s request to join the war. The United States would provide the needed power for England and France to win the war, and the German empire was shattered. Germany continues to be a submarine power, at least in terms of manufacturing and selling them around the world. Though the Deutsche Marine (German Navy) only has six submarines in service, the country’s submarine manufacturers have clients around the world, and its government leaders actively lobby foreign governments to purchase Germanmade subs. One of the more interesting sales might still be wending its way through the final stages of agreement as you read this. In late 2016, Israel agreed to pay $1.3 billion for three new submarines from Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. The fact that Israel’s arch-enemy Iran reportedly owns a 4.5 percent share in ThyssenKrupp, thanks

to an investment made in the early 1970s by the Shah, just makes it a bit more newsworthy than usual. Germany sells submarines to a number of countries, including Greece and other NATO allies. But in 2011, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that the country was subsidizing the submarine sales to Israel as part of Holocaust reparations commitments made but never fulfilled by East Germany and assumed by unified Germany. The magazine said the deal, which reached back to the 1990s, began with the subs being totally paid for by the German government, with declining percentages of subsidy as time went on. Germany is paying for 30 percent of the cost of the subs in the latest deal. Whether it involves World War I, World War II, or future wars, submarines are intimately tied to Germany and Germany’s fortunes. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson, Broadway Books, 2015, 480 pages zs WEIMAR.WS WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse zippererstrasse 35 35

IN BRIEF

Worth a Look

Zippererstrasse’s roundup of short reviews of books, films, podcasts, and other media History of Germany (podcast, by Travis Dow, variable length, ongoing, available on iTunes and Google Play): Part of what makes this enjoyable, in addition to the learning of new information, is the personality of the podcast narrator, Travis Dow. He seldom comes across as if he’s reading from a script; he sounds more like he’s explaining this to you at a particularly interesting party or casual meeting. He’s also family friendly; Dow has done a number of episodes that were co-productions with other podcasts, such as a French history one or a Chinese history podcast; the French episode was particularly enjoyable, not least because Dow, who rarely swears in his podcast and when he does it’s of a negligible sort, endured the good-natured ribbing of his two French podcasting buddies, who, well, you’d have to pardon their French quite a bit. History of Rome (podcast, by Mike Duncan, variable length, complete, available on iTunes and Google Play): In 191 episodes, Duncan takes you from the mythical founding of Rome to the last shattered remains of the empire. Though pretty obviously reading from a script, which removes any sense of spontaneity from the proceedings, Duncan does a nice job of presenting a fair report on the comings, conquerings, and goings of the major consuls, opponents, and emperors, and he devotes time to explaining what everyday life was like at various points of the empire’s existence. He also offers pragmatic reality checks on various long-held popular beliefs. All in all, an intelligent overview of the seminal empire of the West. Begin Again (film, by John Carney, 2013, The Weinstein

Company, 104 minutes): This is not a new film, but it was new to us when we caught it via on-demand recently. It tells the tale of a young singer-songwriter who connects (professionally) with a down-on-his-luck promoter, and they nudge each other toward redeeming themselves. It has its unrealistic side (the young singer gets upset with and finally gives up on her exboyfriend; she believes in nothing but her art, while he is more commercial; the breaking point comes when he sings a song she wrote but lapses into what we’re supposed to believe is a more commercial manner than she intended, but we frankly couldn’t tell the difference between the two versions, so it was a little precious); still, the movie kept our interest, the music was good, and thank goodness they resisted the knee-jerk Hollywood urge to make the two leads (Keira Knightly and Mark Ruffalo) fall in love. The Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715 (book, by Paul Hazard, 2013 reissue, New York Review of Books Classics, 480 pages): When Allan Bloom saw a big change occurring among American thinkers, he was worried and he called attention to it as a crisis. He produced Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, and it was an epochal jeremiad for social conservatives of the 1980s. Admittedly, many of them might not have read much of it, having been tuckered out just after reading the long title. In the 1930s, French scholar Paul Hazard produced a shorter-titled The Crisis of the European Mind, recounting the dramatic changes in thought in Europe (as if the title didn’t tell you that). What the title might

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2016, Belknap Press, 1,008 pages): Central Europe barely registers in much of the Western history taught in the United States; if it didn’t directly affect Britain, it didn’t happen. However, the entire 20th century revolved around the dysfunctions of middle Europe, and Peter H. Wilson’s new book helps explain some of how it got that way, tackling the pivotal role of the Holy Roman Empire. Reader beware: This book can get a bit bogged down in matching events to academic definitions, rather than telling the story of what is happening; this makes it a little difficult at times to enjoy, but it does not reduce the educational benefit of the book. One-sentence reviews Arts & Letters Daily (website, by The Chronicle of Higher Education, since 1998, aldaily.com): A fantastic collection of articles, essays, and more on books, art, philosophy, history, and more— all updated daily and drawing from a wide spectrum of ideas and ideologies. not have gotten across is that this is an optimistic look, because these were exciting and positive changes, representing a modernization of European intellectualism that resonated not only in the 1930s, when populist nationalist intellectual revanchism was sweeping around the world and routing liberalism, but in the modern world, today, when, well, populist nationalist pseudo-intellectual revanchism is sweeping around the world. Kudos to New York Review of Books Classics for reissuing this important book. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (book, by Peter H. Wilson,

Grandma (film, directed by Paul Weitz, 2015, Sony Pictures Classics, 79 minutes): Lily Tomlin is a talent we’d like to see more of, but this $600,000 film, which seems intent in hitting every UC Berkeley talking point (abortion, check; injure man’s genitals, check; lesbians, check; Betty Friedan book check, etc), feels more like the author was sharing his final project from his men’s encounter group therapy. Whiplash (film, directed by Damien Chazelle, 2014, Sony Pictures Classics, 106 minutes): Writer/director Chazelle accomplishes the rare feat of making a film without a single scene that is enjoyable to watch. zs

RELIGION

Centuries of Conflict, with Little Understanding

Tom Holland’s look at the foundation and growth of Islam reveals ties that should bind

s it the role of religious history to tell history straightup, or is it to be incendiary and partisan, or is it to bend history to create artificial peace between the faithful? Holland is an almost toogood-to-be-true historical writer. His Rubicon was addictively good, telling the story of the fall of the Roman republic in terms that ring particularly true today, when there are many parallel developments and similar persons and economic movements threatening our republic. Holland later took on the big topics of the Persian/Parthian empire, Christianity’s fragile moment around A.D. 1000, and then the origins and explosive growth of yet another large religious movement. You might have heard of it—Islam? Controversial? Guaranteed. But nonetheless good and thought-provoking? Absolutely. What is sure to raise the most hackles with this book—has already raised hackles with this book, actually, because it was published in 2012—is his calling into question how much is actually known about the first couple hundred years of Islam. The religion, he argues took many years to form, which would be an uncontroversial statement to make to anyone except those who believe it was fully formed with its founder, Mohammed. Toward that end, Holland cites research that shows intertwining and borrowing between the three big monotheistic religions. And within that, one of his more controversial arguments might be that many of the things about modern Islam that scare the bejeezus out of many non-Muslim Westerners (treatment of women, violence, etc.) were incorporated into Islam from Jewish and Christian schools of thought. Who should be upset now? Fundamentalist

Muslims? Liberal Christians? Secular Westerners? Jewish scholars? Writing a history of Islam would be a largely thankless task, one that would put the author in for a great deal of criticism—some of it ecclesiastical, some of it critical, some of it just politically correct. So naturally, In the Shadow of the Sword was praised and damned. Writing in The Telegraph, Dan Jones stated that Holland’s book “may reach provocative conclusions, but it is also a work of impressive sensitivity and scholarship.” The Independent’s Barnaby Rogerson said it is “a spell-bindingly

brilliant multiple portrait of the triumph of monotheism in the ancient world.” But The Guardian’s Glen Bowersock takes Holland to task over the use of sources of Qur’anic research who have veered from the mainstream: “The past 30 years have seen lively controversies in the scholarship on early Islam, much of it emanating from the revisionist work of John Wansbrough in analyzing the text of the Qur’an and its possible links with both Christian and Jewish language and thought. This is catnip for Holland.” He concludes by knocking Holland’s “cavalier treatment of his sources, igno-

rance of current research, and lack of linguistic and historical acumen” which “serve to undermine his provocative narrative.” (Holland later defended his work in that same paper and pointed out some “cavalier treatment” of research in Bowersock’s article.) Shortly after Holland’s book was published, Britain’s Channel 4 television company commissioned Islam: The Untold Story, a documentary hosted by Holland and drawing on his Shadow book. No surprise, it was controversial, and the channel reportedly cancelled a screening of it following many threats of violence. In a 2015 interview with Quadrapheme, Holland was asked about putting to paper his conclusions following his research. He replied, “When I write about Islam my anxiety, and the reason I always pull my punches, isn’t that I’m afraid I’ll be killed, it’s that I’m afraid to be drummed out of the liberal club.... [W]e’re getting sucked into a vision of Islam that’s all ‘radical chic.’ The sex, the violence, the misogyny and all the rest of it is being glamourised. We sit on a moral Möbius strip because in the cause of antiracism we can end up backing people promoting genocide. That’s insane.” If research into the history of Islam is as lively as Holland says it is, then this won’t be the last word by any means. But it could be the pot-stirrer among liberals. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World (cover of UK edition is shown above; the U.S. edition is subtitled The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire), by Tom Holland, Anchor Books (U.S. edition), 2012, 526 pages zs WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse zippererstrasse 37 37 WEIMAR.WS

TELEVISION

Prime Time for Political Satire

There has never been a better time for sharp and funny political humor on television

ers, James Corden, and Jimmy Kimmel—and we have a new golden age of sharp, funny, often impactful political satire. Thirty years ago, political satire was at a weak state in this country. Aside from an occasional Saturday Night Live gag, there wasn’t much of anything. There was in fact a real dearth of brave, sharp, and funny dissection of politics and politicians (and the people who vote for them). In 1993, along came Comedy Central’s Politically Incorrect (which later moved to ABC). Featuring a roundtable of usually non-political people opining on the issues of the day and described by Maher as “The McLaughlin Group on acid,” it was a rare example of pushing the boundaries of political discourse in this country. The show would be canceled in a fit of ABC-rage after Maher commented on President George W. Bush’s description of the 9/11 hijackers as “cowards” by saying “We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away—that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building? Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.” That’s tough. What is usually not remembered when people recount that story is that Maher was agreeing with a premise of far-right pundit Dinesh D’Souza, who was a guest on that show.

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Left to right: Samantha Bee (Full Frontal with Samantha Bee), Larry WIlmore (The Nightly Show), John Oliver (Last Week Tonight), Trevor Noah (The Daily Show), and Bill Maher (Real Time with Bill Maher). And it strangely fits well into what is essentially a comedy program. But nevertheless, Maher’s show was canceled and he was raptured up to an even better gig, the hour-long Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, where he has hung his hat for the past 14 seasons, engaging with (and sometimes watching dumbfoundedly) a panel of guests who range from actors to politicians to scientists to activists. Maher’s strength is putting his well-honed wit in service to his brave approach to politics. One of the best examples of this was in 2005, when he addressed President Bush with “On your watch, we’ve lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon, and the city of New Orleans. Maybe you’re just not lucky! I’m not saying you don’t love this country; I’m just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.” That’s satire with bite. It’s good satire; it’s provocative, it’s funny, and it’s a verbal slap in the face of the powerful. Best of all, it’s true. Sometimes Maher’s wrong, a little fundamentalist (don’t start a discussion with him about

meat, drugs, or pharmaceutical companies), but he appears to genuinely enjoy having people who disagree with him make strong arguments for their views and engage them in back-andforth discussion. In that sense, he’s a true liberal; liberalism after all relies upon a spirited dissection of ideas and proposals so that nothing becomes law or custom simply because it has always been done or because the loudest person in the room commanded attention. His HBO channel-mate John Oliver takes a different approach. Instead of a roundtable discussion with guests, Oliver is the sole focus of the show, taking viewers through a topic and piling on the facts and absurdities so high that at the end, the audience is left in disbelief of the reality he’s skewering. In one recent episode, he went on for about 19 minutes on the state of journalism, showing the decline in local newspaper staffs as well as newspapers’ adoption of “digital-first” strategies that focus on clicks and social media shares. In one amazing segment, Oliver shows a video of Tribune Co.’s then-owner Sam Zell, who made his fortune in commercial

Maher photo by angela george; BEE photo by Justin Hoch photographing for Hudson Union Society; wilmore photo by gage skidmore;noah photo by 1000heads; Oliver photo by david shankbone

uring a report on the socalled Bernie Bros, the take-no-prisoners, respect-no-one supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention, the reporter for the late-night satire show interviewed Bernie Bro after Bernie Bro. They complained about being marginalized, they shouted down DNC speakers, they talked about the system being rigged. They never stopped talking. Until the day they staged a walkout of the convention, heading elsewhere to silently protest the inevitable nomination of Hillary Clinton. Some of them taped their mouths shut and wrote protest words on the tape. Walking among a nowsilent group of Bros, the reporter marveled at how quiet they finally were: “It’s like a spa!” Delicious. The correspondent was from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, which airs on TBS. Bee is just one of the over-talented veterans to come out of the 15-year span of host Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central. She, along with Larry Wilmore, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert now make up a large part of the political satire contingent on American television. Add in Trevor Noah (Stewart’s Daily Show successor) and Bill Maher—as well as the less frequently overtly political Jimmy Fallon, Seth Mey-

real estate, speaking at a meeting of some of his journalists. When one of them says they have more important journalism to do than curate videos of cute puppies, Zell berates her, accusing her of “journalistic arrogance of deciding that puppies don’t count. . . . Hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq, okay? Fuck you.” Oliver’s report ends with a fake video of newspaper staffers debating the merits of serious coverage or covering cats that look like raccoons; raccoon cats win the day. Oliver’s lengthy rants that have gained widespread attention range from net neutrality to FIFA corruption to Brexit. No one was surprised that he is talented; he had successfully filled in for Jon Stewart when that host took a summer off to direct a film. But the consistently high quality and volume of his sharp satire is a surprise, because we wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to do that. As much as The Daily Show was a high point in political comedy, its changing of the guard from Stewart’s team to Trevor Noah’s team must be welcomed if for no other reason than it freed up so many of Stewart’s correspondents to go create satire gold elsewhere. When Stephen Colbert took the opportunity to succeed David Letterman as host of CBS’s The Late Show, Larry Wilmore moved from Stewart’s correspondent stable into Colbert’s old time slot. Wisely, he did not try to copy Colbert. Even better, he did not try to copy anybody. With The Nightly Show, he crafted a new kind of comedy halfhour program, the centerpiece of which was a roundtable in which he challenged his guests to give real answers to very controversial questions. The African-American Wilmore lost his show over the summer, an example of what some called the “un-blackening” of late-night television, but while it lasted it served as a breath of fresh air both in the worlds of political discussion and among political comedy programs.

And what of Trevor Noah, the replacement for St. Stewart? He appears to have increased the racial diversity of his correspondents and his guests, which is all to the good. But the show arguably has less bite than the Stewart version of the program. A decidedly negative take on Noah’s early tenure was delivered by Slate’s Willa Paskin in January: “I have found The Daily Show milquetoast and broad, diverting in the soothing way I associate with the Jimmys of network late night. On Trevor Noah’s Daily Show, outrages are an occasion for bemused laughter, not righteously funny indignation.” Is that bad? As much as an Oliver rant or a Maher cutting remark or a Bee verbal pummeling is great, every late-night political comedy show doesn’t have to be the same. But like Colbert over at CBS—whose show was largely a snore until he got energized by the summer political conventions and injected his show with his edgier material, revitalizing the program—Noah’s Daily Show will get better as he learns to do more of his own Daily Show. So far, it has seemed too much like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Sitting In for Jon Stewart. And we will see what that version of the show will be; there is good reason to believe it will be impressive, because Noah clearly is a talented comedian, and he is quite effective in those seeming asides, in which he seems to be chatting with the audience off-script but then ends with a good punch line. One of the very positive things that can be said about this group is that no two of them are alike. Their shows are not alike, their personalities are different, they present topics differently. If you are specifically looking for political satire with bite, Noah’s probably not your guy; we still need to look to the others for that. Such as Samantha Bee, who described the Republican National Convention as “the four-day blooper reel that was the Republican convention, a poorly attended rage-a-thon.” Delicious. zs

mysteries

A Summer Frankfurter Everyone Can Enjoy

Jakob Arjouni’s detective dares to take on the city

ystery novels about Germany that show up on our shores tend to be either reprints of World War II-era books or new novels set in that time. It’s an interesting milieu, but it’s unimaginative. Jakob Arjouni escaped those confines by writing mysteries set in modern-day Germany, dealing with very modern problems and featuring a refreshingly different kind of protagonist. Kemal Kayankaya is a German private eye, mostly working the underside of Frankfurt. He can be found dealing with the prostitutes, local mobsters, two-bit thugs, and other lowlifes among whom Kayankaya generally finds his life, his customers, and his friends. Kayankaya is Turkish-German. He deals with the everpresent prejudice against him the same way he deals with everything and everybody: with belligerent humor, a little violence that usually leaves him worse off than it leaves his opponent, and an unquestioned assurance that the other person is an idiot. He is foul-mouthed, fearless, and as likely to interrogate someone as he is to help himself

to the person’s liquor. He bends laws. He blackmails. He makes wisecracks, usually at the expense of the dull-witted and illintentioned people in his way. He is not above tripling his fees when he is on the receiving end of racial condescension from a rich client. Arjouni wrote only five Kayankaya novels before his death. Happy Birthday, Turk! introduces us to Kayankaya, who takes on the case of a murdered Turkish immigrant in Frankfurt’s red-light district. The police aren’t helpful, but Kayankaya keeps unraveling the story of the victim, his family, and the hookers who befriend and bedevil them all. In More Beer, Kayankaya is called upon to try to vindicate four eco-activists accused of murdering the owner of a chemical business. An immigrant prostitute is kidnapped in One Man, One Murder, and her German boyfriend hires Kayankaya to locate her. Kismet finds Kayankaya stumbling (literally, out of a cabinet) into a web of vicious Croatian mobsters. In the final book, Brother Kemal, and older, little more settled Kayankaya is serving two rich clients. These novels have only recently become widely available in the United States. The characters are engaging and the books are well written, but the Kayankaya novels are not without at least one recurring problem. Typos, mostly in the form of missing words, keep cropping up, not often enough to ruin the experience, but enough to annoy. As you stock up on novels to read during the new year, you would do well to grab a couple of Arjouni’s Kayankaya books. Brother Kemal, by Jakob Arjouni, Melville House, 2013, 192 pages zs WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse zippererstrasse 39 39 WEIMAR.WS

ancient history

The Dynasty that Rome Survived

Come for the catfights, stay for the shoulder pads and scenery chewing.

young upstart goes from obscurity to the most powerful person in the empire, killing, seducing, and enthralling his way to the top. To get his wife, he takes the pregnant wife of another; once married, he polices Romans’ morality—while continuing to carry on affairs left and right. After using gangster methods to gain power, he paradoxically becomes a ruler of tolerance and stability. He is Caesar Augustus, the man who changed history, changed Rome, and founded a lineage to rule the world’s greatest empire. Augustus—also known as Octavian or any of the other names he used throughout his amazing life—was not the first famous Caesar, of course. But his pivotal historic role makes him the central character of the story of the house of Caesar, told by Rubicon author Tom Holland in his new book Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Augustus could perhaps also be described as the most successful of the Caesars. His greatuncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was the best of the bunch as a military leader, but not a political one. Julius’ overreaching military victories served not only his own vanity and the Roman peoples’ vanity, but it also served to undermine what was left of the Roman republic’s restraint and rule of law. What Caesar achieved on the field of battle against foreign aggressors helped make him one of the most powerful men in Rome, but as a political actor he wasn’t as good as his great-nephew at maneuvering around the Senate and manipulating it to his advantage. As we all know, Julius Caesar went down in a shower of knives in the Senate, and the country’s civil war started again. It would be Augustus who turned out to be ruthless enough in attaining power but then

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smart enough in holding it who would achieve a level of unprecedented power in Rome. Holland points out that much of the structure and tradition of the Roman republic had been based on trying to prevent that very thing—the accumulation of power by one person. But once that rubicon had been crossed, there was no going back, and Augustus would be followed by others exercising control over the state and peoples of the Roman empire. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this, though, is that the mistakes of Caligula, Nero, and the others of the Claudio-Julian line did not destroy Rome. They destroyed the Claudio-Julian line, of course, but the basic structure they put in place was largely followed, albeit amended here and there, for a long time. Rome continued for hundreds of years more—more than a thousand years, if we include as we properly should the eastern empire, which only fell finally in A.D. 1453, when Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos lost the siege of Constantinople to the 21-year-old Ottoman invader Mehmed the Conqueror. From Rome’s founding in 753 B.C., the miracle success of the town of misfits and brigands had literally changed the world. Its success had been so astounding that this Italian city eventually found itself master of the Mediterranean, and as its reach extended further—into northern German lands, into Britain—the republican empire had proven unable to handle the strain and was replaced by the Caesars with an imperial system. Holland provides some much-needed busting of popular myths. For example, many writers have recycled the claim that Emperor Caligula basically phoned in an invasion of Britain; instead of invading the island

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Right: Nero’s Torches (Leading Light of Christianity), by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1876; at the National Museum in Krakow, Poland.

he is said to have ordered his troops to collect sea shells from the beach; Holland shoots that down. He also gives surprising credit where he deems it to be due, praising Caligula for his ability to select men of real talent to carry out tasks, particularly early in his regime. Even after stripping out much of the fictional horrors that have been added by anti-Caesearian partisans over the centuries, Holland still leaves modern readers with an impression of the House of Caesar as a bloody,

power-hungry machine that ran off the rails. Emperor Claudius, or dear old Claudius as he might be known to those whose image of him was drawn most significantly by Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God, gets a portrayal that makes the accidental emperor look a bit less sympathetic, a bit less accidental, and less committed to the old republic. In fact, he could have had his republic again if he had played his cards differently. After Caligula’s overdue assassination, Claudius

was found by the praetorian guards, whisked away to their camp on the outskirts of Rome, and declared emperor. The Roman senate received the news of the death of the hated Caligula with hard-tocontain glee. Caligula had denounced and degraded the senatorial class in every possible way. He told them flat-out that he no longer had any regard for them or their role in the empire. He had them accused and killed. He debased their women. And when he died, the senators dared to think that they had not only escaped a tyrant but that they had the power to resurrect the republican form of government that had given their legislative body its authority and pride in the first place. They thought they had a chance to once again ensure that

no one man would wield supreme power over them. But they were too slow. Within just a few days, they went from elation to acceptance. While they had been debating and otherwise speechifying, Claudius had been planning and dealmaking, gathering the finances to buy off the real authority in the empire: the military. That accomplished, the senate could do nothing more than vote him honors and hope he wasn’t homicidal. Claudius showed that he grasped the first rule of the new empire instituted by Augustus: Power no longer rested with the senate but with the military. Caesar Augustus made sure he controlled enough legions to allow him to impose his will. But Caesar and his successor Tiberius both worked to cloak their imperial power in the costume of the

republic, giving senators a showy if ultimately powerless role in the proceedings while wielding all of the power themselves. Caligula came to so distrust the senators after repeated attempts on his life by members of that class that he gave up the pretence. Claudius would mark a step back from the maniacal Caligulan approach, but he was not working to rebuild the republic; he was making himself emperor and further cementing the Caesarian monarchy in power. He in turn would be followed by the Caesar who would bring an end to the family’s line, the much-unloved Nero. There is an echo of these tales in today’s politics, because the Caesars got into power by playing the populist theme. And though some of them, like Tiberius, ruled as aristocrats and

were definitely anti-populist, the imperial system was nevertheless a way that a lot of lowercaste Romans—freed slaves, provincials, non-aristocrats—were able to get up the ladder. Partly because of an expanding bureaucracy and partly because of the emperors’ distrust of the senatorial class, there was an entirely new power structure being created within the state, the bureaucratic apparatus that not only ran Caesar’s estates but that ran the Roman empire itself. In at least that one small way, the rise to supreme power of one man—and a succession of lone men—actually helped break the aristocrats’ hold on power. Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar, by Tom Holland, Doubleday, 2016, 512 pages zs WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse 41 WEIMAR.WS zippererstrasse 41

drawn & quoted “if you are here, ann, who is scaring the crows away from our crops?” —Pete Davidson Comedian, To Ann Coulter at Comedy Central roast

“hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the 2nd Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick—if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the 2nd Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.” —Donald Trump Republican Presidential Nominee “not to take away from the historic significance of you perhaps becoming the first female president, but for our younger, younger generation, you will be their first white president.” —Zach Galifianakis Interviewing Hillary Clinton on Between Two Ferns “the world was gloomy before I won - there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!” —Donald Trump President-elect “the dow was at 7949 when President Obama took office. 19933 now. Obama is still in office. YOUR economy starts January 20th, babyhands.” —Steve Marmel Writer, Comedian “if he’s looking for excuses about why the side he and I were 42

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photo: PandamicPhoto.com from Lindenhurst, IL, USA

“because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic State misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of the Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786.” —The New York Times

“trump is digging his own grave. don’t grab the shovel! Leave it to Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to comment because, right now, those guys have got to be feeling like Dr. Frankenstein. “Do as little as possible. If for some reason Trump actually does debate Hillary, she should just say, ‘Hi, I’m Hillary Clinton,’ and then she should turn off her microphone, open a big bag of Skinny Pop, and watch him slowly unravel. And then every ten minutes during the debate, she should just shoot the camera a Jim Halpert look. That’s it! Stay out of it!” —Seth Meyers Host, Late Night

on [lost] the referendum, frankly he should look somewhere else. I have to say to the honourable gentleman, ... it might be in my party’s interest for him to sit there; it’s not in the national interest and I would say—for heaven’s sake man, go.” —David Cameron UK Prime Minister Addressing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament “there is no shortage of troubled 20-somethings out there, and whether they’re radicalized by ISIS or homophobia

or white nationalism or a dislike of movies, we are making it far more easy for their derangement to kill us.” —Samantha Bee Host, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee “my culture is a very dominant culture. It is imposing, and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” —Marco Gutierrez Founder Latinos for Trump

“what does vladimir putin’s dick taste like?” —Stephen Colbert Host, Tonight Show On what he would ask Donald Trump “i hope president-elect Trump won’t become the 3rd American president to misjudge Vladimir Putin.” —Lindsey Graham U.S . Senator (R-South Carolina) “so you have to be attractive to be groped uninvited by Trump. Finally! A reason to want to be ugly!” —Carrie Fisher Writer, Actor “donald wanted me drug tested before last night’s debate. Look, I got to tell you, I am so flattered Donald thought I used some sort of performance enhancer. I did. It’s called preparation.” —Hillary Clinton At the Al Smith dinner “the hobbits or the deplorables had a great run in ’16. Everybody mocked them and ridiculed them, and now they’ve spoken. And I think ’17 is gonna be a very exciting year.” —Steve Bannon Advisor to President Trump “... the electoral college, which is really the worst college since Trump University ...” —Peter Sagal Host, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me zs

Catch up on what you missed ND CO UE SE ISS

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special report: German science fiction then & now The WOrlds Of sCIeNCe & sCIeNCe fICTION

OCT. 2011 $9.95

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Issue #2 A complete episode guide to the SyFy-era Battlestar Galactica! A special report on classic German science fiction; building a real starship; Perry Rhodan starts over; the controversy over spilling Prometheus’ secrets; the world’s first short SF story; a photo guide to Saturn; reviews; & more!

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Issue #4 Special Trek focus! An extended review of Star Trek into Darkness, plus episode guide to first season of ST:TNG; Europa Report; Atremis Eternal; El Cosmonauta; Orson Scott Card boycott; space stamps; Indy Jones update; Ray Kurzweil speaks; Dragon Fire fiction; & more!

Issue #5 Special SF TV preview! New interview with David Gerrold; scientist Inge Lehmann; remembering Terry Pratchett and Leonard Nimoy; Mandelbrot art; Star Wars VII update; Hugo controversy; Frazetta lives; ST:TNG episode guide seasons II & III; Dragon Fire part II; & more!

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Issue #1 Our premiere issue! Michio Kaku interviewed; author David Gerrold on Star Hunt; Mobile Suit Gundam; Lathe of Heaven on TV; space photos; Virgin Galactic; Star Wars in print; Q&As with Mary Doria Russell, Deepak Srivastava, & Michael Medved; news & reviews; & more!

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