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April 2016 Cover.indd 2
3/14/16 2:58 PM
A New Theory
of Trump
W
HY TRUMP? WHY HIM? Why now? As is restrictionists, because they argue that the inflow of
ever the case with a phenomenon that de- Mexicans in particular has depressed the wages of
fies conventional wisdom, analysts have low-skilled jobs to the point where there’s little reason
sought to explain his rise by asserting he has risen for an American to take one.
Now, it is true that Trump resonates loudly with
to prove exactly the point they have been making for
this base of people, or at least that is what the exit polls
years but nobody was listening.
So: Immigration restrictionists say it’s because tell us. Trump himself wants Republicans to believe he
he took up their cudgels. Trump himself suggests as has unique appeal to this cohort, that he will bring its
members to the polls in record
much when he declares no one was paying attention
numbers—and that he already
to immigration until he brought it up.
has.
That is, of course, just one of the
In truth, they are not nu10,000 transparently ridiculous
merous enough to explain the
things he has said, since immiTrump phenomenon. Nor does
gration has been a dominating
the argument hold sociologifeature of the political conversacally. Fewer than 10 percent
tion over the past decade.
of white non-Hispanic AmeriMoreover, that Trump
cans live at or below the poverowes his lead to his ever-wilder
z
t
e
r
o
h
ty line. Ninety-six percent of all
d
positions on immigration—from
o
John P
white non-Hispanics under 45
the 80-foot-2,000-mile wall the
have a high-school diploma. Somewhere between
Mexicans will pay for to instant deportation of 11 million people to the ban on 40 and 50 percent of all whites have attended college.
Muslim entry into the United States—is belied by the Trump could not garner 35 percent of the GOP vote in
persistent finding in exit polls that twice as many Re- aggregate primarily from the white poor, or even the
publicans say they support a path to legalization over white lower-middle class.
His appeal is broader than that. Take my friend
deportation. This finding surprises me. And yet, there
it is. Nonetheless, the restrictionists are certain: He Steve as an example. He runs a 15-person firm in New
York City. It’s a business he started, and I assume he
took up their issue, and so their issue is the issue.
So: Economic declinists argue that Trump is the makes a lot of money. He’s very conservative politigreat tribune of the uniquely beset lower-class white cally. Last fall he told me he was supporting Trump.
population, particularly its males, and they are re- When I asked why, he explained he was tired of
sponsible for his success. They have been warning that political correctness and sick of Wall Street bankthis group of people should not be ignored, because ers getting away with murder. And then he told me
the kinds of jobs that might have propelled those who about the stresses of his business—specifically, that
never graduated from high school have disappeared he works with people who sign contracts featuring
and left them ill equipped for 21st-century America. non-compete clauses with major corporations. When
Many of these analysts dovetail with immigration their time is up and they’re ready to move on, their
it
From the Ed
Commentary
EDITOR Letter.indd 1
or
1
3/15/16 11:54 AM
employers threaten them with legal action due to the
non-compete clauses. These claims are without merit,
Steve says, but litigating them would cost hundreds
of thousands of dollars. So his people stay where they
are. It’s unfair, he says.
What on earth, I asked, does he think Trump
would do to help him and his clients with a noncompete problem? What does this have to do with
anything? It’s the big guys, Steve said. The big guys are
lording it over the little guys.
Now, in no way is Steve a little guy—except by
comparison with major corporations. But he feels like
the little guy.
This illuminated my understanding of the
Trump phenomenon. His candidacy is an emotional
outlet for his supporters. They have taken his message
about “winning” and the “losers” who are running
things and doing it badly—and they have applied it to
their own circumstances. They could be the children
of autoworkers for whom the lifetime employment
their fathers (or grandfathers) enjoyed is a nostalgic
memory. Or they could be Steve the small businessman, feeling under constant pressure and never able
to relax into his own success. They feel beset, and they
feel ill-used by the forces that have beset them. Trump
is telling them he will fix it, even though his answer
to how he will fix it is preposterous. Trade wars and
deportations will not work and will have complex consequences we cannot begin to foresee. What’s more,
chances are, many of his supporters know this.
The economic declinists want the Trump surge
to validate them, and have some grounds to do so—but
as with the immigration restrictionists, they are seizing on it opportunistically to win their argument.
So: Cultural declinists, who tend to hate Trump,
see in his rise the demonstrable evidence of their worst
fears about American cultural life. Eliot Cohen and
Peter Wehner both attribute the Trump phenomenon
to “moral rot,” from the crudity of popular culture to
the collapse of the family to the parlousness of the
education system that has left individual Americans
adrift and uniquely susceptible to the open ugliness
and viciousness of Trump himself. I am sympathetic to
this argument, largely because it’s diffi ult to understand the fact that Trump’s support seems impervious
to the sorts of standards voters expect of other candidates for office. He can lie twice in the same sentence,
he can display a level of ignorance 10 times the level
that turned Sarah Palin’s name into a punch line, and
he can comport himself like a violence-promoting
goon—and while any one of those things would take
another person down, there he remains. What else
could it be than that his supporters are themselves so
2
EDITOR Letter.indd 2
ignorant they don’t know he’s ignorant, and that they
are themselves ill-mannered because they do not mind
his ill-manneredness?
And yet one cannot say American “moral rot”
was any less present in 2008 or 2012, or earlier, for
that matter. The convictions of social conservatives
that the continuing high rate of abortions, the mainstreaming of gay marriage, the growing hostility to
religious liberty, and the force-feeding of transgenderism help account for the rise of a grotesque culture in
which a Trump presidency is thinkable are subject to
the classic “correlation is not causation” criticism. It is
a fact that Trumpism would have been unthinkable in
a more morally constrained society—but that society
has been gone for many decades.
These “Trump proves my theory” explanations
are all examples of a phenomenon diagnosed by Yuval
Levin in his staggeringly brilliant forthcoming book,
The Fractured Republic. Rather than seeing Trump
through the lens of our present circumstances or the
political and social conditions specific and new to
America today, these theorists are all awash in babyboomer nostalgia. The immigration restrictionists
hearken back to a time when the country was whiter
and therefore more cohesive. The economic declinists
hearken back to a time when the United States was
responsible for 60 percent of global industrial production due to the destruction of rival economies in
World War II. The cultural declinists see a more moral
America in the rearview mirror.
Levin’s central point is that our political culture
cannot shake itself of the impulse to locate the present
in the past—and in many cases, a past that was actually
quite distant. The rise of global competition, especially
in Asia, that beset American industrial production
began in the 1960s. The 1960s were half a century ago.
The “amnesty” bill that still riles restrictionists was
passed 30 years ago. Roe v. Wade was decided 43 years
ago. And yet here we are, in 2016, boats against the
current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
So: I want to propose an alternate theory of
Trump’s popularity. It also takes us into the past, but at
least it’s our own immediate past. In September 2008,
after months of uncertainty following the collapse of
Bear Stearns, the financial system went into its terrifying tailspin. A disastrous recession shrank the overall
economy by 9 percent, and the unemployment rate
rose to 10 percent a year later.
Now imagine that the meltdown had taken place
not in September 2008 but rather in September 2006.
Imagine that housing prices and stock prices had fallen in the same way—such that the wealth invested in
the 63 percent of home-owned American households
Editor’s Letter : April 2016
3/15/16 11:54 AM
and in the stocks owned by 62 percent of all Americans to 32. Notwithstanding polls that showed it was deeply
unpopular, the Republican Party had never before
had declined by 40 percent.
Further, imagine that serious proposals arose been so dominant. Its best and brightest lined up to
that the 8 percent of homeowners who had defaulted run for president against an ethically damaged and
on their home loans be forgiven their debts—the very very old-school Hillary Clinton.
And then came Trump.
proposal in 2009 that led investor Rick Santelli to call
So: What I’m suggesting is that the weird timing
for a new “tea party” uprising on the part of the 92
percent who paid their bills on time. Only this time of the meltdown and the rise of Obama hindered and
Santelli’s comments had been spoken in 2007. Imagine delayed a reckoning for 2008 that everybody would
all these things. And then imagine the presidential have expected as a matter of course had the crisis hit
race that would have followed. Does the rise of Trump earlier. Now, there were certainly suggestions of extraand Bernie Sanders suddenly make all the sense in the political populist rage along the way. The Tea Party
was one, though it focused on size-of-government isworld? Of course.
But of course the meltdown didn’t happen in sues, and Occupy Wall Street was another, though its
2006. It took place a mere seven weeks before an anti-banker message was swamped by every far-left
election. A presidential race that was a dead heat the bugaboo on earth. But the signs were easy to misread—obviously, since almost
week before Lehman Brothers
everyone misread them.
went bankrupt turned into an
The weird timing of the
And this is why, I think,
8-point rout. Barack Obama
may have been a “change” can- meltdown seven weeks before the meaning of Trump is being
misused and misunderstood.
didate, but he had no idea the
a presidential election and
He says he wants to “make
change would involve repairing the international finance the conduct of Barack Obama America great again,” but I
don’t think that’s what his acosystem until that was thrust
in office hindered and delayed lytes hear. I think they hear that
upon him by circumstance.
The Obama election
a reckoning for the financial he is going to turn his vicious
temper and unbalanced rage
had a distorting effect on
crisis of 2008. Trump is
on the large-scale forces they
the American response to
feel are hindering them. They
the meltdown of 2008. The
that reckoning.
want someone punished. Could
next seven years in American
be China. Could be Muslims.
political life came to revolve
around him. His actions in the wake of the crisis—a Could be Mexicans. Could be bankers. Could be the GOP
$1 trillion stimulus, the partial nationalization of the “establishment.” Whatever. He’s their Punisher.
Only he won’t be. The qualities that have given
auto industry, and Obamacare—became the policy
focus of American politics. Republicans opposed them him appeal to part of the GOP primary electorate
and stopped him dead with the midterm shellacking would be destructive with a national electorate seven
of 2010. Democrats fought back and secured his re- times the size. If he is the GOP nominee, the gender
gap—12 percent for Romney in 2012—will open into a
election in 2012.
As the elections seesawed, Washington froze. Gender Grand Canyon.
According to Gallup, Hillary Clinton has a net
There were two government shutdowns owing to the
partisan and ideological standoff. The president de- favorability with Hispanics of 33 percent. Trump has a
cided he was frustrated by the checks and balances of net unfavorability among Hispanics of 65 percent. In
the American republican system and warned he had other words, against Clinton, Trump is 98 percent in
the right to do things by executive fiat no president the hole. Hispanics make up 11 percent of the electorbefore him had contemplated, because “we just can’t ate. That’s the ball game right there.
Thus, an election that appeared to be the Rewait.” Republicans used these threats in part to crush
publican Party’s to lose now threatens to fracture the
Democrats in the 2014 midterms.
The Republican Party believed it was back on GOP beyond recognition, with the least popular frontthe road to power. Not only did it control both houses runner in history staggering toward her dynastic inof Congress by healthy margins, Republicans during stallment at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Punisher
the Obama era had taken the majorities in 67 of the has arrived, eight years later—and the only punishnation’s 99 state legislatures by winning 928 seats in ment he will truly deliver will be to his own voters and
aggregate. The number of GOP governors rose from 21 to the party whose nomination he seeks.q
Commentary
EDITOR Letter.indd 3
3
3/15/16 2:20 PM
April 2016Vol. 141 : No. 4
Articles
KC
Johnson
The New Dark Ages on Campus
12
How protestors, professors, and administrators are consciously
working to destroy free thought and free expression at America’s universities.
The New Yorker vs. Free Speech
James
Kirchick
20
America’s most prestigious weekly seems determined to express solidarity
with radicals who want to silence their ideological foes by any means necessary.
Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t
Talk About Being Jewish
Seth
Mandel
27
It’s because he’s a socialist.
Hillary Clinton’s Bad Old Days
Joshua
Muravchik
33
The Democratic frontrunner is still
intimately involved with conspiracy-theorist leftists.
Scalia’s Warning
Tara
Helfman
39
We are in danger of having a ‘failed democracy,’
he said the summer before he died.
Fiction
Ben
Eisman
Connecticut Shade
44
Politics & Ideas
John
Steele Gordon
Naomi
Schaefer Riley
The Change Agent
Frederick the Great, by Tim Blanning
These Parents Today
56
The Collapse of Parenting, by Leonard Sax
The School Runners
Jonathan
Foreman
54
58
The Last Thousand, by Jeffrey E. Stern
Culture & Civilization
Joseph
Epstein
Terry
Teachout
Fernanda
Moore
Matthew
Continetti
Where Have All the Critics Gone?
62
Long time passing.
Don’t Forget Harry James
66
Giving a scorned musician his proper due.
Seattle Protest Roasters
69
Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, by Sunil Yapa
Mediacracy: Donald Trump Is Making the
Mainstream Media Richer and More Powerful
From the Editor 1
The Way We Live Now, by Christine Rosen
Welcome to Herland, 2016 6
Letters 8
72
Welcome to Herland,
2016
I
N 1915, CHARLOTTE PERKINS Gilman published decades on the dating scene. “I Feel Destined to Be Single,
Herland, a utopian novel about an all-female and That’s Okay,” was the title of one essay. Elle magazine’s
society of accomplished and powerful yet peace- recent “Special Report” on being single included helpful
ful women. In Herland, war is nonexistent thanks to a tips such as “Always have sex on the first date,” and “If
proto-feminist form of eugenics that has bred out ag- a man says ‘My Mom is so nice,’ don’t walk—run,” since
gression, defiance, and other presumably unpleasant evidently this is a “fail-safe indication that this man has
male traits. Children are born via asexual reproduction unrealistic expectations for a woman’s emotional range.”
Girls no longer need to look far to find cultural
and reared communally, and crime and conflict, like
heroines like the fiercely indepenthat of the “savages” in the outside
dent Elsa in Frozen, or unmarried
world, is unknown. Everyone is a
and childless female television leads
vegetarian. Marriage doesn’t exist.
such as Olivia Pope on Scandal.
Herland is upon us, evidently.
Even the married women on notaAs of 2009, fewer than half of Amerible shows, like Alicia Florick on The
can women are married. Single
Good Wife and Claire Underwood
ladies are the new normal, we are
Christine Rosen
on House of Cards, are more likely
told, and are ushering in a new era
than not to be scheming to underof activism and social change. As
the National Center for Family and Marriage Research mine their husbands and seize power themselves than
noted in a recent report: “Marriage is no longer compul- meekly supporting them.
But the most important expression of this singlesory....It’s just one of an array of options.”
The journalist Rebecca Traister, who confesses ladies revolution, according to its celebrants, is liberal:
she “always hated it when my heroines got married,” has When Barack Obama ran for reelection in 2012, single
appointed herself amanuensis to All the Single Ladies women voted for him 67 to 31 percent compared with
(which is also the title, borrowed from a Beyoncé song, married women. “Women, perhaps especially those who
of her new book). “Abstention from or delay of marriage have lived untethered from the energy-sucking and idenmay have been a conscious choice for some women in the tity-sapping institution of marriage in its older forms,
1970s and 1980s,” Traister writes. “But it has now simply have helped to drive social progress of this country
become a mass behavior. The most radical of feminist since its founding,” Traister notes. The message is clear:
ideas—the disestablishment of marriage—has, terrify- Today’s single woman can—and ought to—do the same.
Although writers like Traister are very happy that
ingly for many conservatives, been so widely embraced
the cultural image of the single lady has evolved from
as to have become habit.”
The expression of this habit takes unusual forms. sad-sack Cathy cartoons to sex-positive gals such as CarNew York magazine recently featured “Single rie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, what they really pine
Ladies Week,” with essays about the challenges of being for isn’t a nude-selfie-posting Instagrammer who comsingle and childless in a world that encourages couples plains about body-shaming; they want a 21st-century
and kids. Authors meted out advice about how to survive version of Carry Nation, wielding petitions for paid leave
in lieu of a hatchet destroying barrels full of alcohol. In
Christine Rosen appears monthly in this space. Last their view, if women cast their ballots as they should, the
month’s column was about the miniseries, “The People future of single ladies will be a social-justice nirvana,
like some mashup of an undergraduate women’s-studies
v. O.J. Simpson.”
The Way We
Live Now
6
April 2016
a Sisterhood of the Portable-Health-Benefits Pants.
seminar and an episode of The Golden Girls.
Wedding oneself to government benefits is as
One New Jersey hairdresser told Traister that
she disliked the compromises she had to make when in potentially restrictive as wedding oneself to the bonds
a relationship and now values being “unencumbered” of traditional marriage these single-lady activists are so
rather than “smothered.” “It’s so much more exciting eager to denounce. Consider that in European countries
than the idea of combining my dreams with anybody with these policies in place, women are in fact less likely
else’s,” she said. As Traister notes approvingly, “The to reach management positions than men and less likely
independence of women from marriage decried by to be employed full time.
In Herland, when men stumble upon utopia, they
[Daniel Patrick] Moynihan as a pathology at odds with
decide they must either protect or conquer its female
the nation’s patriarchal order is now a norm.”
In truth, this is less independence than it is a inhabitants. The same lack of nuance plagues much of
trickle-down theory of female empowerment that will- the contemporary cheerleading for the supposed chutzfully downplays the costs of being single—and especially pah of all these single ladies. These single-lady boosters
the cost of single motherhood. As Traister concedes, “Al- are the ideological equivalent of the fluffer on porn
most 50 percent of the 3.3 million Americans now earn- sets, constantly keeping up enthusiasm for the idea of
independent women when
ing minimum wage or below
in fact, for a vast number of
are unmarried women.” Not
The revolution begins to seem less
women, such independence
to mention “more than half
is a fantasy. Traister’s “revoof unmarried young mothrevoultionary once you realize it’s a
lutionary rupture” begins to
ers with children under the
Sisterhood of the Portable-Healthlook more like an exercise
age of six are likely to live
in wishful radicalization, esbelow the poverty line,” a
Benefits Pants. Wedding oneself to
pecially when one considers
number five times the rate of
government benefits is as potentially
that in the last presidential
married women.
election, 40 percent of unFor the single-ladies
restrictive as wedding oneself to the
married women didn’t even
narrative to be “empowbonds of traditional marriage.
bother to register to vote.
ering,” it must include inEmbracing the single
creased state power in many
ladies also means celebratspheres—and
increased
spending on the social support single mothers require. ing the disappearance of fathers from children’s lives,
For a movement so heady with its own feelings of inde- and ignoring the social consequences of what that disappendence, its blueprint for the future focuses on govern- pearance means—especially for boys, something Traister
ment dependence. Traister’s book includes a list of policy and others downplay with blather about accepting that
recommendations that will be familiar to anyone who we are “living in a new world.” And what of men, who
supports Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton (higher mini- are more likely than women to have never been married
mum wage, more federal spending on health care, feder- (23 percent vs. 17 percent in 2012, according to the Pew
ally funded day care, paid family leave, increased welfare Research Center)?
What made Gilman’s Herland utopia succeed (as
payments). It’s not clear how taxpayer money will pay for
all of this when she also argues for “shorter workdays,” with most utopias) was its isolation from the rest of the
but no matter. We are skipping along the edges of utopia, world. What makes the message of Traister and other
boosters of single ladyhood work is the way it willfully igafter all. Details aren’t important.
And, as Traister argues, it’s high time the ladies got nores the less palatable side effects of going it alone—and
their fair share of government largesse. “In looking to an assumption that women share common interests. The
the government to support their ambitions, choices, and idea that single women will, by dint of their being female
independence through better policy, single women are as- and independent, exercise a more just, peaceful, lowserting themselves as citizens—full citizens—in ways that carbon-footprint form of power is a direct affront to the
American men have for generations,” she writes. It’s hard evidence of history and human nature. Women now enjoy
to take seriously the claim that this is an “army of free freedom from certain expectations (about marriage, havwomen,” as Traister calls them, when all they are likely to ing children). Assuming they will all use that freedom for
do is exchange a traditional social safety net (marriage) pursuing a particular political or social agenda, however,
for a new one (government benefi s). The revolution be- is worse than utopian; it’s dangerously foolish. The mere
gins to seem a little less revolutionary when you realize it’s presence of unmarried ovaries does not a radical make.q
Commentary
7
Letters
On Obama’s
Watch
To the Editor:
FTER READING Abe Greenwald’s article, I was surprised
that he omitted the Malaysian
Airlines crashes, Ebola virus outbreak, and California mudslides
from Barack Obama’s list of failures [“On His Watch,” January].
I also note, more seriously, that
Mr. Greenwald has conveniently
forgotten to mention our president’s positive role in the Arab
Spring and the spectacular end
to both the Qaddafi and Mubarak
dictatorships, the doubling of the
stock market, health care for an
additional 15 million Americans, a
nuclear agreement with Iran, and
an unprecedented military alliance with Israel (see “Iron Dome”).
As an educator, I’m particularly excited about Obama’s role in opening more doors for college bound
students of working-class families.
So, yasher koach to Commentary for devising a very provocative cover story, but a little balance
would be a nice gesture.
Michael Taub
A
Yonkers, New York
1
8
To the Editor:
BE GREENWALD’S article
covered the Obama administration’s more than eight years of
destroying America’s power and
influence in the world and providing fertilizer for chaos in the Middle East. This is a situation that Israel might not ultimately survive.
(Although Mr. Greenwald doesn’t
mention it, things could result in
a 21st-century Holocaust. From
Syria to Iran, the worst elements
of Muslim society have prospered
with America’s help.
Only one point made by Mr.
Greenwald needs correcting. His
closing line reads: “We are in the
final year of a presidency that unwittingly midwifed a monster.” An
academic as brilliant as Obama—
one educated by an impressive
collection of white and black domestic terrorists and radicals who
helped push him rapidly into the
top of the political elite—cannot be said to have imperiled the
United States unwittingly. Rather,
he knew exactly what he was doing
and for what purpose. His efforts
include adding trillions of dollars
to America’s debt and using executive orders to transform the United
A
States. Additionally, he has, with
the media’s help, given amnesty
to illegal immigrants. As America
changes, there will cease to be an
opposition party at all and we’ll
be like Venezuela or Argentina or
Brazil or Cuba. The American Constitution will be no more, and no
Republican will be able to undo the
revolution, not even Trump. There
has been nothing unwitting about
any of this.
Ira Silverman
Yorktown Heights, New York
1
Abe Greenwald writes:
ICHAEL TAUB implies that
I’ve blamed President Obama
unjustifiably for things that were out
of his control. He also believes I’ve
neglected to mention what he sees
as Obama’s achievements, in foreign
policy and beyond. I can address
both these assertions by explaining
the purpose of my article. The president has not said, as Mr. Taub would
have it, that the war in Syria and the
rise of ISIS are out of his hands. To
the contrary, soon after the ISIS attack in Paris, he said: “We have the
right strategy, and we’re gonna see
M
Letters : April 2016
it through.” Obama has stated that
the policies he’s chosen regarding
the Syrian civil war and the advent of
ISIS were not only the most sensible
of those available but also the ones
with the most support from his top
military and civilian advisors. He
has additionally defended what he
calls a responsible exit from Iraq.
My purpose in writing the article
was to challenge his own claims—to
analyze the efficacy of his policies
and determine whether or not these
policies were supported by his top
officials. I’ve only faulted him for
decisions he has defended.
The record shows that Obama
did not, in fact, take the advice
of those he would go on to claim
as policy allies. When everyone
from his secretaries of defense to
his secretary of state to his joint
chiefs chairman recommended
more forward-leaning policies, the
president rejected their plans in
favor of his own. While Obama
repeatedly went his own way on
Iraq, Syria, and ISIS, the crises
grew and grew—often in precisely
those ways that his detractors had
warned him about. If such a record
is not fair game for critics of the
commander in chief, nothing is.
As for policy pertaining to matters other than Syria, Iraq, and
ISIS, that simply wasn’t within
the scope of the argument I was
making. Fortunately, if Mr. Taub
is interested in my thoughts on
Obama’s approach to the Arab
Spring and U.S.-Israel relations, he
can read an earlier article I wrote
dealing with precisely those matters: “He’s Made It Worse: Obama’s
Middle East,” in the May 2014 issue
of Commentary.
Ira Silverman believes that
Obama has deliberately pursued
policies aimed at hastening global
instability and increasing the terrorist threat to the United States.
About such foreign-policy “birtherism,” the less said the better.
Commentary
April 2016 Vol. 141 : No. 4
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Criticizing
Trump
To the Editor:
HAT JOHN Podhoretz failed
to mention in his article
about Donald Trump is that Trump
is a pragmatist [“Trumped,” January]. He is a TV personality who
has been known to the public for 30
years as a fair and effective decision
maker. Yes, as a businessman selling
hospitality services in largely Democratic areas to liberal public-sector
convention-goers, he has donated
to liberal political campaigns. Yet he
has also donated to Ronald Reagan,
Newt Gingrich, and John McCain,
which put his business at risk of retaliation from liberal groups. In fact,
his current campaign has inspired
threats of boycotts, such as Macy’s
vow to remove his clothing line from
its stores.
Trump campaigns against the
stupidity and cupidity of the establishment. He draws in disaffected
Democrats, Independents, and conservative Republicans, and, when
elected, he will need the continued
support of these people and politicians in order to govern. He will not
“go rogue” and nominate liberal
judges or propose liberal policies.
If he did, he would be a politician
without a party, not trusted by anyone. We can expect Trump to be a
dealmaker, and we can judge him by
his results. To ensure conservative
principles and make the Republican
Party a more conservative party,
those of us on the right should support Trump.
Michael McCarthy
W
Address withheld
1
10
To the Editor:
WAS DEEPLY disappointed by
John Podhoretz’s vituperative
comments about Donald Trump.
When logical reasoning is reduced
to name-calling, the argument is
lost. Mr. Podhoretz has lost my
vote. I am voting for Donald
Trump.
Barry Katz
I
nonetheless the most likely nominee for the Republican Party. Mr.
Podhoretz’s gamble will probably
lose, and then he will be in the
awkward position of not being able
to credibly support Trump over
Hillary. Thus, while Donald Trump
routinely violates Ronald Reagan’s
11th commandment of not speaking ill of fellow Republicans, Mr.
Podhoretz has gone further than
Trump has by compromising the
ability of the most likely Republican nominee to stop Hillary from
being the next resident of the
White House.
Lawrence Slavin
Rockaway, New Jersey
Lawrence, New York
1
To the Editor:
FEAR THAT JOHN Podhoretz
may have gone too far in the
intensity of his criticism of Donald
Trump. While I agree that some (or
most) of his negative characterizations of Trump may be on target, I
doubt that he would prefer to have
Hillary in office. Mr. Podhoretz appears to be staking much of his political capital on being able to stop
Trump’s nomination, but Trump is
I
1
John Podhoretz writes:
AM NOT AN official of the Republican Party. I am not casting
about for votes. I am endorsing
no one. My article about Donald
Trump is an analysis of his rhetoric, behavior, and effect on the
American political system.
I
1
Waterworks
To the Editor:
AUL WOLFOWITZ explains
clearly the importance of water
engineers in addressing the challenge of water scarcity in the Middle East [“Water Engineers Will Be
Its Heroes,” January]. But getting
water from the largest and most
sustainable reservoirs, including
the oceans, requires desalination,
and desalination on a huge scale
requires cheap energy. So the path
P
to water abundance leads through
energy research.
Right now the only technology being developed that promises
clean, safe energy far cheaper than
existing sources is the still experimental but patented “Focus Fusion” process, well documented by
LPPFusion, Inc. (on whose board
of advisers I sit). If successfully developed, this technology will result
in being able to build 5-megawatt
Letters : April 2016
generators capable of providing
electricity to the grid for a total cost
of less than $500,000. This would
be less than one-tenth the price of
coal, and it would be pollution- and
radiation-free—a true paradigm
shift capable of mending the world.
Such cheap energy would make
possible massive desalination of
brackish ground water and even
seawater. Only money is limiting
progress. Currently, research is
funded by about $600,000 a year in
private investments, but larger private or government funding could
speed the development of this vital
technology.
Alvin Samuels
Austin, Texas
1
Paul Wolfowitz writes:
O QUOTE Professor David
Sedlak of Berkeley, as I quoted him in the article, the “laws
of physics make it unlikely that
we will ever fill the desalination
highway with a bunch of compact
hybrid vehicles.” Of course, if energy costs can be brought down
by 90 percent, as Mr. Samuels suggests, there would be no need for
T
the equivalent of compact hybrid
vehicles, whether for desalination
or for transportation. That would
indeed be a paradigm shift—and
not only for agriculture.
The dream of controlled nuclear
fusion has long been pursued as a
route to virtually unlimited supplies of clean energy. Some $20
billion has already been spent on
what one critic calls the “overdue
and overbudget ITER project,” an
international consortium to build
a large fusion reactor. A number of
alternative approaches are being
pursued, some of them by small
companies such as Mr. Samuels’s,
some by investors such as Goldman Sachs and Jeff Bezos. As in
many other cases of technological
innovation, it might be the unorthodox approach that eventually
achieves a breakthrough.
But that possibility, still seemingly remote, is not a reason to
invest in desalination plants that
are designed based on current energy costs.
1
Duran’s Double Life
To the Editor:
REDERIC RAPHAEL’S review
of The Secret Faith of Maestre
Honoratus convinces me that I
should buy this book [“Duran Duran,” January]. I look forward to its
“sober reflection on the pre-Inquisition era, when the Jewish believer
Profayt Duran found himself compelled to camouflage himself in a
faith he despised.”
If there were among the growing number of conversos a few too
many “Duran Duran”s, then that
F
Commentary
would explain why the Inquisition
occurred at all, and why its most
zealous leader was himself from a
converso family. Men as conflicted
as Duran find it hard to keep their
mouths shut, to walk on the razor’s
edge.
John Schuh
Lake Dallas, Texas
1
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11
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HNSON
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A
S LAST FALL’S WAVE of student
protests arrived in Durham, North
Carolina, a self-described “group of
unaffiliated and concerned students”
presented the “Demands of Black
Voices.” The Duke University activists
wanted “bias and diversity training”
for many segments of the Duke community, a new university policy “con-
KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College
and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He
is the author of All the Way With LBJ, published in 2009,
and the co-author, with Stuart Taylor, of 2007’s Until
Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful
Injustice of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.
12
cerning hate speech” toward “students of color,” a new
administrator to address the complaints of students
of color only, and permission for students of color to
miss classes by citing “mental health trauma” from
“racial incidents on campus.”
One demand stood out. “Professors,” the students
wrote, “will be in danger of losing their jobs, and nontenure track [sic] faculty will lose tenure status if they
perpetuate hate speech that threatens the safety of students of color. They will also be liable if the discriminatory attitudes behind the speech could potentially harm
the academic achievements of students of color.”
A university that dismisses professors whose “attitudes” could “potentially harm” the exam performance
of preferred undergraduates has abandoned all pretense
of academic freedom. Given how zealously professors
April 2016
normally defend the concept, one
might have expected that Duke faculty members would have unanimously
condemned the proposal. Instead, the
only public reaction came via a statement signed by 23 Duke professors that
hailed the students for “forcing us all to
learn out loud.” The protesters’ incivility had overcome the “muting of sharply
articulated criticism of white supremacy.” And the professors had a message
for the students who recommended
the dismissal of an unspecified number
of their colleagues: “Thank you.”
Little in the professional experiences of the faculty signatories suggested a culture of “white supremacy”
at Duke (or, for that matter, at any
other contemporary college campus).
The faculty statement was hosted on
the website of Professor Mark Anthony Neal—who, in a fawning 2006
interview in the university’s offi ial
magazine, described his “intellectual
alter ego” as “thugniggaintellectual,”
who “comes into intellectual spaces
like a thug, who literally is fearful and
menacing,” producing “some real kind
of ‘gangster’ scholarship . . . hard-core
intellectual thuggery.” Signatures for
the statement were solicited by Professor Wahneema Lubiano—who came
to Duke, with a lifetime position, more
than 15 years ago, touting two allegedly “forthcoming” books. To date, neither of these books, nor any other Lubiano manuscript,
has appeared in print.
As it turns out, the students could have stayed
home. In the name of promoting appropriate thinking
on matters related to “diversity,” Duke had effectively
implemented the protesters’ plan. Dean Valerie Ashby
announced at a November 2015 forum that department chairs would be held “accountable” for inculcating the administration’s “values” among faculty in
their departments. And “at every stage of their evaluation,” Ashby revealed, untenured professors learned
“how we feel” on questions of race and gender. The
message these faculty members received: “You can’t
be a great scholar and be intolerant. You have to go.”
In a reaction that captured the fundamentally illiberal spirit that animated the fall 2015 campus movement, this news prompted the assembled audience,
filled with student protesters, to burst into applause.
“Sunlight,”
Justice
Louis
Brandeis famously wrote, “is said to
be the best disinfectant.” Ashby’s revelation of a previously nonpublic policy joined such other poisonous incidents captured on video as University
of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s
call for “muscle” to deal with student
journalists covering a campus protest, or a shrieking Yale University undergraduate asking her house master,
“Who the fuck hired you?” As seen in
the administration’s adoption, with
faculty support, of Duke’s new “tolerance” tenure criterion, the episodes
revealed a shared vision of the academy among the protesters, key segments of the professoriate, and most
college and university leaders.
In the narrative offered by the
mainstream media—and by the participants themselves—last fall’s campus protests exposed the continuing
structural racism in the nation’s colleges and universities. To rectify this
purported problem, the protesters
demanded that administrators punish students who publicly challenged
their beliefs; the right to join sympathetic faculty in dictating the curricular choices of all other students;
and the authority to vet new faculty
hires, thereby ensuring increased
conformity of thought on diversity
issues. Administrators should have
responded to these intolerant demands by reminding
all concerned that institutions of higher learning that
abandon academic freedom no longer have a reason to
exist. But recent developments, especially during the
Obama administration, have made colleges uniquely
ill suited to defend ideals of openness and civil liberties. And in any case, most faculty and administrators
seem to share the protesters’ desire for universities
dominated by a never-ending pursuit of diversity. In
this respect, the protesters deserve thanks for unwittingly exposing the public to the increasingly hollow
core of the contemporary academy.
In the narrative
offered by the
mainstream media,
last fall’s campus
protests exposed
the continuing
structural racism in
the nation’s colleges
and universities.
To rectify this
purported problem,
the protestors
demanded that
administrators
punish students
who publicly
challenged their
beliefs.
Commentary
W
HILE UNIVERSITY LEADERS might have
worried about negative publicity from
the campus uprisings, most faculty and
administrators share (or, in the case of
administrators, at least purport to share)
13
the protestors’ vision of an academy
dominated by institutional racism, in
which only extraordinary action can
achieve diversity and protect students
of color from daily microaggressions.
A reminder of this shared vision came
during the Durham protests as the
Supreme Court heard oral arguments
in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case
about the use of racial preferences in
college admissions. Universities raced
to file amicus briefs on Texas’s side;
Harvard’s brief, for instance, deemed
the use of racial preferences “essential
to Harvard’s goals of providing its students with the most robust educational
experience possible on campus and
preparing its graduates to thrive in a
complex and stunningly diverse nation
and world,” and it celebrated what the
university described as “the transformative importance of student body
diversity on the educational process.”
The recognition that all sides—
on campus, at least—had similar
goals on race-related questions had
the effect of encouraging the protestors to make ever more extreme
demands, confident that their baseline assumptions would pass unchallenged. Events at Yale and Missouri,
which attracted the most public attention last fall, demonstrated the
pattern. A perception that the Missouri administration was insuffi
ciently sensitive to alleged racial incidents on campus
prompted an African-American graduate student to
launch a hunger strike, student protestors to occupy
the campus quad, and black members of the Missouri
football team to threaten not to play unless President
Tim Wolfe resigned. At Yale, turmoil erupted after a
fraternity party allegedly denied access to black women (which, after an investigation, seems not to have
occurred) and an innocuous email from Erika Christakis, associate master of Silliman House, about whether students, instead of a university committee, could
best determine appropriate Halloween costumes.
In each case, the defining event—Melissa Click’s
call for “muscle,” the shrieking Yale undergraduate—came from a YouTube video, allowing outsiders
a rare opportunity to experience the contemporary
campus environment firsthand. Both videos produced
an enormous backlash off campus, even as the pro-
testors enjoyed victories on campus.
At Missouri, President Wolfe quickly
resigned. The new leadership team
made clear where it stood regarding
freedom of thought; the school’s interim vice chancellor for inclusion, a
law professor named Chuck Henson,
warned that the First Amendment
did not give students a free pass to
say whatever they pleased. Yale president Peter Salovey declined a call to
remove both Erika Christakis and her
husband, Nicholas, but otherwise appeased the protestors, announcing
that the university would devote $50
million for various diversity initiatives. This response came from a university that already had spent countless millions of dollars on comparable
diversity initiatives over the past several decades.
The conduct of the protestors
caused little reconsideration of their
agenda in the academy at large. Late
in the fall 2015 term, for instance, two
Harvard deans prepared a “place mat
for social justice” ostensibly designed
to instruct Harvard students on how
to discuss hot-button issues when
they went home for the holidays. The
section about Yale suggested the following interpretation: “When I hear
students expressing their experiences of racism on campus, I don’t hear
complaining. Instead I hear young
people uplifting a situation that I may not experience. If non-Black students get the privilege of that
safe environment, I believe that same privilege should
be given to all students.” Though a public backlash
(another reminder of the value of Brandeis’s dictum)
prompted an apology from Harvard and a withdrawal
of the place mats, one of the deans responsible, Thomas Dingman, insisted that the official interpretation of
events at Yale was “more rooted in fairness than in politics,” as the Harvard Crimson summarized his views.
Thus, any questioning of the agenda of the protestors was deemed an assault on fairness. And that
agenda extended well beyond the behavior seen in
the Yale and Missouri videos. The Missouri protestors not only sought to deny First Amendment rights
to student journalists but also wanted students—not
faculty or trustees—to receive final say over the course
of study, through a “comprehensive racial awareness
The poor conduct
of protestors
has caused little
reconsideration of
their agenda in the
academy at large.
Late in the fall 2015
term, for instance,
two Harvard deans
prepared a ‘place
mat for social
justice’ ostensibly
designed to
instruct Harvard
students on how to
discuss hot-button
issues when they
went home for the
holidays.
14
The New Dark Ages on Campus : April 2016
and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff and administration.” The curriculum was to
be “vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.” Their
Yale colleagues envisioned a campus in which politically correct students dictated coursework for all,
through a new, ethnic-studies distributional requirement, whose curriculum would be designed solely by
faculty in the “Native American Studies, Chicanx &
Latinx Studies, Asian American Studies, and African
Studies” programs.
Each of these demands, variants on which appeared at almost every campus that experienced a protest last fall, violated a core principle of academic freedom—that faculty (subject to trustee oversight) have
primary responsibility for curricular and personnel
matters. On the curricular front, protestors envisioned
an academy in which students with the right kind of
beliefs would dictate policy. Protestors at California
Polytechnic State University wanted the school to “institute mandatory Women’s & Gender Studies or Ethnic Studies courses for students in every major.” Emory
University marchers demanded “a General Education
Requirement for courses that explore issues significantly affecting people of color.” At Colgate University,
the protestors pushed for “CORE courses [to] include
national and worldwide perspectives, not just Western
traditions.” At the University of Virginia, the protestors
argued that “every course . . . should strive to recognize
minority perspectives.” They even provided examples
for recalcitrant faculty: “For example, Biology could
study genetics across minority communities, or the ethical history of ‘progress’ in relation to eugenics; Systems
Engineering could discuss culturally sensitive industrial organization; and Classics could review the writings
and lives of ancient minority writers.”
The protestors similarly demanded control over
the hiring process. Those at Brown University wanted
“cluster hires of junior faculty of color,” focused on
questions related to social justice. At Dartmouth College, the call was for a “multi-million-dollar commitment coupled with hired positions focused on increasing numbers of faculty/staff of color (i.e. Asian, Black,
Latin@, and Native faculty/staff ).” Dartmouth protestors also insisted that the college change its tenure
policies, heightening the importance of “mentorship
and service work”—presumably at the expense of research and teaching—“because professors of color are
often called upon . . . [to perform] these forms of labor.”
The Michigan State demands were even more precise:
“an increase in tenure-stream faculty whose research
specializes in Black Politics, Black Linguistics, Black
Commentary
Sociology, Black Psychology, African politics, Black
Queer Studies, Hip-Hop Studies, African American
Literature, African Literature, and Decolonial Theory.
All these faculty hires must be approved by a panel of
Black student leaders and will be tenured in the Department of African American and African Studies.”
Imagine the (appropriate) outrage from academics to student demands for, say, a mandatory course for
all undergraduates on free-market principles; or cluster hiring of libertarian faculty; or curricular oversight
from a self-appointed committee of evangelical Christian
students. Needless to say, a campus environment overwhelmingly tilted in one direction on issues of race, gender, and ethnicity required accommodating the fall 2015
demands, even at the cost of sacrificing fidelity to academic freedom. Writing at the Federalist, Robert Tracinski astutely noted that the typical list of demands “reads
less like a manifesto of student revolutionaries, and more
like a particularly aggressive salary negotiation...a special sinecure for those with the correct political agenda.”
As the $50 million promised by Yale indicated, the protests directly benefited many academic departments—
giving professors in these departments an incentive beyond ideology to champion the protestors’ position.
Reflecting this fusion of academic with political
goals, Brandeis University professor Elizabeth Emma
Ferry altered her class schedule to address themes
sympathetic to the protestors (such as “white fragility”). The move typified conduct in the anthropology
department, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education: “All of the classes in anthropology” changed
their academic focus, purportedly to integrate “the intellectual and political.” But the reality seemed more
like forced political speech. For one class meeting, the
students stood “in solidarity” with the protestors, an approach that reduced Ferry’s prep time at the cost of violating dissenting students’ rights. It seems never to have
occurred to Ferry that perhaps some of her students did
not want to stand “in solidarity” with a campus movement that issued such demands as a 10 percent quota of
“full-time Black faculty” in all Brandeis departments,
or a public apology to Khadijah Lynch, the student
who received harsh criticism for tweeting, after the
killings of New York City police officers Rafael Ramos
and Wenjian Liu, that she had “no sympathy for the
nypd officers who were murdered today.”
At times, the campus events abandoned any
pretense of academic commitment. The targeting of
libraries—including harassing students who were attempting to study—provided particularly troubling
insight into the protestors’ anti-intellectual mind-set.
In mid-November, student protestors at Dartmouth,
organized by the campus NAACP, stormed the library,
15
as part of a “Blackout” demonstration. As they chanted,
“Fuck your white privilege” and “Fuck your comfort,”
the protestors surrounded white students reading at
desks and entered one private study carrel, obstructing the occupants’ efforts to leave. “The protest was
meant to shut down the library,” organizer Tsion Abera
declared. “Whatever discomfort that many white students felt in that library is a fraction of the discomfort
that many Natives, blacks, Latina, and LGBTQ people
feel frequently.” When coverage of this boorishness
generated national criticism, Dartmouth administrator Inge-Lise Ameer soothed the students’ feelings,
telling them, “There’s a whole conservative world out
there that’s not being very nice.”
At Amherst College, students also staged a sit-in
at the college library to “stand in solidarity with the students in Mizzou, Yale, South Africa, and every other institution across the world where black people are marginalized and threatened.” (They offered no insight on
how privileged Yale students encountering potentially
uncomfortable Halloween costumes compared to the
experience of black students in South Africa.) As the
sit-in stretched into a second day, leaders billing themselves “Amherst Uprising” issued a series of demands,
most of which featured boilerplate, only-in-academia
language—such as a call for the Amherst trustees to
issue a “statement of apology to students, alumni and
former students, faculty, administration, and staff who
have been victims of several injustices including but
not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism,
anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/indigenous
racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism,
heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism,
ableism, mental health stigma, and classism.” Displaying the mind-set of those who taught the protestors,
10 of the 12 members of Amherst’s American Studies department responded with a public letter hailing
the protestors’ “depth of . . . knowledge, experience and
analysis of these issues.”
Amherst president Biddy Martin did not issue
the requested mass apology but otherwise embraced
the protestors’ diversity-obsessed agenda—which, after all, she and most of her faculty shared. She promised to “build a more diverse staff and faculty, with
more aggressive recruitment and effective hiring and
retention strategies.” (It is absurd, of course, to suggest that Amherst, like all elite schools, was not already fully committed to this goal.) Martin hinted at
preference for new professors whose research agendas would enhance “understanding of the issues our
students are raising.” And she welcomed the idea of
“safe spaces” to “provide comfort and familiarity.”
16
Martin’s proposals, like those of similar colleges and
university presidents, would create even more ideologically homogeneous campuses on issues of race,
ethnicity, and “diversity.”
Not long ago, some academic leaders fretted about such a development. During her tenure
as Brown’s president, Ruth Simmons repeatedly expressed concerns about the lack of intellectual diversity on the notoriously left-leaning campus. In 2008,
she said students told her of “a chilling effect caused
by the dominance of certain voices on the spectrum of
moral and political thought,” and she cautioned that
“familiar and appetizing offerings can certainly be a
pleasing dimension of learning, but too much repetition of what we desire to hear can become intellectually debilitating.”
This problem no longer concerns Brown’s leadership. The university’s current president, Christina
Paxson, promised to allocate $100 million to create a
“just and inclusive campus.” Responding to the protestors’ demand for the “deliberate hiring of faculty
who work on critical issues related to social justice
such as topics on race, gender, sexuality, ability, and
class as they pertain to specific disciplines,” Paxson
indicated that Brown would bring aboard between
55 and 60 additional “faculty from underrepresented
groups” by 2025, and would institutionalize the very
type of groupthink against which Simmons warned,
by tailoring new hires so as to create “communities
of diverse faculty who are connected by common research interests.”
As the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has pointed
out, Paxson’s proposals seemed “entirely consistent
with how Brown would have tackled these issues ten
years ago.” (Indeed, Paxson’s ideas seemed entirely
consistent with how Brown had tackled “diversity” issues for at least a generation.) To the extent that the
claims of the student protestors could be taken in
good faith, Friedersdorf continued, they implied “that
at least some long-running assumptions about race
held by Brown’s administrators and faculty are incorrect.” Paxson—like Yale’s Salovey or Amherst’s Martin—had no interest in considering the effects of this
legacy of failure.
How much these failed policies have harmed
students remains a subject of intense debate. One of
the Amherst protestors, Imani Marshall, confessed to
the New York Times’s Anemona Hartocollis that “she
had felt unprepared academically and socially for Amherst”—to such an extent that she sometimes hoped
that she would not wake up the next morning. The
recognition of her unpreparedness affected how Marshall interacted with her classmates: “I always feel like
The New Dark Ages on Campus : April 2016
I need to prove to other people that I
do belong here.” Amid relentless messages from faculty and administrators
that Amherst was beset by institutional racism, Marshall unsurprisingly interpreted her struggles as resulting
from racism’s effects, and she joined
the Amherst Uprising movement. But
isn’t it at least possible—reflecting the
argument Richard Sander and Stuart
Taylor Jr. offered in their remarkable
book Mismatch—that a student who,
by her own admission, was neither academically nor socially prepared for
the college to which she was admitted
would have been better served by attending another institution?
It’s not hard to understand why
most administrations and faculty
members have refrained from asking
such questions, and have provided
such minimal resistance to these demands. As the founding statement
of the new academic alliance called
Heterodox Academy pointed out: “In
the 15 years between 1995 and 2010
the academy went from leaning left
to being almost entirely on the left”;
around 60 percent of academics identified as liberal or left, with higher
percentages in the humanities departments that helped propel the student protests. On matters related to
diversity, as seen in the overwhelming
academic support for racial preferences in the Fisher case, the current campus opinion
is near-monolithic.
This groupthink has made campuses unusually
vulnerable to the protestors’ attacks on free speech.
Even on a campus as resolutely left-wing as Amherst, last fall a handful of undergraduates had stood
against the grain. Pro-life students created an “All
Lives Matter” poster to highlight what they saw as the
horrors of abortion. And unknown students posted a
flyer entitled, “In memoriam of the true victim of the
Missouri protests: FREE SPEECH.” The flyer cheekily
included a line informing fellow students that “if you
want to protest this sign, feel free. Because that’s why
the First Amendment exists.”
Amherst Uprising countered not by protesting
but instead by demanding that the administration issue a formal statement that Amherst would “not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the ‘All Lives
Matter’ posters, and the ‘Free Speech’
posters.” The statement continued: “Also let the student body know
that it was racially insensitive to the
students of color on our college campus and beyond who are victim to
racial harassment and death threats;
alert them that Student Affairs may
require them to go through the Disciplinary Process if a formal complaint
is filed, and that they will be required
to attend extensive training for racial
and cultural competency.”
Such a blatant call for punishing students for speaking out on
a contentious issue—in Amherst’s
case, a call quite literally to rebuke
advocates of free speech—should
have met with stern condemnation
in any academic environment committed to the open exchange of ideas.
Instead, two Amherst academic departments praised the protestors’
work. In an open letter, the Black
Studies department gushed that the
“demands to be heard and seen are
righteous.” The professors “heard
those demands as a department and
we are reminded of how central they
are to our mission . . . of our purpose
here as teachers, fellow campus citizens, as a department, and comrades
in the struggle for racial justice here
at the college and in the wider world
from which we all come.” These wellcompensated academics, many of them with life tenure, complained of the “exhausting work” they had
to do to make such a point. The American Studies
department added that the protests demonstrated
that—on one of the nation’s most politically correct
campuses—“people of color too often are marginalized and silenced” and are victims of “an unsafe environment that is antithetical to intellectual exchange.”
For residents of such an allegedly “unsafe” environment, the protestors certainly seemed to feel safe to
make wild demands.
In the professors’ distorted view of reality, the
students whose demands included a college-mandated re-education campaign for their ideological opponents were actually those “silenced” on the Amherst
campus.
President Martin did not go quite this far, cautioning against censorship. Yet in the contest between
In the professors’
distorted view
of reality, the
students whose
demands
included a
college-mandated
re-education
campaign for
their ideological
opponents were
actually those
‘silenced’
on the Amherst
campus.
Commentary
17
the hundreds of protestors who had
occupied her college’s library and
the tiny number of Amherst students
who had stood up for free speech, she
left no doubt about her sympathies.
“Those who have immediately accused students in Frost [Library] of
threatening freedom of speech or of
making speech ‘the victim’ are making hasty judgments,” the president
railed. “While those accusations are
also legitimate forms of free expression, their timing can seem, ironically, to be aimed at inhibiting the
speech of those who have struggled
and now succeeded in making their
stories known on campus.”
The Amherst protestors’ hostility to dissenting viewpoints reflected
a movement, as the liberal commentator Jonathan Chait observed, “that
regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal.” Missouri’s
student-body vice president, Brenda
Smith-Lezama, pronounced herself
“tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when
they are creating a hostile and unsafe
learning environment for myself and
for other students here.” After negative off-campus reaction to a Yale
Daily News op-ed from undergraduate Jencey Paz, who proclaimed, “I
don’t want to debate. I want to talk
about my pain,” editors shamefully
honored Paz’s demand to remove the op-ed from the
newspaper’s website. At Smith College, media that
wanted to cover a campus sit-in needed to “participate
and articulate their solidarity with black students
and students of color.” Incredibly, Stacey Schmeidel,
Smith’s director of media relations, backed the protestors’ imposition of a litmus test for journalists, remarking, “It’s a student event, and we respect their
right to do that, although it poses problems for the
traditional media.”
In a November interview, Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), commented on the sudden change among
students, who for most of FIRE’s history had defended
the work of the nation’s preeminent campus civil liberties
organization. This time, however, he found it “disheartening to see how they are now using freedom of speech to
demand there be less freedom of speech.” Former ACLU
national board member Wendy Kaminer was even blunter, observing that for
many on campus today, “what’s shocking is that free speech . . . is an evil to be
purged.” Like Lukianoff, Kaminer detected a recent shift in student attitudes:
“The ‘I’m not in favor of censorship, but’
mantra that reigned a decade ago has
been replaced with ‘I’m strongly in favor
of censorship, and.’”
A robust defense of civil liberties by campus administrators would
have provided the obvious response
to the campus protests. In theory,
colleges and universities are unusually well equipped to make such
a defense. All public universities,
of course, are bound by the First
Amendment’s protections. And even
though the Bill of Rights does not
apply to private universities, virtually all have contractual guidelines
or mission statements that claim to
protect the freedom of speech and
promote the open exchange of ideas.
A 2015 survey of private institutions’
policies by FIRE found only two nonreligious schools—Vassar and WPI—
that did not promise freedom of
speech for students.
The rhetorical outlines for such
a defense, moreover, came from none
other than President Obama. In a series of remarks about campus matters in fall 2015, Obama celebrated
free speech as a tool “to make sure that we are forced
to use argument and reason and words in making our
democracy work.” He expressed his concern about students “getting trained to think that if somebody says
something I don’t like, if somebody says something
that hurts my feelings, that my only recourse is to shut
them up, avoid them, push them away, call on a higher
power to protect me from that.” Obama disagreed with
the idea that “when you become students at colleges,
[you] have to be coddled and protected from different
points of view.”
These were welcome words—but wholly inconsistent with the record of a president whose administration has launched an almost unprecedented assault
on the civil liberties of college students. Title IX of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been the administration’s
weapon of choice in this crusade, and the Education
Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) its enforcer.
A robust defense
of civil liberties
by campus
administrators
would have
provided the
obvious response
to the campus
protests. In theory,
colleges and
universities are
unusually well
equipped to make
such a defense. All
public universities,
of course, are
bound by the First
Amendment’s
protections.
18
The New Dark Ages on Campus : April 2016
A settlement between OCR and Yale, for example,
produced new procedures that allowed Title IX to threaten students’ promised free-speech rights. In fall 2014,
after the subjects of an article in a student-run newsletter complained to Yale, an administrator turned around
and “counseled the publishers of the newsletter regarding appropriate content.” No one at Yale appears to have
thought that the appropriate response to this matter was
to inform the complaining students that Yale respected
the rights of student journalists to publish freely.
This administration-backed hostility to students’
civil liberties has extended beyond free speech, as colleges and universities bowed to OCR demands and
abandoned all pretense of fair play for students accused of sexual assault. Citing Title IX, federal guidelines now require schools to use the lowest burden of
proof (which is “the preponderance of the evidence”)
in adjudicating sexual-assault cases; in pressuring colleges to adjudicate matters quickly; in hampering the
ability of accused students to gather evidence to defend
themselves; and, most important, in discouraging the
cross-examination of accusers, even in cases where the
accuser is the sole witness to the alleged crime.
President Richard Brodhead cited Duke’s new sexual-assault policy as a model for how his administration
would address the perceived tension between free speech
and comments that hurt the feelings of selected groups
on campus. So did Biddy Martin, who promised to address questions of “race and racial injury” just as “we did
in response to disclosures about sexual assault and the
College’s handling of it.” In that process, Amherst created
new procedures that denied to the accused student the
right to direct cross-examination, legal representation in
the disciplinary hearing, and the opportunity to discover
all exculpatory evidence. The college is currently facing
a federal lawsuit from a student Amherst deemed guilty
of sexual assault—despite text messages from the accuser
that contradicted the version of events she presented to
the school. That Martin sees this kind of process—which
sacrifices her college’s commitment to the truth so as to
appease the forces of political correctness—as an ideal
upon which to base a campus speech policy is disturbing
at the very least.
In this environment, attempts to protect campus freedom of thought mostly seem to have revealed
the weak position of civil libertarians on campus today. At Yale, a group of mostly science or engineering professors signed a letter affirming that “while
the university stands for many values, none is more
central than the value of free expression of ideas.” But
this self-evident proposition drew no signatures from
members of the history, English, or African American
Studies departments, or the university’s programs in
Commentary
American Studies or Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies. The document’s organizer, a physics professor named Douglas Stone, captured the atmosphere
on campus when he told the Yale Daily News that
more of his colleagues would have signed, but they
feared controversy.
When the crisis at Yale first attracted national attention, Lukianoff predicted that Erika Christakis’s remaining in the classroom would test Yale’s commitment
to academic freedom. If so, the university failed. In December, she announced that she would no longer teach
at the school, expressing concerns that the current climate at Yale was not “conducive to the civil dialogue
and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal
problems.” University administrators seemed relieved
at the development: Dean Jonathan Holloway observed
that Christakis’s departure “makes the situation more
straightforward from a [personnel department] point
of view. I don’t have much to add to her decision.”
On many campuses, the protests have continued
into the spring 2016 semester. At Harvard Law School,
student protestors appear to have successfully demanded replacement of the institution’s crest, the family coat
of arms of a slave owner whose estate helped to establish the school. Despite the decision, the protestors
say they will continue to occupy the Student Center’s
lounge until, as one of them remarked, an unspecified
“something legitimate happens from the administration in particular.” That this conduct denies the lounge’s
unimpeded usage to students who do not share their
ideological agenda does not concern the protestors.
With little likelihood of reform from within the
academy, sunlight remains all the more important.
Trustees need to exercise a more rigorous oversight
role regarding campus affairs; so too does the media.
And parents need to closely examine precisely what
kind of institution to which they are sending tens or
hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. In this respect, there is a potentially encouraging sign: Enrollment at the 2016–17 academic year to the school that
originated the fall protest wave, the University of Missouri, has dropped by about 1,500 students, producing a $32 million budget gap. If a moral argument for
upholding civil liberties cannot persuade college and
university leaders, perhaps a concern with declining
tuition revenue will.
The tag-team efforts of radical students, their
professors, and administrators to snuff out elementary
rights and elementary rules of civility and fairness have
already stunted the academic and scholarly life of this
nation. And they will retard the intellectual advancement of the United States and impoverish the life of the
mind in this country for generations to come.q
19
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WO DAYS AFTER Islamists killed nine staffers of the French satirical newspaper Charlie
Hebdo for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in January 2015, a writer for
the most renowned magazine in the Englishspeaking world compared the victims to
Nazis. On the website of the New Yorker, the
Nigerian-American author Teju Cole wrote
that while the slaughter was “an appalling
James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative, correspondent for the Daily Beast, and columnist
for Tablet. He is a professional member of the PEN American Center and a graduate of Yale College.
20
offense to human life and dignity,” it was nonetheless
necessary to realize that such violence takes “place
against the backdrop of France’s ugly colonial history,
its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in
the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab.” Invoking a paradigmatic
free-speech test case, Cole stated that Charlie Hebdo
had a right to publish blasphemous cartoons in the
same way that the National Socialist Party of America
had had a right to march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1979.
And Cole was just getting started.
Before Westerners start making generalizations
about Islam and free expression, he averred, they
must first acknowledge their own bloodily censorious
April 2016
history—a history they have yet to
transcend. Connecting the “witch
burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition” of
yore to the more recent “censuring of
critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom,”
Cole ridiculed the West’s pretension
of seeing itself as “the paradise of
skepticism and rationalism” (even as
he left unmentioned which of his opponents George W. Bush had burned
at the stake). Preoccupation with Islamist violence and the chilling effect
on free speech such violence creates,
Cole argued, diverts scrutiny from
Western governmental infringements upon liberty that are equally if
not more grave. Citing the fate of fugitive National Security Agency leaker
Edward Snowden, Cole asserted that
Washington’s “traditional monopoly
on extreme violence” and “harsh consequences for those who interrogate
this monopoly”—Cole’s euphemistic
word salad for Snowden’s stealing
top-secret information and sharing
it with America’s adversaries—is as
much a peril to freedom of speech as
weapon-wielding religious fanatics
threatening to kill anyone who displeases them.
Cole’s characterization of Charlie Hebdo as a product of the far
right—a publication that “in recent
years . . . has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations” and carried out
a “bullyingly racist agenda”—betrayed his ignorance.
Anyone who actually bothered to acquaint himself
with Charlie would have learned from two minutes
on Google that its “politics,” such as they are, are best
described as anti-politics. Founded and staffed to this
day by anarcho-leftist veterans of the 1968 student rebellions, Charlie Hebdo is anti-clerical and anti-establishment to the core. A survey by Le Monde of Charlie
Hebdo covers over the preceding decade found that
the vast majority mocked French political figures, and
of the 38 covers that lampooned religion, 21 targeted
Christianity while only seven went after Islam.
As evidence of Charlie’s purported racism, Cole
mentioned a cartoon depicting then–Justice Minister
Christiane Taubira, a black woman, as a monkey. “Naturally, the defense is that a violently racist image was
being used to satirize racism,” Cole scoffed. And yet
that is what it was. The cartoon referenced an incident involving a farright politician who had publicized a
doctored image of Taubira drawn as a
monkey and featured this likeness on
a campaign poster underneath a font
historically associated with French
right-wing political propaganda. Taubira herself confirmed the idiocy of
slandering Charlie as bigoted when
she attended the funeral of the very
cartoonist who had drawn the “violently racist image” of her and delivered a eulogy for one of the other cartoonists. She praised the newspaper
staff as “the sentinels, the watchmen,
the lookouts even, who kept watch
over democracy to make sure it didn’t
fall asleep.”
To be sure, one would have to
be at least moderately conversant in
France’s political discourse and satiric
tradition to understand the meaning
of the Taubira cartoon; at first glance
and devoid of context, it does indeed
look like a crudely racist image. But
it’s precisely that mix of subtlety
and cultural arcana that characterizes Charlie Hebdo’s irreverence, and
knowledge of that mix is something
one might have expected from a piece
of New Yorker writing on the matter. But in a perverse way, Cole, along
with the 200-plus writers who signed
an unctuous letter protesting the PEN
American Center’s awarding a free speech prize to
Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff, chose to revel in their
ignorance.
All they needed to know was that the murderers
were dark-skinned Muslims and the victims (for the
most part) white-skinned French; that a police officer
and copy editor of North-African Muslim extraction
was among the murdered was conveniently ignored.
Adhering to a post-colonial identity politics of Western
guilt neatly expressed by “Doonesbury” creator Garry
Trudeau, who condemned his assassinated colleagues
as practitioners of “hate speech” who “punched downward” against “a powerless, disenfranchised minority,”
this worldview ranks Muslims as the worldwide “subaltern” existing at the bottom of a hegemonic power
structure commanded by white Western men.
2015 was the most consequential year for global
free speech since at least 2006, when the Muhammad
Teju Cole’s
characterization
of Charlie Hebdo
as a product of
the far right—a
publication that
‘in recent
years . . . has
gone specifically
for racist and
Islamophobic
provocations’
and carried out a
‘bullyingly racist
agenda’
—betrayed his
ignorance.
Commentary
21
cartoon crisis erupted, if not 1989,
when Ayatollah Khomeini placed his
fatwa on Salman Rushdie. The challenge has been multifaceted, appearing in the guise both of religious fanatics and oversensitive college students.
Beginning with the Charlie Hebdo attacks and ending with a spate of controversies on American university
campuses, 2015 saw the ideals of free
expression and open debate come under sustained, heavy assault. And as
time bore on, the perverse logic Cole
employed to rationalize the Paris
murders would prove to be a feature,
not a bug, of the New Yorker’s coverage of free-speech issues, readily adopted by other contributors and applied to the quarrels at institutions of
higher education.
J
2015 saw the
ideals of free
expression and
open debate come
under sustained
assault. And as
time bore on, the
perverse logic
Cole employed
to rationalize the
Paris murders
would prove to
be a feature, not
a bug, of the New
Yorker’s coverage
of free-speech
issues.
UST A FEW MONTHS
before racially tinged
psychodramas
erupted
at universities across the
country last fall, New
Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh
published a long article anticipating the controversies. Sanneh was
skeptical of the very premise that
“free speech,” which he repeatedly
placed in scare quotes, was being
threatened in any meaningful way
by the demands of student activists
agitating for the penalization of “microaggressions” (words or behaviors deemed insensitive), creation of “safe spaces” (physical areas, up to
and including the entire campus, where utterance of
certain arguments and ideas is prohibited), and the
inscription of “trigger warnings” (cautionary content
notices) within textbooks and assigned reading. To
take but one of countless examples, a “Bias-Free Language Guide” posted on the website of the University
of New Hampshire advised students against using the
words “homosexual,” “American,” and “Arab,” in class
conversations or written assignments, because they
are “problematic.”
According to Sanneh, the threat to “free speech”
at college campuses is chimerical. Mentioning an incident at a Minnesota university where students protested the presence of a camel at a party as a sign of
anti-Arab racism, Sanneh wrote that “there is no advocacy group or high-profile politician avowedly devoted
22
to the cause of cracking down on political speech, no national spokesperson for the war on camels. So [freespeech advocates] are forced to argue
with evanescent Facebook groups or
obscure junior faculty members or
young people who had the misfortune
to be quoted in the college newspaper.” Considering the extant institutionalization of speech codes at the
majority of college campuses, however, the enemies of free speech don’t
need “advocacy groups” to push their
agenda, as speech-limitation is the
status quo.
Sanneh’s attempt to discredit
concerns about the increasingly Orwellian atmosphere on college campuses as right-wing fearmongering
is undermined by significant oversights, beginning with his assertion
that “restrictive campus speech codes
have been widely repealed.” That is
untrue. According to the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education
(FIRE), a nonprofit organization advocating for free speech on campuses,
more than 55 percent of the top 437
colleges and universities it analyzed
“maintain speech codes that seriously
infringe upon the free speech of students.” Nationally, the Department of
Education’s definition of “unwelcome
conduct of a sexual nature” encompasses “verbal conduct,” a legal interpretation by a federal agency that many universities
will regard as binding, meaning that “the right not to
be offended has been enshrined in a federal mandate,”
according to FIRE president Greg Lukianoff.
Why would Sanneh write off the danger to free
speech in this way? Perhaps because by doing so he
could more easily dismiss its defenders—much as
Cole did the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo—as
ideologues insensitive to racism, if not actual racists.
“Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of
arguments, but they—we—are driven, too, by a shared
sensibility that can seem irrational by European standards,” Sanneh wrote, casually linking those who defend an unfettered right to say what one wishes with
those who defend an unfettered right to amass deadly
weapons.
Like the writers who protested the PEN American Center, Sanneh sees freedom of speech and social
The New Yorker vs. Free Speech : April 2016
inclusivity (of racial, religious, and sexual minorities)
as mutually exclusive ideals, with the latter taking precedence. The “instinctive preference for ‘free speech’
may already be shaping the kinds of discussions we
have, possibly by discouraging the participation of
women, racial and sexual minorities, and anyone else
likely to be singled out for ad hominem abuse,” he says
of online political debate, which as those who have
partaken in it can attest, often degenerates into noxious incivility. Sanneh’s preference is simply to stifle
that discussion. “America’s free-speech regime is shot
through with exceptions, including civil (and, in some
states, criminal) laws against libel,” he wrote. “By
what rationale do we insist that groups—races, communities of faith—don’t deserve similar protection?”
A rather simple one, actually: libel and slander laws
protect individuals from defamation. There is no such
legal “protection”—nor should there be—for racial, religious, or any other “groups,” as instituting such restrictions would create a slippery slope toward full-on
censorship.
It isn’t just neo-Nazis or blasphemous French
cartoonists who should smile upon America’s unparalleled free-speech culture but also the supposedly
threatened and fragile minority communities who are
the recipients of the new censors’ purportedly benign
attentions. It was the rights to free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment that enabled
the civil-rights movement to stir America’s conscience
in the fight against racial prejudice. That the same
First Amendment also gives hate-mongers the right
to gather and spew their hate does not invalidate its
special power. Indeed, every movement for social progress in the United States has benefited from the rights
so plainly enumerated in the Constitution. Contrary
to the claim that improving the lot of minority groups
must come at the expense of free speech, it is the assurance of free speech that leads to greater understanding
and social harmony in a diverse population.
It would take only a few weeks after Sanneh’s
article was published, with the beginning of the academic fall semester, for his article to be overtaken by
events. From the University of Missouri to Yale, thousands of students across the country joined protests
* After some students complained that the very title of “Master,”
the honorific given to heads of residential colleges and which
originates from the scholastic nomenclature of Oxford and
Cambridge, is racially traumatizing, the Master of Pierson College haughtily announced he would relinquish it because “there
should be no context in our society or in our University in which
an African-American student, professor, or staff member—or any
person, for that matter—should be asked to call anyone ‘master.’”
Harvard College has since officially followed suit and retired the
title entirely.
Commentary
calling for ever-harsher speech codes and punishment
for those who violated them, and they received enthusiastic support from prominent journalists, faculty,
and political leaders.
Unsurprisingly, given the pedigrees of New Yorker readers, it was the events in New Haven that would
most capture the magazine’s interest. In October 2015,
a Yale student posted to her Facebook page the hearsay
accusation that a fraternity had turned away a group
of black women students from a “white girls only party.” Protests were convened, the rolling of heads was
called for, and an investigation was launched. Around
the same time, the administration sent an email to all
undergraduates warning them not to wear Halloween costumes “that threaten our sense of community,”
along with a handy list of “costumes to avoid.” Many
Yalies understandably read the email as patronizing,
and some complained to Erika Christakis, a professor
of child psychology and the wife of the Master of Silliman College.
To allay the concerns of students who felt they
were being treated like toddlers, Christakis replied to
the missive with her own email that was a model of erudition and reasonableness. Drawing on her expertise
in the field of child development, she asked whether
it was really the role of an Ivy League university to instruct a group of 18- to 22-year-olds as to what Halloween costumes they should wear, and whether the faculty and administration had “lost faith in young people’s
capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure”
and “in your capacity to ignore or reject things that
trouble you.” Little could she expect that students
would behave so much like the pre-adolescent children
who comprise her research cohort. What followed was
a hysteria not dissimilar to the 1980s child-sex-abuse
panic married to the inquisitorial paranoia of the Salem witch trials.
Like the four-year-olds at Fells Acres Day Care
Center telling improbable tales of occult sodomitical
rituals, innumerable Yale students poured forth with
fantastical stories of omnipresent, yet never quite definable, racial transgressions committed against them.
And as the 17th-century villagers in a small New England town accused their neighbors of possession by
the devil, they went on the offensive against their perceived enemies, in this case, Erika Christakis and her
husband, Nicolas. In the most infamous incident to
make the online rounds, video emerged of a Yale senior
at the head of a mob surrounding Nicolas, to whose
face she delivered an expletive-laden tirade, highlights
of which were the rhetorical question “Who the fuck
hired you,” the accusation that he was “disgusting,”
and the demand for a “safe space”—all for defending
23
the honor of his wife from those insisting she be fired
for questioning the propriety of an email about Halloween costumes.
It soon emerged that the occurrences at Yale were
hoaxes or semi-hoaxes. After 1,000 students—about a
fi th of the student body—descended upon Cross Campus to make various “demands” of the administration,
a university investigation into the so-called white-girlsonly party found that no such event had taken place and
ruled that the frat would not face disciplinary charges.
Those who initially publicized the accusation could at
least claim that they were unaware of its fabricated nature; what was less excusable were the many people—
students, faculty, media commentators—who lent credence to the narrative that the Christakis email was
somehow inappropriate or racially insensitive. Lost in
the massive news coverage about the Halloween costume brouhaha was any inquiry into whether there had
even been incidents of Yalies donning racist costumes.
Had there been such incidents, then perhaps a preemptive email to the student body discouraging racially or
culturally insensitive pagan bacchanalia garb would
have been appropriate. In the absence of such episodes,
however, the suitability of the administration’s message was moot, at best, and Christakis’s response was
entirely justified.
But that’s not how the New Yorker viewed the
controversy, at least judging by the responses of its
two writers who chose to weigh in on the matter,
Meghan O’Rourke and Jelani Cobb. “Christakis was
not responding to an actual event in which a student
had been penalized for wearing such a costume, or to
a prohibition against such costumes,” wrote O’Rourke,
a poet and the magazine’s former fiction editor, faulting the professor for her “strangely tone-deaf ” missive. One might similarly point out that the administrators who sent out the reproachful email to which
Christakis replied were not responding to an actual
event (or events) in which a student (or students) had
worn such costumes, making their message strangely
tone-deaf. “Christakis and her husband were privileging abstract free-speech rights over the immediate
emotional experiences of those who are likely to experience discrimination at the university,” O’Rourke
continued. This reasoning has the matter entirely
backwards. It’s the “emotional experiences” of students to imaginary racial trauma that is “abstract,” not
free speech, the most basic and tangible right afforded
to every American.
Cobb, a New Yorker staff writer and director of
the Africana Studies Institute at nearby University of
Connecticut, wrote that invocations to the sanctity of
free speech were a “diversion” from the racist super-
24
structure that lay at the heart of the campus upheaval.
“The default for avoiding discussion of racism is to invoke a separate principle, one with which few would
disagree in the abstract—free speech, respectful participation in class—as the counterpoint to the violation of principles relating to civil rights,” he asserted,
without naming what “violation of principles relating
to civil rights” had occurred on the Yale campus. Much
in the same way that Cole and Senneh did before him,
Cobb outlined a hierarchical system of values in which
free speech is negotiable, not absolute, and is a right
that can, and often should, be overridden in deference to the exigencies of what’s invariably described
as racial or social “justice.” Denouncing “free speech
purists,” he scandalously compared the Christakises
and their defenders to southern segregationists who
complained that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would “necessarily infringe upon the rights of whites.”
In one sentence, Cobb encapsulated the moral
logic linking rationalization of the Paris murders to the
demands of the New Haven protestors: “The freedom
to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom
to bully the relatively disempowered.” This was a more
florid version of Trudeau’s admonishment that satirists should never “punch down.” Drawing cartoons of
Muhammad, writing emails that ask college students
to behave like adults; these may, in the eyes of Cole
and Cobb, not be morally “equivalent” to a “disenfranchised” Muslim denouncing “infidels” or a young black
woman shouting imprecations at her white male professor. But they are no different in the eyes of the law,
and making sweeping, categorical statements about
the relative virtue of different forms of expression
based entirely on the identity of the persons expressing it is a fundamentally illiberal concept.
This is the problem with the worldview proffered
by the New Yorker. Free speech is a clear and definable
right, with a discernable end, that all citizens equally enjoy. But the pursuit of racial and social “justice” is a vague
and arbitrary agenda, has no clear end, and necessarily
privileges certain groups over others. For Teju Cole, “social justice” demands that humanity defer to the sensitivities of an allegedly marginalized Muslim world (1.5
billion people, 57 member states of the Organization of
Islamic Cooperation). For Sanneh, Cobb, and O’Rourke,
it demands that the proclaimed desire of (some) ethnic
minority students to inhabit a “safe space” trump the
constitutionally enumerated rights (not to mention educational experience) of everyone around them. In both
instances, it is important to note, the New Yorker vanguard claims to speak on behalf of an entire group, as if
every Muslim were offended by Charlie Hebdo and every
black student outraged at Erika Christakis’s email.
The New Yorker vs. Free Speech : April 2016
This social-justice ideology extends even to the magazine’s humorous
offerings. In a January “Shouts & Murmurs” piece entitled “My Demands,”
New Yorker contributor Paul Rudnick
writes in the voice of an entitled college
coed adopting PC patois to “demand”
a “boyfriend,” the appointment of an
“Appropriate Use of Lip Liner facilitator,” and immediate solutions to “issues
that affect me, and at least two other
students in my quad, every day.” If her
ultimatums aren’t met, Rudnick’s special snowflake warns, “I will barricade
myself in the snack bar in the library
basement, purchase every last PowerBar from the vending machine, and eat
them all.”
Had Rudnick stuck to his welljustified ribbing of millennial obnoxiousness, “My Demands” might have
been the most biting piece of satire
to ridicule the nationwide campus
controversies. But that wasn’t the
path Rudnick chose. His narrator, the
reader soon discovered, isn’t a socialjustice warrior attending a prestigious liberal arts school, but rather
a Nebraska Bible-college student. Included on her list of 12 demands: “In
my class on harvest imagery in Leviticus, I would like Professor Stamwray
to stop saying ‘Wheat is neat’” and
“I insist on more diversity, by which
I mean that the college should admit
at least one qualified Lutheran student.” Far be it from
me to advise a brilliant humorist like Paul Rudnick on
the subject of comedy, but recognition—of mankind’s
absurdities, hypocrisies, and failings—is essential to
a joke’s landing successfully. If students at American
religious colleges could be mocked for anything, it
would be their obedience and submission to authority; they aren’t the least bit pretentious in the manner
of the protesting denizens of Yale or Missouri.
In choosing these kids as his object of ridicule, and not the absurdly sanctimonious little Maoists cursing out professors for expressing incorrect
thoughts about Halloween costumes, Rudnick was unintentionally publishing satire of the sort denounced
by Garry Trudeau: He was punching down. For New
Yorker readers, it’s inconceivable that racial minorities
attending one of the country’s top Ivy League universities might occupy a higher plane on the socioeconomic
ladder than their peers at obscure,
religious institutions in the flyover
states. According to this exclusively
racialist conception of American society, a black Yale student on scholarship choosing among job offers from
McKinsey, BCG, and Blackstone is
more disadvantaged and “marginalized” than a white Brigham Young
University counterpart working two
jobs and taking out massive loans to
pay for his education. Rudnick presumably believes he’s afflicting the
comfortable by ridiculing students
at Christian universities, where there
have been no such controversies like
the ones he is actually attempting
to mock (the signal failure of recognition that explains why the piece
isn’t funny). In reality, Rudnick is
comforting the comforted—the New
Yorker’s metropolitan liberal readership—by jeering at religious conservatives, much as the mandarins of
mainstream American culture have
been doing since long before the magazine’s signature cover model Eustace
Tilley ever raised a monocle to his discerning eye.
Ironically, one of the best defenses of free speech ever mustered
remains the 1974 Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression
at Yale. Drafted by a distinguished
committee chaired by C. Vann Woodward, then the dean of American historians, the
proximate cause for the “Woodward Report” was
the decision by the Yale Political Union (YPU) to
host a debate featuring William Shockley, a Nobel
Prize–winning physicist who later became a vocal
supporter of eugenics. Delving into a 15-year history of racially charged free-speech controversies at
Yale, from a cancelled George Wallace address to the
campus takeover inspired by the New Haven Black
Panther trials, the report—along with its dissenting
statement—illustrates the remarkable consistency of
pro- and anti-free speech arguments 42 years after
they were published.
Warning against “paternalistic solicitude for
minority welfare and feelings,” the report counsels
against the sort of patronizing attitudes of those who
support “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” today.
In light of the current Yale administration’s craven
Paul Rudnick is
comforting the
comforted—the
New Yorker’s
metropolitan
liberal
readership—by
jeering at religious
conservatives,
much as
mandarins of
mainstream
culture have
been doing since
long before the
magazine’s cover
model ever raised
a monocle to his
discerning eye.
Commentary
25
surrender to student demands (apportioning $50 million for a “diversity” initiative), one grows nostalgic
reading the denunciation by once
Provost, future President Kingman
Brewster (no conservative, he) of the
“storm trooper tactics” students used
to disrupt Shockley’s speech. His
observance that “the capacity for responsibility which emerges from exposure to irresponsibility is far stronger, far tougher, far more impressive
than the kind of responsibility which
is either coerced by restraint or molded by paternalism,” is the same advice
Erika Christakis, whether consciously or not, gave in her letter to the students of Silliman College.
Likewise, the arguments marshaled against free speech at Yale
were remarkably similar to the ones
employed today. Echoing Meghan
O’Rourke, the chairman of the YPU’s
Progressive Labor Party declared free
speech “a nice abstract idea to enable people like Shockley to spread
racism.” The author of the dissenting
opinion, a Yale law-school graduate
named Kenneth J. Barnes, argued
that “free expression is not the only
value which we uphold, either in our
society or in our universities. Under
certain circumstances, free expression is outweighed by more pressing
issues, including the liberation of all
oppressed people and equal opportunities for minority
groups.” Barnes immediately sauntered into a disquisition on Marcusian theory, describing free speech as
essentially a bourgeois right standing
in the way of revolution. Free speech,
Barnes wrote, “serves the cause of oppression,” for, as the radical Yale clergyman William Sloane Coffin declared
at the time, “unless social justice is established in a country, civil liberties,
which always concern intellectuals
more than does social justice, look like
luxuries.”
It’s worth remembering that
the Woodward Report was written in
response to a potential campus address by an actual, bona fide racist,
not the specter of imaginary “white
girls only” parties and phantom
racist Halloween costumes. Considering how gutlessly administrators
cave to far pettier, latter-day student
concerns, it is frankly impossible to
imagine an institution of Yale’s caliber drafting a statement so resoundingly supportive of the most basic
liberal principle. Similarly, it would
once have been impossible to imagine
the New Yorker, or any other seriousminded magazine, being so cavalier
about the principle that allows it and
its writers to function freely. And it
should be wary, as the New Yorker is
itself a bastion of white male privilege, and intellectual surrender of
the sort it has engaged in here will
not slake the thirst of those who seek
to dominate through the repression
of speech. It only makes these foes of freedom more
thirsty, and more likely to turn their pitiless gaze toward Eustace Tilley.q
It’s worth
remembering that
the Woodward
Report was
written in
response to a
potential campus
address by an
actual,
bona fide racist,
not the specter of
imaginary
‘white girls
only’ parties
and phantom
racist Halloween
costumes.
26
The New Yorker vs. Free Speech : April 2016
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BY SE
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IANE REHM—AGED doyenne of public
radio and recipient of the Peabody, the
National Humanities Medal, and sundry
other status markers—had a question
for Bernie Sanders. The date was June
10, 2015. The Vermont senator and selfidentified socialist had just announced
his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s
presidential nomination against Hillary
Formerly an editor at Commentary, Seth Mandel is
the op-ed editor of the New York Post.
Commentary
Clinton. Sanders’s loyalties to the party he sought to
lead but had only just officially joined had become
a subject of some concern to Democrats. But Rehm
wanted to talk about a different kind of loyalty.
Rehm: Senator, you have dual citizenship
with Israel.
Sanders: No, I do not have dual citizenship
with Israel, I’m an American. Don’t know
where that question came from. I’m an American citizen. I have visited Israel on a couple of
occasions. No, I’m an American citizen, period.
27
Rehm: I understand from a list
we have gotten that you were on
that list. Forgive me if that . . .
Sanders: No, that’s some of the
nonsense that goes on in the Internet. But that is absolutely not
true.
Rehm: Interesting. Are there
members of Congress who do
have dual citizenship, or is that
part of the fable?
When asked about
Clinton’s chance
to make history as
the first woman
president, Sanders
retorted obliquely
that it would
be historic for
‘somebody with my
background’
to become
president, too. He
did not say what
background that
was. Not until he was
directly asked about
it in early March did
he express his pride
in his Jewishness.
So: A Jewish public figure was
simply assumed by NPR’s most celebrated chat-show host to have dual
citizenship with Israel. After he corrected the host, the Jew was told that
his name was on “a list.” When he denied it a second time, he was asked to
fork over some names of those who
do have suspect loyalties to America.
As Sanders suggested, the “list”
she had cited was gleaned from an
anti-Semitic Facebook page. Rehm
later apologized. That was the end of
that. But it was only the beginning for
Sanders when it came to questions
about his Jewishness.
He started out the campaign as
more than a long shot. He was treated as an “issue” candidate, with his
issue set being: soak the rich; break
up the banks; nationalize health
care; inequality, inequality, inequality. But Clinton spent the year beset
by scandal. And Sanders’s issues had real power. He
caught her in the early-state polls. The two candidates
fought Iowa’s caucuses to a draw, and Sanders won
New Hampshire by a landslide. In doing so, Bernie
Sanders became the first Jewish candidate to win a
major-party primary.
And he didn’t mention it. At all.
Sanders routinely mentions his father’s background as a Polish immigrant but omits his father’s
Jewishness, olav ha-shalom. When asked about Clinton’s own chance to make history as the first woman
president, Sanders retorted obliquely that it would be
historic for “somebody with my background” to become president, too. He did not say what background
that was. Not until he was directly asked about it by
CNN’s Anderson Cooper at a Democratic debate in
early March did he feel compelled to express his pride
in his Jewishness, though he immediately used the
28
acknowledgment as a political tool
to attack “extremism” of the kind he
says the Republican party engages in.
So Sanders proclaims his socialism while trying to avoid his Jewishness. Why does he behave this
way? Joseph Berger, of the New York
Times, offered this observation: “Mr.
Sanders, those who know him say,
exemplifies a distinct strain of Jewish identity, a secular offshoot at least
150 years old whose adherents in the
shtetls of Eastern Europe and the jostling streets of the Lower East Side
were socialists, anarchists, radicals
and union organizers focused less on
observance than on economic justice
and repairing a broken world.”
But that’s not quite right. So
how about this, from the Forward:
“The Key to Bernie Sanders’s Appeal
Isn’t Socialism. It’s Yiddish Socialism”? Cute, but meaningless.
Only a comment from the New
York rabbi Michael Paley in Berger’s
article got close to the truth—though
neither the newspaper nor Paley
seemed to understand the significance of what was said:
Paley, who worked with Jews in
central Vermont when he was
a Dartmouth College chaplain,
recalled once talking with Mr.
Sanders about “non-Jewish Jews,”
a term coined by a leftist biographer, Isaac
Deutscher, to describe those who express Jewish values through their “solidarity with the
persecuted.” Mr. Sanders seemed to acknowledge that the term described him, Rabbi Paley
said.
As Inigo Montoya might have put it: “That term
‘non-Jewish Jews’—I do not think it means what you
think it means.” A lifelong socialist like Bernie Sanders
surely knows. Indeed, Deutscher’s term “non-Jewish
Jew” offers a key to understanding why Sanders the
Jew long ago discarded ethnic-identity politics in favor of class warfare.
Karl Marx was a Jew—and also an anti-Semite.
He was steeped in the works of 19th-century French
theorist François Fourier. Paul Johnson, in his magisterial History of the Jews, quotes Fourier’s contention
Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Talk About Being Jewish : April 2016
that commerce was “the source of all
evil” and that the Jews were “the incarnation of commerce.” Thus was
the elimination of commerce inextricably tied to the elimination of
the Jews. Ethnic eradication was
part and parcel of socialism, in
Marx’s eyes. Indeed, in Johnson’s
view, “Marx’s theory of communism
was the end-product of his theoretical anti-Semitism.”
Marx was charting a path some
of his co-religionists would follow
after his death—in Johnson’s words,
“the particular type of political Jew
which had emerged in radical politics during the second half of the 19th
century: the Non-Jewish Jew, the Jew
who denied there was such a thing
as a Jew at all.” Isaac Deutscher was
best known as the biographer of Leon
Trotsky, the non-Jewish Jew to end all
non-Jewish Jews.
Born in 1879, Trotsky grew up
in a country intent on solving the
“Jewish problem” in its own horrific
way. In the Russia of Trotsky’s youth,
permanent Jewish residency in Russia was restricted to the Western
provinces known as the Pale of Settlement. Jews’ permitted vocations
were reduced, as was their access
to secondary and higher education.
Jews were also denied the vote. And
there were the pogroms, as the historian Anita Shapira writes:
From its inception
as a working
political doctrine,
socialism was
bad for the Jews.
Indeed, the long
arm of the world’s
first socialist
state killed off its
most prominent
Jewish founder
with an ice pick.
Why, then, would
Jews like Bernie
Sanders be
socialists? The
new spin is that
he isn’t really a
socialist at all.
The Church and the government made no
effort to rein in the mob, and Jews suspected
both of collaborating with the rioters. While
the damage was mainly to property, the shock
was great: mass rioting against Jews had
not occurred in Eastern Europe during the
previous century. The assumption had been
that the strengthening of the absolutist state
ensured public order and security. Now it
suddenly appeared that, whereas in most of
Europe and in America the Jews were citizens
with equal rights, the Russian masses could
still go on the rampage while the government
either stood passively by or was itself involved
in the rioting.
Commentary
The radicalization of young
Jews in this restrictive and vicious
atmosphere followed as a matter
of course. But the revolution they
championed would bring them no
deliverance. Soviet founder Vladimir
Lenin equated Jewish particularism
with treason. Jews were once again
singled out for suspicion and victimization—but now they were getting it
from both sides. They were hounded
by the Soviets and hated by anti-Communists for their association with the
Bolsheviks. Trotsky himself became
a target of Joseph Stalin’s wrath, so
much so that Stalin had him murdered in Mexico in 1940.
So, from its inception as a working political doctrine, socialism was
bad for the Jews. Indeed, the long
arm of the world’s first socialist state
killed off its most prominent Jewish
founder with an ice pick. Why, then,
would Jews like Bernie Sanders be
socialists? Well, with Sanders’s nowundeniable popularity on the left, the
new spin is that he isn’t really a socialist at all.
“Sanders is not a socialist,” declares Marian Tupy in the Atlantic.
“Sanders is, in many ways, a good social democrat,” according to Jacobin
magazine editor Bhaskar Sunkara,
adding: “He’s a generic liberal—actually maybe a bit better than most, but
not by much—when it comes to foreign policy.” And
according to Slate’s Jordan Weissmann, “Bernie Sanders isn’t really all that much of a socialist.”
Actually, no. Sanders really is a socialist.
When he arrived at Brooklyn College in 1959, he
was amazed to discover, in his words, “real live socialists sitting right in front of me!” His first such encounter was with the Eugene V. Debs Club—named for the
first socialist candidate for president of the United
States. Soon, according to Sanders’s biographer Harry
Jaffe, his roommate would come back to their dorm
room to find the socialist reading material Sanders
preferred to his schoolwork.
After a year, Sanders transferred to the University of Chicago, where he threw himself into the burgeoning radicalism swirling around Hyde Park. He
joined the Young People’s Socialist League and took a
leadership position in the Congress of Racial Equality,
29
and he would lecture his roommate
late into the night on the ills and evils
of capitalism.
In 1963, Sanders took a break
from school to volunteer for the reelection campaign of Chicago Alderman Leon Depres. It was his first
taste of electoral politics, and it was
under the wing of a man who claimed
one of his formative experiences
had been visiting Trotsky in exile in
Mexico in 1937. Sanders then threw
himself into Marx’s writings and after graduation dipped his toe into the
world of labor unions.
In 1968, Sanders moved to Vermont, where he would settle into a
life of politics. Jaffe quotes an opinion piece Bernie wrote in 1969: “The
Revolution is coming, and it is a very
beautiful revolution. It is beautiful because, in its deepest sense, it
is quiet, gentle, and all pervasive. It
KNOWS.”
In 1980, Sanders won the Burlington mayoral election in an upset.
The town had fewer than 38,000 residents at the time, but Sanders would
use his office to launch a national
platform with, strangely enough, a
focus on foreign policy. As Michael
Moynihan revealed in the Daily
Beast, Sanders thought the brutal
Marxist Sandinistas of Nicaragua
could provide an example to American local governance.
Sanders went further: “Is [the Sandinistas’] crime
that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they
have given equal rights to women? Or that they are
moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime
in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of the corporations
and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana
republic to American corporate interests.”
He established a sister-city program with Puerto
Cabezas in Nicaragua, met with the Sandinista leader
Daniel Ortega in New York, and even said that the
Sandinistas’ ruthless, dictatorial crackdown on freedom and dissent “makes sense to me.” And, of course,
Sanders made a sentimental visit to Cuba and issued
a gushing report: “I did not see a hungry child. I did
not see any homeless people. Cuba today not only has
free healthcare but very high quality healthcare.” Sanders established a
sister-city program with Yaroslavl in
the Soviet Union. In 1988, he and his
wife honeymooned there.
Sanders isn’t shy about his socialist conviction, and for good reason: He’s finding success on the national stage now because many voters
are increasingly less shy about it,
too. In a February poll, nearly 6 in 10
Democrats said socialism has a “positive impact on society.” A YouGov poll
in January found that 30 percent of
respondents had a favorable view of
socialism.
This helps explain why he is
all-in on socialism but mum on his
Jewish identity: The very energy that
has made Sanders’s seizure of the
national stage possible is also what
makes his Judaism unwelcome to his
own core supporters in the Democratic Party.
In 2011, leftist politics was
roiled by Occupy Wall Street, a utopian, thuggish, pseudo-anarchist protest movement that put capitalism,
and especially high finance, squarely
in its sights. It was hipster socialism—
and it was shot-through with ugly anti-Semitism. As Jonathan Neumann
noted in Commentary, signs like
“Google: (1) Wall St. Jews, (2) Jewish
Billionaires, (3) Jews & FedRsrvBank”
and “Nazi Bankers Wall Street” proliferated in the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan.
One Occupier ranted: “The smallest group in
America controls the money, media, and all other
things. The fingerprints belong to the Jewish bankers who control Wall Street. I am against Jews who
rob America.” Speakers at the “occupations” of parks
throughout the country railed against Jewish bankers
and equated Jews with banking and banking with war.
Anti-Zionist signs were common; anti-Israel organizations backed OWS, which embraced the hate.
Neumann described the scene:
In 2011,
leftist politics was
roiled by Occupy
Wall Street,
a utopian,
thuggish,
pseudo-anarchist
protest movement
that put
capitalism, and
especially high
finance, squarely
in its sights.
It was hipster
socialism—
and it was
shot-through
with ugly
anti-Semitism.
30
On October 28, Zuccotti Park hosted “Kaffiyeh Day at Occupy Wall Street”—the kaffiyeh
being the Arab headdress associated most
famously with Yasir Arafat—and protesters
waved Palestinian flags and chanted “Free
Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Talk About Being Jewish : April 2016
Free Palestine” and “Long live Palestine! Occupy Wall Street.”
How, exactly,
would Sanders pay
for making college
free and
debt-free?
You guessed it:
‘The cost of this
$75 billion a year
plan is fully paid
for by imposing a
tax of a fraction of
a percent on
Wall Street
speculators who
nearly destroyed
the economy
seven years ago.’
The old anti-Semitism of the
new leftist populism was hardly confined to Occupy Wall Street. Indeed,
one mark of the left today is that anti-Israel extremism serves as an initiation rite into the world of credible
left-wing protest movements. Black
Lives Matter, a grassroots group
that rose up in opposition to police
violence against minorities, soon embraced the seemingly irrelevant issue
of Palestinian “resistance” to the Jewish state, with its adherents releasing
a star-studded video aimed at Palestinians titled “When I See Them, I
See Us.”
Sanders needs to whip up the
passions of such activists. Case in
point: his campaign plank to make
college free. Not just free, but “debtfree” too, for the kids currently burdened by student loans. Waving away
basic tenets of economics, Sanders
complains that “it makes no sense
that you can get an auto loan today
with an interest rate of 2.5 percent,
but millions of college graduates are
forced to pay interest rates of 5 to 7
percent or more for decades.”
How, exactly, would Sanders
pay for making college free and debtfree? You guessed it: “The cost of this
$75 billion a year plan is fully paid for by imposing a
tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators
who nearly destroyed the economy seven years ago.”
It all comes back to the bankers. And, therefore,
for the activist left, it all comes back to the Jews. In November, student activists called for a Million Student
March to protest college tuition fees. Students in the
City University of New York system advertised their
event by posting the following note on Facebook:
On November 12th, students all across CUNY
will rally to demand a freeze on tuition and
new contracts! We must fight for funding
for our university, and for CUNY to be accessible to working class communities in NYC
as the public university system. The Zionist
administration invests in Israeli companies,
companies that support the Israeli occupa-
Commentary
tion, hosts birthright programs
and study abroad programs in
occupied Palestine, and reproduces settler-colonial ideology
throughout CUNY through Zionist content of education. While
CUNY aims to produce the next
generation of professional Zionists, SJP [Students for Justice
in Palestine] aims to change the
university to fight for all peoples
[sic] liberation.
Here is their list of demands:
–An End to the Privatization of
Education!
–Tuition-Free Education
–Cancellation of all student debt!
–15$ minimum wage for campus
workers!
An End to Racial and Economic
Segregation in Education!
–Racialized college-acceptance
practices
–Work Program requirements for
students on public assistance
–Rapid gentrification and privatization of public school property
–Transparency in Administration!
–Gender Resource Centers and
perpetrators of sexual assault
expelled
–Demand CUNY divests from
Israel, companies that maintain the Zionist
occupation, private prisons, and prison
labor
–Pay Parity for Adjunct Professors
–A fair contract for CUNY Professors
What does any of that have to do with “Zionists”? The answer goes back to Marx: “The contradiction which exists between the effective political power
of the Jew and his political rights, is the contradiction
between politics and the power of money in general.
Politics is in principle superior to the power of money,
but in practice it has become its bondsman.”
In other words, money talks. And in Marx’s view
and the view of his descendants, it speaks the language
of the Jew, who represents power. If that power is going
to be devolved back into the hands of the people, where
it belongs, it must be wrested from the Jew.
31
The fact that “Zionist” has become a term of loathing on the Sanders left might explain why he is uncomfortable about another interesting
biographical detail. As his campaign
caught fire, curious reporters dug up
the fact he had lived on a kibbutz in
1963. Asked about it, Sanders refused
to say which kibbutz it was—and never
has. Israeli journalists turned themselves into detectives to uncover the
secret, and Haaretz finally dug up the
name of the kibbutz: Shaar Haamakim. According to the Times of Israel,
Shaar Haamakim was connected to “a
communist, Soviet-affiliated faction.”
Of course, kibbutzes were collective
farms, so they were often culturally
leftist. Sanders apparently joined one
of the more radical ones.
“Bernie’s socialism was about
trying to give people a better society,”
his old friend Richard Sugarman told
Tablet, an attitude that was at the
“heart of his thinking about Israel.”
Sanders’s brother Larry told Tablet that
Bernie thought at the time he found
what he’d been looking for; the kibbutz
proved “you didn’t need big bosses, you
didn’t need massive wealth” and that
socialism “could work.”
Perhaps that’s one reason
Sanders didn’t want to talk about his
time on the radical kibbutz: Shaar
Haamakim was supposed to prove
to the world that socialism was the way, but it’s long
gone now, a relic of the past left behind by a country
(of his fellow Jews, no less) that embraced capitalism
and prospered for it.
When Haaretz went looking for the name of
Sanders’s kibbutz, it also unearthed an interview
Sanders did with the paper in 1990, when he was a
congressman. Sanders was already known as a harsh
critic of U.S. Cold War policy, especially in Central America. But the interview showed that Sanders faulted
Israel, too: He was “embarrassed by
Israel’s involvement,” because the
Jewish state had been acting as “a
front for the American government.”
It’s hard to imagine much has
changed. Sanders’s Jewishness might
have generated the “dual-loyalist”
list that so intrigued Diane Rehm,
but in fact he’s almost certainly closer to his party’s Israel critics than
he is to Charles Schumer. His list
of foreign-policy advisers includes
James Zogby of the Arab-American
Institute—for 30 years a leading antiIsrael voice in Washington—and the
conspiracy theorist Lawrence Wilkerson, who was once chief of staff to
Secretary of State Colin Powell. The
level of Wilkerson’s antipathy toward
Israel was evident after it became
clear that Syrian dictator Bashar alAssad had used chemical weapons on
the Syrian opposition in 2013. Wilkerson went on Current TV and insisted that “this could’ve been an Israeli
false-flag operation.”
Sanders’s discomfort with his
own Jewish roots may be intertwined
with his ideological distaste for the
Jewish state—even as his decision to
downplay them on the campaign trail
may stem from the understanding
that the more extreme elements of the leftist base in the
Democratic Party traffic in anti-Semitic stereotypes and
would be less likely to support an openly Jewish candidate.
Bernie Sanders has made history—as a Jew. But
he’ll be the last one to say so, because when socialism actually triumphs, the revolution is not beautiful, it is not
quiet, it is not gentle. And it is never good for the Jews.q
The fact that
‘Zionist’ has
become a term of
loathing on the
Sanders left might
explain why he is
uncomfortable
about another
interesting
biographical
detail. As his
campaign caught
fi e, curious
reporters dug up
the fact he had
lived on a kibbutz
in 1963.
32
Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Talk About Being Jewish : April 2016
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AVCHIK
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BY JOSH
H
AVING TACKED to the left in her contest with the self-described democratic
socialist Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary
Clinton will almost certainly tack back
toward the center in the general-election
campaign. She has executed this zigzag
before. By this point, her true beliefs may
be undiscoverable, perhaps even by her.
Joshua Muravchik, a longtime contributor to Commentary, is a distinguished fellow at the World Affairs
Institute. His most recent book is Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.
Commentary
But her apparent weakness for the counsel of unrepentant veterans of the 1960s New Left gives cause for
wonder about the voices she would listen to and the
direction she would steer once she reached the White
House.
Clinton’s own ideological roots lie in that movement. When the president of Wellesley College yielded to the demand of protesting students that one of
their number be added to the graduation program in
1969 to counterbalance the establishmentarian commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, Hillary
Rodham was their choice. She delivered an address
in which the core idea was this: “Our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including
33
tragically the universities, is not the
way of life for us. We’re searching for
more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”
She was chosen because she
had already made a name as an activist, a trajectory that continued beyond Wellesley. Its highlights were
recalled in 2008 by none other than
Tom Hayden, who as one of the organizers of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) in Michigan was perhaps the preeminent founder of the
New Left. Hayden, whose purpose
was to retaliate against the Clinton
campaign for circulating accounts of
Barack Obama’s far-left associations,
wrote:
Her views, like
those of most of
us who were 1960s
radicals of one
stripe or another,
have doubtless
evolved. Yet in
thousands of
pages of writings
and in countless
spoken words
since, she has
failed to explain
in what way they
have changed.
Instead, she has
deliberately
blurred things.
She was in Chicago for three
nights during the 1968 street confrontations [at the Democratic National Convention]. She chaired
the 1970 Yale law school meeting
where students voted to join a
national student strike against an
“unconscionable expansion of a
war that should never have been
waged.” She was involved in the
New Haven defense of [Black Panther] Bobby Seal during his murder trial in 1970. . . . [A]fter Yale law
school, Hillary went to work for
the left-wing Bay Area law firm of
Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein,
which specialized in Black Panthers and West
Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according
to Treuhaft, were communists and the two
others “tolerated communists.”
It was widely reported that Clinton-family retainer Sidney Blumenthal had furnished the material
on Obama’s past, making this a piquant clash. These
two men—Hayden and Blumenthal—were New Leftists who had gone on to big careers more by obscuring
than revising their youthful radical views. Now each
was seeking to damage the other’s favored candidate
by dishing on their radical pasts.
Of course, everything in Hayden’s Hillary history
happened long ago, and her views, like those of most
of us who were 1960s radicals of one stripe or another, have doubtless evolved. Yet in thousands of pages
34
of writings and in countless spoken
words since, she has failed to explain
in what way they have changed. Instead, she has deliberately blurred the
picture.
In Living History, an autobiography issued in anticipation of
running for the presidency in 2008,
she contrives to make herself seem
to have been nothing but a spectator. She claims she went to the 1968
Chicago demonstration merely “to
witness history.” She writes that she
“moderated the mass meeting” where
Yale students voted to join the strike
and observed “how seriously my fellow students took” the issues—as if
she herself had not been an advocate. She reports that “demonstrations broke out in and around campus” supporting the Black Panthers
while she was at Yale, without offering
a hint that she took part in any way.
As for her summer at the Bay Area’s
premier hard-left law firm, she acknowledges only working on a “child
custody” case.
This evasiveness extended to
her descriptions of the events themselves. No mention is made, for example, that the Panthers in the dock
in New Haven were on trial for the
torture and murder of one of their
own (whom they suspected of being
an informer), as if it all may have been
a matter of government persecution. Regarding Vietnam, she portrays Yale’s chaplain William Sloane Coffin glowingly as having become a “national leader of
the anti-war movement through his articulate moral
critique” of America’s actions, but she omits mentioning that he traveled to Hanoi in solidarity with
America’s enemy, a pitiless totalitarian regime. All this
whitewashing and airbrushing prompts one to wonder whether she ever rethought her youthful radicalism or just left it behind because it was impractical or
impolitic.
In 1992, when the Bill Clinton campaign sought
and won my support as it wooed “Reagan Democrats”
back to the fold, I asked Al Frum, then the head of the
centrist Democratic Leadership Council, about Hillary’s leftward tug on her husband. He responded that
to his surprise she was proving to be a “big help” in
keeping the campaign in the middle of the road. So she
Hillary Clinton’s Bad Old Days : April 2016
may have been, but once ensconced
in the White House, she emerged
at once as being “solidly on the left
of [the] administration’s ideological spectrum,” as the Nation noted
enthusiastically. Her activities, especially her leading role in the unsuccessful effort to dramatically overall
the health-care system, were widely
seen as one source of the backlash
that brought the Republicans control
of both houses of Congress in 1994.
The First Lady’s leftish image
was really defined by her curious dalliance with Michael Lerner, a fellow
1960s radical who had founded the
Seattle Liberation Front. A demonstration the Front organized devolved
into rioting, leading to Lerner’s prosecution in 1970 as one of the “Seattle
Seven.” A decade later, he reinvented
himself as a “psychotherapist,” creating the Institute for Labor and Mental Health. A decade or so after that,
he announced that he had been ordained a rabbi, albeit without having attended any seminary. Rabbinic
garb added bite to Lerner’s criticisms
of Israel, which were constant and
invariably extreme. It also enabled
him to formulate a new patter about
spirituality that grabbed Hillary’s attention.
Lerner’s spirituality did not
signify an interest in man’s relation
to the eternal. Instead it consisted of the same leftist
causes he had long championed, wrapped in ponderous talk about “mov[ing] from an ethos of selfishness
to an ethos of caring and community.” He called this
the “politics of meaning.”
Hillary borrowed the phrase when she delivered
a major speech in 1993 lamenting a “sleeping sickness
of the soul” that she said was “at the root of America’s
ills.” This necessitated “redefining who we are as human beings in the post-modern age.” Soon after, in
greeting Lerner at a public event, she said, “Am I your
mouthpiece or what?” When the speech evinced some
ridicule—“what on earth does it mean?” asked the New
Republic—Clinton conceded, “As Michael Lerner and I
have discussed, we have to first create a language that
would better communicate what we are trying to say.”
So she had him to the White House for a skull session.
Much as Lerner reveled in press accounts de-
scribing him as Hillary’s “guru,” her
“politics of meaning” speech echoed
themes she had favored before ever
encountering Lerner. As the late Michael Kelly pointed out in a stunning
New York Times Magazine article,
the speech tracked closely her 1969
Wellesley commencement address in
which she spoke of “forg[ing] an identity in this particular age” by “coming
to terms with our humanness.” Verily,
the girl was mother to the woman.
The 21-year-old was now 45, but the
thoughts were the same.
After the Republican landslide
in 1994, Bill Clinton moved sharply
back toward the center, Hillary lowered her profile, and Lerner and his
politics of meaning were no longer
heard from in Washington. The result
was a highly successful presidency,
whose success is the core reason there
may yet be a second Clinton presidency. The only real blemish on the
first was the scandal of Bill’s various
extramarital moments, which became
the focus of an impeachment process.
One consequence of this was to cement the role of Sidney Blumenthal
as a key adviser to the Clintons, now
especially to Hillary.
Blumenthal had been a member of the SDS. He began a career in
journalism writing for “alternative”
newspapers like the Real Paper and
the Boston Phoenix and radical magazines like the Nation and In These Times. He published an anthology
that carried an introduction by Philip Agee, the CIA
turncoat who declared himself a “communist” and
turned his knowledge of America’s secrets over to Cuban intelligence. In the 1980s, Blumenthal began to
contribute to mainstream publications and landed a
position with the Washington Post, which then leaned
more sharply leftward than it does today. Blumenthal’s
beat was exposing the wrongdoing—real or invented—
of conservatives. His contributions often appeared
in its Style section, which suited his method—to besmirch his subject’s reputations rather than critiquing
their ideas.
His schoolyard style was vividly displayed in a
book he published at the time, The Rise of the CounterEstablishment. I captured his Trump-like approach in
a review in these pages:
The First Lady’s
leftish image was
really defined
by her curious
dalliance with
Michael Lerner,
a fellow 1960s
radical who had
founded the
Seattle Liberation
Front. A
demonstration the
Front organized
devolved into
rioting, leading
to Lerner’s
prosecution in
1970 as one of the
‘Seattle Seven.’
Commentary
35
He reports that Edwin Feulner, president of
the Heritage Foundation, read two conservative classics in his freshman year in college,
after which “his mind was set in a pattern
that would never waver.” . . . The neoconservatives as a group embraced President Reagan’s
Strategic Defense Initiative as “a way to compensate” for their failure to “broker the Jewish
vote for Reagan” in 1984. Further, “a desire for
vengeance” against the culture of the 1960’s
“led some neoconservatives to feel a measure
of vindication when John Lennon was killed”
(though Blumenthal offers neither names nor
specifics). William F. Buckley Jr. was inspired
to launch National Review by an obsessional
anti-Semite. Arthur Laffer is fat.
The other side of the coin of Blumenthal’s abusiveness toward ideological adversaries was his sycophancy toward liberals in power or with the potential
to get there. NPR’s senior Washington editor Ron Elving has reported this history:
Blumenthal had generated controversy at the
New Republic in 1984 with his enthusiastic
coverage of . . . Democratic presidential hopeful. . . Gary Hart.
The Hart flirtation was soon surpassed by Blumenthal’s infatuation with Bill Clinton, whose
1992 campaign he praised for its potential to
bring “epochal change.” . . . Even as the Clintons’ health care bill collapsed and the Republicans took over both the House and Senate in
the elections of 1994, Blumenthal remained
ardently supportive, touting his access and
long interviews with the president.
By 1997, the year Bill Clinton’s second term began,
Blumenthal dropped the second shoe, going to work as
a White House aide. There he toiled, said the New York
Times, as “speech-writer, in-house intellectual and press
corps whisperer.” The “impeachment trial...solidified
Blumenthal’s relationship with the Clintons,” CNN reported. “Blumenthal routinely provided [them] with
information about their Republican opponents...and
how to message against them.” It was not only politicians whom Sidney went after. His longtime friend and
former fellow-leftist Christopher Hitchens wrote of their
reunion in 1998 after an interregnum:
Where was my witty if sometimes cynical, clev-
36
er if sometimes dogmatic, friend? In his place
seemed to be someone who had gone to work
for John Gotti. He talked coldly and intently of
a lethal right-wing conspiracy that was slowly
engulfing the capital. And he spoke, as if out
of the side of a tough-guy mouth, about the
women who were tools of the plot. Kathleen
Willey, who had been interviewed on television the preceding weekend, was showing well
in the polls, but that would soon be fixed. . . . As
for Monica Lewinsky, he painted her as a
predatory and unstable stalker.
Blumenthal’s position as Clinton family consiglieri did not end when Bill left office. Instead, he took
up his pen again, producing an 800-plus-page book,
settling scores with the Clinton’s critics and detractors.
Describing himself as the first family’s “good soldier”
and “first knight,” he performed “acrobatic feats of protectiveness [that] are endless,” wrote New York Times
book critic, Janet Maslin.
When President Obama named Hillary Clinton secretary of state, she wanted Blumenthal on her
staff, but presidential aides vetoed the idea because of
Blumenthal’s part in spreading derogatory information about Obama during the primaries. Blumenthal
continued nonetheless to function as a confidant and
adviser. In lieu of a government salary, he became a
consultant to the Clinton Foundation and also to Media Matters, a “progressive media watchdog” Hillary
Clinton helped found, and to its closely linked PAC,
American Bridge.
According to news stories, his earnings from
these positions exceeded what he would have drawn
at State.
Mrs. Clinton’s recently released emails include
hundreds from Blumenthal. As Politico’s Nahal Toosi
put it, “Clinton received advice from many…but the
quantity and audacity of the missives from Blumenthal…stand out.” Her address on this private server
was reserved for top aides, close friends, high government officials, and former secretaries of state, denied
even to most diplomatic and administration officials.
When Blumenthal’s outsized presence in her inbox
prompted questions from reporters, Clinton dismissed
it, saying his were “unsolicited” messages, some of
which she had “passed on.”
In truth she often replied to them with appreciation, occasionally asked Blumenthal for more on a subject, and at least once wrote that she was waiting for
something he had promised. As the New York Times reported: “Mrs. Clinton...took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, often forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic
Hillary Clinton’s Bad Old Days : April 2016
officials...and at times asking them to respond. Mrs.
Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after
other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s
assessments were often unreliable.”
The attention that Blumenthal’s messages attracted has been magnified by the ongoing controversy over the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which revolves in part around questions about
whether Secretary Clinton had done everything she
might have to prevent or stop it and whether she had
subsequently misrepresented the attackers’ motives.
As emails were released under judicial order, reporters were quick to notice that prior to the attack, Blumenthal sent her dozens of messages on Libya. By one
journalist’s count, one-third of the released material
pertaining to Libya came from Blumenthal, who had
no known expertise on the subject.
Blumenthal, however, scarcely limited himself
to Libya. The messages consisted mostly of articles he
was forwarding, often prefaced with a brief comment.
They touched on Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Iran,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, North Korea, Germany,
Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands,
Georgia, and the European Union, as well as various
non-geographic topics. No other country received even
a fraction of the attention he devoted to Libya, with
one glaring exception: Israel. There was, however, a
striking difference between Blumenthal’s Libya messages and those about Israel.
The former are long, detailed, and written in the
style of intelligence reports. When called to testify to
Congress, Blumenthal surprised listeners by saying he
had not written them—and their substance and style
confirmed this. Blumenthal, it turned out, was advising a business partnership aiming to secure contracts
to provide humanitarian aid in Libya’s reconstruction.
One of the partners, a retired U.S. intelligence officer,
had authored the memos.
Although Blumenthal’s involvement in this venture created a conflict of interest regarding Libya, his
emails do not seem designed to influence policy. They
and most of those on other topics seem intended primarily to sustain his own value to Clinton by demonstrating his breadth of knowledge and range of contacts. In contrast, his communications about Israel
clearly press a point of view about the country and its
policies. They are unfailingly critical of Israel, blaming
it for the absence of peace.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in
2009 first publicly endorsed a two-state solution with
Palestinians, Blumenthal wrote to Clinton that this
was a “transparently false and hypocritical ploy” on
which she should try to “catch” him. When the U.S.
Commentary
brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in
2012, he wrote: “Hope it holds. . . . Bibi refuses a partner
for peace, but has encouraged one for war.” When she
prepared to speak before the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, he urged using the occasion to diminish AIPAC:
While praising AIPAC, remind it in as subtle
but also direct a way as you can that it does not
have a monopoly over American Jewish opinion. . . . AIPAC itself has become an organ of the
Israeli right, specifically Likud. By acknowledging J Street you give them legitimacy, credibility. . . . Just by mentioning J Street in passing, AIPAC becomes a point on the spectrum,
not the controller of the spectrum.
J Street is the counter-AIPAC, calling itself “proIsrael,” but it devotes the lion’s share of its words and
energy to harsh criticism of the Jewish state.
Among the articles Blumenthal transmitted
was one by the UK’s Jeremy Greenstock arguing that
Hamas sought peace and quoting approvingly a UN official who called Israel’s control of imports into Gaza
“illegal, inhuman . . . insane . . . a medieval siege.” He
sometimes sent articles by left-wing Israelis on various
topics. One, by Gershon Baskin, condemned Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders. Another, by Yuri Avnery,
claimed that “the cult of Masada is becoming dominant” in Israel. A third, by Avner Cohen, argued that
Israel should join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and
abandon its policy of “nuclear ambiguity.” Blumenthal
added the comment that Israel’s policy “is itself the
model for Iran.”
Blumenthal offered counsel on U.S. policy by
paraphrasing a post by Pat Lang, a blogger whom he
called a “friend.” Blumenthal wrote, “The U.S. must be
insistent, especially with Israel, playing very firm and
tough, or else the talks will collapse, which is likely the
Israeli objective.” Another Lang blog that Blumenthal
forwarded suggested that U.S. officials had fallen for
Israeli “disinformation” in reporting that Syria had
transferred Scud missiles to Hezbollah. When Clinton
responded tersely, “skepticism not in order,” Blumenthal replied, implying that Israel was nonetheless the
real villain. “Of course, if Bibi were to have engaged
Syria in negotiations taking its previous gestures seriously,” this might not have happened, he said.
The author whose writing Blumenthal transmitted most often was his son, Max. Max Blumenthal first
garnered public attention with Republican Gomorrah,
a 2009 book that describes itself as “a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidness from the dark heart
37
of the forces that now have a leash
on the party.” Building on this, Max
secured a post as senior writer for
the “alternative” website AlterNet.
When Sidney sent Clinton an advance
copy of the epilogue of the paperback
edition, she raved: “I loved the epilogue. . . . He’s so good.”
In recent years, Max’s focus has
been Israel, the subject of a half dozen
of his articles forwarded by his father.
Max is a mainstay of the fervently
anti-Israel website, Mondoweiss, and
the even more fervent Electronic Intifada, edited by Ali Abunimah, creator
of the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction)
campaign. One gets a taste of Electronic Intifada from tweets by Abunimah and Rana Baker, listed on the
masthead along with Max as members of the site’s “team.” When three
Israeli teenagers disappeared in June
2014 (later to turn up murdered),
Baker tweeted: “Wonderful wonderful news three settlers have been kidnapped.”
Max’s specialty is granular detail
that gives his work a patina of authority
even as the facts he conveys are often
wrong. For example, Mondoweiss ran
2,000 words by Max and Philip Weiss
debunking the accusation that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah voiced antiSemitism. They detailed the sources
scoured by Max. But Nasrallah’s own
website carried an audio recording of him declaiming
the most chilling of the words in question: “If [the Jews]
all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after
them worldwide.”
In 2013 Nation Books published Max’s, Goliath:
Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. The Nation’s own
columnist, Eric Alterman, a harsh critic of Israel’s,
called it “shameful” and “awful,” saying “like a child’s
fairy tale, each story he tells has the same repetitive
narrative, with Israel, without exception, cast as the
Big Bad Wolf.” In sum, he said, “this
book could have been published by the
Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”
Of course Sidney cannot be
held accountable for Max’s writings,
but of the articles Sidney forwarded
to Clinton on the subject of Israel, he
sent more by Max than by any other
author. She never, as far as I can see,
commented on Max’s articles that
focused exclusively on Israel, but to
ones devoted only partly to Israel she
sometimes reacted with enthusiasm.
In a piece on Europe’s anti-immigrant
parties, Max wrote: “The extreme right
is also attracted to Israel because the
country represents its highest ideas…
a racist apartheid state.” Clinton replied, “A very smart piece—as usual.”
To another that referred to “the extensive history of Israeli and ultra-Zionist
funding and promotion of Islamophobic propaganda in the United States,”
she commented, “Your Max is a mitzvah.” To yet another that called the late
Zionist blogger Rachel Abrams “an
unabashed genocide enthusiast,” she
blurted, “Max strikes again!”
The tone of goofy cheer indicates the level of solidarity and intimacy between Hillary Clinton and
Sidney Blumenthal. In making a highly successful career near power, Blumenthal has never, to my knowledge,
confronted his youthful radicalism to
explain which, if any, of the ideas held then seem mistaken today and why. Far more consequentially, the
same is true of Hillary Clinton, which is disquieting
now that the presidency seems so readily within her
grasp. The danger is not that she will reveal herself to
be some kind of Manchurian Candidate once in office.
Rather it is that, having forsaken radicalism merely
out of concern for electability, she will continue to be
credulous toward the counsel of the Michael Lerners
and Sidney Blumenthals of the world.q
t ideas . . . 38
Hillary Clinton’s Bad Old Days : April 2016
Scalia’s
Warning
We are in danger of having a ‘failed democracy,’
he said the summer before he died
By Tara Helfman
I
T IS A RARE AND SOBERING thing to see
a roomful of people rendered speechless, as
if punched in the solar plexus by a proposition so terrible and true that it leaves them
seeing stars. I saw it happen in the summer
of 2015 when I joined a group of attorneys,
scholars, and government officials in Colorado for a seminar on the constitutional doctrine of
the separation of powers.
Our teacher was none other than Supreme
Court justice Antonin Scalia. “You are not going to
learn anything that will make you any money,” he told
us as we convened. “You’re here to be good lawyers.
You’re here to be learned in the law.”
After talk of Montesquieu and Madison, Hamilton and Tocqueville, we got down to cases: Supreme
Court cases, to be exact, each one relating to the rela-
Tara Helfman is an associate professor of law at Syracuse University College of Law.
Commentary
tionship between freedom and the structural constitution. But when we got to U.S. v. Windsor, the controversial 2013 case in which a 5-4 majority struck
down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the room
tensed. Justice Scalia had written a blistering dissent
in the case, taking the majority to task for agreeing to
hear the matter in the first place. “The Court is eager—
hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question
at the heart of this case,” he had written.
Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people
of We the People, who created it as a barrier
against judges’ intrusion into their lives. They
gave judges, in Article III, only the “judicial
Power,” a power to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete “Cases” and “Controversies.” Yet the plaintiff and the Government
agree entirely on what should happen in this
lawsuit. They agree that the court below got it
39
‘If Congress doesn’t do its job and challenge the president,’
Justice Scalia said, ‘what we have is a failed democracy.’
The room fell silent. The moderator called for a break.
right; and they agreed in the court below that
the court below that one got it right as well.
What, then, are we doing here?
It was a good question. The procedural history
of the case was utterly bizarre. President Obama had
instructed the Department of Justice not to defend
DOMA from constitutional challenges because he believed that the statute was unconstitutional. Yet at the
same time, the president had instructed other executive agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service,
to continue enforcing DOMA’s provisions. It was at
this point that a small group within the House of Representatives—the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, or
BLAG—filed an amicus brief attempting to defend the
constitutionality of the law.
According to the majority, this brief enabled the
BLAG to adopt the very cause the executive branch
had abandoned on the steps of the courthouse. It was
an unprecedented procedural move that enabled the
majority to inject the high court into a volatile and
sensitive political debate. But, Scalia assured the seminar’s participants, we need not worry too much about
the long-term implications of Windsor. The holding
was of limited precedential value. The majority got
what it wanted—it killed DOMA—and there was little
by way of a rule of law that emerged from the case.
From the back of the room, I asked Justice Scalia whether, notwithstanding Windsor’s limited precedential value, the threat to the separation of powers
from “executive non-enforcement” had grown critical. In the wake of Windsor, had it become easier for
the president not only to decline to defend laws that
he found objectionable, but to decline to enforce laws
that he found objectionable? It is, after all, one thing
for the president to refuse to defend a law because he
considers it unconstitutional. It is quite another for
the president to refuse to enforce a law because he
considers it bad policy—which is precisely what President Obama has tried to do with respect to federal immigration and drug law. Was there any basis, I asked,
upon which the Supreme Court might rule on the constitutionality of executive non-enforcement?
It all depends on Congress, Justice Scalia responded—and “if Congress doesn’t do its job and challenge the president,” he said, “what we have is a failed
40
democracy.” The blow landed. The room fell silent.
The moderator called for a break.
Justice Scalia’s remark has haunted me since
last August. One’s blood runs cold at the thought that
the American experiment might well be failing. And
with Antonin Scalia’s sudden passing last month, one
wonders whether one of the republic’s last lines of
defense, the separation-of-powers doctrine, will be
overcome by a Court that is growing increasingly unmoored from the text of the Constitution. For the originalism he espoused is more than just an interpretive
method: it is a philosophy of government. And Justice
Scalia was one of its leading proponents, practitioners, and defenders.
Originalism is preoccupied with what it means
to live in a government of laws and not of men. It asks
who, precisely, is doing the governing and by what
constitutional authority. The Constitution is the most
fundamental of our laws. It is also a fundamental law
over which the governed exert substantial control. It
was framed in a closed room in Philadelphia, but it
was ratified by We the People and has been amended
27 times. In this important respect, We the People
are the architects of the frame of government within which we live. Through its political branches, we
create the laws by which we are ruled. In the United
States, constitutional government is the very essence
of self-government.
If our frame of government has a fundamental
design principle, it is the separation of powers. Dividing
power among three separate branches ensures that the
various forms of government authority (legislative, executive, and judicial) cannot be accumulated in either
a single person or in a group of people, the very essence
of tyranny. Checks and balances support the structural
constitution by enabling each branch to guard its powers against encroachments by the other branches. As
James Madison explained in Federalist 48, the legislative branch, whose powers are “less susceptible of precise limits” than the others, cannot draw “all power into
its impetuous vortex” because it is restrained by the executive. The executive, in turn, is restrained by the legislative branch, which holds the power of the purse. And
the judiciary? It is, according to Alexander Hamilton in
Federalist 78, to act as “an intermediate body between
the people and the legislature, in order, among other
Scalia’s Warning : April 2016
Originalism privileges the will of the people over the will of
any judge on the ground that there is no higher expression
of the popular will than the text of the Constitution itself.
things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to
their authority.”
To Hamilton, the legislature posed the greatest
threat to liberty while the judiciary was “the least dangerous” branch. For this reason, he wrote:
The complete independence of the courts
of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited
Constitution. By a limited Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified
exceptions to the legislative authority; such,
for instance, as that it shall pass no bills of
attainder, no ex-post facto laws, and the like.
Limitations of this kind can be preserved in
practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must
be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest
tenor of the Constitution void. . . . It is not otherwise to be supposed, that the Constitution
could intend to enable the representatives of
the people to substitute their WILL to that of
their constituents.
Nor, for that matter, could judges substitute their will
for the act of judging—that is, interpreting the laws—
without encroaching upon the lawmaking function.
The trouble, of course, is that judges may be
tempted to construe the law not as it is, but as they
wish it to be. The interpretive enterprise invites abuses of discretion, and so the manner in which judges
decide cases is essential to preserving the separation of powers. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in
the courts,” Hamilton wrote, “it is indispensable that
[judges] should be bound down by strict rules and
precedents, which serve to define and point out their
duty in every particular case that comes before them.”
As a judicial philosophy, originalism seeks to
bind judges to strict rules of interpretation. As a philosophy of government, it privileges the will of the
people over the will of individual judges on the ground
that there is no higher expression of the popular will
than the text of the Constitution itself. To the originalist, this text should not be interpreted in light of
changing times and changing circumstances. Rather,
it should be interpreted in accordance with the original meaning of the text.
Commentary
Originalism is committed to the proposition
that the Constitution means what it says and says
what it meant when it was written. The Constitution
is neither a dead letter nor a living document. It is an
enduring frame of government. It is the function of
the judge to recover, interpret, and apply the original meaning of the text of the Constitution no matter
what novel situations arise. This is no semantic game.
It is an enterprise that cuts to the very essence of political legitimacy.
As Justice Scalia explained in Reading the Law,
Originalism is the only approach to text that
is compatible with democracy. When government-adopted texts are given a new meaning,
the law is changed; and changing a written
law, like adopting written law in the first
place, is the function of the first two branches
of government—elected legislators and (in
the case of authorized prescriptions by the
executive branch) elected executive officials
and their delegates.*
The approach is not perfect, but it offers something
that no other interpretive approach can offer: a fixed
criterion by which to interpret laws and judge cases.
The only alternative to this approach is to invite
judges to rule us—and in the realm of equal-protection
jurisprudence, they do. Scalia once called the area “an
embarrassment to teach,” filled with decisions “tied together by threads of social preference and predisposition.”** This is particularly evident, Scalia wrote, in the
Court’s affirmative-action jurisprudence, where judges
effectively designate “debtor races” and “creditor races”
in the interest of restorative justice. From college admissions to government contracts, the courts have allowed
entire groups of people to be treated differently on the
sole basis of their race. Here, judges have created an Orwellian line of decisions that tortures the very notion of
equal protection of laws in order to secure preferred societal outcomes. Their logic is, in essence, this: All people
are entitled to equal protection, but some groups are entitled to protection that is more equal than others.
* With Bryan Garner, pp. 82–83
** The Disease as Cure, Washington University Law Quarterly
147 (1979)
41
A flexible approach to the separation of powers is as
hazardous to liberty as a flexible approach to the structure
of a house is to the safety of its inhabitants.
It is by constitutional design that federal judges
are neither representative of nor accountable to the
electorate. The political appointment of life-tenured
judges is meant to preserve the independence of the
judiciary from the political branches, not to render
the federal judiciary a governing committee in black
robes. Originalism demands that judges be mindful of
this. It demands judicial restraint because the integrity of the structural constitution can be maintained
only by the scrupulous preservation of the separation of powers. A fl xible approach to the separation
of powers is as hazardous to liberty as a flexible approach to the structure of a house is to the safety of its
inhabitants.
The very text of the Constitution carves out a
limited role for the federal judiciary. Article III confers
upon it jurisdiction over cases or controversies—that
is, authority to provide injured parties with judicial
remedies against the person or authority responsible.
Sometimes, in the course of exercising this power, the
Court must determine the constitutionality of a law.
Oftentimes the Court does this only incidentally. For
example, in Marbury v. Madison, which recognized the
very power of judicial review essential to Hamilton’s
characterization of the judicial branch, the question
of whether Congress could pass a law that violated the
Constitution was secondary to the question of whether the plaintiff, William Marbury, had a right to the
particular court order he sought.
The Constitution does not confer upon the federal judiciary a free-roaming charter to police the
executive and legislative branches. The judiciary is
neither a babysitter to the president nor a homework
checker to Congress. The Constitution’s grant of power to the courts is modest and determinate: It grants
them the authority to decide cases or controversies
that exist only when litigants possess “standing” to
make the claim that they have been harmed.
Some injuries, however, are neither direct nor
personal. A law that allows people to eat their pets,
for example, may strike people as morally repugnant,
but moral repugnance does not give rise to standing
no matter how irked the claimant is. To these injuries,
the separation of powers offers a different remedy:
participation in the political process. Other injuries
may arise because the Constitution is insufficient to
42
the task, which is inevitable in a system of limited
government. In these cases, the separation of powers
demands that the people alter the text of the Constitution by amendment, not the judiciary by interpretive fiat.
Standing is thus a powerful doctrine that restricts the power of judges to the limits of their constitutional authority. However, when judges ride over
the standing requirement in cases such as Windsor,
they breach the separation of powers. And as judges
expand the courts’ power to decide general questions
of law as opposed to cases or controversies, they also
alter the delicate equilibrium of federal power, arrogating unto themselves the authority to decide matters properly left to the political branches.
Judicial restraint cuts all ways, though. The
standing doctrine may well prevent the Supreme
Court from deciding the merits of a current challenge
to President Obama’s refusal to enforce federal immigration law. In United States v. Texas, which the
Supreme Court will likely decide this spring, 26 states
are challenging the constitutionality of the president’s
proposed deferred-action program. The program
would allow more than 4 million illegal immigrants to
remain in the country and work here legally. The Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that of the 26 claimants, at least one—the state of Texas—had standing
because it demonstrated it would have to issue drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants within the state at a
financial loss. The court barred the president from implementing his policy pending the final disposition of
the case. The executive branch, the same branch that
played fast and loose with the doctrine of standing in
Windsor, has appealed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the
ground that the claimants lack standing.
It is unclear how the Court will rule on the
standing question in U.S. v. Texas, but in a sense it
does not matter. The states should not be in this alone.
The Constitution provides clear recourse in such a
situation: Congress must rouse itself and defend its
legislative authority against nullification by the executive. History reveals the frailty of the executive branch
whenever Congress calls it to task. It was Congress,
not the president, that designed and implemented
Radical Reconstruction in the post-bellum South. And
it was Congress, not the courts, that brought the Nixon
Scalia’s Warning : April 2016
As the electorate grows increasingly frustrated with the
ineffectuality of Congress, it also grows more acquiescent
in allowing courts to fill the vacuum.
administration to its knees during the Watergate scandal. Congress has the constitutional authority to sue the
president over his refusal to uphold his responsibility
under the Constitution’s Article II to take care that the
laws of the United States be faithfully executed—but
Congress is not exercising that authority.
This is why Justice Scalia’s lifework remains so
vitally important. By abdicating its constitutional interest in defending its laws, Congress is also abdicating
its political responsibility to the people who elected its
members. And as the electorate grows increasingly
frustrated with the ineffectuality of Congress, it grows
more acquiescent in allowing courts to fill the vacuum.
Political leaders are taken off the hook, and judges are
allowed greater freedom to decide cases not in accordance with the text of the law but in accordance with
the discretion of the judge. Judicial power is trans-
Commentary
formed into something quasi-legislative.
This is, I believe, what Justice Scalia meant when
he said, “If Congress doesn’t do its job and challenge
the president, what we have is a failed democracy.”
With Justice Scalia’s passing during an election
year, the nation finds itself face to face with a choice
of historic proportions. The Senate is unlikely to approve a successor to Scalia until after the election; and
when it does, that justice will likely shift the balance
of ideological power on the deeply divided court. Not
since 1788 has the nation faced an election in which all
three branches of government were on the line. Voters will decide who controls the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. If ever there was a time
for a renewed commitment to original principles, it is
now. Otherwise, Antonin Scalia’s warning will become
prophecy, and we will have a failed democracy.q
43
FICTION
Connecticut
Shade
A
By B en e isman
T NIGHT AT STONE’S Farm in
the summer of 1931, the thing to
do was fight, and this was done
in the tobacco sheds. There was
no electric light, so we’d bring
out the lanterns from the bunks
and arrange them on the dirt floor in a ring, and
then fight in that ring, with the overhanging tobacco
leaves stinging the fighters’ eyes. If you fought, you
were in the light, and if you didn’t, you were in the
dark, so that only the fighters could be seen. Everyone watched, and, sooner or later, everyone fought.
Except me. I was small-boned and slow-moving,
and lacked the desire to harm or be harmed by the
other boys, no matter how cruel or stupid or deserving
they were, or I was. I’d taken to a kind of hiding in plain
sight, as if aiming to prove I wasn’t really there. And so
I spent the days waiting and watching, as if for a great
cloud bank to pass slowly overhead without bursting.
Our father had gotten a job that year delivering
bread for a bakery near our home in Springfield, Massachusetts, and my older brother, Jacob, and I often went
with him, running loaves up to doorsteps while the car
stayed running, or working the wipers when it rained.
The route took us all over the western half of Massachusetts, from Palmer to Pittsfield, and sometimes over the
borders into Vermont and Connecticut. On a Sunday
morning in early June, we had our biggest delivery
yet, to a place called Stone’s Farm in Windsor Locks,
just north of Hartford. Even with the windows down,
we couldn’t stop sweating from the heat of the loaves
packed in around us. Our father, gripping the wheel,
made no stops, and was quiet the whole way down.
We found Stone’s Farm spread on the banks
of the Farmington River, the fields covered with low
white tents. Beneath the tents grew stout, thick-leafed
plants. Two gleaming new Fords baked in the driveway
of the farmhouse, and forty or so dirt-lacquered boys
Ben Eisman is a former federal prosecutor. This is his first published story.
Commentary
44
C O N N E C T I C U T
around Jacob’s and my age could be seen rummaging
and crawling about in the fields. The air was thick and
damp and our ears filled with the steady wail of invisible insects. Now and then, a blast of sun split through
the cloud cover and landed hard on our heads. Stone’s
manager, Earl Douglas, had ordered eight dozen loaves
of black bread for the pickers; he walked out to meet
our father.
Douglas was thin and bone-faced with burnt
brown skin that clung tightly to his skull beneath a
straw hat. When our father asked him what the crop
was, Douglas looked as if he’d asked what country we
were in, and then spat on the ground. Before our eyes
was the finest wrapper-leaf tobacco in the whole world,
he said. Everyone in the industry knew that, from Cuba
to Nicaragua. Why, even people not in the cigar business knew that. It was called Connecticut Shade, on account of this being Connecticut and the tobacco being
grown under shade. It was simply the best there was.
Pop seemed impressed. He gazed off at the boys in the
fields, and asked, “How much you pay ’em?”
Earl Douglas gave a little smile. “Seventy-five
bucks a boy. For the summer.” He looked at Jacob and
me appraisingly. “I could do eighty-five for the bigger
one.”
Our father nodded to himself, then turned toward us. He placed a hand on each of our shoulders,
and I watched the gray stubble of his chin move up and
down. I knew then we weren’t going home. He said:
“There’s nothing for you boys in Springfield. You understand?” Jacob nodded for the both of us.
It was true. Though Springfield still had the
Armory, Smith & Wesson, and Milton Bradley, fewer
and fewer men seemed to have work at those places
or anywhere else. Plenty of boys’ fathers just waited
on line, or else hid themselves in their cold-water flats,
fighting with their wives and listlessly smoking in back
bedrooms. The boys, hungry and hollow-cheeked, were
left to fight in the alleys below, rougher and rougher as
they grew and made ready for the world.
Pop’s stubble-covered chin kept bobbing as he
told us how we’d all make due—the three of us—from
here on out; that this was called doing what had to be
done. “It’s one summer,” he said. “One single summer in
a whole long life. Im yirtzeh Hashem.” Then he handed
us each a five-dollar bill and a bread sack with changes
Commentary
S H A D E
of clothes he must have packed the night before. We
watched as he got back in the bakehouse Ford by himself, squeezing in amid the undelivered loaves. “And
you, Goliath,” he said to Jacob as he started the engine.
“Watch over this boychick of ours.” Then he headed
back out to the rutted highway, turned the wheel north,
and was gone.
Jacob and I gripped our bread sacks. When we
turned around, we saw that Earl Douglas had been
standing there the whole while, with most of the boys
crowded up and staring from behind him, the heavy
sun in their faces.
Four of these boys, we discovered, were Jews: a
short, quick-witted one from Hartford who wore glasses; a quiet fellow from Enfield with an old man’s face;
and twins from Holyoke, scions of a recently bankrupt
rug empire. Izzy Gross, sixteen and all of five-feet-two,
was the boy from Hartford. He made his way to us
first, pumped our hands, and gave what seemed like a
wink through the filthy lenses of his glasses. “You two
sure travel light,” he said, gesturing at our bread sacks.
“Come on, I’ll take you to the villa.” He led Jacob and
me up a path to a long wooden bunkhouse shared
by the Jewish boys with eight rail-thin Italians, who
stashed cured meats in paper wrappers under their
beds and promised to slit our throats if any ever went
missing. They demonstrated on each other the long,
throat-slitting motion. “Which means,” Izzy said, with
a flick of his fingers beneath his chin, “simply ask the
kind gentlemen if you’d like some.” He then directed us
to a pair of cots that appeared to be recent additions,
shoved tightly into a corner perpendicular to the others.
The Poles and the Irish, Izzy explained, each had
their own bunks, Jews and Italians being considered
somehow less strange bedfellows. Earl Douglas, meanwhile, had a small cabin in the middle of the yard with
an electric line running to it from the farmhouse. He
had a radio that at night perched in the cabin’s window;
and through this window you could see his small white
cot and green Army blanket, no different from our own.
The Stones themselves—whom one seldom saw—had
just returned from a tour of Europe, on account of
which we were to be extra quiet while they relearned
how to sleep in America.
That evening, Jacob and I ate supper in the yard
45
C O N N E C T I C U T
out among the other boys, staring fixedly at our plates
to avoid their eyes. A fat, short-legged terrier sauntered
out from the house and wove among the various ankles
until it reached us; when I looked down at him, he
bared his teeth.
When we finished eating, Jacob and I slipped
back to the bunk and waited for the sky to darken. The
air filled with the sound of crickets—legions of them.
Beneath the crickets came the faint sound of a radio.
“Jacob,” I said, “do you think Mama knows we’re
here?”
My brother lay on his back, drumming his fingers
on his breastbone. “Can’t see what difference it makes,”
he said.
“But do you think she knows?”
Jacob seemed to think it over, gazing up at the
black windowpane. “No, Sammy,” he said. “I don’t.”
B
REAKFAST WAS AT six thirty sharp,
and work at seven. Each boy had a pruning knife and a basket, and we went out
under the tents to cut away the sucker
leaves, which grew low on the stalks
and could suck the lifeblood from a tobacco plant. We
were mostly on our hands and knees, which put us on
intimate terms with the black, river-fed soil. There was
little talk before lunchtime—talk being laborious in the
heat—and what words we had were muted by the thick,
dew-soaked plants we crawled among.
We collected the cut leaves in our baskets and
dumped them into a wheelbarrow that grew heavier
and heavier as the day wore on; but Earl Douglas said
never to empty the wheelbarrow until it was full so as
not to waste time—apparently the worst thing a person
could ever do. Jacob was picked to push the wheelbarrow on account of being the largest and stockiest
among us, and by three o’clock in the afternoon, both
his palms were bleeding. Every minute or so he’d let go
the handles to spit in his hands; then he’d press them
together and open them up slowly with a stricken face.
Our pruning knives had wooden handles worn
smooth as could be, and I passed the time imagining
what other boys might have used my particular knife
before me, what sorts of lives they might have gone on
to—as bankrobbers, pilots, hobos. Probably most of
them were still nearby, though I wondered if any had
46
S H A D E
had to run far away from home, or had died heroically,
or merely young. I didn’t know anyone yet who’d died
or had moved to or from anywhere far away, unless you
counted Europe, the awful place everyone’s parents
had come from, or else the Westfield State Sanatorium,
where Mama had gone when she lost hold of her coughing.
Coming back from the fields that evening, our
backs hurt like old men’s backs, and our tongues lay
dry and swollen in our mouths. Earl Douglas showed
us how to work the cistern, and there was black bread
and kielbasa for supper. Jacob and I had never had kielbasa before, which we knew to be made from groundup swine, and we agreed not to tell Pop we’d eaten it.
Tuning out Izzy’s chatter, we ate beneath a makeshift
canopy of tobacco tents that still smelled strongly of
leaves. We sat on rough-hewn benches, and kept an
elbow on the table, bending low over our bowls. And so
went our days.
But certain nights after dinner, Earl Douglas
would hoist his radio into the window of his cabin
and put on The Lone Ranger or The Witch’s Tale. Radio
Hour, as we called it, was also when fights were decided
on. A boy with a scowl would wander through the darkened yard waiting for someone to look him in the eye,
and then he’d decide he didn’t like the way that other
boy looked, and he’d point at the fellow and say: “You.”
Everyone knew what “you” meant. I made sure to have
my eyes pointed down at this time of night and waited
for the feet of the boy who wanted a fight to pass me by,
never minding if he muttered “kike” under his breath.
I just imagined I was off in old Nevada with the Lone
Ranger and Tonto. At first, Jacob looked down, too. But
I could feel him twitching in the grass beside me, and
I knew that the vibrations of his body were those of a
great gear turning slowly inside him, tooth by tooth.
One night during our second week at the farm, this gear
finished its rotation, and I looked over to see my brother
sitting fully upright, craning his neck.
Jacob’s torso was especially long, so that his
head was perched higher than those of the other boys.
Tommy Dwyer, the Irish boy who said “you” to Jacob
that night, was not much bigger than me, with freckled
skin and flitting eyes. He was thin, but had shoulders
broadened by labor. When Dwyer poked his finger
down at Jacob’s nose, Jacob made as though to stand
April 2016
C O N N E C T I C U T
up right there and then, but Izzy laid a hand on Jacob’s
shoulder. “Wait,” Izzy said.
“What in the hell for?” said Jacob. But he allowed
Izzy’s hand to stay.
After the Lone Ranger finished his exploit, and
lights-out was called, we went back to the bunk. Jacob
paced back and forth with heavy footsteps in the thick
yellow lantern light, as we all watched, including the
eight Italians, who sat cross-legged on their beds. A
half hour later, it was time. Izzy took up the lantern and
we walked out across the cool gray grass to the barn
farthest from the Stones’ house, where we’d just hung
plants to dry that day. The sullen boy from Enfield and
the twins went with us; the Italians came after. Each
bunk made its way to the barn, each with its lantern.
The Irish walked with each boy resting a hand on the
shoulder of the boy in front of him, which I couldn’t
help but admire. Dwyer led them with the lantern,
knotting his brows and glaring at the ground ahead.
Once inside the barn, Dwyer took off his shirt and
his vertebra glowed like half-moons. He bounced on the
balls of his feet, his freckles deepened and multiplied in
the lantern light. Jacob wore the same shirt he worked
in every day. He walked out to the middle of the ring
and stood with his hands at his sides, impassive as an
icebox. Dwyer looked Jacob over, circling him, turning now and then to his bunkmates, who hooted and
jeered. Slowly, Jacob raised his fi ts to his ears. Dwyer
then cut short his circling and leapt fully into the air,
swinging for Jacob’s jaw. Jacob lurched backwards at
the impact, and then stared with a kind of drunken
amazement, the mark of the blow already darkening
his cheek. He and Dwyer circled each other now, Jacob
sidestepping on his stubby feet. This time, Jacob rushed
at Dwyer, who kicked him in the knee as he drew close,
then struck Jacob again, hard across the mouth.
The Irish bunk cheered, pressing tightly around
the ring.
“Come on, Jacob, he’s a bum!” said Izzy. There was
something halting in his voice.
Jacob lumbered now, on his heels. His head
lolled, and bore a kind of half-smile. Dwyer made to
close in for the kill, weaving in with fists raised. Jacob’s
eyes for a moment passed dimly over my own. Then,
like a drunk who suddenly regains himself, he lurched
forward and seized Dwyer about the chest, lifting him
Commentary
S H A D E
in a great bear hug. Dwyer’s feet kicked in the air; I
could see the holes in the bottoms of his shoes.
“Keep at it, Jacob!” said Izzy, edging closer to the
ring’s invisible border. With the Irish boy trapped in
his arms, grimacing and mashing his eyes, my brother
swayed almost soothingly. Dwyer snapped his teeth at
Jacob’s ears and nose, but couldn’t catch hold of him.
Slowly, his face purpling, he slackened in Jacob’s arms,
his head drooping forward, like a child who, after some
forgotten fuss, relents to being carried to bed. The Irish
bunk grew quiet.
Afterwards, as Jacob lay in his cot, Izzy handed
Jacob his half of the money: four dollars and twenty
cents. Jacob slept with the bills curled inside his fi t, as I
listened for his heavy breaths late into the night. Shortly
before dawn, I reached for his nostrils with the back
of my hand. With a start, Jacob opened his eyes. The
eyes locked in on my own, though the rest of him didn’t
move, and I couldn’t tell if he was truly awake. Then he
reached out his hand, which still held the money, and
opened it. The bills were hot and damp. “Hide it,” he
said. “Hide it now.”
I took the bills and stole outside into the purple
light. Walking the perimeter of the bunkhouse, I found
an opening beneath the floor planks and crawled into
it on my belly. I dug with my fingers a small hole in the
depression of a pylon, and buried our winnings. When
I returned inside, Jacob’s eyes were closed, but his hand
remained outstretched, the fingers cupped and barren.
Weeks passed. Nine more times, Jacob fought, in
the same blind and staggering way; and each time he
won. Mostly he fought the Poles, who were in the majority and hated us to the bone, unable to comprehend losing to a Jew—even a giant one. But sometimes another
Irish boy would summon the guts for it, despite, or
perhaps because of, what had happened to Dwyer. And
once Jacob had fought two of the Italians at the same
time, a tall boy and a short one, the short one having
hidden a stone in his hand, with which he tore loose the
top of Jacob’s ear. Earl Douglas had put white medical
tape over that wound, which he said made Jacob resemble a Doberman pinscher. Jacob could laugh at this
because he was proud. And bigger than the other pickers—strangely bigger—so that even when he took blows
to the gut that echoed out with hollow thuds and sent
a collective “ooh” out over the dew-damp crowd and
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C O N N E C T I C U T
brought little chills out from my spine down through
my balls, he could stay on his feet and win by attrition.
Which is all to say that Jacob knew little about fighting per se, but that a part of him had grown to like it.
He could take a punch most anywhere at all and never
scare easy—things he could never teach me, and that I
wished never to learn, even if he could.
He bet our spending money (both his and mine)
on himself, and aside from once when the flap of his
eyebrow slipped down over his eye, and he’d stayed
up all night mumbling and gurgling to our poor lost
mother, he never seemed in any real danger. Izzy took
to calling him the Jewish Giant, and the name stuck. It
seemed that so long as Jacob fought, the other four of us
wouldn’t have to, and that we all knew this to be so. The
Holyoke twins regarded him with a silent reverence,
which Jacob accepted as his due. Each morning, his bed
was made, and each night his clothes were washed, and
we all gave him what extra food could be secreted away
at mealtimes. Even Earl Douglas seemed to grant Jacob
a measure of deference, rarely addressing him, and lowering his voice when he did, in the manner of equals.
In all this adulation, and in the tacit bargain from
which it arose, there was a tincture of shame. By fighting our battles, Jacob had assumed the mantle of not
only his own manhood, but all of ours, and we allowed
it to be so. Izzy did not seem to mind, but I felt it acutely;
and in the fields, when I brought my basket of leaves to
Jacob’s wheelbarrow, I no longer met his eyes.
Then, on the Fourth of July, the night before I
turned fourteen, Jacob announced he was going to
teach me to fight—like it or not. It was in the bunk,
just before dinner, the first time we’d been alone in
some time. I reminded him that when our father had
left us at Stone’s Farm a month earlier, he’d trusted
Jacob to take special care of me. Jacob said, “I am.”
He woke me at five the next morning, and we snuck
outside. Spent fireworks from the night before still
littered the torn-up yard by the creeping edge of the
field, and the phonograph Mr. Stone himself had
brought out still spun and crackled on the porch of
the house. Once inside the tobacco barn, we stood
facing each other. Jacob waited as if to see what consternation or fury I could summon. He loomed, my
brother did, blocking not just the doorway through
which I might escape, but most of the light trying
48
S H A D E
to get in, which had to slip around his enormous
shoulders.
“Look at me,” he said, and when he stepped
toward me the light gathered tightly about him. But
I wouldn’t look. “Where are your eyes?” he said. He
raised his fists to his ears. “Here it comes.” Then
he came for me, too fast on those thick legs, with
the glint of a smile on his lips. I dove for his waist,
which seemed the softest part of him, and he trapped
my head in the meat of his arm, snapping my face
close into his side. I could feel the warmth of his ribs
against my jaw, and smelled the full sourness of his
body, disarmingly similar to my own. He twisted until
my face was pointed straight upwards, into his, and
then he rolled me over his thigh onto the packed dirt
floor. As I started to get up he kicked me in the behind
with the flat of his shoe. But then he backed off a ways
and watched as I rose to my feet.
“Now you come at me,” he said.
“The hell with you,” I said. But I walked towards
him, fists raised, girding myself. Three feet short of
him, I stopped and waited. Jacob took a step towards
me, bits of straw crunching beneath his shoes. He
seemed to study my face a moment, then reared back,
and with an open fist struck the side of my head. The
weight of the blow felt like a sandbag tossed from a
roof; my legs gave way.
On the ground, my ears rang, and the fumes of
the drying tobacco plants seared my lungs. “Damn
you, Jacob,” I said. “Maybe you like being bear-baited
and murdered by Polacks, but not me.” He stood right
over me, but I didn’t move. “And how about if I die,
what’ll you tell Pop then?”
“No one’s dying, Sammy,” Jacob said. “No one’s
murdering no one.” He pushed at my knee with his
foot.
“Oh really? Mom’s dying. Or had you forgotten
about that, too busy being the Jewish Giant?” I leaned
back on my elbows, but looked off to the side.
“Get up,” said Jacob. “Get the hell up.” I started
to stand, still avoiding his eyes, and he slapped me
across the mouth. I sat back at his feet, touching my
lips. “Now look at me,” he said.
This time I looked. Though Jacob’s features did
not always resemble our mother’s, from certain angles or in certain light, or when I allowed my vision to
April 2016
C O N N E C T I C U T
blur just so, her whole face would bloom forth within
his, as if rising to its surface. It had been happening
ever since Pop had driven her off to Westfield and
then come home alone. I saw her there now. Jacob
sat down beside me and wrapped his arms around
his knees. “You can’t talk like that,” he said, softly. I
turned away but felt his eyes on the side of my head.
Then, slowly, he reached out and put his hand on my
back. For a while, he just kept it there. Eventually, I
turned and looked at him. His eyes seemed to shimmer. “I’m sorry,” he said. I nodded. He waited another
moment, then said, “You know what a one-two is,
don’t you?”
We rose to our feet and again stepped apart from
each other. With my eyes trained just below his chin,
I threw a jab and a right cross at my brother’s wide,
dark face, and he caught them in his palms. “Again,”
Jacob said, and again I threw, daring gradually to look
upwards, as Mama’s face worked its way free.
Over and over, I swung for my brother’s face.
Somehow, in the midst of getting pummeled, he’d
learned to box. Catching my punches in his palms,
he grinned, and when I dropped my guard, he cuffed
my ears. My bob and weave, he said, was no good.
Every time, instead of bending at the knees, I leaned
forward at the waist, all but begging for the uppercut.
Finally, Jacob reached down and caught my jaws in
his fingers mid-weave. Pinching my mouth, he tilted
my face up toward his. “Where are you?” he said. I
spat, half wishing teeth would come out in his palm.
He let go, and I dropped my hands to my sides, heaving for air. “I won’t,” I said, “fight anyone.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Jacob said. Then he feinted
with a left hook. “Weave.”
T
HEN ONE MORNING at the end of
August, we took down the tents. It was
nearing harvest time, and we could feel
Earl Douglas watching us extra close. Mr.
Stone even appeared now and then on
the porch of his house with a pair of binoculars. “You
know how much these plants fetch?” Izzy said to me as
we picked. “Fifteen thousand a harvest.” Izzy chewed
on bits of leaves he’d torn off the plants. His teeth were
brown. “You ever do the math?” he said. “Pure profit.
Stone probably pays less than three thousand for all
49
S H A D E
of us boys; maybe five or six hundred for Earl Douglas;
a thousand or so for seeds and supplies; maybe five or
ten percent to a broker; but no rent or nothing. So I’m
figuring they clear seven or eight grand in profit, just
for owning this place and being named Stone. Imagine
that: earning eight grand in a summer just on account
of your name.”
I tried to imagine it, but couldn’t. Instead, I
thought of the twenty-one dollars hidden beneath the
bunk on account of what Jacob did—or who he was. The
sun was horrific on our backs and necks as the day wore
on, and as all the white tents came down, the brilliant
browns and greens of the field were revealed. I rolled
up the gauzy white sheets with Izzy, slapping the dirt
free and tying them with twine. Then we bundled up
the stakes. During our break, I tried flipping one of the
stakes up in the air and catching it, like Jacob and I had
done back home with sticks, pretending we were soldiers drilling with our rifles. Izzy watched. I practiced
throwing the stake higher and higher, catching it every
time. Then I’d swing it across my body and slam it into
my shoulder and call out, “Uh-ten-CHUN!”
“Hey Sammy,” Izzy said, “I bet you can’t flip that
thing five times in the air and catch it.”
“A quarter says I can,” I said. He nodded. I tossed
the stake up in the air, counted five tumbles, caught it,
and Izzy fished a quarter out of his sock.
“Double or nothing,” he said. Then: “Wait. Seven
times.” I threw the stake up again, higher, and counted
seven tumbles. Izzy fished out two more slimy quarters.
Caught up in the moment, I’d failed to notice
the Polish boys who’d come over to watch. One of
them, Kostroski, came up to me then, and stared until I stopped tossing the stake. He was about my size.
He said: “You some kind of Jew majorette?” Then he
pushed me, hard, between the collarbones. Jacob was
nowhere near. “Majorette’s tongue-tied,” Kostroski said.
“But tell you what: two dollars if you can flip it a dozen
times.”
“You don’t have two dollars,” Izzy said.
“The hell I don’t, Shylock,” said Kostroski. “Two
bucks for a dozen flips.”
Izzy took a step back and turned to me. Subtly,
he shook his head. Off in the distance I could see Mr.
Stone standing up on his shaded porch. Then I looked
at Kostroski. I tossed the stake up as high as I could,
April 2016
C O N N E C T I C U T
and Izzy counted off the tumbles: “...nine, ten, eleven,
twelve!”
The stake landed with a sting in my palm.
Kostroski snatched it away. He poked the tip at my
Adam’s apple. “I counted ten,” he said, “not twelve. You
lost.” I looked toward Izzy but saw him standing with
each of his skinny arms gripped by one of Kostroski’s
friends. They then dumped Izzy face-first into the
ground. Kostroski laughed and tossed the stake far out
over the field, among the unpicked plants. “You can pay
me tonight,” he said. My blood was coursing so hard
that my neck felt dammed up. Then a shadow came
over the faces of Kostroski and his friends.
“Go find that stake,” said a deeper voice behind
and above me. I turned around and saw Earl Douglas,
mounted on his old mare, blackened by the overhanging sun.
That evening there was bean soup and corn bread
for dinner, and a bushel of dirt-covered cucumbers
dumped out on one of the picnic tables, which no one
took much interest in. Before coming out to eat, I’d
crawled underneath the bunk and fetched a two-dollar
bill for Kostroski. I had it now in my shoe. As we ate, I
avoided Jacob’s eyes. “You ever think about Pop delivering the bread without us?” he said. “Trying to work the
wipers by himself in the rain?”
“No,” I said, not moving my eyes from the Polish
tables.
“No,” he said back. “I didn’t think so.” He took
a spoonful of soup, blowing on it first. “Pop’d always
swipe a few stale loaves to bring home, you know. And
Mama would put them in the oven with a little cup of
water underneath, to loosen them up again. But you
already knew that.” Kostroski gave a quick look my way;
he seemed close to being done. “That’s why when you
ripped a piece off the loaf,” Jacob went on, “the steam’d
pour out and burn your hand.” Jacob waved a hand in
front of my face, then reached into my bowl and took
my spoon away. “Look at me,” he said. I did, and his
eyes bored into mine. Then I watched as he turned and
hurled my spoon over his shoulder at the Poles’ table,
where it landed in one of their bowls with a splash. All
the voices died down.
Jacob stood up. “One of you Polacks wanna bring
back my brother’s spoon?” he said. What light remained
in the twilit sky seemed to gather then in a single beam
Commentary
S H A D E
pointed down at my head. A moment later, Kostroski
came over, holding my spoon. He passed by Jacob, who
didn’t make a move, and pointed the spoon at my chest.
“You,” he said.
O
NE NIGHT WHEN I was a young
child, while watching my mother
cook dinner, I saw her slice her
knuckle on the edge of a serrated blade. Quickly, she brought the
knuckle up to her lips and when she took it away
there was blood around her mouth. Blood was what
came to the mouth, one way or another, in the end.
Tonight, I realized, I would bleed from the mouth;
Kostroski the Pole would bleed me. I wondered how
it would feel and imagined a sense of dissipation, of
nauseating tragedy. It had been just this way when
our mother had said goodbye to Jacob and me before
driving off with Pop to Westfield: how hard she’d
tried not to cough as he settled her into the car, and
how when she did cough, inevitably, her whole body
had seized and clenched around the cough itself as
though it were a huge and important structure she
alone had been entrusted to hold up. “I’m sorry,” she’d
said, gazing at us through the open window. And as
she spoke, she’d started to raise the handkerchief,
which was a bright red, to her eyes; but quickly Pop
had pulled down her arm so that we caught only a
glimpse of it, and then he drove her far away, to bleed
alone.
I remembered this when, after dinner, Earl Douglas put on The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour variety show,
to which most of the boys sat listening with their palms
stretched behind them in the brown grass, though I
heard not a word. Before the show ended, I wended my
way back through the grass toward the bunk. I had it in
mind to take our money, and my bag of clothes, and to
go. I would walk north on the highway, and by morning
I might reach Springfield. I’d tell Pop that I’d almost
been killed, and that Jacob had made it that way, and
I’d tell him all that the world had become. On the way to
the bunk, I stopped on the path to throw up. Bent over
with my hands on my knees, I studied the puddle of my
vomit in the moonlight. I breathed in its acrid, embarrassing smell. That’s my inside smell, I thought.
In the dark empty bunk, I gathered up my clothes.
50
C O N N E C T I C U T
Then I sat and waited on Jacob’s cot, gazing from there
at my own bed, with the Army blanket folded at the
foot. I saw myself lying there the next day wrapped in
bandages like a blown-to-bits soldier, with a bloody
mouth hole in my gauze-encased head to gurgle and
breathe through. Earl Douglas would dock me for missing work, and my father would argue with him over the
lost wages.
Why should you not pay for the boy’s full labor?
my father would ask. Because your boy didn’t put in,
Earl Douglas would say. “Putting in” was what Earl
Douglas called it when you were supposed to do something you didn’t necessarily like but had to do in order
for the whole thing to work—the whole thing being the
world itself. I’d never been much for putting in, I realized. Our father put in; Jacob put in; the crisply burnt
Irish kids put in; the thick-necked Poles put in; even the
skittering, boastful Italians, with their leathery backs
and hunger-pinched mouths, they put in. All of it, all of
life, was putting in; that’s what people just knew, one
way or another, to do, and did. Otherwise, what became
of you? What became of anyone or anything?
Jacob came into the bunk while the Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour was still blaring over the yard. He
stood over me, the floorboards seeming to bow beneath
his weight, but I wouldn’t look up. I listened to him
breathing, and felt the money lying in wait below.
“Show me your one-two,” he said. I stared at the rough
planks under his feet. His toes moved in his shoes.
“One-two,” he said. “One-two, one-two,” as if the numbers were an incantation. He then showed me his own
one-two, stepping between the beds, flinging quick,
sharp blows into the dark. Dropping his hands, he sat
down on the cot beside me, his cot. For a moment, he
said nothing and just gazed straight ahead. Then he
roused himself again. “One-two, one-two,” he said,
as though certain the words would flip some switch
inside me. “One-two, one-two.” Slowly, he wrapped his
huge arm around my shoulders, with the wrist looped
halfway across my chest. He pressed his fingers into my
breastbone. And somehow we took to rocking together,
my brother and I, back and forth, side to side, on his cot,
as though far out at sea. He squeezed me about the ribs,
and I could smell his oceanic scent, the salt and musk
of my brother.
Slowly I looked up at the thick black hairs sprout-
Commentary
S H A D E
ing from the underside of his jaw. Then higher my eyes
rose, over the full lips, the oddly small nose, the slicks of
his wet brown eyes. “One-two,” said Jacob. One, two, I
said in my mind, in rhythm with the rocking. One, two.
Then I said it out loud: “One, two.” Jacob gripped me
tighter. “One-two,” I said. I broke free of his arm and
rose to my feet. Jacob now sat looking upward, his eyes
glistening. “One-two, one-two,” I said. One and two.
The Fleischmann’s variety hour by then had
ended, and Izzy stood watching us from the corner
by the door. He took up the lantern, doing his best to
look away from Jacob and me as he lit it. Shaking the
match, he carefully turned the lantern’s nozzle until
the small yellow flame ceased its wavering and stood
tall in the glass. “I don’t know whether to bet on you
or what,” Izzy said.
“Bet on him,” said Jacob. Then he brought me
out into the gray-glowing night, with his hands on
my shoulders, and the grass brushed our shins as we
marched.
Inside the tobacco barn were the four lit lanterns and the stinging-sweet smell of the harvested
leaves, drying up above. Kostroski stood before me
on the hard-packed dirt and behind him the Polish boys’ faces hovered like ghosts. Kostroski wore
knickers and no shirt, and his ribs were each pressed
tight to his skin like a starving dog’s. His oily black
hair fell at the middle of his brow in a tight point, just
above his eyes.
“You bring my two bucks?” he said.
I shook my head. “It’s my two bucks.”
Kostroski grinned, and came stalking out toward me. As he drew near, I swung wildly, and he
ducked. Then around me he danced, his thin ankles
lithe in the dust. My eyes blurred with tears from
the tobacco fumes as Kostroski flitted in and out of
my vision. Every so often, he stopped his circling,
popping in towards me with a quick jab. I felt little
pain, but kept my fists up at my ears, all the same.
Kostroski changed the direction of his sidestepping,
and I began to circle opposite him, faster and faster
in the orange half-light. Then he stopped again and
came at me, more determinedly now, raining down
blows as though he had multiple arms. I hid behind
my fi ts and heard the thudding echo of someone’s ribs
being struck, the back of someone’s head, someone’s
51
C O N N E C T I C U T
belly, and watched my feet rocking back and forth, side
to side.
One-two. I swung, wildly again, but this time
connected with Kostroski’s collarbone, sending him
back a step, and saw the tightening in his eyes. I
followed with a right cross, landing it on the top of
his sternum, just below the throat. “Again, Sammy!”
Jacob called. But Kostroski had managed to appear
off to my side, and I felt the wincing pain of his fi t in
my ribs. I tried to dance away again, but my feet were
slower now. Kostroski pursued me, twitching his
head and feinting as he closed the distance. I stared
into his face as it began to blur, as he struck me again,
and we whirled once more, faster and faster, our feet
seeming to skim just over the dirt floor.
Again, our muddied, reed-thin bodies locked
together in combat, and again they broke apart. I
came at Kostroski with a series of jabs, connecting
with one to his nose. His eyes flashed and he dove for
my belly. I struck him on the spine with my knuckles,
and he let go. When he rose up, I caught him square
in the eye with my right fist, and he wobbled on his
toes. But he came forward again and struck me in
the mouth. I no longer cared what happened to me,
or that fighting was a foolish, low thing; within the
violence I felt neither pity nor shame nor exaltation, but an almost incorporeal oneness, a feeling
of my place in the world, if such a thing can be felt.
As I see it now, in my mind’s eye, it was as if we had
risen, Kostroski and I, somewhere high above the
overhanging leaves and the barn itself; over the dark
slumbering fields and Earl Douglas’s homely cabin;
over the farmhouse with the two gleaming Fords in
its driveway; over the paved private road and the
long dirt highway, and above the endless blank of the
country beyond. Into the very tip of the night.
And perhaps it was there that Kostroski brought
us down, stealing the wind from my belly with a body
blow, and then striking me, I was later told, flush in the
temple.
I came to, gazing up into the undulating leaves.
Above me was a face like my mother’s, the fingers of
one hand raised to its lips, the other hand dabbing at
me with a cloth. “You did good,” said my brother’s voice.
“Yeah. Real good,” Izzy said. Above my face he
held the lantern, and I lay there smiling, in the light.
52
S H A D E
T
HE NEXT MORNING, I felt wobbly on
my feet. Sitting cross-legged on their
beds, the Italians offered me slices of
their precious salami and cheese, which
I devoured. “Go easy,” said Izzy. Earl
Douglas peered from beneath his hat as Izzy and Jacob
walked me slowly out to the fields. Izzy stayed at my
side, and told a long, meandering story in which Dick
Tracy finds out he’s secretly Jewish. Every now and
then, he stopped telling the story and said, “You still
with me?” I said that I was. We worked. In the distance,
I watched as Jacob heaved his wheelbarrow back toward the barn. I wondered what this place would do
without us. The fields needed us, it seemed, as if to bear
the burden of what they’d begun.
On the Friday of that week, just before the harvest
had ended, Jacob and I came back from the fields to
find our father’s bakehouse Ford parked in Mr. Stone’s
driveway. Pop, who seemed to have grown smaller, sat
in a folding chair on the grass, fanning himself with his
hat. Earl Douglas stood beside him. Our father held in
his hand an envelope, and he told Jacob and me to go
collect our things. We didn’t have any things, we said.
Didn’t he remember how he’d left us there with nothing? But at this, he simply stared; and we stared back at
the strange hollows beneath his eyes.
We stuffed our extra shirts back in the bread
sacks. Then I crawled beneath the bunkhouse for the
money we’d buried, and took that, too. Izzy watched
me emerge with the stack of bills, which I handed to
Jacob. “Not a bad haul,” he said, as I brushed the dirt
off my clothes. The three of us shook hands, and then
Izzy turned abruptly, avoiding our eyes, and hastened
off to get his dinner, the Holyoke twins close at his
heels.
Jacob and I threw our bread sacks in the bakehouse Ford and drove back down the private road that
led from Stone’s Farm to the rutted dirt highway, which
wouldn’t be fully paved for another fi teen years. Our
father drove us north. Every now and then he reached
out and grabbed one of our ears or noses and gave an
incredulous smile. But he seemed unable to speak, and
said nothing of the bruises and bumps on our faces. We
watched him drive and dodged his reaching fingers,
and studied the new wrinkles that had ringed his throat
and dug burrows in the wells of his eyes.q
April 2016
Commentary
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Politics & Ideas
The Change
Agent
Frederick the Great:
King of Prussia
By Tim Blanning
Random House, 624 pages
Reviewed by
John Steele Gordon
E
UROPEAN HISTORY
abounds in royal nicknames, from Ethelred
the Unready to William the Conqueror to
Ivan the Terrible to Charles the
Rash. The sobriquet “the Great,”
however, has been given to very
few. While England has had many
successful rulers in its long royal
history, only Alfred (ruled 871—
John Steele Gordon, who writes
regularly for our blog, is the author
of Washington’s Monument: And the
Fascinating History of the Obelisk,
just out in all formats.
54
899) was given the rubric. Russia
had Peter (1682—1725) and Catherine (1762—1796). The Holy Roman
Empire had Charlemagne (Carolus
Magnus in Latin, or Charles the
Great). The term is not used to
praise a leader’s character, but
rather his effect on his country and
on the world.
And then there is Frederick I,
King of Prussia, who ruled from
1740 to 1786. As Tim Blanning
makes clear in a new biography
that is at once scholarly and highly
readable, Frederick the Great fully
deserves history’s judgment of him
as a transformative figure of the
second millennium.
When Frederick the Great was
born (in 1712) Prussia was, at best,
a second-rate power. A dynastic assemblage, rather than an organic
state, Prussia comprised disconnected territories spread across
northern Germany and Poland,
from the Rhine to the Baltic states.
By the time Frederick died in 1786,
Prussia was incontestably one of
the great powers of Europe. Its
territory and population had been
greatly increased during his reign
and its major parts geographically
connected, while Berlin, a cultural
backwater in the early 18th century,
had become one of the leading cities in Europe. More, Prussia’s army
was, pound for pound, the best on
the continent and, given Prussia’s
population, extraordinarily large.
Indeed the French philosophe Mirabeau, Frederick’s contemporary,
quipped that Prussia was not a
state with an army but an army
with a state.
Frederick’s life had an upbringing almost too horrible to contemplate. His father, Frederick William
I, was interested only in his army,
which he trained hard and used
seldom.
Politics & Ideas : April 2016
He was monstrous to the ten
of his children who survived to
adulthood. He did not hesitate to
beat or punch them, even the girls,
and, at least once, forced his heir to
kiss his feet in front of others. The
king regarded anything cultural as
“effeminate” and wouldn’t even let
Frederick learn Latin, which Frederick William regarded as “useless,”
but which was then still part of
every gentleman’s education and a
medium of intellectual discourse.
Whatever parental love Frederick received he got from his mother, a daughter of England’s King
George I. He always spoke French
with her, a language he vastly
preferred to German, and she
encouraged his interest in music
and the arts. Frederick delighted in
playing the flute, composing music
and poems, and reading the works
pouring out of the Enlightenment.
Once, after a morning of drilling the soldiers of his personal
regiment, Frederick was able to
get out of his military uniform,
don a “sumptuous red-silk dressing gown,” and spend an afternoon
with his flute master (who was paid
secretly by the Queen). Suddenly
Frederick’s intimate friend, Lieutenant Hans Hermann Von Katte,
burst into the room to warn that
the king, “suspecting something
effeminate was going on” was on
his way. The tutor and Von Katte
were hidden in a closet with the
sheet music and instruments, and
Frederick quickly put his uniform
back on. His enraged father didn’t
find the music master, but did find
the red dressing gown, which was
thrown on the fire.
Shortly after this episode, Frederick and Von Katte made a break
for it, trying to escape to France.
The plot failed and Frederick, under
close arrest, was hustled back to
Berlin, where he was thrown into
a prison cell with only a slit of a
window high on the wall for illumi-
Commentary
i
The
king
regarded
anything
cultural as
‘effeminate’ and
wouldn’t even
let Frederick
learn (‘useless’)
Latin, which
was still
part of every
gentleman’s
education.
nation. His library was confiscated
and sold. Frederick William talked
about executing Frederick for desertion but settled for executing
Von Katte. More, he made Frederick
watch his best friend be beheaded.
The only escape from his father
was marriage, not something for
which he had much relish. His
father chose a minor German princess, Elizabeth Christine of Bevern,
whom Frederick had not even
met. In the eight years they lived
together before his father died, she
did not get pregnant. Once he was
king in his own right, he sent her
off to live in a palace of her own and
visited her only once a year.
The question of Frederick’s sexuality has been around since his own
day. Blanning comes down firmly
on the side that Frederick was
homosexual in both proclivity and
practice. Certainly in the 46 years
of his reign, in an age when royal
mistresses were almost expected,
there was no sign of one in Frederick’s court. There were, however,
a succession of handsome young
men upon whom he lavished presents, money, and position. Blanning describes Frederick’s court as
“homosocial and homoerotic.”
But once his father died, on May
31, 1740, Frederick proved himself
every inch a king and, more, a passionate practitioner of realpolitik.
In December 1740, he started the
War of the Austrian Succession
by invading the rich and populous Austrian province of Silesia,
often personally commanding the
troops. Silesia was but the first of
his territorial acquisitions. Some
were achieved by battle and some
by artful diplomacy with such
monarchs as Catherine the Great
and Maria Teresa of Austria, with
whom he peacefully divided large
chunks of Polish territory in the
First Partition of Poland in 1772.
Blanning carefully covers Frederick’s military exploits, pointing
out how he was often overaggressive and inclined to disregard intelligence that didn’t suit what he
wanted to do—characteristics that
denied him the status of a great
general, although he was often a
successful one.
In domestic affairs, he was a conscientious administrator and prodigious builder of palaces, libraries,
theaters, and opera houses. He did
not sit in the royal box, however,
as he preferred the first row of the
orchestra, right behind the conductor, where he would keep a close eye
on the score and ensure that the
conductor skipped not a single note.
While Frederick was highly intolerant of political dissent (and
saw to it that Prussian newspapers
were heavily censored), he was very
tolerant of religious sects, perhaps
because he regarded them as all
equally misguided. While Prussia
was mostly Lutheran, he readmitted the Mennonites who had been
expelled from the kingdom by his
father, and he tolerated Catholics
55
who had been heavily discriminated against since the Reformation.
He even donated land in Berlin,
next to his beloved opera house, for
the building of a Catholic church.
He was, however, anti-Semitic,
perhaps under the influence of the
virulently Jew-hating Voltaire. He
maintained the many restrictions
under which Jews labored in Prussia. They had to pay higher taxes
than Christians, could not work for
the government, or buy land. Jews
even had to buy an expensive set
of porcelain dinnerware from the
royal porcelain factory before being allowed to marry.
When a guest at Sanssouci, Frederick’s palace at Potsdam, told the
king he was planning on returning
home via Berlin so that he could
visit with the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Frederick had Mendelssohn summoned to
Potsdam as a courtesy to his guest
but refused to meet him personally.
When the Berlin Academy asked
permission to admit Mendelssohn
as a member, the king ignored the
request. He did, however, end the
prohibition against Jews lecturing
at Prussian universities, calling the
ban mere prejudice.
When Frederick died in 1786, he
left behind a transformed Prussia,
stronger, richer, and more cultured
by far than he had found it 46 years
earlier. While temporarily diminished by Napoleon, the country
soon recovered and would dominate the continent of Europe for
nearly a century and a half.
Blanning, formerly a professor
of modern European history at the
University of Cambridge and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, is the
author of several books on Europe
in the era of the Enlightenment. He
has given us a superb portrait of
an enlightened despot, equally at
home on the battlefield and in the
opera house, both utterly ruthless
and culturally refined.q
56
These Parents
Today
The Collapse of Parenting:
How We Hurt Our Kids When We
Treat Them Like Grown-Ups
By Leonard Sax
Basic Books, 287 pages
Reviewed by
Naomi Schaefer Riley
I
N The Collapse of Parenting,
the Pennsylvania psychologist and family physician
Leonard Sax tells the story
of a girl named Julia, a
high school junior who had always
performed at the top of her class.
She wanted to take an advanced
physics class a year early so she
could do an independent study her
senior year. But things went awry
when she got back her first quiz.
The grade was a 74. Her mother
thought something was seriously
wrong when she found her daughter sobbing uncontrollably. The
mother told Sax: “I had to put my
hand over my mouth to keep from
laughing. Here I thought she had
been the victim of some awful
crime, and it was just a low mark
on a quiz.” But then the mother
came unmoored as well. The crying spells continued and “she
didn’t want me to try to comfort
her.” That’s when Julia’s mother
took her to a doctor, who prescribed psychotropic medication.
What’s interesting about this episode is that it reveals not only the
Naomi Schaefer Riley is
the author of ’Til Faith Do Us
Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is
Transforming America.
fragility of American youth these
days—a point that has been driven
home by protests on college campuses over Halloween costumes and
the demand for trigger warnings
before history professors mention
slavery—but also the insecurities
of their parents. Julia’s mother was
sure something must really have
been wrong when she could not successfully comfort her daughter. It
was not only Julia who couldn’t deal
with disappointment or failure. It
was her mother as well.
Sax is hardly the first author to remark on the fundamentally altered
relationship between parent and
child that we are seeing in the U.S.
today. It’s been 35 years since David
Elkind published The Hurried Child:
Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon,
in which he argued that the “children’s rights” movement of the 1970s
was misguided because it treated
children as something they were
not. “Children need time to grow,
to learn, and to develop,” Elkind
wrote. “To treat them differently
from adults is not to discriminate
against them but rather to recognize
their special estate.”
Rather than recognize children
as different, we have continued to
blur the lines. In some cases this has
meant the early sexualization of children. Seeing eight-year-olds wearing
low-rise jeans and showing off their
midriffs is a visual reminder that
we have lost sight of the distinction
between kids and adults. But the
underlying reality is worse. Parents
see it as normal and even desirable
to befriend their children, and many
seem to be desperately seeking their
Politics & Ideas : April 2016
sons’ and daughters’ approval. In
her 1999 book, Ready or Not: Why
Treating Children as Small Adults
Endangers Their Future and Ours,
Kay Hymowitz wrote that parents
saw it as their job to “empower
children, advocate for them, boost
their self-esteem, respect their rights
and provide them with information
with which they can make their own
decisions.”
This approach seems to have
failed, at least by the measures of
many parents who adopt it. And in
order to fix the harm that has been
caused by forcing our children to
grow up too fast and by abdicating
our own authority, we have gone
running to doctors, asking them to
medicate our children.
Sax has treated a great many kids
since he started practicing medicine
in 1989—he estimates 90,000 office
visits over his career. But he began to
see more parents like Julia’s when he
started to speak out publicly against
the overdiagnosis of disorders like
ADHD and the overuse of medication to fix them. The kids may become calmer or less restless, but in
many cases they don’t. And the side
effects can seriously alter the course
of childhood and even adulthood.
Sax argues that parents have
stopped regulating fundamental aspects of children’s lives—what they
eat, how much they sleep, and what
they spend their time doing. One
father came to Sax about his adolescent son. The boy had been playing
video games so much and doing so
little physical activity that he was
gaining weight. Why did the boy
spend so much time sitting in front
of a screen? “Aaron was six years
old. We were playing Madden NFL
Football,” the father related. “Aaron
beat me. By some crazy score. I
think the final score was 62 to 7.”
His father was so impressed that
he decided to let the boy become a
“gamer.” (This echoes the amazement many parents express at their
Commentary
i
In order
to fix
the harm that
has been caused
by forcing our
children to grow
up too fast and
by abdicating
our authority,
we have gone
running
to doctors,
asking them to
medicate our
kids.
children’s ability to operate a videogame console or iPad. But why?
These things have literally been
designed so that four-year-olds can
master them.)
Aaron tried out for the football
team and was told he’d have to come
back the next day to start getting
in shape (he couldn’t run a mile in
under 12 minutes) if he wanted to
make it. He never went back. It was a
result his father simply accepted. He
played more and more video games
and announced he wanted to be a
“professional gamer.” “What can I
say?” Aaron’s father asks Sax. “Maybe
that’s his passion. That’s what he really wants. Who am I to tell him that
he shouldn’t go after his dream? I
just want him to be happy.”
But the job of parents is not
simply to make their kids’ dreams
come true. If that were the case, I
could have paid the $300 for the
“princess package” at Disney World.
But something besides the hair glitter stopped me. Absent any common
religious or philosophical understanding about the purpose of life,
perhaps we can agree that we want
our children to be fulfilled as adults.
And yet, as Sax points out, the traits
we try to inculcate are not generally
good predictors of that. “Intelligence
predicts both income and wealth,”
he points out, “but intelligence does
not predict happiness....Nor does
intelligence predict life satisfaction.”
The personality trait researchers
have found predictive of life satisfaction, health, and lifespan turns out
to be conscientiousness. The kind
of self-control needed to live a long,
happy life is not something kids are
born with. They need to get used to
regulation while they are younger.
And here again, Sax finds the parents that come to see him are simply
throwing up their hands. He does
not blame the childhood obesity
epidemic on the widespread availability of supersize sugary drinks or
some plot by potato-chip companies
to make sure we can’t eat just one.
He blames parents who do not accustom their children to the taste of
healthy foods when they are young.
There are modern parents who
will dismiss Sax as naive and his
demand that parents make their
children finish their broccoli before
eating dessert as quaint. But there
is plenty of evidence he is right.
You can offer kids healthy options
at lunch in the manner prescribed
by Michelle Obama, but if you give
them the choice and they know they
will get pizza and chicken nuggets
later, then it’s not much of a choice.
Parents have not only given up on
mandating vegetables, many have
stopped enforcing a bedtime. This is
a problem Sax has seen repeatedly in
his patients. Kids were playing video
games or texting their friends well
into the night without their parents’
knowledge. And when a child was
not focusing in class as a result of
this sleep deprivation, his parents
turned to medication as the solution.
57
The constant communication in
which kids are engaged is also symbolic of a much larger shift in the
culture. Kids, Sax notes, care much
more what their peers think than
what their parents think. And, he
argues, our culture encourages
kids to have a low opinion of their
parents and adults more generally.
It is a “culture of disrespect,”
Sax writes. It’s not just that the
children he encounters regularly
talk back to their parents or tell
them to “shut up” in front of other
adults. Their behavior is regularly
tolerated and even encouraged.
From T-shirts that say, “I don’t
need you. I have Wi-Fi” or “Do I
look like I care?” to the shows on
Disney Channel in which parents
are perpetually absent or incompetent, the message kids get is that
adults are clueless.
Why, Sax wonders, do parents
tolerate this kind of attitude? Among
the “misconceptions” he hears: “I
want my child to be independent. So
when she talks back to me or is disrespectful, I try to see that in a positive
light, as a sign that she is becoming
more independent. And I support
that.” These people sound as if they
are suffering from battered-parent
syndrome.
For parents today, it might seem
that it has ever been thus. It has
not. If parents actually enforced
their authority, kids would have
to care what their parents thought
and then might grow to care on
their own. And that would ultimately be to their benefit.
Relationships with parents are
the source of stability in a child’s
life. “In peer relations, everything
is conditional and contingent.”
Kids can yell “I hate you” at Mom,
but their moms will still love
them. This may not be true with
a friend. Sadly, even parents now
seem weirdly concerned with the
condition of their children’s peer
relationships. It’s not just that
58
they want kids to have friends—a
reasonable concern—but that they
want kids to be popular. Parents
tell Sax: “I’m worried that if I follow your advice, my child will be
an outcast. He will be the only one
who isn’t allowed to play Halo or
Grand Theft Auto. I’m worried that
he will be unpopular and that he’ll
blame me for that.”
Being a good parent requires a
certain kind of fortitude that many
modern adults don’t have. Sax’s
recommendations might work, depending on how old a kid already
is. Will it be enough for parents to
“command” instead of asking their
kids to do things? Will cutting out
junk food at home and taking away
video games and ensuring the lights
are actually out at bedtime lead
to better-behaved kids? What will
happen when parents actually use
“Because I said so” as an answer to
kids who ask “why”?
Sax optimistically suggests that
parents could see results in as little
as six weeks. But it’s conceivable he
is underestimating the other influences on our children. Without the
support of extended family or religious communities or even neighbors who agree that kids should
not be treated like grown-ups, we
would be raising conscientious
children in a vacuum. Creating
what Sax calls a “family culture” to
raise self-regulating children who
understand the values of humility
and gratitude, who are willing to
work hard and are not undone by
failure, may be more a fantasy than
the surreal landscapes of Grand
Theft Auto.q
The School
Runners
The Last Thousand: One School’s
Promise in a Nation at War
By Jeffrey E. Stern
St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages
Reviewed by
Jonathan Foreman
A
2015 exposé on the
Buzzfeed website
created a stir by
savaging the notion
that the massive expansion of education in Afghanistan has been one of the triumphs
of the international military efJonathan Foreman’s many articles for Commentary include
“The Good News from Afghanistan” (July–August 2014).
fort. It was titled “Ghost Students,
Ghost Teachers, Ghost Schools.”
“As the American mission faltered, U.S. officials repeatedly
trumpeted impressive statistics—
the number of schools built, girls
enrolled, textbooks distributed,
teachers trained, and dollars spent
—to help justify the 13 years and
more than 2,000 Americans killed
since the United States invaded,”
wrote a Pakistani-American journalist named Azmat Khan. The
U.S. government’s claims are, Khan
said, “massively exaggerated, riddled with ghost schools, teachers
and students that exist only on
paper.”
One-tenth of the schools that
Buzzfeed’s employees claimed to
have visited were not operating or
Politics & Ideas : April 2016
had not been built. Some U.S.-funded schools lacked running water,
toilets, or electricity. Others were
not built to international construction standards. Teacher salaries,
often U.S.-subsidized, were being
paid to teachers at nonexistent
schools. In some places local warlords had managed to divert U.S.
aid into their own pockets.
The tone and presentation of
the article leaves little doubt of its
author’s conviction that 13 years
of effort in Afghanistan, including
the expenditure of 2,000 American
lives and billions of dollars ($1
billion on education alone) were
pointless and the entire intervention a horrendous mistake.
Unfortunately, it is all but certain that some of the gladdening
numbers long cited by USAID and
others are indeed inaccurate or
misleading, especially given that
they are based in large part on statistics supplied by various Afghan
government ministries. The government of Afghanistan is neither
good at, nor especially interested
in, collecting accurate data. Here,
as in all countries that receive
massive amounts of overseas aid,
local officials and NGOs have a
tendency to tell foreign donors
(and foreign reporters) what they
think the latter want to hear. They
are equally likely to exaggerate the
effectiveness of a program or the
desperate need for bigger, better
intervention.
Moreover it would be remarkable if there weren’t legions of
ghost teachers. No-show or nonexistent salaried employees are a
problem in every Afghan government department. This is true
even in the military: The NATOled coalition battled for years to
stop the practice whereby Afghan
generals requested money to pay
the salaries of units that existed
only on paper. As for abandoned
or incomplete school-construction
Commentary
i
It is
a fact
that the U.S.led intervention
in Afghanistan
has enabled
the education
of millions of
children who
would never
have seen the
inside of a
school if not for
the overthrow of
the Taliban.
projects, such things are par for the
course not only in Afghanistan but
everywhere in South Asia. India,
Nepal, and Pakistan are littered
with them. You don’t read about
them much because no development effort has ever been put
under the kind of (mostly hostile)
scrutiny that has attended America’s attempt to drag Afghanistan
into the modern era. Given the general record of all development aid
over the past half century and the
diffi ulty of getting anything done
in a conflict-wrecked society like
Afghanistan, it may well be the case
that reconstruction efforts by the
U.S. military and U.S. government
in Afghanistan were relatively effective and efficient.
Despite all the money that may
have been wasted or stolen, there
really has been an astonishing education revolution in Afghanistan
that is transforming the society. It
is an undeniable fact that the U.S.led intervention in Afghanistan has
enabled the education of millions
of children who would never have
seen the inside of a school of any
kind had it not been for the overthrow of the Taliban. The World
Bank and UNICEF both estimate
that at least 8 million Afghans are
attending school. This means that
even if a quarter of the children
who are nominally enrolled in
school aren’t getting any education at all, there are still 6 million
other kids who are; in 2001 there
were fewer than 1 million children
in formal education, none of them
female.
To get a sense of what education
can achieve in Afghanistan, even in
less than ideal circumstances, you
can hardly do better than to read
The Last Thousand, by the journalist and teacher Jeffrey E. Stern.
It tells the extraordinary story of
Marefat, a school on the outskirts
of Kabul. Marefat (the Dari word
means “knowledge” or “awareness”) was originally founded in a
hut in a refugee camp in Pakistan.
After the fall of the Taliban regime
in November 2001, its founder,
Aziz Royesh, brought the school
to Afghanistan and set it up on a
windblown patch of desert West
of Kabul. By 2012, Teacher Aziz, as
he is known to all, had enrolled a
total of 4,000 pupils and was sending students to elite universities
around the world, including Tufts,
Brown, and Harvard.
The school primarily caters to
the Hazara ethnic minority, of
which Aziz (a former mujahideen
fighter) is a member. As anyone
who read The Kite Runner or saw
the movie made from the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini
knows, the Hazara have long been
the victims of oppression by the
majority Pashtuns and Tajiks. The
Hazara (who account for about 10
percent of the Afghan population)
bear a double ethnic burden. They
are Shiites—heretics in the eyes of
59
the Sunni majority of the country.
And they look Asiatic. Indeed, they
are widely but probably wrongly
believed to be the descendants of
Genghis Khan’s invaders.
Hazara were traded as slaves
until the early 20th century. As
late as the 1970s, they were barred
from government schools and jobs
and banned from owning property
in downtown Kabul. As if certain
parallels to another oppressed minority weren’t strong enough, the
Hazara are well known for their appetite for education and resented
for their business success since
the establishment of a democratic
constitution, and they have enthusiastically worked with the international military coalition—all of
which has made them particular
targets of the Taliban.
From the start, Aziz was determined to give his students an education that would inoculate them
against the sectarian and ethnic extremism that had destroyed
his country. He taught them to
question everything and happily
educated both boys and girls,
separating them only when pressure from conservative politicians
put the school’s survival at risk.
(When fathers balked at allowing
their daughters to go to school,
Aziz assured them that a literate
girl would be more valuable in the
marriage market.) Eventually the
school also found itself educating
some of the illiterate parents of its
students and similarly changing
the lives of other adult members of
the school community.
The school’s stunning success in
the face of enormous obstacles won
it and its brave, resourceful founder affection as well as benefactors
among the “Internationals”—the
foreign civilian and military community in Afghanistan. When John
R. Allen, the tough U.S. Marine general in command of all international forces in Afghanistan, finished
60
The
i
Last
Thousand is a
powerful and
important
book, especially
in the way
Stern conveys
the sense of
betrayal and
terror that many
Afghans feel at
the prospect of
international
abandonment.
his tour in February 2013, he personally donated enough money to
the school to fund 25 scholarships.
Thanks to reports about the school
by a British journalist, a “Marefat
Dinner” at London’s Connaught
Hotel co-sponsored by Moet &
Chandon raised $150,000 for the
school in 2011. But by early 2013,
Teacher Aziz was in despair for
Marefat’s future, thanks to terrorist threats against the school and
President Obama’s declaration that
he would pull out half of America’s
forces within a year regardless of
the military and political situation
in the country.
I
T’S A FASCINATING story.
Which makes it a shame that
much of it is told in a rather
self-indulgent and mannered way.
Stern’s prose tends to exude a
world-weary smugness that can
feel unearned, especially given
some shallow or ill-informed observations on subjects such as
Genghis Khan, Blitzkrieg, and the
effect of Vietnam on current U.S.
commanders, and his apparent ignorance of the role of sexual honor
in Hazara culture.
Most exasperating, Stern patronizingly assumes an unlikely
ignorance on the part of the reader.
There are few newspaper subscribers who, after 15 years of front-page
stories from Afghanistan, have not
heard of the grand assemblies
known as loya jirgas, or who don’t
know that Talib literally means
student. Yet Stern refers to the
former as “Grand Meetings” and
the latter as “Knowledge Seekers.”
He also has his characters refer to
Internationals as “the Outsiders,”
even though any Afghan you are
likely to meet knows perfectly well
that the foreign presence comes in
different and identifiable national
and organizational fl vors: Americans, NATO, the UN, the Red Cross,
Englistanis (British), and so on.
The same shtick apparently frees
Stern from the obligation to specify
an actual date on which an event
occurred, or the actual name of a
town or province.
Even so, The Last Thousand is
a powerful and important book,
especially in the way Stern conveys
the sense of betrayal and the terror that many Afghans feel at the
prospect of international abandonment. The Hazara children and
staff at the Marefat school fear a
prospective entente with the Taliban enthusiastically promoted by
foreign-policy “realists” in the U.S.
and UK. They correctly believe
it would lead to cultural concessions that could radically diminish
their safety and freedom—if not a
complete surrender to murderous
Pashtun racism and Sunni bigotry.
The book’s main characters are
concerned by what seemed to be the
imminent, complete departure of
all foreign forces as part of the “zero
option.” This option was seriously
Politics & Ideas : April 2016
considered by the United States in
2013 and 2014 when then–President
Karzai, in the middle of a bizarre
descent into (hashish-fueled) paranoia and poisonous anti-Westernism, refused to sign a bilateral security agreement with the Western
powers.
Aziz confessed to Stern (who
was teaching English at the school)
that he himself was in despair but
was trying to hide his gloom from
his pupils. He began to to urge his
students, graduates, and protégés—especially the female ones—to
be less vocal in their complaints
about discrimination against Hazara, and he himself began controversially to cultivate unexpected
allies such as the Pashtun presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani. But
Marefat’s staff, students, and their
parents had few illusions about
the future. As one young girl said
to Aziz: “If the Americans leave, we
know there is no chance for us to
continue our education.”
Although the future of Marefat
and its Hazara pupils is uncertain,
it is comforting that so much has
already been achieved by the education revolution in Afghanistan.
Assuming that the Taliban and its
Pakistani government sponsors are
not allowed to take over or prompt
a collapse into civil war, this revolu-
Commentary
tion may well have a tremendous
and benign effect on the country’s
future. After all, more than 70 percent of the Afghan population is
under 25 and the median age is 17.
Unlike their parents, these youths
have grown up with television and
radio (there are more than 90 TV
stations and 174 FM radio stations),
cellphones (there are at least 20
million mobile users), and even the
Internet. Their horizons are wider
than anything the leaders of the
Taliban regime could even imagine.
As Stern relates in a hurried epilogue, the bilateral security agreement was finally signed in September 2014 after Karzai’s replacement
by a new national unity government. There are still U.S. and other
foreign troops in Afghanistan, even
if not enough.
I
N STERN’S sympathetic portrayal of the Hazara and their
predicament, it’s hard not to
hear echoes of other persecuted
minorities who put their trust in
Western (and especially AngloSaxon) liberator-occupiers. The
most recent example is the Montagnard hill tribes of Vietnam
who fought alongside U.S. Special
Forces and were brutally victimized by the victorious Stalinist
regime after America pulled out
of Indochina. Something similar
happened to the Shan and Karen
nations of Burma, who fought valiantly alongside the British during
World War II but ever since have
had to battle for survival against
the majority Burmans who sided
with the Japanese. In today’s Afghanistan, Gulbedin Hekmatyar,
the Pakistan-backed Taliban leader, has overtly threatened the Hazara with something like the fate
of the Harkis, the Algerians who
fought with French during the war
of independence between 1954 and
1962: At least 150,000 of the Harkis
were slaughtered with the arrival
of “peace.”
The Last Thousand should remind those who are “war-weary” in
the U.S. (which really means being
weary of reading about the war)
that bringing the troops home is
far from an unalloyed good. Having
met the extraordinary Teacher Aziz
and his brave staff and students
through the eyes of Jeffrey Stern,
and knowing the fate they could
face at the hands of their enemies,
one finds it hard to think of President Obama’s enthusiasm for withdrawal—an enthusiasm echoed distressingly by several candidates in
the presidential race—as anything
but thoughtless, heartless, trivial,
and unworthy of America.q
61
Culture & Civilization
Where Have All
the Critics Gone?
Long time passing
By Joseph Epstein
C
RITICS, LIKE belly
buttons, come in two
kinds: innies and outies. The innies—critics, not navels— are
appreciative, inclusive, always hoping for the best and, some might
say, too often finding it. Those most
likely to say so are the outies, who
view themselves as guardians of
culture, exclusive, permanently
posted to make certain no secondrate goods get past the gate and
into the citadel of superior art. The
innies are hopeful, sympathetic to
experiment, more than a touch nervous about the avant-garde marching past and leaving them behind.
The outies are skeptical, culturally
conservative, and tend to believe,
with Paul Valéry, that everything
Joseph Epstein has published
four books of literary criticism. A
new book, Frozen in Time, Twenty
Stories, will be published in April.
62
changes but the avant-garde.
A critic is putatively an expert,
responsible for knowing his subject
thoroughly and deeply, whether
it is music, literature, visual art,
film, theatre, or any other art. This
would include knowledge of its
history, traditions, techniques, the
conditions under which it has been
made, and all else that is pertinent
to rendering sound and useful
judgment on discrete works of art
in his field. Along with knowledge,
which is available to all who search
it out, the critic must also have
authority, the power to convince—
a power that has been available
only to a few. Whence does such
authority derive? Edmund Wilson,
a dominant literary critic from the
1920s through the 1960s, places
its source, one might say, authoritatively. “The implied position of
people who know about literature
(as is also the case with every other
art),” Wilson wrote, “is simply that
they know what they know, and
that they are determined to impose
their opinions by main force of eloquence or assertion on the people
who do not know.”
“Those who cannot do, teach,”
George Bernard Shaw famously
said, but he would never have said
that those who cannot create art,
criticize—for he himself, the leading playwright of his day, wrote
strong theater and music criticism. One of the many accusations
against critics is that they are frustrated artists. Not, as it turns out,
true, or certainly not always. The
best critics of poetry have been poets: in the modern age, these have
included T. S. Eliot, Yvor Winters,
W. H. Auden, and Randall Jarrell.
Many other important critics have
devoted themselves exclusively to
criticism without, so far as one
knows, ever attempting art: F. R.
Leavis in literature, B. H. Haggin
in music, Clement Greenberg in
visual art, Robert Warshow in film.
The chief purpose of criticism,
as T. S. Eliot formulated it, is “the
elucidation of works of art and the
correction of taste.” The able critic does this through comparison
(with other works) and analysis (of
the work at hand). When it comes
April 2016
to older works, the result usually
leads to defl tion or enhanced appreciation. If he is good at his
task, the critic will have done an
aesthetic service by instructing the
rest of us, the incognescenti, in the
intricacies and ultimate quality of
the art we ourselves have already
experienced or soon will.
Then there is the more complicated matter of critics instructing
artists. (Highly conscious artists,
of course, are their own most
stringent and best critics.) As men
and women who have presumably
trained themselves to see trees and
forest both, critics can be helpful
to artists in informing them where
and how they have gone askew
or cheering them on when they
are doing important work? Harold
Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg
not only wrote about the contemporary visual art of their day but
also coached, for better or worse,
many of the artists who produced
it. In the best of all worlds, the
relation between artists and critics is symbiotic, each helping the
other. Most artists would of course
prefer to have critics on their side,
especially in those situations where
criticism weighs in heavily on the
commercial fate of the art in question. Without interesting art, of
course, critics are out of business.
The one ticket to heaven critics
may possess is acquired through
their discovery of new art or promotion of neglected art. H. L. Mencken
earns a ticket here for helping to establish and find a wider readership
for the novels of Theodore Dreiser,
Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather.
Edmund Wilson was invaluable in
his day for introducing readers, in
his book Axel’s Castle, to the great
modernist writers and through
his reviews in the New Republic
and later in the New Yorker to a
wide range of works, foreign and
* Penguin, 283 pp.
Commentary
i
The
reviewer
advises you on
what to see,
read, hear. The
critic accounts
for the aesthetic
principles
underlying his
judgments and
sets out the
significance, or
insignificance,
of the work at
hand.
domestic, they might never have
discovered on their own. Wilson
prided himself on what he called
his efforts at international literary
cross-pollinization
Critics can be immensely disputatious among themselves, and
have over the years formed schools
from which schisms and thereby further schools have resulted.
“Criticism, far from being a simple
and orderly field of beneficent activity from which impostors can be
readily ejected,” Eliot wrote, “is no
better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators,
who have not even arrived at the
articulation of their differences.”
Nor, usually, do they, ever.
A. O. Scott, one of the current
movie reviewers of the New York
Times, uses this Eliot quotation
in the survey of the schools and
fields of criticism that appears in
his book Better Living Through
Criticism.* Note that I have called
Scott a “reviewer” and not a “critic.”
The reviewer advises you on what
to see, read, hear, or not to see,
read, hear. The critic accounts for
the aesthetic principles underlying
his judgments and sets out the significance, or insignificance, of the
work at hand.
The distinction is a useful one,
and it is noteworthy that Scott fails
to explain the difference anywhere
in his book. This is a mark of the
work’s thinness, and how it inadvertently reveals the true condition
of criticism in our time. Better Living Through Criticism is intended
as an argument in favor of the enduring power of a great and noble
form, but it is in some ways more
akin to an obituary.
N
OT YET FIFTY, the son
of academics, a Harvard
magnum cum laude, a
former assistant to Robert Silvers,
the founding editor of the New York
Review of Books, A.O. Scott has the
perfect resumé of the contemporary bien pensant. Scott is a writer
in the glib school of New York
Times critics begun by John Leonard and continued by Frank Rich.
He is a man who refers to “late capitalism,” always a giveaway phrase
for those who wish to make plain
their progressivist credentials.
(What, one wonders, is to follow
late capitalism? Early Utopianism,
perhaps; or, possibly, middle Gulag?) Contemporary glibness leaves
its greasy prints nearly everywhere
on his pages. He avails himself
of the words “bullshit,” “sucked,”
“punked.” In discussing Kant, he
writes: “Having nothing better to
do in the Prussian city of Königsberg, [Kant] set about investigating the nature of taste.” He refers
to “the political philosopher Isaiah
Berlin riffing on an aphorism of
the pre-Socratic philosopher Antilochus.” At other times he can
become grandiloquent. Apropos of
John Ford’s movie The Searchers,
63
he writes: “The mythology of The
Searchers has grown more troubling and volatile over time, as it
reveals the racial animus and patriarchal ideology, the violence and
paranoia, woven into the nation’s
deepest well-springs of identity.”
Beware, I advise, white men calling
other white men racist.
Scott also enjoys taking a refreshing dip in the bathwater of
political correctness. He scores
off Robert Warshow for his “unreflecting sexism” for using the
word “man” instead of the more, as
they now say, inclusive “persons,”
though Warshow did so more than
60 years ago. He defends jazz,
which he feels was insufficiently
appreciated because it was the art
of a minority group, when it needs
no defense, and has always been an
art with a small but devoted following, black and white. Elsewhere,
siding with the young, he writes:
“To look at the record of contempt
for jazz, hip hop, disco, rock ‘n’ roll,
video games, comic books, and
even television and film is to witness learned and refined people
making asses of themselves by embracing their own ignorance.”
Scott grew up reading, in the
Village Voice and in Rolling Stone,
“a great many reviews of things
long before I saw them, and in a
lot of cases reading the reviews of
something I would never experience firsthand was a perfectly
adequate substitute for the experience.” He read “Stanley Crouch on
jazz, Robert Christigau and Ellen
Willis on rock, J. Hoberman and
Andrew Sarris on film, Peter Schjeldahl on art.” He was especially
taken by a critic named C(ynthia).
Carr, who wrote on avant-garde
and underground theatre and performance art; what won him over
to her was less her ideas than “the
charisma of her voice.”
In Scott’s writing, one senses
a man much worried about be-
64
i
One
senses
that Scott is
much worried
about being
thought out of
it. This fear of
not being au
courant is a key
element in his
view of the role
of the reviewer.
He believes that
nostalgia is a
‘moral danger.’
ing thought out of it. This fear
of not being au courant is a key
element in his view of the role of
the reviewer. Toward the end of
his book he notes that “there is a
moral danger—a danger to morale,
and to decency—that many of us
[reviewers] face as we age.” The
danger turns out to be a lapse into
nostalgia, a loss of youthful ideals,
with a corresponding loss of critical energy. But, then, the kind of
reviewer-critic Scott admires is one
willing to make mistakes, and for
whom one of the gravest mistakes
is moderation. One has to imagine,
say, Harold Bloom, but a Harold
Bloom dragging in Emerson and
Freud to write about comic books.
L
IKE THE A student he
is, Scott brings in the usual
suspects from the past on
the subject of criticism: Johnson,
Shelley, Wordsworth, Arnold, Pater,
Wilde, Mencken, Orwell, Trilling,
and the obligatory Walter Benja-
min. No mention is made, however,
of Randall Jarrell, who, as long
ago as 1952, fourteen years before
Scott was born, adumbrated Scott’s
career in an essay called “This
Age of Criticism.” Jarrell wrote:
“These days, when an ambitious
young intellectual finishes college,
he buys himself a new typewriter
[make that laptop], rents himself
a room, and settles down to write
. . . book reviews, long critical articles, explications.” Jarrell, a poet
who was the best critic of poetry of
his generation, adds: “No wonder
poor poets became poor critics,
and count themselves blest in the
bargain; no wonder young intellectuals become critics before, and
not after, they have failed as artists.
And sometimes—who knows?—
they might not have failed; besides,
to have failed as an artist may be
a more respectable and valuable
thing.”
When Jarrell wrote “This Age of
Criticism,” critics were the dominant
figures in American intellectual life.
The leading intellectual journals of
the time—Partisan Review, Commentary, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Encounter in England—were
filled with criticism. Of the now
well-known New York Intellectuals,
only three, Saul Bellow and Delmore
Schwartz and Mary McCarthy, were
imaginative writers, and the poems
of Schwartz and the novels of McCarthy might never had got the
attention they did without their criticism running, so to say, interference
for them. The other New York Intellectuals—Warshow, Philip Rahv,
Lionel and Diana Trilling, Clement and Martin Greenberg, Harold
Rosenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, et alia—were critics; the young
Norman Podhoretz started out as
a literary critic. The universities
harbored such critics as R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn
Warren, Yvor Winters, Ian Watt, and
Robert Heilman. Critics in that day
Culture & Civilization : April 2016
were much esteemed; they were
heroes of culture. With the blurring
of high and popular culture, they
could no longer be so. Better Living
Through Criticism suggests, if only
by omission, why this is so.
T
HE BOOK IS divided between chapters that are
disquisitions on various
aspects of the traditions of, and
changes over the years in, criticism,
and chapters that are set up as dialogues in which a Mister Interlocutor, as the old minstrel shows had
it, asks the author questions about
his own critical career. The book is
meant to be a justification for criticism and an apologia pro vita sua
of sorts for Scott’s choice of career.
What Better Living Through
Criticism leaves out is the old but
still essential distinction between
highbrow and popular art. Since
the time of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) critics
of all arts were given their assignment, which was to discover and
promulgate the glories of culture,
which was itself “a study of perfection.” This same culture, according
to Arnold, “seeks to do away with
classes; to make the best that has
been thought and known in the
world current everywhere; to make
all men live in an atmosphere of
sweetness and light.” Under these
marching orders, critics were to be
simultaneously missionaries and
propagandists. Theirs was a search
and destroy mission. They were to
search out all that qualified under
the rubric “best that has been
thought and known” and to destroy
all that was pretentious, drivel,
crap, which included all middlebrow and most popular culture.
Of course not all popular culture
is drivel or crap. Lots of it gives
pleasure without bringing corruption in its wake. Much of it informs
us, in ways that high culture does
not, about the way we live now,
Commentary
i
Does
popular
culture require
study in
universities?
Does it require
a corpus of
criticism?
Wasn’t
Casablanca
more enjoyable
before it was
recognized, in
film courses, as a
classic?
which was once the task of the novel. Yet does popular culture require
study in universities? Does it require a corpus of criticism? Wasn’t
the movie Casablanca somehow
more enjoyable before it was recognized, in film courses and else
where, as a classic? Why do I find it
immensely appealing that the late
Julius Epstein, who with his brother Philip wrote the screenplay for
Casablanca, when complimented
on the movie, replied, “Yes, it’s a
pretty slick piece of shit.”
In an earlier day some believed
that even attacking popular culture, which then often went by the
name “kitsch,” wasn’t worth the
time and energy put into it. Best
to leave it alone altogether. Harold Rosenberg twitted (not, mind,
tweeted) Dwight Macdonald for
spending so much time writing
about the movies. What Rosenberg
thought of Robert Warshow’s interest in popular culture is not known.
Warshow’s tactic was neither to
attack nor exult in popular culture,
but to explain its attractions. His
two essays on why Americans were
attracted to gangster and western
movies are among the most brilliant things ever written on the
movies and on popular culture
generally.
Today the standard of highbrow
culture has been worn away, almost
to the point of threadbareness.
For political reasons, universities
no longer feel obligated to spread
its gospel. Western culture—dead
white males and all that—with
its imperialist history has long
been increasingly non grata in humanities departments. Everywhere
pride of place has been given to the
merely interesting—the study of
gay and lesbian culture, of graphic novels and comic books, and
more—over the deeply significant.
Culture, as it is now understood
in the university and elsewhere, is
largely popular culture. That battle
has, at least for now, been lost.
I
N “This Age of Criticism,” Jarrell was actually bemoaning
the spread of criticism, which
he felt was choking off the impulse
to create stories, plays, and poems.
He also felt critics were insufficiently adventurous, content to
dwell lengthily on the same small
body of classic works. His dream of
repressing the field has come to be
a reality.
And so we are left with A.O.
Scott, whose key thesis is that criticism is “the art of the voice.” His
own voice, in his reviews and in
Better Living Through Criticism, is
that of a man who vastly overestimates his own voice’s significance
and charm. The Age of Criticism
Randall Jarrell condemned is over
and done with—but in a way he
would not in the least have approved. Were he alive today, Jarrell
might have to seek work reviewing
video games.q
65
Don’t Forget
Harry James
Giving a scorned
musician his
proper due
By Terry Teachout
J
OURNALISTS ARE fond
of marking centenaries,
but no particular fuss
was made over the occasion of Harry James’s
birth 100 years ago this past
March. To the extent that he is still
remembered today, it is only for
having set Frank Sinatra on the
road to glory by hiring the young
singer to perform with his big band
in 1939. Yet James had once been
famous enough in his own right for
his picture to appear on the front
page of the New York Times when
he died in 1983, a fi ting tribute to a
trumpet-playing bandleader described in the paper’s obituary as
“a major figure of the swing era”
whose big band “remained popular
for more than 40 years.”
That was, if anything, an understatement. No jazz instrumentalist
has ever been more popular than
James. Seventy of his records appeared on Billboard’s pop charts
Terry Teachout is Commentary’s critic-at-large, the drama
critic of the Wall Street Journal, and
the author of biographies of Louis
Armstrong and Duke Ellington. He
will make his professional directing debut in May with Palm Beach
Dramaworks’ production of his fi st
play, Satchmo at the Waldorf.
66
between 1939 and 1953. (The Rolling Stones, by contrast, have had
56 chart hits to date.) During that
same time, he and his band were
heard regularly on network radio
and appeared in 10 feature films,
including one with Betty Grable,
the celebrated World War II pinup
girl and the second of James’s three
wives. Long after rock ’n’ roll had
decisively supplanted golden-age
pop as America’s preferred form
of popular music, he managed to
keep his band working, continuing to perform in public until nine
days before his death.
Why, then, is James mostly forgotten? First, his popularity was and
is off-putting to certain critics and
jazz buffs, and the way in which he
won it was even more offensive to
them. As John S. Wilson explained in
the Times obituary, James’s success
“came only when he added to his
repertory romantic ballads played
with warm emotion and a vibrato so
broad that at times it seemed almost
comic.” Still, even at the height of his
commercial success, he also played
plenty of hard-core big-band jazz,
and numerous other critics and
scholars, including some who had
no use for his schmaltzy hit records
of “I Don’t Want to Walk Without
You” and “You Made Me Love You,”
lauded him. Gunther Schuller, for
one, called James “the most technically assured and prodigiously talented white trumpet player of the
late Swing Era...possibly the most
complete trumpet player who ever
lived.”
No less troublesome, especially
now that race-conscious jazz critics are on the lookout for egregious
examples of “cultural appropriation,” was the fact that James was
white. But the color of his skin did
not prevent such illustrious black
trumpeters as Miles Davis, Dizzy
Gillespie, and Clark Terry from admiring his technique and artistry.
Louis Armstrong, on whom James
initially modeled his playing, went
so far as to praise him in characteristically pithy terms: “That white
boy—he plays like a jig!”
One must dig more deeply
to understand why James is so
little remembered today, a venture
aided by the existence of Peter J.
Levinson’s Trumpet Blues (1999), a
thoroughly researched biography
that deals frankly with his squalid
private life. A hard-drinking, philandering loner who abused his
wives, ignored his children, and
lost a fortune at the craps tables
of the casinos that employed him,
James died broke and unhappy.
But he left behind ample evidence
that he was a great jazzman who
made self-destructive career choices, at least where his reputation
was concerned.
A
S THE SAYING goes,
James was born in a
trunk. His mother was an
acrobat, and his father led a circus
band that toured throughout the
south. James’s father, himself an
accomplished trumpeter, drilled
the boy unstintingly in the hope
that he would become a classical
musician, and Harry developed
into a budding young virtuoso with
an impeccably polished technique
and the iron-lipped stamina that
comes from playing marches for
circus acts.
But James had other plans. He
fell in love with jazz after hearing
Louis Armstrong’s early records,
and when his family settled down
Culture & Civilization : April 2016
in Texas in 1931, he started playing
with local dance bands and working his way up the professional
ladder. Benny Goodman, the most
famous bandleader of the early
swing era, heard and hired him six
years later, and within a matter of
months the 21-year-old James had
become, after Goodman himself,
the band’s best-known and most
admired soloist.
James recorded extensively
with Goodman in 1937 and 1938,
and he can also be heard in offthe-air broadcasts of live performances that illustrate even more
clearly what Zeke Zarchy, whom
he replaced in Goodman’s trumpet section, later said about him:
“Fire came out of that trumpet
every time he picked up his horn.
It was like a guy throwing a spear.”
His sound was fat-toned and ferociously intense, and he played with
a darting, daring agility worthy of
Armstrong in his prime.
James had another spear in his
capacious quiver. Like Armstrong,
he was also a wholly idiomatic
blues player, an accomplishment
rare among white jazzmen of the
’30s that added emotional depth
to a self-consciously flashy style.
As he explained in a 1977 interview
with Merv Griffin: “I was brought
up in Texas with the blues. When
I was 11 or 12 years old, down in
what they call Barbecue Row, I
used to sit in with the guys that had
the broken bottlenecks on their
guitars, playing the blues. That’s
all we knew.”
In addition, he was a talented
composer and arranger, a more
than competent drummer and
dancer, and a physically attractive
man whose piercing blue eyes and
slender build made him catnip to
women—and therefore born to be
a bandleader. In 1939 he went out
on his own and spent the next two
years struggling to find a distinctive ensemble voice. James’s goal
Commentary
i
James
was
determined to
cover all the
musical bases,
and he did so
with seeming
effortlessness.
He always
insisted that
he performed
sentimental
ballads solely
because he liked
doing so.
was to lead “a band that really
swings and that’s easy to dance to.”
He also longed to feature himself
on ballads, which Goodman had
been unwilling to let him play.
Finally, in 1941, he turned the
key of commercial success by hiring Helen Forrest, perhaps the
most tasteful and expressive female singer of the big-band era,
and adding a small string section
to his otherwise conventional instrumental lineup. It was with
this group that James recorded an
unabashedly sentimental arrangement of “You Made Me Love You (I
Didn’t Want to Do It),” a 1913 ballad
that had been revived four years
earlier by Judy Garland. His instrumental version promptly became a
million-selling hit, and he rode it
to fame and fortune by recording
a series of equally fulsome ballads
featuring Forrest.
The jazz critic Dan Morgenstern
has called “You Made Me Love
You” “the record that the jazz crit-
ics never forgave Harry James for
recording.” Their disdain, while excessive, is understandable: James
played the song and others like it
with a mile-wide vibrato that has
been likened to that of an Italian
tenor in full cry, cushioned by
sugary violins. He also featured
himself on light-classic arrangements like “Carnival of Venice”
and “Flight of the Bumblebee”
that showed off the spectacularly
nimble technique he had acquired
from countless hours of youthful
practice. At the same time, though,
he recorded any number of swinging vocal and instrumental sides,
including “Crazy Rhythm,” “Jeffrie’s Blues,” “I’ve Heard That Song
Before” (with Forrest), Duke Ellington’s “I’m Beginning to See the
Light,” and his own “Let Me Up,” all
of which demonstrated his prowess as a jazzman.
James was determined to cover
all the musical bases, and he did
so with seeming effortlessness.
Moreover, he always insisted that
he performed sentimental ballads
not for commercial reasons but
solely because he liked doing so:
“I really get bugged about these
people talking about commercial
tunes . . . I don’t think we’ve ever
recorded or played one tune that
I didn’t particularly love to play.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t play it.”
James maintained his popularity into the late ’40s, far longer than
most of his contemporaries, but
changing musical tastes ultimately
forced him to disband his wartime
orchestra and organize a smaller,
stringless group. Nonplussed by
the fast-growing popularity of solo
singers like Sinatra, he briefl
flirted (as did Benny Goodman)
with big-band bebop in 1949, but
quickly discovered that his fans
were uninterested in hearing him
perform harmonically complex uptempo compositions. “It was a big
mistake . . . playing music that was
67
not fundamentally dance music
in places where people came to
dance,” he ruefully confessed.
After treading stylistic water for
several years, James found a new
path to popularity. Long a fervent
admirer of the no-nonsense swing
of Count Basie, he opted to emulate
the smooth, streamlined approach
of the “New Testament” band that
Basie had put together in 1952.
Basie’s new group played bluesoriented ensemble jazz with explosively wide dynamic contrasts.
It was harmonically advanced but
steered clear of the ultra-fast tempos and vertiginous chromaticism
of the boppers. His 1957 album
Wild About Harry, arranged and
performed in this new style, immediately re-established him as a
major voice.
James stuck closely to his neoBasie approach for most of the
rest of his life, leading a first-class
group of crack instrumentalists
(especially in the mid-’60s, when
Buddy Rich played drums for him)
and programming his hits of the
’40s alongside big-band versions
of jazz compositions such as Miles
Davis’s “Walkin’” and Horace Silver’s “Doodlin’.” Not only did he
continue to solo with verve and authority, but he gradually expanded
the parameters of his style, incorporating elements of the playing
of such postwar bebop trumpeters
as Clifford Brown without compromising his individuality.
Then his luck ran out. The major labels stopped recording him
in 1968, the same year in which
he made his last appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show, and he
soon came to be seen not as a stillvital soloist but as the leader of a
nostalgia act, playing a steadily
narrowing repertoire of pop hits
for senior citizens who longed to
relive their youth. By the time he
died in 1983, he had become a back
number.
68
i
The
major
labels stopped
recording
James in 1968,
the same year
in which he
made his last
appearance on
The Ed Sullivan
Show, and he
soon came
to be seen as
the leader of a
nostalgia act.
H
OW COULD SO superlative a soloist and
bandleader have fallen off
the map of jazz? In retrospect, it
seems clear that James’s key mistake with those writers who maintain and burnish the reputations of
musicians was to present himself
as a celebrity bandleader first and
a jazz musician second.
Throughout his two-year tenure as a member of Benny Goodman’s troupe, he had recorded to
unfailingly powerful effect as a
small-group sideman with such
distinguished swing-era contemporaries as Lionel Hampton, Billie
Holiday, Pete Johnson, and Red
Norvo. But after he started his
own band in 1939, James never
again worked as anything other
than a leader, nor did he perform
in small groups save on rare occasions with studio-only combos
whose members were drawn from
the ranks of his own band. As a
result, baby-boom jazz fans were
largely unaware of his gifts as an
improviser.
At the same time, James mostly
limited his public appearances to
ballrooms and casino lounges. It
would not be until 1958 that his
band would play a jazz club. Basie
and Ellington performed both in
nightclubs and in concert halls,
and they made a point of recording frequently with small groups
of various kinds as well as with
their big bands. Because of this,
they were seen as jazzmen first and
foremost. And even after the center
of gravity in jazz shifted from big
bands to combos in the ’50s, no
one was in doubt as to their continuing musical significance. Not
so James, who clung stubbornly to
his superannuated matinee-idol
status until it was too late for him
to remake his image along more
modern lines.
James’s refusal to come to
terms with his diminished place
in the world of American pop
culture likely had much to do
with the emotional immaturity
on which everyone who knew him
remarked. Incapable of personal
intimacy and embarrassed by his
lack of formal education, he spent
his free time chasing women,
drinking to excess, and gambling
away his hard-earned fortune.
Such compulsive behavior is usually the mark of a deeply troubled
person, and Helen Forrest, with
whom James had a romantic relationship in the ’40s, believed that
he was happy only when playing
for an adoring crowd: “He was at
peace, and he knew he was loved
when he was playing the trumpet. . . . He knew nobody could hurt
him.”
It stands to reason that such
a man would have found it inordinately diffi ult to settle for the
limited amount of fame available to the postwar jazzman. But
James’s unwillingness to face reality
Culture & Civilization : April 2016
should not be allowed to obscure his
musical stature. He was one of the
foremost jazz trumpeters of the
20th century, and the groups that
he led from 1957 to the end of the
’60s ranked among the very best in
postwar big-band jazz. One can—
and should—forgive a great many
saccharine ballads in return for
such consistent excellence.q
Seattle Protest
Roasters
Your Heart Is a Muscle
the Size of a Fist
By Sunil Yapa
Lee Boudreaux Books, 320 pages
Reviewed by Fernanda Moore
Y
our Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist,
Sunil Yapa’s debut
novel, takes place
on the first day of
the 1999 protests against the World
Trade Organization conference in
Seattle. Fifty thousand demonstrators, some of them strange
bedfellows indeed, surrounded the
convention center where the WTO
was scheduled to meet: “Teamsters
and turtles” marched in solidarity
with farmers, labor unionists, NGO
workers,
consumer-protection
groups, and anarchists, among
others. When an anarchist “black
bloc” began smashing windows,
the understaffed and underprepared Seattle police panicked.
Within hours, the march turned
from a mildly surreal spectacle
into a violent showdown between
protestors and police, who fired
tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber
bullets into the crowds in a vain
effort to disperse them. Hundreds
Fernanda Moore, our fiction
critic, wrote about Elizabeth Strout
last month.
Commentary
of protestors were arrested; several WTO meetings were canceled
or postponed. Property damage
was tallied in the millions of dollars. The cops ran out of tear gas.
The following day, Seattle’s mayor
called in the National Guard.
Yapa’s novel opens, fittingly,
with a struck match. Victor, a
homeless 19-year-old, “with his
dark eyes and his thin shoulders and his cafecito con leche
skin, wearing a pair of classic Air
Jordans, the leather so white it
glowed,” is getting high beside
the tent he’s pitched below a freeway. Soon he’ll join the marching
crowds—not to demonstrate (Victor claims he’s “absolutely allergic
to belief ”), but to sell weed to the
protestors. Victor’s a messed-up
kid—lonely, angry, tired, “his heart
of hearts poisoned by a bitter,
wounded hatred, a sickness of the
soul.” Through his jaded eyes, we
get our first glimpse of the WTO
protestors.
They’re a motley bunch, chanting and singing and “popping out
from every hole and door, waves of
protestors sloshing in the streets,
bright-eyed thousands appearing
as if summoned.” At first, all Victor
can do is gawk. Topless girls with
duct tape across their nipples cry
“Death to the police state.” There
are “dreadlocked djinns dangling
from the lampposts, cameras
around their necks” and civil-rights
lawyers in combat boots. Yuppies
are “stomping into the dawn from
their suburban warrens, from their
gorgeous mansions that glittered
fat on the Sound.” It’s a parade,
Victor decides, a bizarre and trippy
pageant, all these “sweet, round,
high-fructose faces” glowing in
solidarity. “Hey, man,” Victor says,
sidling up to a hefty guy in a blue
jacket—a union man, it turns out,
marching right next to all the
hippies and freaks. “You need any
weed?”
But poor Victor has badly, and
hilariously, misjudged the scene.
Everyone he approaches—from the
union guy to a geezer banging a
goatskin drum—recoils, then tells
him to get lost. “You guys are some
pretty cool heads,” he says, rather
desperately, to a pair of groovyseeming baby boomers.
“Are you trying to sell me marijuana?” the husband snaps, before
storming off to tattle to a cop. Even
a “sexy undergrad” who plops
down next to Victor wants nothing
to do with his stash. “Look, you
don’t understand. This is a drugfree area,” she tells him. “This is
a protest march,” Victor counters,
wearily exhaling smoke. “Where’d
you hear that?” she says. “This isn’t
a protest march. This is a direct action.” And with that, she plucks the
joint from Victor’s lips and crushes
it beneath her shoe.
It’s a great setup—amusing
and revelatory all at once—and it
cleverly shines light on both the
privileged, fuddy-duddy protestors
and the clueless, half-baked kid.
Victor’s failed business venture
nicely illuminates an interesting
paradox: While the rich white folks
protest corporate capitalism, the
homeless black teenager—a budding entrepreneur!—is desperate
for a sale.
In subsequent chapters, Yapa
introduces six more narrators. Two
69
are activists, three are cops, and
one is the Sri Lankan delegate to
the WTO. This should work beautifully—what better way to showcase
the protests’ complexities and contradictions than to describe key issues from multiple vantage points
across both sides? But hold on.
First we meet John Henry, a
holier-than-thou career activist,
“a man you could imagine in a
dream of the Himalaya, high above
the clouds.” (Actually, he’s from
Detroit.) Once he was a storefront preacher; now he leads “a
congregation in the streets” and
spends a lot of time yammering
about the beauty of struggle and
how much he loves his people.
John Henry’s girlfriend—a skinny,
dreadlocked white woman named
King—is another experienced dissident, “trained in the tactics,
techniques, and philosophy of nonviolence.” Deep down, of course,
she’s someone entirely different—a
woman with a dark (but easy to
guess) criminal secret, a violent
temper, and a dangerous tendency
toward rage.
On the other side of the barricades, we get Officer Timothy
Park—jumpy and hostile, his face
disfigured by scars, the very model
of a trigger-happy Bad Cop. Right
away he gets in trouble for tangling
with the protestors; a few pages
later, to his partner Julia’s exasperation, he pepper sprays a carload
of Quaker activists who give him a
little lip. Julia, a tough-talking, gorgeous, Latina cliché (her steely demeanor, naturally, belies her tender and damaged heart) privately
considers Park “as radioactive as a
blast survivor”—which turns out to
be exactly what he is. Park’s mental
and physical scars date from the
Oklahoma City bombing; Julia
was traumatized by the Rodney
King riots in Los Angeles. They’re
like a roll call of late-20th-century
catastrophes.
70
i
The
novel
falls apart as
coincidences
pile up. Yapa’s
writing turns
mushy and
sentimental.
Everyone waxes
moony and
philosophical,
and all the
characters
sound exactly
the same.
Julia and Park report to Bill
Bishop, chief of police, by all accounts a hell of a guy. A 30-year
veteran of the force, Bishop favors
community policing, opposes departmental racism, and cheerfully
marches—though he’s straight—in
Seattle’s Gay Pride parade. Naturally, he’s a secret sufferer, too. Ever
since his beloved wife died and his
troubled teenage stepson ran away,
Yapa tells us, Bishop has had “a
heart full of loss and a head full of
doom.”
Yapa’s policemen and protestors lack Victor’s spark; they’re
drab stereotypes with utterly predictable inner conflicts, artlessly
deployed at intervals throughout
the novel’s increasingly hackneyed
plot. First Park, tipped off by the
un-groovy boomers, confiscates
Victor’s drug stash; then King and
John Henry show up to save Victor
from the Man. In a trice, formerly
apolitical Victor morphs into a
burgeoning activist. (He learned
about the power of the people, it
seems, by reading his beloved dead
mother’s books.) When his new
best friends need one more body
for “lockdown,” Victor eagerly volunteers; after being chained to fellow protestors, he looks up to see
a familiar uniformed man. Guess
which police chief turns out to be
his estranged stepfather?
As these and other coincidences
pile up, the novel falls apart.
Yapa’s writing turns mushy and
sentimental, riddled with rhetorical questions (“Was there not a
single word he could say that had
not been emptied of value?”) and
bogged down in treacly cliché.
“Son, how easily an open heart
can be poisoned, how quickly love
becomes the seeds of rage. Life
wrecks the living.” That’s Victor,
channeling Chief Bishop, though
it’s often hard to sort out whose
perspective the narrative is mired
in. Everyone waxes moony and
philosophical, and all the characters sound exactly the same.
Symbolic details are invariably
overdetermined and overdone.
Victor’s Air Jordans, for instance,
stand for sweatshop labor, latestage American capitalism, misplaced materialism, greediness,
parental indulgence, and, finally,
for fatherly love. We hear so much
about fear and loss and loneliness and tears that we grow immune to their significance. Which
is frustrating, since Yapa writes
beautifully when he wants to. An
extended digression describing the
Sri Lankan civil war is vivid and
convincing, and there are plenty of
small moments (as when Yapa describes feuding protestors “yelling
philosophies in each other’s faces”) that come across as perfectly
apt. Taken together, these sections
aren’t quite enough to save Your
Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.
But they certainly leave the reader
curious about Yapa’s next novel.q
Culture & Civilization : April 2016
Mediacracy
c on ti nu ed fr om pa g e 72
Such behavior is worse than shortsighted. It is
the free publicity
been worth to Trump? It’s impossible to calculate, blind. And not only because Moonves and his fellow
and I am no good at math, but let’s try a thought television moguls are willing to gamble with the
experiment nevertheless. My friends tell me a fate of the country, and to risk the deeply unsettling
30-second television spot costs, say, $35,000. Ac- prospect of making president a man whose coarsecording to media blogger Eric Tyndall, who follows ness of manner, volatility of temper, and eagerness
the network nightly news, “Donald Trump is by far to flout norms are not distractions from his camthe most newsworthy storyline of Campaign 2016, paign but the entirety of it.
By so blithely and condescendingly treating
alone accounting for almost a third of all coverage.”
Last year Trump enjoyed 327 minutes of coverage on the Trump candidacy as little more than a joke
the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening broadcasts. That’s by which the already rich and privileged stand to
gain, Moonves is inad19,620 seconds, which
vertently confirming that
amounts to 654 spots—
candidacy’s portrayal of
worth $22,890,000.
Note that this calculaLes Moonves not only sees the elites as self-interested
and out of touch. His
tion leaves out the network morning shows, to interests of his company and his peculiar combination of
sanctimony and greed is
which Trump regularly
country as divergent but also
almost enough to make
calls in, as well as cable
news, where Trump is simply does not seem to care that one want to see Trump
just so Moonves
omnipresent. The GDELT
what helps one might even harm elected,
would have to deal with
Project tracks mentions
the consequences of the
of the candidates using
the other.
Frankenstein monster he
the Internet Television
has helped create. (I reArchive. As I write, since
peat: almost enough.)
entering the race in June
How far we have traveled from the days of Charles
2015, Trump has been discussed 92,971 times on
MSNBC, 82,369 times on CNN, and 60,002 times on Erwin Wilson, the General Motors executive who
Fox News Channel. Mentions of Trump outnumber said at his confirmation hearing to be Eisenhower’s
those of his opponents by an incredible amount. secretary of defense that he had always assumed
Trump is to cable news in general what the search what was good for GM was good for the country.
for the missing Malaysian jetliner was to CNN in Now we live in the era of Moonves, who not only
particular—a horrible disaster story unfolding in sees the interests of his company and his country as
divergent but also simply does not seem to care that
real time that the networks cannot get enough of.
You will notice who has been absent from these what helps one might harm the other.
Over the course of the last year, Donald Trump
calculations. The messages of the other Republican
candidates have been drowned in the Trump tsu- has benefited enormously from the selfishness of
nami. And then there are, lest we forget, the Ameri- many individuals and institutions, and from the
can people, who stand a chance of electing the most willingness of voters and candidates and media perunqualified and most disliked president in their sonalities to put the potential of short-term reward
history. But hey, who’s keeping track? “It may not be ahead of long-term danger. The con has become so
good for America,” Moonves said in February, “but complicated that it is becoming hard to sort out.
Who is playing whom? The liberal media executives
it’s damn good for CBS.”
I don’t think I’ve heard a more revealing com- boosting a candidate they hate, the reality star proment about the 2016 election. Here’s the good moting his brand, or the Republican voters backing
liberal Moonves boosting the candidacy of a man a man who has never held political office and has no
whose politics and character repulse him, even as firm convictions beyond “winning”? However CSI:
he acknowledges that what he is doing is bad for the Mar-a-Lago ends, I can tell you that no one, not even
Les Moonves, will be laughing.q
country. And why? Profit.
Commentary
71
Donald Trump
Is Making the
Mainstream Media
Richer and More
Powerful
W
hat would Donald Trump’s most devoted But, during a call with investors in December, he
supporters do if they learned that ultra- had nothing but kind words to say about Trump.
rich liberals living in New York City are The amount of money CBS was poised to make off
Trump was “pretty phenomenal,” Moonves said. A
behind his campaign?
This is not a hypothetical question. The reason large field of Republican candidates benefits shareTrump has spent so little money on his candidacy is holders. “The more they spend, the better it is for
not that he’s “self-funding.” It’s because he has ben- us,” he said. “Go, Donald! Keep getting out there!”
Trump didn’t need the encourefited enormously from what’s
agement.
called earned media: television
It’s a virtuous cycle for
time he doesn’t pay for. The endTrump and the press barons.
less interviews, town halls, SatTrump benefits from earned
urday Night Live and late-show
Matthew Continetti
media. The networks benefi
appearances, press conferences,
from high ratings, which allow
debates—these extraordinary
advantages have been given to Trump by the very them to charge more for advertising. And all of the
individuals and institutions that anti-establishment campaign ads and Super PAC and issue-advocacy
spots desperately trying to stop Trump guarantee
voters are said to despise.
Why? It was Les Moonves, the chairman of CBS, additional revenue. Imagine how sad Les Moonves
who let us in on the answer. Moonves is worth must be that Michael Bloomberg has decided to
some $300 million. He supports President Obama. forgo an independent presidential candidacy and
has therefore deprived the networks of some $250
Matthew Continetti , who appears monthly million in ad money. Moonves could have bought
in this space, is editor in chief of the Washington Free another house.
How much has
Beacon.
co nt in ued on pa g e 71
Mediacracy
72
Culture & Civilization : April 2016
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