ADAM HASLETT AND CHRIS LEHMANN ON

THE TRUMP PHENOMENON

HILLARY
PRESID FOR
ENT
THE E
D IT O

OCTOBER 24, 2016

THENATION.COM

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3, 2016

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Not So Gurley After All

While I do not take issue with
Madeleine Schwartzs image of
Helen Gurley Brown in her review of two recent biographies of
Cosmopolitans most famous editor
[Notes From Many Years, Sept.
26/Oct. 3], her characterizations
of the magazine ignore something:
Among the articles about attracting
men and sex, one could find pieces
that dealt with other issues affecting womens lives. I know because,
in the 1970s, I wrote them: the
story of an adoptees long, arduous
search to find her birth mother and
the fallout from her adoptive parents; a long piece (in blank verse,
no less) about the breakup of my
first marriage, with no happy ending in sight; and a serious discussion of the effect of premenstrual
hormones. Womans Day had rejected the latter with a brisk Too
retro. Certainly I was not the only
one writing such pieces.
The reason Cosmopolitan was successful was that, in between the articles
on relationships and the joy of sex, we
could find articles that other womens
magazines wouldnt toucharticles
that were either too retro or ahead
of their time, depending on your
perspective.
Lorraine Dusky

sag harbor, n.y.

I Beg Your Pardon!

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*Plus $19.99 tax + shipping.

I am disappointed in both The

Nation and the ACLU for Jon
Wieners A Pardon for Snowden
[Sept. 26/Oct. 3]. To the articles
first questionHow many documents did Snowden release to the
public?the ACLUs Ben Wizner
answers zero. Come on! He gave
the documents to the media: In my
book, that is disclosing them. Then
Wizner goes on to say that the news
organizations made a determination
that publishingwas in the public

interest. Thats BS. The determination was made to publish because it

would be a money-making sensation.
I had difficulty reading the rest of the
article after that propagandistic start.
Kenneth Viste

boise, idaho

Edward Snowden and Chelsea

Manning are heroes who must be
pardoned. Charlotte E. Edwards

Signifying Everything
Patricia Williams opens wide a new
window through which to perceive
Donald Trump [Trump lOeil,
Sept. 26/Oct. 3]. Yes, exactly: He
is a performative signifier! As she
explains, Once weve been lured
onto [his] emotionally charged
field of rational bypass, words stop
working. And so even the most
skilled moderator is unlikely to be
able to contain him in the presidential debates, just as none could
do so in those of the Republican
primaries. For the same reason,
Hillary Clintons much-touted
debating skills may also prove ineffectual. Its not hard to imagine
Trump declaring that her very rationality makes her fundamentally
untrustworthy, and even mentally
unfit for the presidency. George
Orwell would marvel at the man,
and fear for us and the world.
Stephen E. Levick

narberth, penn.

Why the Fuss Over Russ?

Re Mr. Feingold Goes Back to
Washington by John Nichols
[Sept. 26/Oct. 3]: Russ Feingold?
Ask that progressive hero why
he couldnt endorse Bernie Sanders. Ask Elizabeth Warren, too.
They hail him now, but where
were they then, when their voices
would have helped the larger cause?
Comments drawn from our website

letters@thenation.com

(continued on page 26)

The Nation.
since 1865

UPFRONT
4 DC by the Numbers;
10 Side by Side: Easy
Choices; 11 Comix Nation:
Tom Tomorrow; 12 Ladies
Go Legal: Law Fools; 13
Back Issues: (1992) One

Cheer for Clinton, Again

Hillary Clinton for President

he Nation endorses Hillary Clinton for president and

believes that a substantial victory by her in November is
essential to advance the progressive issues we have long
championed. We supported Senator Bernie Sanders
in the Democratic primary, and we remain concerned about Clintons

approach to politics and governing. But Clinton

isnt running against Sanders anymore.
In Trumps America, workers would see their rights
The first case for Clinton can be summed up in rolled back, their unions hobbled, their pensions
two words: Donald Trump. In the contest between looted, and their wageswhich Trump says are too
hope and cynicism, justice and prejudice, solidar- highcut. Women would see their reproductive
ity and selfishness, we can be absolutely certain that rights attacked, including the defunding of Planned
Trump is not on our side. Given the perils facing our Parenthood, and their claim to equal pay for equal
country and our planet, we believe that Trumps elec- work dismissed. Hard-won victories in the fight
tion would be a catastrophe for the United States for gay rights would be endangered. And Trumps
and for the world. We also believe our best chance energy policyone that denies climate change,
right now to advance the cause of justice,
doubles down on fossil fuels, strangles
rather than spend the next four years on
incentives for renewable energy, and guts
EDITORIAL
the defensive, is to elect Clintonand
the regulations that protect our air and
give her coattails long enough to elect a
waterwould flood our coasts, burn our
Congress committed to turning the proforests, parch our cities, and leave the
gressive rhetoric of the Democratic Party
whole planet a smoldering wasteland.
platform into concrete legislation.
On foreign policy, Trumps at-timesTrumps manipulation of racism and
incisive criticism of trade deals, disregard
xenophobia, his attacks on the press and
for the Cold War consensus, and skeptical
the judiciary, his demonization of his opapproach to nation-building must be balponents and gleeful encouragement of
anced against a daily torrent of ignorant,
violence by his supporters, may not fit the diction- offensive, and alarming views. How can someone
ary definition of fascism, but they pose a clear and who routinely demeans Latinos and Muslims expect
present danger to our Republic. Taken at his word, to conduct effective diplomacy with Latin America or
Trumps America would be a country where the the Muslim world? How can someone who views the
forces of hatred, fear, and division animate the body revelations of Abu Ghraib not as an indelible stain on
politicand are in turn amplified by the mechanisms America, but as a modelWere going to have to do
of state power. Mass deportations would victimize things that are unthinkableexercise any claim to
millions of our neighbors while molding America global leadership? Trumps repeated calls to bar Musinto a society of stool pigeons and informants. A lims from entering the United States underscore not
national stop-and-frisk program would turn our cit- only his disdain for international law and basic human
ies into racial combat zones.
rights, but his alarming ignorance of our countrys
Trump would repeal the Affordable Care Act historic rejection of religious tests for citizenship.
and close off, perhaps forever, the route to universal
A Trump administration would target the families
health care. Far from expressing remorse over his of suspected terrorists, making the murder of innoown tax evasion, Trump boasts that it was smart. cent women and children official policy. He promises
His tax plan would lock in this grotesque favoritism to keep Guantnamo open and load it up with bad
toward the ultrarich at the expense of the poor and dudes. He wants to sharply increase US military
middle class by cutting the corporate tax rate by spending, expand the use of drones in overseas conmore than half while shredding the social safety net. flicts, renege on the normalization of USCuban

3 Hillary Clinton for

President
6 The Debate We Need
William Greider

7 Asking for a Friend

Liza Featherstone

COLUMNS

10 Subject to Debate
The Case for Hillary
Katha Pollitt

12 Diary of a Mad
Law Professor
The Hillary Effect
Patricia J. Williams

13 Deadline Poet
On Losing the
First Debate
Calvin Trillin

Features
14 Vandal in Chief
Adam Haslett
Donald Trump isnt
manipulating our rage; hes
manipulating our shame.

22 The Journeys of
Ursula K. Le Guin
Zo Carpenter
The legendary sciencefiction authors writing feels
more urgent than ever.

Books &
the Arts
27 Le Carrs Other
Cold War
Ian Buruma

32 Trumps Gospel of
Positive Thinking
Chris Lehmann

36 Films: )!.,!./+*
1((5%00(!%/0!.
Stuart Klawans

VOLUME 303, NUMBER 17,

October 24, 2016
The digital version of this issue is
available to all subscribers November 7
at TheNation.com.
Cover illustration by John Mavroudis.

The Nation.

12

Weeks of paid
leave an employee will receive to care for
a new child or a
sick family member under Hillary
Clintons plan

35M

Number of
Americans who
would be lifted
out of poverty
by Hillarys proposed minimumwage increase
to $12 an hour

$275B

Funds that would

be invested in
comprehensive
infrastructure
rebuilding under
Clintons plan

$0

Tuition that
students from
families making
up to $125,000
a year will pay
at in-state fouryear public
colleges and
universities
by 2021 under
Clintons plan
Molly Stier

Lets prove
that the
American
dream
is big
enough for
everyone.
Hillary Clinton

relations, ramp up confrontation with China, and unravel respect for immigrants, debt-free public higher educathe nuclear deal with Iran. While we desperately need an tion, the expansion of Social Security, a public option to
alternative foreign policy, Trumps cavalier approach to challenge health-care profiteering, and a great big hike in
nuclear proliferation and his willingness to treat our allies the minimum wage. Thanks to a populist waveand her
like chumps in a global protection racket would make the willingness to listen to itClinton is running on the most
progressive platform in the modern history of the Demoworld a far more dangerous place.
The perils of Trumpism go beyond one man. Trump cratic Party. We want to see that platform put into action.
Thats why we believe Clinton needs not just to deleads a party that has sought to normalize a cruel and unusual politics that rivals that of the European right-wing. feat Trump, but to demolish him. If she doesnt win big,
Throughout the election, Trump has insulted women, and if the Democrats dont make significant advances in
questioned the patriotism of Mexican and Muslim Ameri- Congress, obstruction will remain the order of the day,
cans, incited hatred of refugees, mocked a disabled and progress will be stymied at a time when America is
journalist, and depicted the lives of African Americans as desperately in need ofand genuinely ready forradical
a total catastrophe. While its tempting to cast this ram- renewal. On the other hand, a big win would empower a
pant disregard of social norms as novel, Trumps crude progressive bloc of newcomers in Congress like Zephyr
and demeaning conduct in fact emanates directly from Teachout, Jamie Raskin, and Pramila Jayapal, and give
the Fox News and alt-right power brokers that he has progressive champions like Sanders, Elizabeth Warren,
empowered to lead his campaign. Likewise, his repeated Sherrod Brown, and Russ Feingoldwho is campaigning
warnings that this election will be rigged is not just an to return to the Senatereal authority to shape legislaeffort to delegitimize his opponent and disempower those tion, expose inequality, rein in Wall Street, and make
groups, such as African-American voters, who have been government work on behalf of those who need it most.
We also believe that the new social movemost loyal to Clinton; it is an assault on the
mentswhether born out of Occupy Wall
very basis of democratic governance itself, a
A Clinton
Street, climate justice, and the Fight for
tendency that has bloomed on the right since
victory is a
$15, or rising in response to the epidemic of
the election of Barack Obama.
chance for
police violence in communities of color
Finally, the next president will also determust be encouraged and heeded, not placated
mine the balance of the Supreme Court. As
progressives
and patronized. Clinton isnt a perfect ally
president, Trump would be able to fulfill his
to mobilize.
herewe worry about her inclination to tripromise to appoint a new justice as close to
angulate and compromisebut throughout
[Antonin Scalia] as I can findthus tipping
the balance of a currently divided court back toward reac- the campaign, she has proved herself a skilled politician,
tion, with several more nominees potentially to come. The willing to take the measure of those movements and the
Supreme Court alone should motivate progressives in our pulse of her party and respond in kind. As Sanders put
determination to keep Trump out of the White House. it recently in The Nation, Im not going to sit here and
And, make no mistake, the only sure vote to keep Trump say to you that Hillary Clinton is going to be great on all
these issues with absolute confidence. Im saying that
out of the White House is a vote for Hillary Clinton.
on many, many issues, her views are progressive. In many
ut there is also a positive case to be made areas, they are awesome. Where theyre not progressive,
for Hillary Clintonand not solely because weve got to push her.
of the historic opportunity to elect our first
We agree with Bernie. On almost every issue you
woman president. Over the course of her can think of, Clinton is so much better than Trump that
public career, Clinton has more than dem- comparison seems like a meaningless exercise. This does
onstrated her intelligence, tenacity, ferocious work ethic, not constitute a blank check or a wholesale endorsement.
and seriousness of purpose. As a law student, she went Clintons enduring ties to Wall Street and corporate CEOs
undercover as a tester to expose racial discrimination in mean that progressives will have to continue to push her on
Alabamas private schools. She has championed the rights trade, financial regulation, taxation, and public investment.
of women and girls on the global stage for more than 20 The Nation also stands ready to support Warren and others
years. And while we may disagree with some of her solu- in making sure Clintons cabinet officials and economic
tions, Clinton has been a forceful advocate of health-care advisers are subjected to a searching scrutiny.
reform since her husbands administration. She has also
Clintons hawkish foreign-policy reflexes also raise
most recently on the debate stagerepeatedly displayed grave concerns. She has frequently embraced positions to
the quality that Ernest Hemingway invoked as a definition the right of President Obama, and has been embraced in
of courage: grace under pressure.
turn by a rogues gallery of neoconservative and liberalClinton showed grace in refusing to be deflected by hawk advisers who together personify a failed bipartisan
Trumps posturing and prevarications. But she has also foreign-policy consensus. Shes backed regime change
shown grace in the way shes responded to the pressure from Honduras to Libya to Syria, upholding the view that
that Sanders and the movements that powered his cam- America is the indispensable nation entitled to police
paign created. Clinton has long been an advocate for the world. Her blinkered view of Israel and Palestine ofwomen, children, and the disabled. But now she seeks fers no comfort to those who long for a just peace in the
the presidency as a supporter of action to address cli- Middle East. Instead of seeking to engage Russiaan
mate change, criminal-justice reform, LGBTQ equality, essential partner in resolving the crisis in Syria and the

CC 2.0 GAGE SKIDMORE

DC BY THE
NUMBERS

October 24, 2016

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

conflict in Ukraine, as well as combating nuclear proliferation and

addressing climate changeClinton seems intent on deepening a
new Cold War. Even as we endorse her, we understand that it will
be incumbent on us to challenge President Clinton to break her
hawkish habits and move toward a new and progressive realism.

hat about Jill Stein? In Europe, the Greens

have emerged as an effective voiceand
consciencefor the environmental left. We
would still like to see Stein and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson included in the
presidential debates, and we respect the challenge that both have
raised to a frequently dysfunctional two-party system. But we cannot agree with Johnsons penchant for privatization and survival-ofthe-fittest economics. And while we share many of the views that
Stein has advanced, her cause has not been helped by the Green
Partys reluctance, or inability, to seek, share, and build power,
with all the messy compromise this often entails. Instead of the
patientand Sisypheantask of building an authentic grassroots
alternative, the Greens offer a top-down vehicle for protest.
If this were an ordinary election, there would be little reason
to depart from the practice of strategic voting, which requires
only swing-state voters to choose between the lesser of two evils.
But 2016 is not an ordinary election. We know that some readers
will find it hard to vote for Clinton; we ask them to think again.
Not just about forgoing the advances that a Clinton administration could achieve if progressives were empowered: stopping the
Trans-Pacific Partnership; overturning Citizens United; debt-free
college; a path to citizenship for immigrants; paid family leave;
the biggest investment in jobs since World War II; and an administration that looks like America today. But also to reconsider the
balance between expressing their own disgust and diminishing the
size of Trumps repudiation.
Without question, a Trump victory would represent much
more than a temporary setback. At best, it would throw movements that have made enormous strides in the past year on the
defensive. At worst, that tremendous reservoir of movement
energy might well dissipateor evaporate in the heat of despair,
amid recriminations about opportunities missed. And for millennial voters, many of whom were inspired by Sanders to engage
electoral politics for the first time, a Trump presidency would
spell a generation of ecological and economic ruin. We cannot
risk that fate.
Over the past eight years, progressives have learned the hard
way that voting for hope and change doesnt always deliver hope
or change. So while voting for Clinton may be necessary, it is
hardly sufficient. Clinton now stands with progressives on a
host of issues, from health care to climate change. On criminal
justice and trade policy, shes moved left even when that involved renouncing her husbands legacy. On foreign policy, we
still have much work to do. All the more reason, then, to stay
mobilized. For progressives, a Clinton victory should be cause
for organization, not celebration. Unless we stay right on top of
her administrationwatching, protesting, demandingshe may
abandon her newfound progressive positions. What we dont
knowand wont ever know, unless shes electedis how far we
might push her. As Frederick Douglass noted, Power concedes
nothing without a demand. How much might an administration
that relies on our votes, but is far from certain of getting them,
accomplish at our demand? There is only one result in November that will give us the chance to find out.

INAUGURAL LECTURER

BILL MCKIBBEN
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10TH, 2016

TISHMAN AUDITORIUM
63 FIFTH AVE, NEW YORK, NY 10003
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The Nation.
RAW DEAL

Exporting

Jobs
5M

US manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and

2014, according
to the Economic
Policy Institute

3.6M

Manufacturingjob loss from

2000 to 2007
attributable
to trade deficits, according
to the EPI

2.3M

Manufacturing
jobs lost
during the Great
Recession

900K

Manufacturing
jobs
that have been
recovered
as of 2015

82%

Americans who
believe that
factory workers
should have the
right to unionize,
according to a
recent Pew poll

11.1%
American
workers who
belonged to
a union at the
end of 2014

October 24, 2016

policy for Americaa new doctrine for how the United

States might engage globalization in the national interest. And hes creating a new pivot point for political
Trump is a jerk, but he has exposed globalizations ills. debate: Isnt it time for the United States to let go of
its neocolonial hubris and back away from our selff Hillary Clinton loses this election, it will be be- proclaimed role as the indispensable nation?
cause shes had nothing much to say in response
Trump mocks the policy elites faith in US triumphato Donald Trumps most compelling issue: how lism. Im not against free trade, Im against stupid, stuglobalization has devoured American prosperity, pid, stupid trade, he has said. And: Im not angry with
especially for the working class.
China. And Im not angry at Japan. And Im not angry
Trump sprinkles poison over everything he has to say, at Mexico. Im angry at our leaders, because they are
even as his advisers try to play down his bigoted insinu- grossly incompetent and they shouldnt have ever been
ations. But instead of scolding Trump or praising him, I elected to do this job.
want to talk about the great debate we still havent heard.
Thats the debate I wanted to hear in 2016, because
Trump delivers zingers about companies abandoning the the consequences are already bearing down on us. If
United States and moving good jobs elsewhere. America, political leaders wont take up the challenge, citizens can
he says, is being ripped off by every single country in do their own digging. The first step is to understand that
the world. Clinton brushes off his accusations with an trade agreements are not the heart of the matter. The
I-feel-your-pain solicitude for the losers. Give her this place to start digging is with the strategies created by
much: She is steadfast and loyal in evading any admission national governments to guide or control their countries
that her husbands presidency spilled a lot of the blood in own industrial sectors.
the decline of US manufacturing.
Americans could start by asking how
Her campaign platform, pulled leftward
Germany has succeeded in the age of globalTrump is
by the Bernie Sanders challenge, includes
ization. What do the Germans understand
essentially
many worthy social measures to reduce inthat American leaders dont get? The facts
defining a
equality and support family life. But Clintons
are not secret. German manufacturing wages
reforms would treat the symptoms rather
are 35 percent higher than US wages ($48.98
new industhan confront the causes of deteriorating
an hour versus $36.34 in 2013). Thirty years
trial policy.
income security. So long as the US approach
ago, the United States was first in wages
to globalization generates still-greater downexcept for a few very small nations in Northward pressure on jobs and incomes, the bleeding is ern Europe. As of 2013, the United States was 14th,
bound to sow greater distress and political rebellion.
Germany fifth. Yet despite its high wages, Germany is
Trumps remedies speak mostly to nostalgic longing, an export powerhouse, as economist Robert Pollin
but give him this: He, along with Sanders, managed puts it. They achieved this success through aggressive
to restore the injury and anger of the working class to industrial policies. In other words, the German governa central place in our politics. During the GOP pri- ment shaped the structure and performance of its major
maries, Trump was careful not to label himself or his industrial sectors to produce these results.
proposals as Republican; after all, he was challenging
The United States did roughly the opposite. Through
conservative sacred cows like free trade and the US trade deals and business-favoring tax cuts, Washington
Chamber of Commerce. Losing American greatness shaped the US industrial structure to enable companies
was depicted as a bipartisan collaboration. It was only to shift manufacturing jobs offshore.
after Trump secured the GOP nomination that he
Germany now runs annual trade surpluses of around
laid the blame exclusively on Democrats. And Clinton $275 billion, while the United States has trade deficits
took the bait: She asked voters to defend US greatness of $745 billion. US officials like former Federal Reserve
against Trumps crude attacks in a season when nearly chairman Ben Bernanke have criticized Germany for
70 percent of Americans say the country is on the wrong running surpluses that take exports from competing natrack. Portraying Trump as unpatriotic did not sell.
tions. German officials operate with what could be called
Trump found a label for his hybrid agenda almost by a policy of Germany First.
accident. In a March interview with The New York Times,
Author and labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan exhe was asked if he was advocating a policy of America plains why Americans are confused by their own governFirst. Yes, he responded without hesitation: Not isola- ments propaganda. The Germans are making money
tionist, but America First. I like the expression. But this off of China, and China is making big-time money off
label is tainted with negative associations, including anti- of us. Many Americans think that weve got a trade
Semitism, because it was the banner for the isolationist deficit because we cant compete with China. Weve got
movement before World War II. A more reasonable inter- a trade deficit because we cant compete with Germany
pretation now is that Trump was simply saying: Lets take in selling things to China. Until people wake up and
care of the homeland first instead of looking for trouble look at the kinds of things the Germans are doing to
in other peoples neighborhoods and making stupid trade keep their manufacturing base, were going to continue
deals that benefit competitors but not America.
to run deficits.
In his clumsy way, and despite his breathtaking igAs Trump might say, American exceptionalism is exWILLIAM GREIDER
norance, Trump is essentially defining a new industrial ceptionally stupid.

The Debate We Need

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

Dear Liza,
Im an expat NGO worker living in rural West
Africa, and Im struggling to navigate the dating
scene appropriately. The power asymmetry
stemming from my gender and comparative
wealthseems to create a gap between me and my
would-be sweethearts too vast for any amount of
privilege consciousness to traverse. Most pointedly,
any semblance of a relationship devolves into a
transactional exchange of materials and sex (at least
so it feels to me). Obviously there are power dynamics in any relationship, but do you think there are
limits beyond which equitable, loving relationships
are not possible? Or am I thinking about this in the
wrong way?
Privileged American Male
Dear Privileged,
re you working on a screenplay about the
experiences that have provoked this question?
Please say yes. But in any case, lets acknowledge that there are indeed some power dynamics
that completely preclude equitable relationships; for
example, there have been reports of humanitarian-aid
workers in poor or war-torn countries exchanging desperately needed food and money for sex. This is an ugly
example of NGO staffers abusing their power over
vulnerable people in morally abhorrent ways.
But you are not considering sex for basic necessities, and the women in your village are most likely
not starving. Most saliently, Privileged, they may
not feel exploited by the dynamic youre describing. Danish social scientist Christian Groes-Green
studied dating between well-off expat European
men and younger, poorer black women in Maputo,
Mozambique. He found that the men were expected
to shower their girlfriends with gifts and even cash,
and that Westerners and Mozambican women viewed
this exchange in sharply contrasting ways. European
expat observers tended to judge such relationships
harshly, assuming that the men were exploiting the
women (for sex). The men themselves worried that
the women were exploiting them (for their money).
But the Mozambican women took a different view,
feeling that as women, they were beautiful and valuable, and that men who could afford to show their
appreciation in a concrete, material way should do
so. Some felt slighted if they had sex with a wealthy
Western man and received no money or presents in
return. One young woman was in tears over such an

ILLUSTRATION BY JOANNA NEBORSKY

The Dating Game

iz

ne

Asking for
a Friend
a F
to
eathers

experience: How could she know whether hed enjoyed the sex when he
didnt give her anything the next morning? The experience left her feeling disposable and devalued. The Maputo women also viewed the transactional nature of their relationships as a matter of redistribution and
fairness, believing on principle that men should give money to women
and, especially, that rich men should give money to poor women.
Obviously, Im not trying to say that Maputo, a large capital city in
southern Africa, is just like your West African village. Your guilt over this
may be culturally specific, but a large body of anthropological research
suggests that Groes-Greens findings arent unique to Mozambique; in
many countries, poor women dont find transaction to be at odds with
love or romance. And not just poor womenin fact, we
find some element of materialism in courtship all over
the world. After all, while they may be more subtle or
Questions?
Ask Liza at
conflicted about it, many Western women (and young
TheNation
men) still expect older, well-off men to buy them stuff
.com/article/
(at least drinks), but people fret about this, worrying
asking-for-athat romance shouldnt have these commercial elements.
friend.
This is part of what Moira Weigel has called datings
prostitution complex.
So what should you do? Find a local woman whose company you enjoy,
someone who is interested in you. You dont say whether you share a common language with the women in your village, but it sounds as if you may
need to work on communication. As you would when getting to know
someone new in any setting, ask her what shes looking for in a relationship with you, and think about whether its something you can provide.
You may need to get more comfortable with giving her money and
(continued on page 11)

FROM THE ARCHIVES

@thenation.com

n occasion, in partnership with

valued advertisers, The Nation will
republish noteworthy archive content for our readers. The From the
Archives letters spread here is an added
bonus to, not a replacement of, our regular
letters section. The archive content itself
is entirely handled by us, as is this introductory column.
The Nation has over 150 years of fascinating archive
material. Were happy to showcase this material from time
to time and equally happy that Bleecker Street sees the value
in doing so. We hope you enjoy what weve collected on
this occasion and also enjoy Denial, which is now playing
in select cities before opening everywhere on October 21.
In 1964, David Irvings account of the 1945 Dresden
bombing was attracting attention. The author was an
English journalist who has specialized in modern German
history, as The Nation reported.

By the 1990s, however, Irvings specialization proved

sloppy, fraudulent, and sinister. Christopher Hitchens
confronted Irvings fellow denier Robert Faurisson in his
Minority Report column for The Nation. Aryeh Neier
highlighted Irvings claims that the Holocaust was a blood
lie and Anne Franks diary a fraud. Irvings response to
that article (in which Neier also stated Irvings right to freedom of speech) and Neiers counter are reproduced below.
Widely discredited, Irving at this point sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt, who had repeated what had
become evident: that Irving was a Holocaust denier and
his history poor. In a British court, however, the onus
falls on the accused to defend herself. Instead of Irving
having to account for his selective writing, Lipstadt had
to defend her positionshe had to prove the Holocaust
happened and establish a critical truth for humanity.
Bleecker Streets Denial details this crucial test of
historical fact.

june 3, 1996

I NEVER DENIED, SAYS HE

London
The fact-checkers at U.S.
magazines are the envy of us
all. They seem, however, to
check only the lesser details,
while the larger allegations
pass unscrutinized. Where,
to give one example, can I
be found to have denied the
Holocaust? Certainly not in
my biography, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. (In
fact, the answer is, nowhere.)
At most, I have voiced a muted
but proper skepticism about
some aspects of that immense
tragedy [Aryeh Neier, Publishing & Perishing, May 6].
My opponents have employed two of the principles
established by the Nazi propagandist himself: First, if you
repeat a lie often enough, it
will eventually be believed;
second, you must never be
seen to initiate the lie in your
own journals, but always plant
it somewhere else. Goebbels would start his lies in,

for example, the ostensibly

neutral Svenska Dagbladet
and then quote them as
coming from that source.
The modern equivalent is
the Internet, a cesspit choking
in its own unverified cyberflotsam. To persuade St. Martins Press that I was an author
unworthy of their imprint, my
opponents seeded their materials around the Net, then
fished them out, wiped off the
slime and presented them as
fact to my baffled publishers.
Despite my requests, St.
Martins Press never invited
my comments on these stories. They assured me they
intended to stand firm. Coming under a barrage of death
threats and obscene calls,
they capitulated on the eve
of publication. Canceling
production of the book that,
in private, they had repeatedly lauded to the skies, they
ascribed their decision not
to their own cowardice but
to what they claimed to have
learned only now about me,

from the Internet. To see

my thirty-five-year record
as one of the worlds leading historians on Nazi Germany ignored, indeed publicly trampled on by my own
publishers, has been a very
miserable experience indeed.
David Irving

NEIER REPLIES
New York City
I could not find the word
Holocaust in the 794 pages
of David Irvings 1990 book,
Hitlers War, and could locate
only passing references to
the death camps. But he does
write this of Auschwitz: By
late 1945 the worlds newspapers were full of unsubstantiated, lurid rumors about
factories of death complete
with lethal gas chambers. I
suppose the quotation marks
around factories of death
and gas chambers are what
Irving considers muted
but proper skepticism.
The most notable feature of
Hitlers War is its attempt to

excuse Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. Hitlers

response to Kristallnacht (not
so labeled by Irving) was to
instruct Himmler that the
Gestapo were to protect Jewish property and lives. Writing about late 1941, Irving says
that no documentary evidence
exists that Hitler was aware
of what was happening to the
Jews. Hitler did seek to rid
Europe of Jews, but throughout his intent was to ship them
to Madagascar. For more
on David Irving, including
his attempt to expose The
Diary of Anne Frank as a fraud,
see Deborah Lipstadts 1993
book, Denying the Holocaust.
Irving has a right to his say,
and having mistakenly agreed
to publish his book and then
having accepted it, I think St.
Martins Press has an obligation to help him exercise that
right. But as my editorial indicated, I stop short of arguing
that its imprint should be permanently associated with him.
Aryeh Neier

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CASTING
MUSIC
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TI
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OTHY
SPALL
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A
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N O W P L AY I N G

10

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

SIDE BY SIDE

MINIMUM WAGE

Hillary Clinton supports

raising the federal minimum wage to $12, and she
has also supported the Fight for
$15 in individual cities and states.
Donald Trumps stance
has been called indecipherable, but campaign officials say he supports
a $10 federal minimum wage,
as well as the right of states
to set their own minimums.
I M M I G R AT I O N

Hillary Clinton says shell

introduce comprehensive immigration reform
with a path to full citizenship in
her first 100 days in office, and
she has also pledged to end
private deportation centers.
Donald Trump says hell
build a wall along the
US-Mexican border, deport undocumented immigrants
convicted of crimes with zero
tolerance, and triple the number of deportation officers.
H E A LT H C A R E

Hillary Clinton supports

expanding the Affordable
Care Act and incentivizing states to expand Medicaid.
Donald Trump has
vowed to repeal and
replace the Affordable
Care Act and plans to encourage states to design their
own Medicaid programs.
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Hillary Clinton stands with

Planned Parenthood and
defends access to affordable, safe, and legal abortions.
Donald Trump says hes
opposed to abortion except
in a few cases; he supports
defunding Planned Parenthood
and turning the Hyde Amendmentwhich severely restricts
Medicaids coverage of abortion
servicesinto permanent law.
Samantha Schuyler

Katha Pollitt
The Case for Hillary
She and her platform represent much more than just the lesser evil.

he people have spoken: Dont try

to scare me into voting for Hillary Clinton by talking about how
awful Trump is. Make me love her!
I happen to believe that thwarting
Trumpa racist, xenophobic, misogynistic fake
populistis an excellent reason to vote for his
opponent, a normal human being. If you think
Clintons evil, which I dont, let me paraphrase
Noam Chomsky: The reason to vote for the lesser
evil is that its less evil. Also, its delusional to think
that a Trump presidency would pave the way for a
left victory in 2020, much less Susan
Sarandons revolution. It didnt happen when Humphrey lost to Nixon,
it didnt happen when Carter lost to
Reagan, and, just to go there for a moment, it certainly didnt happen when
the German communists scorned the
weak-tea socialists in the 1932 election with the slogan After Hitler, us.
Mostly, right-wing victories pave the
way for more right-wing victories.
But since you ask, here are 12 reasons why
Hillary deserves your vote on her own merits.
1. Reproductive rights. Im putting this first
because theyre crucial to everything you care about:
womens rights, economic equality, family wellbeing, access to education, to say nothing of simple
human happiness. Hillary is great on this issue: She
supports funding for Planned Parenthood, factbased sex education, and widespread access to birth
control (including emergency contraception). Shes
also broken new ground by calling for an end to the
Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal
Medicaid funds to pay for poor womens abortions.
(President Obama, whom Im guessing many Hillary holdouts supported, accepted the amendment
as an American tradition.) The contrast with
Trump, who wants to ban abortion and has filled
his campaign with hard-core anti-choicers, couldnt
be starker.
2. Health care. As first lady, Clinton worked
to pass the State Childrens Health Insurance Program, which funds health care for 6 million children. Now she wants to get resistant red states
to expand Medicaid; add a public option to the
Affordable Care Act; let those 55 and over buy into
Medicare; and offer coverage to undocumented
immigrants. She wants to rein in drug companies,
and has detailed plans to improve access to care for

HIV, mental illness, and more.

3. Voting rights. The Republican Party has
been working hard to disenfranchise black, Latino,
student, and other likely Democratic voters. Clinton supports automatic registration for all citizens
when they turn 18; restoring the Voting Rights Act;
extending voting rights to ex-felons; and setting a
national standard of 20 days for early voting.
4. Immigration. Clinton supports a path to
citizenship for Dreamers, the young people brought
to this country as children by their parents. Unlike
Obama, she doesnt support deporting undocumented immigrants, unless theyre violent criminals or terrorists. This is
huge: peace of mind for 11 million
people.
5. Children and families. Hillary
supports 12 weeks of paid parental and
family leave; 12 weeks to recover from
a serious illness; universal preschool;
doubling Head Start; and affordable
child care that costs no family more
than 10 percent of its income. She also
wants to raise the pay of child-care workers and add
quality child-care centers to college campuses.
6. Education. She supports debt-free public
college and free community college, with debt relief for current borrowers. Shes also pledged $25
billion for historically black colleges and universities and other institutions
that serve minorities.
7. Criminal justice. Stopping Trump
Clinton will support
is more than
legislation to end racial
profiling and introduce enough reason
sentencing reforms to to vote for
end our shocking era of
Clinton. But
mass incarceration.
8. Workers rights. here are another
She wants to raise the
federal minimum wage 12 arguments
to $12 an hour (not $15, in her favor.
I grant you), fight wage
theft and other employer
abuses, and strengthen unions bargaining rights.
She opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership
another success for Bernie Sanders. (Just to remind
you: Trump has endorsed right-to-work legislation
and boasts of stiffing people who worked for him.)
9. Taxes. Clinton wants to raise taxes on the
rich, prevent them from avoiding estate taxes,

ILLUSTRATION: ANDY FRIEDMAN

Easy
Choices

October 24, 2016

and close loopholes for Wall Street and corporations.

She debunks trickle-down economicsthe conservative belief that obscene wealth in the hands of a few leads
to prosperity for all, and that if youre poor, its your own
fault. (Trump brags about not paying taxes, because they
would be squandered too.)
10. Foreign policy. Yes, her hawkishness is a concern;
its why I supported Obama in 2008. Hillary was wrong on
Iraq, and plenty of people who cheerfully supported John
Edwards and John Kerryboth of whom voted the same
wayhold it against her. She supported intervention in
Libya, which has not worked out well. But, unlike Trump,
she supports the Iran nuclear deal, restoring diplomatic
relations with Cuba, and reducing the military budget.
11. Personnel is policy. The next president will nominate at least one and as many as four justices to the Su(continued from page 7)
presents, even in the context of a fun and
loving relationship.
Its possible that nakedly transactional
relationships conflict too deeply with your
values, and in any case there may be other
barriers to dating local women (religious
differences, disapproval of families). If so,
all is not lost. Many other expat humanitar-

11

The Nation.

preme Court, and many judges to the federal judiciary.

This alone would be reason enough to vote for Hillary.
And as Tom Geoghegan points out in In These Times, the
White House controls thousands of appointments for the
officials who actually run the government. Remember the
many hapless and bigoted officials of the George W. Bush
years? Hillary, who is superbly knowledgeable on a wide
range of issues, will nominate and appoint progressive,
competent peoplemany of whom, as Geoghegan notes,
are likely to have been Bernie supporters.
12. Everything else. Clinton is for gun control, equal
pay for women, ending the school-to-prison pipeline, and
the Paris climate-change agreement. Yes, she believes in
global warming!
A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for all these good
Q
policies. Ready to cast yours?

ian workers are seeking sex and company,

just as you are, and they have more ways
to meet one another than in the past. Such
relationships present their own challenges:
They are usually long-distance, and many
aid workers eschew committed attachments. Even the logistics of visiting can be
tricky, especially if one person is in a war
zone or other high-security site. But dating

She wants to
raise taxes on
the rich, allow
Medicaid to
cover abortion,
and supports the
Iran nuclear deal
and debt-free
public college.

a fellow humanitarian can be an alternative

to navigating the power divides youre now
discovering. Do check out Humanitarian
Dating.com, a website founded in 2007 by
two aid workers (a couple whod carried on
an e-mail courtship between Ethiopia and
Myanmar before settling down together in
Amsterdam). The site is used by romanceseeking humanitarian and development
workers all over the world, as
well as by other activists.
Dear Liza,
I have a friend who I
really like and feel is a very
good person. Thing is, she
constantly refers to herself
as a socialist, but shes always supporting Democrats
and watches MSNBC on
the regular. I feel she really
doesnt understand what socialism is, and is more akin
to a Lawrence ODonnell
type of Im a socialist. Do
I point this out to her? And
if so, how do I do it in a
kind way?
Fed Up
Dear Fed Up,
o. Socialism isnt like
your favorite Norwegian electronica
act, Fed Up; it doesnt become uncool as soon as somebody from the unenlightened
American mainstream likes
it. Socialism will only ever
matter when it becomes a
mass movement, which will
surely include dorky MSNBC
watchers. We should be so
Q
lucky.

12
LADIES GO LEGAL

1886
In its class listings, Yale University notes that the law courses
are open only to men. While
several women practiced law
at the time, elite schools were
still hostile to enrolling women,
with one Yale alumnus saying,
In theory I am in favor of their
studying law and practicing
law, provided they are ugly.

1939
The dean of Columbia Law reports an urgent need for a new
womens bathroom, as the only
one available is in the cellar.

1968
A group of Harvard Law women
protest an institution common at
elite schools, called Ladies Day,
in which professors single out
women to answer embarrassing
or provocative questions ranging
from dower to what degree of penile penetration constitutes rape.
A 1969 graduate said it was entertainment, a show put on at our
expense. The Harvard women
ended the practice by dressing
in black and, when prompted to
finish a lewd joke about womens
underwear, produced from their
briefcases lacy lingerie, which
they tossed at their male classmates and mortified professor.

1994

A study published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review

reports significantly lower rates
of class participation among
women, who describe a classroom dynamic in which they felt
their voices were stolen. One
woman recounted being called a
man-hating lesbian due to her
frequent participation, which she
said nearly made her drop out.
Samantha Schuyler

Patricia J.Williams

The Hillary Effect

Clintons presidential run has triggered a resurgence of unhinged sexism.

hen Hillary Clinton was toilets in formerly all-male bathrooms.

nominated at the DemoThis amnesia about womens history doesnt
cratic National Convention, mean that we have overcome. Indeed, such
the party celebrated with a forgetfulness disguises the ways in which Clinton
video of a glass ceiling being and other American women are still being subshattered, only to reveal Clinton emerging trium- jected to debilitating disparagement and concrete
phantly from the shards.
limitations. President Obamas election was so
Although her achievement is moving to me, monumental and so unprecedented that it erased
a woman of a certain age, it is unclear how many history in some quarters, particularly among the
younger Americans appreciate the profoundand major media outlets, who sold it as an unqualirapidrevolution underwriting this moment. In an fied feel-good story, and among well-educated,
interview in New York magazine last spring, Clinton left-leaning whites, for whom he was something
recalled an encounter shed had many years ago, of a reliefarticulate and bright and clean, as
when she took the LSAT. A young
then-Senator Joe Biden once put it.
man said to her, If you get into law
But that loss of the long view
school and I dont, and I have to go to
wasnt shared by most African AmeriVietnam and get killed, its your fault.
cans, who anticipated and greatly
The interview inspired a comment in 130'&4403 feared a backlash, never having forwhich the writer complained: I dont
gotten the postCivil War reversals
believe for one second her story about
that quashed the electoral triumphs
the LSAT. This is more of her play
of the Reconstruction era and ushered
for sympathy and victimization.
in Jim Crow. Consider the trajectory
This is a bitter election, and there
of the so-called Obama effect: Gun
are those who will never believe that
sales jumped 90 percent in the month
the sun is in the sky if Hillary Clinton says so. But after the 2008 election, apparently thanks to rightI attended law school only a few years after she did, leaning whites who thought that a black president
and her story is certainly exemplary of what my effectively meant that
female classmates and I were told. And its more a race war was upon
or less what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader us. That fear has been
Nothing about
Ginsburg and her eight other female classmates a constant ever since,
encountered in 1956, when Erwin Griswold, the most recently invoked this moment
dean of Harvard Law School, demanded to know by Trump when he can be taken
how each of them justified taking the space of a declared that we have
presumably more productive man.
race riots on our for granted.
I graduated in 1975, when women composed streets on a monthly Glass ceilings,
only 8 percent of a class of approximately 500. basis.
Those numbers improved rapidly during the acSimilarly, we must once broken,
tivism of the late 70s and 80s. Today, women be on our guard against can be boarded
make up approximately 50 percent of the students a Hillary effect
at most American law schools. Yet many do not a powerful resurgence back up.
know that Hillary Clinton, Sandra Day OConnor, of sexism. Trump has
and other icons of todays legal landscape came of become its current mouthpiece, placing Clintons
age in a timeagain, not so very long agowhen iconic attainments on behalf of womens and chilmost law schools struggled to find toilets that drens rights on the same level as accusations that
women could use. (Barbara Underwood, Yale Law her going to the bathroom is disgusting; that
Schools first female faculty member, was told to she got schlonged by Obama during the last
use the janitors closet.) We forget that the moral election; and that if Hillary Clinton cant satisfy
panic about bathroom access for transgender peo- her husband, what makes her think she can satple has a direct precedent in the affective disgust isfy America? (this last from a Trump fans tweet,
that greeted the first generation of womenpar- shared by the candidate). After all, Trump has gone
ticularly pregnant womenwho tried to use the on record saying that he thinks women need to be

DIARY OF A
."%
-"8

ILLUSTRATION: ANDY FRIEDMAN

Law
Fools

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

October 24, 2016

treated like shit, and then lives precisely by that credo.

In his latest and most baffling attack, Trump has
accused Clinton of marital infidelity. In his untethered
opinion, I dont even think shes loyal to Bill. Its like
the unfunny version of a Restoration comedy: accusing
your opponent of having cuckolded and emasculated her
husband andsomewhat confusingly in this contextof
being too masculine to be feminine.
Trumps scattershot broadsidesagainst women,
men, cheaters, haters, Mexicans, Muslims, and crying
babiesare crosshatched in ways that make pushback
a challenge for many traditional pundits and advocacy
groups. Trump possesses a singular ability to mix the
poisonous waters of the culture wars into colorful new
hybrids of exotic demonization. His words rain down like
cluster bombs, exploding in so many pieces and directions
that one scarcely knows how to assess the damage. His

concept of civic worth is so exclusive that he enfranchises,

privileges, and anoints no one but himself. I alone, he
declared during the Republican National Convention,
speaking as though he were an emperor. If there is hope
to be found in this dismally divided insult-swamp upon
whose edge America trembles, it may lie in this: Never
have so many been so united in their marginalization.
Nothing about this moment can be taken for granted.
Glass ceilings, once broken, can be boarded back up.
The very brief history of women and minorities on the
national stage makes manifest the urgent necessity of reinvigorating the very notion of politics itself. Defending
human, civil, and other democratic rights is an unending
struggle. Only the most generous coalition of humanand civil-rights activism will succeed in the project of creating a world we might one day describe as postracial,
Q
postgender, and (I pray!) post-Trump.

S N A P S H O T / C H I N A S T R I N G E R N E T WO R K

Lake Effect

CHINA STRINGER NETWORK / REUTERS

An aerial view of Yuncheng Salt Lake, also known as Chinas Dead Sea, half of which turned red in September
due to the reaction of algae to a rise in heat and light intensity. The lake has become a popular tourist attraction, but similar phenomena have occurred in lakes in the United States, Turkey, France, and Iran.

ON LOSING THE FIRST DEBATE

Calvin Trillin
Deadline Poet

13

The Nation.

Donald Trump claims that someone may have broken

his microphone on purpose, and that Lester Holt asked
unfair questions.
News reports

A blowhards ID is revealed by one sign:

How quickly the boasting turns into a whine.

TWEET THAT!
Again, Trump
was sued
for racial
discrimination
by the Nixon
administration.
BY THE NIXON
ADMINISTRATION.
@KevinMKruse,
historian Kevin
M. Kruse

BACK ISSUES/1992

One Cheer for

Clinton, Again

n 1992, longtime Nation

editorial board
member Norman Birnbaum
published an essay
in these pages offering his thoughts
on the presidential
election. What
is certain, he
wrote, is that
a re-election of
George Bush would
see Los Angeles
writ large across
the countrythe
Rodney King riots
had happened that
Aprilwith more
actual and spiritual
violence and a despairing climate in
which the pathologies so evident
at the Republican
convention would
move to the center
of national life.
That is reason
enough to vote for
Clinton and Gore.
Are there other
reasons for those
of us who seek
major changes in
our institutions and
our social ethos?
Birnbaum had
his complaints, but
he was cautiously
optimistic: Let us
admit the worst
about Clinton: his

cynicism (as in his

use of the death
penalty), his imbalance of conviction
and intelligence,
his technocratic
limitations. The
very ambiguities
and hesitations
of his campaign
show how open his
presidency might
be to coherent and
sustained pressure
from those seeking
an American social
democracy. A
President Clinton
would be, at least
initially, less imperial than the desiccated patrician now
in the White House,
and would be a
good deal closer
to the nation and
those who have to
endure its failings.
His conclusion?
For the moment,
one cheer for Clinton. Amen.
Richard Kreitner

The Nation.

VANDAL
in
CHIEF
Donald Trump has incited
violence and trashed political
norms. But it isnt rage hes
manipulatingits shame.

by ADAM HASLETT

ike so many of us, ive spent the last 18 months

enthralled by the dark carnival of our latest national election.
From the start, I couldnt tear my eyes from the spectacle of
the Republican primaries. Never have I experienced such
oceanic quantities of schadenfreude as I did watching the

front men for modern conservatism stand slack-jawed while the leading candidate
for their partys nomination figuratively slapped George W. Bush across the face
for starting the Iraq War and flushed 30 years of free-market trade policy down
the toilet like schoolwork torn from the hands of teachers pets. From my own
white, middle-class safety, I thrilled at Donald Trump nally bringing the
Republican Partys appeals to racial prejudice into the open, where they
would be judged in all their ugliness. But at the end of each debate,
I felt the nausea of the glutton and promised myself to consume less of the circus in the days ahead, only to return to
the political blogs the next morning, hungry for fatuous
ILLUSTRATION BY PHILIP BURKE

The Nation.

commentary on who had won, knowing in my gut that all I or any of us

were doing was losing whatever frayed threads of decency still held American
political life together. Through the conventions, the summer meltdowns, and
now the fall debates, my mind has been captive to each flicker in the polls.
And I am hardly alone. Our presidential contests have become such prolonged episodes of mass distraction and political anxiety its hard to even keep
track of what we are experiencing. Still, we have to try. And that begins by understanding that one of the reasons they have become such totalizing events is that
presidential elections are one of the only chances we have left to fulll the basic
human need to experience collective emotion. In an era of social atomization and
online living, when we have so few points of civic attachment in the vast middle
ground between domestic life and the imperial presidency, the candidatesas
the phenomenon of Barack Obama made abundantly clearhave become repositories for feelings that have nowhere else to go. What have been, for most
of our history, political contests over leadership of the executive branch have
transmogried in recent decades into something we experience less as debates on the direction of the nation than as
zero-sum battles over who will be allowed the pleasure and
relief of feeling they are not alone in their own country.
Beneath the smog of vitriol and disgust that has characterized this election, then, lies a great sorrow: that there
is so little fellow feeling left among us these days that we
are compelled to seek it in our national leader. Historically,
this has never been a good sign.
No one has better manipulated this paucity of solidarityand thus more powerfully distracted us from
the concerns of real lifethan Donald Trump. Hes accomplished this through endless acts of public verbal
violence that have broken one unwritten rule of political
discourse after the next, and have had the effect that all
Donald Trump,
to voters in
violence does: to shock those who experience it into a
Pennsylvania
kind of stunned passivity. Eventually, as we have seen,
the violence numbs peoples senses to the point that
they no longer fully register the horror of what they are
living through.
In an essay on King Lear, the philosopher Stanley
Cavell describes Lears daughter Regan, who orders the
eyes of her fathers loyal friend Gloucester gouged out,
thusly: She has no ideas of her own; her special vileness is always to increase the measure of pain others are
prepared to inict; her mind is itself a lynch mob. A The Apprentice,
and reality-TV shows
year and a half into Trumps incitement of a campaign, like it, have helped
this seems the most concise formulation of his character: create a national
He has no ideas of his own; his special vileness is always theater of shame.

You
people
dont win,
thats for
sure.

October 24, 2016

to increase the measure of rhetorical violence others are

prepared to inict; his mind is itself a political mob.
How can we resist this maelstrom of distraction and
the intellectual passivity it induces? We have to start by
letting go of the two beliefs, nearly universally accepted, that lie at the heart of it. The rst is that Trump,
in his serial demolition of political norms, is some radical anomaly, unprecedented in our stable two-party systeman argument that Hillary Clintons campaign has,
disappointingly, chosen to center itself on. While this is
true in a host of trivial ways, the repetition of it ad nauseam hides the far deeper continuity between Trump and
the development within the American right over the last
two decades of precisely the strategy of political vandalism and brinkmanship that he has used to fuel his rise.
The second belief to let go of, and the more powerfully
distorting one in the long run, is that the emotion driving
our present politics is anger, when it would be more accurate and far more illuminating to say that its shameeconomic, ethnic, and personal shame. And here, importantly,
there is no obvious partisan divide. At a time of gaping
inequality and an ever-more-freelance labor market, economic insecurityabsolute or relativeis a general condition for the vast majority of the population, regardless of
what the ofcial unemployment numbers tell us. For all
the political rage on display in this election, the deeper,
more private, and more pervasive feeling animating our
current political misery is the shame that has always accompanied poverty, or not being able to provide all you
want for your children, or enjoying less than you see others
enjoying, orin this second Gilded Agesimply not being rich. Add to this the humiliation that our society visits
with such numbing regularity on women, racial and sexual
minorities, and, increasingly, on white working-class people for their supposed pathologies, and you begin to see
that shame has become the force that binds us together.
The real divide comes in how this shame is used.
Trump has weaponized it. Indeed, his skill is precisely
this: to create an entire national theater of shame in
which he induces that very emotion in his followers, on
the one hand, while on the other saving them from having to acknowledge its pain by publicly shaming others
instead. This has been the central action of his campaign
from the outset. He tells people that we dont win anymore, that we are losers, losers who dont even have
a country, because it has been overrun and raped by
immigrants and foreign powers. This summer, in Erie,
Pennsylvania, he dropped the pretense of including himself among the losers and told his audience directly: You
people dont win, thats for sure. But yelling at people
about their degraded state is just part of a larger performance in which he gives them the means to avoid the
shame of their condition by enjoying, live or online, his
shaming of others: opponents, journalists, protesters,
disabled people, and, often most virulently, women. His
recent misogynist tirade against a former Miss Universe
is just one in a series of instances in which he has guratively offered up the bodies of women for public denunciation. Despite all the attention to the rage supposedly
being channeled by Trumps campaign, it isnt anger that
has made this theater of his hypnotic. Its the more primal

BEBETO MATTHEWS / AP

16

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

17

pain and pleasure of public humiliation.

In contrast, the Democratic Party that
Clinton now leads is grounded in the opposite, ethical response to shameat least for the
historically disenfranchised identity groups at
the heart of the Obama coalitionwhich is to
acknowledge the existence of shame and the
suffering it has caused, and then to seek its political repair. This is the social balm that the
party proposes to cover the bruising of its neoliberal economic policy: Well give you gays
in the military, you give us the Trans-Pacic
Partnership. That one of the unintended consequences of this gambit has been to open up
space for Trump and others to exacerbate the
shame experienced by a large segment of the
white working class is the most volatile and
misunderstood dynamic of this election.

J PAT CARTER / AP

o get at the roots of the rights

political vandalism and the supercharged
emotions of this election, we need to return
to the modern avatar of antiestablishment
resentment, Rupert Murdoch. Contrary to
his image on the left as the Darth Vader of conservatism,
Murdoch, like Trump, has long been a chameleon when
it comes to political party. In the United Kingdom,
his papers supported Labour before they supported
Margaret Thatcher; they played a decisive role in electing Tony Blair prime minister, before switching again to
the Conservatives under David Cameron. As biographies
of Murdoch make clear, from his earliest days as an
Australian at Oxford with socialist leanings, to his economically foolish determination to buy The Wall Street
Journal late in life, his central urge has been far less to
bring victory to any particular ideology than to thwart,
discomt, and if possible destroy whatever he perceives
to be the establishment, be it English aristocrats, cultural
snobs, labor unions, or East Coast liberal elites.
In a description of Murdochs entry into the British
media business in the 1960s, The Economist once credited
him with having invented the modern tabloid newspapera stew of sexual titillation, moral outrage and political aggression. Long before his most famous media
property appeared on American cable, Murdoch imported this stew to the United States with his purchase of the
New York Post in the mid-70s. One of the rst things he
did was to order up a gossip column, the famous Page
Six. The heartand spleenof the paper, as Vanity
Fair once described it, the column was meant to bring
the high and mighty down to the realm its readers occupied by exposing their hidden seediness.
Page Six and the New York Post are what rst made
Trump famous. As a former Page Six editor aptly put
it, the column denitely played a role in helping push
Donald Trump to the rst round of his never-ending
whatever. An otherwise unremarkable heir of a realestate fortune, Trump became the subject of a record
number of Post covers for his carefully cultivated and basically false image as a Manhattan playboy. His salacious
behavior and conspicuous lifestyle sold newspapers, just

Trump supporters
at a rally in Oklahoma
City.

In creating
Fox News,
Murdoch
brought
the tabloid
stew of sex,
outrage, and
aggression to
coverage of
Washington.

as they sell cable and Web ads today.

In creating Fox News, Murdoch brought the format
of the tabloid newspaper to coverage of Washington.
And it has been this formatthe stew of sexual titillation, moral outrage and political aggressionmore
than the channels support for any particular candidate or
policy, that has had the most lasting and corrosive effect
on our politics. As the intrepid Gabriel Sherman details
in his biography of Roger Ailes, erstwhile Fox News
chief and current Trump adviser, the networks
audience began to explode based on its coverage (and, in no small part, its invention) of
the Monica Lewinsky scandal. With the help
of Matt Drudge, the Murdoch Mini-Me of the
early Internet, a new, hyperaggressive gossipmongering became, for the rst time, a major
driver of Americans understanding of their
government, with other networks and websites
entering similar territory in order to compete.
It was during Ken Starrs investigation that the
marriage between right-wing Republicans and
tabloid media that denes our political landscape
today was consummated.
What elected politicians like House Speaker Newt
Gingrich and his henchmen brought to the wedding table to feed this new spectacle machine was a willingness
to commit what amounted to vandalism of the Constitution in the pursuit of an ideological end. Before we allow Trumps violence to create such amnesia that people
pine for the sober-minded Republicans of the 1990s, let
us not forget that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was
a grotesque abuse of the system of checks and balances,
out of joint with any reasonable understanding of when
that extraordinary power ought to be exercised. Just
as Trumps antics do now, the impeachment circus engrossed the nation, stunning much of it into a new political normal in which a imsy and hypocritical moral crisis
justied such vandalism. Its real purpose, of course, was
to debilitate a Democratic president and engender deep
cynicism about the federal governmentthe ideological
end of an antigovernment party.

18

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

The impeachment was such a success even in its failure, much as Trump has thus far proven to be, that it
set the template for how the right could operate from a
position of political and, increasingly, cultural weakness
to nonetheless achieve its revanchist aims: by violating a
political norm in spectacular fashion, thereby creating a
Whether
media frenzy and, under cover of the ensuing distraction,
advancing its otherwise endangered or unachievable
Trump wins
goals. Just as physical violence monopolizes attention in
real time, so theatrical and rhetorical violence monopo- or loses, the
lizes it in the political space.
purposeful
Thus, during the Florida recount, the Bush campaign, in a plot conceived in part by Trump adviser degrading of
Roger Stone, paid hundreds of Republican operatives
to fake a violent protest outside a Miami-Dade election our political
center. The so-called Brooks Brothers riot interrupted
culture will
and discredited the electoral process itself; the resulting
intensify.
wall-to-wall cable-news coverage stupeed the country
into believing that chaos reigned, and that the Supreme
Courtdespite violating its own legal normswas justied in deciding the election. It remains, at least for a few
more weeks, the most consequential victory of tabloid
journalism over our political institutions, altering as it
did the course of history and leading to the war in Iraq.
Employing the formula in 2004, right-wing groups,
again with the help of Fox News, created a months-long Adam Haslett is a
news circus by trashing another supposedly sacrosanct rule fiction writer and
of our political life: that a decorated war heroin this case, journalist whose
John Kerrywould not be attacked for his service. Again, most recent book is
the novel Imagine
the story drew such fervid attention not, in the main, beMe Gone. Hes
cause of its content, which was paltry, but because, con- written widely
sciously or not, we were stunned by the violation of what for newspapers
had been an implicit bargain about the treatment of veter- and magazines in
ans. It was this violence that did the enthralling; and with the United States
the successful swift-boating of Kerry, a weak president and Europe.
was reelected. If Trumps rhetorical cluster bombs make
these episodes seem quaint, it is not because they are different in kind, but in degree: The arc and format of their unfolding in the media
are nearly identical.
By the time we reach the Obama administration and the rights massive resistance to its very existence, the vandalism of unwritten institutional
arrangements and the ginning-up of false criseseach with its own attendant cable-news conagrationproliferate so quickly theyre hard to catalog: the Tea Partys emergence; Joe You lie! Wilson; Mitch McConnell
announcing that the Senates chief priority was to make Obama a one-term
president; the threat to default on the national debt; the government shutdown; and, most recently, the refusal to hold hearings for a sitting presidents Supreme Court nominee.
Once we step back from all the drama and fake emergencies, what we see
over the past 20 years, beginning with the Clinton impeachment, is a domestic variation of what Naomi Klein described in The Shock Doctrine. But here,
rather than inducing and taking advantage of disasters, wars, and other types
of violence to advance laissez-faire capitalism, the right is fomenting and
subsequently manipulating a misery that exists mainly in the realm of culture
and fantasy. While free-market economics has come along for the ride, the
main antigovernment end being advanced in this less concrete realm has far
older and deeper roots in American history than Milton Friedman. It is an
attack on the federal government and judiciary for its perceived sponsorship
of the interests, and often simply the full citizenship, of African Americans,
women, and other racial and sexual minoritiesa sponsorship that, ever
since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, has become more

and more identied with the Democratic Party.

It is no accident that this pattern of vandalism began
in the 1990s, just as Republican dominance of the popular
vote was ending (even if Trump were to eke out a victory
over Clinton, in no scenario would he receive an absolute
majority). People dont employ vandalism from a position
of strength; they resort to it when their weakness in the
existing system prevents them from achieving their goals
through regular order. To the extent, then, that we continue to treat Trumps own shock doctrine as anomalous
rather than as the latest fruit of the now long-standing
marriage between tabloid journalism and the American
right, we remain caught in one of the most powerful distractions contained in most coverage of this election: the
idea that any of this is going to end on November 8.
Whether Trump wins or loses, starts a cable network,
or runs again for president, the purposeful degrading and
delegitimizing of our political culture and institutions that
he has accelerated will not only continue; as the electoral
strength of the GOP further wanes, it will intensify. Thats
what Trump isan intensication of an existing weakness.
If Democrats, much less progressives, retain any aspiration to advance their goals through the existing system, we
have to be clear-eyed about what is occurringor we are
as doomed to fail as a boxer at a knife ght.

ow did it come to this? the most

common explanation given is that decades
of technological advancement and automation, neoliberal trade and labor policy,
and stagnating real wages have effectively
disenfranchised huge numbers of Americans by cutting
off access to a decent, stable life for themselves and their
children. Vast inequality in wealth, combined with demographic change and residential segregation along racial
and ideological lines, has fostered mutual suspicion and
resentment among those who see their place in the old
social hierarchy eroding. And thus we arrive at the dominant trope of the endless attempts to account for Trumps
rise: the seething, racially tinged anger of the white working class. For 18 months, barely a day has gone by that I
havent read an article that told some version of this story.
This story is not untrue. The economic and cultural
conditions it describes are real. But as an explanation of
Trump, it obscures as much as it reveals, because it buys
into the image that Trump himself is peddling: that he is
the true populist channeling the fury of dispossessed white
America. And in this effort, for all their supposed antagonism, Trump and the news media have cooperated in portraying his theatrical rage and the most violent behavior of
a minority of his supporters as the emotional crux of his
campaign. This is how weve been led to equate the character of his live audiences with that of his electoral support.
But if we allow ourselves to believe that some 40 percent of
the national electorate consists of foaming-at-the-mouth
white supremacists, we may as well copy the Texans, start
our own secessionist movement, and call it a day. Yes,
Trump is inciting racial hatred and mainstreaming whitesupremacist politics more directly than any of his Republican predecessors dared to do. But for all the attention this
does and must receive, it is not all that he is doing.

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20

The Nation.

The widely cited Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and

Culture in Crisis, by National Review contributor J.D. Vance, recently offered what is, in essence, a gentler version of the infamous Moynihan Reportonly this time written from the inside
and about the social mores not of African Americans, but of the
residents of what Vance calls Greater Appalachia. Its most telling passage doesnt deny the existence of racial resentment in the
world he grew up in; rather, it complicates it:
We know were not doing well. We see it every day: in the
obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause
of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack
Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is
a good father while many of us arent. He wears suits to his
job while we wear overalls, if were lucky enough to have a
job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldnt be feeding our
children certain foods, and we hate her for itnot because
we think shes wrong but because we know shes right.
What Vance is describing here is shame. A shame that is both
personal and ethnic, that is grounded in economic conditions
but experienced sociallyboth locally, within communities, and
nationally, in the fun-house mirror of the mass media.
It is certainly true that the recently noticed travails of white
people without college educations, such as increased heroin use
and higher suicide rates, have received strikingly more sympathetic
coverage than the ongoing suffering of African Americans living in
poverty. Nonetheless, to understand Trumps ourishing, we have
to acknowledge that the degrading of the social fabric wrought by

October 24, 2016

our brand of capitalism, and by the Great Recession in particular,

isnt limited to communities of color. In the places Vance writes
abouttowns that have become the subjects of the kind of voyeuristic proles in despair that The New York Times and The Washington Post once reserved for developing countrieswhat Trump has
taken a sadistic advantage of is not so much raw anger, but rather its
more basic predicate: the shame of being lesser-than. Its the feeling
Vance describes arriving at that bastion of establishment privilege,
Yale Law School, where his lower social class planted a doubt in my
mind about whether I belonged and the lies I told about my own
past weighed on him. In much the same way that a gay kid can only
overcome the damage of self-loathing by acknowledging it, part of
what allowed Vance to form intimate relationships after being raised
by a drug-addicted mother in a series of poor white communities in
Ohio is that he stopped being ashamed. My parents mistakes were
not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them.
There is something very important to listen to here if, in the
long run, were to have any hope of repairing the vandalism that
the right wing has visited on the body politic, and that Trump is
committing with such abandon. Shame is what we have in common. It is the messy, volatile, and most often intolerable feeling
that haunts unemployed young men in isolated rural communities
and urban ghettos alike. It gnaws at millions of women who are
belittled, harassed, and underpaid, and who live on their own in
higher numbers than ever in our history while still being told that
family is the key to fulllment. It plagues African Americans humiliated by the police, or who have had loved ones killed by them, only
to be told that the victims were to blame for their own deaths. Despite the advances in gay rights, it still consumes LGBTQ youth,
who kill themselves at four times the rate of their straight brothers

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October 24, 2016

The Nation.

and sisters. It eats away at veterans consigned to poverty. And yes,

it troubles the spirits of many white Americans living in what are
glibly called the y-over states, who perceivenot incorrectly
that most of the gild of the age is concentrated in cities on the
coasts, whose wealthier residents consider them cultural primitives.
Indeed, it even lies in the hearts of those who, on the left, we
consider our most virulent enemies. As Gabriel Shermans book
chronicles, the leading men of Fox NewsRoger Ailes and Bill
OReillywere formed in part by feelings of class humiliation that
bred their resentment of what they consider the liberal establishment. As for Trump, hes a son of the outer boroughs whom Page
Six once reported had been blackballed from membership at
the most exclusive country club in East Hampton because, after
all, he simply wasnt one of them.

his is the divide. this is the choice. make

shameyour own and othersinto a weapon,
as these men have done, and you get the closest
thing to fascism weve had in this country since the
1930s. Create the room for shames articulation,
and therefore a recognition of our commonality, and you have at
least a shot at the working basis for an ameliorative democracy.
But what makes the latter so hard to achieve at present isnt
just the acid partisanship most frequently blamed for our ills;
its the feedback loop between the endlessly disruptive drive of
commodity capitalism and the cultural climate weve allowed it
to produce. Here the instrumental use of other peoples shame is
in no way limited to the political right. Much reality television,
The Apprentice most denitely included, is based on it. It wasnt
always the case that ordinary peoples humiliation was the stuff of

21

our daily entertainment. But it is now. Whats more, the tabloid

format that Murdoch honed in the UK in the 1960s, that stew
of sex, outrage, and aggression, hasnt just corroded our experience of national politics. It has, in a very real sense, swallowed us
whole. Between pornography, celebrity gossip, crime and disaster
clickbait, and political fury, the Internet itself has become the innitely circulating tabloid we live our days inside. We dont even
require the Murdochs of the world anymore. On social media,
we turn our own lives into tabloids: gossiping, titillating, publishing our moral outrage and our political diatribes, updated by the
minute. And nowhere has shame been more effectively weaponized than on these platforms, where online bullying immiserates
lonely teenagers and people share links to revenge-porn videos to
humiliate their departed lovers. It is not just Trump supporters
who are caught up in a national theater of shame. In one way or
another, to one degree or another, we are all in attendance now.
Is it any wonder, then, that fellow feeling is so hard to come by?
And that we would seek it, in however mediated a form, from some
of the only people left who can act as containers of our collective
emotionour presidential candidates. Hillary Clintons inability,
for a variety of reasons, to become that vector of shared sentiment,
as Obama so clearly did, is one of the dening facts of this electionas is Trumps ability to achieve precisely that. The fact that
he is the one to accomplish this in 2016 brings to mind a line of
Mary Gaitskills, from her novel Veronica: The more withered the
reality, the more gigantic and tyrannical the dream.
Donald Trump, a would-be tyrant, is a creature born of our
already withered public life. He is neither an anomaly nor the end
of his kind. We either nd a way to acknowledge together what we
Q
suffer in common, or we live in his world.

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EX-PRESIDENT.
NEW TERMS.

October 24, 2016

RIGHT: WES GUDERIAN

arly this year, the writer ursula k. le guin looked on

in dismay as Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys occupied the
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon.
Le Guin had fallen in love with that hard countrywith its
high desert and the treeless basalt ridges of Steens Mountain
some 50 years ago, on a road trip. It was a difficult drive over gravel roads
with young children in the backseat. But the landscape bowled her over.
Shed never seen anything like it, yet it felt familiar.
Now here comes the slightly woo-woo part of it, Le Guin warned me
as we sat on her porch in Portland on a warm afternoon in July. Recently,
thumbing through a packet of family papers, she discovered that as an adolescent, her grandmother Phebe had helped her great-grandfather drive 350
head of cattle through the Black Rock Desert in Nevada and onto the eastern
ank of Steens Mountain, where theyd homesteaded for several years in the
1870s. Perhaps Le Guin was drawn to the landscape by some primal sense,
the way a salmon nds its river.
To much of America, Harney County was as unfamiliar as Gethen, the
snowbound planet Le Guin created in her radical 1969 novel The Left Hand
of Darkness. The Bundy event could itself have been a Le
Guin tale: The rough peace of a strange desert in winter
disturbed by the arrival of armed outsiders; a community
fractured but kept from breaking fully apart by the good
sense of the county sheriff, whom Le Guin described
as her hero. The occupation raised many of the same
questions Le Guin has asked throughout her career:
about the meaning of freedom, and of belonging; about
the value of the natural world; about humanitys capacity
for destruction, and for peacemaking.
Le Guin hasnt been back to Harney County since the
occupation. Shell be 87 this month and doesnt have the
stamina for long trips, nor for much writing. Shes stopped
writing ction completelya deep personal loss, as theres
nothing she likes better than making up stories. Its a
public loss, too. Le Guin is one of Americas most inuential living writers, and one of literatures most subversive
and generous imaginations. Since receiving her rst rejection letter at the age of 11 (from Astounding Science Fiction
magazine), shes published 10 story collections, six volumes
of poetry, 13 childrens books, four translations, numerous
essays, and 20 novels. Le Guin brought us to wizarding
school (in the Earthsea series, published long before Harry
Potter), to a dystopian Portland where one mans dreams
change reality (The Lathe of Heaven), to a planet where gender is unxed and the king is pregnant (The Left Hand of
Darkness), to a drought-stricken anarchist planet (The Dispossessed), to a postindustrial Napa Valley (Always Coming
Home), and, most recently, to Bronze Age Italy (Lavinia).
For Le Guin, elsewhere has always been a lens magnifying the vexations of our own time and place, including
militarism, sexism, governance, and ecology.
Le Guin hasnt always been recognized for her contributions. She struggled until her 30s to publish her
ction, and after shed found a home in science ction
and fantasy, fought what she saw as bias in the literary
establishment toward women and genre writers. Reviewers werent sure what to do with her stories, slippery
and idiosyncratic as they are. Now the gatekeepers have
caught up. The National Book Foundation awarded her
the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters in 2014. In September, the Library of America
released a collection of her historical ction set in an
PHOTOGRAPHED BY WILLIAM ANTHONY

23

The Nation.

imaginary Central European country called Orsinia. The

publication puts Le Guin on the spare list of authors who
have been canonized by the series while still alive, including Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth.
Imaginative ction, Le Guin wrote in 2011, is a way
of saying, It doesnt have to be the way it isit being the connes of gender, capitalism, or the publishing industry. Le Guin wrote people of color into science
ction at a time when white men mostly wrote about
themselves, albeit on other planets, and she troubled the
space-race-era faith in technological triumph. For half a
century, shes been hacking escape hatches into the roof
of the suburban McMansion where American literature
has been trapped. That so much of todays celebrated ction pulls its energy from the fantasticthink George
Saunders, Karen Russell, David Mitchell, or Michael
Chabontesties to her ax work.
This month, Small Beer Press will release a collection
of Le Guins reections on
reading and writingessays,
lectures, and book reviews
called Words Are My Matter.
The collection articulates Le
Guins belief in the social and
political value of storytelling,
as well as her fear that corporatization has made the publishing landscape increasingly
inhospitable to risk-takers,
to those who insist on other
ways. This is a real problem,
particularly if we cant count
on fresh water from the well
of Le Guins imagination. In
a year stalked by the long
shadows of authoritarianism,
ecological collapse, and perpetual war, her writing feels
more urgent than ever.

ometimes it just seems like the more

women tell the truth, the less men want
to hear it. Le Guin was sitting amid potted geraniums and tomatoes, nursing a
glass of scotch and water. She is a small
woman, quick to laugh, with light-hazel eyes and gray
hair cropped close to her ears, the way shes always worn
it. We were talking about Lavinia, her most recent novel.
Le Guin has an affinity for languages, and the book grew
out of a desire to read the Aeneid in its original Latin.
She was struck by the daughter of Latinus, wife to the
hero Aeneas, who is slighted by Virgil: Given nothing but modest blushes, and no character at all, Lavinia
never speaks. Le Guin mined her silence (and the library
stacks) for a fully realized female hero and a Bronze Age
Italian world as richly drawn as any of her far-off planets.
Le Guin warned me that she didnt want to talk about
politics straight-on, but Id been there only a few minutes when she turned the conversation that way. Ive
been thinking about this sick election that weve got goinghow much of the problem is misogyny? she asked.

24

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

That same afternoon, across the country in Cleveland, attendees at the Republican National Convention were eagerly buying up buttons and waving
signs referring to Hillary Clinton as a bitch and a tramp, and baying like
bloodhounds for her imprisonment. It isnt talked about very much, Le
Guin complained. The big part of [Trumps] appeal is not that hes appealingits just that hes a man, and he sneers at women.

e guin came haltingly to feminism. when she was a teenager, her mother gave her Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own
and Three Guineas; Woolf has been a lifelong influence. (Le Guin
hates being asked about her influences, which are uncountable.
On the other hand, shes written, a select number of books have
made no impression on her at allamong them, Atlas Shrugged.) But she
spent the first decades of her career writing stories about men, in a genre so
dominated by them that many of the women who wrote science fiction did so
under male pen names. Le Guin went to Radcliffeheaven intellectually,
but narrow in its social conceits. Women were schooled in gracious living
and trained to accept that fact that you were better than other people, she
recalled. It was a lesson she unlearned very painfully. In
her fiction, she treats class as a matter of exploitation; she
is interested in the underbelly of richness, with its depenIts
dence on poverty elsewhere. The most explicit example
is in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, her
pretty clear
famous psychomyth about a utopian city where peace
and prosperity are contingent on the ceaseless suffering
in all my
of a single child.
At 20, Le Guin got pregnant, her condition conrmed writing that
by a rabbit test. A friend helped her nd what she thinks I hate war
was probably the most expensive, and safest, illegal aborIm in fear
tion in New York City. She is acutely aware that she was
one of the lucky ones. Its very hard for me to imagine,
of it and
but I do try: What if I had obeyed the antiabortionists
and had my baby as I was supposed to? she wondered. I hate it.
She is certain that she wouldnt have met her husband, or
had the three children she wantedor her career.
Le Guin loves a love story, and her own romance
with Charles Le Guin, a historian, was fairly classic. Both
Fulbright scholars, they met en route to France on the
Queen Mary. It wasnt an immediate romance, she insisted; it took four nights before she was pretty sure about
him. And it seemed to her that Charles took forever
at least a week. In Paris, they lived in a little hotel in the
Latin Quarter and married later that year. She calls their
partnership life-determining. Alone, it would have
been impossible to support herself as a edgling writer,
especially while raising three children. Although she prefers to write in the morning, she wrote at night when the
kids were young, upstairs in her ofce while Charles listened for the children. For years, the only writing of hers
that found its way into print was poetry.
She began picking apart gender in the late 1960s,
while working on The Left Hand of Darkness. The novel
is set on a snowbound planet populated by Gethenians,
who are androgynous. But it was another decade before
she wrote a novel with a female protagonist, and that
happened by accident, after she killed off the man shed
assumed was the hero of The Eye of the Heron midway
through. Really, the book showed me what it had to do,
she explained. She stopped writing for a while, and read
the entire Norton Book of Literature by Women. I thought,
Oh, can I do this? Im sort of scared. I went on fol-

lowing the book where it went. Since then, Le Guins

stories have been increasingly populated by women, old
and young, and concerned with themes often dismissed
as feminine, and thus unimportant. Lavinia, with its
attention to the domestic and spiritual rituals of the royal
household and the fraught relationship between the protagonist and her mother, is a capstone. Unsurprisingly, Le
Guins feminism is most explicit in her essays, in which
she comes at sexism not with resentment or righteousness
but with her considerable wit. (Despite the seriousness of
her subjects, Le Guins writing is often playful, and funny.)
The night she felt her career take off, she was in
Oregons Coast Range, the middle of nowhere, in a tworoom cabin full of kids and no telephone. A neighbor
came racing down the hill to tell her that someone had
called from Pennsylvania. It was her agent, Virginia Kidd.
I went roaring up the hill, Le Guin recalled, and Virginia said, You won!the Hugo Award, one of sci-s
most prominent prizes along with the Nebula, which
shed won earlier that year. I said, Youre kidding!
Then I went back down to the creek and sat for a while
and thought, Holy moly, they noticed.

e guin grew up in berkeley, in a house

built from and surrounded by redwoods. It
was remarkably beautiful, but also full of
largeness, darkness, and unexpected spaces,
with room in it for many and mysterious
beings, Le Guin writes in an essay in Words Are My
Matter. Perhaps all my life I have been trying to rebuild
it around me out of words. Summers were spent at the
family ranch in Napa, listening to her father and greataunt Betsy tell myths and family stories around the fire.
Alfred Kroeber, Le Guins father, was an anthropologist,
famous for his work with Native Americans, and she grew
up around an Indian uncle and European expats who
instilled in her an early affinity for the other. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber, wrote a best-selling biography of
Ishi, the last wild Indian in California. Its easy to draw
lines between the work of father and daughterthe scrupulous attention to the details of an unfamiliar society, its
norms and tools and foundational mythsbut as a child,
she was less aware of the content of his work than the idea
that time spent alone in a study, writing, was sacred.
When Le Guin was 9, Germany invaded Poland. All
three of her brothers went into the military, the eldest
aboard a minesweeper in the North Pacic. She nds it
difcult to talk specically about the war. Everything was
khaki-colored; there were blackouts in Berkeley, and the
darkness stuck with her. Its pretty clear in all my writing
that I hate warIm in fear of it and I hate it, she said.
Later, her father took her to one of the founding conferences of the United Nations, in San Francisco. It gave her
some hope that maybe we were done with that.
Of course, we werent. She wrote the novella The Word
for World Is Forest while living in London during some of
the grimmest stretches of the Vietnam War. Cut off from
the antiwar movement back home, Le Guin channelled
her frustrated anger and shame, as she put it in a 2008
interview, into that book, in which militaristic colonizers
bring murder, rape, and clear-cutting to a tree-rich planet

October 24, 2016

inhabited by peaceful, green-furred hominids. Le Guin has long been an activist,

though a quiet onemarching, writing
letters, holding signsagainst nuclear
testing, for civil rights, and more recently
against the Iraq War. To inform her activism, she sought out pacist and anarchist
literature in little bookstores in Portland.
That led to The Dispossessed, her ambiguous utopia set on two planetsone
much like Earth, the other inhabited by
anarchists.
After living through so much war, Le
Guin still writes about it as a fresh horror.
In a remarkable passage in Lavinia, the
poet Virgil tells the young heroine of the
violence that is to come on her account,
a hideous chant of slaughter running
several pages long. The war happens, the
poet explains, because men are men.
Axes cleave skulls, swords sever arms
from shoulders, Aeneas kills and kills and
kills. He kills like a butcher. Why is he
a hero? Lavinia asks of her future husband. Because that is how empires are founded, the poet
replies. At a time when most Americans give little thought
to the bombs being dropped by remote control on people
they know nothing about, Le Guin reminds us that war is
never bloodless.
For someone preoccupied with humanitys ability to destroy itself and the rest of the natural world,
Le Guin is notably disinterested in dystopias. Frankly,
they bore her. I think theyre just ground out, she told
me. Theyre just the latest way to write sci- novels.
Dont readers ever get tired of being told that the world
is coming to a nasty, ugly end and only a very few people
will survive, by luck and by violence? Nor does Le Guin
think much of the kind of shallow moralism used to justify invasions and torture. She has written through plenty
of dark territory, but with an eye xed on the constant
stars of kindness and bravery.

n 2014, le guin committed what is now

a notorious act of bravery. After accepting her
medal from the National Book Foundation,
she went to the podium to give the five-minute
acceptance speech shed spent six months writing. Hold on, she said as she slipped on her glasses and
adjusted the microphone. She gave a small laugh, and
thanks for the beautiful reward. Then she delivered
both an impassioned case for the social value of literature
and an indictment of her own publishers, Amazon, and
other commodity profiteers that sell us like deodorant,
and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Le Guin had warned before that writers were being stripped of ownership of their work by Amazon and
Google. But it was something else to tweak the nose of
the publishing industry while it was sitting there right
in front of her. Hard times are coming, she warned,
when well be wanting the voices of writers who can
see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through

25

The Nation.

Its very
hard to
write about
being old.
We dont
have the
vocabulary.

our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds
for hope. We will need writers who can
remember freedom. Books arent just
commodities; the profit motive is often
in conflict with the aims of art. We live
in capitalism, its power seems inescapableso did the divine right of kings.
Le Guin has a reputation for being
somewhat prickly, largely when someone asks a poorly thought-out question
or tries to pigeonhole her as a sciencection writer; she would rather be called
an American novelist and poet. But what
she objects to is using genre to assign
valueshe doesnt mind it as a descriptive
category. Genre is a rich dialect, in which
you can say certain things in a particularly
satisfying way, she writes in Words Are My
Matter. Shes been quick to defend science
ction from well-known writers who have
wandered through it, in her opinion, briefly and unseriously. In 2014, she savaged
Chang-rae Lee (and, in an aside, Cormac McCarthy) for
using essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibly,
supercially, in his dystopia On Such a Full Sea.
With edgling writers, particularly women, Le Guin
is much gentler. She opened the door for me into writing science ction and fantasy, said her friend Molly
Gloss, another Portland writer who took a workshop
with Le Guin early in her career. Even in the worst piece
of student writing, Le Guin could nd one sentence that
was beautifully written, and she takes the time to blurb
unknown writers whose work she admires. For years,
shes been an active member of a local poetry group.

lways a writer from the margins,

Le Guin is now writing from lifes edge.
Its very hard to write about being old. We
dont have the vocabulary. Its the way a lot
of women felt when they realized they had to
write about being women and didnt have the vocabulary,
she told me. We were in her living room, with its comfortable chairs and the window looking north past an old
redwood tree to Mount St. Helens. Pard, her green-eyed cat, stretched on a
scarlet carpet nearby. Le Guin feels a duty to try to report from the frontier,
but its very difficult, and mysterious. You are definitely approaching the
borderland. Borderlands are weird places.
Poetry ts this particular edge best, and so, at the end of her career, Le
Guin is returning to the form that began it: bones words / pot-shards /
all go back, she writes in Earthenware, from her collection Late in the
Day, released in December 2015. She lingers on spoons, a pestle, and other
homely objects; returns to the landscapes that have soaked into me, as she
described it; and examines her own precarious position. If there are stories
she hasnt had time to tell, she keeps them to herself. From The Games:
Im not sorry, now alls said and done / to lie here by myself with nowhere
to run, / in quiet, in this immense dark place.
While we were talking, a clock began to strike. The timepiece, a gift from
Charles, is beautiful and old. Le Guin listened, counting the chimes. It rang
Q
out precisely. Bless her old heart, she said, and blew the clock a kiss.

26

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

Letters

The Nation.

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(continued from page 2)

Im 65, and Im sick of being
suckered by party politicians
who tell us what we want
to hear when they need our
votes but cant be found when
the chips are really down.
Eric Henning

grand isle, vt.

This article gives us a little

hope, which is hard to find
these days with Hillary Clinton
as the Democratic nominee for
president. Maybe Wisconsin
voters will feel the same.
Carl and Rosalind Figueroa
If all Democrats campaigned like Russ Feingold,
they wouldnt have lost their
majority in Congress. Good
policy and good politics go
Carolyn Herz
together.

Disruption Roulette
Thank you for Alissa
Quarts Driven to Extremes
[Sept. 26/Oct. 3]. As one who
has done it, Id say that driving for Uber is like stopping
on a New York City street to
try your hand at a game of
three-card monte: Uber wins,
Thomas Walker
not you.

A Friend Indeed
A viral source of outrage
crackthank you, Liza
Featherstone, for that deathless phrase [Asking for a
Friend, Sept. 26/Oct. 3].
Your column is a welcome infusion of hilarity and common
sense. My only complaint is
that it doesnt appear often
Rene Saller
enough!

Collective Responsibility
The slaughter of Californias
indigenous people chronicled
in Benjamin Madleys An
American Genocide is bloodchilling, but not at all an
isolated episode in American
historyif that history is
told honestly and without

the bias born of the psychosis

of American exceptionalism, a point Richard White
alludes to in his review of
the book [Rather a Hell
Than a Home, Sept. 12/19].
The story of the savagery of
Christian Americans has been
told over and over again. For
example, Daniel N. Pauls We
Were Not the Savages tells of
the brutal treatment of the
Micmac in the eastern provinces of Canada and Maine.
What we have done in
the Middle East amounts to
genocide, although it doesnt
conform to the United Nations
definition: the concerted effort
to obliterate a whole ethnic
group. Our arrogance and
barbarism in maintaining the
American empire has earned
us the hatred of most of the
world. We are not the golden
city on the hill but a monstrous rogue state.
Needless to say, our leaders
and most sleepwalking citizens
are in deep denial about the
true nature of who we are. Take
President Obamas visit to Laos;
it was an exercise in sheer hypocrisy. Although technically
not genocide, we destroyed that
country with over 200 million
cluster bombsmany unexploded, which will sever the limbs
of men, women, and children
far into the future. And Obama,
although he presented the evidence of our perfidy, couldnt
find the courage and decency to
apologize. We must also mention Vietnam and Cambodia,
whose people will suffer the effects of our savagery, including
the use of Agent Orange, for
generations to comebecause
we couldnt just let our bombers
stay there with nothing to do.
Sadly, most of us are the
equivalent of good Germans,
going about our daily struggles
and turning a blind eye to the
horror around us. Al Salzman

fairfield, vt.

Books & the Arts.

LE CARRS OTHER COLD WAR

The wonder and rage the English novelist
felt toward his own country

eading John le Carrs 1993 novel

The Night Manager, I was struck
by the odd sensation that I had
actually met the villain of the story.
Richard Onslow Roper is one of
le Carrs typical English upper-class shits.
He is suave, handsome, well-connected

Ian Buruma teaches at Bard College. His latest

book is Their Promised Land: My Grandparents
in Love and War (Penguin Press).

in high circles, and utterly unscrupulous.

His vast profits come from selling arms,
illegally, to warlords in poor non-Western
countries, and he is aided in his criminal
enterprise by a variety of amoral smoothies
in the British government.
Roper is, of course, a fictional character. But it didnt take long to figure out
whom he reminded me of: Alan Clark,
right-wing politician, notorious skirtchaser, classic-car buff, scandalous diarist,
ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM MAIDA

by IAN BURUMA
member of Margaret Thatchers government, and tireless promoter of more or less
shady arms deals with countries like Saddam Husseins Iraq and General Suhartos
Indonesia. In Iraq, Clark helped a British
company evade the official arms embargo.
Indonesia used British weapons to massacre civilians in East Timor. Asked by a
journalist whether this had ever bothered
him, Clark drawled: No, not in the slightest. It never entered my head.

28

Back in the 1990s, I interviewed Clark

in his elegant flat in London. He couldnt
have been more charming. He also told me
how much he admired aspects of Hitlers
Third Reich, which he said would have been
perfectly fine were it not for all that horsing
around by the SS.
I dont know whether le Carror David
Cornwell, his real namehad Clark in mind
when he wrote The Night Manager. But I was
fascinated to read in Adam Sismans riveting
new biography of the novelist that the two
men once knew each other well. They had
met by chance in a small hotel near the East
German border in the 1960s, when le Carrs
literary career was taking off and Clark was
still trying to establish himself as more than
the rich-playboy son of Kenneth Clark, the
eminent art historian.
Le Carr and Clark drove through Europe
in Clarks Mercedes 600. They exchanged
letters with endearments like lover boy and
golden boy. Even though Clark was married
to a much younger woman, he would
often use his friends London flat
for secret sexual encounters.
Le Carr was sometimes appalled, but also intrigued,
by Clarks extreme views
and disreputable friends.
The two finally fell out
after one of Clarks trysts;
le Carrs housekeeper
had found blood on the
walls; very young girls had
allegedly been involved. Le
Carr decided that his friend was
too rich for my blood.
Sisman writes judiciously about this odd
friendship. Le Carr, he observes, detected
in [Clark] an unusual capacity for evil. For
him, Clark was a kind of Mephistopheles,
whose wicked example he found both fascinating and repellent. This combination of
attraction and repulsion, in particular toward
British elites, runs like a current through
much of le Carrs life and often electrified
his literary work.
Many of le Carrs villains are seductive
scoundrels not unlike Clark, and they usually come from the British upper class, or
aspiring upper class. This was true as far
back as his second published novel, A Murder
of Quality, which told the story of a homosexual schoolmaster in an exclusive English
public (meaning private) school. The man, in
le Carrs hands, is depicted as a silky aesthete, a snob, and a murderer.
The school in A Murder of Quality was
based on Eton, the most exclusive public
school of them all, where le Carr taught

The Nation.

The Pigeon Tunnel

Stories From My Life.
By John le Carr.
Viking. 310 pp. $28.

John le Carr
The Biography.
By Adam Sisman.
Harper. 672 pp. $29.99.

German for two years in the 1950s. At Eton,

le Carr came to loathe the snobbish rituals
and sense of entitlement built into what he
called the schools Herrenvolk doctrine.
At the same time, he was enchanted by the
fine manners and cultivated self-confidence
instilled in the future members of Britains
most privileged class.
Other institutions that le Carr was involved in before reaching the unassailable
autonomy of a best-selling author also filled
him with feelings of ambivalence: the Foreign Office, for which he served as a junior diplomat in Germany in the
early 1960s; and, of course,
the intelligence agencies
MI5 and MI6, for whom
he worked first while a
student at Oxford, and
later in Austria and
Germany under diplomatic cover.
One of le Carrs
great strengths as a
novelist is his gimlet eye
for the nuances of dress,
speech, and manners that distinguish such institutions and that
marked off Englands upper classes. He is
the ever-alert outsider who can pass brilliantly on the inside by mimicking the people
around him so convincingly that they believe him to be one of them. This is the
prerequisite of the successful spy and, as
le Carr has often pointed out, of the successful novelist. When writing his stories, le Carr
inhabits his imagined characters, as Sisman
puts it. He views the world with the sense
of wonder that goes with being an observant child who feels like an interloper in the
schools and institutions that he is compelled
to be part of.

n le Carr, this sense of wonder was

always mixed with large dollops of resentment and rage. The kernel of his anger,
as he himself has acknowledged, was his
torturous relationship with his father,
Ronald Cornwell. In Sismans biography,
Ronnie is by far the most compelling
character, regularly upstaging his son in

October 24, 2016

the narrative. The chapter on his father is

also the best thing about The Pigeon Tunnel,
le Carrs own collection of anecdotes about
his life that he published this year. His bitter
memories of Ronnie are the closest this highly
guarded author comes to self-revelation.
Ronnie was a charming con man who
often managed to live as a rich grandee by
defrauding friends, family, and strangers of
their savings while tryingunsuccessfully on
several occasionsto steer clear of prison
and bankruptcy. The remarkable thing about
Ronnie is that even his wretched victims, after
losing everything they owned to his duplicitous schemes, found it hard to resist his allure.
Theres a photograph of Ronnie at Ascot
or some other horse-racing venue, looking
like an Edwardian fop in a gray top hat and
morning tailcoat, with the lopsided grin of a
vaudevillian performing a particularly baffling
conjuring trick. Women adored him.
One of Ronnies victims was Alan Clarks
brother Colin. This is, in fact, how Alan introduced himself to le Carr when they first met
in Germany: My name is Clark. Your father
ripped off my brother.
Typically, Alan rather admired Ronnie for
it. In Colins words, quoted in Sismans book:
What was difficult to comprehend about
Ronnie was that everything was fake. His office, his car, his chauffeur, his regular box
at Ascot, were all just hired for the occasion,
and never paid for. His wife was not his wife,
and his accountant was just an accomplice.
Ronnie married three times. His first wife,
Olive, gave birth to le Carr and his elder
brother Tony. Olive was so badly treated by
Ronnie that she eloped with a friend when
le Carr was just 5. Today, I dont remember
feeling any affection in childhood except for
my elder brother, who for a time was my only
parent, le Carr writes. Ronnie, meanwhile,
drifted in and out of his sons livesalways
dressed to the nines, smelling of fine cigars
and the hint of perfume left by one of his
many mistresses.
Ronnie went on jaunts to the casino at
Monte Carlo. And there were times when he
mysteriously disappeared. There were grand
parties replete with famous sportsmen, showbusiness figures, politicians, and underworld
cronies. Le Carr also recalls seeing Ronnie
behind bars in one of the prisons where he did
time, although he isnt quite sure whether he
might just be imagining it.
Living with so many lies set le Carr apart
from his peers at a very early age. Growing up
with a con man means that nothing is certain.
So much about Ronnie was fantasy, a shaky
stack of cards built on promises of great riches
that left others in ruins, even as Ronnie lived

October 24, 2016

it up whenever he could.
Often revolted by his fathers behavior,
le Carr wasnt immune to his dangerous
charm. Ronnie was the original model for
many of the seductive rogues in le Carrs fiction, including the villainous Roper. Sisman
tells us: While the finished version of Roper
is quite unlike [le Carrs] own father, the
early sketches of his characterare reminiscent of Ronnie: proletarian but senatorial
genial but menacing. It is perhaps relevant
that [le Carr] had suspected Ronnie of trying to find an opening in the arms trade at
the time of the Six Day War.
Ronnie keeps popping up like a recurring nightmare in his sons life. Checking
into fine hotels around the world, le Carr is
frequently confronted by managers inquiring about his fathers unpaid bills. When the
film version of The Spy Who Came in From
the Cold was about to be made, Ronnie was in
Berlin pretending to be his sons professional
adviser, in which capacity he accepted studio
tours and the company of starlets. Le Carr
had to bail his father out of prison in Zurich
for hotel fraud, and in Singapore for a betting
scam, and in Vienna and Indonesia, and so on
and so forth.
Ronnie was also quite prepared to blackmail his son, once threatening to expose one
of le Carrs marital infidelities if he wasnt
paid 1,000 to keep his mouth shut. What is
perhaps the creepiest aspect of this grotesque
father-son relationship was only revealed to
le Carr after Ronnies death. A woman from
Brussels contacted him to remind him of an
affair theyd had on a train. Le Carr quickly
realized what had happened: The liaison had
most likely taken place, but his father had
passed himself off as his famous son.
In his account of Ronnie, le Carr is unsparing, still a little angry, but not unforgiving.
In a sense, he can see himself, as the professional spinner of tales, in the distorted image
of his father. Ronnie, he writes, could not have
lived any other way:

29

The Nation.

NOMINATED FOR A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Strangers in Their Own Land

is extraordinary . . . *
THE BRILLIANT NEW BOOK THAT EXPLORES THE
INTERSECTION OF EMOTIONS AND POLITICS OF TEA PARTY
AND TRUMP SUPPORTERS IN THE SOUTH

* . . . for its consistent empathy. . . . It is billed as a book for this

moment, but it will endure. GABRIEL THOMPSON, Newsday
This is a smart, respectful and compelling book.
JASON DEPARLE, The New York Times Book Review
Among the most timely of books in this moment
of seeming near apocalypse . . . remarkable.
SEAN MCCANN, Los Angeles Review of Books
[Hochschilds] connection and kindness to the
people she meets is what makes this book so powerful.
MARION WINIK, Minneapolis Star Tribune
The anger and hurt of the authors interviewees is
intelligible to all. In todays political climate, this may
be invaluable. The Economist

I dont think he wanted to. He was a

crisis addict, a performance addict, a
shameless pulpit orator and a scenegrabber. He was a delusional enchanter
and a persuader who saw himself as
Gods golden boy, and he wrecked a lot
of peoples lives. Graham Greene tells
us that childhood is the credit balance
of the writer. By that measure at least, I
was born a millionaire.
Living with a con mansome of whose
secrets the young boy found out by literally
spying on his fathertaught le Carr the art
of make-believe (such as pretending at school

THE NEW PRESS

THE NEW PRESS

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30

that his father was a wartime secret agent

when he was in fact a black marketer). I
remember the dissembling as we grew up,
le Carr writes, and the need to cobble
together an identity for myself, and how in
order to do this I filched from the manners
and lifestyle of my peers and betters, even to
the extent of pretending I had a settled home
life with real parents and ponies.

eople associate le Carr with the spy

novel. This is accurate, up to a point.
Some of his best books Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy (1974), or Smileys People
(1979), or the autobiographical A Perfect Spy (1986)feature secret agents and are
set against the backdrop of the Cold War.
But le Carrs novels also belong to a
genre at which English writers often excel:
the comedy of manners. This type of story
has everything to do with the complicated
rituals of the British class system, which
has changed over the years but has never
disappeared. The Cornwell family was not
at all from the top drawer, but
from the provincial lower
middle classshop assistants and the like.
Part of Ronnies
projected image
of grandeur was
to make proper
gentlemen of his
sons by sending
them to fancy
public schools.
And there, as
le Carr explained
in an interview, we
did what spies do. We
acquired the clothes. We
acquired the mannerisms,
we acquired the voicethe code
of the target that we were penetrating.
At St. Andrews, the exclusive prep school
that he attended, the young le Carr joined
in the laughter of his peers at the sound
of a lower-class accent, while concealing
his shame that his own relatives spoke like
that too. As Sisman observes: He became
especially sensitive to social nuance, noticing details to which boys from more secure
backgrounds might be oblivious.
This sensitivity breeds the fine ear and
acute eye of a comic novelist. It also breeds
the lifelong resentment, all too common in
Britain, of the man who doesnt quite fit in,
and it explains le Carrs ambivalence about
his institutional affiliations, from St. Andrews to MI6. This extended to his feelings
about his country and was one reason why

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

he often sought to escape from England, as

he did to Switzerland when he was 16, and
why he chose to live in the solitude of his
imagination.
Some of this ambivalence toward English
society may have been the misdirected anger
he felt toward his father. In fact, when describing his teenage escape to Switzerland in The
Pigeon Tunnel, le Carr admits as much: And
very probably I blamed the school for my
woesand England along with itwhen my
real motive was to get out from under my father at all costs. In any case, it was on this trip
abroad that he had his first encounter with the
world of spies. While in Switzerland in 1948,
he was approached by a woman in tweeds
from the British consulate, who probed him
over a glass of sherry on his patriotic credentials. Considered sound, he was asked to spy
on meetings of left-wing students and report
on the British citizens who attended them.
Three years later, le Carr was serving in the
British Army Intelligence Corps in Austria,
interrogating people who had slipped past
the Iron Curtain. In 1952, he was a
student at Oxford, where he
led a peculiar double life:
raising a glass to king and
country in the exclusive
company of other former public-school
boys and joining
left-wing groups to
snoop on subversive elements.
Spying on fellow students who
believe theyre your
friends is an unsavory
business, and some of le
Carrs friends never forgave him. Why was he so keen
to do this? Le Carr puts these activities down to love of country. Having grown
up during the war, and having avidly read a
steady stream of schoolboy books on imperial heroes by John Buchan, Dornford Yates,
G.A. Henty, and the like, le Carr became
the greatest British patriot in the hemisphere, he recalls. There was also the Cold
War, and the real menace of the Soviet Union.
Someone had to do the dirty work required
to protect the free world, and as a result, he
undertook actions that, although they were
in some way morally repugnant, I felt at the
time, and still feel, to have been necessary.
What he did, apart from snooping around,
le Carr is not prepared to say. The details of
his life as a spy are still shrouded in secrecy.
There is no reason to think that he is being
disingenuous about his patriotic spirit or his

views on the Cold War. Most of his contemporaries in Britain at the time probably felt
much the same way. Then again, most of
them never became spies.

e Carr started at Oxford in 1952, at a

particularly fraught time for the British
intelligence services. It was the year
after two of the Cambridge Five
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean
defected to Moscow. Kim Philby, whose
betrayals probably caused more deaths than
any of them, followed in 1963.
Le Carr has always harbored a particular
hatred for Philbyperhaps because he recognized something of himself in him. One
thing they shared was growing up with an
impossible father. St. John Philby, Philbys
rather sinister and eccentric father, was
an anti-Semitic convert to Islam who was
briefly arrested in 1940 as a possible Nazi
sympathizer. As le Carr explains in Sismans biography: Through his father, and
the education which his father gave him,
[Philby] experienced both as a victim and
as a practitioner the capacity of the British
ruling class for betrayal and polite selfpreservation. Effortlessly he played the parts
which the Establishment could recognize.
In many ways, this was what made both
Philby and le Carr good spies. They had
what the KGB agent who recruited the Cambridge Five recognized as an inherent class
resentfulness, a predilection for secretiveness
and a yearning to belong. Le Carr once
described the intelligence services as a kind
of masonry where troubled souls could
find a home, even a moral center. And yet
joining this masonry might seem like an odd
choice for an Englishman suffering from class
angerespecially MI6, which was run by the
very men that he, and others like him, resented. No wonder that Sir Dick White, head
of MI6 when le Carrs bleak The Spy Who
Came in From the Cold came out, declared that
the author is getting his revenge on the oldschool-ties in British intelligence.
There has always been something contradictory about le Carr and his work, especially
when it came to his attitude toward Britain.
Obviously, he never betrayed it as Philby and
the other Cambridge spies did, but why was
he so frequently enraged with his own country? After he took Swiss residency in 1990,
this consummate Englishman declared: I
really didnt think I could stand being English
for another day, or in England.
Class resentment may have been one reason. But there was perhaps another as well. I
once asked the writer Bruce Chatwin why he
thought so many English authors between the

October 24, 2016

two world wars wrote so venomously about

England. Chatwins answer was both concise
and plausible: It is because they actually
cared very much. Writers of le Carrs generation grew up in the twilight of empire and
witnessed its fairly swift demise. Young readers of Buchan and Henty, they were imbued
with an exalted view of Britain. Even leftist
rebels who opposed British imperialism often
failed to shake the conviction that there was
something superior about being British.
This was especially true of men with a
public-school education: Guy Burgess still
proudly wore his Old Etonian tie even after
defecting to Moscow. The sense of gloom that
permeates le Carrs work is the disillusion of a
patriot who once believed in the moral superiority of his countrys institutions. It is a gloom
created by his recognition that the institutions
to which he was committed did not live up to
their promise. The spy who came in from the
cold wasnt only the protagonist of his 1963
novel; it was also le Carr himself, who had
once thought hed found a home in MI6.

he moral bleakness of his early novels

is often read as cynicism. But this is,
in many ways, to misread le Carr. It
is true that the British spies in his fiction are usually depicted as cynical and
worldly, in contrast to the crass and hubristic
navet of American agents. Harold Macmillan, later a Tory prime minister, once said:
These Americans represent the new Roman
empire, and we Britons, like the Greeks of old,
must teach them how to make it go. Le Carr
would disagree with the premise, I think, but
not with the sentiment. The world-weariness
of George Smiley and his ilk has less to do
with a natural (or cultural) tendency toward
cynicism than with disappointment in a nation that had failed to live up to its own billing.
It is often hard to tell in le Carrs novels
whom he despises more: the coarse, powerdrunk Americans or the smoother Brits who
do their bidding. This came to an especially
frothy head after George W. Bush unleashed
war in the Middle East with the fawning connivance of Tony Blair. Le Carr declared that
he wasnt anti-American, just disgusted with
what he called the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld
disaster of the last eight years.
His anger was justified. We have squandered the peace that weve won with the
Cold War, he observed, and whatever one
thinks of the Western powers conduct during the Cold War, this is surely true. But
le Carrs feelings about the meddling
Yankslike those of Graham Greene, a
writer with whom he is often compared
goes deeper than that and, in fact, preceded

31

The Nation.

Bush and Cheney.

Sisman quotes an entry in le Carrs notebook about his detestation of the CIA agents
hed met: I hate them more than I hate
myself, more than I hate a hangover. Theyre
the one bunch I hate morally: I only have to
see their Mormon haircuts and listen to their
open-plan charm. I have only to hear them
call Europe Yurrp and I start sweating at
the joints.
Le Carrs moral hatred of the CIA agents,
and by extension the nation they serve, goes
beyond a political dislike; it is cultural. The
diatribe reveals something else as well, which
moves his feelings about the United States
a bit closer to those for his own country.
Le Carrs sense of anger and frustration
stems from the official American claim of
a higher morality. So much of US foreign
policy, then and now, has been cloaked in
the language of freedom and democracy
even when it involved raw aggression. To le
Carr, this hypocrisy is what makes it even
more odious than the actions of openly
criminal regimes.
The main difference between Smileys
people and their cousins across the Atlantic
was that the British had more or less given
up pretending they were morally better than
others, while the Americans continued to do
so. Blairwith his self-aggrandizing and missionary zealwas a signal exception, which
is why le Carr came to loathe him so much.

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erhaps some of this is a bit over the top.

But le Carrs angry moralism (the opposite of world-weary cynicism) is what
gives many of his stories their zest. The
Constant Gardener (2001), for example,
tells of the corrupt Western pharmaceutical
industry operating in Africa. Several reviewers
criticized itunfairly, in my viewfor being
too angry, but this is what gives the novel its
power. Le Carr once said that his wife Jane
thought he was unreasonable at times about
the United States. He said that she was probably right: In fact, Im becoming seriously
unbalanced about America altogether. But
he also wasnt sure that isnt the right thing
to be.
This lack of balance, which can be found
in some of his views of Britain and its pernicious class system as well, is a sure sign of disenchanted idealism. He believes that Britain
and the United States could have done better.
More than the imperialist romances that le
Carr imbibed in his youth, this is at the center of his patriotism. His books are the cry of
an outsider who has been on the inside, and
who cares enough about his country to be
Q
outraged by what he saw.

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MR.BRIGHT
SIDE
D
by CHRIS LEHMANN

onald Trump begins Crippled America, his will-to-power

tract about recovering American greatness, with an uncharacteristic apology of sorts. The picture we used on
the cover of this booka glowering shot of the realestate and reality-TV mogulis angry, even mean
looking, he writes. He assures the concerned reader that this was
deliberate. There were plenty of beautiful pictures of an upbeat
and smiling Trump. But these would send the wrong message
for his dark diatribe: In this book were talking about Crippled
America. Unfortunately, theres very little thats nice about it. So
I wanted a picture where I wasnt happy, a picture that reflected
the anger and unhappiness that I feel, rather than joy. Because we
are not in a joyous situation right now.
The scowling, belligerent image of Donald Trump is by now
something of a campaign clich. Its the face of an insurgency of
aggrieved middle-class and working-class Americansfed up,
as their leader loudly is, with the tortured public etiquette of
political correctness, and determined to wrest back the bulwarks of American opportunity from the malign neglect of our
incompetent political class. Its the countenance of a movement
that wants to eradicate all illegal immigration, bar Muslims from
entering the country, and bomb ISIS back to the Stone Age. And
its the image of Spenglerian doom that we witnessed during his
speech at the Republican National Convention.
But as Trump himself acknowledges, there is another side
to him. Flip forward to the photos illustrating Crippled America,
and youll see the other, far sunnier Trump: color images of the
extended family, interspersed with promotional photos of his
towering and luxurious properties. Go back to the endmatter of
the book, and youll see an About the Author note that runs
17 pages, featuring tidbits like In March of 2013, Mr. Trump
was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in front of 25,000
fans at Madison Square Garden; Mr. Trump is one of only
two peoplenamed to ABCs Barbara Walters special The Most
Fascinating People two times; and In 2013, Mr. Trump received
the T. Boone Pickens Award from The American Spectator at the
Robert L. Bartley Gala.
This cheerful, self-congratulating Trump, of course, is the
one whos ruled New Yorks tabloid-media scene for the better
part of four decades, building a career as a real-estate mogul, reality-TV personality, and retail-brand-for-hire. In fact, despite
the visage on the cover of Crippled America, and the fusillades of
insults and bigoted asides at his rallies, this wellspring of optimism nourishes the deeper roots of his appeal. Trump isnt just
a tireless doomsayer; hes also an apostle of the upward-striving
mantras of self-help, a lay preacher of the deepest fantasies and
longings of the aspirational American soul. He draws his power
from the age-old gospel of American success, the spiritual-cummotivational faith that beholds the most lavish spectacles of
Chris Lehmann is editor in chief of The Baffler and the author, most
recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the
Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

AP

Trumps gospel of positive thinking

October 24, 2016

unequal accumulation and pronounces them

duly anointed blessings of the divine will.
Trumps political genius comes from his
deft rhetorical maneuvering between the
poles of apocalyptic despair and spectacular optimism. Like the American jeremiadpreachers who stretch as far back as Jonathan
Edwards, Trump understands that the specter of chaos and damnation only whets the
wavering believers appetite for deliverance.
Whether hes scowling or beaming, invoking
the immigrant hordes or the sensational ratings of The Apprentice, Trump comes bearing
the tacit message that he is not merely the
aggrieved voice of dispossessed Americans;
he is also the embodiment of their greatest
aspirations. He is, believe it or not, the nations premier positive thinker.

he growing cottage industry of Trump

biographies tends, not surprisingly, to
overlook this facet of his mass appeal.
The chief composite picture of Trump
is that of a figure at the center of a series
of shady real-estate deals, lawsuits, and bankruptcy proceedings, all turned to his favor via
the intercession of a brutal fixer or a generous
bailout by creditors. The story of the Trump
fortune, writes investigative journalist David
Cay Johnston in The Making of Donald Trump,
is that of a business career built on breaking,
ignoring, or making up rules.
Johnstons case is unassailable and eye-opening, even if it misses most elements of Trumps
gospel of self-advertised success. A former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Johnston
chronicled the near-collapse of Trumps Atlantic City holdings on a day-to-day basis back in
the early 1990s. His new book, which collects
much of this reporting into a brief against
Trumps biggest selling pointhis image as a
deal-makeroffers a bracing account of the
backroom negotiations and lax New Jersey regulatory regime that permitted the last-minute
rescue of Trumps hotel-and-casino empire on
the Jersey Shore. As Johnston documents, these
machinations allowed his properties in Atlantic
City to stagger out of their all-but-certain receiverships and into the ambit of downscaled
debt and face-saving partnerships. But perhaps

the greatest revelation in Johnstons book is

his incisive rendering of the supreme cynicism of Trumps media-handling strategy.
In the Atlantic City negotiations, for example, Trumps lieutenants avoided using the
term bankruptcy in their descriptions of the
pending bailout before the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. Their hope was
to prevent journalists from using the word in
their reporting. Johnston, who has a background in financial journalism, saw through

33

The Nation.

Crippled America
How to Make America Great Again.
By Donald J. Trump.

Threshold Editions. 193 pages. $25.

The Truth About Trump

By Michael DAntonio.
Thomas Dunne Books. 389 pages. $16.99.

Trump Revealed
An American Journey of Ambition,
Ego, Money, and Power.
By Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher.
Scribner. 431 pages. $28.

The Making of Donald Trump

By David Cay Johnston.
Melville House. 263 pages. $24.99.

The Gilded Rage

A Wild Ride Through Donald Trumps America.
By Alexander Zaitchik.
Hot Books. 127 pages. $21.99.

the charade and filed an Inquirer dispatch

under the headline TRUMP EMPIRE COULD
TUMBLE TODAY, CASINO PANEL TOLD. But
what really struck Johnston was not only how
ably Trump and his lieutenants handled the
press, but also how ably they then harassed and
targeted those who hadnt been manipulated:
All but two of the other reporters
who had been told what testimony to
expect missed the story. Because the
word bankruptcy went unsaid, these
reporters did not allude to it.
Many reporters accurately quote
what they are told, but dont know
much about the underlying issues. For
Trump and others like him, this makes
it easy to manipulate most of the press.
Those who see through the manipulation and make connections themselves
get a different response: complaints to
editors, threats of litigation, and occasionally public denunciations.
This is a spot-on dissection of how
Trump creates and enforces his assiduously cultivated public image as a successful
and hard-charging businessman. But it also
leaves out a crucial detail: Trump cant
permit the notion of bankruptcy to be attached to his image because of the harm it
would inflict on his own psyche and sense
of self-worth.
As the Atlantic City fiasco unspooled,
Trump famously confided to his future second wife, Marla Maples, that a homeless
man they passed on the streets of Manhattan
had a higher net worth than his own. But

as he explained in the wake of his rescue, it

was crucial to his image that no one thought
he was, in a personal sense, bankrupt. As
the Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Michael DAntonio observes in The Truth About
Trump, far and away the most comprehensive
and insightful recent account of all things
Trump, Others had used the peculiar dynamics of bankruptcy to similar effect, preserving substantial fortunes while escaping
the stigma of personal bankruptcy, but few
considered it a great accomplishment.
For Trump, avoiding the taint of bankruptcy was a public relations advantage.
If I had filed a personal bankruptcy,
DAntonio quotes Trump as saying, I dont
feel that my comeback story would have
been nearly as good a story. It would have
been always a tarnished story.

rumps resistance to the tarnished

nomenclature of failurehis fear of
being publicly perceived as an also-ran
or a bankrupt loseris more than just
solicitude for his public image. It is
also the faith he was raised in: the positivethinking creed pioneered by Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of the Marble Collegiate
Church in Manhattan, where the Trump
family worshipped.
Touting his religious credentials in
Crippled America, Trump writes: Reverend
Peale was the type of minister that I liked,
and I liked him personally as well. I especially loved his sermons. He would instill
a very positive feeling about God that also
made me feel positive about myself. I would
literally leave that church feeling like I could
listen to another three sermons.
There is no particular reason to doubt
that Trumps endorsement of Peales gospel is
heartfelt (which is decidedly not the case with
the candidates clumsier efforts to package
himself as a stout evangelical, overtures that
found him botching the names of Bible books
and gamely suggesting that hes never done
anything worth repenting). Peale presided
over Trumps first wedding, to the former
Ivana Zelnickova, in 1977. And many features
of Trumps message that traditional political
observers find so exasperating and resistant to
critical inquiry can be traced to the reverends
influence. In fact, Trumps sprawling record
of policy reversals and flat-out lies isnt just a
personality quirk, but the logical extension
of the reverends gospel of positive thinking.
Trumps new-millennial gloss on Peale plies a
vision of capitalist uplift steeped in a doggedly
counterempirical belief that Christians can
achieve success by relentlessly intoning their
own preferred image of prosperity.

34

Like his positive-thinking spiritual master, Trump clearly believes that the manic
repetition of what he desires to be real, in
both the pecuniary and political realms,
is enough to make it a reality. This is the
guiding directive in Trumps preferred narrative of his otherwise far from self-evident
personal successand its just as powerful a
driving force in his assured prophecy of an
America that he will make great again.
This set of autosuggestive word pictures
likewise forms the heart and soul of Peales
enormously influential preachments of personal success. A self-described missionary
to American business, Peale burst into the
pantheon of Protestant uplift with the 1952
publication of The Power of Positive Thinking. Written in a curious mixture of psychoanalytic jargon and the imperative style of
industrial-age assembly manuals, the book
laid out the basis for successful self-reinvention in the trenches of market warfare.
Picturize, prayerize, and actualize was
the mantra of the Peale method, and one of his
key homilies drove home the process-driven
character of his positive-thinking gospel. On
a roadside billboard, I saw an advertisement
of a certain brand of motor oil, Peale announced to his success-hungry flock:
The slogan read, A clean engine always
delivers power. So will a mind free of
negatives produce positives; that is to
say, a clean mind will deliver power.
Therefore, flush out your thoughts,
give yourself a clean mental engine,
remembering that a clean mind, even as
a clean engine, always delivers power.

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

ts no great exaggeration to note that each

time Trump contradicts his past assertions and positions, or summons phony
mental pictures of New Jersey Muslims
celebrating the 9/11 terror attacks, or
recalls seeing a nonexistent video of a $400
million US payment to the government of
Iran, he is, in Peale-ist terms, revving up his
mental engine. Trump isnt just lying; he is
exercising the power of positive thinking.
This is why the mere suggestion that reality is otherwise sends the great man into unappeasable transports of fury. In 2006, for example, Trump sued New York Times reporter
Timothy L. OBrien for supposedly harming
his future earning capacity by depriving him,
in the book TrumpNation: The Art of Being
the Donald, of the sacred title of billionaire.
For Trump, OBriens trespass was far more
than a matter of misguided accounting: The
Times reporter had struck at the very heart of
the moguls innermost sense of self-worth. As

DAntonio notes, the deposition that Trump

gave in the OBrien suit is one of his most
notorious flights of fancyand it comes right
out of the Peale playbook:
When asked if he exaggerated, he said, I
think everybody does. Who wouldnt?
In an echo of Norman Vincent Peale,
he added, I like to be as positive as I
can with respect to my properties. He
explained that he was so inclined to
look on the bright side of things that
he regarded his 30 percent interest in
the West Side yards development as 50
percent. Why? Because if the seventy
percent owner puts up all of the money,
I really own more than thirty percent.
And I have always felt I own fifty percent, from that standpoint.
I have always feltthis is, for a devoted
positive thinker like Trump, the most relevant
measure of ones fortune. Pressed again during the OBrien deposition to verify his actual
net worth, Trump once more replied with an
impressionistic Peale-like word-picture:
My net worth fluctuates, and it goes
up and down with markets and with
attitudes and with my feelings. Yes,
even my own feelings, as to where the
world is, where the world is going, and
that can change rapidly from day to
day. So, yeah, even my own feelings
affect my value to myself.
To no ones surprise, Trumps suit against
OBrien was dismissed, as was a subsequent
appeal by his legal team. But in true positivethinking fashion, Trump spun the whole
proceeding as a victory, since it tied OBrien
up in a procedural limbo for years on end. I
liked it because I cost him a lot of time and
a lot of energy and a lot of money, he told
Washington Post reporters Michael Kranish
and Marc Fisher in Trump Revealed. He even
claimed that I didnt read [OBriens book],
to be honest with you. I never read it. I saw
some of the things they said. I said, Go sue
him, it will cost him a lot of money.
The ironclad self-conviction that allows
someone to claim that he doesnt need to
read a book before deeming it libelous
is psychotic. But like the rest of Trumps
fiercely defended citadel of megalomaniacal
self-regard, it is also a logical outgrowth of
Peales positive-thinking gospel.
In fact, much the same evidence-free
grandstanding is now driving an ideological wedge into the heart of the Republican
Party. Trumps die-hard adherence to Pealeism has begun to divide the GOP, crowding
out virtually every hard-and-fast doctrine

of modern American conservatism. The

party of business has casually discarded its
century-plus devotion to free trade, and
it has done so based on little more than
Trumps feeling that existing regional trade
accords have sapped Americas ability to
be great again. And Trump, of course, will
redraft them all to recover Americas competitive advantage in a flurry of deal-making
geniusyet another effusion of Trumps
positive-thinking dogmatics.
Indeed, Crippled America is notably short
on any sort of policy specifics. Instead, it
devotes long stretches of argument to the
mystic deal-making prowess that Trump
exercises by sheer force of charisma. In one
particularly flagrant example, he explains
that he will be able to renegotiate the 2015
nuclear-nonproliferation deal with Iran because I am especially good at reading a
contract. There is always a loophole.

ts true that many of Trumps excursions

into the realm of magical thinking are
more confrontational and punitive than
what is commonly associated with the
gospel of positive thinking. But in economic and political terms, the liberal theological mysticism of the positive-thinking
creed has often sparked a deeply reactionary
policy agenda.
Its worth recalling that Peale kept close
company with some of the roughest rightwing ideologues of his time. From 1942 to 45,
Peale chaired the antiNew Deal Committee
for Constitutional Government, organized
by Edward Rumely, who was once suspected
of transacting business with the German government during both world wars. Another
close ally was James W. Fifield Jr., a far-right
Congregationalist pastor from Southern California and a sworn foe of pagan stateism.
And most famously, Peale joined forces with
Billy Graham and other prominent conservative preachers to publicize the alleged Romanist menace of John F. Kennedys 1960
presidential candidacyan effort that both
name-brand ministers eventually disavowed.
In other words, Trumps trademark compound of sunny self-promotion and ugly
nativism isnt anything new for American
conservatism. Indeed, the annals of heroic
American enterprise have long doubled as a
history of metaphysical suggestibility, from
Cornelius Vanderbilts flirtations with spiritualism to the unhinged techno-utopianism of
Elon Musk. But what makes Trumps visions
of uplift distinctive is how he has customized
them in order to mobilize millions of ordinary, striving Americans behind his banner.
Trumps more notorious boondoggles

October 24, 2016

such as the litigation-addled Trump University and the failed Trump Mortgage operationare, among other things, bald-faced
efforts to cash in on the positive-thinking aura
associated with his celebrity. Trump accurately assessed the appeal of his positive-thinking
gospel long before this years election. He
deliberately timed his abortive run at the
2000 Reform Party presidential nomination
to coincide with a motivational lecture tour
he was conducting with Tony Unleash the
Power Within Robbins and other evangelists
of the gospel of success. But perhaps because
the conservative base has become so much
more restive and economically desperate over
the past decade and a half, his formulas for
personal transformation have proven wildly
effective for his 2016 run. And so, unlike the
many failed peddlers of the positive-thinking
gospel, Trump has displayed the unique gift of
seeing his success prophecies come trueat
least insofar as they concerned himself.

part from DAntonios 2015 book,

which takes pains to depict Trump as
the face of modern success, few explications of the Trump phenomenon
mine these deeper connections between the Trump insurgency and his positivethinking faith. We often encounter a familiar
rehash of Trump as the avatar of untrammeled
American ambition. The Trump brands primary product line, Kranish and Fisher tell
us in Trump Revealed, was a menu of ways
to fulfill the workingmans vision of a titans
lifestyle, and Trump sold his productscasinos, hotels, condosin part by surrounding
himself with symbols of the high life.
But to read the Trump movement as
entirely an effusion of his publicity-hungry
ego, and to frame his supporters in the working and (sinking) middle classes as gullible
victims of a bait-and-switch scheme, is to miss
the ways that Trumpism has taken root as a
perverse brand of antiestablishment protest.
Alexander Zaitchiks The Gilded Rage offers a sharp corrective to the panicked schematic analysis of Trumpism as another GOPchoreographed hoodwinking of disgruntled
grassroots conservatives. By focusing on the
Trump phenomenon as a social movement,
Zaitchik astutely shows us how Trumps mass
appeal doesnt stem so much from his person
or past rsum, but rather arises out of the
same populist discontent that the GOP leadership has stoked throughout the Obama era,
without even pretending to assuage it.
Zaitchik is perhaps more sensitive to
the question of how Trump has arisen to
meet a vast, pent-up demand for populist
outrage because hes not fixated on Trump

35

The Nation.

qua Trump. Unlike other recent chroniclers,

who home in on the vagaries of Trumps
bumpy political ascent, Zaitchik spent much
of the 2016 primary cycle talking to people
who have come to embrace the fundaments
of Donald Trumps success gospel.
Zaitchik offers close-up portraits of the
Trump insurgency in Arizona, Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New Mexico,
and California. To his great credit, he listens
while his subjects offer up complicated,
often self-questioning accounts of their idiosyncratic paths to ardent Trump support.
Theres nothing here that resembles the glib
demographic explanations-cum-dismissals
of Trumpism that are now fashionable
among liberals in the Northeast corridor.
Yes, many of Zaitchiks sources are downwardly mobile inhabitants of forgotten
American manufacturing regions. And yes,
some are old, angry white guys given to
hair-trigger outbursts against the shadowy
immigrant hordes. But few in Zaitchiks book
are outright bigots. Many are recipients of
federal or state income supports; still others
are angry beneficiaries of a deeply dysfunctional VA systeman issue that Trump made
his own on the primary stump.
One supporter at a Trump rally in West
Allis, Wisconsin, a middle-aged white woman
named Kathy, laments that the country is
more racist than ever and recounts with
great sympathy how a number of people of
color have worked at her home assisting her
special-needs son, but find themselves spread
thin by contingent work and no benefits:
These are hard-working women.They
want to earn a decent income but the policies
say, if you earn $20,000 or $25,000, youre
going to be completely cut off from food
stamps if you need them, heating assistance if
you need it, daycare assistance if you need it.
This is both a strong, if inadvertent, case
for instituting a minimum income, and a
critique of the perverse incentives of Bill
Clintons 1996 welfare overhaul. But one of
the tacit tragedies that Zaitchik documents
here is the flip side of Kathys support for
Trump: a Democratic Party that has spent
the better part of a political generation
ignoring the plight of its former workingclass and poor constituencies and feverishly
packing American manufacturing jobs off to
low-wage foreign destinations.
Indeed, one of Zaitchiks more striking
interviews is with a West Virginian named Ed
Wiley, a former mine worker committed to
stopping the spread of silica dust to the schools
in his native Coal Creek. After he failed to get
state and local officials involved, Wiley walked
some 300 miles to the DC office of his home-

state senator, Robert Byrd, in an attempt to

get some traction in Congress. (The effort
ultimately failed when Byrd, then on the verge
of retirement, insisted that he was powerless to
rein in the states coal industry.)
Wiley could have gone in two directions:
the left or the right. Guess which one he
ultimately chose? Trump will get elected,
he explains. Im for it. People in America
like his attitude. Were tired of being broke.
Peoples tired of bull crap. Jobs never should
have left here. They should have stayed in
America. Hes a businessman, and mostly
everything in the world now depends on
some kind of business.
Like several of Zaitchiks interview subjects, Wiley is attracted to Trump not because of Trumps xenophobia or dour view
of the political status quo; hes drawn because
Trump represents a return to a no-nonsense
view of Americas promise and place in the
world. We need to keep our butts at home,
stay out of these wars, Wiley says. Trump
says it like it is. And like any true positivethinking believer, Wiley adds: If he says it,
hes probably going to do it one way or another, or try to. He dont hold nothing back.
In fact, Wiley wishes that Trump would
hold back a few of his more apocalyptic
applause lines. Hes not a champion, for
example, of the fabled wall that Trump wants
to erect along our southern border. We dont
need a damn wall, Wiley says. Get along
with the people. Bring them and build more.
Help us build the country. They want to
work too. He likewise rejects Trumps lawand-order bluster on the immigration issue:
Trump should stop calling them scoundrels. Everybodys not a scoundrel. And them
people are desperate. You become a bit of a
scoundrel when you get desperate, whether
you are or not. You get hungry, youre going
to grab that donut, if you can get it.

he overall effect of Zaitchiks unrushed, painstaking interviews is to

show a Trump electorate whose membersmuch like the rest of usare
deeply anxious and concerned about
their precarious standing in a political and
economic order that hasnt given them any
grounds for hope. He also captures the power
that Trumps positive-thinking gospel has
over many Americans who find themselves
trapped in grinding socioeconomic despair.
That hopelessness does undoubtedly spill
over into spasms of racially charged invective.
More often, though, it translates into a talismanic faith in Trumps near-mythical ability to fix it. Rather than deriding Trumps
following as a collection of unseemly and

36

The Nation.

ill-informed yahoos, our elite commentariat

would be far better served by actually talking to them and considering how Trump has
become a symbol of the yearnings for hope
and possibility in the American heartland.
Many of Zaitchiks informants say
approvingly of Trump that hes a businessmani.e., a nonpolitician who knows how
to get things done when no one else will.
Trumps long record of past business failures
doesnt dampen this faith. Quite the contrary: It serves as a credential among some

of his supportersa reminder that, rich as

he may be, hes also faced hard times and
prevailed. Why not give Mr. Trump the
opportunity to bring the country back? asks
Eldon Martinez, a retired Native American
cop at a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Who better than Trump, a business
owner who has failed a couple of times?
Who knows how to pick himself up and
move forward?
Still, its surpassingly odd to hear people
describe, in painful detail, the business-

HUMAN
PRESENCE
Cameraperson, Sully, and Little Sister

by STUART KLAWANS

irsten Johnsons Cameraperson begins

with a voice on the sound tracka
disembodied whisper of delight and
discoveryas an image of wildflowers
pops up, their heads bobbing in closeup beside a farmhouses barbed-wire fence.
(The location, a title card informs you, is
Bosnia.) A flock of sheep comes trotting up,
driven along the hilly road by a shepherd on
a white horse, and Johnson, still unseen behind her camera, impulsively runs after him,
laughing and panting. Then, almost without
transition, you see the panorama of a rural
highway in Missouri. The road is deserted
and silent, the horizon low, the clouds a vast
twilight wash of purple and indigo. Suddenly,
a distant bolt of lightning splits the left side
of the frame, top to bottom, and from behind
the camera comes the sound of Johnsons
gasp. After that, the stillness resumes for a
moment, until you hear another sounda
sneezeand the picture shakes.
With that, Cameraperson becomes one of
those rare films that snap you wide awake as
soon as you begin to watch, and listen. Its
this combination of eyes and ears that puts
you on the alert: the act of contemplating
things shown in absolute facticity but unexplained juxtaposition, and the feeling of
being touched by the contingency of ambient sound, which would be scrubbed from
most films but here is left intact, to give you
a sense that the sneezer is immediately present. You seem to share her spot behind the
camera; and so, joined imaginatively with
Johnson, you dont just take in the view but,
like her, direct your eyes toward it.
Johnson has been intently paying attention for many years, having collaborated as

a cinematographer with documentarians like

Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick, and Gini Reticker (who
serves as executive producer on this film).
Cameraperson is Johnsons memoir of her life
spent in the field, which means its a whirlwind tour of five continents. Its also a deeply
thoughtful essay about the ethics and purposes of filming people, especially those who
have less money and power than the ones who
are watching; and its an intimate self-portrait,
in which an artist who ordinarily concentrates
on connecting (however temporarily) with the
subjects she documents now turns around to
establish a bond with the audience.
And yet theres a trick. The memoir has
no chronological order; the essay leaves the
authors thoughts unspoken; and the selfportrait keeps the artist out of the frame until
the end, when passing glimpses of Johnson
appear in a couple of mirrors. With reticent
ingenuity, she has composed Cameraperson as
a collage, working with editor Nels Bangerter
and coeditor Amanda Laws to piece the film
together from material shes recorded over
the past 25 years. You, too, become a partner
in this work of assemblage, as you trace recurring characters and situations and supply
unstated thematic linksan activity that adds
thinking to the functions of watching and
listening, and keeps you caffeinated.
A review cannot do this thinking for you.
(If it could, it would rob you of a wonderful
experience.) But here, for the record, is a
partial inventory of the subjects that Cameraperson touches upon: the rape, massacre, and
forced exile of Muslims during the civil war in
Bosnia, and the perseverance of Muslim peasants; the efforts of investigators to document

October 24, 2016

engineered mauling of their livelihoods and

communitiesand then see them turn to
a singularly callous and self-obsessed businessman as their appointed political savior.
Then again, these are people who have been
systematically denied any meaningful measure of political control or power over their
lives. Except, that is, the power of positive
thinkingand that grim truth will provide
ample reason for Trump and his new legion
of alt-right enablers to keep smiling well
Q
beyond the 2016 election.
war crimes in Bosnia, and of prosecutors to
present evidence in the murder of James Byrd
Jr., who was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas,
by native-born terrorists; the repercussions
of 9/11, as intimated by prison architecture
in Sanaa and at Guantnamo Bay, or experienced by a half-blind young man in Kabul, or
recorded on Edward Snowdens thumb drive,
which you see being buried in concrete at an
undisclosed location.
Johnsons source material also addresses
forms of religious practice, as witnessed in
a mosque in Herat, Afghanistan; at a spirit
dance in a tent in Nakisenyi, Uganda; and at
a public performance in Colorado Springs,
presented by white-draped girls who twirl,
circle, and bow around a wooden cross. You
see and listen to the struggles of a midwife in
an underequipped clinic in Kano, Nigeria; of
a young woman seeking an abortion at one
of the few medical offices in Alabama that
provide the service; and of women in a refugee
camp in Darfur, who can get fuel to cook their
childrens meals only by chopping down the
remaining trees in an otherwise unshielded
desert. You visit the lushly wooded landscape
where Johnson grew up in Washington State;
meet her twin children, at home in Brooklyn
and on a visit to their grandfather in Washington; and see the sheep ranch in Wyoming
where Johnsons mother lived out her last
years with Alzheimers disease.
Perhaps its not cheating to say that this
inventory, by itself, suggests that an interest
in wildflowers and sheep comes naturally
to Johnson, whether she finds them in the
western United States or Bosnia. Other connections emerge more obliquely, through
hints and passing remarks. The trainer of
a Golden Gloves boxer in Brooklyn advises
his fighter that Theres nothin wrong with
gettin close to the other guywords that
might also serve as a motto for a documentary cinematographer. Right after you hear
them, you see a newborn infant being laid in
a cradle in Kano, with the midwife laughingly saying to Johnson, Hes lookin at you.

October 24, 2016

People in the frame always have the possibility of looking back, and the filmmakers who
set up the shot cant evade the responsibilities of having drawn close, whether the consequence is to offer words of sisterly support
to a miserable young woman in Huntsville;
cry at the story of the half-blind young man
in Kabul; get stopped by military guards in
Sanaa (along with the extraordinarily brave
taxi driver whom theyve implicated); or
share an intimate moment of grooming with
a fading mother.
What comes of all this intrusion and complicity? Johnson is far too smart to offer a
simple answer; and as she demonstrates by
assembling a self-portrait made up of images
of other people, shes too modest to claim any
exculpation for herself, let alone virtue.
Still, she is willing to incorporate an
ethical and political guideline laid down by
someone else: the expatriated Syrian dissident Charif Kiwan, who is seen addressing
a media collective in the Bronx. Why do we
have to look at dead people in the media? he
asks. When you focus on death, you think
its done, its finished. Nothing to be done
but watch and Wow. Kiwans idea of useful documentation depends on maintaining
a sense of dignity amid extreme situations,
even when people have suffered terribly.
In that vein, Johnson returns, near the
end of Cameraperson, to places and people
shed filmed in Bosnia five years earlier. She
doesnt ignore the history of murdershe
drives with the war-crimes investigators to
the site of a mass gravebut her main business now is to go back to a rural family and
show them how they look in her footage.
Johnson explains to them that she was so
caught up in their ongoing lives that when
she came back to the US, she thought that
instead of having made a documentary about
ethnic cleansing, shed recorded a film about
blueberries. The family members, laughing
with her, enjoy seeing themselves on the
computer screen and suggest that in future
years, maybe Johnsons children would like
to visit, to see how peasants live.
Cameraperson can teach you something
about exposure, framing, camera placement,
and choice of subject; thats also a part of
Johnsons agenda, though a small one, which
she tends to present lightheartedly through
a series of her mistakes. The rough spots
are perhaps not so much illustrations of
the technical challenges of her profession
as they are reminders of a human presence.
They, along with the offhand comments and
ambient sounds, keep your eyes and mind
open and your spirit invigorated throughout
this remarkable film.

37

The Nation.

Cameraperson is like a latter-day Man With

a Movie Camera made by a woman, not to celebrate the thrilling power of technical progress
and social revolution (as Dziga Vertov did), but
to express sorrow, respect, and admiration for
the individual lives caught in the grand sweep
and small eddies of history. Cameraperson, too,
can be excitingbut its introductory text is
signed, appropriately, With love.

ust as 9/11 is part of the fabric of

Cameraperson, so too is it integral to
Clint Eastwoods new movie, Sully,
which by no coincidence opened in
theaters on the weekend of the 15th
anniversary of the attacks. You dont need to
search for a subtext to understand that this
dramatized account of the emergency landing
of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson
River in January 2009, with all passengers and
crew surviving, draws much of its emotional
power from the trauma of 2001. As a pilots
union representative says to Tom Hanks,
white-haired and white-mustached in the role
of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, Its been a
while since New York had news this good
especially with an airplane in it. If thats not
enough of a hint, Eastwood and screenwriter
Todd Komarnicki repeatedly show you Sullys
nightmares and waking fantasies after the
landingvisions of what might have been,
as the disabled aircraft slews into skyscrapersand during reenactments of the event,
the filmmakers insert point-of-view shots of
pedestrians, their faces tense as they once
again see a jetliner coming in much too low.
Perhaps its the need to work through an
obsessively remembered pain, as much as
to sustain the audiences interest in an event
whose outcome is known in advance, that
gives Sully its repetitive structure. As Sully
relives the episode, often in disastrous variations, and as he and his copilot (Aaron Eckhart) testify before a panel of federal investigators, you see three full-dress re-creations of
the incident, spaced at intervals throughout
the movie. On top of that, you watch four
more versions, played out in simulators and
introduced at the hearing as evidence, because
the investigators arent so sure that a landing
on the Hudson was necessary. On the level of
plot, these recurrent catastrophes eventually
lead to Sullys exoneration, as demanded by a
screenplay that posits possible condemnation
as the only element of suspense. On the more
important symbolic level, the recurrences deliver not exoneration but redemption. You live
through the shadow of September 11 again
and again, and at last theres a happy ending.
Whatever details Sully might get wrong, or
invent, this is pretty much the truth of New

Yorkers feelings about the landing on the

Hudsonand Eastwood brings them back
with a crisp, unmannered efficiency of which
few other moviemakers are capable. He isnt
always capable of it himself, as you can see
from the fussiness of recent films like Hereafter, Invictus, and his other post-9/11 movie,
the dreadful American Sniper. In Sully, though,
Eastwood is back in form, maybe because this
is the story of a man not unlike himself, an
old pro with a task at hand. The point of the
moviea point thats in productive tension
with its goal of lifting you upis that Sully
and his copilot are neither heroes (a fiction of
the media and an emotionally needy public)
nor wrongdoers (a false supposition of the investigators). All the pilots need to know about
themselves is that, with the help of many other
people, they saved 155 lives. All they have to
say about it is: We did our jobs.

ooking ahead to Halloween, weve got

yet another film that evokes 9/11 in
Zach Clarks improbably engaging Little
Sister. Set in late October 2008, when
people are putting out jack-o-lanterns
and Obama-Biden lawn signs, its the tale of
young Colleen (the diminutive Addison Timlin, whose eyes look worried and whose mouth
has a way of tying itself into knots), who fled
her crazy North Carolina family three years
earlier and is now living in New York, where
shes about to take vows as a Sister of Mercy.
Early in the film, at the request of a friend,
Colleen visits a Brooklyn performance venue,
where she meekly suffers the mockery of hipsters (theyve never seen a real nun) and seems
out of touch with the show, which involves a
burlesque destruction of the Twin Towers. But
when she tentatively returns homealerted
that her older brother Jacob (Keith Poulson)
has come back from Iraq gravely disfigured
and wont leave the guesthouse, where he
thrashes at his drum set day and nightit
turns out that mild little Colleen is herself a
veteran of satanic entertainments. To reconnect with Jacob, she dyes her hair hot pink,
puts on corpse-paint makeup, and lip-syncs
one of his favorites, Gwars Have You Seen
Me, while mutilating baby dolls.
Although Little Sisters reconciliations
might ultimately seem sentimentalIll
leave that call to you, depending on your
mood when you see itthe Gwar scene
alone is worth the price of admission. So,
too, is its sympathy with young people who
at one time wanted to play at being monsters, and now might be mistaken for them;
and so is the welcome understanding that a
true Sister of Mercy will remain just that, no
Q
matter her hair color.

38

October 24, 2016

The Nation.

Puzzle No. 3410

JOSHUA KOSMAN

AND

HENRI PICCIOTTO

1`2`3`4`5`6`7~~
`~`~`~`~`~`~`~8
9````~0````````
`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
-```````~=`````
`~`~~~`~q~`~`~`
w```e~r````````
~~~~`~`~`~`~~~~
t`y``````~u`i`o
`~`~`~`~`~~~`~`
p`````~[``]````
`~`~`~\~`~`~`~`
a````````~s````
`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
~~d````````````
ACROSS

DOWN

1 Comedian frames funny bit for singer (7)

2 Two naked males limiting insurrection (1,6)
3 Gather leftover ends and nubbins, primarily! (5)
4 $5 found between circle and winding street: thats worth
noticing (2,8)
5 Yokels fruit-flavored drink with potassium (4)
6 Discombobulate brother with an offensive (9)
7 notion, however tolerable at first (7)
8 One hundred boarding a ship to get high (6)
13 Elegant bio, revised, is up for discussion (10)
15 It involves a racket: running a foundation for
illegitimate moneymaker (9)
17 Research lymphatic features in a clever way (6)
18 United Nations breaking boxes and bars (7)
20 Unpleasant person lying about sports-league game (7)

1 Haters need! (6,2,5)

21 Likely to collapse from miserable, icy trek (7)

9 Find start of trail and wander (5)

24 Beginning to labor in long factory (5)

10 Peruvian hollers for working together (2,7)

25 Cars incomplete sound system (4)

11 Solidarity for mischievous kids gives protection from

punishment (8)
12 Accent a shoe (6)
14 Database constrains diminutive dork (5)
16 Staggered around erratically, etc., like Ronald Reagan (9)
17 Mentions singer having taken sedatives (7,2)
19 Get to a point with a radio journalist, sometimes (5)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 3409

ACROSS 1 SP + ICE 4 final letters 6 2 defs.
9 EM(PER)OR (Rome rev.) 10 M(IST)AKE
(its anag.) 12 hidden 13 anag. 14 SE +
SAME 16 CARD A MOM 19 anag.
21 2 defs. 24 pun 25 C(UR)IA 26 O + S +
MOSES 27 E(MY + LO[af])MU
28 2 defs. 29 pun 30 hidden
DOWN 1 anag. 2 I + MPOSTS (anag.)

22 Relative is held back by unfinished matter (6)

3 pun 4 HO + RACE 5 RO(MANIA)N

23 That mans fear is originating in Mexico, perhaps (8)

11 S(WIND)LE[d] 15 ME(AD)OWS

26 White onion, maybe? Thats an idea! (5,4)

27 How cute sportsman in Oakland halfway kept up (5)
28 Transmitted germ of inspiration by telepathy and with
feeling (13)

7 [l]ANA + H(E)IM 8 initial letters

17 M + ARM + A + DUKE 18 anag.
20 anag. 22 PAR(S)LEY 23 A + GREED
24 hidden 25 COMET[o]

SPICE~HERB~SAGE
N~M~A~O~O~~~N~J
EMPEROR~MISTAKE
E~O~L~A~A~W~H~C
ZESTY~CONDIMENT
E~T~~~E~I~N~I~~
SESAME~CARDAMOM
A~~~E~N~N~L~~~A
TARRAGON~PEPPER
~~E~D~N~A~~~A~M
SEASONING~CURIA
T~L~W~S~R~O~S~D
OSMOSES~EMMYLOU
R~A~~~U~E~E~E~K
MINT~SEED~THYME

Kosman & Picciotto explain what theyre up to at TheNation

.com/article/solving-nations-cryptic-crosswords/.

The Nation(ISSN 0027-8378) is published weekly (except for 18 double issues, published the second and last weeks of January, the last week of March through the last week of September, and the second and fourth weeks of December;each double issue counts as two issues delivered to subscribers)by The Nation Company, LLC 2016in the USA by The Nation
Company, LLC, 520 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018; (212) 209-5400. Washington Bureau: Suite 308, 110 Maryland Avenue NE, Washington, DC 20002; (202) 546-2239. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription orders, changes of address, and all subscription inquiries: The Nation, PO Box 433308, Palm Coast,
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PO Box 433308, Palm Coast, FL 32143-0308. Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

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