thenation--2020-08-24--Eric Posner’s Democracy for the Few

Eric Posner’s Democracy for the Few

It is one of the virtues of an extraordinarily vicious presidency that it has led some to openly confess their preference for elite rule .
Even those who vigorously promoted elements of aristocracy—or oligarchy—once used to feign devotion to a democratic creed .
Now , alongside the regular suggestion that Donald Trump threatens democracy , some are willing to say he proves its bankruptcy .
“ Voters know in the abstract what they ought to know , ” conceded Jason Brennan , the author of Against Democracy , after the last presidential election .
“ They just don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should.
” When the people chose Trump , Brennan concluded , it proved the need for “ epistocracy , ” a kind of update to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato ’ s contention that the wise should rule .
The Demagogue ’ s Playbook : The Battle for American Democracy From the Founders to Trump Like many members of the self-anointed “ Resistance , ” Eric A. Posner was shaken by Trump ’ s election .
Best known as a skeptic of international law who agreed that George W. Bush was justified in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Terrorism , Posner became an unexpected ally of those decrying Trump ’ s propensity to smash norms .
Having made his reputation as a scourge of progressives , the legal scholar became a leading critic of the miscreant in chief .
But Posner ’ s new history , The Demagogue ’ s Playbook , reveals he has not so much changed his mind as found a propitious moment to defend his belief that elites should control politics and that American traditions of dethroning them suggest what happens when democracy goes too far .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ right : Democracy unleashes the base passions , and it is therefore to be expected that in the resulting disorder and tumult , people will turn to a tyrant for a modicum of order .
The Demagogue ’ s Playbook tells how politicians throughout the history of the United States have drawn on democratic legitimation while upending the elitist designs of the American founders and the normal functioning of the government .
“ For Plato , ” Posner writes , “ pretty much any popular leader in a democracy was a demagogue.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in some sense , a place where the people rule , he still insists that our experience with Trump makes clear the eternal worth of Plato ’ s insight—and the need to save elite control from democracy .
His attempt to do so , however , shows the reverse is true : What the Trump era proves is that we need more democracy in America , not less .
A leading law professor at the University of Chicago , Posner is a gifted scholar .
The son of Richard Posner , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that sought to wreck the premises of the redistributive and regulatory state , Posner fils spent most of his early career building a withering attack on international law .
In part , he chose the topic because there were few other fields of law for him to turn the family ’ s demolition business on .
In part , he did so because criticizing appeals to global norms before and during the War on Terrorism allowed him to make his own contribution to the American right .
Together with some like-minded colleagues at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frequent coauthor Adrian Vermeule , Posner cultivated the reputation of a generational bad boy .
He collaborated with Vermeule on a defense of their friend John Yoo ’ s torture memos that appeared in The Wall Street Journal in 2004 .
Associating himself with the early years of the Bush administration , Posner also defended coercive interrogation , a broader category overlapping with torture , as a necessary tactic in some circumstances .
Apparently , for Posner , the War on Terrorism and its associated costs were not all that objectionable ; he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fruits of demagogy .
Posner and Vermeule also worked to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt , the notorious Nazi jurist .
They coined “ tyrannophobia ” to describe the notion that if one temptation in governance is to allow too much authority in one place , another is to fear its concentration so much as to incur even higher costs .
( Vermeule impishly titled one of his more notorious papers “ Optimal Abuse of Power.
” ) As their last major act together before Trump ’ s election , they penned the 2011 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the American presidency had outgrown the founders ’ attempts to impose checks and balances against it .
Public opinion , they maintained , was now nearly the sole force that kept America ’ s national leaders from transgression—and this was a good thing , too , because of the beneficial role a competent administrative state plays relative to dysfunctional legislatures and ignorant judiciaries .
In the fun and games of intellectual strife before Trump , no one anticipated that someone like him was coming to inherit the power the authors defended .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ horsemen of the apocalypse , these now middle-aged conservatives blinked in November 2016 when the apocalypse actually materialized .
Posner soon discovered his inner liberal : Within a matter of months and without ever explaining his turnabout , he began regularly advising liberals on how they could use the law to constrain the current president .
No longer an edgy gadfly and outlier , he now helps man the ramparts of the Resistance and has been heralded by many of his erstwhile critics .
Heads nod sagely everywhere The New York Times is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from a defender of torture about how to hem Trump in .
But for informed observers , it seemed more like an atheist rushing into the arms of the church after the devil appeared .
( For his part , Vermeule literally joined the church—he converted to Catholicism in 2016—and embraced reactionary positions much more consistent with his earlier writings , but that is another story . )
Part of Posner ’ s appeal to the centrist coalition known as the Resistance is no doubt found in the fact that he is not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Trump ’ s election .
Though Posner has written a book with the economist E. Glen Weyl , Radical Markets , that belatedly registered some of the costs of America ’ s accelerating inequality , the only credible alternative to neoliberalism , they insisted , was even more of it .
( We should marketize the voting system ! )
And now in The Demagogue ’ s Playbook , Posner blames “ the people ” for Trump ’ s rise .
For Posner , all manner of evils are defensible , from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that ruin the world , as long as elites are the ones who implement them .
What the Platonist can not abide is when the people push back .
Posner ’ s opening premise in The Demagogue ’ s Playbook is that “ demagogue ” is a better label for Trump than “ authoritarian ” or “ fascist , ” at least to date .
For Posner , the frequent arguments that Trump is already a fascist politician or a dictator on the make are not so much mistaken as premature .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to express—in constitutional terms—an uneasiness.
” If democracy can lead to tyranny , as Plato first proposed , demagogy is a distinct and preliminary stage .
And , Posner insists , it is more present , so far , in American history .
The threat of demagogy , Posner contends , is the reason the American founders were Platonists : They crafted a modern republic on the assumption that the people themselves were the chief threat to it , and they sought to make popular legitimation safe for and through elite rule .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Constitution in a manner that not only responded to the frailty of the federal government after 1776 but also warded off the growing signs of democracy , like the radical Pennsylvania state government and Shays ’ s Rebellion .
Their inspired achievement was the suite of antidemocratic devices that the Constitution enshrined , from the Electoral College to the enumeration of congressional powers , from a Senate to cool any populist legislation to a Supreme Court that could invalidate it .
Founder John Adams ’ s main mistake , Posner writes , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was good for them to defer to the superiors , as in his proposal of the tag “ Your Majesty ” for the president of the new republic .
His son John Quincy Adams enthusiastically predicted that the handiwork of the founding generation would “ increase the influence , power , and wealth of those who have it already.
” After celebrating the origins of the rule of the wise , American style , Posner goes on to discuss how challenges to it were contained .
The process started , he argues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agrarian ideals , one of the founders , Thomas Jefferson , decided to take a run at the ascendancy of the best and the brightest he had helped set up .
Then came “ the first demagogue , ” Andrew Jackson .
Whereas Jefferson conceded the need for elites and attacked the original framework at the margins—earning resistance from his never-Jefferson opponents after the election of 1800—Jackson was the real deal .
A white nationalist who railed against elite projects like Alexander Hamilton ’ s national bank , “ Old Hickory ” portended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president before or since .
A lot of ills followed , but Posner disputes the notion that Jackson did any good in exchange for the horrors he brought , even for the ordinary white men he claimed to represent .
In Posner ’ s view , Jacksonianism proved that democracy is the worst of both worlds : You lose elite governance without helping the masses , either .
Human Rights Are Not Enough Given that most of the people then could not even vote , it took the new era of mass democracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next wave of demagogy to arrive .
Wading into an old debate over late 19th century political history , Posner insists that a demagogic politics was central to the populist movement .
But with little interest in the different economic and social grievances that propelled it , he generally conflates left and right populism and sees little reason people in the late 1800s—America ’ s first Gilded Age of the victory of the rich , before our own—might have been interested in reclaiming power from elites .
Generously , however , he concedes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for president three times as a progressive and pacifist , wasn ’ t a demagogue .
Posner ’ s chronicle of American history continues with what he applauds as “ the triumph of elite technocracy ” in the 20th century .
Progressives may have adopted populist ends , he allows , but they “ distrusted the ordinary people whom the populists celebrated.
” Franklin Roosevelt capped this movement of elite egalitarian change : He helped the people by keeping them in their place , according to Posner .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extended this suppression .
He acknowledges that demagogues could still rear their heads throughout , from anti-communist zealots like Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s to Southern segregationists like George Wallace in the ’ 60s .
But Posner is wistful for the middle decades of the 20th century as a time when no president came close to demagogy , in spite of a few feints by Richard Nixon .
Instead , the party establishments worked to enthrone experts , pretty much as the Platonist founders had planned it .
In tracing the final stretches @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shifts from his study of personalities to a story of the “ political institutions that constrained the public ’ s influence on the selection of the president and other major politicians.
” He has in mind , in particular , nomination processes and transformations in the media .
Predictably , for Posner , all hell broke loose as the parties democratized after 1968 .
With the rules changed , the people now had more power , which he argues allowed a series of figures to arise who now seem like premonitions of our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Posner specifically rejects economic and status grievances as causes for Trump ’ s success , first among Republicans and then against his Democratic opponent , Hillary Clinton .
Instead , he contends that Trump inherited and maximized the populist undercurrent that elites sagaciously kept from surging in the prior century .
The defects in Posner ’ s account begin with the sloppiness of his central concept .
The word “ demagogue , ” he says , has a “ core meaning ” that has “ remained stable over millennia.
” In fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ term—which literally means “ leader of the people ” —used it as the title for an office that advocated , after Pericles ’ s death , the correct course for the city-state to take .
It was not a term of abuse ; for that matter , Plato never used it in any of his dialogues .
When it comes to modern history , Posner is on sturdier ground and is clearly onto something when he asserts that some politicians flirt with the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the point of outrageous excess @ @ @ @ @ @ @ series of dry runs for Trump—and as a set of struggles by elites to maintain control of a democracy they were sometimes forced to build upon and expand—misses most of its moral drama and almost all of its social conflicts .
Gone , in particular , are the deeper reasons elites desire control and sometimes lose it when their failures and shortcomings become clear .
Part of the problem ( though Posner gets points for honesty here ) is how apologetically he slips into laudatory portraits of elites as disinterested rather than self-dealing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unwashed .
In some ways , he is attempting to revive the consensus historiography of Richard Hofstadter , a Columbia historian and the most celebrated scholar of the American past in the mid-20th century .
Yet Hofstadter , a former radical who was not merely anxious about challenges to centrist rule but also sensitive to liberalism ’ s dark sides , was not above excoriating the injustices that elites perpetrate .
He hoped to confine the most potentially destructive forces on the right to their fringe while protecting the vital center against the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but uncomplicated , in part because it was far more open to how universal irrationality is .
This is why the most revealing section of Posner ’ s book is on the mid-20th century , when Hofstadter could consider centrist liberalism a fait accompli , thus normalizing the New Deal and the emerging Cold War consensus .
For starters , Posner bends over backward to distract us from recognizing how damaging Roosevelt is to his whole framework .
Although highborn , FDR nonetheless played the man of the people , challenging norms and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so .
For his trouble , he was commonly branded a demagogue—or an authoritarian or fascist—by his enemies , far beyond the denunciations that all leaders earn from their foes .
The real reason that memory has not preserved how profound Roosevelt ’ s challenge was to the norms and institutions of his time is one that Posner eventually comes around to conceding : FDR “ was vindicated by events , as much as history ever allows.
” The victorious demagogue in one era becomes the mainstream democrat in the next .
Fortunately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But if Roosevelt succeeded where Trump fails , it is hardly because of the latter ’ s excoriation of elite mistakes .
Rather , it is because his persona and program intensified the elite rule of our time , as part of what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson recently dubbed “ plutocratic populism.
” Likewise , Posner does not engage the foreign policy fiascoes of elites that—especially given his own past—ought to loom large in any assessment of how they lost hold .
During the Cold War , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elite rule , Roosevelt ’ s “ technocratic ” successors armed the American state like no power before it and made the globe its killing field .
Posner affectionately cites John Adams , who remarked that “ the Athenians grew more and more Warlike in proportion as the commonwealth became more democratic.
” Posner doesn ’ t mention that the Cold War and the War on Terrorism would have made Adams blanch .
As the 1980s and ’ 90s brought early warning signs of the impending disaster of 2016 , like Buchanan ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the dangerous people were improvidently being given a chance to speak , as Posner disarmingly proposes .
Rather , they were symptoms of how catastrophic the elite ’ s performance was at home and abroad .
The clues to the mystery of how Trump became credible to 60 million Americans surely lie in these decades—but not because democracy was unleashed , since , after all , a minority put him in office , thanks to the very minority-rule mechanisms the founders designed .
Instead , the outcome signaled just how disastrous the preceding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As for Posner ’ s explanation for Trump ’ s electoral success , it is circular .
On the one hand , he rejects the combination of grievance and racism that drew voters to Trump in order to insist it was demagogy that did it ; on the other , he acknowledges that these very factors made the situation ripe for demagogy .
( He explains that they were just not “ a sufficient condition ” —though who said they were ?
—and required a demagogue to take advantage of the situation .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ his tale of American demagogues kept at bay with a suite of new remedies for the pathologies of popular rule .
Surprisingly , he offers none .
He acknowledges that “ constitutional reform ” is on the agenda .
“ Perhaps , ” he muses , “ we need to strip the presidency of many of the powers that it has accumulated over the years , so that future demagogues who are elected president will be unable to cause harm.
” But the sole indication that Posner has thought about how to reconcile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presidential aggrandizement and the critic of this particular president—comes in a footnote .
“ I believe , ” he says there , “ that only a strong presidency can solve the problems with the American constitutional system.
” The only fair conclusion is that for Posner , even once you realize demagogy is a risk , you do not act to contain unaccountable and unchecked power ; you just pray that elites wield it .
In the end , Posner replaces one Resistance cul-de-sac with another .
Instead of focusing on impending tyranny @ @ @ @ @ @ @ useful notion that the country ’ s problem is demagogy .
But it is not clear that any political leaders elected by a majority have ever have seized dictatorial control of their countries , and certainly none have done so in American history .
( So much for Plato ’ s theory . )
And Posner ’ s charge that America ’ s difficulty is that the country has finally fallen to the very demagogy its founders designed it to avoid really just distracts from assessing the costs of elite rule .
New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Arnold had it right : “ The man with the social values which you do not like , you will call the demagogue.
” Crying “ demagogue ” is another kind of evasion .
Learning nothing from his experiences , Posner offers an apology for elite rule during a period in which it is in a state of crisis—an apology that will persuade only those who share his complacency .
A study that found the top 10 percent of earners control the political system “ does not prove that elite control is excessive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ we would need to know what policy would look like if elites held less control , and no one knows.
” He prefers to rest content with the wisdom that in “ any organized system of governance ” there is a “ need for division of labor and specialization of functions ” that “ results in a small number of people at the top.
” Instead of calling for better elites , however , Posner goes so far as to indict the rare ones who bolt from the defense of their privileges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is no direct way for the people to rule in the American system , ” as he observes , is hardly an excuse for suggesting that we should simply accept the status quo ante of the rule of the self-appointed wise .
Thanks to thinkers like Gaetano Mosca , Vilfredo Pareto , and Joseph Schumpeter , the first lesson of modern political science as a profession is indeed that elites will rule even in democracies .
But it very much matters which ones do so , for whose sake , and to what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can help democracy live up more and more to its promise of collective self-government , challenging the line between the ruling class and the rest of us .
Finally , unlike Posner and the other latter-day Platonists , we know that elites have their own passions and prejudices , as disabling and distorting as those of the people and probably more so .
Posner ’ s most debatable error—one that connects his earlier career arguing for free markets and executive power with his current bout of democratic malaise in the Trump era—is in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That the ancient case against the irrationality of democracy is itself irrational suggests that Plato is the wrong place to begin when explaining Trump ’ s rise .
The reasonable fear for the immediate future , once Trump is kicked out by the people , is of a baleful elite restoration .
In fact , it already seems like the biggest thing to fear .

This article appears in the September 7/14, 2020 issue.
It is one of the virtues of an extraordinarily vicious presidency that it has led some to openly confess their preference for elite rule. Even those who vigorously promoted elements of aristocracy—or oligarchy—once used to feign devotion to a democratic creed. Now, alongside the regular suggestion that Donald Trump threatens democracy, some are willing to say he proves its bankruptcy. “Voters know in the abstract what they ought to know,” conceded Jason Brennan, the author of Against Democracy, after the last presidential election. “They just don’t actually know the things they think they should.” When the people chose Trump, Brennan concluded, it proved the need for “epistocracy,” a kind of update to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s contention that the wise should rule. Books in Review The Demagogue’s Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy From the Founders to Trump By Eric A. Posner Buy this book
Like many members of the self-anointed “Resistance,” Eric A. Posner was shaken by Trump’s election. Best known as a skeptic of international law who agreed that George W. Bush was justified in pushing its boundaries in the War on Terrorism, Posner became an unexpected ally of those decrying Trump’s propensity to smash norms. Having made his reputation as a scourge of progressives, the legal scholar became a leading critic of the miscreant in chief. But Posner’s new history, The Demagogue’s Playbook, reveals he has not so much changed his mind as found a propitious moment to defend his belief that elites should control politics and that American traditions of dethroning them suggest what happens when democracy goes too far. For Posner, too, Plato was right: Democracy unleashes the base passions, and it is therefore to be expected that in the resulting disorder and tumult, people will turn to a tyrant for a modicum of order.
The Demagogue’s Playbook tells how politicians throughout the history of the United States have drawn on democratic legitimation while upending the elitist designs of the American founders and the normal functioning of the government. “For Plato,” Posner writes, “pretty much any popular leader in a democracy was a demagogue.” While he acknowledges that America should remain, in some sense, a place where the people rule, he still insists that our experience with Trump makes clear the eternal worth of Plato’s insight—and the need to save elite control from democracy. His attempt to do so, however, shows the reverse is true: What the Trump era proves is that we need more democracy in America, not less.
A leading law professor at the University of Chicago, Posner is a gifted scholar. The son of Richard Posner, the founder of the law and economics school that sought to wreck the premises of the redistributive and regulatory state, Posner fils spent most of his early career building a withering attack on international law. In part, he chose the topic because there were few other fields of law for him to turn the family’s demolition business on. In part, he did so because criticizing appeals to global norms before and during the War on Terrorism allowed him to make his own contribution to the American right.
Together with some like-minded colleagues at the University of Chicago, especially his frequent coauthor Adrian Vermeule, Posner cultivated the reputation of a generational bad boy. He collaborated with Vermeule on a defense of their friend John Yoo’s torture memos that appeared in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. Associating himself with the early years of the Bush administration, Posner also defended coercive interrogation, a broader category overlapping with torture, as a necessary tactic in some circumstances. Apparently, for Posner, the War on Terrorism and its associated costs were not all that objectionable; he certainly did not argue that they were the fruits of demagogy. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
Posner and Vermeule also worked to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt, the notorious Nazi jurist. They coined “tyrannophobia” to describe the notion that if one temptation in governance is to allow too much authority in one place, another is to fear its concentration so much as to incur even higher costs. (Vermeule impishly titled one of his more notorious papers “Optimal Abuse of Power.”) As their last major act together before Trump’s election, they penned the 2011 book The Executive Unbound, which claimed that the American presidency had outgrown the founders’ attempts to impose checks and balances against it. Public opinion, they maintained, was now nearly the sole force that kept America’s national leaders from transgression—and this was a good thing, too, because of the beneficial role a competent administrative state plays relative to dysfunctional legislatures and ignorant judiciaries. In the fun and games of intellectual strife before Trump, no one anticipated that someone like him was coming to inherit the power the authors defended.
Known to their liberal opponents as the horsemen of the apocalypse, these now middle-aged conservatives blinked in November 2016 when the apocalypse actually materialized. Posner soon discovered his inner liberal: Within a matter of months and without ever explaining his turnabout, he began regularly advising liberals on how they could use the law to constrain the current president. No longer an edgy gadfly and outlier, he now helps man the ramparts of the Resistance and has been heralded by many of his erstwhile critics. Heads nod sagely everywhere The New York Times is read as it prints op-ed after op-ed from a defender of torture about how to hem Trump in. But for informed observers, it seemed more like an atheist rushing into the arms of the church after the devil appeared. (For his part, Vermeule literally joined the church—he converted to Catholicism in 2016—and embraced reactionary positions much more consistent with his earlier writings, but that is another story.) Current Issue View our current issue
Part of Posner’s appeal to the centrist coalition known as the Resistance is no doubt found in the fact that he is not interested in the root causes that led to Trump’s election. Though Posner has written a book with the economist E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets, that belatedly registered some of the costs of America’s accelerating inequality, the only credible alternative to neoliberalism, they insisted, was even more of it. (We should marketize the voting system!) And now in The Demagogue’s Playbook, Posner blames “the people” for Trump’s rise. For Posner, all manner of evils are defensible, from free markets on steroids to forever wars that ruin the world, as long as elites are the ones who implement them. What the Platonist cannot abide is when the people push back.
Posner’s opening premise in The Demagogue’s Playbook is that “demagogue” is a better label for Trump than “authoritarian” or “fascist,” at least to date. For Posner, the frequent arguments that Trump is already a fascist politician or a dictator on the make are not so much mistaken as premature. They are “more like an inarticulate attempt to express—in constitutional terms—an uneasiness.” If democracy can lead to tyranny, as Plato first proposed, demagogy is a distinct and preliminary stage. And, Posner insists, it is more present, so far, in American history.
The threat of demagogy, Posner contends, is the reason the American founders were Platonists: They crafted a modern republic on the assumption that the people themselves were the chief threat to it, and they sought to make popular legitimation safe for and through elite rule. To do so, they constructed the Constitution in a manner that not only responded to the frailty of the federal government after 1776 but also warded off the growing signs of democracy, like the radical Pennsylvania state government and Shays’s Rebellion. Their inspired achievement was the suite of antidemocratic devices that the Constitution enshrined, from the Electoral College to the enumeration of congressional powers, from a Senate to cool any populist legislation to a Supreme Court that could invalidate it. Founder John Adams’s main mistake, Posner writes, was “incautiously” telling the people openly it was good for them to defer to the superiors, as in his proposal of the tag “Your Majesty” for the president of the new republic. His son John Quincy Adams enthusiastically predicted that the handiwork of the founding generation would “increase the influence, power, and wealth of those who have it already.”
After celebrating the origins of the rule of the wise, American style, Posner goes on to discuss how challenges to it were contained. The process started, he argues, when, in the name of agrarian ideals, one of the founders, Thomas Jefferson, decided to take a run at the ascendancy of the best and the brightest he had helped set up. Then came “the first demagogue,” Andrew Jackson. Whereas Jefferson conceded the need for elites and attacked the original framework at the margins—earning resistance from his never-Jefferson opponents after the election of 1800—Jackson was the real deal. A white nationalist who railed against elite projects like Alexander Hamilton’s national bank, “Old Hickory” portended Trump, Posner asserts, like no president before or since. A lot of ills followed, but Posner disputes the notion that Jackson did any good in exchange for the horrors he brought, even for the ordinary white men he claimed to represent. In Posner’s view, Jacksonianism proved that democracy is the worst of both worlds: You lose elite governance without helping the masses, either. More From Samuel Moyn In the Shadow of 9/11 September 7, 2021 Allegations of Fascism Distract From the Real Danger January 18, 2021 Navigating Freedom With Cass Sunstein June 3, 2019
Given that most of the people then could not even vote, it took the new era of mass democracy that followed the Civil War for the next wave of demagogy to arrive. Wading into an old debate over late 19th century political history, Posner insists that a demagogic politics was central to the populist movement. But with little interest in the different economic and social grievances that propelled it, he generally conflates left and right populism and sees little reason people in the late 1800s—America’s first Gilded Age of the victory of the rich, before our own—might have been interested in reclaiming power from elites. Generously, however, he concedes that William Jennings Bryan, the Nebraskan Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for president three times as a progressive and pacifist, wasn’t a demagogue.
Posner’s chronicle of American history continues with what he applauds as “the triumph of elite technocracy” in the 20th century. Progressives may have adopted populist ends, he allows, but they “distrusted the ordinary people whom the populists celebrated.” Franklin Roosevelt capped this movement of elite egalitarian change: He helped the people by keeping them in their place, according to Posner. The Cold War, he argues, merely extended this suppression. He acknowledges that demagogues could still rear their heads throughout, from anti-communist zealots like Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s to Southern segregationists like George Wallace in the ’60s. But Posner is wistful for the middle decades of the 20th century as a time when no president came close to demagogy, in spite of a few feints by Richard Nixon. Instead, the party establishments worked to enthrone experts, pretty much as the Platonist founders had planned it.
In tracing the final stretches of the road to Trump, Posner shifts from his study of personalities to a story of the “political institutions that constrained the public’s influence on the selection of the president and other major politicians.” He has in mind, in particular, nomination processes and transformations in the media. Predictably, for Posner, all hell broke loose as the parties democratized after 1968. With the rules changed, the people now had more power, which he argues allowed a series of figures to arise who now seem like premonitions of our moment—rabble-rousers like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. Posner specifically rejects economic and status grievances as causes for Trump’s success, first among Republicans and then against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Instead, he contends that Trump inherited and maximized the populist undercurrent that elites sagaciously kept from surging in the prior century.
The defects in Posner’s account begin with the sloppiness of his central concept. The word “demagogue,” he says, has a “core meaning” that has “remained stable over millennia.” In fact, the ancient Athenians who coined the term—which literally means “leader of the people”—used it as the title for an office that advocated, after Pericles’s death, the correct course for the city-state to take. It was not a term of abuse; for that matter, Plato never used it in any of his dialogues.
When it comes to modern history, Posner is on sturdier ground and is clearly onto something when he asserts that some politicians flirt with the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the point of outrageous excess. But rereading US history as a series of dry runs for Trump—and as a set of struggles by elites to maintain control of a democracy they were sometimes forced to build upon and expand—misses most of its moral drama and almost all of its social conflicts. Gone, in particular, are the deeper reasons elites desire control and sometimes lose it when their failures and shortcomings become clear.
Part of the problem (though Posner gets points for honesty here) is how apologetically he slips into laudatory portraits of elites as disinterested rather than self-dealing and of populist forces as uneducated and unwashed. In some ways, he is attempting to revive the consensus historiography of Richard Hofstadter, a Columbia historian and the most celebrated scholar of the American past in the mid-20th century. Yet Hofstadter, a former radical who was not merely anxious about challenges to centrist rule but also sensitive to liberalism’s dark sides, was not above excoriating the injustices that elites perpetrate. He hoped to confine the most potentially destructive forces on the right to their fringe while protecting the vital center against the left. But his centrism was anything but uncomplicated, in part because it was far more open to how universal irrationality is.
This is why the most revealing section of Posner’s book is on the mid-20th century, when Hofstadter could consider centrist liberalism a fait accompli, thus normalizing the New Deal and the emerging Cold War consensus. For starters, Posner bends over backward to distract us from recognizing how damaging Roosevelt is to his whole framework. Although highborn, FDR nonetheless played the man of the people, challenging norms and institutions for their failures, and rightly so. For his trouble, he was commonly branded a demagogue—or an authoritarian or fascist—by his enemies, far beyond the denunciations that all leaders earn from their foes.
The real reason that memory has not preserved how profound Roosevelt’s challenge was to the norms and institutions of his time is one that Posner eventually comes around to conceding: FDR “was vindicated by events, as much as history ever allows.” The victorious demagogue in one era becomes the mainstream democrat in the next. Fortunately, that will not happen with Trump. But if Roosevelt succeeded where Trump fails, it is hardly because of the latter’s excoriation of elite mistakes. Rather, it is because his persona and program intensified the elite rule of our time, as part of what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson recently dubbed “plutocratic populism.”
Likewise, Posner does not engage the foreign policy fiascoes of elites that—especially given his own past—ought to loom large in any assessment of how they lost hold. During the Cold War, which Posner portrays as a golden age of elite rule, Roosevelt’s “technocratic” successors armed the American state like no power before it and made the globe its killing field. Posner affectionately cites John Adams, who remarked that “the Athenians grew more and more Warlike in proportion as the commonwealth became more democratic.” Posner doesn’t mention that the Cold War and the War on Terrorism would have made Adams blanch.
As the 1980s and ’90s brought early warning signs of the impending disaster of 2016, like Buchanan’s candidacy, it hardly signified that the dangerous people were improvidently being given a chance to speak, as Posner disarmingly proposes. Rather, they were symptoms of how catastrophic the elite’s performance was at home and abroad. The clues to the mystery of how Trump became credible to 60 million Americans surely lie in these decades—but not because democracy was unleashed, since, after all, a minority put him in office, thanks to the very minority-rule mechanisms the founders designed. Instead, the outcome signaled just how disastrous the preceding decades of elite rule had been.
As for Posner’s explanation for Trump’s electoral success, it is circular. On the one hand, he rejects the combination of grievance and racism that drew voters to Trump in order to insist it was demagogy that did it; on the other, he acknowledges that these very factors made the situation ripe for demagogy. (He explains that they were just not “a sufficient condition”—though who said they were?—and required a demagogue to take advantage of the situation.)
One might expect Posner to close his tale of American demagogues kept at bay with a suite of new remedies for the pathologies of popular rule. Surprisingly, he offers none. He acknowledges that “constitutional reform” is on the agenda. “Perhaps,” he muses, “we need to strip the presidency of many of the powers that it has accumulated over the years, so that future demagogues who are elected president will be unable to cause harm.” But the sole indication that Posner has thought about how to reconcile his old and new selves—the apologist for presidential aggrandizement and the critic of this particular president—comes in a footnote. “I believe,” he says there, “that only a strong presidency can solve the problems with the American constitutional system.” The only fair conclusion is that for Posner, even once you realize demagogy is a risk, you do not act to contain unaccountable and unchecked power; you just pray that elites wield it.
In the end, Posner replaces one Resistance cul-de-sac with another. Instead of focusing on impending tyranny, he endorses an only slightly more useful notion that the country’s problem is demagogy. But it is not clear that any political leaders elected by a majority have ever have seized dictatorial control of their countries, and certainly none have done so in American history. (So much for Plato’s theory.) And Posner’s charge that America’s difficulty is that the country has finally fallen to the very demagogy its founders designed it to avoid really just distracts from assessing the costs of elite rule. New Deal reformer and Yale Law professor Thurman Arnold had it right: “The man with the social values which you do not like, you will call the demagogue.” Crying “demagogue” is another kind of evasion.
Learning nothing from his experiences, Posner offers an apology for elite rule during a period in which it is in a state of crisis—an apology that will persuade only those who share his complacency. A study that found the top 10 percent of earners control the political system “does not prove that elite control is excessive,” he asserts. Instead, “we would need to know what policy would look like if elites held less control, and no one knows.” He prefers to rest content with the wisdom that in “any organized system of governance” there is a “need for division of labor and specialization of functions” that “results in a small number of people at the top.” Instead of calling for better elites, however, Posner goes so far as to indict the rare ones who bolt from the defense of their privileges.
But the fact that “there is no direct way for the people to rule in the American system,” as he observes, is hardly an excuse for suggesting that we should simply accept the status quo ante of the rule of the self-appointed wise. Thanks to thinkers like Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Joseph Schumpeter, the first lesson of modern political science as a profession is indeed that elites will rule even in democracies. But it very much matters which ones do so, for whose sake, and to what ends. Among other things, they can help democracy live up more and more to its promise of collective self-government, challenging the line between the ruling class and the rest of us.
Finally, unlike Posner and the other latter-day Platonists, we know that elites have their own passions and prejudices, as disabling and distorting as those of the people and probably more so. Posner’s most debatable error—one that connects his earlier career arguing for free markets and executive power with his current bout of democratic malaise in the Trump era—is in giving elites a pass for their dysfunctions. That the ancient case against the irrationality of democracy is itself irrational suggests that Plato is the wrong place to begin when explaining Trump’s rise. The reasonable fear for the immediate future, once Trump is kicked out by the people, is of a baleful elite restoration. In fact, it already seems like the biggest thing to fear.


thenation--2020-08-24--How Yale Became the Latest Target in the Plot to Kill Affirmative Action

The Department of Justice has not filed a single case to defend the Voting Rights Act during the Trump era .
Other Republican administrations have mounted at least token defenses of the law , but Donald Trump ’ s DOJ has not found even one instance of voter discrimination or suppression that it is willing to bring to federal court .
And it has all but stopped conducting investigations into biased policing and greatly reduced the number of investigations into hate crimes and disability rights cases.1 What has the civil rights division at the Justice Department been doing all this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of federal law enforcement in charge of policing racial discrimination ?
Apparently , it has been preoccupied with white kids who can ’ t get into Yale .
The Department of Justice recently accused the university of civil rights violations over the school ’ s use of affirmative action in college admissions .
According to the DOJ , a two-year investigation revealed that Yale systemically discriminated against white and Asian American applicants to the university.2 If this accusation sounds familiar , it should .
The DOJ ’ s claims against Yale are near @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Fair Admissions , a group led by the anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum against Harvard .
SFFA ’ s lawsuit against Harvard also used Asian American students—who almost certainly are discriminated against—as a front for a legal action designed primarily to make it easier for mediocre white students to get into elite universities.3 SFFA lost its lawsuit in front of US District Judge Allison D. Burroughs last fall .
She ruled that Harvard ’ s admissions policy was squarely in line with constitutional principles , as established in Grutter v. Bollinger .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2003 , requires affirmative action programs to be “ narrowly tailored ” in order to achieve the “ compelling interest ” of promoting diversity on college campuses .
Burroughs ruled that Harvard ’ s use of race as one factor among many was in keeping with Supreme Court precedent .
The case is now pending appeal.4 The Department of Justice , which weighed in with an amicus brief in support of SFFA ’ s suit , offers no compelling evidence for how Yale ’ s admissions program differs from Harvard ’ s—or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ test Harvard passed less than a year ago .
Eric S. Dreiband , the assistant attorney general for civil rights , said , “ Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes , bitterness and division , ” which is a statement devoid of any relevant information about Yale ’ s facially legal admissions priorities.5 In its letter to the school , the Justice Department ordered Yale “ not to use race or national origin in its upcoming 2020-2021 undergraduate admissions cycle.
” It ’ s an amazing commandment when you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is still allowed to consider , according to the DOJ .
Yale can consider if an applicant is a legacy , a prince , or a celebrity .
It can consider an applicant ’ s gender or sexual orientation .
It can consider whether an applicant can paint , sing , or dunk .
But Yale is being ordered to put its head in the sand and ignore whether an applicant has faced systemic racism .
Yale can look at whether an applicant is from Manhattan , N.Y. , or Manhattan , Kan. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ applicant ’ s ancestors are from San Juan , P.R.
, or Lagos , Nigeria.6 The argument against affirmative action is never really about merit or fairness or any of the buzzwords conservatives use to mask their racism .
It ’ s always about promoting the chances of white kids over everybody else.7 The Justice Department gave Yale until August 27 to voluntarily comply with its directive .
Yale already indicated it will not comply .
Despite the lack of a valid legal argument , the Justice Department is likely to sue the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arguments is not ever the point when it comes to the Justice Department under Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr ( or former AG Jeff Sessions , for that matter ) .
They ’ re not trying to make a case ; they ’ re simply trying to get a case in front of a Trump-appointed judge or an appellate court stacked with Trump judges .
And if they lose in the lower courts , well , there ’ s always the Supreme Court.9 I believe there have been enough votes on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ college admissions since alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh ascended to that bench .
I also believe that Justice Clarence Thomas , who dissented in part in Bollinger and has contempt of affirmative action because he thinks it made white people not take him seriously , will be able to keep himself alive on pure hatred until he is allowed to write the opinion ending its use .
Conservatives don ’ t have a constitutional rule they want universities to follow in order to promote diversity on campus ; they just want universities to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Barr is trying to do is rush this case onto a court ’ s docket before Trump is ( hopefully ) kicked out of office in January .
If it gets onto a court ’ s docket , it will likely be assigned a lawyer by the court even if Joe Biden wins in November and his Justice Department withdraws the complaint .
At that point , Barr will have opened up another opportunity for some conservative judge to issue a sweeping ruling that would end affirmative action , throwing various university programs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conservative-controlled Supreme Court to sort out the mess.10 No matter who wins , Asian American students will lose .
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing minority group in the country and have been for most of this century , but their representation at elite universities has not kept pace .
It ’ s not because Black kids are taking up spots .
It ’ s because many of the other factors that universities consider serve to disadvantage Asian American applicants .
Geographic diversity favors white kids , school recommendation letters favor white kids , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white kids .
To use just one popular example , more than a third of those admitted to the Harvard Class of 2022 were legacies.11 Trump ’ s Department of Justice isn ’ t trying to end affirmative action ; it ’ s trying to keep Black children out of elite colleges and universities .
It has no problem with affirmative action for middling white students.12

This article appears in the September 7/14, 2020 issue.
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The Department of Justice has not filed a single case to defend the Voting Rights Act during the Trump era. Other Republican administrations have mounted at least token defenses of the law, but Donald Trump’s DOJ has not found even one instance of voter discrimination or suppression that it is willing to bring to federal court. And it has all but stopped conducting investigations into biased policing and greatly reduced the number of investigations into hate crimes and disability rights cases.1
What has the civil rights division at the Justice Department been doing all this time? What has commanded the attention of federal law enforcement in charge of policing racial discrimination? Apparently, it has been preoccupied with white kids who can’t get into Yale. The Department of Justice recently accused the university of civil rights violations over the school’s use of affirmative action in college admissions. According to the DOJ, a two-year investigation revealed that Yale systemically discriminated against white and Asian American applicants to the university.2
If this accusation sounds familiar, it should. The DOJ’s claims against Yale are near carbon copies of allegations leveled by Students for Fair Admissions, a group led by the anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum against Harvard. SFFA’s lawsuit against Harvard also used Asian American students—who almost certainly are discriminated against—as a front for a legal action designed primarily to make it easier for mediocre white students to get into elite universities.3
SFFA lost its lawsuit in front of US District Judge Allison D. Burroughs last fall. She ruled that Harvard’s admissions policy was squarely in line with constitutional principles, as established in Grutter v. Bollinger. That case, decided by the Supreme Court in 2003, requires affirmative action programs to be “narrowly tailored” in order to achieve the “compelling interest” of promoting diversity on college campuses. Burroughs ruled that Harvard’s use of race as one factor among many was in keeping with Supreme Court precedent. The case is now pending appeal.4
The Department of Justice, which weighed in with an amicus brief in support of SFFA’s suit, offers no compelling evidence for how Yale’s admissions program differs from Harvard’s—or why it should fail the same legal test Harvard passed less than a year ago. Eric S. Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said, “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness and division,” which is a statement devoid of any relevant information about Yale’s facially legal admissions priorities.5 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Current Issue View our current issue
In its letter to the school, the Justice Department ordered Yale “not to use race or national origin in its upcoming 2020-2021 undergraduate admissions cycle.” It’s an amazing commandment when you think about all the other things Yale is still allowed to consider, according to the DOJ. Yale can consider if an applicant is a legacy, a prince, or a celebrity. It can consider an applicant’s gender or sexual orientation. It can consider whether an applicant can paint, sing, or dunk. But Yale is being ordered to put its head in the sand and ignore whether an applicant has faced systemic racism. Yale can look at whether an applicant is from Manhattan, N.Y., or Manhattan, Kan., but it must ignore if the applicant’s ancestors are from San Juan, P.R., or Lagos, Nigeria.6
The argument against affirmative action is never really about merit or fairness or any of the buzzwords conservatives use to mask their racism. It’s always about promoting the chances of white kids over everybody else.7
The Justice Department gave Yale until August 27 to voluntarily comply with its directive. Yale already indicated it will not comply. Despite the lack of a valid legal argument, the Justice Department is likely to sue the school.8
Of course, offering valid legal arguments is not ever the point when it comes to the Justice Department under Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr (or former AG Jeff Sessions, for that matter). They’re not trying to make a case; they’re simply trying to get a case in front of a Trump-appointed judge or an appellate court stacked with Trump judges. And if they lose in the lower courts, well, there’s always the Supreme Court.9
I believe there have been enough votes on the Supreme Court to end affirmative action in college admissions since alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh ascended to that bench. I also believe that Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented in part in Bollinger and has contempt of affirmative action because he thinks it made white people not take him seriously, will be able to keep himself alive on pure hatred until he is allowed to write the opinion ending its use. Conservatives don’t have a constitutional rule they want universities to follow in order to promote diversity on campus; they just want universities to stop promoting diversity on campus.
All Barr is trying to do is rush this case onto a court’s docket before Trump is (hopefully) kicked out of office in January. If it gets onto a court’s docket, it will likely be assigned a lawyer by the court even if Joe Biden wins in November and his Justice Department withdraws the complaint. At that point, Barr will have opened up another opportunity for some conservative judge to issue a sweeping ruling that would end affirmative action, throwing various university programs into disarray, and wait for the conservative-controlled Supreme Court to sort out the mess.10
No matter who wins, Asian American students will lose. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing minority group in the country and have been for most of this century, but their representation at elite universities has not kept pace. It’s not because Black kids are taking up spots. It’s because many of the other factors that universities consider serve to disadvantage Asian American applicants. Geographic diversity favors white kids, school recommendation letters favor white kids, and most important, legacy status favors white kids. To use just one popular example, more than a third of those admitted to the Harvard Class of 2022 were legacies.11
Trump’s Department of Justice isn’t trying to end affirmative action; it’s trying to keep Black children out of elite colleges and universities. It has no problem with affirmative action for middling white students.12


thenation--2020-08-24--The Border Patrol Considered Accepting a Donation From We Build the Wall

After the arrest of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon last week for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to a private organization with the stated purpose of building a wall along the southern border , We Build the Wall , administration officials have sought to distance themselves from the project .
But Customs and Border Protection ( CBP ) leadership met with representatives of We Build the Wall to consider their offer of donating the privately constructed wall to the US government .
CBP described it as “ an overall positive meet and greet ” and even provided the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its wall to CBP , according to an internal CBP memo obtained exclusively by The Nation .
How Stephen Miller Turned the Department of Homeland Security Into a Political Weapon In a November 2019 meeting , CBP leadership—including Deputy Commissioner Robert Perez—privately advised representatives of the project on how to transfer the finished wall to CBP control using an obscure donation procedure , according to the memo .
To assist the effort , CBP conducted an assessment of the group ’ s completed wall section section in Sunland Park , N.M. , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assessment .
On November 26—five days after the date on the document—We Build the Wall issued a press release announcing that Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) chief Chad Wolf had endorsed the project , purportedly calling it a “ game-changer.
” After the indictments , however , Wolf told CNN that he never endorsed the effort .
Marked for official use only , the memo is signed by DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism Ntina Cooper .
It was provided to The Nation by a DHS source on condition of anonymity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2019 , CBP Leadership met with representatives of WBTW [ We Build the Wall ] in an overall positive meet and greet to discuss the completed wall section in Sunland Park , New Mexico .
USBP [ United States Border Patrol ] representatives outlined the results of the operational assessment that was conducted on the project and identified some areas of concern and other approaches USBP takes when undertaking similar projects .
WBTW representatives asked for clarification on what a donation offer would need to look like and whether CPB would be amenable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Deputy Commissioner Perez expressed that CBP is interested in exploring all available options if an offer were made .
WBTW was provided with CBP ’ s Barrier Donation Checklist .
The barrier donation checklist is not included in the memo but appears to be a list of criteria necessary for CBP to accept existing border wall segments as donations .
According to the memo , the firm that We Build the Wall hired to construct the wall , Fisher Industries , inflated its capabilities .
As an example , it contrasts Fisher @ @ @ @ @ @ @ need three to four working days to place 2,200 feet of wall panels with the fact that it took more than eight working days while working 24 hours per day .
“ Performance during the execution period was not consistent with Fisher Industry claims , ” the document states .
“ Their performance on this small project shows that some claims may have been inflated due to lack of experience with this type of work.
” Fisher Industries is a construction company headed by CEO Tommy Fisher , a frequent guest on Fox @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has reportedly lobbied in the past for major border wall contracts to go to Fisher Industries .
The memo goes on to describe a number of “ challenges ” to CBP ’ s accepting the border project ’ s construction , including a lack of environmental impact studies .
“ If DHS/CBP were to engage in a NEPA analysis of the proposed construction , due to the cultural sensitivity of the Mount Cristo Rey site and likely controversy , the project would likely require a full Environmental Impact Statement , as opposed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states .
Mount Cristo Rey , in El Paso along the border with Juarez , Mexico , is considered a sacred site by many Catholics .
The memo also describes complications posed by the private border wall ’ s surveillance cameras , the details of which appear to be unknown to CBP : Last week , the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against members of We Build the Wall ’ s advisory board , including Steve Bannon , Brian Kolfage , and two others .
Kolfage allegedly spent the skimmed money on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cart , and jewelry ; Bannon is accused of using what he took to pay down credit card debts .
They face charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering , felony offenses that each carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison .
We Build the Wall , originally begun as a GoFundMe campaign in December of 2018 , raised $ 25 million and boasts an advisory board studded with high-profile Trump administration associates like Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ offered an appointment to the DHS but was not hired after a CNN report that he had plagiarized his master ’ s thesis .
CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment .

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After the arrest of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon last week for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to a private organization with the stated purpose of building a wall along the southern border, We Build the Wall, administration officials have sought to distance themselves from the project. But Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leadership met with representatives of We Build the Wall to consider their offer of donating the privately constructed wall to the US government. CBP described it as “an overall positive meet and greet” and even provided the group with guidance on how to gift its wall to CBP, according to an internal CBP memo obtained exclusively by The Nation. the border How Stephen Miller Turned the Department of Homeland Security Into a Political Weapon Jean Guerrero
In a November 2019 meeting, CBP leadership—including Deputy Commissioner Robert Perez—privately advised representatives of the project on how to transfer the finished wall to CBP control using an obscure donation procedure, according to the memo. To assist the effort, CBP conducted an assessment of the group’s completed wall section section in Sunland Park, N.M., and provided it with the results of that assessment.
On November 26—five days after the date on the document—We Build the Wall issued a press release announcing that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Chad Wolf had endorsed the project, purportedly calling it a “game-changer.” After the indictments, however, Wolf told CNN that he never endorsed the effort.
Marked for official use only, the memo is signed by DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism Ntina Cooper. It was provided to The Nation by a DHS source on condition of anonymity. The memo states:
In September 2019, CBP Leadership met with representatives of WBTW [We Build the Wall] in an overall positive meet and greet to discuss the completed wall section in Sunland Park, New Mexico. USBP [United States Border Patrol] representatives outlined the results of the operational assessment that was conducted on the project and identified some areas of concern and other approaches USBP takes when undertaking similar projects. WBTW representatives asked for clarification on what a donation offer would need to look like and whether CPB would be amenable to acceptance if an offer were made. Deputy Commissioner Perez expressed that CBP is interested in exploring all available options if an offer were made. WBTW was provided with CBP’s Barrier Donation Checklist.
The barrier donation checklist is not included in the memo but appears to be a list of criteria necessary for CBP to accept existing border wall segments as donations. According to the memo, the firm that We Build the Wall hired to construct the wall, Fisher Industries, inflated its capabilities. As an example, it contrasts Fisher Industry’s claim that it would need three to four working days to place 2,200 feet of wall panels with the fact that it took more than eight working days while working 24 hours per day. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
“Performance during the execution period was not consistent with Fisher Industry claims,” the document states. “Their performance on this small project shows that some claims may have been inflated due to lack of experience with this type of work.” Current Issue View our current issue
Fisher Industries is a construction company headed by CEO Tommy Fisher, a frequent guest on Fox News and a Republican donor. Trump has reportedly lobbied in the past for major border wall contracts to go to Fisher Industries.
The memo goes on to describe a number of “challenges” to CBP’s accepting the border project’s construction, including a lack of environmental impact studies.
“If DHS/CBP were to engage in a NEPA analysis of the proposed construction, due to the cultural sensitivity of the Mount Cristo Rey site and likely controversy, the project would likely require a full Environmental Impact Statement, as opposed to an Environmental Assessment,” the document states. Mount Cristo Rey, in El Paso along the border with Juarez, Mexico, is considered a sacred site by many Catholics.
The memo also describes complications posed by the private border wall’s surveillance cameras, the details of which appear to be unknown to CBP:
The type of cameras installed is unknown. However, WBTW has indicated an intention to provide real-time access to four cameras to donors to their program. Security of cameras, data storage, data type, image format and transmission all remain unknown.
Last week, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against members of We Build the Wall’s advisory board, including Steve Bannon, Brian Kolfage, and two others. Kolfage allegedly spent the skimmed money on a boat, cosmetic surgery, a golf cart, and jewelry; Bannon is accused of using what he took to pay down credit card debts. They face charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, felony offenses that each carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
We Build the Wall, originally begun as a GoFundMe campaign in December of 2018, raised $25 million and boasts an advisory board studded with high-profile Trump administration associates like Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke. In 2017, Clarke said he was offered an appointment to the DHS but was not hired after a CNN report that he had plagiarized his master’s thesis.
CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


thenation--2020-08-24--The Democrats Just Showed Us a Weakness in Their 2020 Strategy

Did Democrats just inadvertently throw Trump a lifeline for reelection ?
More worrisome , did their convention presage a Biden administration without a mandate to address the stark challenges of this time ?
Democrats left their often-moving virtual convention last week confident that they ’ d consolidated Biden ’ s lead and roused their coalition .
Throughout the major speeches , their critique of Trump focused on his lack of character and competence .
Former president Barack Obama warned of the threat he poses to democracy itself .
The Democrats as a whole chose not to highlight how Trump had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crucial to his victory in 2016 .
They emphasized Biden ’ s decency and empathy and his ability to reach across the aisle .
But they offered neither a compelling explanation for why we ’ re in the mess we are in nor a clear sense about how Biden plans to get us out of it .
The convention successfully displayed the emerging Democratic coalition linking the suburban middle class , particularly women , with people of color and the young .
Trump ’ s catastrophic failure to manage the pandemic got deserved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ justice , immigration , guns , climate , child care—were chosen for their appeal to elements of the coalition .
This strategic choice—in essence , a replay of Hillary Clinton ’ s strategy in 2016—is worrisome as campaign strategy and even more troubling if it indicates the direction Biden will follow if elected .
Progressives , Get Ready to Push Them Left The Complete Dysfunction of the GOP Is on Full Display Congress Isn ’ t Doing the Bare Minimum for Pandemic Relief Exposing Trump ’ s con of his working-class voters wouldn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tax cuts larded the pockets of the rich and corporations , while workers never saw the raises that were promised .
His trade policies left manufacturing in a recession even before the pandemic , while his tax bill actually rewarded corporations that moved jobs abroad .
He and the Republican Senate are blocking continued support for the 28 million people still on unemployment .
He continues to try to repeal Obamacare without offering an alternative .
Yet deaths of despair , the opioid epidemic , the continued shuttering of factories got little attention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ security establishment figures that helped mire us in endless wars abroad were arrayed in support of Biden , while Trump ’ s failed promise to end those wars went unnoticed .
Democrats did not offer a clear argument about why this economy does not work for most Americans—a reality that long precedes Trump—and what Biden proposes to do about it .
Biden did mention raising the minimum wage , touched on the importance of unions , and linked the green investment agenda to jobs .
But the focus was on Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unity against division , diversity against prejudice .
This strategic choice reflects the campaign ’ s strategy : The presidential campaign apparently won ’ t reach out to the white working class , particularly men .
Democrats will focus on turning out the vote of the people of color and the young and making inroads in the suburbs , particularly among women .
This slights the very voters—the Obama-Trump voters in the key states of the Midwest—who cost Hillary Clinton the election in 2016 .
Electorally , in the short term , this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ popular vote four years ago when Democrats were complacent , and Trump was considered an amusement .
Now Democrats are aroused and Trump is a menace .
His bungling of the pandemic and the chaos now around school openings have driven his approval down to new lows .
But it does give Trump an opening .
His virtual convention , in which he will be “ the talent in chief ” and appear every night , will inevitably display his bile and his guile .
He will play the race card , pitching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cities .
He ’ ll offer a stage to wingnuts like the St. Louis couple who brandished guns against peaceful protesters passing their home .
He ’ ll savage Biden personally—for alleged mental decline , corruption , as “ stone cold crazy ” and a ” puppet of the radical left ” who wants to “ abolish the suburbs.
” But the focus of his attack is likely to be on policy—scouring Biden for his support for mass incarceration , his championing of ruinous trade deals , his vote for the Iraq War @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the nation , Trump went to Scranton , Penn.
, Biden ’ s birthplace , to tell supporters , “ Joe Biden is no friend of Pennsylvania .
He ’ s actually…your worst nightmare .
Biden supported every single globalist attack on Pennsylvania workers , NAFTA , China ’ s entry into the World Trade Organization , which built China into a power , [ the Trans-Pacific Partnership ] , Korea , the horrible , ridiculous Paris climate accord , which stripped our nation of its energy , and the so-called Clean Power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the insurgent , not the incumbent , fighting for the little guy against the elite establishment , the deep state , the swamp .
He ’ ll sell a mythical pre-pandemic economy and promise a miraculous post-pandemic recovery .
The strategic decision of Democrats to ignore his con of working people gives Trump an open field to be the populist in the race .
Even if Biden goes on to win , the Democratic default has worrisome implications .
Without a mandate , Biden will have more trouble building a majority for systemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bipartisan cooperation will empower the deep pockets , the entrenched interests , and the conservative wing of the party .
In the long run , betrayed by Trump and neglected by Democrats , the white working class will be left without a party .
The appeal to people of color on the basis of identity rather than economic interest is likely to have a limited shelf life .
Democrats may well find that the failure to ground their coalition and their agenda in the broad working class will make it impossible to build @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we need .

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Did Democrats just inadvertently throw Trump a lifeline for reelection? More worrisome, did their convention presage a Biden administration without a mandate to address the stark challenges of this time?
Democrats left their often-moving virtual convention last week confident that they’d consolidated Biden’s lead and roused their coalition. Throughout the major speeches, their critique of Trump focused on his lack of character and competence. Former president Barack Obama warned of the threat he poses to democracy itself. The Democrats as a whole chose not to highlight how Trump had betrayed the very working people who were crucial to his victory in 2016. They emphasized Biden’s decency and empathy and his ability to reach across the aisle. But they offered neither a compelling explanation for why we’re in the mess we are in nor a clear sense about how Biden plans to get us out of it.
The convention successfully displayed the emerging Democratic coalition linking the suburban middle class, particularly women, with people of color and the young. Trump’s catastrophic failure to manage the pandemic got deserved attention. The other issues touched upon—racial justice, immigration, guns, climate, child care—were chosen for their appeal to elements of the coalition.
This strategic choice—in essence, a replay of Hillary Clinton’s strategy in 2016—is worrisome as campaign strategy and even more troubling if it indicates the direction Biden will follow if elected. More From Robert L. Borosage Jesse Jackson Is Keeping Hope Alive July 13, 2023 The Left Should Support Ending Violence in Ukraine April 27, 2023 Biden, Go Bold in the State of the Union February 6, 2023
Exposing Trump’s con of his working-class voters wouldn’t have been hard. His tax cuts larded the pockets of the rich and corporations, while workers never saw the raises that were promised. His trade policies left manufacturing in a recession even before the pandemic, while his tax bill actually rewarded corporations that moved jobs abroad. He and the Republican Senate are blocking continued support for the 28 million people still on unemployment. He continues to try to repeal Obamacare without offering an alternative. Yet deaths of despair, the opioid epidemic, the continued shuttering of factories got little attention at the Democratic convention. The national security establishment figures that helped mire us in endless wars abroad were arrayed in support of Biden, while Trump’s failed promise to end those wars went unnoticed.
Democrats did not offer a clear argument about why this economy does not work for most Americans—a reality that long precedes Trump—and what Biden proposes to do about it. Biden did mention raising the minimum wage, touched on the importance of unions, and linked the green investment agenda to jobs. But the focus was on Trump’s malevolence, on decency against anger, unity against division, diversity against prejudice. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
This strategic choice reflects the campaign’s strategy: The presidential campaign apparently won’t reach out to the white working class, particularly men. Democrats will focus on turning out the vote of the people of color and the young and making inroads in the suburbs, particularly among women. This slights the very voters—the Obama-Trump voters in the key states of the Midwest—who cost Hillary Clinton the election in 2016. Current Issue View our current issue
Electorally, in the short term, this may not matter. Hillary won the popular vote four years ago when Democrats were complacent, and Trump was considered an amusement. Now Democrats are aroused and Trump is a menace. His bungling of the pandemic and the chaos now around school openings have driven his approval down to new lows.
But it does give Trump an opening. His virtual convention, in which he will be “the talent in chief” and appear every night, will inevitably display his bile and his guile. He will play the race card, pitching law and order against lawlessness in the cities. He’ll offer a stage to wingnuts like the St. Louis couple who brandished guns against peaceful protesters passing their home. He’ll savage Biden personally—for alleged mental decline, corruption, as “stone cold crazy” and a ”puppet of the radical left” who wants to “abolish the suburbs.”
But the focus of his attack is likely to be on policy—scouring Biden for his support for mass incarceration, his championing of ruinous trade deals, his vote for the Iraq War. On the day Biden spoke to the nation, Trump went to Scranton, Penn., Biden’s birthplace, to tell supporters, “Joe Biden is no friend of Pennsylvania. He’s actually…your worst nightmare. Biden supported every single globalist attack on Pennsylvania workers, NAFTA, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which built China into a power, [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], Korea, the horrible, ridiculous Paris climate accord, which stripped our nation of its energy, and the so-called Clean Power Plan.”
He’ll campaign as the insurgent, not the incumbent, fighting for the little guy against the elite establishment, the deep state, the swamp.
He’ll sell a mythical pre-pandemic economy and promise a miraculous post-pandemic recovery. The strategic decision of Democrats to ignore his con of working people gives Trump an open field to be the populist in the race.
Even if Biden goes on to win, the Democratic default has worrisome implications. Without a mandate, Biden will have more trouble building a majority for systemic change. His calls for unity and bipartisan cooperation will empower the deep pockets, the entrenched interests, and the conservative wing of the party.
In the long run, betrayed by Trump and neglected by Democrats, the white working class will be left without a party. The appeal to people of color on the basis of identity rather than economic interest is likely to have a limited shelf life. Democrats may well find that the failure to ground their coalition and their agenda in the broad working class will make it impossible to build a broad majority for the fundamental changes we need.