vox--2020-07-24--Fact-checking the alternate history and politics of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers .
Curtis Sittenfeld ’ s novel Rodham postulates a theory : If Hillary Rodham had never married Bill Clinton , the past 30 years of American politics would be fundamentally changed — sometimes subtly , and sometimes in huge , world-bending ways .
Rodham isn ’ t a political treatise or textbook that ’ s aiming for documentary levels of realism in the political events it tweaks .
It ’ s a work of fiction that uses the real-life Hillary Clinton to examine ideas about power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ charisma in politics , and most of the changes to real history that appear in the book were chosen specifically to fit those themes .
Demanding that they fit a narrow idea of documentary realism would be pedantic at best .
But listen , this is Vox and we ’ re pedantic nerds here .
So at the Vox Book Club this week , we ’ ve decided to check Rodham ’ s alternate history against the facts of what happened in the real timeline — and , in the process , show @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about politics and power Sittenfeld is interested in as she bends reality to her will .
To help make this fact-check as stringently accurate as possible , I ( Vox book critic Constance Grady ) have enlisted help from Matthew Yglesias , Vox co-founder and senior correspondent .
Together , we hammered out what a Jerry Brown presidency would mean for America , what the Supreme Court might look like in Rodham , and whether a Hillary Rodham who never served in the executive branch would be quite so dominant a frontrunner for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Matt Yglesias !
Thank you for visiting the Vox Book Club this week to share your expertise .
I want to start at Rodham ’ s first major point of divergence from our own timeline : the 1992 Democratic primaries .
Without Hillary by his side , Bill Clinton crashes and burns at his infamous 60 Minutes interview and drops out of the race four days later .
Bush wins the general election , and the list of American presidents and vice presidents over the next two decades looks like this : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it appears that neither 9/11 nor the Iraq War ever happened , which in turn means that when Hillary eventually runs for president , she never has to defend voting in favor of invading Iraq .
How does all this strike you ?
Does it look broad-strokes accurate ?
Was Bill Clinton really the only Democratic nominee who stood a chance against Bush in 1992 ?
Would John McCain definitely have stopped 9/11 ?
Who even is Jerry Brown ?
It ’ s a little hard to know what to make of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doesn ’ t tell us who the Democratic nominee was .
But there were basically five candidates in that race — Clinton , Jerry Brown , Bob Kerrey , Tom Harkin , and Paul Tsongas .
Since a Brown-Kerrey ticket wins in 1996 , it seems likely that neither of them was the loser of the 1992 general election .
I ’ m inclined to guess that if Clinton had dropped out early , then Harkin , an affable Midwestern labor liberal , would ’ ve run and would ’ ve beaten Bush @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to tell for myself about this is that Clinton ’ s dropout proves to be a boon to former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas , whose neoliberal approach was a good match for Clinton policy-wise but who didn ’ t have anything close to Clinton-level charisma .
Democrats are now saddled with a bit of a cold fish New Englander as a nominee who also doesn ’ t have Clinton ’ s connections to the Black community .
Consequently , he loses Louisiana , Arkansas , Kentucky , Tennessee , and Georgia ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was very different back then ) while a stronger Ross Perot campaign tips Ohio , Montana , and Nevada to Bush .
It sort of makes sense if you squint .
Maybe .
The fundamental problem here , though , is that the 1992 race just wasn ’ t that close .
The most plausible alternate history scenario in which Bush gets reelected is one in which the Fed doesn ’ t deliberately slow-walk economic growth as part of an “ opportunistic disinflation ” scheme .
But the normal rules of alternate history @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one thing — in this case , Hillary standing by her man — and everything else has to follow from that .
And I have a hard time seeing why Bill Clinton dropping out would change the macroeconomic fundamentals .
What ’ s really interesting here in a big-picture sense is Sittenfeld ’ s implicit theory of how presidential nominations work .
Brown and John McCain were both , like Howard Dean , charismatic outsiders who exploited new technological paradigms to raise money outside traditional party donor networks and made a lot of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a consensus party favorite .
An important political science book , The Party Decides : Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform , argued that the failure of these insurgencies was no coincidence and that party networks effectively controlled nominations .
After Donald Trump ’ s victory , that theory doesn ’ t look so good .
But one view is that it was true of the nominations of the 1990s and 2000s , but party control has been eroded by changes in the media landscape .
Sittenfeld ’ s alternate history is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was never really true and if you allow events to unfold slightly differently , then Brown and McCain can succeed .
I don ’ t think I agree with Sittenfeld ( if anything , making H.W .
Bush a more successful president should have made the Bush legacy stronger , not weaker ) but it ’ s not a crazy hypothesis either .
What ’ s tougher for me is to see how Barack Obama becomes president in this world .
Obama ’ s accession to the presidency had a lot to do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also had more than a little to do with his having been on the right side of the Iraq debate .
In real life , McCain was super hawkish and I think it ’ s plausible he ’ d have tried to start a war there even without 9/11 .
But the story here seems to be that the McCain administration somehow averted 9/11 and didn ’ t invade Iraq .
In that case , what ’ s Obama ’ s issue that he rides to overcome doubts about his experience and electability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the alt-SCOTUS .
Clinton filled two Supreme Court vacancies in his first term with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer .
Harry Blackmun ’ s retirement that created the Breyer vacancy was pretty clearly strategically timed , and in the alternate timeline he would have simply waited until 1997 to step down .
But even though Byron White , who stepped down early in Clinton ’ s presidency , was a Democratic appointee , he fell out of step with cultural liberalism pretty quickly and dissented from famous progressive opinions like Miranda @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t pass away until 2002 so he clearly could have stayed on the bench and waited for the Brown administration if he ’ d wanted to .
But it ’ s not clear to me from the historical record that he really was acting strategically with that timing — he was pretty old by 1993 and maybe just didn ’ t want to do the job anymore .
In that case , you ’ d have had a more conservative Supreme Court throughout this period , and especially so after Sandra Day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So interesting !
My impulse as a book critic is to say that part of the fantasy of this alternate George-W.-less , Obama-full history is to restore some innocence to America .
We never have to experience the generational horror of 9/11 and the ensuing war , but we do get to have the redemptive moment of electing our first Black president .
It ’ s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too story .
But back to the fun part : demanding real-world accuracy from this fictional book .
While Bill Clinton is dropping out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rodham is just starting to take her first steps into national politics .
After leaving Bill in the ’ 70s , she took a job as a law professor at Northwestern .
She did some local political work , most notably advocating for voting rights in Black communities during the 1983 Chicago mayoral election , which , in Hillary ’ s timeline as in ours , saw Harold Washington becoming the city ’ s first Black mayor .
And in 1991 , after Anita Hill ’ s testimony pushes a wave of women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political strategist tells Hillary she should run for Senate and face off in the Illinois primary against Alan Dixon , who voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court .
Hillary ’ s tempted by the idea , but she doesn ’ t officially sign on until she sees Bill flame out of the presidential race .
In the real world , Carol Moseley Braun successfully primaried Alan Dixon in that race and went on to become the first Black woman in the US Senate .
In Rodham , Hillary briefly decides @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , because she believes Braun to be more charismatic than she is , and she doesn ’ t think a comparison between the two of them will do her any favors .
“ Your serious-professor vibe , ” her strategist friend tells her , might “ come off as pretentious or elitist ” next to Braun .
But after she attends one of Braun ’ s campaign events , Hillary reconsiders .
Braun ’ s late to her own event ; she seems messy and disorganized .
A wealthy Chicago socialite tells Hillary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it takes to win and she would prefer to invest in Hillary as a candidate over Braun .
Hillary takes her offer , defeats both Braun and Dixon , and goes on to win the general election , too .
How does this election strike you as a plausible entree into national politics from a respected law professor ?
Are we basically turning Hillary into Elizabeth Warren here ?
As far as ways to make this plot mechanic work , Sittenfeld has hit on a pretty good one .
It ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Illinois Senate primary was genuinely weird .
Not only did Moseley Braun knock off an incumbent Democrat but a third candidate — rich-guy lawyer Albert Hofeld — got 27 percent .
You could take Hofeld as a proof of concept that there was an appetite for a non-Moseley Braun challenger to Dixon , and posit that Clinton would ’ ve been more compelling .
But you ’ re right that this does seem to sort of be a merger of Clinton ’ s life story with Warren ’ s , which is telling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terms , these are actually two very different Democrats and Warren was very critical of Clinton in her book The Two-Income Trap .
But politics is about more than just public policy and ideology , and I know a lot of die-hard Hillary fans who fell hard for Warren in 2020 .
On a personality level they both fit an archetype of hyper-competent , detail-oriented professional women that I think resonates very strongly with a lot of the people in my personal social circle , even if it ’ s not as appealing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that makes this plot development great is that by having Clinton be an Illinois senator in the 1990s rather than the first lady of Arkansas in the 1980s , it means she would naturally develop a policy record and political profile that ’ s more in keeping with mainstream contemporary liberalism than the actual one she and her husband put together as red-state Democrats during the Reagan era .
Yes , I think one of the big fantasies this book indulges in is that Hillary gets to be freed from her sins .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ crime bill ; she never votes for the Iraq War .
And since she never enters Obama ’ s Cabinet to become secretary of state , nothing happens with Benghazi either .
The downside of that is we end up with a bit of a vacuum in terms of Hillary ’ s actual politics that is never quite filled .
We get some descriptions of her process that seem to match real Hillary pretty closely — obsessive reading of policy papers , meetings with experts , a wonkish love of details — but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the actual results .
We don ’ t know much about what her legislative aims are or what her major accomplishments are as a senator .
And since she was never a first lady or a secretary of state , she has no significant experience in the executive branch .
Her public persona actually veers away from Warren to become a bit Amy Klobuchar-esque , with profiles referring to her as a “ flat-voweled Midwesterner ” and making much of her straightforward uncoolness .
Nevertheless , alt-Hillary comes to occupy essentially the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the 2016 election : It seems pretty clear to everyone , including Hillary herself , that she is the woman most likely to be America ’ s first woman president .
And she faces a virulent misogynistic backlash as a result of that status .
When Bill decides to come back into politics to throw his hat into the ring for the 2016 Democratic nomination after decades as an infamously hedonistic tech billionaire ( whatever , it ’ s fun ) , the young tech bros at his rallies start chanting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up !
” every time Hillary ’ s name is mentioned .
But Sittenfeld ’ s version of the 2016 election ends differently than ours did .
In a deliberately comic string of events , Donald Trump ends up deciding not to run and instead throws his support behind Hillary and against Bill , whom he hates .
( In Trump tweets , Hillary becomes “ Hardball Hillary , ” and Bill is “ Cheatin ’ Bill.
” ) Bernie Sanders is never mentioned .
And Hillary ends up clinching the nomination against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debate about how much she resents people focusing on her likability .
“ If you want someone very attractive , you can watch a Hollywood movie , ” she says .
Instead , she thinks people should vote for her “ because I ’ ll do a good job.
” That argument encapsulates what a lot of Hillary ’ s supporters said about her during the 2016 election : that Hillary ’ s particular set of skills is better suited for governing than for campaigning .
And the thought of hearing Hillary give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cathartic .
But when I read that speech in Rodham , I didn ’ t feel catharsis .
Instead , my first thought was , “ No way do Americans vote for a woman who scolds them for wanting her to be likable .
We just don ’ t respect women enough to do that.
” What do you think ?
Do you see a surprise moment of honesty from Hillary Rodham clinching the presidency for her ?
And would she have become a de facto frontrunner without any time at all in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ something you see over and over again in fictionalized versions of Democratic Party presidencies , whether it ’ s Laine Hanson in The Contender telling Congress that she believes in gun confiscation or Jed Bartlett smacking down evangelical Protestants on The West Wing .
Secular , cosmopolitan , educated liberals see that most Democratic Party politicians seem to resemble them demographically but don ’ t actually voice some of the views that are widespread in that demographic .
They process that as a form of unattractive hypocrisy , and then they posit that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who would forcefully embrace the authentic spirit of cultural liberalism would be more popular and win .
Realistically , though , that seems unlikely .
These scenes are a kind of fan service for a certain class of Democrats .
The Clintons , in particular , seem to inspire some people to try to clean up their narratives — with Bartlett ’ s impeachment happening over something more high-minded than Bill ’ s , or Sittenfeld ’ s book rewriting history to eliminate people ’ s issue-oriented complaints about Hillary and leaving only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whether she ’ d have been a contender at all in this scenario is an interesting one .
By virtue of her service as first lady , Clinton sort of had the mantle of “ potential first woman president ” to herself presumptively throughout 21st-century Democratic Party politics .
Without that boost , would someone like Dianne Feinstein have been a formidable contender in 2008 ?
Would former Washington state governor Christine Gregoire have gotten more buzz ?
Clinton herself was given to saying during the 2016 campaign “ I ’ m not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unfavorable comparisons in that regard to her husband and to Obama .
In some ways that ’ s giving herself short shrift — as Vox ’ s Ezra Klein wrote at the time , she ’ s a very skilled politician in the sense of coalition-building .
But she ’ s not great at showpiece speeches .
It ’ s easy to imagine her being a very successful workhorse senator or even a majority leader based on her very real skills .
But absent the context of her White House service in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ having the kind of star power that makes a person a presidential prospect ?
Happenstance really matters here .
We know from the 1988 and 2008 campaigns that Joe Biden is not such a dynamo of charisma that nobody can beat him in a primary .
But eight years as vice president put him in a position to win rather easily .
I don ’ t mean it as a big slam on Hillary to say I ’ m skeptical she ’ d have been president without prior service as first lady .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ other qualified women in statewide office who just didn ’ t get any consideration in the real world .
On a more level playing field , it ’ s easy for me to imagine one of them prevailing instead .
I agree with you on that , and that ’ s what makes me think that one of the great strengths of Rodham is also its biggest limitation .
This book is enchanted that by the idea of tweaking one thing in the recent past , you can fundamentally alter the present .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rodham from her marriage to Bill Clinton ; you can unleash all that frustrated potential on the world and then sit back and watch what happens next .
And that idea is , especially to those who appreciate Hillary Clinton ’ s fierce and undeniable ambition as an attractive quality in and of itself , a heady one .
But because Rodham is so narrowly focused on Hillary herself , it is never able to examine all of the other possibilities for the world it ’ s created .
I was shocked , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was for me to see so many women on the floor at the first debate of the Democratic primaries .
And it ’ s entirely possible that there would never have been so many of them there if Clinton hadn ’ t cracked the glass ceiling in the first place .
But I also have to wonder if her position as the de facto “ if there ’ s going to be a woman president , it ’ ll be her ” figure of the past 20 or so years means that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ smart and just as capable never found national attention , and if they are only now , after Hillary Clinton has more or less ceded the game , finding themselves emboldened to enter the field .
Watching Hillary face off against Bill offers Rodham some of its most compelling scenes .
But what would it have looked like if she were facing off against another woman candidate instead ?
I ’ d love to hear your thoughts , book clubbers .
You can let us know what you think about Rodham and all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the comments below .
Plus , meet us back here next week , on Thursday , July 30 , to see me talk with Curtis Sittenfeld live on Zoom .
You can RSVP here , and make sure to sign up for the Vox Book Club newsletter to be sure you don ’ t miss a thing .

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Rodham postulates a theory: If Hillary Rodham had never married Bill Clinton, the past 30 years of American politics would be fundamentally changed — sometimes subtly, and sometimes in huge, world-bending ways.
Rodham isn’t a political treatise or textbook that’s aiming for documentary levels of realism in the political events it tweaks. It’s a work of fiction that uses the real-life Hillary Clinton to examine ideas about power, gender, and the role of charisma in politics, and most of the changes to real history that appear in the book were chosen specifically to fit those themes. Demanding that they fit a narrow idea of documentary realism would be pedantic at best.
But listen, this is Vox and we’re pedantic nerds here. So at the Vox Book Club this week, we’ve decided to check Rodham’s alternate history against the facts of what happened in the real timeline — and, in the process, show a little more clearly exactly what ideas about politics and power Sittenfeld is interested in as she bends reality to her will.
To help make this fact-check as stringently accurate as possible, I (Vox book critic Constance Grady) have enlisted help from Matthew Yglesias, Vox co-founder and senior correspondent. Together, we hammered out what a Jerry Brown presidency would mean for America, what the Supreme Court might look like in Rodham, and whether a Hillary Rodham who never served in the executive branch would be quite so dominant a frontrunner for president as our own Hillary Clinton was.
Constance Grady
Matt Yglesias! Thank you for visiting the Vox Book Club this week to share your expertise. I want to start at Rodham’s first major point of divergence from our own timeline: the 1992 Democratic primaries.
Without Hillary by his side, Bill Clinton crashes and burns at his infamous 60 Minutes interview and drops out of the race four days later. Bush wins the general election, and the list of American presidents and vice presidents over the next two decades looks like this:
1992: George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle
1996: Jerry Brown and Bob Kerrey
2000: John McCain and Sam Brownback
2004: John McCain and Sam Brownback
2008: Barack Obama and Joe Biden
2012: Barack Obama and Joe Biden
Of note: Under the McCain presidency, it appears that neither 9/11 nor the Iraq War ever happened, which in turn means that when Hillary eventually runs for president, she never has to defend voting in favor of invading Iraq.
How does all this strike you? Does it look broad-strokes accurate? Was Bill Clinton really the only Democratic nominee who stood a chance against Bush in 1992? Would John McCain definitely have stopped 9/11? Who even is Jerry Brown?
Matthew Yglesias
It’s a little hard to know what to make of this alt-1992 election in part because Sittenfeld doesn’t tell us who the Democratic nominee was. But there were basically five candidates in that race — Clinton, Jerry Brown, Bob Kerrey, Tom Harkin, and Paul Tsongas. Since a Brown-Kerrey ticket wins in 1996, it seems likely that neither of them was the loser of the 1992 general election. I’m inclined to guess that if Clinton had dropped out early, then Harkin, an affable Midwestern labor liberal, would’ve run and would’ve beaten Bush.
But the story I’m going to tell for myself about this is that Clinton’s dropout proves to be a boon to former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas, whose neoliberal approach was a good match for Clinton policy-wise but who didn’t have anything close to Clinton-level charisma. Democrats are now saddled with a bit of a cold fish New Englander as a nominee who also doesn’t have Clinton’s connections to the Black community. Consequently, he loses Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia (all of which Clinton carried — politics was very different back then) while a stronger Ross Perot campaign tips Ohio, Montana, and Nevada to Bush. It sort of makes sense if you squint. Maybe.
The fundamental problem here, though, is that the 1992 race just wasn’t that close. The most plausible alternate history scenario in which Bush gets reelected is one in which the Fed doesn’t deliberately slow-walk economic growth as part of an “opportunistic disinflation” scheme. But the normal rules of alternate history are that you only get to change one thing — in this case, Hillary standing by her man — and everything else has to follow from that. And I have a hard time seeing why Bill Clinton dropping out would change the macroeconomic fundamentals.
What’s really interesting here in a big-picture sense is Sittenfeld’s implicit theory of how presidential nominations work.
Brown and John McCain were both, like Howard Dean, charismatic outsiders who exploited new technological paradigms to raise money outside traditional party donor networks and made a lot of noise during their primary campaigns before losing to a consensus party favorite. An important political science book, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform, argued that the failure of these insurgencies was no coincidence and that party networks effectively controlled nominations. After Donald Trump’s victory, that theory doesn’t look so good. But one view is that it was true of the nominations of the 1990s and 2000s, but party control has been eroded by changes in the media landscape.
Sittenfeld’s alternate history is implicitly arguing that, no, it was never really true and if you allow events to unfold slightly differently, then Brown and McCain can succeed. I don’t think I agree with Sittenfeld (if anything, making H.W. Bush a more successful president should have made the Bush legacy stronger, not weaker) but it’s not a crazy hypothesis either.
What’s tougher for me is to see how Barack Obama becomes president in this world.
Obama’s accession to the presidency had a lot to do with his natural talents. But it also had more than a little to do with his having been on the right side of the Iraq debate. In real life, McCain was super hawkish and I think it’s plausible he’d have tried to start a war there even without 9/11. But the story here seems to be that the McCain administration somehow averted 9/11 and didn’t invade Iraq. In that case, what’s Obama’s issue that he rides to overcome doubts about his experience and electability?
Another interesting thing to think about is the alt-SCOTUS. Clinton filled two Supreme Court vacancies in his first term with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Harry Blackmun’s retirement that created the Breyer vacancy was pretty clearly strategically timed, and in the alternate timeline he would have simply waited until 1997 to step down.
But even though Byron White, who stepped down early in Clinton’s presidency, was a Democratic appointee, he fell out of step with cultural liberalism pretty quickly and dissented from famous progressive opinions like Miranda and Roe v. Wade. He didn’t pass away until 2002 so he clearly could have stayed on the bench and waited for the Brown administration if he’d wanted to. But it’s not clear to me from the historical record that he really was acting strategically with that timing — he was pretty old by 1993 and maybe just didn’t want to do the job anymore. In that case, you’d have had a more conservative Supreme Court throughout this period, and especially so after Sandra Day O’Connor stepped down in 2005.
Constance Grady
So interesting! My impulse as a book critic is to say that part of the fantasy of this alternate George-W.-less, Obama-full history is to restore some innocence to America. We never have to experience the generational horror of 9/11 and the ensuing war, but we do get to have the redemptive moment of electing our first Black president. It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too story.
But back to the fun part: demanding real-world accuracy from this fictional book.
While Bill Clinton is dropping out of the 1992 election in Rodham, Hillary Rodham is just starting to take her first steps into national politics. After leaving Bill in the ’70s, she took a job as a law professor at Northwestern. She did some local political work, most notably advocating for voting rights in Black communities during the 1983 Chicago mayoral election, which, in Hillary’s timeline as in ours, saw Harold Washington becoming the city’s first Black mayor. And in 1991, after Anita Hill’s testimony pushes a wave of women to campaign for national office, a political strategist tells Hillary she should run for Senate and face off in the Illinois primary against Alan Dixon, who voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Hillary’s tempted by the idea, but she doesn’t officially sign on until she sees Bill flame out of the presidential race.
In the real world, Carol Moseley Braun successfully primaried Alan Dixon in that race and went on to become the first Black woman in the US Senate. In Rodham, Hillary briefly decides against entering the campaign after Braun announces, because she believes Braun to be more charismatic than she is, and she doesn’t think a comparison between the two of them will do her any favors. “Your serious-professor vibe,” her strategist friend tells her, might “come off as pretentious or elitist” next to Braun.
But after she attends one of Braun’s campaign events, Hillary reconsiders. Braun’s late to her own event; she seems messy and disorganized. A wealthy Chicago socialite tells Hillary that Braun doesn’t have what it takes to win and she would prefer to invest in Hillary as a candidate over Braun. Hillary takes her offer, defeats both Braun and Dixon, and goes on to win the general election, too.
How does this election strike you as a plausible entree into national politics from a respected law professor? Are we basically turning Hillary into Elizabeth Warren here?
Matthew Yglesias
As far as ways to make this plot mechanic work, Sittenfeld has hit on a pretty good one. It’s a little bit far-fetched, but that 1992 Illinois Senate primary was genuinely weird. Not only did Moseley Braun knock off an incumbent Democrat but a third candidate — rich-guy lawyer Albert Hofeld — got 27 percent. You could take Hofeld as a proof of concept that there was an appetite for a non-Moseley Braun challenger to Dixon, and posit that Clinton would’ve been more compelling.
But you’re right that this does seem to sort of be a merger of Clinton’s life story with Warren’s, which is telling in its own way.
In ideological terms, these are actually two very different Democrats and Warren was very critical of Clinton in her book The Two-Income Trap. But politics is about more than just public policy and ideology, and I know a lot of die-hard Hillary fans who fell hard for Warren in 2020. On a personality level they both fit an archetype of hyper-competent, detail-oriented professional women that I think resonates very strongly with a lot of the people in my personal social circle, even if it’s not as appealing nationally.
Of course the other thing that makes this plot development great is that by having Clinton be an Illinois senator in the 1990s rather than the first lady of Arkansas in the 1980s, it means she would naturally develop a policy record and political profile that’s more in keeping with mainstream contemporary liberalism than the actual one she and her husband put together as red-state Democrats during the Reagan era.
Constance Grady
Yes, I think one of the big fantasies this book indulges in is that Hillary gets to be freed from her sins. She never supports her husband’s crime bill; she never votes for the Iraq War. And since she never enters Obama’s Cabinet to become secretary of state, nothing happens with Benghazi either.
The downside of that is we end up with a bit of a vacuum in terms of Hillary’s actual politics that is never quite filled. We get some descriptions of her process that seem to match real Hillary pretty closely — obsessive reading of policy papers, meetings with experts, a wonkish love of details — but we don’t learn much about the actual results. We don’t know much about what her legislative aims are or what her major accomplishments are as a senator. And since she was never a first lady or a secretary of state, she has no significant experience in the executive branch. Her public persona actually veers away from Warren to become a bit Amy Klobuchar-esque, with profiles referring to her as a “flat-voweled Midwesterner” and making much of her straightforward uncoolness.
Nevertheless, alt-Hillary comes to occupy essentially the same space that real Hillary held leading up to the 2016 election: It seems pretty clear to everyone, including Hillary herself, that she is the woman most likely to be America’s first woman president. And she faces a virulent misogynistic backlash as a result of that status. When Bill decides to come back into politics to throw his hat into the ring for the 2016 Democratic nomination after decades as an infamously hedonistic tech billionaire (whatever, it’s fun), the young tech bros at his rallies start chanting, “Shut her up! Shut her up!” every time Hillary’s name is mentioned.
But Sittenfeld’s version of the 2016 election ends differently than ours did. In a deliberately comic string of events, Donald Trump ends up deciding not to run and instead throws his support behind Hillary and against Bill, whom he hates. (In Trump tweets, Hillary becomes “Hardball Hillary,” and Bill is “Cheatin’ Bill.”) Bernie Sanders is never mentioned. And Hillary ends up clinching the nomination against Bill by making a speech at a debate about how much she resents people focusing on her likability. “If you want someone very attractive, you can watch a Hollywood movie,” she says. Instead, she thinks people should vote for her “because I’ll do a good job.”
That argument encapsulates what a lot of Hillary’s supporters said about her during the 2016 election: that Hillary’s particular set of skills is better suited for governing than for campaigning. And the thought of hearing Hillary give voice to that argument is a little cathartic.
But when I read that speech in Rodham, I didn’t feel catharsis. Instead, my first thought was, “No way do Americans vote for a woman who scolds them for wanting her to be likable. We just don’t respect women enough to do that.”
What do you think? Do you see a surprise moment of honesty from Hillary Rodham clinching the presidency for her? And would she have become a de facto frontrunner without any time at all in the executive branch?
Matthew Yglesias
This seems like something you see over and over again in fictionalized versions of Democratic Party presidencies, whether it’s Laine Hanson in The Contender telling Congress that she believes in gun confiscation or Jed Bartlett smacking down evangelical Protestants on The West Wing.
Secular, cosmopolitan, educated liberals see that most Democratic Party politicians seem to resemble them demographically but don’t actually voice some of the views that are widespread in that demographic. They process that as a form of unattractive hypocrisy, and then they posit that a hypothetical “more honest” Democrat who would forcefully embrace the authentic spirit of cultural liberalism would be more popular and win. Realistically, though, that seems unlikely. These scenes are a kind of fan service for a certain class of Democrats. The Clintons, in particular, seem to inspire some people to try to clean up their narratives — with Bartlett’s impeachment happening over something more high-minded than Bill’s, or Sittenfeld’s book rewriting history to eliminate people’s issue-oriented complaints about Hillary and leaving only pure misogyny behind.
The question of whether she’d have been a contender at all in this scenario is an interesting one. By virtue of her service as first lady, Clinton sort of had the mantle of “potential first woman president” to herself presumptively throughout 21st-century Democratic Party politics.
Without that boost, would someone like Dianne Feinstein have been a formidable contender in 2008? Would former Washington state governor Christine Gregoire have gotten more buzz? Clinton herself was given to saying during the 2016 campaign “I’m not a natural politician,” making some unfavorable comparisons in that regard to her husband and to Obama. In some ways that’s giving herself short shrift — as Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote at the time, she’s a very skilled politician in the sense of coalition-building. But she’s not great at showpiece speeches. It’s easy to imagine her being a very successful workhorse senator or even a majority leader based on her very real skills. But absent the context of her White House service in the 1990s, would she be seen as having the kind of star power that makes a person a presidential prospect?
Happenstance really matters here. We know from the 1988 and 2008 campaigns that Joe Biden is not such a dynamo of charisma that nobody can beat him in a primary. But eight years as vice president put him in a position to win rather easily. I don’t mean it as a big slam on Hillary to say I’m skeptical she’d have been president without prior service as first lady. But we really did have plenty of other qualified women in statewide office who just didn’t get any consideration in the real world. On a more level playing field, it’s easy for me to imagine one of them prevailing instead.
Constance Grady
I agree with you on that, and that’s what makes me think that one of the great strengths of Rodham is also its biggest limitation.
This book is enchanted that by the idea of tweaking one thing in the recent past, you can fundamentally alter the present. You can save brilliant, ambitious Hillary Rodham from her marriage to Bill Clinton; you can unleash all that frustrated potential on the world and then sit back and watch what happens next. And that idea is, especially to those who appreciate Hillary Clinton’s fierce and undeniable ambition as an attractive quality in and of itself, a heady one. But because Rodham is so narrowly focused on Hillary herself, it is never able to examine all of the other possibilities for the world it’s created.
I was shocked, in 2019, to realize how moving it was for me to see so many women on the floor at the first debate of the Democratic primaries. And it’s entirely possible that there would never have been so many of them there if Clinton hadn’t cracked the glass ceiling in the first place. But I also have to wonder if her position as the de facto “if there’s going to be a woman president, it’ll be her” figure of the past 20 or so years means that other women politicians who are just as smart and just as capable never found national attention, and if they are only now, after Hillary Clinton has more or less ceded the game, finding themselves emboldened to enter the field.
Watching Hillary face off against Bill offers Rodham some of its most compelling scenes. But what would it have looked like if she were facing off against another woman candidate instead?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, book clubbers. You can let us know what you think about Rodham and all the ideas embedded in its alternate history in the comments below. Plus, meet us back here next week, on Thursday, July 30, to see me talk with Curtis Sittenfeld live on Zoom. You can RSVP here, and make sure to sign up for the Vox Book Club newsletter to be sure you don’t miss a thing.


vox--2020-07-24--China is systematically detaining Uighurs — and the world isn’t doing enough about it

In China ’ s Xinjiang province , Uighur Muslims are being detained and held in what are effectively concentration camps , where they ’ re subjected to human rights abuses , including torture , forced sterilization , and brainwashing .
But no one seems to be doing much about it at the international level .
On this week ’ s episode of Worldly , Vox ’ s weekly international podcast , senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp , international security and defense reporter Alex Ward , and senior foreign editor Jennifer Williams discuss why the international response to the Uighur crisis has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much more attention and action .
The Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority group that share cultural and ethnic similarities with Central Asian nations .
An estimated 11 million Uighurs live in Xinjiang — but as many as 1 million Uighurs are being held in these camps .
In the camps , Uighurs are reportedly facing mass sterilization , forced labor , sexual assault , and intense surveillance .
They are also said to be forced to learn Mandarin Chinese and to criticize or renounce their Muslim faith .
But China denies that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ call “ re-education camps.
” China ’ s position is that the Uighurs are receiving “ vocational training ” to learn about Chinese history and culture , with the goal of fending off terrorism from Uighur separatist movements .
Earlier this week , China ’ s ambassador to the UK , when confronted with drone footage of what appears to be blindfolded Uighurs being led to a camp , again denied that the Uighurs are facing abuses and claimed that Uighurs live harmoniously with other ethnic groups .
Despite these reports of human @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , international responses to the crisis have lacked urgency .
The UK government has spoken out against the abuses and the US has imposed sanctions on China , but widespread action has been absent , including from Muslim-majority countries ( like Iran , which is currently finalizing a $ 400 billion economic and security deal with China ) .
To hear more about why China is detaining the Uighur people and what the international community should be doing about it , listen to the full episode of Worldly , which you can stream @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever you listen to podcasts .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

In China’s Xinjiang province, Uighur Muslims are being detained and held in what are effectively concentration camps, where they’re subjected to human rights abuses, including torture, forced sterilization, and brainwashing.
But no one seems to be doing much about it at the international level.
On this week’s episode of Worldly, Vox’s weekly international podcast, senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp, international security and defense reporter Alex Ward, and senior foreign editor Jennifer Williams discuss why the international response to the Uighur crisis has been muted — and why it deserves much more attention and action.
The Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority group that share cultural and ethnic similarities with Central Asian nations. An estimated 11 million Uighurs live in Xinjiang — but as many as 1 million Uighurs are being held in these camps.
In the camps, Uighurs are reportedly facing mass sterilization, forced labor, sexual assault, and intense surveillance. They are also said to be forced to learn Mandarin Chinese and to criticize or renounce their Muslim faith.
But China denies that abuses are occurring in what they euphemistically call “re-education camps.” China’s position is that the Uighurs are receiving “vocational training” to learn about Chinese history and culture, with the goal of fending off terrorism from Uighur separatist movements.
Earlier this week, China’s ambassador to the UK, when confronted with drone footage of what appears to be blindfolded Uighurs being led to a camp, again denied that the Uighurs are facing abuses and claimed that Uighurs live harmoniously with other ethnic groups.
Despite these reports of human rights abuses being committed against the Uighurs, international responses to the crisis have lacked urgency. The UK government has spoken out against the abuses and the US has imposed sanctions on China, but widespread action has been absent, including from Muslim-majority countries (like Iran, which is currently finalizing a $400 billion economic and security deal with China).
To hear more about why China is detaining the Uighur people and what the international community should be doing about it, listen to the full episode of Worldly, which you can stream below.
And subscribe to Worldly on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.


vox--2020-07-24--Portland, polarization, and the crisis of the Republican Party

Late on Wednesday evening , Portland , Oregon , Mayor Ted Wheeler ( D ) was tear-gassed in his own city .
Wheeler was visiting the main site of the city ’ s ongoing protests , which have devolved into violent clashes with the police for weeks , to try to understand their grievances .
Seemingly out of nowhere , as-yet-unidentified law enforcement personnel unleashed gas on the crowd — while the mayor was still in it .
“ I saw nothing that provoked this response , ” Wheeler told a New York Times journalist on the scene .
According @ @ @ @ @ @ @ launched the gas were not local police .
Instead , they were part of the Homeland Security Department ’ s contingent in Portland , which the Trump administration has deployed over the explicit objections of both Wheeler and Oregon Gov .
Kate Brown ( D ) .
The DHS officers operate in military-style gear without obvious identification .
They have been extremely violent , using heavy-handed tactics that have escalated the conflict in downtown Portland .
They have been filmed grabbing suspected protesters off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ these detachments to other parts of the country — announcing , on Wednesday , “ a surge of federal law enforcement ” to Chicago and Albuquerque , language that likens the federal deployments to those cities to troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan .
How could an American president start abusing federal authority in such a blatantly authoritarian fashion ?
How could he get one of the country ’ s two major parties to acquiesce to this , especially the party that claims to be for federalism and states ’ rights ?
How @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What we ’ re seeing , according to experts on comparative democracy and American politics , is our polarized political system reaching its breaking point — and our democracy buckling under the pressure of Trump ’ s authoritarian impulses and near-total control of the Republican Party .
There is no legitimate justification for deploying these federal troops over local objections .
The protests in Portland are limited to a small area and are primarily peaceful protests rather than riots .
The violence that does grow out of those protests , like the recent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a quintessentially local issue ; the federal government has no business getting involved absent local request .
But Trump is running a “ law and order ” reelection campaign that works by entrenching partisan divides and stoking racial resentment .
His unprecedented deployment of federal law enforcement personnel is a means to that end ; he gets away with it because American politics is so dangerously polarized that Republicans are willing to accept virtually anything if it ’ s done to Democrats .
“ Accepting this type of ‘ occupation ’ of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such an extreme level of dehumanization of the citizens — which is probably why Trump repeatedly labels these cities as being run by ‘ liberal Democrats , ’ ” says Lilliana Mason , a political scientist at the University of Maryland .
“ At this point in our political circumstances , that label alone is enough to allow law-abiding Americans in those cities to be viewed as less worthy of basic democratic protections — and to permit harm to come to them at the hands of the state.
” To understand why scholars @ @ @ @ @ @ @ development , it ’ s important to put Trump ’ s handling of the Portland case in context .
It ’ s certainly true that there ’ s been real unrest in Portland .
There was one particularly bad riot on May 29 ; since then , protesters have been gathering outside of two buildings in downtown Portland , the federal courthouse and the Justice Center , which houses the headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau and the city jail .
Ostensibly , the federal troops have been sent in to protect federal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ’ s no evidence that local authorities need or want their help ; the violence has been fairly contained to a 12-block zone that the Oregonian , a local newspaper , describes as “ a tiny point of the city.
” In fact , local reporters suggest that use of force by law enforcement is primarily responsible for things turning violent — and that federal troops have been particularly , dangerously heavy-handed .
“ I have been in the streets of Portland documenting this movement since the very first riot , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What ’ s happening now is “ the end result of more than six weeks of escalating state violence against largely nonviolent demonstrators.
” This kind of violent federal deployment over the objections of state and local officials has no real precedent in American history .
The closest parallels are Reconstruction , when Union troops occupied the states of the defeated former Confederacy , and military deployments to the South during the civil rights era to enforce desegregation orders .
In both of those cases , it was uniformed soldiers that were sent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an alphabet soup of obscure DHS agencies .
More fundamentally , these troops were being used to protect moves toward racial progress — not suppress protesters who were there to demand it .
In fact , outside of the context of a domestic insurgency like the Troubles in Northern Ireland , there is no example of state security forces being deployed under circumstances like this inside any democratic state .
“ There is precedent in democracies of national police being used to deal with mass unrest , ” says Daniel Ziblatt , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How Democracies Die .
“ But there is no mass unrest on a scale to justify this , and it is being done in an entirely lawless , nonconsensual away over the heads of state and local officials.
” There are , however , eerie similarities to what governments do during civil wars .
During Sri Lanka ’ s fight with the Tamil Tiger insurgency between 1983 and 2009 , state security officials would use unmarked white vans to scoop up citizens who had run afoul of the Sri Lankan government .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detainee ’ s torture or disappearance ; they were so common at one point that Sri Lankan citizens started using the term “ white-vanning ” as a shorthand .
Obviously , that ’ s not what ’ s happening to protesters detained in Portland , but experts find the echoes chilling .
“ In Sri Lanka , the white , unmarked van is the symbol of state terror , ” says Kate Cronin-Furman , a political scientist at University College London who ’ s worked in that country .
“ As an American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to see something so strongly associated with some of the world ’ s worst state repression of dissidents unfolding in our own cities.
” The point of all these comparisons is not merely to say that what Trump is doing is scary or undemocratic .
Rather , it ’ s to illustrate what this says about the mindset that goes into launching a program like this .
The federal deployments to Portland and the tactics they use given the context are not normal .
They are the tools of authoritarian states and military @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of deployment in Portland , let alone to see the brutal results and then to announce expansions to other cities , reflects a radical de-democratization of American politics : a sense , on the part of the president and his allies , that the residents of Portland and Chicago are the enemy .
And that , experts say , reflects a deep rot in our country ’ s democracy .
It ’ s obvious to everyone that American politics is extremely polarized .
The question is how powerful this polarization is .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ will do in the name of pursuing their partisan interests and hurting the other team ?
The Portland situation represents an edge case in these discussions .
Trump is engaging in behavior that should clearly be unacceptable in a democracy ; the historical and international comparisons make that excruciatingly clear .
Yet , with a handful of exceptions , you aren ’ t hearing a peep of protest from congressional Republicans .
Top federal officials , like Attorney General Bill Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf , are all-in on these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if state and local officials decide to take appropriate action instead of refusing to enforce the law , ” Wolf said in a July 16 statement .
“ DHS will not abdicate its solemn duty to protect federal facilities and those within them.
” Trump ’ s most important outside validators , the hosts of Fox News ’ s slate of opinion programming , are cheering him on .
To understand this assent , it ’ s worth unpacking the way polarization works in the United States a bit more deeply .
One @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seen in the United States in the past several decades is the rise of what ’ s called “ negative partisanship ” : the growth of a political identity defined not so much around liking one ’ s own party as hating the other one .
A negative partisan feels like they “ win ” by inflicting defeats on the other team rather than passing their own positive legislative agenda ( though sometimes they ’ re the same thing ) .
But in a democracy , rising negative partisanship is playing with fire @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy , to be sure , but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question .
But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly , they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state .
We ’ ve seen evidence that this kind of extreme negative partisanship has become dominant on the Republican aisle , ranging from the blockade of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the wide-ranging efforts at the state level to disenfranchise Black ( and Democratic-leaning ) voters .
What we ’ re seeing in Portland represents negative partisanship breaking through the limits : fusing with longtime Republican and Trumpist demonization of American cities to take things to a previously unthinkable low .
“ I don ’ t even think calling it polarization is sufficient , ” Mason , the Maryland scholar , says .
“ We are witnessing a crisis of democracy that is perfectly acceptable to a significant portion of the population — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The second important aspect of polarization to consider is the way it alters the incentive structures of legislators .
In America ’ s Madisonian system , Congress is supposed to be an institution with a shared sense of purpose : a legislature that ’ s antagonistic to the president , that aims to put a check on presidential power to safeguard its own influence .
But in an extremely polarized environment , members of Congress are pushed to align more with a president of their own party than with the institution .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and members of Congress second ; if they don ’ t , they suffer the wrath of primary voters all too willing to punish deviation from the president ’ s line .
This has , throughout the Trump presidency , made him largely immune to congressional oversight , the Ukraine impeachment being the most vivid example .
Now it allows him to get away with the imposition of a kind of occupation on American citizens with no real risk of congressional blowback .
“ Due to extreme polarization and Trump ’ s popularity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is abdicating responsibility for oversight , ” Stephen Levitsky , a Harvard professor and Ziblatt ’ s How Democracies Die co-author , said .
“ We knew polarization and populism were a problem , but no one had any idea of just how far the implications stretched.
” The causes of this crisis , this beyond-polarization level of abuse , are profound and structural ( on this , I ’ d recommend my colleague Ezra Klein ’ s book ) .
But one reason Portland has become such a dangerous situation is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deepest drivers of polarization , America ’ s culture wars and conflicts over identity , with Trump ’ s personal authoritarian instincts .
The unrest in Portland began as part of the nationwide uprising in the wake of George Floyd ’ s killing .
While the protests have taken on a life of their own today , they still center on grievances concerning the disproportionate use of force by police — against both African Americans and nonviolent protestors demanding their rights .
The extreme federal deployment there isn ’ t just about demonizing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a means for the president to activate the kind of racial grievance politics that propelled him to power in the Republican Party .
His mechanism for doing so is by leaning into the side of his political personality that admires foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin and Turkey ’ s Recep Tayyip Erdogan , both of whom have notably suppressed protests by force .
“ It ’ s not just about partisanship — it ’ s about who gets to be considered a ‘ real ’ American , with the full rights and privileges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the way for Trump ’ s push toward authoritarian rule , ” Mason concludes .
“ It feels like the brakes are off.
” Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Late on Wednesday evening, Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) was tear-gassed in his own city.
Wheeler was visiting the main site of the city’s ongoing protests, which have devolved into violent clashes with the police for weeks, to try to understand their grievances. Seemingly out of nowhere, as-yet-unidentified law enforcement personnel unleashed gas on the crowd — while the mayor was still in it.
“I saw nothing that provoked this response,” Wheeler told a New York Times journalist on the scene.
According to the Times, the officers who launched the gas were not local police. Instead, they were part of the Homeland Security Department’s contingent in Portland, which the Trump administration has deployed over the explicit objections of both Wheeler and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D). The DHS officers operate in military-style gear without obvious identification. They have been extremely violent, using heavy-handed tactics that have escalated the conflict in downtown Portland. They have been filmed grabbing suspected protesters off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans.
And now President Trump wants to send these detachments to other parts of the country — announcing, on Wednesday, “a surge of federal law enforcement” to Chicago and Albuquerque, language that likens the federal deployments to those cities to troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How could an American president start abusing federal authority in such a blatantly authoritarian fashion? How could he get one of the country’s two major parties to acquiesce to this, especially the party that claims to be for federalism and states’ rights? How could any of this be happening?
What we’re seeing, according to experts on comparative democracy and American politics, is our polarized political system reaching its breaking point — and our democracy buckling under the pressure of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and near-total control of the Republican Party.
There is no legitimate justification for deploying these federal troops over local objections. The protests in Portland are limited to a small area and are primarily peaceful protests rather than riots. The violence that does grow out of those protests, like the recent rise in gun violence in Chicago, is a quintessentially local issue; the federal government has no business getting involved absent local request.
But Trump is running a “law and order” reelection campaign that works by entrenching partisan divides and stoking racial resentment. His unprecedented deployment of federal law enforcement personnel is a means to that end; he gets away with it because American politics is so dangerously polarized that Republicans are willing to accept virtually anything if it’s done to Democrats.
“Accepting this type of ‘occupation’ of American cities by unidentified federal agents requires such an extreme level of dehumanization of the citizens — which is probably why Trump repeatedly labels these cities as being run by ‘liberal Democrats,’” says Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland.
“At this point in our political circumstances, that label alone is enough to allow law-abiding Americans in those cities to be viewed as less worthy of basic democratic protections — and to permit harm to come to them at the hands of the state.”
The dangers of Trump’s Portland policy
To understand why scholars like Mason are so alarmed by this development, it’s important to put Trump’s handling of the Portland case in context.
It’s certainly true that there’s been real unrest in Portland. There was one particularly bad riot on May 29; since then, protesters have been gathering outside of two buildings in downtown Portland, the federal courthouse and the Justice Center, which houses the headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau and the city jail. Ostensibly, the federal troops have been sent in to protect federal property (the courthouse).
But there’s no evidence that local authorities need or want their help; the violence has been fairly contained to a 12-block zone that the Oregonian, a local newspaper, describes as “a tiny point of the city.” In fact, local reporters suggest that use of force by law enforcement is primarily responsible for things turning violent — and that federal troops have been particularly, dangerously heavy-handed.
“I have been in the streets of Portland documenting this movement since the very first riot,” reporter Robert Evans writes in Bellingcat. What’s happening now is “the end result of more than six weeks of escalating state violence against largely nonviolent demonstrators.”
This kind of violent federal deployment over the objections of state and local officials has no real precedent in American history. The closest parallels are Reconstruction, when Union troops occupied the states of the defeated former Confederacy, and military deployments to the South during the civil rights era to enforce desegregation orders.
In both of those cases, it was uniformed soldiers that were sent, not unidentified state security forces from an alphabet soup of obscure DHS agencies. More fundamentally, these troops were being used to protect moves toward racial progress — not suppress protesters who were there to demand it.
In fact, outside of the context of a domestic insurgency like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, there is no example of state security forces being deployed under circumstances like this inside any democratic state.
“There is precedent in democracies of national police being used to deal with mass unrest,” says Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and co-author of How Democracies Die. “But there is no mass unrest on a scale to justify this, and it is being done in an entirely lawless, nonconsensual away over the heads of state and local officials.”
There are, however, eerie similarities to what governments do during civil wars.
During Sri Lanka’s fight with the Tamil Tiger insurgency between 1983 and 2009, state security officials would use unmarked white vans to scoop up citizens who had run afoul of the Sri Lankan government. This sort of abduction typically ended in the detainee’s torture or disappearance; they were so common at one point that Sri Lankan citizens started using the term “white-vanning” as a shorthand. Obviously, that’s not what’s happening to protesters detained in Portland, but experts find the echoes chilling.
“In Sri Lanka, the white, unmarked van is the symbol of state terror,” says Kate Cronin-Furman, a political scientist at University College London who’s worked in that country. “As an American citizen, it’s quite shocking to see something so strongly associated with some of the world’s worst state repression of dissidents unfolding in our own cities.”
The point of all these comparisons is not merely to say that what Trump is doing is scary or undemocratic.
Rather, it’s to illustrate what this says about the mindset that goes into launching a program like this. The federal deployments to Portland and the tactics they use given the context are not normal. They are the tools of authoritarian states and military occupations.
To even think about this kind of deployment in Portland, let alone to see the brutal results and then to announce expansions to other cities, reflects a radical de-democratization of American politics: a sense, on the part of the president and his allies, that the residents of Portland and Chicago are the enemy.
And that, experts say, reflects a deep rot in our country’s democracy.
Beyond polarization, the abyss
It’s obvious to everyone that American politics is extremely polarized. The question is how powerful this polarization is. Are there limits to what political actors will do in the name of pursuing their partisan interests and hurting the other team?
The Portland situation represents an edge case in these discussions. Trump is engaging in behavior that should clearly be unacceptable in a democracy; the historical and international comparisons make that excruciatingly clear.
Yet, with a handful of exceptions, you aren’t hearing a peep of protest from congressional Republicans. Top federal officials, like Attorney General Bill Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, are all-in on these deployments.
“This siege can end if state and local officials decide to take appropriate action instead of refusing to enforce the law,” Wolf said in a July 16 statement. “DHS will not abdicate its solemn duty to protect federal facilities and those within them.”
Trump’s most important outside validators, the hosts of Fox News’s slate of opinion programming, are cheering him on.
To understand this assent, it’s worth unpacking the way polarization works in the United States a bit more deeply.
One key element of what we’ve seen in the United States in the past several decades is the rise of what’s called “negative partisanship”: the growth of a political identity defined not so much around liking one’s own party as hating the other one. A negative partisan feels like they “win” by inflicting defeats on the other team rather than passing their own positive legislative agenda (though sometimes they’re the same thing).
But in a democracy, rising negative partisanship is playing with fire. For a democratic system to work, all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy, to be sure, but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question. But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly, they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state.
We’ve seen evidence that this kind of extreme negative partisanship has become dominant on the Republican aisle, ranging from the blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination to the wide-ranging efforts at the state level to disenfranchise Black (and Democratic-leaning) voters. What we’re seeing in Portland represents negative partisanship breaking through the limits: fusing with longtime Republican and Trumpist demonization of American cities to take things to a previously unthinkable low.
“I don’t even think calling it polarization is sufficient,” Mason, the Maryland scholar, says. “We are witnessing a crisis of democracy that is perfectly acceptable to a significant portion of the population — as long as it hurts their enemies.”
The second important aspect of polarization to consider is the way it alters the incentive structures of legislators.
In America’s Madisonian system, Congress is supposed to be an institution with a shared sense of purpose: a legislature that’s antagonistic to the president, that aims to put a check on presidential power to safeguard its own influence.
But in an extremely polarized environment, members of Congress are pushed to align more with a president of their own party than with the institution. Republican senators act like Republican partisans first and members of Congress second; if they don’t, they suffer the wrath of primary voters all too willing to punish deviation from the president’s line.
This has, throughout the Trump presidency, made him largely immune to congressional oversight, the Ukraine impeachment being the most vivid example. Now it allows him to get away with the imposition of a kind of occupation on American citizens with no real risk of congressional blowback.
“Due to extreme polarization and Trump’s popularity among Republicans, the entire Republican Party is abdicating responsibility for oversight,” Stephen Levitsky, a Harvard professor and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die co-author, said. “We knew polarization and populism were a problem, but no one had any idea of just how far the implications stretched.”
The causes of this crisis, this beyond-polarization level of abuse, are profound and structural (on this, I’d recommend my colleague Ezra Klein’s book). But one reason Portland has become such a dangerous situation is that it’s fused some of the deepest drivers of polarization, America’s culture wars and conflicts over identity, with Trump’s personal authoritarian instincts.
The unrest in Portland began as part of the nationwide uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. While the protests have taken on a life of their own today, they still center on grievances concerning the disproportionate use of force by police — against both African Americans and nonviolent protestors demanding their rights.
The extreme federal deployment there isn’t just about demonizing Democrats and antifa; it’s a means for the president to activate the kind of racial grievance politics that propelled him to power in the Republican Party. His mechanism for doing so is by leaning into the side of his political personality that admires foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, both of whom have notably suppressed protests by force.
“It’s not just about partisanship — it’s about who gets to be considered a ‘real’ American, with the full rights and privileges that entails. But it also clears the way for Trump’s push toward authoritarian rule,” Mason concludes. “It feels like the brakes are off.”