The
Minimized
Life

For the majority of us , consuming art is a destination appointment .
Museums and galleries put on physical demonstrations of an artist ’ s importance , arduously assembling exhibitions of figures like Hilma af Klint or Agnes Martin , so that we noncollectors can experience the auratic objects as they are meant to be , in person .
The wavering gridded lines of a Martin canvas or Klint ’ s color-saturated abstractions are most striking directly in front of you .
There ’ s a sense of devastation in seeing galleries closed since mid-March , when major American cities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ infrastructure of curators , exhibitions , and openings , so much of our context for understanding art disappears .
Artists whose work takes on a life outside of the immediate art ecosystem are few—the likes of Piet Mondrian , Georgia O ’ Keeffe , Andy Warhol .
The influence and legacy of their art can be found just as easily in the culture at large as in a museum , in the ways they have already changed our perceptions .
Mondrian ’ s utopian mingling of the mechanical and human ; O ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flowers ; Warhol ’ s heightening of mass entertainment and lowering of high art—we experience these without leaving the house , just by looking around .
Donald Judd is perhaps the most influential , least lauded artist in this category .
The last exhibition I managed to see before quarantine was the Museum of Modern Art ’ s “ Judd , ” which opened on March 1 and was scheduled to run through mid-July .
( It closed indefinitely when Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a stay-at-home order three weeks later . )
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the United States in 30 years , surprising for an artist who left a mark not only on avant-garde art , but also on twenty-first–century lifestyle in general , from the furniture we covet to the apartments we live in and the clothes we aspire to wear .
If you ’ ve been to an austere coffee shop , stored books in an IKEA shelf , or seen a condo advertised as an “ artist ’ s loft , ” you ’ ve encountered a bit of Judd ’ s legacy .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ he became a kind of Martha Stewart of the avant-garde , a tastemaker ’ s tastemaker .
Both through the artwork he produced and the grandly bohemian home and studio spaces he designed for himself , Judd created a template for modern cultural life , an elegant vision of postindustrial omnivorousness .
His influence can be seen in our domestic environments , particularly in cities , where old hospitals and warehouses now serve as luxury condos , sites not for care of the sick or for manufacturing goods but for precisely choreographed leisure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part in transforming Minimalism from a radical art movement into what we now call a lifestyle brand : a commodified identity and a recognizable , Instagrammable style .

After a sojourn in Korea with the U.S. Army, Judd studied art in the 1950s under the GI Bill. His own art practice, sustained by a side-career of writing art criticism, consisted of derivative Abstract Expressionist paintings that gradually reduced into linear abstractions in saturated solid colors. Then the two-dimensional image began projecting out from the wall, in a reverse of Ab-Ex’s race toward total flatness. Judd embedded found material in his paintings, like a baking pan that makes a shiny divot in a field of black in a work from 1961. The works jump off the wall into three dimensions in the box structures that Judd fabricated with the help of his father (an executive who also happened to be an experienced carpenter) and painted a blazing, inorganic cadmium red.
There’s a poignancy to these early pieces, the handmade joints and seams straining to look more industrial than they are. This vanishes in the mid-1960s, when Judd begins to outsource his work to local manufacturers like Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties. The boxes that result are slick, gleaming, and perfect, such as a smaller brass number at MoMA from 1968. You could almost call it cute; it looks to us like a pedestal in a Prada boutique only because retail later adopted (or appropriated) Judd’s style. In the ’60s, such work was perceived as alienating and obtuse. Critics argued over whether to describe the work of Judd and his compatriots like Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, and Yayoi Kusama as “Boring Art” or “Literal Art.”
Cantankerous and reclusive as Judd was, he became a kind of Martha Stewart of
the avant-garde,
a tastemaker’s tastemaker.
The term Minimalism came from the British philosopher Richard Wollheim’s 1965 essay “Minimal Art.” The work contained “minimal art-content,” Wollheim wrote. If Abstract Expressionism moved from figuration to nonobjective abstraction, then Judd et al. were going even further. Painters like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning still purported to express stuff with their canvases—messy things like love, disgust, nature. The whole point of Minimalism was that it didn’t express. There was no narrative, no feeling to communicate, no lesson to teach. “What you see is what you see,” as Stella once said. Instead of dramatic brushstrokes or extravagant symbolism, artistic decisions were limited to a premade paint color, the size of a box, or the finish of a material.


Rebuilding the Constitution

In May 1987 , Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered a speech at the annual seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Association .
That year marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the Constitution ’ s drafting in Philadelphia , and celebrations were planned nationwide under the guidance of former Chief Justice Warren Burger , who had resigned from the court a year earlier to orchestrate the proceedings .
But not everyone saw reason for patriotic rejoicing .
As he did so often during his final years on the court , Marshall dissented .
“ I can not accept this invitation , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘ fixed ’ at the Philadelphia Convention , ” he told the audience .
“ Nor do I find the wisdom , foresight , and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound .
To the contrary , the government they devised was defective from the start , requiring several amendments , a Civil War , and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government , and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights , we hold as fundamental today.
” Marshall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to those changes .
Even before joining the Supreme Court , he played a pivotal role as a civil rights lawyer in redefining and expanding the Constitution ’ s protections .
“ When contemporary Americans cite ‘ the Constitution , ’ they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago , ” he said .
Instead of celebration , he counseled a more humble and sober reflection on how Americans had fought , lived , and died to create the modern Constitution .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ relevant today .
The past three decades , which span my entire life , have shown the limits and flaws of the Constitution of 1787 .
Congress is a pale shadow of its past self .
Between partisan gerrymandering of the House and widening geographic disparities in the Senate , the two chambers can barely be called “ representative ” of the people they ostensibly serve .
The average legislator , beholden to the demands of loose campaign-finance laws , spends more time dialing for dollars than crafting major legislation or overseeing the @ @ @

The juxtaposition between state and federal responses forced me to rethink my approach to American federalism. I cannot argue with a straight face today that the federal government should wield a greater share of the states’ allocated powers while it dramatically fails to show it could properly use them. At the same time, I still favor a strong federal government and an expansive reading of the Commerce Clause so that national solutions can be applied to national problems. And I cannot ignore that for most of the last quarter-millennium, it was the states that most often undermined Americans’ civil rights and restrained their right to democratic participation.
To that end, I would only offer three changes to the current balance of powers. First, I would strengthen a little-known provision of the Constitution of 1787 that never reached its full potential: the Guarantee Clause. The short proviso declares that the federal government “shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.” In other words, states could not become monarchies or theocracies or direct democracies; they had to adhere to small-r republican principles. In 1849, the Supreme Court ruled that this “guarantee” could only be enforced by Congress and not the courts. By allowing courts to hear challenges against state practices that violate the Guarantee Clause, Americans would gain another tool to challenge more subtle forms of state-level political repression.
The new Constitution should explicitly state that the right to vote cannot be deprived for any reason whatsoever.
Second, I would constitutionalize Section 1983. The provision, whose shorthand name comes from the portion of the U.S. Code in which it resides, comes from a Reconstruction-era law that targeted the original Ku Klux Klan and its allies. Section 1983 allows Americans to sue state and local officials in federal court for violating their civil rights under color of law. It is, at its best, a mighty weapon with which ordinary people can bring abusive police officers and authoritarian officials to justice. Over the past half-century, however, the Supreme Court has undermined its efficacy with a doctrine known as “qualified immunity,” which often amounts in practice to absolute immunity for all but the most egregious violations. Enshrining Section 1983 in constitutional text would restore one of the great safeguards of American liberty to its proper status.


newrepublic--2020-05-15--America Is Not as Resilient as It Thinks It Is

This year ’ s Atlantic hurricane season could be one of the most active on record , according to models from Pennsylvania State University ’ s Earth System Science Center .
Hurricane season officially begins on June 1 but has been creeping earlier in recent years : Warm waters off the Florida coast this weekend could produce the season ’ s first tropical system ahead of schedule .
And all while the country is still dealing with a global pandemic .
It ’ s not groundbreaking at this point to say the United States was unprepared for the coronavirus .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ White House ’ s outbreak preparedness infrastructure , and our health care system makes seeking treatment a trial even for those lucky enough to have insurance .
But the country ’ s problems meeting this kind of crisis also go beyond the incompetence of any one presidential administration .
Staggering racial inequality , a bloated for-profit health care system , and American politicians ’ apparent allergy to international collaboration aren ’ t just moral failings : They ’ re also vulnerabilities .
The coronavirus represents a warning shot .
Future decades may bring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we ’ ll navigate in a post-Covid-19 world will involve rising temperatures in one way or another : further zoonotic disease outbreaks , declining crop yields , rising seas , and extreme weather , to name just a few of the more obvious examples .
Beyond their immediate impact , these climate impacts will drive profound changes in where and how people live .
In the U.S. alone , an estimated five million Americans have already been either temporarily or permanently displaced by weather-related disasters since 2016 , according to the Internal Displacement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to collide in troubling ways with other crises hurtling toward us .
A full one-fifth of U.S. residents will be over the age of 65 by 2030 , a “ Silver Tsunami ” that will ripple through everything from the housing market to the small business sector as the ranks of retirees grows .
Nursing homes have been a hot spot for the coronavirus , exposing how little thought has been put into how to care for an aging population and how few protections there are for the people whose job it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home employees have filed more than 500 complaints in recent months with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and state workplace safety boards about the lack of on-the-job protections .
Elderly Americans are similarly some of the most vulnerable to extreme heat , both because their bodies are more sensitive to heat stress and because many older people are socially isolated , without the support networks to help them reach cooler locations .
Seventy-two percent of those who perished in the Chicago heat wave of 1995 were older than 65 ; and as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were disproportionately Black .

A full one-fifth of U.S. residents will be over the age of 65 by 2030, a “Silver Tsunami” that will ripple through everything from the housing market to the small business sector as the ranks of retirees grows. Nursing homes have been a hot spot for the coronavirus, exposing how little thought has been put into how to care for an aging population and how few protections there are for the people whose job it is to look after them; nursing home employees have filed more than 500 complaints in recent months with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and state workplace safety boards about the lack of on-the-job protections. Elderly Americans are similarly some of the most vulnerable to extreme heat, both because their bodies are more sensitive to heat stress and because many older people are socially isolated, without the support networks to help them reach cooler locations. Seventy-two percent of those who perished in the Chicago heat wave of 1995 were older than 65; and as with this pandemic, those who died were disproportionately Black.
Covid-19 has also highlighted the crisis of care that feminist scholars and groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance have long warned about. Organized society rests on work performed inordinately by women, people of color, and immigrants, much of it done for free by family members or by workers who lack basic labor protections. “Overworked, underpaid and ignored, domestic workers and caregivers are too often asked to put the needs of the families who employ them over their own and those of their families,” NDWA Director Ai-Jen Poo wrote recently in The New York Times, pointing to the care workers who stayed behind to tend to elderly clients in the deadly wildfires that have swept California these last few years. “Without access to health care, paid time off, or job security, they must navigate crisis and disaster time and again, without a safety net.”


newrepublic--2020-05-15--The Great’s Empowerment Problem

The Great’s Empowerment Problem

Though better known for partitioning Poland and touring Potemkin villages , Catherine the Great was also an accomplished writer , and not just of political tracts .
She wrote fairy tales for her grandchildren , libretti for nine operas , and a book of proverbs , not to mention her memoirs ( which took up three volumes ) .
Catherine was particularly accomplished , however , as a writer of comedies : She wrote 14 in all , including an entire trilogy of plays condemning the rise of the Masons in Russia , two of which carried the unsubtle titles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ published a satirical journal under the pen name “ Babushka ” ( grandmother ) , where she mocked ( or instructed , she would say ) courtiers on manners and carried out literary disputes with her critics about the role of satire and comedy in rooting out vice and sparking reform .
In her correspondence with the luminaries of the Enlightenment , she similarly encouraged wit and even dirty jokes .
In praising her for getting vaccinated against smallpox ( a very “ modern ” and risky decision at the time ) , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inoculated with less fuss than a nun taking an enema.
” That is why when I first saw the trailer for Hulu ’ s new series , The Great , I was excited to learn it was a comedy , and from the screenwriter of The Favourite , Tony McNamara , no less .
Last year ’ s HBO drama series Catherine the Great , starring Helen Mirren , felt over-serious and sentimental , lacking the sense of the ridiculous and over-the-top pageantry that dominated Catherine ’ s court ( and royalty on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That show took Catherine ’ s self-fashioning as an “ enlightened despot ” at its word , rather than acknowledge how hypocritical and self-congratulatory the empress in fact was .
The real Catherine did things like celebrate her smallpox inoculation not with quiet reflection about the benefits of modern medicine but by having a ballet performed in the court in her honor .
It was called Prejudice Overcome , and it involved dancing chimera ( symbolizing smallpox ) being stopped from eating children by Minerva ( a stand-in for Catherine ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the bravado and bombast for Peter III , Catherine ’ s husband , played by a dashing Nicholas Hoult ( The Great is proudly and profoundly ahistorical , but this upgrade for the famously homely Peter is especially jarring to anyone familiar with the record ) .
Elle Fanning ’ s Catherine is a young , bookish , doe-eyed princess , eager to tell everyone she meets about the works of Rousseau .
When she does decide to wrest power from her husband , it is with the intention to ascend the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and senseless wars , to erect schools and an art museum .
It will be a “ coup of ideas , ” she insists to her co-conspirators .
The dirty work of regime change , the realpolitik of running an empire , and the good jokes are largely left to the other characters .
Why has Hollywood suddenly taken an interest in Russia ’ s longest-serving female ruler ?
The appearance of two series about her in six months could be coincidental—a symptom of “ Peak TV ” and the breakneck pace at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
However , the near-identical framing of these shows , wherein Catherine serves as a fresh feminist antidote to the cruelty and caprices of men in power , suggests empress-mania is more about contemporary political frustrations with sexism in politics than the intrigues of imperial Russia .
( Catherine was actually the fifth woman to sit on the country ’ s throne in the eighteenth century . )
The Great , for all its delights , feels too anxious to convince us that women make better , more competent rulers , a baseless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ higher standard and gives viewers less to laugh at .

Though better known for partitioning Poland and touring Potemkin villages, Catherine the Great was also an accomplished writer, and not just of political tracts. She wrote fairy tales for her grandchildren, libretti for nine operas, and a book of proverbs, not to mention her memoirs (which took up three volumes). Catherine was particularly accomplished, however, as a writer of comedies: She wrote 14 in all, including an entire trilogy of plays condemning the rise of the Masons in Russia, two of which carried the unsubtle titles The Deceiver and The Deceived. She published a satirical journal under the pen name “Babushka” (grandmother), where she mocked (or instructed, she would say) courtiers on manners and carried out literary disputes with her critics about the role of satire and comedy in rooting out vice and sparking reform. In her correspondence with the luminaries of the Enlightenment, she similarly encouraged wit and even dirty jokes. In praising her for getting vaccinated against smallpox (a very “modern” and risky decision at the time), Voltaire remarked that she had gotten “inoculated with less fuss than a nun taking an enema.”
That is why when I first saw the trailer for Hulu’s new series, The Great, I was excited to learn it was a comedy, and from the screenwriter of The Favourite, Tony McNamara, no less. Last year’s HBO drama series Catherine the Great, starring Helen Mirren, felt over-serious and sentimental, lacking the sense of the ridiculous and over-the-top pageantry that dominated Catherine’s court (and royalty on the whole, for that matter). That show took Catherine’s self-fashioning as an “enlightened despot” at its word, rather than acknowledge how hypocritical and self-congratulatory the empress in fact was. The real Catherine did things like celebrate her smallpox inoculation not with quiet reflection about the benefits of modern medicine but by having a ballet performed in the court in her honor. It was called Prejudice Overcome, and it involved dancing chimera (symbolizing smallpox) being stopped from eating children by Minerva (a stand-in for Catherine).


newrepublic--2020-05-15--America’s Eternal Stockholm Syndrome

America’s Eternal Stockholm Syndrome

At some point during the pandemic ( what is time anymore , anyway ? )
, Sweden—a high-tax , welfare-loving country where citizens generally seem to like and listen to their government—found a surprising libertarian fan base in the United States .
To marshal support for reopening the economy in the U.S. , conservatives started touting Sweden ’ s coronavirus response , which has largely foregone the type of lockdown measures practiced in other countries and instead relies on people to practice social distancing measures on their own .
Ben Shapiro , Tucker Carlson , and other talking heads on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ find mask orders more objectionable than widespread death , praised Sweden ’ s seemingly laissez-faire approach to virus containment .
“ Bottom line , Sweden accepts the concept of ‘ trade-offs , ’ something that many who attack President Donald Trump ’ s response to the coronavirus do not seem to understand , ” went one typical Fox News analysis .
As it happens , the trade-off is dying .
Currently , Sweden has a much higher coronavirus death rate than its Scandinavian neighbors and several other European countries that have adopted lockdown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most of the claims about Sweden ’ s supposed miracle approach have been exaggerated or are false .
Newt Gingrich ’ s insistence , for instance , that Sweden had “ done a much better job with much less economic damage ” isn ’ t true : Its economy is suffering .
And as public health experts and Swedish officials have pointed out , Sweden ’ s entire approach , for better or for worse , was contingent on a level of public trust in the government that simply doesn ’ t exist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aided by the country ’ s robust public services , including universal health care , and its relatively healthy population .
It should be underscored : Those on the right who have touted Sweden ’ s approach are not championing an increased trust in government or an enhanced social safety net .
In this way , the coronavirus lockdown battles are just the latest iteration of the curious way that Sweden and its Nordic neighbors continually figure in the American political imagination .
The Nordic countries have been the object of a recurring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the U.S. , which have , at various times , both seized upon the region ’ s unique style of governance and relatively high standard of living in order to prove a point about our own country .
While the right ’ s invocation of Sweden generally relies on fantasies of cultural superiority , the left has its own version of Nordic mythology .
On the left , the Nordic countries are routinely held up as paragons of successful social democratic welfare states that afford their residents a wealth of high-quality , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , health care , and education .
Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders , for instance , often praised Denmark and other Nordic countries on the stump , invoking their successes so frequently that his 2016 Democratic primary opponent , Hillary Clinton , eventually quipped , “ I love Denmark , but we are not Denmark.
” In the same vein , left-leaning publications like The Nation have run a number of popular explainers and essays on the differences in quality of life in the Nordic countries and the U.S. , where our paper-thin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vulnerable .

When it comes to fact, Matt Bruenig, the founder of the think tank People’s Policy Project, or 3P, has studied the ins and outs of the Nordic welfare model for over a decade. (“If we want to achieve low levels of poverty, and we want to create equality, we should find the countries that have been the most successful,” he said in a recent talk for Jacobin magazine.) Currently, a number of the think tank’s policy recommendations are fashioned after the Nordic countries’ social supports. For instance, 3P’s Family Fun Pack proposal—which includes 36 weeks of paid parental leave, free childcare, free pre-K, and a monthly check for families with children, among other benefits—“was basically copied straight from Finland, with a few changes here and there to make more sense in the U.S. context,” Bruenig told me. Likewise, the organization’s Leisure Agenda, which advocates increased work-life balance through mandated vacation, mandated sick leave, and generous unemployment benefits, was drawn, in part, from the Nordic model.
In recent years, some commentators have disputed whether that particular model is a type of socialism, as Bernie Sanders has sometimes suggested. According to Bruenig, while conservatives used to argue that the Nordic states were socialist—and therefore much worse off than the U.S.—there’s since been a push instead to reclassify them as free-market success stories in light of those countries’ high rates of growth and employment. (“Finland Is a Capitalist Paradise” was the title of one popular New York Times op-ed last year.) “It is true that they’re less socialist than they used to be, especially in Sweden, but they’re still way, way beyond where we are,” Bruenig said. To emulate the so-called capitalist paradise of Finland, as he wrote in 2019, the U.S. “would need to not only build a social-democratic welfare state, but also socialize $35 trillion of assets, unionize 120 million workers, and move 25 million workers into the public sector.”
For the most part, while conservatives’ fantasies of Swedish libertarianism or a uniquely Scandinavian love of education—let alone far-right fever-dreams of a bygone Nordic purity—are forms of cultural fetishization, the left’s Nordic interest seems mostly inspired by the simple evidence that countries can create economies that don’t guarantee wide-scale misery. And while many still tend to overidealize the region—Scandinavia has its own problems with the far right and anti-immigrant policies—the welfare policy aspirations seem at least rooted in something like reality.


newrepublic--2020-05-15--A Beach Read With Teeth

A Beach Read With Teeth

Before picking up her new novel , All Adults Here , I did not think that Emma Straub was for me .
A Vogue profile in 2016 described meeting up with the writer “ in a tiny café ” in Cobble Hill—the most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn— “ near where she and her husband recently bought a home.
” Add the fact that Straub has written several novels about rich New Yorkers and owns a bookstore called Books Are Magic , also in Cobble Hill , and it was difficult to tell where Emma Straub ended and her books began @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Or so I thought .
All Adults Here turns out to be her third excellent book about rich , flawed families struggling to stay together .
Without having read her work , I had fallen prey to precisely the kind of confusions Straub pitches her novels at : the weird and anxious confines of New York psychology .
Her best works feature characters who are ever so slightly clueless about their own privilege , complainers who enjoy comfortable positions in this maddening torrent of a city , where most people swim against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent ’ s boats .
Straub began her examination of New York ’ s upper classes with The Vacationers ( 2015 ) , about a Manhattan family on holiday in Spain .
Next came Modern Lovers ( 2016 ) , set in Ditmas Park and starring trendy restaurateurs , a real estate agent , and a shiftless dad living on his family ’ s money .
Neither are heavyweight novels , but they pull off a difficult trick : fluffy enough to devour in a few subway rides , yet built on themes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Straub ’ s speciality is the revelation of long-kept family secrets at moments of crisis .
All Adults Here takes place in the Hudson Valley , a corridor of vacation spots for New Yorkers escaping the city .
The town , Clapham , is fictional , but small and artsy and white and famous for its antiques , like Hudson or Beacon .
At the center of the novel is the Strick family , whose three generations— “ Gammy ” Astrid ; her kids Nicky , Porter , and Elliott ; plus their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ( where Astrid still lives ) to deal with an escalating series of disasters .

All the kids have their own problems, not that they share much with Astrid. Porter is pregnant and doesn’t want to repeat her mother’s coldness with her own child. Elliott is a taut wire of frustration and disappointed hopes, bullied by his own hyperactive twin boys. Nicky is fine, but his daughter Cecelia most certainly is not. Why else would she be sent to live with Astrid for the summer? Straub flips between the internal monologues of the various Stricks, but the novel’s core is Astrid’s regret over her parenting decisions and her wonderment at how the best-laid plans fail. “That was the problem with being part of a family,” Astrid thinks to herself. “Everyone could mean well and it could still be a disaster.”
Straub has a facility for describing homes and buildings, as when she notes that a nursing home for the elderly is “shaped like a tarantula, with a fat middle and legs extending outward, each hall occupied by residents’ rooms.” The metaphor also works for the Strick family, whose problems seem to radiate from Astrid. She is a heart-freezing mix of hypercompetence (“She could name all the plants in her garden and identify trees and birds”) and emotional distance (“she did not invite intimacy the way Porter had observed in other mothers, the kind who would let their children sleep in their bed after a bad dream or get their hair wet in a swimming pool”).
That is a feature of Astrid’s class, but also her gender and upbringing. All Adults Here is a portrait of norms at work in a little, white town as much as it is about one single family, and over the novel’s course Straub builds a strong critique of the ways “respectability” can breed shame. The frantic plot is set at roughly the pace of a Mad Max movie, but that’s what keeps things entertaining.


newrepublic--2020-05-15--Jared Kushner Is a National Disaster

Jared Kushner Is a National Disaster

Trump administration villains flit in and out of the limelight depending on what particular disaster is most visibly unfolding at any moment .
Sometimes these are members of his Cabinet , receiving more coverage because of their corruption or because they ’ re suddenly in charge of baby jails ; many fade away because they end up resigning , once Trump gets sick of the bad press or feels they ’ re insufficiently loyal .
Others stick around permanently , like Stephen Miller , absorbing ( or perhaps feeding off ) wave after wave of criticism .
Perhaps the most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the White House walls has been Jared Kushner , the president ’ s son-in-law , who , it is always necessary to point out , had no experience in anything like government before being catapulted to one of the most important roles in the administration .
Kushner may resemble the kind of overgrown intern who arrives at the office on the insistence of his powerful Daddy ( in-law ) and sticks around far too long .
He is instantly recognizable to anyone who has worked with a nepotism hire as the insufferable product @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only rich people and their dull children ( and those who flatter them ) .
Yet it ’ s long past time to recognize that the worst thing about Kushner is not how he stumbled headlong into this powerful position , but the damage he ’ s done since arriving .
The role he has played during the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates how he ’ s no mere hapless victim of nepotistic circumstance , but an active villain in his own right .
Much attention has been focused on Kushner ’ s status as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Trump ’ s right-hand man , for good reason .
He is easily mocked as a J .
Crew mannequin brought to life , or perhaps as a vain prince about to be cursed by a wizard in a forest , or just as a dickhead in a flak jacket .
He has Big Draco Malfoy Energy .
But this kind of criticism can accidentally imply that had Trump chosen a close adviser for the “ right ” reasons , that adviser would necessarily be better for the country .
We know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after all , picked Stephen Miller .
He has picked countless corrupt and self-serving aides whose goal in government , if it isn ’ t entirely to enrich themselves , is to make life harder for various classes of oppressed people while making it easier and more profitable for the uberwealthy .
Kushner may have gotten there through marriage , but he ’ s not so different from the rest of the office .
Early on in the pandemic , The Spectator reported that Kushner had asked his brother ’ s father-in-law , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the pandemic : Kloss , an emergency room doctor , in turn asked a 22,000-member Facebook group , “ Bad Ass Fucking Emergency Room Doctor , ” for help .
“ Please only serious responses , ” Kloss wrote .
In another post , Kloss asked for a “ name and contact for Disaster Medicine leader.
” We can only hope that one of his fellow doctors suggested Dr. Nick Riviera , reachable at 555-NICK .

Worse still, there is much evidence to suggest that Kushner’s failure to respond to the pandemic is intentional. The Financial Times reported this week that Kushner argued early on that “testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it.” This is not a case of helpless incapability but of actively choosing a more deadly path because of his ideology and his class status. According to The New York Times, Kushner was “deeply involved” in pushing Trump to announce a Google website for coronavirus testing which, as we now know, never existed. Is it incompetence to tell the president to announce a website that doesn’t exist, or is it a malicious effort to distract from the reality of our situation—and increase his own power?
Another report from The New York Times laid bare the way Kushner’s “volunteer force,” made up of Ivy League grads and big tech alums in their twenties who ended up forwarding completely fraudulent offers of supplies to the administration, can fairly be seen as an example of bumbling incompetence. But it was also a choice that Kushner made. It’s not just that he is too stupid to use the resources that are right in front of him; he actively believes that people who come from investment firms and consulting groups are inherently better than government bureaucrats who have spent decades applying their relevant experience to solving problems. Kushner seems to view the country’s needs as an opportunity for him to enlarge his personal LinkedIn network. So while the rest of us are experiencing the coronavirus pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, Kushner has treated it as a rosy opportunity to expand his own power in the administration and make new business connections. He’s working on a long-term project to enrich himself once his time in Washington ends, while the simple act of buying groceries becomes a deadly prospect for both shoppers and store-workers.
As Adam Serwer and I have both argued, the Trump administration’s determination to reopen the economy despite mounting deaths, and without building the kind of testing capacity that could allow us to move toward a safe reopening, can be attributed to the fact that the pandemic is killing black and Hispanic people at a far greater rate than white people. It is this indifference that explains why Jared Kushner might be more worried about spooking the stock market than ramping up testing, or stacking his little task force with Wall Street brats who are too young to have used a landline phone. All of the death and misery is theoretical to him—until it reaches the Hamptons, at least.


The Minimized Life


newrepublic--2020-05-16--White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching

We are presently embroiled in a redundant public debate about whether it ’ s appropriate to watch and/or circulate images of black people being murdered by the police and other , nonstate killers .
The videos , like that of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery , are being watched and circulated regardless of the persuasiveness of arguments pleading otherwise , and I think this question— “ Should we watch ?
” —now misses the point .
Rather , why are these videos being watched ?
Specifically , why do white people continue to make cases for watching them ?
Central @ @ @ @ @ @ @ videos is the idea that viewership begets justice or somehow emphasizes the notion that black life does matter and that black life is grievable ( never mind that black people have long been in a near-constant state of grief and mourning over the violent negations of the lives of our kin ) .
This reasoning was the centerpiece of an article recently published in The Intercept arguing that without these videos , “ there is rarely public and official recognition that the taking of a black life , simply because of the person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” One version of this logic , expressed in the more neutral language of “ accountability ” or reportage , acts as justification for its wide circulation and repetition through traditional media .
But the translation of passive witnessing into structural ( that is to say , punitive ) justice is an idea that is as misguided as it is old : This was the very rationale deployed in campaigns against colonial atrocities in , for example , the Congo Free State in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries .
Photographs taken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Congolese natives shackled in chains or with severed hands or feet , the latter of which was the bullet-saving punishment for enslaved laborers who failed to meet collection quotas for rubber , ivory , or palm oil .
The images were released by the Congo Reform Association ( whose American branch counted W.E.B .
du Bois and Mark Twain among its members ) as an exemplar of abolitionist witnessing in a case against King Leopold II ’ s brutal management of the colony as his personal plantation .
Because of the international propaganda @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and complementary efforts , Leopold lost his colony in 1908 .
But a hyperfocus on the logics that arguably facilitated the success of the missionary ’ s visual campaign obscures a proper situating of the humanitarian photograph in the white imaginary .
In addition to the nebulous idea of “ awareness-raising , ” which we ’ ll return to , the humanitarian image does two important things .
First , it permits an affective distancing through the production of a far removed “ other.
” By making known the suffering of said “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s own ( what one might begin to call altruism or empathy ) , “ this suffering is occluded by the other ’ s obliteration , ” writes Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection : Terror , Slavery , and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America .
Where empathy exists , it is not sufficiently urgent to move white people to actually seek to alleviate witnessed suffering .
It serves , actually , as a reinscription of white supremacy : a reification of the boundary between the white self and the black “ others @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the enforcement of race through public violence .

We’ve seen antebellum images of enslaved black people whose backs were marred by whip marks, we’ve seen Bill Hudson’s photographs of black protesters being attacked by high-powered fire hoses and police dogs at the command of Bull Connor. We’ve seen pictures of the rubble of the 16th Street Baptist Church after it was bombed by the Klan in 1963 and the smoldering remnants of the MOVE commune after it was bombed by a Philadelphia police helicopter in 1985. We saw the recordings of Rodney King being tasered and assaulted by four Los Angeles police officers in 1991 (as well as the riots that followed their acquittals), Oscar Grant being pinned down and shot in the back on a train platform in 2009, and Eric Garner being choked to death on a Staten Island sidewalk in 2014. If the argument is that witnessing this violence is enough or is necessary to galvanize action, my single question is when? When will these acts become too unacceptable to simply continue to watch? In how many more decades, and after how many more dead?
Violence against black people occupies an understatedly important place of pleasure in the white racial imaginary, evidenced by the countless depictions of grinning whites and scenes of afternoon leisure in twentieth-century lynching photographs. Some attendants of these lynchings scrambled to collect burnt clothing, pieces of bone, or tufts of hair; Leigh Raiford wrote that “lynchings incorporated elements of ancient traditions and antebellum nostalgia.” So, too, do the video-recorded successors that are bookmarked on our phones and computers. Whiteness transmutes atrocity images into ephemera, into a thing to be collected, more quickly than we would like to imagine. Arguably, the almost industrial production of these lynching videos—circulated in loops on cable news, shared widely across social media—de-exceptionalizes the event. The pattern of learning a new hashtagged name and face and collectively petitioning for some semblance of punitive justice is heartbreakingly banal and psychologically depleting. (And what of the many we never come to know?) It does not sufficiently push a critical mass of people toward a crisis of racial consciousness, and it instead feeds into a piercingly mundane echolalia that flows seamlessly into the tapestry of American inequality.
The killings, in a way, become a macabre method of marking social and political time. Trayvon Martin’s murder radicalized many of us in 2012, and Renisha McBride was killed in November 2013, just a few months after the creation of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The fatal shooting of Michael Brown set into motion the Ferguson uprisings of 2014, and the in-custody killing of Freddie Gray animated protests in Baltimore the following year. In 2016, Eric Reid and Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the National Anthem in protest of these racist deaths, and the latter was functionally blackballed from the NFL. The quarantine-time killings of Arbery and Breonna Taylor, who was killed in March when police entered her apartment during a no-knock warrant, remind black people that even a pandemic will not stem the tide of anti-black murders and that, in fact, violent racism makes many black people rightfully wary of wearing necessary protective face masks in public.


newrepublic--2020-05-18--The Deranged Civic Religion of the Lockdown Protesters

Over the weekend , The Washington Post published a chilling description of the first day of reopened business at a mall in an upscale suburb of Atlanta , Georgia .
Bored rich people wandered the aisles of Anthropologie and Crate & Barrel , pawing at the wares , some with no masks or hand sanitizer in sight .
One woman getting a manicure said , “ I went to the antique mall yesterday on Highway 9 and it was just like—it was like freedom .
We have to get out.
” Everyone who is lucky enough not to have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home , but one has to laugh at the idea that American Freedom is visiting the antique mall on Highway 9 .
Then again , maybe she ’ s right : Maybe that is American Freedom .
The right to visit whatever business you please is not one enshrined in the Constitution .
There is no constitutional right to go to Arby ’ s .
But from the start , lockdown protesters claimed their constitutional rights were being trampled by the stay-at-home orders .
Protest signs in Southern California read : “ Pandemics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Constitutional rights !
!
Freedom over fear , ” and “ No Liberty , No Life , Reopen California.
” My colleague Matt Ford is not the only one suggesting tweaks to America ’ s foundational documents , it seems : The angry bourgeoisie of the “ reopen America ” movement has invented an entirely new category of civil rights .
On Monday , in New Jersey , a protester at a gym that opened despite the shutdown order held a sign that said , “ The constitution is essential , ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Right to work/Right to worship/Right to free speech/Right to be free.
” A protester in Washington said : “ I lost my job as a bartender and now I live on way less income , and I ’ m upset that my constitutional rights are being trampled all over.
” Advocates of a federal job guarantee will be thrilled to hear that there is a constitutional right to a job .
This line of criticism might make a little more sense if the issue in question was the federal government enforcing a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their homes .
But there are no patrols of soldiers forcing citizens to remain indoors , certainly not among the white and wealthy .
Take Newport Beach , California , for example : The city said on April 3 that it would not enforce Governor Gavin Newsom ’ s stay-at-home order , saying the governor “ expects Californians to do the right thing ” and “ self-regulate.
” Californians can still go to the grocery store , the pharmacy , the laundromat .
They can still shop online .
They can still go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Arby ’ s—drive-thru , at least .

White dudes who own big pickup trucks and live in Newport Beach have rarely been at risk of overaggressive policing.
The fact remains that even if a mandatory quarantine were harshly enforced by the government, all the available evidence suggests that the white people who feel threatened enough by government overreach to parade around state capitols with guns are not the ones who would be at risk of violence from the police. New York City data revealed earlier this month that 35 of the 40 people arrested for social distancing violations were black, four were Hispanic, and only one was white. White dudes who own big pickup trucks and live in Newport Beach have rarely been at risk of overaggressive policing.
This is simply the conservative mentality: a constant state of perceived victimhood. The notion that oppressed groups enjoy being persecuted, because it lets them complain about victimization, becomes a weird sort of envy. This leads the would-be wretches to invent forms of oppression, like having to buy two iced teas instead of getting a free refill, so they get to have a turn at complaining. They may genuinely not realize that actually oppressed groups are not having fun when they object to their situation. The conservative-fear-industrial complex runs on conjuring ever-changing enemies of liberty, each browner and more Marxist than the last, because it makes them feel alive.
Hence the outrage directed at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for noting that we will need to consume less beef if we want to prevent apocalyptic climate change, which was in turn reminiscent of the anger at Michelle Obama for proposing that children should be given healthy food at school instead of pizza and white bread. How dare you, government bureaucrat, suggest that I shouldn’t kill myself with a diet of only red meat and Mr. Pibb? Never mind the millions for whom a diet of processed food and soda is all that’s affordable or available; the real oppression is you criticizing the choices I use to define myself, which, for some reason, now include eating burgers. For anyone, particularly nonwhite women, to suggest otherwise is essentially the new Gestapo.


newrepublic--2020-05-18--House Democrats Are Blowing Their Chance at Student Debt Relief

The median amount of debt for American borrowers in 2016 was $ 17,000 , per the Pew Research Center .
And while a quarter of all borrowers at the time of the Pew study owed over $ 43,000 , taking a five-figure chunk out of every indebted student ’ s owed amount , as House Democrats initially planned , was at the very least a step toward the more necessary measure of full relief .
But instead of doing the most sensible thing and relieving a little of everybody ’ s debt , Democratic leadership has instead decided to pare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ While right-wing wonks have argued that the increasing amount of student loan debt is fine as long as people pay it off eventually , the truth of the matter is that even before the pandemic , millions were unable to make payments and were , whether they knew it or not , part of a rising collective effectively boycotting their student loans .
The inability by any person to pay off their loans has nothing to do with a lack of personal responsibility—a lazy response that is still voiced by critics who lived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was an actual thing people were able to do .
The straining of the much-needed public university system , the lack of adequate public investment in trade schools and community college systems , and the racial and economic inequality that define the private university model have left those from working- and middle-class families who want to go to college to choose between a lifetime in debt or the inability to get that education .
This harsh , inequitable reality is compounded by the fact that , parallel to the widespread higher education disinvestment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to seek employment in—so that they can slowly pay off said loans—has now been subject to two of the most drastic downturns in American financial history : first the Great Recession and now the global coronavirus pandemic .
The more ambitious student loan relief provision wasn ’ t the only measure axed from the $ 3 trillion bill that the House passed .
The proposal of monthly payments of around $ 2,000 to qualifying workers—despite being popular among leading Democratic senators—was also dropped , with the final bill instead opting again for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The Paycheck Guarantee Act , brought forward by Representative Pramila Jayapal and the Congressional Progressive Caucus , which would have covered workers ’ wages up to $ 90,000 for a full year—and was estimated to have been cheaper than the small business loans Congress already approved—was also left on the cutting-room floor .
( In France , a wage subsidy program funded by the government pays workers up to 84 percent of their wages .
Similar models were employed by Germany and Italy in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and have since been used to steady their economies during the current pandemic . )
Jayapal was among the 14 House Democrats who ultimately voted against the Heroes Act , saying that the bill “ ultimately fails to match the scale of this crisis .
”

While right-wing wonks have argued that the increasing amount of student loan debt is fine as long as people pay it off eventually, the truth of the matter is that even before the pandemic, millions were unable to make payments and were, whether they knew it or not, part of a rising collective effectively boycotting their student loans. The inability by any person to pay off their loans has nothing to do with a lack of personal responsibility—a lazy response that is still voiced by critics who lived in an era when working through college was an actual thing people were able to do.
The straining of the much-needed public university system, the lack of adequate public investment in trade schools and community college systems, and the racial and economic inequality that define the private university model have left those from working- and middle-class families who want to go to college to choose between a lifetime in debt or the inability to get that education. This harsh, inequitable reality is compounded by the fact that, parallel to the widespread higher education disinvestment, the economy that students are expected to seek employment in—so that they can slowly pay off said loans—has now been subject to two of the most drastic downturns in American financial history: first the Great Recession and now the global coronavirus pandemic.
The more ambitious student loan relief provision wasn’t the only measure axed from the $3 trillion bill that the House passed. The proposal of monthly payments of around $2,000 to qualifying workers—despite being popular among leading Democratic senators—was also dropped, with the final bill instead opting again for a one-time payment as in the Cares Act. The Paycheck Guarantee Act, brought forward by Representative Pramila Jayapal and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which would have covered workers’ wages up to $90,000 for a full year—and was estimated to have been cheaper than the small business loans Congress already approved—was also left on the cutting-room floor. (In France, a wage subsidy program funded by the government pays workers up to 84 percent of their wages. Similar models were employed by Germany and Italy in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, helping over 700,000 workers keep their paychecks, and have since been used to steady their economies during the current pandemic.) Jayapal was among the 14 House Democrats who ultimately voted against the Heroes Act, saying that the bill “ultimately fails to match the scale of this crisis.”


Making Life Cheap

Even in an age of social distancing , you ’ ll still find the strangest people getting into bed with each other .
In mid-March , the U.K. government ’ s behavioral insights team—known as the “ nudge unit ” —unveiled its response to tackling the novel coronavirus .
Its plan , as is well known now , involved allowing the disease to run through the population in order to develop local herd immunity .
The nudge unit ’ s rationale was that most of those infected would recover and develop a natural resistance to the virus , which would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the most vulnerable as the search for a vaccine continued .
The British nudgeocrats did not flinch at the implication that this strategy , given the virus ’ s known mortality rates , could eventually kill between a quarter- and a half-million people : effectively a form of state-sanctioned mass murder .
In response to the predictable outcry , the U.K. government eventually changed course and embraced social distancing and other mobility-limiting measures to flatten the viral infection curve .
But the death drive at the heart of the herd immunity strategy did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nudgeocrats ’ preferred approach .
As lockdowns took hold and the full economic toll of the pandemic grew apparent , calls across the developed world to “ get back to work ” and more carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of social distancing increased .
At the start , this was usually framed as a choice between lives and dollars : “ No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health , ” editorialized The Wall Street Journal on March 19 , while an opinion column in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but at what cost ?
” Eventually , these calls became more straightforwardly eliminationist , presenting the slaughter of those most at risk from the virus as a form of heroic wartime sacrifice .
In an emblematic exchange , 70-year-old Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson he would be prepared to risk death if it would allow the economy to return to normal .
This strain of eliminationism is not simply a derangement of the political right ; the notes sounded by the dollars versus deaths brigade come straight from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration regulator and patron saint of the nudgeocrats , got in early with his own gratingly contrarian pandemic take .
“ Probability neglect , ” he announced in late February with a characteristic cod-social-scientific flourish , meant “ a lot of people are more scared ” about the coronavirus “ than they have any reason to be.
” Libertarians quickly followed suit , among the most prominent of them law professor Richard A. Epstein and economist Robin Hanson , who pushed for the adoption of strategies centered around “ voluntary infection ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distancing .
A common thread united these approaches : the idea that , sometimes , life is simply not worth fighting for .
“ It is not always unacceptable to cause death knowingly , ” Sunstein wrote in one of the four books he published last year .
“ When government allows new highways to be built , it knows that people will die on those highways.
” For a liberal cost-benefit fanatic like Sunstein , policy is always about trade-offs , even when the costs can be measured in lost lives ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ highways just because some people will die on them ?
Since the value of a human life can be quantified—at $ 9 million to $ 10 million , according to major federal agencies—death is acceptable , and lives expendable , when more valuable goods are involved .
The coronavirus pandemic has breathed new life into this old utilitarian chestnut , and it is precisely the life-reducing mindset of cost-benefit analysis that has driven the resistance to social distancing .
What ’ s remarkable is how voices conventionally thought to occupy opposite ends of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the cause of acceptable death .
Cheering for the elimination of humans is now an authentically pan-political concern .
“ Wow , ” a Silicon Valley product designer tweeted in mid-March .
“ Earth is recovering .
Air pollution is slowing down .
Water pollution is clearing up .
Natural wildlife returning home .
Coronavirus is Earth ’ s vaccine .
We ’ re the virus.
” That catchphrase ( “ We are the virus ” ) has been widely mocked and memed , and while there are many in the environmental movement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ humans , rather than resource use or consumer capitalism , are the problem—plenty of others have responded in vigorous agreement .
In one of the more interesting contributions to this school of thought , Canadian ecologist William E. Rees connected the pandemic to climate change , characterizing both as the result of a single factor : rampant population growth .
“ There are no exceptions to the first law of plague dynamics : the unconstrained expansion of any species ’ population invariably destroys the conditions that enabled the expansion , thus triggering collapse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The only way to “ salvage global civilization , ” he insisted , is by reducing “ the human ecological footprint ” through a “ controlled contraction of the human enterprise.
” In other words , we must depopulate or perish .
Fewer people will be our salvation .

None of this should come as much of a surprise, since electorates all over the developed world have been conditioned by 50 years of market liberalism to think of the economy in purely agonistic terms. Most of the literature on the demographic crisis in the West is the work of conservatives: good-vibes natalists like Jonathan V. Last or weary cultural pessimists like Ross Douthat. In The Decadent Society, his recently published volume of demographic aphorisms and film criticism, Douthat dismisses immigration as the solution to demographic decline in the West, characterizing it as a technocratic fantasy uninformed by political reality. Mass immigration, he writes, “is a double-edged sword.... It delivers the promise of a more dynamic future, potentially, than the future promised by low birthrates, but for natives who are aging and whose communities aren’t thriving, it also suggests the benefits of that imagined future belong increasingly to people who seem culturally alien, to inheritors who aren’t your natural heirs, to other people’s children and grandchildren rather than the dwindling numbers of your own.” All of which is true, but that critique only makes sense as long as you accept the world as it is—as long as you don’t question an economic model that privatizes public goods, leaves the state shriveled and impotent, and pits people against one another rather than building bonds between them. The “immigration problem” is nothing to do with immigration per se, but a reflection of the way in which immigration has been instrumentalized within a public sphere built on self-dealing. The immigrants have no share of blame in this; nor do those threatened by their arrival. Rather, the “problematic” nature of immigration today stems from its mismanagement by governing elites, reflecting a basic failure of political imagination.
The economy is not exogenous; it does not exist in a state of nature.
In 1910, Eugene Debs faced down an attempt by the right wing of the Socialist Party of America to adopt a policy against Asian immigration. In a letter, he wrote: “The plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletariat gathering under the auspices of an international movement that is calling on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation.” “Integrating” immigrant populations—the obsession of political demography in the developed world today—would be far easier in a society encouraged to view human existence as an exercise in cooperation and solidarity rather than individual self-enrichment. Moral clarity of Debs’s caliber is in desperately short supply today, and the marketization of our political imagination—the reduction of politics to a marketplace of domination and defeat—is a big part of the reason why. Liberal capital demands profitability above all. As long as immigrants are welcomed into an economic matrix whose defining characteristics are competition, alienation, and violence, the hospitality of receiving countries will remain contingent, riven with conflict, and precarious, and the developed world’s “immigration problem” will endure. It makes no sense to speak naïvely of morality and justice—to make the obvious ethical case for immigration, regardless of the intervening urgencies of developed-world demographics and climate change—while ignoring the social distortions wrought by the atomizing nature of the economies into which most immigrants today are absorbed. The demographic and environmental arguments in favor of immigration will fail as long as they refuse to reckon with this basic reality. Climate change will accelerate, along with the demographic decline of the West. And developed nations will limp on, their policies to extract themselves from this double crisis hopelessly out of step with the times.
There is history to contend with here, but surely no path dependence. The economy is not exogenous; it does not exist in a state of nature. Our ability to transform patterns of human energy use is coterminous with our ability to imagine a different economy, a different model of human enterprise and togetherness. Resolving the paradox of developed-world immigration policy—by, say, recentering liberalism around creative freedom rather than the freedom to consume, or embracing a reinvigorated left populism built around a culture of cooperation and care, or whatever else is usually thrown up these days as the grand solution to what ails capital—is work for the years ahead. What’s at stake is the struggle to define the human. The anti-natalist Peter Wessel Zapffe, a Norwegian ecological philosopher, once wrote that human beings are “a noble vase in which fate has planted an oak”: Hopelessly unsuited to our environment, we are condemned to seek existential meaning while maintaining a dreadful awareness of the futility of existence. This bind led Zapffe to conclude that life was not worth living, and the best solution for the human race was to simply die out. Those of us who still like being alive might find this extreme, but the orientation of Zapffe’s inquiry is probably correct. Reckoning with our future under climate change will inevitably require much deeper thinking about what it means to be human—about what gives human life value, what being present in the world entails, and whether our present socioeconomic configurations allow us to live truly as we want. We are indeed a noble vase, as Zapffe wrote, but that does not mean we must accept our fate as an oak. The power to flower is still ours.


newrepublic--2020-05-18--The Unsuitable Passions of J.M. Coetzee

The Unsuitable Passions of J.M. Coetzee

Men and their desires .
Do we really need more on the subject ?
It is ground that has been plowed so often , by Roth , Updike , and others who came of age during the sexual revolution and its aftermath .
These writers practically exhausted the English language exploring every aspect of their desire : David Foster Wallace , back in 1997 , famously described Updike as “ a penis with a thesaurus.
” Yet our understanding of male desire has changed since the heyday of the Great Male Narcissists , as Wallace called them .
It is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and hence more mysterious , too—lying at the root of Harvey Weinstein ’ s crimes , to name a specific example , and of “ toxic masculinity ” more broadly .
The pernicious influence of desire is now understood to be so widespread that Wallace himself has entered the pantheon of Great Male Narcissists .
Since the publication in 1999 of his novel Disgrace , desire has been an abiding preoccupation of the South African Nobel laureate J.M .
Coetzee .
Disgrace combines Coetzee ’ s earlier focus on apartheid , often filtered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the story of a middle-aged professor in Cape Town who is shunned for preying on one of his students .
The novels that followed increasingly revolved around a recurring figure : a reserved , pedantic man who is also full of hidden passion ; a philosopher enslaved by his emotions .
Sometimes the figure is purely fictional : The main character in Slow Man ( 2006 ) is an amputee who develops an “ unsuitable passion ” for his physical therapist , a married mother of three .
Other times the figure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( 2002 ) , the second in Coetzee ’ s trilogy of autobiographical novels , features a young Coetzee in search of the muse who will unleash the torrent of feelings dammed up within him ; Summertime ( 2009 ) , the third in the trilogy , is partly told from the fictionalized perspectives of the former objects of Coetzee ’ s desire , who return his affections by describing him as a “ cold fish , ” a “ eunuch , ” a “ célibataire.
” Now in his late career , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : The Childhood of Jesus ( 2013 ) , The Schooldays of Jesus ( 2016 ) , and the newly released The Death of Jesus .
These elliptical , ruminative novels follow the adventures , such as they are , of a boy named David and his middle-aged caretaker , Simón , “ a placid man , placid to a fault , ” whose soul nevertheless secretly “ aches with longing for it knows not what.
” Over the course of three books , Simón mulls the great existential questions—about life and death @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrong—but it is desire that is his intellectual lodestone , the riddle that might explain his restlessness , his unhappiness , his condition .
It might also offer him redemption .
As the titles of these books suggest , Coetzee is working within a more spiritual dimension , concerned less with temporal matters than the judgment we might levy on our lives .
In Coetzee ’ s moral matrix , desire is of a piece with our fallen nature , equal parts good and evil .
It is the source from which so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have and to hold ; to love and to cherish ; to wound , to dominate , to destroy .

The thematic premise of the Jesus trilogy is actually outlined in a previous Coetzee book. Paul Rayment, the character in Slow Man who has lost a leg, has a reverie while lamenting the diminishment of his manhood: “A phrase from catechism class a half-century ago floats into his mind: There shall be no more man and woman, but … But what—what shall we be when we are beyond man and woman?” In the Christian afterlife, Rayment remembers, love will be pure, unblemished by sin. Is this a love we would recognize? Is this a love we would admire, a love that is shorn of earthly desire, that finds its expression in the beatific smile of the blessed?
Whether our feelings are delusions or the sacred location where truth resides is a question that runs throughout these novels.
Something like love plays a decisive role in Simón’s quest to find David’s mother. Like the other episodes in The Childhood of Jesus, the discovery of the mother happens suddenly and improbably; the narrative, like a bad dream, is composed of a string of non sequiturs. They see her on a tennis court, all dressed in white. Simón feels that she is dimly familiar, that he has met her before. She is Inés, a “thirty-year-old virgin.” Simón tells Inés that she is David’s mother. Though mother and child do not recognize each other, she agrees to take care of him. One of Simón’s neighbors in the Blocks is appalled that he would entrust David to a stranger’s care. “The moment I saw Inés, I knew,” Simón says, defending himself. “If we don’t trust the voice that speaks inside us, saying, This is the one! then there is nothing left to trust.”
This is the type of delusional thinking, his neighbor retorts, that results in “calamitous love affairs.… She is just a random woman on whom you have projected some private obsession of yours.” Whether our feelings are delusions or the sacred location where truth resides is a question that runs throughout these novels. David’s favorite book is a children’s version of Don Quixote, featuring the knight of the doleful countenance fighting the windmills he believes are giants. As Simón explains to David, Don Quixote “presents the world to us through two pairs of eyes”: the addled perspective of the knight and the sober perspective of his sidekick, Sancho Panza. Through this juxtaposition, we know that the old knight is crazy. Yet is Don Quixote any less noble, any less courageous, any less a knight, for being a fool? Love is like that: a hallucination that is overwhelmingly real.


newrepublic--2020-05-19--How Democrats Can Win Coal Country—and the 2020 Election

It ’ s been a rough spring for the United States ’ long-shrinking coal industry .
The U.S. is down to just 43,800 coal jobs , and as the coronavirus shutdowns continue to eat into energy demand , coal consumption is predicted to drop 23 percent through 2020 .
For the first time ever , the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects the U.S. will get more of its electricity from renewable sources than coal this year ; experts now predict that the coal industry may never recover .
While that ’ s good news for the atmosphere , it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that mine coal and for the places that burn it : Coal-fired power plants , now being phased out at a steady clip , can be some of the only jobs available in rural areas .
The outlook for jobs in the oil and gas sector isn ’ t much rosier .
An analysis recently released by Baker Hughes found that the number of domestic oil rigs in operation has dropped from around 800 a year ago to just 258 , with oilfield services companies expected to shed 1 million jobs .
Many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ losses are also battleground states in the 2020 election .
Colorado , Pennsylvania , Ohio , New Mexico , North Carolina and Virginia are all swing states home to sizable extractive sectors .
Joe Biden ’ s campaign has further identified Texas—the hub of the oil and gas industry , and facing mass layoffs—as a potential battleground state .
As the Trump administration continues to shower fossil fuel executives with handouts , there ’ s an opportunity for Democrats to draw a stark contrast : offering tangible relief to the communities hit hardest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crises while Trump bails out the industry ’ s bosses .
So far , nobody in party leadership seems keen to do that .
The Republican Party seem to be offering Democrats an easy way to score political points : Despite frequently using coal industry employees as props on the campaign trail , the Trump administration has been cool to calls from the United Mineworkers and coal-state senators to extend protection to underground miners , whose close-quarters work has been deemed essential .
White House loyalties , that is , lie mainly with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t exactly simpatico with those of their employees .
The National Mine Association ( NMA ) —a trade group for coal companies—pleaded for Congress and the White House to slash the amount mine operators must pay into the Abandoned Mine Lands fund and the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund in what became the Cares Act , citing economic hardship .
The latter helps pay the expenses of some 25,000 retired miners who—after years unearthing coal dust and silica—are now vulnerable to Covid-19 ’ s attack on the respiratory system .
The NMA @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , but will keep pushing .
As for the oil and gas industry , Bloomberg recently reported that Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc. first exploited a provision in the March stimulus bill to reap a $ 9.7 million tax refund , then immediately tried to funnel that same amount to four of the company ’ s top executives through bankruptcy court .
Diamond laid off 102 employees in April .
Democrats aren ’ t doing as much as they could to funnel funds to unemployed workers rather than their ex-bosses .
The ReWIND @ @ @ @ @ @ @ month by several progressives in Congress , has tried to stop oil and gas executives from squirreling away stimulus funds meant for struggling workers and municipalities .
Yet even some of the more expansive stimulus ideas from Congressional Democrats have avoided tackling the hemorrhaging of fossil fuel jobs head-on .
In oil , gas , and especially coal , there are potentially millions of jobs that simply aren ’ t coming back .

The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which represents the governments of 31 fossil fuel–producing states, has requested that the Trump administration furnish stimulus funds through the Department of Energy to keep laid-off industry employees working by paying them to plug so-called orphan wells. A recent report from the Center for American Progress has found that a $2 billion federal investment in plugging orphan wells could yield between 14,000 and 24,000 jobs. As for the coal industry, with North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power plant facing closure, the Dakota Resource Council has proposed putting industry employees to work in environmental reclamation, which could also provide jobs on the site of shuttered coal-fired power plants in Minnesota and elsewhere.
Investments in carbon sequestration and geothermal technology could provide both shovel-ready work in the short term and long-term career prospects for oil and gas industry workers, whose existing expertise can be used to store carbon underground and access no-carbon energy, helping to satisfy climate goals for comparable wages and benefits. Investments to scale up an array of green technologies are popular with voters, and extending the Production and Investment Tax Credits for wind and solar power could buoy jobs in the clean energy sector, which have also taken a hit from the coronavirus but are expected to recover as demand returns. Poor housing stock, moreover, is a potentially endless source of weatherization jobs, which the Department of Energy and Department of Agriculture already provide support for. Those programs, too, could be expanded. A comprehensive federal jobs program could provide meaningful, living-wage work for the many people in coal country and oilfields who don’t happen to work in mines or on rigs but have found themselves unemployed as the oil-based economy collapses around them. And all that’s just scratching the surface.
The gains of these kinds of policies would be concentrated in places where Democrats have historically had trouble gaining support. They could provide an off-ramp from the emissions-heavy fossil fuel industry, while securing the livelihoods of those ensnared in it. This, of course, means admitting something Democrats have been reticent to acknowledge: that fossil fuels are not a permanent fixture of the economy, and that the path away from them needs to be well funded and managed in order to prevent suffering in communities that rely on the income and tax revenues incumbent fuels produce.


newrepublic--2020-05-19--We’re Not Polarized Enough

We’re Not Polarized Enough

Now more than ever , political differences yield personal hostility—partially because politics now links up our multiple identities in dramatic ways .
“ Today the parties are sharply split across racial , religious , geographic , cultural , and psychological lines , ” Klein writes .
“ There are many , many powerful identities lurking in that list , and they are fusing together , stacking atop one another , so a conflict or threat that activates one activates all.
” This feeds the kind of zero-sum , anything goes politics that characterized not only the conservative movement ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ personal and political indiscretions in 2016 but also the Republican opposition to the Obama administration—from the hysterical rhetoric about the Affordable Care Act to the blocking of Merrick Garland ’ s nomination to the Supreme Court .
Why have voters taken to polarization so easily ?
Of all the forces thought to drive political attitudes and action , Klein focuses almost exclusively on the behavioral dynamics theorized by evolutionary psychologists .
“ Human beings evolved to exist in groups , ” he writes .
“ To be part of a group , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ survival .
To be exiled from a group or to see our group crushed by its enemies , could mean death .
Is it really so strange that we evolved to feel the life and death stakes of group belonging and status ?
” He cites a ream of research to ensure the reader agrees : On one page , he gives us a study on schoolchildren asked to allocate money after being separated by invented test scores ; on another page , we get a paragraph about “ micro-awakenings ” during isolated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that ensures our bodies are on guard when there ’ s no one around to protect us .
All the evidence suggests “ it takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity , ” Klein writes , and once those identities take shape , intense competition between groups naturally follows .
As this theory would have it , the conflicts that characterize contemporary American politics are , to a large extent , outgrowths of the primitive brain .
If an intense tendency toward group formation and identification is an inescapable fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it loom large not only over politics in the United States , but over politics everywhere ?
Yet the state of American politics appears altogether different from partisan arrangements across the world .
Elsewhere , the ideological divides between major parties are less deep , sociocultural identification with parties is less strong , and functional relationships between multiple parties are common .
If the human brain truly craves tight partisan affiliations and intractable partisan conflict , how have political systems at odds with those impulses—multiparty systems that often rely on coalition governments , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ countries ?
Is the American brain different ?
There seems to be more to the story here , and a more thorough accounting of why polarization occurs would probably acknowledge that politics also takes place beyond our borders .
Crucially , though , the psychological perspective also leaves one with a muddled view of the American sociopolitical scene .
Take , for instance , Klein ’ s characterization of the finding that over 60 percent of Republicans tend to prefer large houses and open space , while nearly the same proportion of Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communities .
“ Thus , a preference that seems nonpolitical on its face , ” he writes , “ becomes yet another force pulling partisans away from each other.
” This is meant to mean that partisan divides “ don ’ t merely track differences in our politics .
They track differences in our psychologies.
” But do they ?
How many Americans declare a preference for large houses and yards over diverse cities largely because rural or suburban areas are where they ’ ve spent most of their time , perhaps through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How sure can we be , in general , that our preferences are innate rather than artifacts of the communities we happen to find ourselves in ?

Now more than ever, political differences yield personal hostility—partially because politics now links up our multiple identities in dramatic ways. “Today the parties are sharply split across racial, religious, geographic, cultural, and psychological lines,” Klein writes. “There are many, many powerful identities lurking in that list, and they are fusing together, stacking atop one another, so a conflict or threat that activates one activates all.” This feeds the kind of zero-sum, anything goes politics that characterized not only the conservative movement’s willingness to overlook Donald Trump’s personal and political indiscretions in 2016 but also the Republican opposition to the Obama administration—from the hysterical rhetoric about the Affordable Care Act to the blocking of Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
Why have voters taken to polarization so easily? Of all the forces thought to drive political attitudes and action, Klein focuses almost exclusively on the behavioral dynamics theorized by evolutionary psychologists. “Human beings evolved to exist in groups,” he writes. “To be part of a group, and to see that group thrive, meant survival. To be exiled from a group or to see our group crushed by its enemies, could mean death. Is it really so strange that we evolved to feel the life and death stakes of group belonging and status?” He cites a ream of research to ensure the reader agrees: On one page, he gives us a study on schoolchildren asked to allocate money after being separated by invented test scores; on another page, we get a paragraph about “micro-awakenings” during isolated human sleep, evidently a self-defense mechanism that ensures our bodies are on guard when there’s no one around to protect us. All the evidence suggests “it takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity,” Klein writes, and once those identities take shape, intense competition between groups naturally follows. As this theory would have it, the conflicts that characterize contemporary American politics are, to a large extent, outgrowths of the primitive brain.
If an intense tendency toward group formation and identification is an inescapable fact of human nature, shouldn’t it loom large not only over politics in the United States, but over politics everywhere? Yet the state of American politics appears altogether different from partisan arrangements across the world. Elsewhere, the ideological divides between major parties are less deep, sociocultural identification with parties is less strong, and functional relationships between multiple parties are common. If the human brain truly craves tight partisan affiliations and intractable partisan conflict, how have political systems at odds with those impulses—multiparty systems that often rely on coalition governments, for instance—endured for so long in other countries? Is the American brain different? There seems to be more to the story here, and a more thorough accounting of why polarization occurs would probably acknowledge that politics also takes place beyond our borders.


newrepublic--2020-05-19--André
Leon Talley Corrects the Record

André
Leon Talley Corrects the Record

“ I live on a relatively grand scale , because that ’ s the way fashion is , ” André Leon Talley wrote in his 2003 memoir , A.L.T .
“ By its very nature , it is larger than life .
It ’ s fickle , it ’ s flamboyant , and it ’ s fabulous.
” Though sprinkled with gossipy tidbits ( Betty Catroux wore boys ’ T-shirts beneath her YSL couture !
Halston served dinner guests baked potatoes and piles of cocaine ! )
, A.L.T .
is less a book about fashion than a story of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s a story of a black man from the South improbably rising to the very top of the systems of fashion and publishing—the intersection of money , influence , glamour , and power .
It ’ s the story of queerness sublimated into taste : a reverence for indomitable women , luxurious objects , sensual ( but never sexual ) pleasures .
It ’ s the story of the flamboyant and the fabulous .
Now , 17 years on , Talley has finally got to the fickle , in his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yes , it ’ s more of the same—incredibly , Talley repeats the anecdotes about Catroux and her T-shirts and Halston and his cocaine .
But the vantage is different , Talley more exile than insider .
This is an account of his excommunication from the inner circle by his friend of many years , the designer Karl Lagerfeld , before Lagerfeld died in 2019 .
It ’ s a public reckoning with Vogue , his longtime perch , where he is now an emeritus presence .
It ’ s the cautionary tale @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in inverse proportion to his girth , for fat is a cardinal sin in the beau monde , which manages to be both hedonistic and ascetic .
If you know him only as the camp loudmouth on Entertainment Tonight gushing over starlets walking the red carpet there ’ s some useful context here .
Talley was raised by a great-grandmother and grandmother who boiled the laundry and ironed the sheets .
This fact may illuminate his kinship with Mrs. Vreeland ( never Diana ! )
, the legendary editor of Vogue who took @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her closet full of Porthault linens .
Talley did his master ’ s at Brown—his thesis : “ North African Figures in Nineteenth-Century French Painting and Prose ” —and a classmate ’ s father brokered an introduction to Vreeland , who had gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after S.I .
Newhouse dismissed her from Vogue .
Talley worked alongside her in the Costume Institute , an unpaid “ volunteer , ” then Vreeland sent him off to Andy Warhol , who hired Talley at Interview .

Indeed, fashion is perhaps his only expression of the former. “Sex confused and bewildered me,” Talley writes. “In respectable Southern black households, it was simply not discussed. Physical intimacy of any kind was kept to a bare minimum.” He writes of his sexual abuse at the hands of a neighbor, then a succession of local boys. It’s terrible, and the ramifications are clear to the reader even if they’re largely unexamined (on the page anyway) by the author. “Love has not been in my life in any degree,” he tells us. “I have had many emotional highs and definite lows when it comes to love and romance, and yet I am alone.”
The Chiffon Trenches has been much talked about for the promise of dish. There is that. It’s hardly illuminating (Karl Lagerfeld was a nut; Anna Wintour is dogged), though the specifics are delicious. Divulging what Talley has to tell will spoil one of the pleasures of the memoir, but the book is less interesting as gossip than it is as a correction of the record, the man insisting on defining his legacy.
He wants to have his say, even if that’s rude. “Vogue was a culture of deportment, a culture of manners. This was all unspoken, yet it was crystal clear. Flowers were sent and thank-you notes were handwritten,” Talley writes. It’s a violation of that culture of deportment for him to tell all, but important to declare his life an accomplishment of blackness. He is right to. This is a man whose friend called him a “nigger dandy.” What must his detractors have said?


newrepublic--2020-05-19--The Flawed Fantasy of a Different Hillary Clinton

This is the novel ’ s third big counterfactual : What if Hillary Clinton had chosen to believe a victim of sexual assault over loyalty to the man she loved ?
The fictional Hillary ’ s clarity on the question allows Sittenfeld to imagine the glories of her political ascendancy , but it doesn ’ t connect back to the actually existing Hillary Clinton very smoothly .
The most charitable reading of the parking lot encounter is that it gives the fictional Hillary the chance to see the worst side of Bill before she enmeshes her life more tightly with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this incident takes place in 1974 , four years before the one Broaddrick has described ; by 1978 , the Clintons had already been married three years , and Broaddrick ’ s story would not become public for another 20 years .
Nonetheless , the moral certainty of the fictional Hillary Rodham makes an awkward contrast with real Hillary Clinton ’ s position on similar stories , which remains at best unclear .
That dissonance is hard to ignore through the rest of the novel .
Her break from Bill is the choice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and well-connected law professor at Northwestern , politically one to watch in her thirties , and a United States senator by her forties .
Her main regrets center on loneliness and the problems of dating while becoming ever busier and more prominent .
It ’ s also a turning point for Bill : Without someone of Hillary ’ s acumen and intelligence by his side , his 1992 presidential bid falls apart when he ’ s grilled on 60 Minutes about his affair with “ a cabaret singer in Little Rock ” ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s a moment of vindication for the Hillary Rodham character in the novel , as is her later discovery that Bill has settled a sexual harassment lawsuit for $ 850,000 .
Her distance from him is her most consistently reinforced moral position .
Perhaps a bigger problem for the book as a work of fiction is its trouble imagining just how Hillary Rodham would have turned out absent the privileges and the traumas of her time as first lady and her decades at the very top level of American politics and global @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the determined pragmatism , none of the insistence on courage in the face of intractable problems , of the Hillary Clinton who titled her 2014 memoir Hard Choices .
It would be hard to see her running on experience the way her real-life counterpart did in 2016 : She shows little interest in national security , and one can imagine the press criticizing her for lack of a coherent foreign policy .
This Hillary is not asking who you want answering the phone at 3 a.m. and doesn ’ t seem to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world ’ s leaders , knows the military.
” ( Henry Kissinger , described by the real Hillary as a “ friend , ” is a guest at a political soirée later in the novel , but , like ships that pass in the night , he and Hillary Rodham do not appear to know each other . )
What remains of Hillary Clinton in this character is a familiar awkwardness on the campaign trail .
There is an embarrassing incident in which Hillary Rodham attempts to go viral , releasing a video @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hat make me look on fleek ?
” There is her single-minded cultivation of a cancer patient named Misty LaPointe , whom she meets at a rally and magnanimously connects with “ her team ” ; after a few friendly texts , it transpires that her motive is to get Misty , an Iowan , to announce her to the crowds at a crucial campaign stop .
Throughout the book , she talks like a politician ; the novel has the taut cadences of a stringently focus-grouped narrative .
Her sentences are even-handed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , even when she ’ s discussing sports with family .
“ This season does seem promising , but I ’ m trying not to get my hopes up , ” she texts her brothers .

This is the novel’s third big counterfactual: What if Hillary Clinton had chosen to believe a victim of sexual assault over loyalty to the man she loved? The fictional Hillary’s clarity on the question allows Sittenfeld to imagine the glories of her political ascendancy, but it doesn’t connect back to the actually existing Hillary Clinton very smoothly. The most charitable reading of the parking lot encounter is that it gives the fictional Hillary the chance to see the worst side of Bill before she enmeshes her life more tightly with his. It’s notable that this incident takes place in 1974, four years before the one Broaddrick has described; by 1978, the Clintons had already been married three years, and Broaddrick’s story would not become public for another 20 years. Nonetheless, the moral certainty of the fictional Hillary Rodham makes an awkward contrast with real Hillary Clinton’s position on similar stories, which remains at best unclear.
That dissonance is hard to ignore through the rest of the novel. Her break from Bill is the choice that enables her to become an accomplished and well-connected law professor at Northwestern, politically one to watch in her thirties, and a United States senator by her forties. Her main regrets center on loneliness and the problems of dating while becoming ever busier and more prominent. It’s also a turning point for Bill: Without someone of Hillary’s acumen and intelligence by his side, his 1992 presidential bid falls apart when he’s grilled on 60 Minutes about his affair with “a cabaret singer in Little Rock” (again, not named). It’s a moment of vindication for the Hillary Rodham character in the novel, as is her later discovery that Bill has settled a sexual harassment lawsuit for $850,000. Her distance from him is her most consistently reinforced moral position.
Perhaps a bigger problem for the book as a work of fiction is its trouble imagining just how Hillary Rodham would have turned out absent the privileges and the traumas of her time as first lady and her decades at the very top level of American politics and global power. This character has none of the determined pragmatism, none of the insistence on courage in the face of intractable problems, of the Hillary Clinton who titled her 2014 memoir Hard Choices. It would be hard to see her running on experience the way her real-life counterpart did in 2016: She shows little interest in national security, and one can imagine the press criticizing her for lack of a coherent foreign policy. This Hillary is not asking who you want answering the phone at 3 a.m. and doesn’t seem to be the candidate who “already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military.” (Henry Kissinger, described by the real Hillary as a “friend,” is a guest at a political soirée later in the novel, but, like ships that pass in the night, he and Hillary Rodham do not appear to know each other.)