The Washington Post National Weekly - January 19, 2020

SUNDAY, JANUARY 19, 2020

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

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Toys Are Us Playmobil wants to be part of workplace culture. Should we play along?

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Politics Speeding up Trump’s trial 4

World Putin’s play to stay leader 10 5 Myths War powers 23

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Politics

Trump team aims for swift acquittal

Senate Television/Associated Press

The president’s lawyers plan to block witnesses and cast doubt on impeachment charges

BY T OLUSE O LORUNNIPA AND J OSH D AWSEY

W

hite House lawyers are trying to engineer the fastest impeachment trial in American history, aiming to have President Trump acquitted by the Senate without witnesses and after just a few days of proceedings, according to senior administration officials.

Trump’s desire for a short trial has solidified over the past few weeks, as House Speaker Nancy

Pelosi (D-Calif.) delayed transmitting two articles of impeachment to the Senate because of concerns about how the trial would be structured. The White House, which previously supported a more expansive trial in the GOPled Senate, has now accepted the idea that senators should make quick work of acquitting Trump.

“I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that we’d be going beyond two weeks,” said a senior administration official, who briefed reporters Wednesday on the condition of anonymity. “We think that

this case is overwhelming for the president, and the Senate’s not going to be having any need to be taking that amount of time on this.”

President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial in 1868 lasted 11 weeks. President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999 lasted more than a month.

The trial, which began Thursday and continues Tuesday in the Senate, will be the Trump legal team’s first official attempt to substantively defend the president against charges that he abused his

Members of the Senate are sworn in for the impeachment trial against President Trump on Thursday. The president’s allies hope to make quick work of the trial.

power by politicizing the U.S. relationship with Ukraine and obstructed Congress by blocking lawmakers’ attempts to investigate him.

The White House has derided the House impeachment inquiry as politically motivated and based on secondhand information and flimsy evidence. The president’s lawyers plan during the Senate trial to dissect the testimony of Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, according to senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition

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Politics of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Sondland, a Trump donor, made explosive revelations during a televised November hearing i­ mplicating the president and others in a “quid pro quo” scheme to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Trump’s political ­rivals.

Sondland revised his testimony several times between his closeddoor meeting with lawmakers and his public appearance before Congress, an issue the president’s lawyers hope to use to cast doubt on his reliability.

White House aides are also figuring out how to manage Trump during the trial, which they expect him to watch and possibly tweet about while it is underway, as he did during the House impeachment hearings, according to the officials. Trump allies plan to have several surrogates on television defending the president during the trial.

White House Counsel Pat ­Cipollone is expected to lead the president’s team during the trial, after Trump heeded the advice of Senate Republicans who urged him not to appoint House members to his legal team. Trump’s outside counsel Jay Sekulow and deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin are also likely to have a role in the Senate proceedings, officials said.

Some White House officials are wondering whether Cipollone, a longtime commercial lawyer who does not usually appear on television, will turn in the kind of performance that will please Trump during the televised proceedings and keep him supportive of the trial strategy that his aides and Senate Republican leaders are advocating.

Trump, who has vacillated on the desirability of having a lengthy trial vs. quick proceedings, has been influenced by his recent travel to friendly locales outside Washington.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who attended the college football national championship game with the president in Louisiana on Monday, said the cheers from the crowd “buoyed Trump’s spirits” significantly.

This helped get Trump on board with the plan crafted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to conduct a swift trial without hearing from key witnesses.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post

“He wants it done sooner rather than later,” Graham said in an interview. “I’ve told him, in my view, ‘The sooner the trial is over, the better.’ ” The briefing for reporters Wednesday came after House Democrats named seven impeachment managers and voted to send the two articles of impeachment to the Senate. Democrats said the managers, six lawyers and one former police chief, signify a desire for a full trial with witnesses, documents and other evidence implicating Trump. Anything short of that would be a “coverup,” Pelosi said.

The crux of the case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Zelensky into announcing and launching an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“The president violated his oath of office, undermined our national security, jeopardized the integrity of our elections, tried to use the appropriations process as

his private ATM machine . . . to advance his own personal and political advantage,” Pelosi said Wednesday.

A senior administration official briefing reporters said that House Democrats’ case lacked evidence of wrongdoing by Trump, but the official refused to address new documentary evidence that Democrats say further implicates the president.

The official indicated that Trump is likely to block efforts by Democrats to further build their case through new witnesses, including former national security adviser John Bolton. Allowing testimony from a former presidential aide about his discussions with Trump on foreign policy would be “extraordinary,” said the official, who added that he did not think the Senate should hear from any witnesses.

Another official said the White House was prepared to exert executive privilege if the Senate subpoenas Bolton, who has said he is willing to testify under subpoena about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

As the articles were being sent to the Senate, House Democrats continued to press Republicans to allow evidence that the White House has so far blocked.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been at the helm of a plan to conduct a swift impeachment trial without key witnesses.

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“We have only obtained a very small sample of the universe of documents that the president is withholding,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), after he was named one of the impeachment managers. “If Mr. McConnell wants to follow the Clinton model, as he keeps professing, all of the documents were provided before the trial. Those documents should be demanded by the senators.”

Several members of Trump’s legal team, including Cipollone and Sekulow, have expressed expansive views on executive power and have experience in rebuffing congressional inquiries.

Cipollone was at the White House last weekend preparing for the case, and White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland has talked to aides extensively about rules and procedural motions they can make during the trial, officials said. Ueland worked as a staffer for a Republican senator during the Clinton impeachment trial.

In an Oct. 8 letter to the House, Cipollone declared the impeachment inquiry unconstitutional and illegitimate and said the Trump administration would not participate in it.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s Law School, said the “very disturbing” letter was an indication that Cipollone would take the same antagonistic approach to the Senate trial.

“The October 8 letter was very disturbing because of its very aggressive and combative tone. It also reflected no recognition of the importance of accountability and congressional oversight,” he said.

During Clinton’s impeachment trial, his legal team spent three days methodically addressing the various charges against him as the chief justice of the United States presided and most senators sat silently.

Trump’s defense could be considerably shorter. A senior administration official said the White House would Mount a “strong case” for the president but that a long trial would not be necessary.

“The reason it doesn’t take a very long time is that the facts are simple, and the facts are on the president’s side,” the official said.

“When you have an easy case, you don’t need a long time to present it.” n

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Nation

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Unequal results after disaster strikes M IRANDA G REEN in La Conchita, Calif.

BY

I

n the surfer’s paradise where Mike Bell has lived for four decades, talking about rain is blasphemy. “We have sprinkles, we have showers, we have mist, but we don’t use the ‘r’ word, because the ‘r’ word is what kills people,” he says.

Fifteen years ago, after 18 inches of it fell in just over two weeks, terrain that slopes through his small, tightknit town morphed into a massive mud avalanche and buried several dozen houses.

Ten people died, including three young sisters.

Almost exactly 13 years later, just a short drive up the coast in Montecito, another post-rain mudslide washed away more than 100 homes. Witnesses said it sounded like a freight train crashing through. Twenty-three people were buried.

Years after the disasters — one on Jan. 10, 2005, and the other on Jan. 9, 2018 — the two seaside communities are still grappling with hard decisions stemming from the destruction and loss of life. Yet they have made very different progress along their paths to recovery.

Affluent Montecito is anticipating county and federal funds to move forward with plans to build a basin to contain deadly debris the next time the ground turns liquid. In working-class La Conchita, however, support for a proposed hill-grading project has come and gone, followed by acrimony and anger.

The challenges both places face raise questions that scientists say are increasingly likely to confront other California cities and towns, especially given the threats from climate change: If a future natural disaster is probable, at what cost can a community be protected? And if residents can’t afford that, where do they go?

Santa Barbara and Ventura counties are as vulnerable as any; geologists who study southern California’s terrain say future slides and flows there are both natural and inevitable, part of a

curtis Skene

In California, an affluent town gets help after mudslides; a working-class one is still waiting drought-to-deluge cycle.

In the immediate wake of La Conchita’s tragedy, involving an estimated 400,000 tons of earth, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited and promised to make the Ventura County community safe. He said he would be back. He never was — and the money needed to fulfill his promise never came.

Scientist Randall Jibson of the U.S. Geological Survey was at the scene days after the event. He heard residents describe La Conchita as idyllic, tucked tightly between mountains and ocean. “I heard the term heaven,” he recalled recently. “Yet from time to time, it turns into hell instead.”

In his 2005 report on future danger, he concluded that the community was likely to experience “a rather bewildering variety of landslide hazards.” A later study commissioned by the state found that protecting La Conchita would require building steps into the 500-foot hill directly behind it. The cost was estimated as

high as $50 million. The median income in La Conchita and the surrounding area is $54,565, according to census records.

Ventura Supervisor Steve Bennett, who has represented La Conchita’s part of the county for 19 years, said officials were never going to foot the multimilliondollar project: “Basically, it’s an enormous amount of money . . .

It’s not something that I’m willing to commit the taxpayers to do.”

The county did pay to remove rubble from adjacent streets and yards and put up signs saying the area was geologically unsafe to inhabit or visit. Bennett said he asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to consider buying out residents and creating a park, but the idea was rejected.

In his view, those who remain do so at their own risk.

The conversations have been much different in neighboring Santa Barbara. A remedy for Montecito — where celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey live and homes sell for millions — has never been

Curtis Skene's home in Montecito, Calif., was among more than 100 houses destroyed by a 2018 mudslide. Twentythree people died in the destruction.

a question of money or support.

The speed and scale of devastation seen there were stunning. It followed a late-night cloudburst that in 15 minutes dumped nearly an inch of rain on bone-dry hills recently scorched by the historic Thomas Fire.

Curtis Skene, 66, awoke to the sound of wood cracking everywhere. A moment later, his bedroom wall ripped open “and eight to 10 feet of mud and debris just rushed into the room.”

The private-equity specialist, who grew up in Montecito, vowed to lead an effort to prevent future slides even if it meant residents had to raise some of the funding.

At a community meeting, he struck up a friendship with the county’s deputy director of water resources, Tom Fayram. Together they devised a plan to build a new flood basin on one of the streets that had been wiped out. Its projected cost: upward of $25 million.

Skene went door to door to drum up support. He convinced the handful of property owners whose empty lots would be used for the project to sell to the county, which agreed to pick up a quarter of the bill and to work with FEMA to pay for the remainder. Although the agency hasn’t officially signed off on the plan, Skene and Fayram say officials at a meeting in Sacramento last August told them the plan had been approved and was just awaiting final environmental review.

La Conchita is still waiting for some significant safety or mitigation effort. Untamed dirt from the 2005 slide still comes up to the back of several second-story homes, and a street that once encircled the town is now permanently closed since portions were never rebuilt. The local emergency plan includes a shed paid for by residents and filled with a tractor, generator, floodlights and folding chairs.

“The county never will ever do something unless we have another slide,” Bell said. “And if it does, it likely will fall where it fell. And if it does that, hopefully nobody gets killed.” n

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World

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In Iran, anger turns against leaders E RIN C UNNINGHAM in Istanbul BY

F

or a brief moment this month, Iran’s rulers appeared buoyed by the wave of nationalist sentiment that swept the country following the U.S. killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani.

Now that support has been clouded by anger, as public outrage continued to grow over Tehran’s accidental downing of a civilian airliner.

After days of denial, Iran’s armed forces said last weekend that the plane — Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 — was shot down unintentionally when they mistook it for a hostile aircraft. Since then, sporadic protests criticizing the government have flared in Tehran and other cities.

Student protesters at the University of Tehran this week chanted anti-government slogans as officials scrambled to find a way to quell the unrest. Iran’s judiciary spokesman on Tuesday announced the arrest of “some individuals” in connection with the plane’s downing but by midweek offered no detail on who had been detained.

President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, appeared to urge Iran’s military brass to “explain to the public” why it took days to reveal that the plane had been shot down. “It is very important for our people that whoever, at any level, was to blame should be introduced and whoever is to be punished, should be punished,” Rouhani said.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Wednesday that demonstrators were angry at being “lied to.”

“Our military forces were brave enough to claim responsibility early on. But people are angry even with those two days. That is the expectation that people have with the government — that the government should have disclosed the information,” he said.

The comments came after a video surfaced Tuesday that appears to show two missiles, fired about 30 seconds apart, striking the aircraft.

Vahid Salemi/Associated Press

Protests flare over downing of passenger plane, just days after killing of Soleimani rallied support “Why did it happen? Because there was a crisis,” Zarif added.

And in a crisis, “people make mistakes, unforgivable mistakes.” He said the loss of life in the incident “was because of tensions created by the United States.”

Meanwhile, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, took the exceptional step of leading Friday prayers in Tehran this past week for the first time in eight years. He said the United States suffered a “strong blow” to its “superpower image” following an Iranian strike on U.S. facilities in Iraq, and he urged Iranians to unite amid a worsening economic crisis and escalating tensions with the West.

The efforts by senior officials to calm the public were in stark contrast to the defiant tones struck by Tehran amid an outpouring of grief for Soleimani at his funeral procession this month, attended by hundreds of thousands of Iranians. The juxtaposition of these public displays of passion, less than a week apart, highlighted the

tensions and fissures in the body politic of Iran, a nation of some 80 million people whose attitudes at times clash and other times converge.

Iran is often presented “as a monolith . . . a country where all of its citizens move as one,” said Reza Akbari, a researcher of Iranian politics at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Washington. “But Iranians are capable of condemning U.S. attacks against their sovereignty while protesting the gross negligence of their government,” he said.

For many Iranians, Soleimani’s killing in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad was a national affront and came amid widespread resentment over harsh economic sanctions imposed on Iran by the Trump administration after its withdrawal in 2018 from the landmark nuclear deal.

At the same time, the protests over the downed airliner, Akbari said, align with longer-term demands from the Iranian population for transparency, justice and

An anti-government demonstration at the Tehran University campus on Tuesday.

Protesters were angry at the delayed announcement that Iran unintentionally shot down a Ukrainian plane.

accountability. These demonstrations, along with widespread unrest that gripped Iran in November, reflect frustration with the government over everything from corruption to economic mismanagement to political repression.

“Iran is a diverse and dynamic society . . . [and] the large turnout across Iran for Soleimani’s funeral processions, as well as the angry protests against the regime for shooting down the Ukraine flight, are evidence of that diversity,” said Afshon Ostovar, author of “Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.”

Over the past week, some Iranians who are traditionally supportive of the government have criticized its handling of the downed airliner while some pro-reform citizens have marched at the processions for Soleimani, who was widely credited in Iran with helping defeat the Islamic State.

“Some people who went to [Soleimani’s] funeral also protested the government over the downing of the airplane,” said Zahra, 33, a resident of Tehran, said. She spoke on the condition that her full name not be used so she could discuss freely political dynamics in Iran.

Zahra said that the killing of Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, elicited a range of strong emotions. “Some people viewed Soleimani as a terrorist and others as a savior for the country,” she said. “And some are just scared about the possibility of war,” she said.

In a statement this past week, students from Amir Kabir University in Tehran, a site of recent protests, conveyed dismay over being trapped between belligerence from abroad and hardship at home.

“While the government’s economic policies and political suppression have brought the people to the end of their tether, the shadow of war has also appeared above our heads,” the statement said. “In the midst of constant threats by military powers, today what is lacking in Iran’s political climate is the people’s voice . . . the people demand freedom and equality.” n

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books

Hunting down Nazi war criminals N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

J ONATHAN K IRSCH

‘T Citizen 865 The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America

By Debbie Cenziper Hachette.

300 pp. $28

o tell the truth, I used to read and write German,” a 73-year-old retired potato chip salesman named Jack told a federal prosecutor at the outset of his interrogation in 1992. “Now I have forgotten.”

Jack, as we discover in “Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America” by Debbie Cenziper, was actually Jakob Reimer, one of the Nazi mass murderers trained in a village in southeastern Poland called Trawniki.

The author calls it “one of the most diabolical operations in the Holocaust,” but “the Trawniki men,” too, are mostly forgotten nowadays.

Cenziper’s mission in “Citizen 865” is to restore and preserve our memory of Trawniki through her account. She is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist on The Washington Post’s investigative team.

Cenziper brought her investigative skills to bear on the challenge of retrieving the hard facts, but she also possesses the gift of a storyteller. For that reason, “Citizen 865” is a work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller.

She shows us the human faces of the real men and women of her narrative — the victims, the survivors, the perpetrators and those who sought to bring the perpetrators to justice. Prominent among them are the lawyers, investigators and historians who refused to allow the victims to disappear into mass graves. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI), a unit of the Justice Department, took up the task in 1978, when Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn “helped pass legislation that made it easier for the federal government to deport anyone found to have participated in Nazi persecution, striking down a series of exemptions long provided under immigration law.”

The OSI pursued dozens of Nazi war criminals in the United States, including the notorious John Demjanjuk, and Cenziper shows

MITCH JACOBSON/Associated Press

Jack Reimer, right, was one of “the Trawniki men,” trained in Poland by the German SS to commit atrocities.

His U.S. citizenship was revoked in 2002, but he died before he could be deported.

us both the successes and the failures. But it is Jakob Reimer, a member of “the Trawniki elite” whose identification number was 865, who is placed in the crosshairs of her book.

A descendant of immigrants from Germany to Russia, Reimer was born in a Mennonite community in Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union, in 1918. He was serving as an officer in the Red Army when he was taken prisoner by German soldiers in 1941, and the SS plucked him out of a POW camp for training and service at Trawniki. Reimer insisted that he was only a civilian paymaster, but in fact he rose to the SS rank of top sergeant and was “deployed on at least two critical missions [that sent] forty thousand Jews to their deaths in the Treblinka gas chambers” in 1942, as well as the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the final liquidation of the Jews confined there in 1943.

Reimer’s war record was over-

looked when he was granted entry to the United States and, later, full citizenship, but the author allows us to witness the interrogation that finally revealed the truth in 1992. “Reimer had always excelled, as a Red Army lieutenant, as a commander at Trawniki, as an immigrant, as an American,” Cenziper writes, echoing the thoughts of his interrogator. “And somewhere deep in the woods outside Trawniki, Reimer had excelled as a participant in a mass-killing operation.”

The decision that finally revoked Reimer’s citizenship in 2002 was hailed by James B. Comey, then serving as U.S. attorney in New York: “Reimer’s presence in the United States is an affront to all those killed in the Holocaust.”

His appeal was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in an opinion written by future Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor. But Germany refused to accept him back, and he died in

the United States before the OSI and the State Department “could find a country willing to take him.”

No matter how many times we peer into the black hole of the Holocaust, something new and strange is there to behold. Cenziper quotes a remark by Eli Rosenbaum, director of the OSI, about “late-night images” from the historical record that have the power to haunt us: “You try to imagine these things,” Rosenbaum would say, “and then you try real hard not to imagine them.”

Rosenbaum’s words remind us of Cenziper’s greatest accomplishment in a highly significant work of investigation that is eye-opening and heartbreaking. She compels us to confront the crimes of the Trawniki men in a way that burns itself into both memory and history. n Jonathan Kirsch is the author of, most recently, “The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan.”

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Business

KLMNO Weekly

HR’s newest buzzword: ‘Belonging’ BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

M

ove over, “diversity.”

Make room, “inclusion.”

Today, the hot corporate buzzword in the diversity field is “belonging.”

The word is popping up everywhere. LinkedIn, Nordstrom, HubSpot, DoorDash and other companies all now have executives with job titles such as manager of “diversity, inclusion and belonging” or vice president of “global culture, belonging, and people growth.”

Earlier this year, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School hosted its first lecture panel focused on the topic. Harvard and Yale have also been getting in on the idea, hiring faculty or staff with “belonging” in their titles after launching related task forces or campuswide initiatives.

The latest lingo — most prevalent among Silicon Valley companies — reflects millennial and Gen Z employees’ expectations about work, diversity experts say, as well as the impression that other concepts haven’t made enough progress retaining diverse employees.

The idea suggests employers should not just focus on numbers of women and people of color — or behaviors that make people feel included. Rather, they should focus on whether workers sense they can be themselves and feel like part of a community.

The term is new enough that it is not clear how it is broadly viewed by women or people of color. Louis Montgomery Jr., who leads the diversity officers’ practice at executive search firm Korn Ferry, said “belonging” has a warmer and more approachable feel to it. “ ‘Inclusion’ is a weird word, if you think about it. It’s not something we use outside of a work situation,” he said.

But others say they’ve heard skepticism. “People of color, by and large, are interested in fair workplaces. Is ‘belonging’ just another term that became about everybody but me?” said Whar-

tadamichi/Getty Images/iStock

Diversity experts say the term reflects younger employees’ expectations about work culture ton professor Stephanie Creary.

“Companies may be going about it the wrong way if they’re not also focusing on equity and diversity.”

“There’s this sense of fatigue around talking about diversity and inclusion, and people are feeling frustrated about a lack of progress,” said Jessica Hyman, a head of strategy and sustainability at the software firm Atlassian, which has begun describing its diversity efforts as “balance and belonging.”

Christianne Garofalo, who leads diversity and inclusion recruiting at the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, said she has seen the word take off in job titles within the past year.

“Diversity is a fact, inclusion is a behavior, but belonging is the emotional outcome that people want in their organization,” she said. “What’s fueling it is a desire to have a sense of purpose at work and a sense of community.”

Yet some diversity experts worry that adopting the fuzzier

word could be viewed by some as the latest example of corporate speak.

“The complicated vocabulary around D&I makes it difficult,” said Laura Sherbin, managing director of the consultancy Culture@Work. “Senior leaders really understand diversity. Inclusion they understand, because it’s about behavior. With belonging, they’re like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ ” It can also be hard to measure or hold employees accountable, Sherbin said. “At the end of the day it’s about trying to induce a feeling in someone, which is incredibly hard to do.”

Indeed, what “belonging” looks like in terms of concrete practices is still pretty fuzzy.

LaFawn Davis, vice president of diversity, inclusion and belonging at Indeed.com, which started using the term in the past three months, put the distinction this way: “Inclusion is about having a voice that is heard, making sure you can voice a contrary opin-

“Belonging is about creating a sense of community.”

LaFawn Davis, vice president of diversity, inclusion and belonging at Indeed.com

ion,” she said. “Belonging is about creating a sense of community.”

Others said human resources leaders have long used new labels for diversity programs to help encourage skeptical employees — often senior white men — to get on board. What started as “equity” or “equal opportunity” in the 1980s later became “diversity” and “inclusion” as companies looked to make the business case for investing in it, Creary said.

“How do we look at those who resist diversity and inclusion strategies and make them feel like they’re part of the solution?

‘Inclusion’ started that way. Now lo and behold, ‘belonging’ follows,” she said.

The idea of “belonging” in the workplace may not resonate with some of the very people it is intended to bring in. Use of the word has proliferated at the same time executives have touted the notion of “bring your authentic self to work” — an H.R. mantra that describes being able to be yourself on the job, not hiding personal interests and being comfortable enough to show flaws.

Still, younger generations are more likely to expect that the workplace offers a social group and a community, said Nicole Sanchez, chief executive of Vaya Consulting. “They’ve been socialized to identify in different ways,” she said. “Fewer younger people have that strong boundary” between their personal and professional lives.

After learning women were often the only female employee on their individual teams, Atlassian matched up women with female peers for coffee dates and created “mentoring rings” to help create a sense of belonging. It says it has cut female attrition in half and that 20 percent of technical roles are held by women.

“You can have that one token person that allows you to say we’ve got one of each of those,” said Hyman. “But if I show up and I’m the only [woman or minority on a team], we don’t really have a sense of balance.” n

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COVER STORY

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SUNDAY, January, 19, 2020

Not content to have shaped your childhood, Playmobil now wants a role in your workplace too

Toying Around

BY

J ASON W ILSON

On a dreary, cool spring day in Zirndorf, Germany, I finally realized a childhood dream of visiting the Playmobil headquarters. The feeling was relatively bittersweet, as I ate a Wiener schnitzel for lunch, alone on a weekday, in the beer garden at the uncrowded Playmobil FunPark, next door to the corporate offices. Playmobil had been my favorite toy as a kid, though it’s been four decades since my parents brought home my first set — a Wild West fort — from a trip abroad, before it was widely available in the United States. My own kids are teenagers now and have no time for the Playmobil Vikings or pirates or Arctic explorers or airport we used to play with together when they were younger — something I miss. They never even want to set up the Playmobil remote control train station during the holidays anymore. Everything remains boxed up in the basement.

The situation didn’t seem all that optimistic inside in the Playmobil offices, either. One of the first things I discussed with Björn Seeger, the company press officer, was the recent collapse of Toys R Us, during which the toy chain filed for bankruptcy and later shut down 735 American stores. “In 2018, we had quite a disruption with Toys R Us,” Seeger said. “We lost 13,000 meters of retail shelf space, overnight.” Playmobil has recovered somewhat in the American market, but the company is still feeling the squeeze.

I had come here to check out a product that Playmobil would soon launch, called Playmobil Pro — “an innovative modelling system for professionals,” as the company had described it. The idea, apparently, was to bring Playmobil figures into offices so employees could creatively “role play” or “find new business solutions” or “visualize stakeholders” or “bring theoretical discussions to life.” According to the sales materials, the same toys you loved as a child now “can also be used by adults in the frame of a professional context to aid in prototyping, project management, creative workshops and much, much more.” The kit was developed in cooperation with such organizations as Deutsche Bank, Adidas, Daimler’s Joint Think Tank and the Barcelona School of Management.

Seeger and I sat in a white-walled conference room surrounded by large versions of smiling Playmobil figures: a knight with a shield; a pirate with a bandanna and dagger; an indeterminate figure wearing a cap, flannel shirt and vest while holding a golf club.

(Possibly a Playmobil tech executive?) The Playmobil Pro case sat in the middle of a table; it had drawers for figures, costumes, accessories, sticky notes and pens. Instead of the usual colorful Playmobil figures, the ones in the kit were completely white — Photos by D.A. Peterson for The Washington Post

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KLMNO Weekly

Cover Story

without skin, hair, clothing colors or facial expressions. “The classic Playmobil figure has a smile, and maybe that’s not always great for business,” Seeger said. Earlier tests with an array of skin and hair colors had immediately seemed problematic for group dynamics across many different countries. “It quickly became apparent that plain white figures would distinguish Playmobil Pro,” he said. The kit comes with erasable pens that allow people to personalize the figures by drawing on them.

The costumes and accessories in the kit brought back a wave of nostalgia. Hats, capes, backpacks, animals, instruments, vehicles, furniture, etc. — these little, everyday, bourgeois details are Playmobil’s charm. As Seeger and I spoke, I idly clicked different hats on the figures and clipped props into their hands.

“There’s an emotional attachment,” Seeger said. “Many had this experience with Playmobil in childhood.” He talked about how the so-called kidult market — adults who buy toys for themselves — has become one of the biggest growth areas of the toy industry.

By some estimates, about a quarter of all toys and games are purchased by adults for themselves. “It’s a huge market, selling toys to adults,” he said. “Gen X is so happy to buy something to remind them of their childhood. So why don’t we transfer this into a business context?”

When a video of the initial Playmobil Pro prototype was posted on LinkedIn in early 2019, it went viral, with more than 35,000 views in five days. Requests for the kits flooded in. “We were all completely shocked,” says Victoria Dobbie, a member of the Playmobil Pro design team. “Now we had to do something with it.”

It was quite a leap from selling adults childlike guilty pleasures to bringing those toys into the workplace. But Playmobil Pro isn’t alone in this niche market. In fact, thanks to its rivals at Lego, it had a model to follow. For at least two decades, Lego has been finding its way into corporate settings, and a whole methodology called Lego Serious Play has emerged. A corporate trainer, called a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator, brings a pile of Lego into a conference room and guides a team of employees through building exercises meant to spur new ideas and, according to the Lego website, “unlock imagination and innovation.”

The concept — developed in the 1990s at the Denmark-based toy company in collaboration with two Swiss academics, Johan Roos and Bart Victor — was based on research showing that our hands are connected to 70 to 80 percent of our brain cells. By 2010, there was an independent Association of Master Trainers for Lego Serious Play and a well-established certification process. At that point, the company made the methodology “open source,” meaning facilitators were free to use it without licenses from Lego.

While the knowledge may be free, the company still sells official Serious Play kits for nearly $800 each. Playmobil Pro, for its part, retails for around $600 and will be available in the United States this month.

One of the first things Playmobil did was send beta versions to experts: certified Lego Serious Play facilitators around the world.

I spoke with a fellow named Guy Stephens, based near London, a facilitator who uses Lego Serious Play in his job as a corporate trainer for one of the world’s largest technology companies. As Stephens sees it, using toys in corporate settings can have significant benefits. “It takes people to a deeper, more emotional level,” he explains. “There’s a level of empathy. It’s a much safer space to ideate.” He was attracted to the new Playmobil Pro kit but unsure what its application would be, precisely. “With Lego Serious Play, you play around with a lot of metaphors,” he told me.

“A brick can be anything you want it to be. A red brick can represent democracy, or can represent a cake. The application may be narrower for Playmobil. Because you have literally a figure of a person, it’s very hard to break away from that. The opportunity for it to all go wrong is greater.”

Unlike Lego, Playmobil has developed no methodology for how to use Playmobil Pro in a business situation. “We don’t want to say, ‘This is Playmobil Pro and this is how you use it.’ We’re quite open to seeing how it’s developed,” says Dobbie. “People will come to us

to make suggestions and tell us what they need.”

Of course, whether anyone actually needs Playmobil — or Lego for that matter — in a business setting is another question entirely.

What role could toys possibly play in the types of serious, adult decisions that need to be made in the workplace? It may all seem like odd territory for toy companies, but Playmobil was barreling ahead. Stephens was planning a workshop in the fall to test-drive Playmobil Pro and invited me to come. That’s how I ended up at a Legoland near London, spending the day with a group of professional adults, playing with toys.

L

egoland Windsor Resort is about 25 minutes from Heathrow Airport. I arrived there on a Tuesday morning in October, still jet-lagged, and waited for a few minutes in the noisy hotel lobby. More than a dozen excited kids were shouting and running around, hopping in and out of a giant play box in the middle of the room that was filled with thousands of Lego bricks. Some built little towers or animals or stuck minifigures into cars, boats or spaceships. Some just happily scooped up Lego pieces and threw them at one another. Finally, Stephens fetched me and led me upstairs to a much quieter conference area, where there was coffee and pastries and a large round banquet table piled with Legos.

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Cover Story “There’s an emotional attachment,” said Björn Seeger, Playmobil’s press officer. “Many had this experience with Playmobil in childhood.” He talked about how the so-called kidult market — adults who buy toys for themselves — has become one of the biggest growth areas of the toy industry.

The group Stephens organized for the workshop consisted of a half-dozen consultants and experts in workplace creativity, using methodologies with names like Play to Innovate or Systematic Inventive Thinking — offshoots of the concept of “design thinking” pioneered at MIT and Stanford in the 1950s. Several work with the same Lego Serious Play methodology as Stephens.

Over coffee and introductions, they bantered. Charles Woolnough, a program director at a major video game company and a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator, brought up his first workshop, where colleagues were dismissive of any team-building.

There were knowing chuckles.

Stephens told me, “You absolutely get skeptics who walk into a room and say, ‘Oh God, not another consultant,’ or ‘I’m paying you X thousands to play with Lego?’ But then they walk out and say, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’ ” Our group took places around the table, and Stephens ran us through a warm-up exercise. Typically, the facilitator poses a question or presents a challenge, then the group has a time limit to build something in response. Then each presents or tells their story. Finally there is time for reflection.

To start, we were each given bags with six identical yellow, white and red pieces, and Stephens asked us to build a duck. Even though I’ve put together dozens of Lego kits for my own kids over the years, I usually follow printed directions. I didn’t realize, for instance, that two of the pieces were the duck’s “eyes” until time was up. “What this shows is that you got the same six pieces, but you’ve all interpreted a duck in your own way,” Stephens said.

For the next exercise, I was paired with Ben Mizen, a lecturer in business and management at Solent University in Southampton, England, and also a certified Lego facilitator. Mizen and I were to build a metaphor that described our Mondays and used only four Lego pieces. I rummaged in the pile of bricks and built a bridge, with blue and gray pieces, which was meant to convey the prosaic idea that I had flown across the Atlantic the day before. Mizen went even more abstract, showing a ladderlike model — with green, yellow, blue and orange pieces — that he said expressed his need for structure in a workday. To be honest, I couldn’t really follow along, but I appreciated that this had a lot of meaning for him. Mine felt overly simplistic next to his.

Next we were asked to take our same model and give it some other meaning. My mind went blank as I stared at my bridge. All I could think about was a river. Then, oddly, Bruce Springsteen’s “The River.” When the time limit ended, I blurted out, “This reminds me of my favorite song, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River.’ ” This is absolutely not my favorite song, but I felt compelled to say so, to give my banal thought some kind of meaning. This did, however, lead me into telling a true story of how one night in a pub, a musician who was singing “The River” forgot the lyrics, and I stood up and sang them for him. It felt weird that my reaction to this exercise — basically, pretending that being a Springsteen fan was central to my identity — actually brought me to this oddly personal moment.

Mizen nodded his head enthusiastically and said, “Great!

That’s really good!” Then he explained that his model was a spaceship, with the green piece being the earth, the blue the sky, the yellow the sunlight, and the orange “representing something like man’s pointless endeavors.”

Thinking about “man’s pointless endeavors” now made me feel even more self-conscious about my own response. “This is kind of stressful,” I said to the group. I got a look of empathy from Dave Temple, whose company Myndflo makes an eco-friendly version of sticky notes. “It can feel a little forced sometimes,” Temple said.

“Yes, we want you to be stressed,” said Yesim Kunter, a toy designer and “play futurist” who conducts Innovation Through Play workshops. “Play is all about vulnerability. To be creative, you need to be playful. People need to give permission to themselves for more playfulness.”

“Changing the mode from linear to the creative, I get it,” said Greg Stadler, U.K. managing director of Systematic Inventive

KLMNO Weekly

Thinking, a company that promotes a method — created in Israel in the 1990s — of developing “innovative ideas on demand.” “But,” he added, “what do you do if people are really bad at this?” I wondered if this comment was possibly directed at me.

Woolnough said that the real value was in discovering something brand new while building. “You can’t prepare your answers when you’re doing a model,” he said. If bosses “don’t want to hear what everyone thinks, don’t use this technique. Also, if you want to tell them what to think, don’t use this method.”

After a final warm-up session, Stephens seemed satisfied. “This was to level-set everyone,” he said.

After a break, it was time to move on the main reason we all had gathered that day. In a separate corner of the room, he had set up the Playmobil Pro kit. He invited everyone to gather around and familiarize ourselves with the pieces.

Our group seemed impressed. “Top marks for the kit, because it’s a nightmare to sort 2,000 pieces of Lego,” Woolnough said.

Mizen put it this way: “I love that Playmobil has just said, ‘Here it is, have a go!’ ” A few in the group voiced some concern about whether Playmobil Pro could reach the level of abstraction and metaphor of Lego Serious Play. Stephens took a white figure and put a jester hat on it. “This can represent a jester,” he said. “But it can also represent anarchy.”

W

hen I had visited the Playmobil headquarters in the spring, the company’s rivalry with Lego loomed over the entire conversation. There was talk, for example, of “Playmobil: The Movie,” a long-awaited, $75 million extravaganza voiced by Jim Gaffigan, Adam Lambert, Meghan Trainor and Daniel Radcliffe. No doubt the company hoped to chase the same massive success that “The Lego Movie” had achieved in 2014. But “Playmobil: The Movie” was a flop: Its U.S. premiere in December earned only an estimated $668,000, the third-worst opening ever for a movie released on more than 2,000 screens. The Hollywood Reporter called it a “generic and lifeless promotional tool.” Variety said it “never transcends its blatant product-flogging.”

And, perhaps most painfully, from the Times of London: “But much like the Playmobil toys, with their poky feet and weird, lobster-like hands, ‘Playmobil: The Movie’ is similar but inferior to the Lego equivalent.” Ouch.

Playmobil seems perpetually overshadowed by the popularity of Lego. Why hadn’t Playmobil, I wondered, gone into licensing agreements and video games, the way that Lego had over the past decade, partnering with Star Wars, Harry Potter, SpongeBob SquarePants and Marvel? “Well, we are much smaller than Lego.

We would not have been able to afford that,” Seeger said. But then he asked: “Do you need these licenses as a toy brand? Or can be it more about the child’s own imagination?”

In theory, I agree with him. Playmobil’s virtues for me have long resided in its more generic, less flashy scenarios. It’s a quirkier toy — one that I’ve always believed appeals more to parents than to their kids. Who but an adult could appreciate wry miniature details like a construction crew that comes with a case of beer and a porta-potty, a bakery with four specific types of bread (rye, wheat, sourdough and baguettes), a timber lodge with a lederhosen-clad innkeeper playing an accordion and pulling draft beers from the tap?

Consider also that Playmobil has done a solid business making replica sets of famous works of art, such as Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” or Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid,” both co-branded souvenirs sold at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Or that, remarkably, the best-selling Playmobil figure of all time — with over 1.3 million sold since its release in 2015 — is Martin Luther, complete with quill and German Bible.

No wonder Playmobil never seemed quite as cool as Lego. Yet perhaps the same sense of whimsy and weirdness that might hold Playmobil back with contemporary children could prove to be a strength in the adult world of workplace toys.

Indeed, as I was seeing at Legoland Windsor, a certain kind of

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Cover Story

We were asked to build a figure that presents how we believe others may see us, and I found it strange how simply adding tiny accessories to a blank Playmobil figure had caused a level of introspection.

The only note of skepticism came from one participant who said, “This is great.

But at what point do you put down the toys and start working?”

“To me, Playmobil seems a little less abstract than the Lego,” Temple said.

The only note of skepticism came from Stadler, who said, “This is great. But at what point do you put down the toys and start working?”

N

quirkiness was, for people using toys in a corporate setting, very much the name of the game. The first Playmobil Pro exercise that Stephens asked our group to do was simple: Take a figure, add whatever accessories we’d like, and label the figure as we saw ourselves. I fished around in the pile of accessories with the others. It was now clear that many of the items were meant to build metaphors: snake or spider for “fear,” a crown for “boss,” a hand mirror for “self-reflection,” a globe for, well, “global.” But how did I see myself?

Slow? Old-fashioned? A traveler? Fond of wine? Pretentious? Somewhat ridiculous? I grabbed a pirate hat, a map and a golden chalice. I cringed and wrote “Artisan” on my figure.

Woolnough presented first. He’d written “Fixer” on his figure, which wore a cavalry hat and held a vacuum cleaner (“for mopping up”) and a lantern (“this is me shining a light”). Temple had written “Innovation” on his, which wore a superhero cape (“I’m trying to create supermen”), and had drawn a smile on his figure’s face. Kunter had written “Magic Creator” on hers, which held flowers and rode a skateboard. Stadler presented the most involved figure, which had a megaphone, binoculars, a wizard’s hat, a treasure chest with coins and a pickax (“I help mine for new ideas”). “I am Solutions Finder,” he said.

We were then asked to build a figure that presents how we believe others may see us. I figured I may as well be honest and wrote “Troublesome” on my figure. I attached a winter hood, suggesting that I’m too closed-off, a suitcase for all my baggage, and a tuba, representing that I often have too loud of a voice. I guess I was trying to be cheeky, at first, but I’d also arrived at some truth.

I found it strange how simply adding tiny accessories to a blank Playmobil figure had caused a level of introspection. Yet everyone else at the table was equally, surprisingly self-critical. Kunter had chosen a small child figure who rode a lion. “People think of me as like a child, and not letting people get too close,” she said. Temple’s figure was pushing a shopping cart overflowing with accessories (“I’m someone with lots of ideas but sort of unorganized”).

Woolnough had written “Old” on his, which wore a cowboy hat, held a boombox and rode a fox. (“People see me as too old-school, and smart at working the system.”)

During the reflection period, there was great excitement about the applications for Playmobil Pro. “I had my reservations that Playmobil Pro might not have the same opportunities for riffing,” Mizen said. “But wow, this is great for role play.”

“Yes,” Kunter said. “This is a user journey.”

“I like that the person is the biggest thing here,” Mizen said.

“The HR applications for this are stunning.”

ext, Stephens suggested we all focus on a real-life dilemma.

Could we build a model with Playmobil Pro to improve the flow of immigration and passport control at Heathrow? I had just been through the tediously long line the day before, with dozens of people waiting for a single agent to stamp passports. I grabbed as many of the figures as I could and lined them up. “How about more agents?” I said. Stadler lined up a row of computer monitors and said they represented body scanners that led figures into one of two lanes. Someone said this felt like “the subdued faceless violence of the state.” We all decided maybe fixing Heathrow’s immigration problems might be too grand of a task for Playmobil Pro. Perhaps if any of us had worked in the airline or transportation industries, or in law enforcement, this might have been more effective. But as it stood, there was a limit to how the toys might solve Heathrow’s problems.

We decided it was time for a break, though the facilitators continued to give feedback on Playmobil Pro. “We have to push metaphor to get meaning,” Mizen said. “I think Playmobil feels a little more personal than Lego,” Woolnough noted. “Mixing the Playmobil and the Lego together could be powerful?” Kunter suggested.

After the break, the group went back to the Lego table.

Stephens asked us to model what it might look like for a company to recruit talent. First we built our own models, and then we were asked to join the most important piece of each. Again, there was a lot of abstraction: strings connecting team members, clear window pieces representing transparency in the hiring process, sharks as people to avoid, a monkey representing fun or what someone called “the joy of working.”

Then Stephens moved us all back to the Playmobil table and asked, “What is a potential candidate looking for in our company?” We all took the plain white figures and dug into the pile of accessories. One person gathered up shovels, brooms, axes (“she wants the right tools to do a good job”). Another surrounded his candidate with other figures (“she wants to feel like part of a team”). Someone else grabbed clocks, an umbrella, a snake, a robot. Another put a crown on the figure, a bugle in her hand. I put a helmet on my figure (“security”) and set her on a bicycle (“advancement”), a watering can in one hand (“growth”) and, of course, a stack of euros in the other (“money”). It was noteworthy that all of the men had chosen female figures for this exercise. For a group of consultants who work with human resources and corporate training, that choice seems obvious; any company not actively recruiting or promoting women is simply out of step with society and the marketplace.

But did we actually need toys to show us this — or to clarify any of the other ideas about business, teamwork and self-actualization that we had been playing around with using not-so-subtle metaphors and imagery? That, I suppose, would be the cynical view of this strange corner of corporate life. Or perhaps by requiring us to clip whimsical little props into the tiny hands of figures reminiscent of childhood, Playmobil and Lego create just enough distance for us to leave our everyday minds. And if that’s true, then maybe quirky exercises with these toys really can lead to more meaningful, free-form and natural conversations about thornier issues.

After spending several hours with professional toys, I’m still not entirely sure which version I believe. I do know that by the end of this exercise I was dazed. When it was time to present our Playmobil models of potential candidates, everyone at the table looked exhausted. Kunter sighed and said, “It’s such a tiring thing to do play.” n

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Opinions

The MLB should have seen this scandal coming Barry Svrluga is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

We live in a world in which, if a baseball player slides into a base safely but loses contact with it for the blink of an eye, he can be out. It is a world in which at least one team has been accused of using lasers to establish marks on the field so it could better position outfielders. It is a world in which general managers without Ivy League degrees are outliers.

And it’s a world in which the sport takes in nearly $11 billion annually. ¶ Mix it together, and the scandal that resulted makes sense. Houston fired general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch on Monday because they oversaw a team that prided itself on finding every possible edge. (In the following days, Boston manager Alex Cora and New York Mets manager Carlos Beltran also were out of jobs for their roles in the scandal.) Such an environment emboldened players to use elements both modern and archaic to — how to put this? — outright cheat the game, cheat the opponents, cheat the fans who thought they were witnessing a fair fight.

We should have seen it coming.

Sign-stealing, using the human eye, has been baked into baseball culture for a century. Put millions of dollars on the line, outfit each team with frame-by-frame, highdefinition video, and, lo and behold, the notion of using the available tools for unintended purposes proved too tantalizing to resist. Go figure.

An hour before Astros owner Jim Crane dismissed his club’s two most visible leaders, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred had suspended each for the 2020 season because they failed to stop their club’s elaborate and electronic method to steal signs from its opponents.

This, coupled with a $5 million fine and the stripping of firstand second-round draft picks for two years, was Manfred’s hammer. As many stars as the Astros have — from Justin Verlander to Alex Bregman to Carlos Correa — Luhnow and Hinch defined the organization,

inwardly and outwardly.

The Astros, then, are the villains, and while baseball can’t strip them of the 2017 World Series title they won — this isn’t the NCAA — they are forever stained. That is indisputable. Yet remember, even while cursing Houston and bemoaning its victims, that MLB is not beyond reproach.

As forceful and decisive as Manfred’s move seemed Monday, it shouldn’t be forgotten how lax the league office was about monitoring this stuff in the first place. Once there’s a phone in the dugout that goes directly to a video room, and once information is flowing from that room to the participants in the game — be they players, coaches or the manager — then someone should have put into place safeguards to make sure operations such as the Astros’ didn’t develop.

Major league baseball is perhaps our most quantified and analyzed sport, one in which

David Zalubowski/Associated Press

Houston Astros manager A.J. Hinch was fired Monday after being suspended by the MLB for his role in a sign-stealing scheme.

teams now more than ever sift through the sands for even the slightest advantage. That the sport’s powers put into place mechanics that could easily be exploited seems obvious now. It should have been obvious in 2014, when the replay challenge system went into effect. It was not, and the Astros’ sinister ways developed from there.

That it was Luhnow’s Astros who developed this methodology is hardly coincidence. Long before Houston’s franchise became the pariah that it turned into this offseason, I was talking casually to the head of baseball operations of another club. This was late in the 2015 season, Hinch’s first as manager, Luhnow’s fifth as GM. In describing his distaste for how Luhnow conducted his club’s business, this executive had one word: “binary.” Either a move helps the Astros win more games, or it does not. There is no room for gray areas.

Who was hurt here? Plenty of people. The Red Sox, Yankees and Dodgers, whom the Astros beat en route to the 2017 championship.

The Indians, whom the Astros swept in the division series in 2018. And the Rays and Yankees, whom the Astros beat last fall.

Manfred’s report said the Astros stopped using their system

at some point in the 2018 season — not because they had a moral epiphany but “because the players no longer believed it was effective.” But who’s to say?

You know who gets off easy here? The players. Manfred’s report said “most of the position players” at least knew about the scheme, but he called it “impractical” to discipline so many, particularly because some now play for other teams. The only player named in the report is Carlos Beltrán, the new manager of the New York Mets. But MLB’s investigators, who interviewed 68 characters, have to know where the ideas and the orders came from. Can’t those individuals be held accountable?

What a mess. An organization that thought of itself as redefining how we should think about baseball is a shambles because of the culture it created. A sport that has embraced technology and data analysis is reeling because it allowed those to mix, unchecked.

And with spring training a month away, we’re left not only with the hope that such methods will be abandoned because of better policing and — oh, I don’t know — a sense of morals and fair play, but also with the knowledge that all these shenanigans should have been prevented in the first place. n

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Opinions

KLMNO Weekly

Tom Toles

Hate can only accomplish so much Michael Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post. He is the author of “Heroic Conservatism” and coauthor of “City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era.”

Usually our civic holidays inspire us. But sometimes — as in the case of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year — the spirit of a holiday is so at odds with our current practice that it judges and indicts us.

That spirit is impossible to summarize in one King quote from a lifetime of quotable eloquence. But if I were forced to try, it would be this: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive our hate; only love can do that.”

Is it possible to find a more routinely violated principle in our public life? We have a president who boasts of avenging slights and criticism with multiplied viciousness. Donald Trump has political opponents (including, on occasion, myself ) who feel obliged to attack his breaches of decorum, morality and ethics with an intensity that continues the country’s rhetorical escalation. Partisan media and talk radio make their money through incitement and answering fire with fire.

And much of this conflict is based on a trend that threatens to become a tragedy. Political divisions in the United States are becoming less ideological than sociological. Americans are increasingly taking opposition to their views as an assault on their way of life. So issues such as gun control or climate disruption —

instead of being matters requiring debate and offering the possibility of compromise — become signifiers of cultural identity. Among those who hold this mind-set, losing an election raises the fear of cultural extinction. The strongest and loudest political advocates tend to think their loss might end America as they know it.

If there is any common ground left in our political life, it is the general belief that hatred is the only thing that can drive out hatred.

The depth of our divisions would not, of course, surprise King, who lived in a time when social divisions were far deeper, and the level of political violence far higher. King was not optimistic about human nature.

He strongly rejected the false idealism of white liberals who thought that education and

economic development could overcome racial divisions under the guidance of benevolent experts. “This particular sort of optimism,” King said, “has been discredited by the brutal logic of events. Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but to such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.”

King’s primary source of hope was not in human potential but in God’s nature. “God has planted in the fiber of the universe certain eternal laws which forever confront every man,” he argued.

“They are absolute and not relative. There is an eternal and absolute distinction between right and wrong.” It is the human calling to discern and apply these principles to public affairs with prophetic intensity and urgency.

No one, in King’s view, can finally be neutral. Every man and woman has the duty to resist evil and seek the good.

For King, the passion for justice was not synonymous with defeating an enemy. Influenced by thinkers such as Jesus, Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi, King believed that moral goals must be pursued by moral methods — by means that bring credit to the principle itself. In this way,

suffering for a cause can be more powerful than killing for a cause.

Violence leads to escalation and makes future reconciliation very difficult. Unmerited suffering, in King’s view, can reveal the moral bankruptcy of racists while maintaining the possibility of future reconciliation.

“Nonviolence, according to King, was based on the belief,” said historian Albert J. Raboteau, “that acceptance of suffering was redemptive, because suffering could transform both the sufferer and the oppressor . . . and it was grounded in the confidence that justice would, in the end, triumph over injustice.”

“I think I have discovered the highest good,” said King. “It is love. This principle stands at the center of the cosmos.” And he found this true for a specific reason. “Agape [meaning God-like love] means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated,” King wrote. “All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself.”

Many will find this impractical.

But in the midst of our zero-sum politics, it is worth asking: How practical and successful is the theory that hate can drive out hate? n

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Five Myths

War powers BY

S COTT R . A NDERSON

The Trump administration’s drone strike killing Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani raises old and new questions about the president’s authority to use military force. The president’s war powers derive from norms, laws and the Constitution, but there are many gray areas shrouded in misperceptions. Here are five.

Myth No. 1 Presidents can do whatever they want.

In 1973, historian Arthur Schlesinger cautioned against the “unprecedented centralization of decisions over war and peace” in what he called an “imperial presidency.”

But this authority is not (yet) unbounded. Executive branch lawyers acknowledge that uses of force must be “limited in their nature, scope, and duration” so as to fall below, and avoid escalating into, large-scale wars of the sort that Congress must authorize under the Constitution’s “declare War” clause. Moreover, this authority exists only “insofar as Congress has not specifically restricted it,” as stated in the 2011 Justice Department memo outlining the Obama administration’s view on use of force in Libya — implying that Congress can impose at least some limits, as it did with the 1973 War Powers Resolution.

Myth No. 2 The 1973 War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional.

In reality, the constitutionality of much of the War Powers Resolution is not in doubt. When he vetoed it in 1973, President Richard Nixon contended that two key provisions were illegitimate: a requirement that U.S. troops withdraw from “hostilities” if they do not receive congressional authorization within 60 days, and a special procedure that allowed a simple majority in Congress to direct withdrawal sooner by avoiding a

possible presidential veto. While the Supreme Court vindicated Nixon’s view on the latter, Congress has since enacted alternate procedures that accomplish the same thing. And subsequent administrations have walked back objections to the former. When presidents have failed to comply with the 60-day requirement, they have generally adopted a narrow interpretation of “hostilities” or claimed tacit congressional authorization, not taken a firm stance against its constitutionality.

Myth No. 3 AUMFs have been stretched beyond recognition.

The executive branch has certainly interpreted the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force expansively. But this has been facilitated by, not in spite of, the legislative texts, which are ambiguous and imprecise. Both authorize the president to use all “necessary and appropriate” force without geographic limits or a fixed expiration. The 2001 AUMF’s stated goal is to prevent future attacks by the 9/11 perpetrators and others who harbored or assisted them — language the executive branch has interpreted to apply to al-Qaeda and groups that evolved from or fight alongside it. The 2002 AUMF, which addresses “the continuing threat posed by Iraq,” has been interpreted to authorize support for a stable, democratic Iraq, including by combating terrorism there. While there are reasonable grounds to object to several of these interpretations,

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

After President Trump’s recent moves and threats against Iran, questions have been raised about his powers to wage war. In fact, he can’t simply do whatever he wants.

none are clearly inconsistent with language passed by Congress.

Myth No. 4 Courts can’t restrain the president’s war powers.

It’s true that federal courts often resist involving themselves in war powers questions. But this logic does not apply where there is a clear conflict between the branches, such as a president acting contrary to an express statutory mandate.

If a law were enacted now expressly limiting the use of future military force against Iran, and the next president ignored it, courts might be more inclined to intercede. In general, the Supreme Court has held that courts have a “duty” to weigh in, even if the subject matter is sensitive.

Myth No. 5 To stop a war, Congress can just cut off funding.

In practice, however, this authority is difficult to wield.

Congress typically appropriates money for the federal government through large omnibus bills on a roughly annual basis. This furnishes the

cash to maintain various military units, usually making it unnecessary for the president to seek additional funding to initiate the use of force, and depriving Congress of the opportunity to withhold money for specific action in advance.

While lawmakers could pass legislation limiting existing appropriations for specific military operations, doing so would probably trigger a presidential veto, which would in turn require support from twothirds of Congress to override — a high threshold that’s been met only six times since 2000.

Absent such strong support, Congress’s moment of leverage will come only if hostilities last until the current appropriations expire. Even when this occurs, appropriations bills need to balance an array of interests and cannot always risk a veto. n Anderson is a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow in the national security law program at Columbia Law School.

He has served as an attorney-adviser at the State Department Office of the Legal Adviser and as a legal adviser for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

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