thenation--2020-07-27--Will the Left Get a Say in the Biden Doctrine?

Over the past few years , a loose coalition of activist groups , think tanks , and policy-makers dedicated to ending the post-9/11 forever war has asserted itself in foreign policy debates .
As recently as February , when Bernie Sanders appeared to be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination , it seemed possible that US foreign policy was on the verge of turning toward a less militarized and interventionist approach .
Sanders and the other major progressive candidate in the race , Elizabeth Warren , had foreign policy advisers who advocated slashing defense budgets and reinvesting in diplomacy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden ’ s decisive victory over Sanders dealt a blow to those hopes .
For decades , Biden has been a representative figure of the mainstream foreign policy establishment , the so-called Blob .
He supported the Iraq War , is close with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , and has premised his campaign on a restoration of the Obama era .
Biden appeared to secure the nomination just as the coronavirus pandemic began radically reshaping every aspect of policy-making , including international affairs .
I wanted to take the temperature of leading @ @ @ @ @ @ @ primary race and the pandemic to get a sense of how they might attempt to influence a Biden administration and to explore what national security means in an age of deadly viruses that don ’ t recognize national borders .
On one key point , there was a broad consensus : Covid-19 vindicates what the left has been saying about foreign policy—that endless war has squandered resources without making Americans safer—and represents an opportunity to shift the debate in a more constructive direction .
On the question of whether a Biden administration would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shift , there was far less agreement .
In early April , Ben Rhodes , a national security adviser for President Barack Obama , wrote in The Atlantic that “ as COVID-19 has transformed the way that Americans live , and threatens to claim exponentially more lives than any terrorist has , it is time to finally end the chapter of our history that began on September 11 , 2001.
” That is certainly the hope of all my interviewees , but for now , America ’ s wars rage on .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” said one leading progressive foreign policy adviser , who requested anonymity to speak candidly .
“ Just because we happen to be more focused on the pandemic right now does not let us off the hook for ending wars.
” But everyone I spoke to agreed on the urgency of doing so .
“ On foreign policy , as on a range of other issues , the pandemic has starkly demonstrated a lot of Senator Sanders ’ s arguments about how we have failed to invest in our own country , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Matt Duss , Sanders ’ s foreign policy adviser .
In response to the pandemic , Sanders and progressive allies in Congress recently proposed cutting the Pentagon ’ s budget by 10 percent , a plan since endorsed by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer .
“ It shows very clearly that our security priorities and investments—the obsessive focus on counterterrorism , the overuse of the military as the foreign policy instrument of first resort—have been not just wrong but wildly counterproductive , ” Duss said .
Stephen Wertheim , a cofounder of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tank that launched last year with funding from George Soros and Charles Koch , told me , “ The pandemic illustrated a lot of what we ’ ve been saying for some time—that our main challenges from the perspective of US interests are planetary and transnational , not military threats from rival nation-states.
” Wertheim added , “ What did our massive military apparatus and our national security state deliver for us against the biggest threat of our lifetime ?
Not much.
” By international standards , the United States has done an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Failures at every level of government mean that Covid-19 continues to spread across the US , even as countries in Europe and Asia turn the corner .
All of this suggests that American global leadership , already damaged by Donald Trump ’ s misgovernance , will have a hard time recovering from the pandemic .
“ Who would ever take that seriously after this ?
” said Duss .
“ This idea of America as this unparalleled and supremely competent global hegemon is over.
” Covid-19 is a preview not only of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the transnational security crisis that will define our lives .
The rest of the century is likely to see more famines , droughts , flooding , other natural disasters , resource wars , and mass migrations , all of which hurt the poorest countries disproportionately while sparing no one .
In the ideal scenario , nations would come together to create solutions to these borderless threats .
But it ’ s at least as plausible that countries will retreat into the kind of right-wing nationalism that has dominated international politics over the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not a luxury .
It ’ s a necessity , ” said David Adler , an informal Sanders foreign policy adviser and the general coordinator of the Progressive International , a recently launched organization dedicated to fostering ties among left-wing politicians and movements around the world .
“ All of humanity is thinking about the same crisis and confronting the same question of how you lock down a population while providing for basic resources .
We are all consumed by a similar anxiety.
” “ But that ’ s a fleeting moment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the old inequalities are going to settle in… .
We ’ re moving to a politics that ’ s very ripe for nationalism .
It ’ s our plight , as progressives , to have to force our way between those two perspectives to say that [ internationalism ] didn ’ t work the way it was constructed for the past half century and also that the direction of the right populists is far too dangerous.
” Kate Kizer , the policy director of the anti-interventionist advocacy group Win Without War , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m seeing two different paths ahead—either one of authoritarianism , driven by xenophobic nationalism , or an internationalist response that is rooted in cross-border solidarity and cooperation .
It ’ s a little bit scary , because authoritarianism is a playbook that ’ s tried and true and has been well organized for a long time and building towards this moment.
” She called the coronavirus crisis “ an authoritarian ’ s dream ” because it provides an excuse to declare emergency powers and suspend normal political processes and civil liberties , something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bolivia .
Covid-19 is also directly affecting the US military and its many theaters of operation .
In April the Navy fired Brett Crozier as captain of an aircraft carrier after he raised the alarm about a coronavirus outbreak on his ship .
In Yemen , a country mired in starvation and cholera due to an ongoing US-backed Saudi intervention in its civil war—opposition to which has been a central mission for progressive foreign policy activists—deaths from Covid-19 could exceed wartime fatalities in the internationally recognized capital of Aden .
In just two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 950 deaths from the pandemic , roughly half of Aden ’ s war fatalities in all of 2015 .
“ The primary focus for us remains asserting congressional war powers to end US support for the war in Yemen that continues to be the world ’ s worst humanitarian crisis , ” said Erik Sperling , the executive director of the left-wing anti-war group Just Foreign Policy .
“ Covid in Yemen is just starting .
They have an absolutely devastated health system .
We ’ ve had Save the Children hospitals that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The virus has also had a disastrous effect on Iran , which suffers under economic sanctions that were lifted after the Obama administration ’ s 2015 nuclear deal and reinstated under Trump after he unilaterally withdrew the US from the agreement in 2018 .
In January of this year , the Trump administration assassinated Iran ’ s top general , Qassim Suleimani , nearly setting off a regional war .
The White House had already imposed sanctions , denying Iranians access to food , prescription drugs , and medical devices .
More @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the government struggles to obtain critical supplies .
In late March 34 lawmakers—including Sanders , Warren , and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—sent a letter to the administration urging sanctions relief .
The letter was endorsed by groups such as Just Foreign Policy , Win Without War , J Street , and the Ploughshares Fund .
On April 2 the Biden campaign released an equivocal statement criticizing Trump ’ s Iran policy and providing guidelines for humanitarian aid to work around sanctions , but it did not call for sanctions relief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ main foreign policy adviser , Tony Blinken , said at an American Jewish Committee event that under a Biden administration , all sanctions on Iran would remain in place , including those introduced under Trump , unless Iran resumed full compliance with the nuclear deal—which it was doing before the US withdrawal , according to the International Atomic Energy Agency .
“ It was good that [ Biden ] said something , but I think what he called for was the bare minimum and that he should go much further , ” said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ progressives tend to appraise Biden .
Should he win the presidency , he will be responsible for managing US military commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere , for pursuing a multilateral diplomatic strategy for threats like the pandemic , and for navigating America ’ s increasingly fraught relationship with China .
Foreign policy progressives are ready and willing to advise him on all of these issues—but will he listen ?
The figure most likely to determine the answer is Blinken , a former Obama administration national security official who has been advising @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee .
Blinken , 58 , is a former contributor to The New Republic , a partner in a private equity firm ( as The American Prospect reported , a number of top Biden foreign policy advisers have gotten rich in the private sector ) , and an outspoken humanitarian interventionist .
Blinken had a hand in Obama ’ s Afghanistan surge ( which Biden , as several interviewees noted , opposed at the time ) and intervention in Libya .
In New York Times op-eds , Blinken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ air strikes on Bashar al-Assad ’ s regime in Syria and for providing military assistance to Ukraine .
Blinken is visible in Pete Souza ’ s famous photograph of the White House Situation Room during the assassination of Osama bin Laden .
Blinken also played a role in shaping the Iran nuclear deal .
Asked whether a Biden administration would be receptive to foreign policy progressives and vocal opponents of the forever war , Blinken said in a statement , “ Given the scope of the challenges the next president will face , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advice from a wide range of experts , including many progressive leaders , to help us build out a foreign policy agenda that reflects Vice President Biden ’ s long-held values , and will help restore America ’ s leadership role in the world as we confront new threats like the coronavirus ” ( emphasis added ) .
Who Is Matt Duss , and Can He Take On Washington ’ s ‘ Blob ’ ?
Multiple outlets have reported that progressives have been lobbying Blinken and others to commit to some of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Warren , with limited success at best .
Duss , the Sanders adviser , said he has had conversations with Blinken , bonding over a shared passion for the Beatles .
“ I have known him for quite some time , ” said Duss .
“ I like him a lot .
I have great respect for him.
” Duss added that he has recommended a number of people from Sanders ’ s foreign policy working group to work on the Biden campaign and that Biden ’ s team has been in touch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has welcomed supporters from not only the other progressive campaigns but from all of the other primary candidates with open arms , ” said another progressive foreign policy adviser .
“ They have incorporated advisers into their working groups .
They are proactively seeking to do what they can to unify the party.
” But the adviser cautioned , “ I think there is still an open question about whether that will result in any substantive changes in terms of policies and whether or not any of the more progressive voices in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The adviser also expressed concern that Biden has yet to commit to winding down wars in the Middle East or reducing the Pentagon budget .
“ Trump has increased it by hundreds of billions of dollars .
It doesn ’ t seem like too much of an ask to expect the Democratic nominee , at a minimum , to say that we ’ re going to undo those increases , even if they ’ re not willing to go further.
” Others were even more critical .
“ I don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ write , very recently , an op-ed with pro–Iraq War neocon Bob Kagan in The Washington Post , ” said Wertheim , who noted that while he has not spoken with Blinken , there are people in Biden ’ s orbit whose anti-interventionist views align with the Quincy Institute ’ s .
“ Biden ’ s record is the record of a mainstream Democrat over many decades—which is to say , not very good.
” In March , Wertheim criticized an essay written by Biden—presumably with input from Blinken—in Foreign Affairs laying out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It claimed to end the forever war , ” Wertheim said .
“ And then in the next sentence , it explained that what that meant was that perhaps half of US ground troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East would be withdrawn .
That ’ s not ending the forever war.
” Lara Friedman , who succeeded Duss as president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace , which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , was blunter .
She excoriated Blinken for his statement during a webcast in May that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your differences—to the greatest extent possible—between friends behind doors , ” referring to how Biden would handle disagreements with Israel .
The event was hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel , a super PAC funded in part by people who have donated to Republicans and that has targeted progressive candidates , including Sanders , with negative ads .
“ It ’ s quite striking , ” said Friedman .
“ They didn ’ t put this out in August .
They put this out in May , before the July 1 annexation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’ s pledge to annex parts of the occupied West Bank this summer , in violation of international law and against pre-Trump US policy .
( As of this writing , the process had not formally commenced . )
“ He ’ s saying aid will never be used as leverage of any kind .
He ’ s promising to protect Israel at the United Nations , which I have a hard time reading as anything other than a shot at Obama ” —a reference to Obama ’ s decision @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Israeli settlements in the West Bank in December 2016 .
Friedman was pessimistic about a Biden administration ’ s willingness to listen to pro-Palestine activists .
“ If they ’ ve already annexed by the time you come in , how much political capital are you going to spend trying to undo or unwind annexation ?
” she asked .
One issue that came up repeatedly in my interviews was the US-China relationship .
The Covid-19 pandemic was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan ; as a result and presumably to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus , the Trump administration , Republican hawks like Senator Tom Cotton , and right-wing media outlets have attempted to stoke xenophobic outrage against China .
But so has the Biden campaign , which in May faced pushback from progressives and Asian American groups for releasing an ad that accused the president of having “ rolled over for the Chinese.
” “ Even before the [ coronavirus ] crisis , there was a growing narrative in Washington that the rise of China presented an existential threat to the United States , ” said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tom Cotton ’ s proposal to increase military spending for more weapons to be used potentially against China .
If we continue down the path of demonizing China and the xenophobia and hate that goes along with it…we ’ re going to ultimately end up hurting our ability to address security challenges.
” There is also the issue of accountability for past US policies associated with the forever war .
In June the Biden campaign announced that its foreign policy and national security transition team will be led by Avril Haines , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ director of the CIA , a position in which she helped oversee redactions to the Senate ’ s torture report .
“ Not only was Haines part of the torture infrastructure under [ Gina ] Haspel , she also actively supported Haspel , a known torturer , to lead the CIA , ” said Maha Hilal , an anti-torture advocate with the organization Justice for Muslims Collective .
Haspel became the CIA ’ s director in 2018 .
“ Haines already played a direct role in absolving others of their crimes , so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work under a potential Biden presidency.
” This might be the hardest aspect of a Biden administration for progressives to accept ; given the personnel involved , there is likely to be little appetite for reckoning with the recent past .
The presumed outcome of the primaries is still a sore spot for everyone I spoke with .
“ It ’ s immeasurably sad , ” said Adler .
“ Bernie ’ s campaign was the place where [ progressive foreign policy ] ideas were getting a fair hearing.
” Daniel Bessner , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the University of Washington who advised the Sanders campaign , described himself as “ pretty pessimistic about Joe Biden ” and said he expected that a Biden administration would be very similar to the Obama administration and would rarely draw on the ideas developed working with Sanders .
But whether a Biden administration listens to foreign policy progressives will depend on not only personnel but also whether anti-war voices can organize and assert themselves .
Here , at least , I found some optimism .
“ There is a much more solid and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ foreign policy priorities that there simply was not toward the beginning of the Obama administration , ” said Duss .
“ It came to fruition in support of the Iran nuclear agreement.
” He added that whereas the neoconservatives who have lobbied in favor of wars have long been well organized , with “ a lot of donors and think tanks and letterheads and columnists , ” the anti-war left ’ s main advantage is that its views now reflect a clear majority of Americans ’ .
Meanwhile , in terms of infrastructure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to new groups like Quincy with the budgets and connections to provide an alternative to the echo chamber in Washington .
Increasingly , elected officials are listening .
After the Suleimani assassination in January , Democrats sprang into action to insist on Congress ’ s constitutional authority over wars , which Duss called “ a positive shift ” since the Obama administration—although Democrats may not be as eager to assert such authority against a Democratic president .
Progressives both in and out of government are also rallying around the dovish Representative Joaquin Castro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Foreign Affairs Committee , where he would replace New York ’ s recently primaried Representative Eliot Engel , a noted hawk .
“ Castro has shown a commitment toward various progressive causes , especially ending the US ’ s unconstitutional war on Yemen , ” said Shireen Al-Adeimi , an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a Just Foreign Policy board member .
“ I definitely agree that the outside movement is much more organized , ” said Kizer .
“ And I think that ’ s going to be one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understand , that there is an active , progressive constituency who cares about national security and also that the changes that progressives are seeking on domestic policy are tightly intertwined with changes that are necessary on the international front.
” This summer , mass demonstrations across the country have pushed policy-makers to implement long-overdue reforms aimed at ending racist police violence .
Biden may not have been most progressives ’ first choice , and he has some responsibility for the modern police state , but he and his advisers seem to understand how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ win in November , perhaps progressive activists will force him to reevaluate the untenable foreign policy status quo in which he is similarly implicated .

This article appears in the August 10/17, 2020 issue.
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Over the past few years, a loose coalition of activist groups, think tanks, and policy-makers dedicated to ending the post-9/11 forever war has asserted itself in foreign policy debates. As recently as February, when Bernie Sanders appeared to be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, it seemed possible that US foreign policy was on the verge of turning toward a less militarized and interventionist approach. Sanders and the other major progressive candidate in the race, Elizabeth Warren, had foreign policy advisers who advocated slashing defense budgets and reinvesting in diplomacy to confront nonmilitary threats.
But Joe Biden’s decisive victory over Sanders dealt a blow to those hopes. For decades, Biden has been a representative figure of the mainstream foreign policy establishment, the so-called Blob. He supported the Iraq War, is close with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has premised his campaign on a restoration of the Obama era.
Biden appeared to secure the nomination just as the coronavirus pandemic began radically reshaping every aspect of policy-making, including international affairs. I wanted to take the temperature of leading foreign policy progressives in light of the primary race and the pandemic to get a sense of how they might attempt to influence a Biden administration and to explore what national security means in an age of deadly viruses that don’t recognize national borders. On one key point, there was a broad consensus: Covid-19 vindicates what the left has been saying about foreign policy—that endless war has squandered resources without making Americans safer—and represents an opportunity to shift the debate in a more constructive direction. On the question of whether a Biden administration would be receptive to those urging such a shift, there was far less agreement.
In early April, Ben Rhodes, a national security adviser for President Barack Obama, wrote in The Atlantic that “as COVID-19 has transformed the way that Americans live, and threatens to claim exponentially more lives than any terrorist has, it is time to finally end the chapter of our history that began on September 11, 2001.” That is certainly the hope of all my interviewees, but for now, America’s wars rage on.
“The forever war has clearly not ended,” said one leading progressive foreign policy adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Just because we happen to be more focused on the pandemic right now does not let us off the hook for ending wars.” But everyone I spoke to agreed on the urgency of doing so.
“On foreign policy, as on a range of other issues, the pandemic has starkly demonstrated a lot of Senator Sanders’s arguments about how we have failed to invest in our own country, people, and infrastructure,” said Matt Duss, Sanders’s foreign policy adviser. In response to the pandemic, Sanders and progressive allies in Congress recently proposed cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10 percent, a plan since endorsed by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. “It shows very clearly that our security priorities and investments—the obsessive focus on counterterrorism, the overuse of the military as the foreign policy instrument of first resort—have been not just wrong but wildly counterproductive,” Duss said. 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
Stephen Wertheim, a cofounder of the Quincy Institute, an anti- interventionist think tank that launched last year with funding from George Soros and Charles Koch, told me, “The pandemic illustrated a lot of what we’ve been saying for some time—that our main challenges from the perspective of US interests are planetary and transnational, not military threats from rival nation-states.” Current Issue View our current issue
Wertheim added, “What did our massive military apparatus and our national security state deliver for us against the biggest threat of our lifetime? Not much.”
By international standards, the United States has done an exceptionally poor job of containing the coronavirus. Failures at every level of government mean that Covid-19 continues to spread across the US, even as countries in Europe and Asia turn the corner. All of this suggests that American global leadership, already damaged by Donald Trump’s misgovernance, will have a hard time recovering from the pandemic. “Who would ever take that seriously after this?” said Duss. “This idea of America as this unparalleled and supremely competent global hegemon is over.”
Covid-19 is a preview not only of future pandemics but also of climate change, the transnational security crisis that will define our lives. The rest of the century is likely to see more famines, droughts, flooding, other natural disasters, resource wars, and mass migrations, all of which hurt the poorest countries disproportionately while sparing no one. In the ideal scenario, nations would come together to create solutions to these borderless threats. But it’s at least as plausible that countries will retreat into the kind of right-wing nationalism that has dominated international politics over the past few years.
“Internationalism is not a luxury. It’s a necessity,” said David Adler, an informal Sanders foreign policy adviser and the general coordinator of the Progressive International, a recently launched organization dedicated to fostering ties among left-wing politicians and movements around the world. “All of humanity is thinking about the same crisis and confronting the same question of how you lock down a population while providing for basic resources. We are all consumed by a similar anxiety.” Related Article The Woman Behind Elizabeth Warren’s Foreign Policy David Klion
“But that’s a fleeting moment,” he added. “Very quickly, the old inequalities are going to settle in…. We’re moving to a politics that’s very ripe for nationalism. It’s our plight, as progressives, to have to force our way between those two perspectives to say that [internationalism] didn’t work the way it was constructed for the past half century and also that the direction of the right populists is far too dangerous.”
Kate Kizer, the policy director of the anti-interventionist advocacy group Win Without War, expressed similar fears. “I’m seeing two different paths ahead—either one of authoritarianism, driven by xenophobic nationalism, or an internationalist response that is rooted in cross-border solidarity and cooperation. It’s a little bit scary, because authoritarianism is a playbook that’s tried and true and has been well organized for a long time and building towards this moment.” She called the coronavirus crisis “an authoritarian’s dream” because it provides an excuse to declare emergency powers and suspend normal political processes and civil liberties, something already happening in countries like Hungary and Bolivia.
Covid-19 is also directly affecting the US military and its many theaters of operation. In April the Navy fired Brett Crozier as captain of an aircraft carrier after he raised the alarm about a coronavirus outbreak on his ship. In Yemen, a country mired in starvation and cholera due to an ongoing US-backed Saudi intervention in its civil war—opposition to which has been a central mission for progressive foreign policy activists—deaths from Covid-19 could exceed wartime fatalities in the internationally recognized capital of Aden. In just two weeks in May, the city recorded 950 deaths from the pandemic, roughly half of Aden’s war fatalities in all of 2015.
“The primary focus for us remains asserting congressional war powers to end US support for the war in Yemen that continues to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of the left-wing anti-war group Just Foreign Policy. “Covid in Yemen is just starting. They have an absolutely devastated health system. We’ve had Save the Children hospitals that have been bombed by the Saudi coalition.”
The virus has also had a disastrous effect on Iran, which suffers under economic sanctions that were lifted after the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal and reinstated under Trump after he unilaterally withdrew the US from the agreement in 2018. In January of this year, the Trump administration assassinated Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, nearly setting off a regional war. The White House had already imposed sanctions, denying Iranians access to food, prescription drugs, and medical devices. More than 13,000 Iranians have died from Covid-19 as the government struggles to obtain critical supplies. In late March 34 lawmakers—including Sanders, Warren, and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—sent a letter to the administration urging sanctions relief. The letter was endorsed by groups such as Just Foreign Policy, Win Without War, J Street, and the Ploughshares Fund.
On April 2 the Biden campaign released an equivocal statement criticizing Trump’s Iran policy and providing guidelines for humanitarian aid to work around sanctions, but it did not call for sanctions relief. More recently, Biden’s main foreign policy adviser, Tony Blinken, said at an American Jewish Committee event that under a Biden administration, all sanctions on Iran would remain in place, including those introduced under Trump, unless Iran resumed full compliance with the nuclear deal—which it was doing before the US withdrawal, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“It was good that [Biden] said something, but I think what he called for was the bare minimum and that he should go much further,” said Kizer. That summarizes how foreign policy progressives tend to appraise Biden. Should he win the presidency, he will be responsible for managing US military commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere, for pursuing a multilateral diplomatic strategy for threats like the pandemic, and for navigating America’s increasingly fraught relationship with China. Foreign policy progressives are ready and willing to advise him on all of these issues—but will he listen?
The figure most likely to determine the answer is Blinken, a former Obama administration national security official who has been advising Biden on foreign policy since his days on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Blinken, 58, is a former contributor to The New Republic, a partner in a private equity firm (as The American Prospect reported, a number of top Biden foreign policy advisers have gotten rich in the private sector), and an outspoken humanitarian interventionist. Blinken had a hand in Obama’s Afghanistan surge (which Biden, as several interviewees noted, opposed at the time) and intervention in Libya. In New York Times op-eds, Blinken has voiced support for Trump’s air strikes on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and for providing military assistance to Ukraine. Blinken is visible in Pete Souza’s famous photograph of the White House Situation Room during the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Blinken also played a role in shaping the Iran nuclear deal.
Asked whether a Biden administration would be receptive to foreign policy progressives and vocal opponents of the forever war, Blinken said in a statement, “Given the scope of the challenges the next president will face, we’re actively soliciting input and advice from a wide range of experts, including many progressive leaders, to help us build out a foreign policy agenda that reflects Vice President Biden’s long-held values, and will help restore America’s leadership role in the world as we confront new threats like the coronavirus” (emphasis added). Related Article Who Is Matt Duss, and Can He Take On Washington’s ‘Blob’? David Klion
Multiple outlets have reported that progressives have been lobbying Blinken and others to commit to some of the foreign policy proposals embraced by Sanders and Warren, with limited success at best. Duss, the Sanders adviser, said he has had conversations with Blinken, bonding over a shared passion for the Beatles. “I have known him for quite some time,” said Duss. “I like him a lot. I have great respect for him.” Duss added that he has recommended a number of people from Sanders’s foreign policy working group to work on the Biden campaign and that Biden’s team has been in touch with them.
“The Biden campaign has welcomed supporters from not only the other progressive campaigns but from all of the other primary candidates with open arms,” said another progressive foreign policy adviser. “They have incorporated advisers into their working groups. They are proactively seeking to do what they can to unify the party.” But the adviser cautioned, “I think there is still an open question about whether that will result in any substantive changes in terms of policies and whether or not any of the more progressive voices in the party are appointed into positions of influence.”
The adviser also expressed concern that Biden has yet to commit to winding down wars in the Middle East or reducing the Pentagon budget. “Trump has increased it by hundreds of billions of dollars. It doesn’t seem like too much of an ask to expect the Democratic nominee, at a minimum, to say that we’re going to undo those increases, even if they’re not willing to go further.”
Others were even more critical. “I don’t understand why Tony Blinken would want to write, very recently, an op-ed with pro–Iraq War neocon Bob Kagan in The Washington Post,” said Wertheim, who noted that while he has not spoken with Blinken, there are people in Biden’s orbit whose anti-interventionist views align with the Quincy Institute’s. “Biden’s record is the record of a mainstream Democrat over many decades—which is to say, not very good.”
In March, Wertheim criticized an essay written by Biden—presumably with input from Blinken—in Foreign Affairs laying out his most comprehensive foreign policy vision. “It claimed to end the forever war,” Wertheim said. “And then in the next sentence, it explained that what that meant was that perhaps half of US ground troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East would be withdrawn. That’s not ending the forever war.”
Lara Friedman, who succeeded Duss as president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace, which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was blunter. She excoriated Blinken for his statement during a webcast in May that “Joe Biden believes strongly in keeping your differences—to the greatest extent possible—between friends behind doors,” referring to how Biden would handle disagreements with Israel. The event was hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel, a super PAC funded in part by people who have donated to Republicans and that has targeted progressive candidates, including Sanders, with negative ads.
“It’s quite striking,” said Friedman. “They didn’t put this out in August. They put this out in May, before the July 1 annexation date,” referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to annex parts of the occupied West Bank this summer, in violation of international law and against pre-Trump US policy. (As of this writing, the process had not formally commenced.) “He’s saying aid will never be used as leverage of any kind. He’s promising to protect Israel at the United Nations, which I have a hard time reading as anything other than a shot at Obama”—a reference to Obama’s decision not to veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank in December 2016.
Friedman was pessimistic about a Biden administration’s willingness to listen to pro-Palestine activists. “If they’ve already annexed by the time you come in, how much political capital are you going to spend trying to undo or unwind annexation?” she asked.
China-bashing: Asian American groups criticized a Biden ad for exacerbating anti-Asian racism.
One issue that came up repeatedly in my interviews was the US-China relationship. The Covid-19 pandemic was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan; as a result and presumably to distract from their failure to contain the virus, the Trump administration, Republican hawks like Senator Tom Cotton, and right-wing media outlets have attempted to stoke xenophobic outrage against China. But so has the Biden campaign, which in May faced pushback from progressives and Asian American groups for releasing an ad that accused the president of having “rolled over for the Chinese.”
“Even before the [coronavirus] crisis, there was a growing narrative in Washington that the rise of China presented an existential threat to the United States,” said Kizer. “We saw this with Tom Cotton’s proposal to increase military spending for more weapons to be used potentially against China. If we continue down the path of demonizing China and the xenophobia and hate that goes along with it…we’re going to ultimately end up hurting our ability to address security challenges.”
There is also the issue of accountability for past US policies associated with the forever war. In June the Biden campaign announced that its foreign policy and national security transition team will be led by Avril Haines, who during the Obama administration served as deputy director of the CIA, a position in which she helped oversee redactions to the Senate’s torture report.
“Not only was Haines part of the torture infrastructure under [Gina] Haspel, she also actively supported Haspel, a known torturer, to lead the CIA,” said Maha Hilal, an anti-torture advocate with the organization Justice for Muslims Collective. Haspel became the CIA’s director in 2018. “Haines already played a direct role in absolving others of their crimes, so she will surely extend this to her work under a potential Biden presidency.” This might be the hardest aspect of a Biden administration for progressives to accept; given the personnel involved, there is likely to be little appetite for reckoning with the recent past.
The presumed outcome of the primaries is still a sore spot for everyone I spoke with. “It’s immeasurably sad,” said Adler. “Bernie’s campaign was the place where [progressive foreign policy] ideas were getting a fair hearing.” Daniel Bessner, a professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington who advised the Sanders campaign, described himself as “pretty pessimistic about Joe Biden” and said he expected that a Biden administration would be very similar to the Obama administration and would rarely draw on the ideas developed working with Sanders.
But whether a Biden administration listens to foreign policy progressives will depend on not only personnel but also whether anti-war voices can organize and assert themselves. Here, at least, I found some optimism.
“There is a much more solid and continually growing and mobilized coalition around progressive foreign policy priorities that there simply was not toward the beginning of the Obama administration,” said Duss. “It came to fruition in support of the Iran nuclear agreement.”
He added that whereas the neoconservatives who have lobbied in favor of wars have long been well organized, with “a lot of donors and think tanks and letterheads and columnists,” the anti-war left’s main advantage is that its views now reflect a clear majority of Americans’. Meanwhile, in terms of infrastructure, progressives are catching up, thanks to new groups like Quincy with the budgets and connections to provide an alternative to the echo chamber in Washington.
Increasingly, elected officials are listening. After the Suleimani assassination in January, Democrats sprang into action to insist on Congress’s constitutional authority over wars, which Duss called “a positive shift” since the Obama administration—although Democrats may not be as eager to assert such authority against a Democratic president. Progressives both in and out of government are also rallying around the dovish Representative Joaquin Castro’s campaign to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he would replace New York’s recently primaried Representative Eliot Engel, a noted hawk. “Castro has shown a commitment toward various progressive causes, especially ending the US’s unconstitutional war on Yemen,” said Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a Just Foreign Policy board member.
“I definitely agree that the outside movement is much more organized,” said Kizer. “And I think that’s going to be one of the critical things…for the Biden team to understand, that there is an active, progressive constituency who cares about national security and also that the changes that progressives are seeking on domestic policy are tightly intertwined with changes that are necessary on the international front.”
This summer, mass demonstrations across the country have pushed policy-makers to implement long-overdue reforms aimed at ending racist police violence. Biden may not have been most progressives’ first choice, and he has some responsibility for the modern police state, but he and his advisers seem to understand how that debate has shifted. Should he win in November, perhaps progressive activists will force him to reevaluate the untenable foreign policy status quo in which he is similarly implicated.


thenation--2020-07-28--Little Pharma on Rooms

Little Pharma on Rooms

She thinks in a smaller hospital She would remember each face With some embarrassment She can remember all the rooms 1421 From whose eaves pigeons tumble Its permanent winter of shit Where she would like to put a thin strip of suspended garden Something in love with guano like hay Some ruffling infancy of color 707 Where a couple lay in bed , one sick The two now faceless in ozone hoods The room wore its stretch of curtain Tight and broad like a bandeau in June Unspeakable honeymoon Ringing for ginger ale all the time 1603 With its own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost expects a little home bar Silver shakers a cigarette tray 707 Where a couple lay in bed —was the smaller one sick Is that just farm logic— Its stretch of green curtain Smooth and stiff like a banker ’ s lamp Amortizing a fixed account 830 She thinks somehow she belongs there Its shadows and somnolence appeal to her The clock runs behind The television sometimes stuck on a Mass Just its own digestion Plasma and diode It is what she will ask for when sick 1118 Snow falls to water The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bed rail with a bell ’ s tread The green fixtures spell nausea Like a lighthouse one sees the swing Begin before the beam ’ s upon 516 Surely the face here— It forms then jumps Pocket magnet startled By breathing She grasps it and it changes Faster than tadpoles She shoves it And it will not grimace Long enough to keep

This article appears in the August 10/17, 2020 issue.
She thinks in a smaller hospital
She would remember each face
With some embarrassment
She can remember all the rooms
1421
From whose eaves pigeons tumble
Its permanent winter of shit
Where she would like to put a thin strip of suspended garden
Something in love with guano like hay
Some ruffling infancy of color
707
Where a couple lay in bed, one sick
The two now faceless in ozone hoods
The room wore its stretch of curtain
Tight and broad like a bandeau in June
Unspeakable honeymoon
Ringing for ginger ale all the time
1603
With its own sitting room
A surplus of telephones
One almost expects a little home bar
Silver shakers a cigarette tray
707
Where a couple lay in bed
—was the smaller one sick
Is that just farm logic—
Its stretch of green curtain
Smooth and stiff like a banker’s lamp
Amortizing a fixed account
830
She thinks somehow she belongs there
Its shadows and somnolence appeal to her
The clock runs behind
The television sometimes stuck on a Mass
Just its own digestion
Plasma and diode
It is what she will ask for when sick
1118
Snow falls to water
The nurse’s badge
Clicks on the bed rail with a bell’s tread
The green fixtures spell nausea
Like a lighthouse one sees the swing
Begin before the beam’s upon
516
Surely the face here—
It forms then jumps
Pocket magnet startled
By breathing
She grasps it and it changes
Faster than tadpoles
She shoves it
And it will not grimace
Long enough to keep


thenation--2020-07-28--For My Wife, Who Is Writing a Collection of Stories Called ‘Homescar’

Rocks are notched with sea limpets , and the pockets limpets leave once they ’ ve sealed into the rock @ @ @ @ @ .
You can sketch their home-scar with your thumb , the X the body can @ @ @ @ @ , little mollusk driven by the seas then sealing again to the same known .
@ @ @ @ @ joke about home , grooves in the rock we land in again and again .
@ @ @ @ @ of PF Chang ’ s , the shoe stores in the mall , the lit @ @ @ @ @ for calm .
Before that , my people are from fear : my great- grandfather @ @ @ @ @ wagon of straw .
He crossed the ocean early , just before he couldn ’ @ @ @ @ @ fear .
I steer clear of harm if I can , wear an extra sweater @ @ @ @ @ my ankles buckle .
Oh beloved , I will try to be bold .
The @ @

This article appears in the August 10/17, 2020 issue.
Rocks are notched
with sea limpets, and the pockets
limpets leave once they’ve sealed
into the rock and know
themselves most inside it,
shell swelling,
softening the stone.
You can sketch
their home-scar
with your thumb, the X
the body can’t stop
returning to, little mollusk
driven by the seas then
sealing again to the same
known. My glorious wife and I joke
about home, grooves
in the rock we land in
again and again. I am from the soothing
of PF Chang’s,
the shoe stores in the mall, the lit waves
of others exchanging money
for calm. Before that, my people
are from fear: my great-
grandfather left,
hidden in a wagon of straw. He crossed
the ocean early, just before
he couldn’t. I am from fear.
I steer
clear of harm if I can, wear an extra
sweater and don’t let
my ankles buckle. Oh beloved, I will try
to be bold. The body longs
backward and forward, backward and forward.


thenation--2020-07-28--The US Chamber of Commerce Says Trump Is Bad for Business

The Signal this week is that pigs just might be able to fly .
In a little-noticed move , the US Chamber of Commerce , one of the Republican Party ’ s most reliable allies , has announced that it is preparing to sue the Trump administration over its anti-immigration executive orders and regulatory changes .
This marks an extraordinary moment .
The lobbying group has long regarded the GOP as the party of low taxes , deregulation , and anti-unionism , but also of free trade , internationalism , and a relatively open immigration system .
The Chamber ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ huge boon to Republicans in recent decades .
Now US business interests are beside themselves with anger at the Trump administration ’ s recent efforts to shred the H-1B visa program , ongoing attempts to end Deferred Action for Child Arrivals ( DACA ) , and the ham-handed ( albeit short-lived ) decision to deny visas to international students whose colleges had moved to all-online classes during the pandemic .
Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue even penned a furious op-ed for The New York Times , arguing that these actions “ clearly exceed the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they take a sledgehammer to the immigration laws that Congress crafted over many generations.
” Donahue writes that it is economically counterproductive to lock out skilled workers and kick out international students .
In reference to the administration ’ s continued threats to end DACA despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that it had not provided a good reason to do so , Donohue states , “ If you want children to grow up to reach their potential and live their American dream , you give them the tools and certainty to succeed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of the only country they ’ ve ever known.
” Trump Is Flailing , and the Country Is Paying the Price The Chamber ’ s eruption of rage at Trump ’ s nativism got shouted down by all the crass Noise this past week , including Trump ’ s threat to send tens of thousands of federal officers into cities around the country and the epithets that Ted Yoho lobbed at fellow representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .
( AOC held her own , publicly shaming Yoho with a powerful speech delivered from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make no mistake : Even if it didn ’ t command the headlines last week , the Trump–Chamber of Commerce rift is a big , big deal .
If the group breaks with Trump and sours on the Republican project more generally—and if the businesses it represents start to distance themselves from a Trumpified GOP—that could signal a major realignment , barely three months before the election .
Also in the pigs-can-fly category : Trump has spent much of his time in the White House trying to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worst for-profit elements of the health care system .
Last week , however , the Trump administration announced four executive orders seeking to rein in drug costs .
One of these orders would allow patients to import lower-cost drugs from Canada .
Another would seek to drive down drug prices in the United States by limiting Big Pharma ’ s ability to charge Medicare and other bulk purchasers more than it would charge in other countries .
But there ’ s always a catch with Trump : He said Friday that he ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drug companies don ’ t come up with their own ideas to lower prices by August 24 .
There are lots of exemptions and time delays built into the other orders as well , and the immediate impact on drug prices appears limited—certainly in comparison to genuine drug-pricing bills such as HR3 , otherwise known as the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act .
That act was authored by Democrats and passed last year by the House of Representatives , and it actually came with genuine regulatory teeth attached .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opposed it , arguing that the bill would force companies to accept lower prices for new drugs and would result in less innovation and deleterious health consequences for consumers .
It ’ s still significant , though , that the administration saw the need to at least pay lip service to reining in Big Pharma .
Trump wants the upcoming election to be all about immigration , law and order , and race politics—but his team clearly understands that for many Americans , it will be about health care .
Don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the health care options available to Americans .
Whatever good Trump could possibly do with these orders would be more than undone by his efforts to have the Supreme Court overturn the ACA ; by his administration ’ s religious exemption for companies that don ’ t want their employees ’ insurance to cover contraceptives ; and by the passage of a “ public charge ” rule that could exclude millions of Americans from Medicaid and other health-related parts of the safety net .
Trump has neither the inclination nor the stamina @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in this country .
He has no stomach for a legislative fight , and no understanding of the complexities of America ’ s multitrillion-dollar health care industries .
Instead , he signs a few half-hearted executive orders and , in essence , says , “ Job done .
”

The Signal this week is that pigs just might be able to fly.
In a little-noticed move, the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the Republican Party’s most reliable allies, has announced that it is preparing to sue the Trump administration over its anti-immigration executive orders and regulatory changes. This marks an extraordinary moment. The lobbying group has long regarded the GOP as the party of low taxes, deregulation, and anti-unionism, but also of free trade, internationalism, and a relatively open immigration system. The Chamber’s nearly unstinting support has been a huge boon to Republicans in recent decades.
Now US business interests are beside themselves with anger at the Trump administration’s recent efforts to shred the H-1B visa program, ongoing attempts to end Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA), and the ham-handed (albeit short-lived) decision to deny visas to international students whose colleges had moved to all-online classes during the pandemic. Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue even penned a furious op-ed for The New York Times, arguing that these actions “clearly exceed the authority of the executive branch, as they take a sledgehammer to the immigration laws that Congress crafted over many generations.”
Donahue writes that it is economically counterproductive to lock out skilled workers and kick out international students. In reference to the administration’s continued threats to end DACA despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that it had not provided a good reason to do so, Donohue states, “If you want children to grow up to reach their potential and live their American dream, you give them the tools and certainty to succeed; you don’t kick them out of the only country they’ve ever known.” Related Article Trump Is Flailing, and the Country Is Paying the Price Sasha Abramsky
The Chamber’s eruption of rage at Trump’s nativism got shouted down by all the crass Noise this past week, including Trump’s threat to send tens of thousands of federal officers into cities around the country and the epithets that Ted Yoho lobbed at fellow representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (AOC held her own, publicly shaming Yoho with a powerful speech delivered from the floor of the chamber.) 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
But make no mistake: Even if it didn’t command the headlines last week, the Trump–Chamber of Commerce rift is a big, big deal. If the group breaks with Trump and sours on the Republican project more generally—and if the businesses it represents start to distance themselves from a Trumpified GOP—that could signal a major realignment, barely three months before the election.
Also in the pigs-can-fly category: Trump has spent much of his time in the White House trying to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act and cozying up to Big Pharma and the worst for-profit elements of the health care system. Last week, however, the Trump administration announced four executive orders seeking to rein in drug costs. One of these orders would allow patients to import lower-cost drugs from Canada. Another would seek to drive down drug prices in the United States by limiting Big Pharma’s ability to charge Medicare and other bulk purchasers more than it would charge in other countries. Current Issue View our current issue
But there’s always a catch with Trump: He said Friday that he’ll sign that last order only if drug companies don’t come up with their own ideas to lower prices by August 24. There are lots of exemptions and time delays built into the other orders as well, and the immediate impact on drug prices appears limited—certainly in comparison to genuine drug-pricing bills such as HR3, otherwise known as the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act. That act was authored by Democrats and passed last year by the House of Representatives, and it actually came with genuine regulatory teeth attached. That is likely why the White House bitterly opposed it, arguing that the bill would force companies to accept lower prices for new drugs and would result in less innovation and deleterious health consequences for consumers.
It’s still significant, though, that the administration saw the need to at least pay lip service to reining in Big Pharma. Trump wants the upcoming election to be all about immigration, law and order, and race politics—but his team clearly understands that for many Americans, it will be about health care.
Don’t fall for Trump’s newfound concern about the health care options available to Americans. Whatever good Trump could possibly do with these orders would be more than undone by his efforts to have the Supreme Court overturn the ACA; by his administration’s religious exemption for companies that don’t want their employees’ insurance to cover contraceptives; and by the passage of a “public charge” rule that could exclude millions of Americans from Medicaid and other health-related parts of the safety net.
Trump has neither the inclination nor the stamina to fundamentally improve the health care system in this country. He has no stomach for a legislative fight, and no understanding of the complexities of America’s multitrillion-dollar health care industries. Instead, he signs a few half-hearted executive orders and, in essence, says, “Job done.”


thenation--2020-07-28--The Tangle of Desire and Class in ‘Normal People’

Teen romance stories are almost always about the feeling of a shift in power .
They channel the thrill of turning a position of weakness into one of strength : the ugly , poor , or otherwise disadvantaged using their less apparent abilities—talent , wit , emotional acuity—to claim for themselves a better role in the social hierarchy .
In teen romance , things tend to change all at once rather than gradually .
A relationship ’ s subtext shifts through strange , rare moments of shared perception , and then , in some moment of truth—often a school dance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and replaces what came before .
A received , social understanding is replaced with an interpersonal , emotional truth that levels all disparities .
Normal People , a novel by the Irish writer Sally Rooney recently adapted into a TV series on Hulu , is not a traditional teen romance , but it is a love story that begins when its protagonists , Marianne ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ) and Connell ( Paul Mescal ) , are in the final year of secondary school .
Connell is working-class , confident , and popular ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost universally disliked .
Connell ’ s mother works as a cleaner at Marianne ’ s house , and the stilted , fumbling conversations between the teens there lead to a romantic relationship that Connell insists on keeping secret .
They fall out , then encounter each other months later at Trinity College Dublin , where Connell finds Marianne newly confident , surrounded by a group of intellectual , wealthy friends .
The show follows Connell and Marianne as they pick up and pause their relationship several more times , but the version @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me like the template for the changes in their fortunes and their romantic status throughout the rest of the story .
In Carricklea , the fictional town in County Sligo where they grew up , Connell enjoys a higher status among their peers , but in the wider world , Marianne has all the advantages .
Neither fully apprehended this as teenagers , although it contributed to the animus between Marianne and her classmates , and Connell happily manipulated his standing to create terms for their relationship that favored him .
Then , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after a lonely first few months of college , both realize that the context of their relationship has changed dramatically and permanently .
In Carricklea , other things mattered more than wealth , but at college in Dublin , class is a blatant and inescapable fact .
This tangle of desire and class is a common romantic setup—seen in everything from Gossip Girl to Pride and Prejudice—and the tension of love across class lines usually dissipates once the lovers get together ( or the story simply ends ) .
Rooney , a lifelong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tension drop ; it keeps coming up throughout Normal People , turning it into a provocation .
Is it even worth trying , the story asks , to love someone when the scales will never be balanced ?
Marianne and Connell ’ s relationship is idiosyncratic ; treating it as the sum of sociopolitical contingencies would be a disservice .
But it ’ s often those contingencies—lost jobs , abusive families , a painful , inborn awareness of status—that drive them apart .
How can people fall in love in a world structured @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at Trinity , he ’ s been invited to a party by Gareth , a foppish campus celebrity type engaged in a battle with student activists over his debate club ’ s decision to invite a neo-Nazi to speak at the school .
After awkward small talk in the packed , hazy lounge of Gareth ’ s campus apartment—when Connell mentions that he ’ s sharing a room , Gareth ’ s brain appears to short-circuit as he mutters , “ Oh , that ’ s… brutal , man ” —he leads Connell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the purple-pink dusk is Marianne : She has a new haircut , her eyes are outlined in thick black eyeliner , and she ’ s wearing a velvet blazer and smoking .
Her initial surprise at seeing Connell quickly gives way to a sharp , dark amusement .
The two split off and find a corner to engage in a high-level emotional sparring match , in the course of which Marianne reveals a surprising level of scorn for Gareth .
When Connell skewers him as a Holocaust denier , Marianne concedes that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ ideological purity.
” She then asks Connell if he ’ s seeing someone , and he admits he ’ s finding it difficult to meet people at Trinity .
“ A bit different from home , I suppose , ” he adds .
“ Probably why I ’ m good at it , ” she replies .
Although Marianne continues to privately voice disdain for her coterie of one-percenter friends , she is still unmistakably one of them .
Even after Connell is welcomed into their circle , he remains on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year in college , Connell and his roommate Niall backpack across Europe and meet Marianne and her new boyfriend , Jamie , at her family ’ s vacation home in Italy .
( In Rooney ’ s novel , Jamie is introduced by the biographical detail that his father is “ one of the people who had caused the financial crisis—not figuratively , one of the actual people involved.
” ) Jamie goes out of his way to make Connell and Niall feel unwelcome at a backyard dinner the evening after they arrive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of champagne coupes versus flutes to volley a series of escalating snipes at backpacking , hostels , tourists , and scholarship recipients .
He begins directing these attacks at Marianne as well , culminating with him breaking a glass and pouring wine on the floor in an altercation inside the house .
Earlier that day , while grocery shopping in the quaint Italian town closest to the villa , Marianne acknowledges her position of economic privilege relative to Connell .
“ I am conscious of the fact that we got to know each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family , ” she tells him , adding that she imagines her mother is a bad employer , something Connell confirms .
“ Why hasn ’ t this come up before ?
” she asks .
“ Honestly , I think it ’ s totally fair if you resent me.
” “ I don ’ t resent you , ” Connell responds .
“ Why would I ?
I just don ’ t think I ’ m processing the change all that well.
” Rooney went to Trinity herself ; one imagines that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that “ all the guys in his class wear the same waxed hunting jackets and plum-colored chinos ” is drawn from life .
In a 2019 New Yorker profile , she described her experience meeting the children of the ruling elite for the first time in college .
“ What I wasn ’ t prepared for was encountering the class of people who run the country , ” she said .
“ I had a feeling , on one hand , of being appalled , but on the other hand a real sense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to prove I ’ m just as good as they are .
I don ’ t know why—it would have made a lot more sense to just let them be—but it ’ s a fascination that ’ s not purely revulsion.
” In the United States , there are some differences : In my experience , the same stratum of the elite understands the aesthetic and political benefit of cosplaying as working-class , dressing and performing accordingly .
Still , despite differences in style , I recognize a familiar young one-percenter worldview @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to some extent , in Marianne .
The specific strain of irritation it triggers made it difficult for me to evaluate Normal People purely on its merits when I first read the novel .
As Marianne and Connell traded positions of relative power , it never felt to me like an even game .
How could I sympathize with a character whose wealth shielded her from so many common hardships—hardships that her friends and loved ones had to face ?
The answer , of course , is that it will never be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ genre ’ s promise of a satisfying conclusion .
Normal People is something else : a document of the sacrifices , gains , and adjustments it takes to keep a relationship intact .
The night after the dinner party in Italy , Marianne sleeps in Connell ’ s room and attempts to tell him that , like Jamie , her brother is abusive , and his actions are enabled by the rest of her family .
“ Last time I was home , my brother said he wished I was dead , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Connell offers the wrong response— “ What provoked it ?
Like , how did the argument start ?
” —and Marianne , sensing blame and disbelief , shuts down .
He then asks a question that mirrors hers from earlier : “ Why ’ d you never say any of this to me before ?
” It ’ s this aspect of the novel that I appreciated seeing play out in the television show : how many attempts it takes for Marianne and Connell to understand what the other is saying .
Moments @ @ @ @ @ @ @ short of understanding each other , accumulate until they get it right .
Marianne splits with her family after she has a violent confrontation with her brother and her mother asks her to send back the keys to the family apartment where she ’ s been living in Dublin .
It becomes clear that her family ’ s wealth was never simply a resource ; it also kept her trapped in a family dynamic of endless , gendered violence .
She spends Christmas with Connell ’ s family , and as she moves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it never felt like home .
“ I wouldn ’ t be here if it wasn ’ t for you , ” Connell says as he helps her pack her things .
“ You ’ d be somewhere else entirely , ” Marianne replies .
“ You ’ d be a different person .
”

This article appears in the August 10/17, 2020 issue.
Teen romance stories are almost always about the feeling of a shift in power. They channel the thrill of turning a position of weakness into one of strength: the ugly, poor, or otherwise disadvantaged using their less apparent abilities—talent, wit, emotional acuity—to claim for themselves a better role in the social hierarchy. In teen romance, things tend to change all at once rather than gradually. A relationship’s subtext shifts through strange, rare moments of shared perception, and then, in some moment of truth—often a school dance or other public event—the subtext becomes explicit and replaces what came before. A received, social understanding is replaced with an interpersonal, emotional truth that levels all disparities.
Normal People, a novel by the Irish writer Sally Rooney recently adapted into a TV series on Hulu, is not a traditional teen romance, but it is a love story that begins when its protagonists, Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal), are in the final year of secondary school. Connell is working-class, confident, and popular; Marianne is wealthy, standoffish, and almost universally disliked. Connell’s mother works as a cleaner at Marianne’s house, and the stilted, fumbling conversations between the teens there lead to a romantic relationship that Connell insists on keeping secret. They fall out, then encounter each other months later at Trinity College Dublin, where Connell finds Marianne newly confident, surrounded by a group of intellectual, wealthy friends.
The show follows Connell and Marianne as they pick up and pause their relationship several more times, but the version that unfolded in secondary school feels to me like the template for the changes in their fortunes and their romantic status throughout the rest of the story. In Carricklea, the fictional town in County Sligo where they grew up, Connell enjoys a higher status among their peers, but in the wider world, Marianne has all the advantages. Neither fully apprehended this as teenagers, although it contributed to the animus between Marianne and her classmates, and Connell happily manipulated his standing to create terms for their relationship that favored him. Then, when he encounters her at a party after a lonely first few months of college, both realize that the context of their relationship has changed dramatically and permanently. In Carricklea, other things mattered more than wealth, but at college in Dublin, class is a blatant and inescapable fact.
This tangle of desire and class is a common romantic setup—seen in everything from Gossip Girl to Pride and Prejudice—and the tension of love across class lines usually dissipates once the lovers get together (or the story simply ends). Rooney, a lifelong Marxist, doesn’t let the tension drop; it keeps coming up throughout Normal People, turning it into a provocation. Is it even worth trying, the story asks, to love someone when the scales will never be balanced? Marianne and Connell’s relationship is idiosyncratic; treating it as the sum of sociopolitical contingencies would be a disservice. But it’s often those contingencies—lost jobs, abusive families, a painful, inborn awareness of status—that drive them apart. How can people fall in love in a world structured by power? 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
When Connell encounters Marianne at Trinity, he’s been invited to a party by Gareth, a foppish campus celebrity type engaged in a battle with student activists over his debate club’s decision to invite a neo-Nazi to speak at the school. After awkward small talk in the packed, hazy lounge of Gareth’s campus apartment—when Connell mentions that he’s sharing a room, Gareth’s brain appears to short-circuit as he mutters, “Oh, that’s… brutal, man”—he leads Connell outside to meet his girlfriend. There in the purple-pink dusk is Marianne: She has a new haircut, her eyes are outlined in thick black eyeliner, and she’s wearing a velvet blazer and smoking. Her initial surprise at seeing Connell quickly gives way to a sharp, dark amusement.
The two split off and find a corner to engage in a high-level emotional sparring match, in the course of which Marianne reveals a surprising level of scorn for Gareth. When Connell skewers him as a Holocaust denier, Marianne concedes that dating him is a failure of her “ideological purity.” She then asks Connell if he’s seeing someone, and he admits he’s finding it difficult to meet people at Trinity. “A bit different from home, I suppose,” he adds. “Probably why I’m good at it,” she replies.
Although Marianne continues to privately voice disdain for her coterie of one-percenter friends, she is still unmistakably one of them. Even after Connell is welcomed into their circle, he remains on the margins. The summer after their first year in college, Connell and his roommate Niall backpack across Europe and meet Marianne and her new boyfriend, Jamie, at her family’s vacation home in Italy. (In Rooney’s novel, Jamie is introduced by the biographical detail that his father is “one of the people who had caused the financial crisis—not figuratively, one of the actual people involved.”)
Jamie goes out of his way to make Connell and Niall feel unwelcome at a backyard dinner the evening after they arrive, using a dispute over the semantics of champagne coupes versus flutes to volley a series of escalating snipes at backpacking, hostels, tourists, and scholarship recipients. He begins directing these attacks at Marianne as well, culminating with him breaking a glass and pouring wine on the floor in an altercation inside the house.
Earlier that day, while grocery shopping in the quaint Italian town closest to the villa, Marianne acknowledges her position of economic privilege relative to Connell. “I am conscious of the fact that we got to know each other because your mother works for my family,” she tells him, adding that she imagines her mother is a bad employer, something Connell confirms. “Why hasn’t this come up before?” she asks. “Honestly, I think it’s totally fair if you resent me.”
“I don’t resent you,” Connell responds. “Why would I? I just don’t think I’m processing the change all that well.”
Rooney went to Trinity herself; one imagines that an observation through Connell’s eyes that “all the guys in his class wear the same waxed hunting jackets and plum-colored chinos” is drawn from life. In a 2019 New Yorker profile, she described her experience meeting the children of the ruling elite for the first time in college. “What I wasn’t prepared for was encountering the class of people who run the country,” she said. “I had a feeling, on one hand, of being appalled, but on the other hand a real sense of wanting to prove myself to people, to prove I’m just as good as they are. I don’t know why—it would have made a lot more sense to just let them be—but it’s a fascination that’s not purely revulsion.”
In the United States, there are some differences: In my experience, the same stratum of the elite understands the aesthetic and political benefit of cosplaying as working-class, dressing and performing accordingly. Still, despite differences in style, I recognize a familiar young one-percenter worldview in Marianne’s college circle and, to some extent, in Marianne. The specific strain of irritation it triggers made it difficult for me to evaluate Normal People purely on its merits when I first read the novel. As Marianne and Connell traded positions of relative power, it never felt to me like an even game. How could I sympathize with a character whose wealth shielded her from so many common hardships—hardships that her friends and loved ones had to face?
The answer, of course, is that it will never be an even game, despite the romance genre’s promise of a satisfying conclusion. Normal People is something else: a document of the sacrifices, gains, and adjustments it takes to keep a relationship intact. The night after the dinner party in Italy, Marianne sleeps in Connell’s room and attempts to tell him that, like Jamie, her brother is abusive, and his actions are enabled by the rest of her family. “Last time I was home, my brother said he wished I was dead,” she says into the dark room. Connell offers the wrong response—“What provoked it? Like, how did the argument start?”—and Marianne, sensing blame and disbelief, shuts down. He then asks a question that mirrors hers from earlier: “Why’d you never say any of this to me before?”
It’s this aspect of the novel that I appreciated seeing play out in the television show: how many attempts it takes for Marianne and Connell to understand what the other is saying. Moments like this, when they fall just short of understanding each other, accumulate until they get it right. Marianne splits with her family after she has a violent confrontation with her brother and her mother asks her to send back the keys to the family apartment where she’s been living in Dublin. It becomes clear that her family’s wealth was never simply a resource; it also kept her trapped in a family dynamic of endless, gendered violence. She spends Christmas with Connell’s family, and as she moves out of the apartment, she mentions that it never felt like home.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you,” Connell says as he helps her pack her things. “You’d be somewhere else entirely,” Marianne replies. “You’d be a different person.”


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