Back in the days before all data was stored everywhere, forever, never to disappear even if you try, writers and composers shared the experience of waking up at 3am, in cold-sweat terrors because of the “lost manuscript” nightmare.
This fear was based on hoary stories about some novelist or historian who got into a cab with a bag containing a 1,000-page manuscript representing years of work — and got out of the cab leaving the bag behind, impossible to retrieve. Or, in a variant, the only copy of the manuscript was sitting in the house, when the house burned down—or aboard a boat, when the boat sank.
Apparently real-life writers have actually suffered this misfortune. You can read an account covering authors from Milton to Hemingway to Edna St. Vincent Millay here, and others here and here.
I’ve personally seen a real-life version of this nightmare. As described here, the very first story I ever wrote for my college newspaper was about a fire that destroyed the university economics department. On the sidewalk outside, I encountered a man sobbing as he watched the blaze: the only extant copy of the book he’d been working on for years was inside, and was reduced to ashes. (As I confessed: “The moment had a career-changing effect on me. As the first question I asked, for the first story I wrote, I turned to this unfortunate and said: Well, Dr. Swami, how does it feel to see your life's work vanish? I was becoming a journalist.”)
And I’ve recently encountered a minor-league real-world version. On a long-haul flight on the morning after this past week’s election, I ground out a “meaning of it all” dispatch for our web site. But for oddball logistics reasons, that couldn’t get posted right away — and ever-changing news headlines made what I’d originally written seem oddly framed.
So this post, kicking off a new Thread, has two points. One is to summarize the post-election wrap-up I had laid out, in lost-manuscript form. The other is to give some illustrations of what I argue is the fundamentally promising post-election theme.
First, what happened this past week? My long-form argument was that many Democrats felt emotionally gut-punched on Election Night, mainly because of three very high-profile losses in long-shot but closely run races. These involved, of course: Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Andrew Gillum in Florida.
Whatever may eventually turn out in the Georgia and Florida recounts, as of last Tuesday night they were all heartbreaking disappointments for the Democrats. And while those (apparent) losses were offset by some emotionally important surprises and successes, principally the defeats of Kris Kobach in the governor’s race in Kansas and of Scott Walker in Wisconsin, they were accompanied by a range of other defeats, from Joe Donnelly’s and Heidi Heitkamp’s in the Senate to Amy McGrath’s and M.J. Hegar’s and Richard Ojeda’s in the House.
But — the “pivot” argument in my day-after piece — I said that the long-term fundamentals of the election would be more favorable to Democrats than the emotion of that first night suggested, in several ways.
The most obvious was simply the shift in control of the House. That the Democrats would gain at least the requisite 23 votes was clear by very late on Tuesday night. And as close races have kept being called since then — notably in California and Arizona, with their long-established pattern of early returns skewing Republican and the Democratic share edging up as the count wore on—the scale of an extremely sizable victory has begun to sink in.
As I write this update, it looks as if the Democrats will pick up around 35 seats and carry the popular vote for the House by 7 to 8 per cent, results that would have been reported as “a wave” if they’d been foreseen or recognized on election night. It is on track to be a bigger percentage-point margin than the Republicans scored in the Tea Party elections of 2010, when gerrymandering allowed them to flip sixty-plus seats. (Here’s a fascinating Atlantic graphic categorizing the traits of districts that flipped this time.)
Beyond the intangible effects of House results that will be larger than they initially seemed, there is the hugely important practical consequence of the House being again empowered as a check on presidential excesses. With Adam Schiff as (presumptive) chairman of the Intelligence Committee — and Adam Smith at Armed Services, and John Yarmuth at Budget, and Maxine Waters at Financial Services, and Nita Lowey at Appropriations — hearings, subpoenas, and investigations will mean something very different in the next two years of Donald Trump’s term than they have in the past two.
At the state-legislature level, it appears that in this one election Democrats will have won back well over one-third of the seats they lost during eight years under Barack Obama. The balance of the Obama years — emotional satisfaction at the top of the ticket, losses lower down — was at least partially reversed. And the anti-gerrymandering and voting-expansion initiatives passed in a large number of states, while presumably useful to the Democrats in the short term, are more important longer-term as repairs to the working mechanisms of democracy.
And so, I would have argued in my phantom piece, the 2018 elections were indeed likely to be the opposite of the Obama years. Emotionally, for Democrats November, 2018 felt much less satisfying than November, 2012 or (especially) November, 2008. But the practical advances were more sizable than initial coverage implied.
Now, for a little more on this last point: the ways in which this election might be seen as a hinge point on repairing the mechanics of democracy. This is of course a trend I’ve been talking about for a long time, and on which the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote today in the Washington Post, citing arguments Deb Fallows and I have made (emphasis added):
While many red states will continue to be tough battlegrounds for Democrats, even in growing metropolitan areas, an increasing number of Republicans in those states may move toward Cornett-style [Mick Cornett, former Republican mayor of Oklahoma City], get-it-done moderation and away from tea party conservatism.
James and Deborah Fallows, authors of the recent book “Our Towns,” traveled extensively around smaller urban areas in heartland America in the course of their research. They discovered that, in contrast to the hyper-partisanship and gridlock at the federal level, local politics retains a penchant for collaboration, reasonable compromise and long-term vision.
If there’s any hope for our collective political future, it’s that such pragmatism will percolate up from our local politics to our national politics. And the 2018 midterm results suggest that green shoots of moderation are breaking out, even in the states that many East Coast liberals think are hopelessly addicted to Trump’s brand of divisive cultural warfare.
As will come as no surprise, I agree with Kabaservice’s emphasis on engagement and practical-mindedness “percolating up” from the still-functional level of American politics. And here are a few other indications of this trend underway:
“Anti-Gerrymandering Reforms Sweep the Nation in 2018,” from IVN, the Independent Voter Network. Hope for more-representative democracy. “Rural Voters Delivered Key Victories for Democrats in 2018,” from The Washington Monthly. Easing the supposedly enormous rural-urban values-and-belief divide. “On Ballot Measures, a Progressive Sweep,” from our partners at CityLab. Local-level support for making governance work. “Tuesday’s Verdict on Voter Suppression and Gerrymandering,” from The American Prospect. More on structural reforms. “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s War on Gerrymandering Is Just Beginning,” from The Atlantic. If anyone can get this done… “Massive Turnout Turns Important Texas Courts Blue,” in the legal publication The Appeal: Political Report. Beto O’Rourke didn’t win, but large number of elected judges who promised reforms in “cash-bail” systems and other abuses did prevail. “Civil Rights Advocate Elected to North Carolina Supreme Court,” another from The American Prospect. “Let the People Vote,” by David Leonhardt in the New York Times. The subtitle tells it all: “America finally has a pro-democracy movement — and it did very well at the polls last week.”The ongoing theme in this space will be where and why practical-minded functionality is percolating up from the local level, and what circumstances might hasten and favor that process. It’s been a good beginning this past week.
At least 25 people have been killed by wildfires raging across California, as the state battles with its deadliest fire season in decades.
Firefighters are warring with blazes on both sides of the state. In the north, the so-called Camp Fire has become the largest and most destructive fire in state history, killing at least 23 people and consuming 109,000 acres. In its trail of ash stand the smoldering ruins of Paradise, California, a city of 26,000 people until this week.
The Camp Fire is only about a quarter contained, and it still threatens the edge of Chico, the largest city in Butte County. The Camp Fire got its jolly name through a fluke: Most Western wildfires are named after where they started, and the Camp Fire began on Camp Creek Road.
In the south, firefighters are battling the Woolsey Fire, which has grown with the help of hot, howling Santa Ana winds. That fire has killed two people and devoured more than 83,000 acres, destroying buildings across Ventura County. It’s only 10 percent contained, and the Santa Anas are expected to pick up again on Sunday afternoon. (The Santa Ana winds worsened last year’s fires, as well.)
The Woolsey Fire has prompted the evacuation of Thousand Oaks, the same city menaced by a mass shooting on Wednesday that left 12 people dead.
“Right now, families are in mourning, thousands have lost homes, and a quarter-million Americans have been forced to flee,” said Brian Rice, the president of the California Professional Firefighters. He was responding to comments from President Donald Trump, who threatened to withhold disaster relief for the state due to its “gross mismanagement of the forests.” (Most timberland in California is under federal control.)
While this California fire season has been particularly destructive, it is only the latest stage in what the climate scientist Daniel Swain calls “an astonishing multi-year fire siege.” Three of the state’s five largest fires on record have occurred in the past three years, all of them in Northern California. Millions of people have gotten used to living near big fires—sniffing the smoke when they open their door every morning, seeing the somber pink circle of sun in the sky every evening. A smaller number have fled homes in the middle of the night or driven through a storm of embers.
Yet the worst is probably still to come for much of the state. The California fire season usually ends with the first rains of fall. In recent years, these rains have been arriving later, and precipitation has concentrated in the darkest winter months. California’s hilly scrubland is at its driest—and most fire-prone—right before the rains arrive, so their delay can lengthen and intensify the fire season. Climate change appears likely to push the rains even later in the year.
The insurance companies, in particular, have started to fear the worst. A recent RAND study found that home-insurance premiums have recently risen in the state’s most fire-prone areas compared to its less fire-prone areas. Some homeowners have switched to smaller deductibles. The same study estimated—as the climate changes— the number of acres burned per year in the Sierra Foothills would double in the next 30 years. If humans continue emitting carbon pollution at current rates, then the number of acres will quadruple by 2100.
Climate change has already made fires worse. A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that climate change doubled the number of acres burned across the American West since the 1980s.
Fires are not the only disasters that climate change will make worse—though they are among the most dramatic. Heat waves are the deadliest natural disasters in the United States, and they too are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of human greenhouse-gas pollution. They prove particularly deadly for senior citizens and infants. Forest fires might be seen as the particularly horrific edge of a sword that is coming for us all.
Newly empowered congressional Democrats are gearing up for their first battle with the Trump administration over the acting attorney general appointed after the president fired Jeff Sessions, demanding he follow Sessions’s example and recuse himself from overseeing the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York, the likely incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called the acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, “a complete political lackey.” Speaking Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Nadler said Whitaker will be “our very first witness” summoned, or subpoenaed if necessary, once the Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives in January. Nadler said he will ask how Whitaker can be trusted to impartially supervise an investigation that he publicly criticized as a cable-news commentator.
[Read: The Sunday shows set the agenda in Trump’s Washington.]
“He’s already prejudged the Mueller situation,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said on the same program. “If he stays there, he will create a constitutional crisis by inhibiting Mueller or firing Mueller.”
Schumer added that he and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi have sent a letter to the Justice Department’s chief ethics official asking whether Whitaker should recuse himself from overseeing the Russia probe, as Sessions did, drawing Trump’s ire early in his administration. The letter reportedly asks Assistant Attorney General Lee Lofthus, a career official, whether he has already issued guidance on a possible recusal, which would not automatically become mandatory.
[Read: It’s probably too late to stop Mueller.]
Schumer also said that if Whitaker does not recuse himself from supervising the Russia probe, he wants to attach an amendment protecting the investigation to “must-pass legislation” like the spending bill. That has the potential to cause a government shutdown if House Democrats refuse to pass a bill without the protection while Senate Republicans refuse to pass a bill with it.
[Read: How Mueller could defend the Russia investigation]
Some more moderate GOP senators have said they would support protective legislation. Senator Susan Collins of Maine on Friday renewed her call for such a move. Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator who is leaving Congress in January, said he would partner with a Democrat to force a vote on a bill, though it would be unlikely to succeed.
But most Senate Republicans remain staunchly opposed to a law protecting Robert Mueller’s investigation, as two prominent Judiciary Committee members reiterated on CBS’s Face the Nation. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said there was no need for such a bill because he trusts that “Mr. Mueller will be allowed to do his job without political interference by Mr. Whitaker.” Ted Cruz of Texas said he thought it would be unconstitutional for Congress to prohibit the special counsel’s removal. And Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader who controls the agenda, said Friday that he remains confident that “the Mueller investigation is not under threat.”
Graham RoumieuRainbow Rowell, writer, Runaways
She-Hulk. This is my least favorite way to create female characters—Hey, what if there was a girl version of that guy everybody likes?—but She-Hulk is the goddamn best. Complex, nuanced, always delightful. She kept working as an attorney after she went green, because she’s so good at it. Also, she’s funny. And she has Marvel’s best hair.
Jess Calder, producer, Blindspotting and Little Monsters
In 1944, the artist Chu Hing created the Green Turtle, who was rumored to be the first Asian American superhero. We never saw the masked hero’s face—purportedly Chu’s silent refusal to bend to the publisher’s whitewashing wishes. Luckily for us, the author Gene Luen Yang and the illustrator Sonny Liew have now claimed him as Chinese American and given him a rich backstory, reminding us all that “sometimes a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting.”
Michael Dennin, physics and astronomy professor, UC Irvine, and co-host, Fascinating Fights
Aquaman does much more than speak to and summon fish. Breathing underwater, withstanding attacks from supervillains, and resisting machine-gun fire are just the tip of the iceberg. Add in the Trident of Neptune, and he is unbeatable!
Reader Responses
Graham RoumieuLucia Perri, Guthrie, Okla.
It has to be Mr. Clean. Who would pick a man who spins spiderwebs over a man who can clean the kitchen floor?
Emilie Cunning, London, United Kingdom
Ant-Man’s ability to shrink to ant size and act as a concealed attacker is quite remarkable, as is his inverse ability to grow giant and overpower others with his sheer strength. Scott Lang is also a down-to-earth and amusing character who cares deeply about his family and friends—traits that are lacking in some other superheroes.
Louis Phillips, New York, N.Y.
The bacteria that destroyed the alien invaders in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, thus saving the human species.
Dan Fredricks, Janesville, Wis.
The inimitable cartoon sailor Popeye, whose real superpower was influencing generations of kids to eat spinach.
Graham RoumieuPhillip Welshans, Baltimore, Md.
Magneto, who is the realist to Professor Xavier’s idealist in the X-Men universe. He stands up for mutants who are unfairly persecuted and imprisoned by humans. And every time he starts to believe Professor X’s lines on the good that exists in human nature, we do something terrible to reconfirm what he has always suspected. Magneto is the super anti-hero we deserve in these dark days.
Katherine Simonson, Cedar Crest, N.M.
The Road Runner: Flightless and inarticulate (with a one-word vocabulary), this plucky little bird outwits his dogged adversary in every episode. His superpower is his ability to evade all manner of nefarious schemes.
Silvia Vong, Toronto, Canada
Captain Planet battled eco-villains like Hoggish Greedly, Looten Plunder, and Duke Nukem while educating viewers on eco-friendly best practices: “The power is yours!”
Mike Plocher, Happy Valley, Ore.
An easy choice: Angus MacGyver (portrayed by Richard Dean Anderson), whose skill set was unequaled. Over the course of 139 prime-time episodes, he showed us what it takes to get the job done.
Judah Lewis, actor, The Christmas Chronicles (17 years old)
The most underrated superheroes are people who, in the face of adversity, advocate for positive change. Namely the Parkland survivors who continually stand up for the lives of children and our future.
Kristen Ruhlin, actor, writer, and producer, Welcome to Mercy
Caregivers—not just parents, nurses, or children, but all the men and women who have the sole responsibility to care for another person. It's thankless, exhausting, beautiful, funny, horrific—it's a lot, but it's love.
Want to see your name on this page? Email bigquestion@theatlantic.com with your response to the question for our March issue: What was the biggest scandal of all time?
Even as firefighters continue to battle the devastating Camp Fire in California’s northern Central Valley, several other large wildfires are roaring through tinder-dry sections of the state, including the Woolsey Fire, near Malibu. The Woolsey Fire and nearby Hill Fire have forced the evacuations of nearly 250,000 residents from their homes near the Pacific Coast in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. At least two deaths have been blamed on the fire, which has burned across more than 80,000 acres, destroying more than 150 homes in the past few days.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will now have one less defender in Congress. Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California—who famously arm wrestled with Putin in the 1990s, and who was warned by the FBI in 2012 that Russian spies were trying to recruit him as an “agent of influence”—has lost his reelection bid after two decades in Congress, succumbing to a Democrat who ran ads touting Rohrabacher’s curious affection for the Russian autocrat.
While election officials won’t certify the results of the race until December 7, the Democrat Harley Rouda declared victory Saturday morning, leading Rohrabacher by about 8,500 votes, according to the Associated Press. Now, with Democrats set to take control of the House in January, Rohrabacher’s Kremlin ties could face renewed and intensified scrutiny.
[Read: “This election in California may make all the difference.”]
Rohrabacher’s loss wasn’t necessarily a surprise. He consistently trailed Rouda in polls and was seen as vulnerable heading into Election Night. Locally, Rohrabacher tried to appeal to California voters by playing up his support for reforming marijuana laws, calling states’ rights to legalize and regulate the drug “a fundamental issue of federalism and freedom.” And he talked about the economy and immigration, the latter in inflammatory terms. Rohrabacher told The New York Times last year that his constituents “couldn’t care less” about Russia.
Paul Martin, a Republican who challenged Rohrabacher in the June primary, told me he believes that the congressman’s defeat in California’s Forty-Eighth District was more a reflection of voters’ desire for a moderate candidate than of their frustration with Rohrabacher’s coziness to the Kremlin.
“I made my campaign about the gruesome human-rights abuses of Putin, especially his suspension of the adoption of Russian orphans after the passing of the Magnitsky Act,” Martin told me, referring to Putin’s retaliatory measures after Congress passed a 2012 law designed to sanction high-level Kremlin officials. “But I’m not sure the voters here cared.” (A spokesman for Rohrabacher was not immediately available for comment.)
[Read: A Rohrabacher aide is ousted after Russia revelations.]
Rouda similarly went after Rohrabacher. He accused the lawmaker in a debate last month of “meeting with Russian operatives” in 2016, and criticized him for downplaying Russia’s election interference. “Representative Rohrabacher has said that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies that were staffed by working men and women from diverse backgrounds, including our U.S. military … were all wrong,” Rouda said, “and that the Russians had nothing to do with meddling with our elections.”
On the national stage, Rohrabacher has become best-known for his defense of Putin’s leadership. A fierce Cold Warrior in the 1960s who later worked for Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher had a dramatic change in attitude toward Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. By 2014, he was publicly excusing Putin’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine—viewed globally as a major breach of international law—and characterizing Russia, which had recently placed the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny on house arrest, as a bastion of free speech and Christian piety.
“There have been dramatic reforms in Russia that are not being recognized by my colleagues,” Rohrabacher said at the time. “The churches are full. There are opposition papers being distributed on every newsstand in Russia. You’ve got people demonstrating in the parks. You’ve got a much different Russia than it was under communism, but you’ve got a lot of people who still can’t get over that communism has fallen.”
Rohrabacher has attracted attention more recently for his involvement in the congressional and federal investigations of Russian election interference. After Democrats take over the House inquiry in January, Rohrabacher’s relationships abroad—not only with Russian government officials, but also with the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange—could be more closely examined. Like President Donald Trump, Rohrabacher has downplayed the significance of Russia’s interference and claimed in March that the U.S., too, has “tried to influence their elections, and everybody’s elections.” And he’s called Assange, who gave Russia a platform to disseminate stolen emails from prominent Democrats via WikiLeaks, a “very honorable man.” He tried to strike a deal with Trump that would have exonerated Assange in exchange for supposed evidence that Russia wasn’t WikiLeaks’ source for the hacked emails.
His defense of Russia has attracted negative attention even from those within his own party. “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, said during a closed-door meeting of the chamber’s leadership in 2016 that was secretly recorded and leaked to The Washington Post. (McCarthy later said he was joking.)
Further digging into Rohrabacher’s history could help illuminate a major moment in the Russia investigation: the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump-campaign officials, including the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Rohrabacher could provide a key link to understanding the Kremlin’s role. On a trip to Moscow in April 2016, a few months before the meeting, Rohrabacher obtained a memo about the Magnitsky Act and the Putin critic Bill Browder from the office of Russia’s chief federal prosecutor, Yury Chaika. Rohrabacher also dined with Veselnitsksya on that trip. Later, at the Trump Tower meeting, Veselnitskaya provided a nearly identical memo to the Trump campaign, indicating that she was not an independent operator but rather a representative of Russian government interests. She later admitted to being an “informant” for the Kremlin.
Rohrabacher also had considerable influence on Capitol Hill as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and emerging threats. Upon returning to Washington, D.C., from his Moscow trip in April 2016, Rohrabacher circulated the memo he had obtained and tried to organize a screening of a film that attacked Browder and the Magnitsky Act, according to The Daily Beast. He also tried to get Russia’s deputy general prosecutor, Victor Grin, removed from the U.S. sanctions list in 2016—a move that prompted Browder to file a complaint with the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Rohrabacher testified before the House Intelligence Committee last year about his communications with Assange and with Russian nationals during the 2016 election, but Republicans have declined to make Rohrabacher’s transcript public. That could change by early next year. Democratic Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, who sits on the committee, told me last month that while Rohrabacher’s testimony did not contain “a missing link to understanding the Russia investigation,” there were some “wild and woolly moments” that the American public could benefit from reading. “When something is hidden,” Himes said, “it understandably raises questions.”
Last week on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, Pete Davidson made a flip, inopportune joke—hardly the first of his young career. In the midst of a series of quick-hit punch lines mocking the appearance of various congressional candidates, he turned to a picture of Lieutenant Commander Dan Crenshaw, who wears an eye patch after losing an eye in combat in Afghanistan. “This guy is kinda cool. … You may be surprised to hear he’s a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno movie,” Davidson said, adding, “I’m sorry, I know he lost his eye in war, or whatever.”
In an interview after the episode aired, Crenshaw took the high road, saying, “I want to get away from this culture where we demand apologies every time someone misspeaks,” but added, “It wasn’t even funny. It was not original … It was just mean-spirited.” Indeed, the joke seemed to exist mostly as a nasty little jolt for the audience, particularly Davidson’s tacked-on faux-apology about “war, or whatever.” Insult comedy is hardly the noblest subgenre of humor, and it can really only succeed if the audience thinks the target is worth taking down a peg. In Crenshaw’s case, outcry quickly spread, and even Davidson’s co-star Kenan Thompson (whose father is a military veteran) said the joke had missed the mark.
On last night’s episode, the entire affair was handled in classic Saturday Night Live fashion. Crenshaw, who in the intervening week won election to Congress, was invited on the show to share the “Weekend Update” desk with Davidson. “In what I’m sure was a huge shock for people who know me, I made a poor choice last week,” Davidson said, apologizing on behalf of the show and himself. “If any good came of this, maybe it was that for one day, the left and the right finally came together to agree on something: that I’m a dick!”
Crenshaw thanked him for “making a Republican look good” and got in a few of his own jabs, saying Davidson “looks like if the meth from Breaking Bad was a person” and playing an Ariana Grande track from his phone. The congressman-elect then added more seriously, “Americans can forgive one another—we can remember what brings us together as a country and still see the good in each other.” He referenced Davidson’s father, a firefighter who died on 9/11 when Davidson was only 7 years old, as being among the heroes honored on Veterans Day.
It was an interesting and somber capper to the whole saga, and a reminder of the sensibility that’s always defined Davidson’s comedy. The cast member was hired on SNL in 2014 at the age of 20, having only been performing stand-up for about four years, and he quickly made an impression as someone who mixed close-to-the-bone joke telling with a youthful sort of guilelessness. “I lost my dad on 9/11, and I always regretted growing up without a dad … until I met your dad, Justin. Now I’m glad mine’s dead,” he said at the Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber, a line that drew gasps from the audience.
A 2015 New York Times profile of Davidson gets at his particular approach—shock-jock lines mixed with a childish, aw-shucks smile. Regarding one particularly lewd segment that Davidson performed on “Weekend Update” in 2014, the SNL creator and showrunner, Lorne Michaels, noted, “People would have judged the same material from someone else much more harshly.” It’s worth noting that Michaels still oversees the show, and would’ve watched Davidson’s Crenshaw joke in dress rehearsal before it was made live on the air. This was not some spontaneous jab, but something written on a cue card and approved by the bosses.
Obviously, the blowback to the joke was meaningful enough that Michaels deemed an apology necessary. It’s a sign that even Davidson’s puppy-dog attitude only provides him so much cover, especially since the hysterical tabloid coverage of his personal life makes him more of a well-known figure. Most of all, though, the apology indicated that whatever partisan divides exist in mainstream comedy only extend so far. It made sense, then, that last night’s carefully scripted “Weekend Update” not only gave Crenshaw a chance to balance the scales for himself, but also delivered a pro-veteran message that would appeal to—or at least not stir controversy among—viewers on both sides of the aisle.
PARIS—The ceremony was planned long in advance. A chance for French President Emmanuel Macron to welcome world leaders to mark the centenary of the armistice that ended the hostilities of World War I. A way to decry nationalism and reinforce his deep commitment to multilateralism, and to a European Union born out of past conflicts.
Then President Donald Trump came to town.
Since his arrival late Friday night, Trump’s every action has seemed emblematic of the unilateralism he has made the hallmark of his administration. And of the whiplash he tends to inflict on his hosts. First, Trump tweeted a direct attack on Macron, who has been calling for Europe to step up its own defense. The two men acted as if they had made up Saturday morning when they appeared—both manspreading in their chair with a forced smile—making brief remarks at the Élysée Palace before a bilateral meeting. Trump said he wanted a strong Europe. But it was clear the romance was over.
Then came the news that Trump would skip a central event of his 48-hour trip: a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial outside of Paris, where he had been expected to honor American soldiers who had died in World War I. The White House said inclement weather prevented his helicopter from flying. But the site is an hour’s drive from Paris, and the weather wasn’t that bad. What was Trump doing instead? Whom was he meeting with? No details have yet emerged.
The vanishing act was classic Trump—dominating the news cycle, insulting and upstaging his hosts, to say nothing of U.S. soldiers and veterans. In the United States, Twitter blew up with anger at the president, and there was much chatter about how conservative media would have responded if a Democratic president had skipped a war commemoration because of a little rain. But here in Europe, Trump’s political theater underscored exactly what Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other European leaders are increasingly concerned about: Europe is being isolated, if not hung out to dry, by the United States.
On Sunday, the front page of France’s Journal du Dimanche, a weekly newspaper, bore the headline: “Why Trump Threatens Us.” The “us” in question was both France and Europe. Coinciding with Trump’s visit, Le Monde has been running a series on the growing transatlantic divide, beginning with “The Europe–United States Divorce: Tensions in the Western Family.” French commentators noted that Trump was also shunning the Paris Peace Forum, a kind of Davos for multilateralism that opened Sunday. While it was inaugurated by Macron, Merkel, and the secretary-general of the United Nations, Trump was outside Paris at another American military cemetery, where he offered brief remarks.
The sense of Europe’s and the world’s growing distance from the United States, under a president who is a committed unilateralist, also echoed in the optics of the commemoration on Sunday morning. While Macron, Merkel, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Justin Trudeau, and more than 80 world leaders and leaders of major world organizations arrived in buses, walking solemnly in the rain together to take their place under the Arc de Triomphe, Trump arrived solo, in his own motorcade.
Others also arrived alone, including Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin, who was the last to arrive. And there may have been security concerns involved. But Trump’s solitary arrival felt even more freighted, yet another sign of how under Trump, the United States intends to go it alone, pulling out of international multilateral treaties and starting trade wars with allies. French television commentators called it “symbolic” that the U.S. president shunned the group, and also noted, as Trump stiffly took his place next to Merkel, that “he didn’t look very smiley.” He was more smiley when Putin arrived. The Russian president gave Trump a thumbs-up and a brief, friendly pat on the arm.
Donald Trump smiles as Vladimir Putin arrives at the Arc de Triomphe, while other world leaders look on. (Benoit Tessier / Reuters)In a somber speech beneath the Arc de Triomphe, Macron recalled how with World War I, Europe almost committed suicide. He said “old demons” were resurfacing and history was threatening to repeat itself, and threatening Europe’s history of peace. He decried “the selfishness of countries that regard only their own interests,” which sounded like a remark clearly aimed at the United States. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” he said. “Nationalism is its betrayal. In saying ‘Our interests first and others don’t matter,’ we erase what is most precious to a nation, what makes it live, what makes it great, what is most important: its moral values.” It was impossible not to hear Macron’s words, before so many other world leaders, as aimed at Trump, a sign of how the rest of the world is contending with the repercussions of “America First.”
In his speech, Macron called on nations to work together to fight climate change, poverty, hunger, sickness, and inequality. He said victory over “counter-truths” and “obscurantism” was in our power. And he concluded by saying: “Long live peace between people and between states. Long live the free nations of the world. Long live friendship between peoples. Vive la France.”
Vive la France indeed. This was very much Macron’s show, a way of positioning himself on the world stage as a uniter of Europe, a force against populism, ahead of elections for the European Parliament in May. It was also a chance for Macron to shore up the postwar Franco-German alliance. On Saturday, while Trump stayed in Paris doing whatever he was doing, Macron and Merkel went to Compèigne, a site outside Paris freighted with 20th-century history. It is the site where Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the supreme commander of the Western Front, signed the cease-fire agreement with Germany, ending World War I, and where Adolf Hitler forced France to sign a capitulation agreement in 1940.
It was the first time two leaders of France and Germany had met at the site since that year. The defining image of the day, of Merkel and Macron clasping hands in the rain before a dark-gray marble war memorial, was a potent symbol of Franco-German unity, a reminder of how the European Union was created to help keep German, and French, nationalism in check. There was something moving, even melancholy, about the image. Merkel’s era is coming to an end. Macron’s popularity has been flagging at home, and his pro-EU message may not be heeded. Right-wing forces are on the rise in France and across Europe, and have been calling for more national sovereignty and stronger borders. The photo already felt like an image from the past, a snapshot of the end of an era rather than the beginning of a bright new one. In inaugurating the Paris Peace Forum on Sunday, Macron said it was up to today’s leaders whether the images from the Armistice Day commemoration would be interpreted in the future as “a symbol of lasting peace between nations, or of the last moment of unity before the world falls into a new disorder.”
And then there’s Europe’s sense of distance from, even abandonment by, the United States. What had set Trump off upon his arrival in France was a radio interview Macron had given on November 6, in which the French president said Europe needed to step up its own defense in case of aggression from Russia and also because the United States announced that it would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which required the United States and Russia to eliminate certain missiles and weapons systems.
[Read: Trump hates international treaties. His latest target: a nuclear-weapons deal with Russia.]
Elsewhere in the radio interview, Macron had talked about cyberthreats. “We are being shaken by hacking attempts in our cyberspace. We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia, and even the United States of America,” Macron said. Some press reports conflated Macron’s two remarks, leading to the impression that Macron wanted Europe to set up its own army in case of attacks from the United States. “Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should pay its fair share of NATO, which the U.S. subsidizes greatly!” Trump tweeted.
On Friday, before Trump arrived in Paris, insulted Macron by tweet, and skipped his planned visit to the American cemetery, John Bolton, the national-security adviser, tried to downplay the clash of worldviews between the two leaders. “I don’t think the president or 99 percent of the people in the United States view things through a lens of saying, ‘This is multilateral, or that’s unilateral, or this is plurilateral,’” Bolton said in a small briefing in Paris. “I think from the president’s perspective, it’s very, very practical, which is, ‘What is the best way to protect the vital interest of the United States?’”
World War I was the first time American soldiers fought on European soil, after joining late in the game. “From the American perspective, of course, we were never isolationists, since we were creating a country moving west. We just weren’t Atlantic-facing, or as Atlantic-facing as some wanted,” Bolton said. He drew his own lessons from World War I. “I think the enduring lesson for the United States is, when you become a global power … you have global interests to protect.”
Back at the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday morning, the ceremony organized by Macron was appropriately somber. Yo-Yo Ma played a Bach cello suite. High-school students read testimony from accounts of World War I soldiers. The Beninise singer Angélique Kidjo belted out a song of gratitude. The European Union Youth Orchestra played “Boléro” by Ravel, who fought in World War I. It rained. After his speech, the speech decrying nationalism, Macron stood surrounded by soldiers in uniform and lit a commemorative flame. He was a man alone. But at least on his watch, the lessons he drew from World War I would not be forgotten.
Donald Trump decided, it would appear, to skip attendance at a ceremony honoring American war dead because of rain. The site was the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where lie the remains of 2,289 American soldiers and marines. The occasion was intended to commemorate the end of World War I and, among other things, the Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918.
That epic fight is commemorated chiefly by the U.S. Marine Corps, which had a brigade in the fight, but the U.S. Army had two divisions present. It cost the Americans nearly 10,000 dead and wounded. During it, Sergeant Major Dan Daly famously urged his men on, shouting, “Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?” He became one of fewer than 20 who have won the Medal of Honor twice.
This was not the first battle of World War I that Americans took part in. Even before the official American entry in the spring of 1917, young Americans had volunteered to serve with the British and French forces, and many of them paid the ultimate price.
[Read: Trump’s bromance with Macron fizzles spectacularly]
To Trump’s decision to stay away because of rain from a solemn occasion to honor these dead, none of us living today can offer an adequate response. So perhaps it is best to let one of the more famous of those early volunteers, Alan Seeger, deliver a rebuke from beyond the grave.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Seeger, a Harvard graduate, had shortly passed his 28th birthday when he died serving in the French Foreign Legion. There is a monument honoring him at the Place des États-Unis in Paris, and honoring other Americans who fell defending our oldest ally. He was not the only son of privilege who served—there are many names on the walls of memorial chapels in America’s finest universities to confirm that.
But the main thing is those two last lines: “And I to my pledged word am true / I shall not fail that rendezvous.”
Alan Seeger and the soldiers and marines of Belleau Wood were young men; Donald Trump is an old man. They took a pledge to serve faithfully, even at the risk of their lives; Donald Trump took a pledge to discharge the office of commander in chief, a similarly unlimited oath. They faced shot and shell; Donald Trump faced damp. They dutifully made their rendezvous; to his eternal shame, Donald Trump failed his.
It is a strange turn of events when a president famous for denouncing “fake news” is discovered to have entered into an agreement with a media organization to finance the concealment of very real but politically unfavorable newsworthy information. The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump entered into an explicit agreement with the chairman of American Media (AMI), David Pecker, to help his campaign by buying off women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. AMI came through: It paid Karen McDougal $150,000 to “catch and kill” her account of an affair with Trump. She did not know at the time that the background agreement between AMI and Trump existed, but was instead told that in addition to compensation for the exclusive rights to her story and an option for columns on fitness and health, she would be the featured model on two magazine covers.
The deal that Trump reached and executed with AMI violates federal campaign-finance laws. AMI made an illegal corporate in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign, and the campaign and Trump share in the liability by accepting this illegal support. As open-and-shut cases go, this one is high on the list. But this is only part of what makes this a remarkable episode in the history of presidential-campaign lawbreaking.
For a candidate to break corporate-spending rules in a matter like this, involving friendly media organizations and embarrassing details about his personal life, is no mean feat. The relevant law is generally favorable to the candidate. Trump still managed to violate it.
[Bob Bauer: Trump exposes the holes in campaign-finance laws]
There is, first, the question of what kind of help the candidate was seeking. As the case of the former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards demonstrated, candidates might successfully argue that in drawing on supporters’ funds to help them hide affairs, no political contributions were made or received, because the motive was personal, not political. When news first surfaced about Trump’s payments to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, one might have assumed that some similar argument could be available to Trump. Yet according to the direct testimony of those with whom he conspired, the Journal reported, Trump’s concern was political, not personal: He was defending his presidential campaign against potential harm.
Second, for a media organization to make a prohibited corporate contribution to a candidate, it has to depart materially from its performance “in its legitimate press function.” Media companies enjoy wide latitude in the production and dissemination of news stories, commentaries, and editorials. Any questions about legality are typically resolved in favor of the press. So if a media company sympathetic to a political candidate steers away from critical coverage, it may have committed an offense against journalistic ethics, but it is not operating outside of legal boundaries. This affords ample leeway for news editorials and coverage that are coordinated—that is, discussed and even planned—with a candidate.
But when the media duck does not quack like a duck and the actions taken are distinctly not ducklike, those legal protections fall away. An early case on the scope of the media’s exemption from campaign-finance regulation offered the example of “a partisan newspaper [that on Election Day] hired an army of incognito propaganda distributors to stand on street orders denouncing allegedly illegal acts of a candidate and sent sound trucks to the streets blaring the same denunciations, all in a manner unrelated to the sale of his newspapers.” A later court presented a different hypothetical of a press entity not performing a legitimate press function: soliciting donations to fund a political documentary exhorting its audience to vote for a particular candidate. The distinction here is one that separates the editorial page and standard news commentary on one side from clear-cut campaign activity on the other.
[Reihan Salam: Campaign-finance reform can save the GOP]
So AMI’s Pecker might have directed his tabloids to ignore the claims made by women alleging they had had affairs with Trump and stayed within the range of exempt press activity. But Pecker went much further, the Journal reported. He concluded an arrangement with a candidate to spend funds to quash a story that other media organizations would have chosen, in their legitimate press function, to publish and disseminate. He carried out this plan by lying to a source his company ostensibly paid for the rights to a story it had no intention of running. AMI was not acting as a press entity, but as an arm of the Trump campaign.
AMI has apparently concluded that it has no legal defense, because Pecker and his company have been actively cooperating with the government under an immunity agreement. It is not known whether the same lawyers who blessed the company’s original agreement with McDougal then reassessed and revised their position in the face of an active criminal investigation. If so, while they got it very wrong the first time, they did better later when prosecutors showed up at AMI’s door.
Apparently, when this deal was being considered, AMI lawyers concluded that because the offer made to McDougal included access to cover stories and the opportunity to write health and fitness columns, there was enough of a “business” arrangement to wash away the campaign-related purpose. This was wishful thinking rather than sound legal analysis. It seems clear from the facts the Journal reported that had it not been for the patently political arrangement between Trump and Pecker, the newspaper would not have offered McDougal this “business” opportunity and didn’t see much value in it. In fact, Michael Cohen, the president's lawyer, and Pecker discussed a sale of McDougal's rights to Cohen, who is, of course, not in the media business and did not intend to help McDougal meet any of her professional goals. Business had nothing to do with these machinations. In the end, AMI decided against accepting any payment from Trump.*
In fact, the pretext of a supposed business purpose worsened rather than mitigated AMI’s legal position. It is so evidently a sham that it underscores the intent of the parties to misrepresent to McDougal, and in the formal documentation, their true purpose, which was to fulfill a commitment to Trump to help him in his campaign. The attempt to dress up the deal with McDougal as a business proposition is not even a case of being too clever by half. It’s a clumsy cover-up.
[Read: Trump’s bromance with Macron fizzles spectacularly]
This case has exposed the limits of legal protections for self-proclaimed press entities engaged in blatant electioneering activity. A similar issue arises for the Trump campaign in asserting a First Amendment defense in relation to its relationship to WikiLeaks in the strategic publication and dissemination of stolen emails. On the evidence to date, including emails released by an internal critic of WikiLeaks, that organization shared with Trump and with the Russian government the political objective of defeating Hillary Clinton. Julian Assange’s operation became a vehicle for the indiscriminate dumping onto the public record of whatever private materials, embarrassing or just distracting to the Clinton campaign, the Russians could acquire by hacking. The Trump campaign encouraged the hacking in its public statements and, through agents such as the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Roger Stone, communicated with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks’ supporting role in this scheme also raises the question of whether it was engaged in a legitimate press function, even generously construed.
The AMI episode has some bearing in one other respect on what we might understand about Trump’s personal complicity in yet another legal problem for the president: the Russian electoral intervention in 2016. In that case, as in the McDougal and Daniels matters, he denied any involvement in legally questionable activity. He specifically disclaimed any knowledge of the Russian government’s offer of help for his campaign that culminated in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. He denied knowing of or approving in advance the meeting, or being briefed afterward about the outcome. It was never credible that the candidate who ran the personal fiefdom called the Trump Organization as a one-man-show would be uninformed and uninvolved in a strategically sensitive matter so important to his campaign. The Journal reporting on Trump’s active, detailed engagement in the McDougal and Daniels payoffs confirms that this is not how he operates. It gives powerful additional reason to disbelieve his outright denial of participation in the Russian contacts.
In the meantime, this president, self-appointed scourge of the press, must face the legal consequences of his political deals with at least one—perhaps two—media organization. He might not normally worry too much about causing trouble for the media, except that he has also caused serious legal trouble for himself.
*This story originally said that the sale of McDougal's rights to AMI had been completed. We regret the error.
After the Tree of Life shooting, Ian Bogost argued that to turn the reassuring line into a consolation meme for adults is to misinterpret advice that was originally meant for preschoolers.
I was appalled to read such an intellectualized, narrow and superficial interpretation of Mr. Rogers’s direction to children: “Look for the helpers.” Of course he was talking to, for, and about children, but not just to children. Many parents watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with their children, not just for their children but also for themselves. I was one of them. Mr. Rogers provided comfort and security in the middle of the day. Everybody needs comfort, calm, respite—whatever you want to call real love and connection.
Yes, Mr. Rogers firmly believed in parents taking care of their children, but his understanding and compassion went far beyond that: He believed adults should take care of themselves and each other. How we do that is a reflection not just of our neighborhood, but our culture and civility.
Robert Boyce
Springfield, Ore.
Ian Bogost challenges the moral wisdom of Fred Rogers’s celebrated suggestion that we call our attention to those who provide material aid and comfort around tragedies like the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue.
Bogost’s argument is misguided and morally counterproductive on a number of counts.
First, most adults don’t really suppose that Rogers’s (mother’s) advice to look for the helpers is “sufficient relief.” When folks recirculate Rogers’s advice in the wake of tragedies, it’s because it’s genuinely important to remind oneself that there is hope in the human goodness that’s always on display, even in the darkest moments. Such hope is needed for making the more concrete efforts to redress wrong and reform broken systems.
That’s the psychological reality that Bogost does not trouble himself with. Indeed, he does not disguise his contempt for his readers’ moral and emotional intelligence, explicitly casting them as stunted internet couch potatoes, “helpless as children,” self-infantilized by their addiction to mawkish memes. Insulting readers with uncharitable assumptions about their maturity, at least in this context, is wrong in itself, but Bogost’s argument has the added perverse effect of subverting the gesture Rogers suggests.
Of course there are disputes about whether armed citizens, for instance, deserve to be considered “helpers” alongside rescue workers and other authorized personnel. Whoever you think is a real helper, others will probably regard as helpers those you think are actually harmful. But this obvious point hardly means that we must give up calling anyone a helper, or encouraging one another to notice them. On the contrary, it makes the proper use of the term an urgent priority.
Some people (The American Red Cross, public TV stations, many news media organizations, on-site volunteers) are genuine helpers in particular situations. The fact that regressive elements in our society—white nationalists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists—mistake harmers for helpers does nothing to change that fact. What escapes Bogost is that stirring up doubt about that fact is what’s dangerous. By doing so, one ironically reinforces the “everything is relative” hogwash that erodes reality-based discourse in our hazardous “post-truth” era of declining trust in news, other institutions, and each other.
In short, Bogost is wrong on several counts.
He’s wrong that adults believe that Rogers’s advice is “sufficient relief” or all that’s needed to redress tragedies and reform the systems that produce them.
He’s wrong that the habit of looking for helpers in the wake of tragedies is only of value to children.
And, most importantly, he’s wrong that “it’s time to stop offering this particular advice.” Looking for the helpers isn’t a naïve flight from our duty to help others. It gives us the hope we need to be better helpers in the first place.
Christian M. Golden, Ph.D.
Knoxville, Tenn.
Fred Rogers is so universally beloved, and for such good reason, so I understand why some readers are eager to defend him against a perceived slight. I love him too, which is why I wanted to revisit his lesson in such detail. After doing so, it strikes me as more superficial to take Mr. Rogers’s lessons as received wisdom, even when transformed by intervening events and media practices. Mr. Rogers might indeed offer comfort to adults, and that comfort has a place. But for we adults who grew up with him, it is also a memory of the comfort he offered to us as children. Let’s not let that memory of childhood justify a child’s version of solace, one we adults should have outgrown.
After a recent Uber ride, I hesitated between offering the four-star rating that captured my adequate ride and the five-star rating that I knew the driver expected. Eventually I tapped five stars and closed out of the app, relieved to be done with this tiny moral quandary. Later, the phone buzzed in my pocket with a text asking me to rate my experience getting an oil change. The next day, I politely declined to stay on the line “for just four to six minutes” to complete another customer satisfaction survey. Sorry, but I have feedback fatigue.
Companies promise that “your feedback is important to us,” but providing it does not necessarily yield discernible change. Instead, the endless requests for feedback often feel dehumanizing. Being pestered for thumbs-ups and likes makes me feel like just another cog in the machine.
There’s a reason for that: The current mania for feedback can be traced back to the machine that kick-started the Industrial Revolution, the steam governor. Revisiting that machine, and understanding feedback’s lost, mechanical origins, can help people better use, and refuse, its constant demands.
Traceable to antiquity, the idea of feedback roared to prominence in the 18th century, when the Scottish engineer James Watt figured out how to harness the mighty but irregular power of steam. Watt’s steam governor solved the problem of wasted fuel by feeding the machine’s speed back into the apparatus to control it. When the machine ran too fast, the governor reduced the amount of steam fed to the engine. And when it slowed down, the governor could increase the flow of steam to keep the machine’s speed steady. The steam governor drove the Industrial Revolution by making steam power newly efficient and much more potent. Because it could maintain a relatively stable speed, Watt’s steam engine used up to one-third less energy than previous steam-powered engines.
Few of today’s machines are steam-powered, but many use feedback. Governors control the speed of aircraft propellers while in flight. They prevent ceiling-fan lights from overheating and limit how fast cars can go. Long before the Nest controlled home temperatures with fancy digital sensors, analog thermostats used feedback to maintain comfort.
So how did feedback shift from a means of regulating engine behavior to a kind of customer service? In 1948, Norbert Wiener coined “cybernetics,” his term for a science of automatic control systems. Wiener took Watt’s steam governor as the model for the modern feedback loop. He even named cybernetics after kybernetes, the Greek word for governor.
Wiener broadened the definition of feedback, seeing it as a generic “method of controlling a system” by using past results to affect future performance. Any loop that connects past failures and successes to the present performance promises an improved future. But instead of energy, Wiener thought of feedback in terms of information. No matter the machine, Wiener hypothesized, it took in “information from the outer world” and “through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus,” made information useful. Water flow, engine speed, temperature—all become information.
[Read: Why mistakes are often repeated]
Cybernetics promised a utopia of systemic self-regulation. Wiener imagined the feedback loop as a structure that could explain almost any system: not just engines or thermostats, but also racial identity, the free-market economy, or the Holy Roman empire.
Even people were seen as feedback-driven structures: Wiener saw them as “a special sort of machine.”
Human beings, like machines, can change their behavior by learning from past successes or failures. But far from characterizing a soulless automaton, the feedback loop was meant to testify to the human power to adapt. For Wiener, feedback became the highest “human use” of power in the age of machines.
Cybernetics’ popularity faded in the 1970s, but its insights live on. Starting in the 1950s, management seized on the idea of feedback as an integral practice of modern business. The founder of management cybernetics, Stafford Beer, claimed that “if cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control.” Beer’s emphasis on control, rather than improvement, echoes Watt’s insight into steam regulation. One of Beer’s earliest, most compelling examples of management cybernetics standardized a complex system to halve energy costs for steel production.
Approaches like Watt’s and Beer’s, which keep a system operating within tight parameters, demonstrate negative feedback. That’s not pessimistic or bad feedback, but feedback that prompts the system to maintain control. In traditional, cybernetic terms, negative feedback isn’t a one-star rating but any information that helps the system regulate itself. Negative feedback is actually good feedback because it yields greater efficiency and performance, as in Watt’s steam governor.
[Read: The thing to understand about the word ‘cyber’]
Positive feedback, by contrast, causes the system to keep going, unchecked. Like a thermostat that registers the room as too warm and cranks up the furnace, it’s generally meant to be avoided.
But today’s understanding of feedback has reversed those terms. Positive ratings are a kind of holy grail on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, and negative reviews can sink a burgeoning small business or mom-and-pop restaurant. That shift has created a misunderstanding about how feedback works. The original structure of the loop’s information regulation has been lost.
Think about it: The proliferation of ratings systems doesn’t necessarily produce a better restaurant or hotel experience. Instead, it homogenizes the offerings, as people all go to the same, top-rated establishments. Those places garner ever more reviews, bouncing them even further up the list of results. Rather than a quality check, feedback here becomes a means to bland sameness.
Unharnessed from its cybernetic meaning, positive feedback becomes an evaluation of services rendered rather than measure of the system’s performance. Untethered from the system that they’re meant to evaluate, these measurements of quality have no loop to go back into. They float out in the world, stars and number ratings and comment cards generated in response to the sucking need for more feedback, not in the service of improved outcomes.
Chasing ever more ratings abandons the original lesson of mechanical feedback: Specific, critical information can make a system perform well. The thoughts, opinions, experiences, and advice that consumers are asked to share all seem to have equal significance—and organizations seek ever more quantities of that feedback. An app called DropThought, for instance, promises to “capture feedback anywhere” from users who can reply “easily with one click using their smartphones.” Any thought, any response is worth capturing.
DropThought’s rotating tagline suggests that all feedback is interchangeable, promising that “Instant Feedback Equals Happy Customers / Clients / Students.” The only measure of quality is how quickly the reviews roll in. Feedback may matter to the corporations that solicit it, but the nature of the feedback itself—the people who provide it, the relevance of their opinions, and the quality of the information—seems not to matter at all. What if people want different things? What if they are mistaken in their desires?
[Read: The case against performance reviews]
All feedback isn’t created equal. Watt’s steam governor used a form of negative feedback, temperature, specific to that system. Other factors, like how much a bystander liked the look of the engine, were not relevant to its internal operation. Wiener cautioned that good feedback isn’t simply a stream of numerical data. Learning happens when the input is suited to the system’s “pattern of performance”—that is, when the feedback is perfectly calibrated to the system. The call to “close the loop” only works when the information the system receives is attuned to the environment.
The love affair with feedback for its own sake has inadvertently abandoned the mechanical insights of the steam governor. Indiscriminately valuing feedback of any kind from any source reduces its ability to regulate the system. That isn’t to say that opinions, stars, and reviews aren’t helpful. I’ve scoured book reviews on Amazon and Yelped my way to good ramen. But that kind of feedback—variable, messy, unchecked—doesn’t easily translate to systemic improvement. It is too attached to human user’s feelings and passions. Perhaps the problem isn’t that feedback loops are dehumanizing, but that they aren’t dehumanizing enough.
If thumbs-ups or ratings on a five-point scale are not automatically useful, what kind of feedback would be? Finely-tuned feedback that targets the system it’s meant to regulate will always surpass a barrage of angry or ecstatic reviews. Rather than trumpeting the desirability of all feedback, apps and review sites should pursue only the information that is crucial for making the system work better.
That approach also reveals some of the ethical shortcomings of feedback as it is used today. In the wake of many scandals, the ride-sharing company Uber recently introduced a new, faster way to give feedback: before the ride is even over. Uber frames this offer as a sign of the company’s humanity: “We never want to miss an opportunity to listen and improve.” But giving feedback is not the same thing as being heard. Encouraging users to fire off reviews—especially those that have consequences, such as a driver’s livelihood—turns opinions into information. That information gets fed back into the system regardless of its quality, and gig-economy workers and small-business owners suffer the consequences.
Mechanization can seem like a bad thing, but its lessons can be humanizing. Don’t confuse feedback with listening. Clicking a thumbs-up is not the same thing as “making your voice heard.” It’s just introducing noise into the system. Collecting less information of more relevance and higher quality could produce better results. And it might mean an end to feedback fatigue in the process, which would be a five-star improvement for sure.
Some of the first stories you remember reading, or hearing read aloud, were probably translations, though chances are you didn’t realize it. “The Emperor’s New Clothes?” That was from the Danish. “Sleeping Beauty?” French. “One Thousand and One Nights?” Arabic. “Hansel and Gretel?” German. “Pinocchio?” Italian. “Cinderella?” French—or, depending how far you back you want to go, German, Italian, or even Greek. As you grew up, if you read The Swiss Family Robinson or The Count of Monte Cristo, did you notice who translated it?
Not so long ago, it was rare for a translator’s name to appear on a book’s title page, let alone a cover, or for a review of a foreign novel to mention its translator. With a handful of exceptions (Robert Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, anyone’s Proust), if a book originated in a language other than English, that fact was downplayed. Behind this disappearing act lay an assumption that readers would recoil from a book if they realized it was translated, fearing it would be “tricky or complicated or inaccessible,” as Samantha Schnee, founding editor of the translation journal Words Without Borders, put it.
This is changing. In the span of about 15 years, foreign provenance, once treated almost like a guilty secret, has become a source of allure. As blockbusters from foreign lands invaded American bestseller charts in the first decade of the 21st century—Suite Française, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—independent and non-profit presses that specialized in translated literature sprang up from coast to coast; among them Archipelago Books (2003), Europa Editions (2005), Open Letter (2008), New Vessel Press (2012) and Restless Books (2013) in New York; Deep Vellum (2013) in Texas; and Transit Books (2015) in California. On November 14, the National Book Foundation, recognizing this shift in relevance, will award a Translated Literature prize— the first category added to the National Book Awards in more than two decades.
Lisa Lucas, the Foundation’s executive director, sees the prize as “a lens, it’s a spotlight … it’s not about a distillation of all the works that are meritorious; the point is that you’re celebrating.”
[Read: Readers don’t need the Nobel Prize in literature.]
There are a few possible explanations for this metamorphosis from near-invisibility to celebration. One is that, in the late 20th century, a craze arose for retranslating the classics. Critics, always fascinated by what’s difficult, and eager to spot a trend, took note, raising the profile of translators in the process. Perhaps the most prominent in this cohort are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a husband-and-wife team who embarked in the 1980s on the audacious project of retranslating much of the Russian canon—which they are still doing, three decades on. Every time they let fly a new Slavic doorstop, a critical explosion ensues. Today, the release of any new translation of a famous work—by Homer, Proust, Kafka, Flaubert—tends to elicit a passionate reaction from the literary elite, even if the translator is relatively unknown.
A complementary trend at the turn of the century heightened interest in the lived experience of people in or from other nations. A generation of American writers, born outside of this country, were coming of age: Chang-Rae Lee and Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri and Gary Shteyngart, Khaled Hosseini and Junot Diaz. In their books they reached into other lands— Korea, Haiti, India and England, Russia, Afghanistan, and the Dominican Republic— braiding imported history, attitudes and priorities into American narratives. Although they wrote in English, they were translating foreign cultures through their fiction. In the process, they created a flourishing literary hybrid that broadened domestic reading tastes.
Even as the identity of American fiction took on an international flavor, technological advances in machine translation demystified foreign languages for monolingual Americans, making the outside world more legible. Cellphones can translate street signs, notice boards and menus into English (or German, or Chinese, or French) with the click of a button; internet translation engines can convert foreign-language news stories into readable English in seconds. Philipp Koehn, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University who wrote the book on machine translation (literally, it’s called “Statistical Machine Translation”) recalls that when he started out in this field, 20 years ago, “All that these machines produced was gibberish; we were amazed when something came out that that you could almost read.” Now, however, “If you find a newspaper article in good languages—by which I mean the ones we have enough data on, like French or English— and run it through Google Translate, you actually have to look for errors.”
In 2016, Google’s engineers applied something called Deep Learning to their translation engine. Deep Learning mimics the brain’s cognitive processes by layering a computerized version of neural patterning onto textual databanks (zillions of words, drawn from dictionaries, European Parliament debates, online hotel webpages, and other uncopyrighted text). This synergy improves the engine’s ability to produce meaningful sentences, rather than chains of words that read like absurdist prose poems. It’s a great leap forward.
[Read: Could two people use real-time translation to fall in love?]
But for now, at least, machine translation has not rendered literary translation obsolete. You still wouldn’t want to get your Chekhov from Google Translate. “We don’t currently see in the immediate future any kind of path to having machine translation being as good as a dedicated qualified human translator, especially when it comes to literary translation,” Koehn admits.
Instead of obviating literary translation, machine translation may be increasing both its perceived value and its user-friendliness. The very fact that an ordinary mortal who does not know a foreign language can get by in one these days, to a degree, with a bit of cyborg assistance, may be making the idea of reading books in translation less daunting, less alienating, and more familiar than it once was.
In 2012, on top of all the factors that had already converged to fortify the translation field—the critical foment, the emergence of bestselling translated novels from abroad, the birth of new publishing houses, the rage for authors with immigrant pasts, and the new translation technology—came two more sweeteners.
The first was the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, who mesmerized the literary establishment with his massive, multi-volume auto-fiction epic My Struggle, translated by a Briton, Don Bartlett, and published by Archipelago. (The sixth and final installment came out in English in September.) The second was a mysterious Italian woman who called herself Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym), whose quartet of novels set in Naples, starting with My Brilliant Friend (which reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list), were translated by a New Yorker named Ann Goldstein, and published by Europa. These books were highly literary, highly demanding, and highly in demand. As a sign of the strength of the crossover, on November 18, “My Brilliant Friend” will premiere on television as an HBO miniseries.
If there was any doubt before that translated literary fiction could be popular and of-the-moment, Knausgaard and Ferrante—through Bartlett and Goldstein—have erased it. They have shown that contemporary works by previously unknown foreign authors can be taken from their native soil almost as soon as they emerge, and be successfully transplanted here by gifted translators who know how to make them thrive in English.
[Read: How Ann Goldstein translated Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels into English]
Lisa Lucas doesn’t want to overemphasize the role of these two authors: “There was no trend in publishing that inspired this prize. We didn’t say, ‘Oh man, gotta get into that Ferrante fever,” she jokes. “This is a permanent prize!” But books like these make “all translated books rise,” she says. “A person who has a great experience reading an author from another country in translation is more likely to go to a bookstore and look for another.”
In 2018, American literature no longer means literature written by Americans, for Americans, about America. It means literature that, wherever it comes from, whatever nation it describes, American readers recognize as relevant to them, as familiar. Foreign is no longer foreign.
That said, the question of how “foreign” a translation should “feel” provokes fierce disagreement. When you open a translated novel from overseas, do you want to sense its author’s French, German, Swedish, Spanish or Italian sensibility, even if that breaks the spell of your reading experience? Or do you want to feel as if the book had magically converted itself into flawless, easeful English, attuned to your own idiom? (This is called the “foreignization vs. domestication” debate.) And should a translation hew closely to the language and structure of the original, or should it recraft the language to appeal to the target audience? (This is the “faithfulness” question.) Hardly anyone agrees—not editors, not scholars, not translators, and not readers. This makes it difficult even for experts to reach a consensus on which translated new books, by unfamiliar authors and translators, should be singled out for praise. Another difficulty is that few have read the translated books in the original language, which means that most base their assessments on their opinion of the English, not knowing to what extent it reflects the ur-text.
That’s why Lucas prefers to avoid using the word “best” when she discusses the prize contenders. “There are always going to be people who object to which books are chosen,” she says. “They’ll say, “this should have been on the long list, this should have been on the finalists list, this or that book should have won.” To her mind, all the books win; because the act of nominating them “generates energy, conversation and critique;” the prize is not a competition, but an affirmation.
Collectively, the five titles on the National Book Foundation’s shortlist for the Translated Literature prize demonstrate the transformation and continuity of America’s investment in international voices. Three of the books come from two houses that formed only in the last 15 years—Archipelago, with Love, by Hanne Orstavik, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken; and Europa, with Disoriental (translated from French) and Trick, by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri. A fourth title, The Emissary, by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, comes from the venerable independent house New Directions. Only one of the books, Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (Flights won the Man Booker International prize in May), comes from one of New York’s “big five” houses (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster). It was published by Riverhead, a division of Penguin Random House.
Still, there is room for progress. All five of the shortlisted books feature the translator’s name on the title page; but only two put it on the cover. One of these, Trick, presumably, does so because its translator, Lahiri, a Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist, is better known in the United States than its author. Imagine that: Reading for the translator.
Each spring, the music world hears the name “Coachella” and thinks of a major two-weekend arts and music festival. So attached are the name and the event that the web address Coachella.Com takes you not to the city’s official site but one where you can buy tickets for the festival.
The rest of the year, Coachella is a smallish farming community, in the sun-baked desert, where irrigation has supported a date-palm and grapefruit industry and where a mainly Latino farm work force has struggled over the decades for better pay and conditions.
This past spring, as the music festival was about to kick off, I did an item on “The Other Coachella” — the one I had known while growing up in the area, and the one that’s still there after the festival visitors have left. The occasion for the post was a new “Story Map” from our friends at the mapping company Esri, which gave a multimedia version of the city and people who dominate the town through the non-festival weeks of the year. The map, called “In the Valley of Coachella,” was written by the novelist Susan Straight and illustrated with photos by Douglas McCulloh. It is well worth a return look.
There’s one more aspect of “The Other Coachella,” and another kind of Coachella festival, that are also worth notice. Last month a group called Cinemas Culturas (plus other partners) put on the debut of “Festival in the Fields,” a film, arts, and education event meant to focus attention on the region’s working population. In a note earlier this year describing the project, Cony Martinez, director of Cinemas Culturas, the festival’s main organizer, said:
My mother was a farmworker for over 25 years. Therefore, I decided to create a platform that focuses and honors people like my mother.
The project focuses on the migrant community and the Latino community in general of the Coachella Valley.
Here is an example of the kind of film that it is featuring: Adios Amor, about the search for the historical truth about a pioneering labor organizer named Maria Moreno:
You can watch a YouTube clip about other films featured at this year’s festival here. Part of the purpose of the festival is to engage local children in the history of their region. Here are some of the students from Cesar Chavez school in Coachella, at the time of this year’s festival.
Students of Cesar Chavez Elementary School, in Coachella, with Judy White, superintendent of Riverside County Schools (center) and Cony Martinez. Photo: Cony Martinez.Cony Martinez also emphasizes the community-building aspirations the project has, including talks for parents, in Spanish, about motivating their children for achievement and college. In another email she wrote:
We are not the Palm Springs International Film Festival. It's not about Brad Pitt nor any other movie star. It's about bringing films that the Hispanic community, who are the majority in the Other Coachealla, can identify with and relate to. The majority of the films are in Spanish with English subtitles for this reason. And this is the same reason we offer workshops on storytelling in Spanish for adults and children so their stories can go on the big screen at Festival in the Fields.
I wasn’t able to be in California for this year’s event, but it’s an ongoing project, and I hope to be there for future ones. I’m glad it’s broadening the understanding of what their city stands for and how it came to be.
Nancy Pelosi really does not want to impeach Donald Trump—and she’s prepared to take all the heat from her party and from the new House Democratic majority she’s hoping to lead, unless she sees something wildly different emerge.
But she said she won’t let Robert Mueller define the decision.
“Recognize one point,” Pelosi told me during an interview in the conference room of her minority-leader suite in the Capitol late Friday: “What Mueller might not think is indictable could be impeachable.”
Pelosi said people should pray for the country as long as Trump is in charge. She’s not sure of his mental condition. She thinks he’s degraded the Constitution and American values. She says the intelligence assessments are indisputable in showing that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. She thinks the firing of Jeff Sessions and the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general in a clear move against the Mueller probe “is perilously close to a constitutional crisis.”
That’s not enough, she said.
“You have to have evidence, evidence of the connection. Everything’s about the connection,” Pelosi explained.
In other words, it comes down to a topic the president has notably refrained from tweeting about for weeks: collusion.
[Read: Trump is about to get a rude awakening.]
Maybe there’s something else in his tax returns. Maybe there’s something that’s beyond the special counsel’s scope. Maybe there’s something Trump has yet to do. “That’s why we want to see the documents,” Pelosi said. “Because we’re seeking truth. We’re seeking truth for the American people about the integrity of our elections, and honoring the Constitution.”
Her opponents are working overtime to block her from getting enough votes on the floor to be speaker, counting on all the new members who said during their campaign that they wouldn’t vote for her not to flake.
“Any member that pledged to vote against Pelosi or for a change in leadership during their campaign and then flips will be a political dead man or woman walking within an hour of being sworn in,” one of the House Democrats involved in the opposition effort told me Saturday. “And if they think Nancy Pelosi cares about them, they should go talk to the dozens of members she made walk the plank during the cap-and-trade bill [in 2009] that the Senate didn’t even take up for a vote. This is all about her, and not them.”
That all sounds nice, Pelosi’s allies point out, but Republicans across the country tried to make her a killer issue in House campaigns, and they lost anyway.
[Read: The harsh truth exposed by the midterm elections]
To Pelosi and her allies, navigating Trump is the strongest argument for another term as speaker, despite all the veteran and new members who say they don’t want to vote for her, and all their colleagues who privately share that dislike but aren’t ready to act on it. She has the experience and the staff, sure, but that’s only part of it. The caucus will be divided and antsy, and she’s the only one who won’t have to care that people in the Capitol, those in the White House, and the public will hate her for the decisions she makes. As far as she sees it, anyone who’s going to hate her for that hates her already, and she’s at the stage of her career—she’s taken to using the word transitional as she campaigns for what will probably be just one more term at the helm—when it doesn’t matter to her.
So on impeachment, Pelosi says she’s looking for whatever evidence to be so irrefutable that Republicans would join the effort. She says that’s about protecting the integrity of the country, not letting impeachment become just another politicized process—but it’s also a deliberate poison pill that would almost stop impeachment from ever happening. She knows what it would take for Republicans to come along. She wants the bar set that high.
Impeachment wasn’t a big topic during any of the midterm campaigns, but it is a big worry among Democratic operatives and politicians in Washington. The fever among the base to take down Trump is so high, they worry, and the president’s eagerness to overreach and pick fights is so core to who he is, that it can seem like they’ll go right from reading Mueller’s expected report to filing articles of impeachment.
[Read: The Nancy Pelosi problem]
To most Democrats anxiously analyzing the political landscape, there couldn’t be a dumber way to throw the 2020 election to Trump. Look what brought them all the House wins that are still piling up day by day, they say, plus all the governors races that went their way and what’s seeming like an at-worst two-seat net loss in the Senate. It wasn’t playing into Trump’s talking points, but stressing health care, infrastructure, and the way the Trump tax cuts were tilted to the wealthy.
No new leader, no matter who, could absorb what is about to explode, they say. “I just don’t see anyone else being able to serve in that role and push back against Tom Steyer, push back against the two or three or 10 articles of impeachment that get filed,” a House Democrat told me a few days ago. “She’s the only one who can do that. She needs to do that long enough, until the Mueller report comes out … at which point that will determine what happens next.” This House Democrat was not eager to talk publicly about Pelosi or impeachment, but acknowledged that both are going to be issues moving forward.
I asked Pelosi why she thought she could stop the newly emboldened Democrats from chasing impeachment or from tacking left over the next two years.
“Because I’m a liberal. I’m a San Francisco liberal,” she said. Later, she proudly pointed out that she was reelected to her own seat with 87 percent of the vote on Tuesday, and said, “I am such a target of the left, it’s almost funny.”
So that gives you the credibility to say no? I asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
Pelosi does not buy the argument, voiced most prominently by Steyer, that Trump has already clearly committed impeachable offenses through obstruction of justice and violation of the emoluments clause, among other things.
“What you have is a president who has declared war on the Constitution publicly this week. If that’s not obstruction of justice, what is obstruction of justice?” Steyer said, when told Saturday of Pelosi’s comments. Despite pointing out that he has deep respect for her, he said, “My blood just popped out the top out of my head.”
He also noted that his online impeachment petition now has more than 6.2 million signers, with 5,000 more who joined it over Friday night alone. With the incumbent party racking up as many losses as it did on Tuesday, even with a low 3.7 percent unemployment rate, Steyer argued, that’s a referendum on Trump that Democrats should act on.
“There’s always a short-term reason to do the wrong thing,” he said. He said the thinking on waiting any longer is like saying “‘The bully said he’s going to beat us up, but if we give him 50 bucks, he’ll leave us alone. Let’s just give him the 50 bucks.’ He’s going to be back for 100 bucks tomorrow.”
Pelosi argued that Bill Clinton’s impeachment was “so bad, it was so wrong, and they had no right to do it, and it disrupted the public confidence in what we do,” and often likes to point out that she had evidence that George W. Bush had lied in the run-up to the Iraq War that she chose not to impeach him on. Her model is Watergate, when eventually the Republicans joined in. Bring it up, and she even does a little impression of Richard Nixon making the “V” sign, with her head down.
The lesson Pelosi draws from the past two years isn’t that she needs to get in the trenches against Trump, but that she has to turn the country against him, talk about results, how to be unifying. “They care about the Mueller investigation and they want us to take care of it, but they want to see what we’re doing for them. And just to come here to do that as our primary purpose, I just don’t think is the right thing to do,” she said.
The next two years in Washington will be all about spinning a stalemate. With the Democrats and the Republicans splitting the House and the Senate, and with Trump clearly believing that his best political strategy is to reach into the depths of his base rather than reach out, nothing is going to get done. Trump will argue that he was trying to make things happen but that Democrats stood in his way, and the Democrats will argue that the president never did anything but big talk and tweets.
“He’s going to make a decision about whether he’s going to support bipartisan legislation, whether it’s comprehensive immigration reform, whether it’s Dreamers, whether it’s gun safety,” Pelosi said, laying out some of the issues she’s expecting to put forward to dare the president not to move on. “We feel like there is support in the House.”
Since election day, Pelosi has been in touch with Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, and Elijah Cummings, the incoming chairs of the Intelligence, Judiciary, and Oversight Committees, respectively, which will be the core of the House Democrats’ aggressive investigation of the administration. She’s also brought in the chairs of other committees, like Financial Services to track potential money laundering and Homeland Security to look into election integrity. Staffers have been meeting weekly since early last year, coordinating strategy and communications in the minority, and those meetings will now be amped up as they try to find connections between oversight and proactive policy moves on climate and other legislation.
In recent months, a separate group has been convening with its counterpart among the Democratic Senate committee staff, running scenarios on Trump and preparing contingency plans to activate if and when he makes a move. They had planned around the assumption that Trump would fire Sessions on Thursday, so were ready when the news came on Wednesday. They have a rough plan of action if Trump fires Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, with statements and actions and moves lined up from former United States attorneys general, current state attorneys general, and academics.
All the while, Pelosi is counting votes. Two years ago, when the last big challenge to her leadership arose, she predicted that she’d get two-thirds of the caucus against Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio, and she got exactly that. This time around, given how many new members will be arriving in Washington and the general sense of exhaustion with having to be attacked for having her around, her margin looks tighter.
Except that it’s not at all clear that there’s anyone to actually challenge her. Ryan is looking at running for president, but has not ruled out taking another swing at her. Seth Moulton, a congressman from Massachusetts who is eager with his criticism of her, told me in the spring that he thinks he’d be bad at the job. Others tend to grumble to one another in private strategy sessions, but then duck talking openly about taking on Pelosi.
Most assume she will be speaker. But two retrenched possibilities have started to circulate.
Some see the chance that Pelosi will work the caucus for the next couple of weeks, see that the votes aren’t materializing in the way she’s confident they will, and decide to pull out. Then the race wouldn’t be against her, and would immediately open up. Among the names that get thrown around as replacements then are Cummings, the congressman from Maryland who is the chair of the Oversight Committee; Schiff, the TV-proficient chair of the Intelligence Committee, who’d be able to call on the support of his fellow Californians; and Hakeem Jeffries, the 48-year old African American congressman from New York, who’s currently running for the caucus-chair position being vacated by his fellow New Yorker, defeated Congressman Joe Crowley. Cheri Bustos, a congresswoman from Illinois who spent the year training candidates all over the country and who is currently running for Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, is also seen as someone who might slot in.
Pelosi dismisses the possibility of pulling the plug as flatly as she does the other idea going around: Some say she’d serve only about a year of a term as speaker and then step down ahead of the 2020 elections—and they would hope she’d convince her rivals and fellow leaders Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn to go with her. That way, they say, she wouldn’t be around to star in GOP campaign commercials like she did all last year, and whoever had a problem from voting for her as speaker could point to a more recent vote for someone else.
“I’ll be a full term. I’m not here for a year. If I were here for a year, I’d go home right now,” Pelosi said.
So I asked her what “transitional” means, since she’s been saying that’s how she now sees herself.
“I’m not going to declare myself a lame duck over a glass of water,” she said.
It’s been more than a year since Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had dinner at the White House with the president, and all three walked out saying they’d struck a deal on protecting the Dreamers, people brought illegally to America as minors who’d then grown up their whole life here. There was a lot of coverage. Aides made sure to feed reporters the colorful factoid that it had been over Chinese food, famously Schumer’s favorite. They all made excited comments.
Nothing happened. The deal never came to be. The deadline came and went. Trump started blasting the Dreamers again. The bigger immigration bill that Republicans said they’d make happen over the summer fell apart, too.
I asked Pelosi what insight that had given her into dealing with Trump. She made what seemed like a subtle dig at Schumer, who’s approached Trump as the deal maker. “We have to talk to him through the public rather than over Chinese food,” she said.
That’s the other part of Pelosi’s pitch to be leader again: With Trump getting bolder and with the 2020 presidential race starting any minute now, there isn’t any time for a new person to build relationships, and she would be the one who could best marshal forces within the caucus and outside allies. She talked about her skills at communication and harnessing new powers like social media. Frustrated younger members and staffers argue that she has not been as good for them on television as she needs to be, and that a younger leader would be better in connecting with the younger voters who are powering Democratic victories. As for the experience argument, they say, what that has added up to is the leadership overseeing Democrats being in the minority in the House for 21 of the past 25 years.
She says her attention is on Trump.
“Anybody who saw his press conference the other day would know that we have to pray for our country very deeply. Pray for him, too, but for our country,” she said.
So does she think Trump is stable?
“I don’t know,” she said. “You can’t make a diagnosis over TV, they tell me.”
When Leonor Grave moved from Portugal to the United States in 2012 to start boarding school, she and her family had some inkling of what she was getting into. In Portugal, gun violence and mass shootings “were always talked about like an American thing,” she says. “We saw things on the news, and we’d be kind of in disbelief that there didn’t seem to be anything being done about it.” Grave knew that students routinely participated in lockdown drills and active-shooter training in the public schools near her boarding school in Baltimore—but it wasn’t until college that she began to see firsthand how mass violence was transforming the lives of America’s youth.
Grave, now a senior at the College of William & Mary in Virginia and a news editor at the William & Mary Flat Hat, can rattle off with breathtaking quickness the candlelight vigils and mass-tragedy-adjacent events that she’s covered as a student reporter and editor. One of her first stories as a freshman was about the campus response to the Paris terror attacks in 2015. She wrote about the Pulse nightclub shooting as a rising sophomore. Last week, she assigned a younger reporter a story on a campus vigil for the 11 people recently killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue. In 2018, she explains, part of a college-campus news editor’s job is to remind young writers not to inject their political beliefs into the stories they write about mass shootings. “It’s very hard to be objective, to be fair and accurate writing these stories,” she admits. “Because it seems very clear which side you should be taking.”
College-aged Americans—most of whom were born in the late ’90s—don’t remember a time when school gun violence wasn’t a widely feared threat to young people. Their lives have been repeatedly punctuated by deadly mass shootings in schools: Though few remember Columbine, most remember Virginia Tech, Newtown, Parkland, and Santa Fe, among others. When a gunman at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, killed 12 people Wednesday night, one of the victims was Alaina Housley, a freshman at nearby Pepperdine University. Several survivors were also Pepperdine students, attending Borderline’s “College Country Night” and celebrating birthdays. The raucous college social event interrupted by an act of terror is an awful but ever more familiar worst-case scenario. And the ominous possibility that it could unfold on any given campus on any given day has altered the American college experience.
For one thing, many college students think a lot about gun violence erupting in public places. When Grave was hired to work in the campus library, she had to watch a 20-minute active-shooter training video as part of her employee training. The video she watched was, all told, pretty boring—to her, the weird part was that it was so boring and routine, sandwiched between segments on topics such as logging work hours and how to shepherd students out through the emergency exits in the event of severe weather. But ever since that training video, she says, on slow days when she’s working the front desk near the entrance of the library, “sometimes I’ll look around and imagine: If someone were to walk in right now [with a gun], what would I do?”
[Read: The developing norms for reopening schools after shootings]
When Grave read about the Thousand Oaks shooting, she found one aspect of the story particularly chilling. “There was this one girl there who was celebrating her 21st birthday,” she says. “It’s just really scary. When I turn 21 in three weeks, should I be worried about where I go [to celebrate]?”
Something similar happened to Chad Rhym, a senior at Morehouse College in Atlanta who’s often out with friends on weeknights near campus. “To now see that happen in a place where I could hypothetically be,” he says, “I think that’s the scariest part.”
The recent shootings at synagogues and churches have also affected how Rhym evaluates his safety on campus at Morehouse, a historically black college. “If elementary schools aren’t off-limits, if synagogues, temples, [and] churches aren’t off-limits, I’m sure my black school isn’t either, which is scary,” he says. “I guess the more I think about it, the more I create these hypotheticals, the scarier everything becomes.”
Some students, however, have grown up with the threat of gun violence so present that by the time they get to college, it barely registers anymore. Mars Alvarez, a sophomore at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, grew up in East Houston, Texas, and attended a high school that she says routinely went into “lock-in” mode, securing all the entrances when “any sort of robbery or gun violence” was happening nearby. So when Dartmouth security officials announced last Friday night that students were to shelter in place because an active-shooter situation was unfolding on campus, Alvarez noticed that the other students with her in a theater after a student play were much more frightened than she was.
“I didn’t realize how normalized it was, how unafraid I was of it,” she says. She was worried, of course, but in her experience, security measures such as these just meant being cooped up for an hour or two and then carrying on as usual. “Seeing the reaction of people really opened my eyes a little bit more to ... how this affects others,” Alvarez says. “For a lot of students, this was their first run-in with gun violence ever in their life. I can see how that’d be terrifying, you know?”
One ever-present feature of the college campus in the age of school shootings is regular texts and emails from the campus emergency-alert system. When an emergency-siren system in Williamsburg, Virginia, is being tested, for example, William & Mary students receive a brief Heads-up; no action necessary text message. When campus buildings are closed due to inclement weather, students are also alerted via text. And when a shooting happened near campus a few years ago, students learned of it through that same text-message system. “We got a message saying shots had been fired outside this restaurant and that we should stay away,” Grave remembers.
In moments of crisis, though, some students have found their campus emergency-alert systems less than helpful. Maddie Wu, a sophomore at Princeton, stayed on campus during spring break earlier this year, and found herself locked in and bewildered when a breakfast café she’d visited one morning was put on lockdown due to an active-shooter situation at a Panera two doors down. “I was kind of waiting for one of the mass texts or mass phone calls from the school,” she says, “but I finally ... got a sense of what was going on from Twitter.” Alvarez says she found out that the Dartmouth campus was on lockdown from a friend who’d called repeatedly and then texted during the play Alvarez was watching. She received the school’s official message only after the show had ended—by which time many of the students had already been alerted by friends and social media.
Many older adults, whose education took place in a time when schools felt safer, are alarmed at the new norms on campus—and none probably more so than the students’ parents. Rhym says that his mother gets the automatic alerts from Morehouse and “she worries.” “She doesn’t like it,” he says. “It makes her anxious to get alerts about crimes around the area.” Wu says that her parents were “freaked out” when they learned she’d been down the block from an active-shooter situation. Alvarez contemplated whether to call her mother during the lockdown at Dartmouth. “I didn’t know enough information yet. I didn’t want to call her and be like, ‘By the way, there’s an active shooter out on campus,’” she says.
Grave, too, gets the occasional phone call from Portugal after an incident near William & Mary. “[My dad will] call and be like, ‘Hey, is everything okay? I saw this on the news; just wanted to check in.’
“Thankfully, I have not been in the direct path of a school shooting, or a shooting in a public place,” she adds. But she worries that one day her dad will have to call and make sure she’s okay in the wake of something more serious. “All these shootings are becoming so mundane,” she says. “There’s no particular reason that this time it was Pepperdine instead of William & Mary.”
More than 200 years ago, when books for children first became common, they delivered simple moral lessons about, for instance, cleanliness and the importance of prayer. Today, story time is still propelled by moral forces, but the issues have gotten a good deal more sophisticated.
In recent years, publishers have put out children’s books with political undertones and activist calls to action on topics ranging from Islamophobia to race to gender identity to feminism. “The trend has definitely exploded in recent years with the social-justice books and the activism books,” says Claire Kirch, a senior correspondent at Publishers Weekly who has been covering the book industry for 15 years.
For children of all ages, books about such charged topics are, in the words of one publishing executive, coming to be seen as more “retail-friendly.” This development applies all the way down to picture books—a category for which the intended audience and the buyers are two very different groups. In this sense, "woke" picture books can be thought of as products for parents, helping them distill some of the day’s most fraught cultural issues into little narrative lessons for their kids.
[Read: Do children just take their parents’ political beliefs?]
The wave of politicized children’s books has come more from the left than from the right. Kirch told me that “of the three publishers that are the most well known for publishing conservative books”—Center Street, Sentinel, and Regnery Publishing—“only one really has a kids’-book line.” That one is Regnery, which has put out titles such as Donald Drains the Swamp!, Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride (by Newt Gingrich’s wife, Callista), The Remarkable Ronald Reagan, and The Night Santa Got Lost: How NORAD Saved Christmas.
It seems there is more of an appetite for liberal-minded kids’ books: Kirch noted that another Regnery title—Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, by Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte and told from the perspective of the family’s pet rabbit—was far outsold by a parody of the book overseen by John Oliver’s HBO show that imagined the titular bunny to be gay.
All children’s books are political in the sense that their authors make choices about who to include and who to exclude, which values to promote and which to downplay. But lately there has been a proliferation of books for young children infused with themes that are dear to many political progressives. This year has seen the release of picture books with titles such as Dreamers and W Is for Welcome: A Celebration of America’s Diversity. These are the newest additions to a slate of progressive-minded mid-2010s children’s books such as A Is for Activist (which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies), Stepping Stones (about the journey of a Syrian refugee family, written in English and Arabic), and One of a Kind, Like Me/Único Como Yo (about a boy who wants to dress up as a princess for a school parade). Political biographies for young children are not a novelty, but lately many of them have had a feminist bent, including picture books about Elizabeth Warren, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (wife of Alexander).
Other recent titles are about civic involvement more generally, including What’s the Big Deal About Elections and the novelist Dave Eggers’s What Can a Citizen Do?, both out this fall. "We’ve definitely seen a lot published over the past year, and have every reason to expect that will continue,” said Stephanie Fryling, Barnes & Noble’s vice president of merchandising for children’s books, referring to the trend she’s seen of books about immigration and civics in particular.
These books are of course not the first to package political issues for the preschool set. Several classic children's books of the past few decades center around issues of diversity and representation, and were thus tied up in progressive causes as well: 1989’s Heather Has Two Mommies was a landmark for its treatment of same-sex parenting, 1997’s Nappy Hair focused on African American hairstyles and identity, and 2001’s Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart dealt with poverty.
Since then, the number of books featuring marginalized identities has increased. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison examines thousands of books for kids and teens published each year, and in 2015, it found that about 14 percent of American kids’ titles were about people who weren’t white. In 2017, this figure rose to 25 percent. “We have found, however, that the increase in the number of books about people of color is due to an increase in white authors writing about diverse characters,” the Center’s director, KT Horning, told me. “It does not mean that we are seeing more books by people of color.” Even so, diversity—in children’s books and in so many other parts of society—is these days a politicized issue, and an increasing focus on it in children’s books is a development that scans to some as liberal.
Some of the messages in politically oriented books, though, might be going over kids’ heads. Sharna Olfman, a psychology professor at Point Park University, in Pittsburgh, walked me through what children of different ages might be able to understand when reading or hearing stories with political themes. She told me that very young children can empathize with another’s feelings, but that it isn’t until “middle childhood”—roughly ages 5 to 11—that they can empathize with someone’s circumstances, like coming from another country or being unable to speak a certain language fluently. After age 11, kids can start to grasp the finer points of a political philosophy. For that reason, Olfman says it’s important to distinguish between “parroting the perspective of the author or the parent” and “deeply understanding” the issue at hand.
Laura Stoker, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, put it to me this way: “Kids know that they’re Democrats before they have any clue what a Democrat is.” Stoker thinks it’s possible that children’s books touching on politicized issues are representative of broader political polarization. “Parents who feel very strongly want to produce children who feel the way they feel and adopt their values,” she says.
Still, she noted that most American children actually aren’t raised with much political instruction. “That may sound crazy to those of us who came from very, very politicized homes, but the vast majority of Americans come from other kinds of homes where that's not true,” she says. Buying woke picture books may be a popular political statement for some parents, but it seems plenty of households don’t have any use for them.
It’s November 4, 2020. Across the United States—and across the globe—liberals and Donald Trump–opposing conservatives alike drag themselves from fitful sleep, red-eyed and exhausted, filled with dread, incomprehension, and déjà vu. How did he do it again?
The night before, Trump had won reelection as president—despite a chaotic and frustrating first term, multiple investigations, and a historically low approval rating. Of course, Trump had won in 2016 despite many of the same weaknesses, but that win was thought to be a fluke, a product of a weak Democratic candidate, Russian interference, and Trump’s novelty. His critics never imagined lightning could strike a second time.
With a second term, Trump now has the potential to be among the most influential presidents in American history. The reelection gives him a mandate to continue his goal of dismantling historic U.S. alliances and trade deals. It means Congress could finally acquiesce to building the border wall that the president continues to demand. By the end of his first term, Trump had already started roundups of thousands of undocumented immigrants and cut the number of refugees the nation accepts to barely anything, and he’s now expected to forge ahead with plans to curtail legal immigration as well. Having appointed three justices to the Supreme Court in his first four years, Trump will likely notch at least another one or two in his second term, solidifying the first truly conservative Court in almost a century for decades to come. The federal government will be radically reoriented around his form of laissez-faire conservatism. Stung by Robert Mueller’s investigation and an impeachment attempt in his first term, Trump is also poised to purge the Justice Department and give himself broad protection from scrutiny and investigation.
[Sarada Peri: He’s going to get reelected, isn’t he?]
In the press and in the academy, Trump is almost uniformly recognized as a catastrophe, the worst president in history. And even though the public holds little regard for either institution, a majority of voters agree with them, and voted for Trump’s Democratic opponent by a margin of several million. It’s no matter: Through a mixture of shrewd strategy and massive spending—both radical departures from his 2016 campaign—Trump has managed to wring out a sizable margin in the Electoral College. It’s not an unalloyed victory: Once again, Trump failed to win the popular vote, though he continues to insist otherwise. He is now considering new maneuvers to curtail the press, which keeps peskily pointing out his lies and hyperbole. For now, the president is willing to take a moment to enjoy his triumph. They said it couldn’t be done, and he did it—twice.
Is this a euphoric daydream of Trump fans? The dystopian nightmare of pessimistic progressives? Or simply a plausible prediction about 2020?
Perhaps it is all three. Despite the struggles of the Trump presidency, which are acknowledged at home, abroad, and even inside the administration—as an astonishing anonymous New York Times op-ed in September demonstrated—the president stands a decent chance at reelection in two years’ time. There are other possible scenarios, as we’ll discuss later, but the prospect of a Trump reelection is both so widely disregarded among his many critics and also so plausible that it deserves serious consideration. With the midterm elections over, Trump is expected to ramp up the pace of his campaigning, even though the presidential election is two years away.
The fact is that Trump enjoys campaigning far more than he enjoys governing. He never stopped talking about the 2016 race, filed for reelection the day he entered office, and has held campaign-style rallies throughout his presidency. His aspiring rivals will be on the trail soon, too. For years, American political analysts have talked about the “permanent campaign,” which refers to the importation of election-style tactics into governance. Trump has literally created such a permanent campaign, keeping the election-style tactics while largely ignoring the work of governance, save for a few top priorities.
In his bid for a second term, Trump will benefit from systemic features of U.S. politics as well as a few attributes particular to himself. Let’s start with the system. First, incumbency is a powerful force. Since the Second World War, only two elected presidents who sought a second term have failed to win it. One, Jimmy Carter, was hobbled by a poor economy. The second, George H. W. Bush, was also hurt by the economy and by the fact that Republicans had run the country for 12 years, long enough for voters to be ready for a change. Even presidents whom voters have harshly punished during midterm elections by pounding their allies in Congress have won reelection (Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama). So have those overseeing failing wars (Richard Nixon, George W. Bush).
The incumbency advantage is particularly strong if the economy is good. With remarkable consistency, a president overseeing a growing economy wins at the polls, even if—as is usually the case—he had little to do with creating it. The American economy is chugging forward. Employment and stocks are both up, and while wage growth remains frustratingly slow, it is positive. A lot could change between now and November 2020, and some economists believe the U.S. is due for a recession. But as long as current trends hold, Trump has the wind at his back.
Trump also benefits from the peculiarities of the American electoral system. For years before his election, progressive demographers pushed the “emerging Democratic majority” theory. It holds that as white voters shrink as a portion of the population, the new electorate—with greater shares of black, Hispanic, and Asian voters, as well as younger voters of all races—will slant heavily toward liberal candidates. Obama’s two victories, carried by surging votes from African Americans, convinced the theory’s proponents they were right. A high-profile Republican Party “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 concurred, arguing that the party needed to open up to nonwhite voters or risk irrelevance. In the meantime, Democrats benefited from their legacy of strong support in the Rust Belt. There, the shrinking but still large number of blue-collar workers provided Democratic candidates with a built-in Electoral College advantage. This “firewall” would protect the party until the minority youth movement arrived.
[Read: The emerging democratic majority turns 10.]
Then Trump came along and demolished both of these basic premises for electoral forecasting. The 2016 race proved that a candidate could still win by relying on white votes—in fact, he could win enough white votes to be elected while explicitly stoking racial grievances. Meanwhile, the return of minority votes to pre-Obama norms suggested that only a rare Democratic candidate could produce the high turnout required to win. At the same time, Trump demolished the Rust Belt firewall, winning Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and coming close in Minnesota.
On the remade electoral map, Republicans have the built-in edge. If Trump can hold most of the states he won in 2016, he’s well on his way to victory. Meanwhile, the list of Republican states that Democrats can hope to flip is short. Liberals are hopeful about someday taking over Texas, as well as minority-heavy southern states such as Georgia, but that may still be a couple of election cycles away. The minority surge is coming, but it’s still on the horizon. In the medium-to-long term, relying on white votes and racially divisive rhetoric may well be suicidal for the Republican Party, but Trump will be long gone by the time it’s too late.
Trump also benefits from the current media environment. First, he has the unstinting support of what is effectively palace media. Partisanship in the press is nothing new, but for decades, the United States had nothing resembling the party-aligned organs that exist in many other democracies. Instead, there was a center-left mainstream press that mostly aimed for objectivity and a small, scrappy conservative-media alternative. The right-wing press has grown in strength for the past three decades, but in the Trump era, it has reached its apotheosis, becoming a servant not so much of conservatism as of Trump himself.
The most prominent example is, of course, Fox News, where the star anchor Sean Hannity reportedly speaks to the president daily, but there are dozens of other important outlets of all sizes. The network’s former head, ousted for allegedly covering up sexual harassment, is now Trump’s communications director. These conservative media outlets wield enormous influence over their audience. John Dean, the Nixon aide turned informant, has said his boss would have survived Watergate if Fox News had existed to spin alternative narratives.
At the same time, trust in the media as a whole is low—in part thanks to unrelenting attacks from the conservative press—though it has rebounded somewhat since the beginning of Trump’s presidency. A certain segment of the population will dismiss anything that CNN or The Washington Post reports simply because CNN or The Washington Post reported it, which has lessened the impact of the impressive investigative journalism focused on the Trump administration.
[Read: The U.S. media is completely unprepared to cover a Trump presidency.]
None of this is to discount the specific characteristics of the 2020 race. Trump’s flaws have been so extensively cataloged that it’s easy to lose sight of his strengths as a politician. One reason why so many observers didn’t take Trump seriously in 2016 was that for years, businessmen had announced their arrival in politics and expected it to be easy, only to flame out. But unlike his failed predecessors, Trump possesses an unequaled instinct for connecting with voters and exploiting their grievances. One of his great weaknesses is also a great strength: He is willing to do and say almost anything, and he shows no sense of shame.
The most important skill Trump learned in business and cross-applied to politics is media manipulation. His reputation in business always far outstripped his success because he was so adept at courting coverage, and he quickly applied that to campaigning, offering nonstop press conferences and interviews. (He only later curtailed access.) As the 2016 campaign showed, the traditional media is ill-equipped to deal with a prolifically mendacious figure like Trump. As a candidate, he perfected the art of making outrageous and often false statements and then quickly changing the focus by replacing them with new, outrageous, and often false statements. This means that no story ever got full scrutiny, but that Trump was constantly the center of attention. According to one media-tracking firm, Trump captured the equivalent of $5 billion in advertising in the 2016 election. There’s no indication the mainstream press has solved the problem of how to cover Trump without playing into this ploy. If anything, it’s harder than ever to avoid taking his bait now, because he’s the president of the United States.
Although Trump is deservedly known for his dishonesty, he is surprisingly dogged in pursuing his core campaign promises, even over the noisy objections of his Republican allies and even when it’s clear that by keeping a vow to his base, he is undermining his popularity with the nation at large. Though he has been repeatedly stymied, he has shown no indication of letting go of his dream of a wall on the border with Mexico. He has pursued trade wars even when they have begun to hurt American consumers and producers. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal over the objections of his advisers. His Supreme Court picks have been the conservative Christian crusaders he promised—in contrast with previous Republican presidents who, despite more religious piety and a commitment to conservative ideals, chose moderate justices.
Trump is also expected to enter the election with a huge campaign fund. While he ran his 2016 race on the cheap, he won’t do that again. By the summer of 2018, he had already amassed close to $100 million. Trump also benefits from a Republican Party that is no longer ambivalent about him, as it was two years ago, and has largely been reshaped in his image.
Finally, Trump could once more be lucky in his slate of opponents. Hillary Clinton was an unadaptable and clumsy candidate who cleared the field in 2016. The 2020 field is crowded, with no obvious standard-bearer. The Democratic primary will likely be expensive and bruising. While there are many potential candidates, all have major possible flaws: too old (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren), too young (Cory Booker, Kamala Harris), too boring (Kirsten Gillibrand, Eric Garcetti), too exciting (Michael Avenatti), too liberal (Sanders, Warren), too moderate (Joe Biden), and so on.
While Democrats reclaimed the House in the midterm elections, there’s a real danger of overreach that comes with renewed heft in Congress. The party has already planned extensive investigations into alleged corruption, among other schemes, to confound Trump. It is true that Trump, as an unusually divisive figure despised by his opponents, is susceptible to inquiries. But aggressive pressure from opposition parties following midterm victories has backfired in the past. Voters swept Republicans into power in 1994 but opted to keep Bill Clinton two years later. After making Obama’s life miserable by electing Tea Party Republicans in 2010, voters resoundingly reelected him in 2012.
[Read: Trump is about to get a rude awakening.]
Without knowing how the economy will perform for the next two years, without a clear vision of how Democrats might behave with control of Congress, and without knowing whether Trump is likely to face a true crisis not of his own creation, he’s hardly a lock for reelection. But it’s well within reason that he could win a second term.
Nonetheless, Trump’s weaknesses are real, and it’s easy to envision him joining Carter and George H.W. Bush as one-term presidents—one of the few things that would unite the three men. The question is who could beat him, and how.
Trump might choose not to run again. He will be 76 on Election Day 2020, older than any nominee in history. His first term has been beset with frustrations and investigations, he often seems plainly unhappy, and by some reports, he never especially wanted or expected to win in 2016. Given Trump’s defiant demeanor, it’s hard to imagine him ever resigning from office, but retiring after one term could give him a comparatively graceful exit. It would probably be a relief to him and the millions of his countrymen.
Then again, grace has never been Trump’s strong suit. What would his opposition look like? At this stage, Trump seems likely to face some sort of primary challenge by fellow Republicans, with John Kasich generally considered the most eager contender. It’s no surprise that a president as unpopular as Trump would face a rival, but the president is in a surprisingly strong position to withstand one. Despite poor approval ratings overall, Trump remains extremely popular with Republican voters.
Though there will surely be calls for a third-party challenger, the American system as constituted continues to make it all but impossible for any third-party candidate to do more than play spoiler. Besides, the two most obviously formidable independent prospects have both ruled themselves out: Kasich said he’ll only run as a Republican, while Michael Bloomberg, a perennial potential independent candidate, is exploring running as a Democrat.
The Democratic field remains packed and up for grabs, but the party’s options fit into three basic groups. The party could opt to nominate a reliable, familiar face: former Vice President Joe Biden, the 2016 runner-up Bernie Sanders, or former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. It could opt for a fresh face—Senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, or Kamala Harris; Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado; or Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, to name a few. Or voters could choose a wild-card candidate. It’s a sign of the desolation of the Democratic Party’s ranks of leaders, following the down-ballot losses of the Obama years and Hillary Clinton’s defeat, that each of these paths is fraught with danger.
Take the old reliables. Biden has run for president before, and has never fared well. He has something of Trump’s touch with blue-collar voters, but is often politically out of step with the Democratic Party of today. He would be 77 when inaugurated. Sanders, also at the end of his career, surprised most observers in 2016, but it’s still unclear whether his dyspeptic leftism has broad enough appeal in a general election. Patrick was a well-regarded governor, but he has little national profile now.
Fresh faces have the advantage of novelty but the danger of being unproven. Warren might be the strongest (and oldest) of the bunch, though she’s only ever run in very liberal Massachusetts. The highly ambitious Booker is charismatic, but a political cipher. Harris has captured the imagination of many Democrats, but she’s only just barely arrived in the Senate. Gillibrand has a longer track record and the advantage of representing wealthy and populous New York, but she isn’t the most exciting candidate. As for Garcetti, no mayor has been nominated for the presidency since 1812. Hickenlooper is a heartthrob for centrist pundits, but his broader appeal is untested.
Democratic voters could also decide to fight fire with fire and choose an outsider or celebrity candidate to mirror Trump. The appetite for such a plan became clear in January, when a speech by Oprah Winfrey at an awards show sparked widespread calls for her to run for president. She demurred, but others may not be so restrained. Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, is said to be considering a run. Michael Avenatti, the brash lawyer who represents Stormy Daniels, the porn actor and director who claims to have had an affair with Trump, has declared his interest in running and has even visited the key early state of Iowa.
The preceding analysis makes barely any mention of what is often portrayed as the central battle in the Democratic Party: between the center-left and the quasi-socialist left wing. If Sanders or Biden were to win the nomination, that dispute might become operative. Otherwise, it’s likely to be beside the point. For one thing, even the more cautious, moderate candidates like Booker have adopted Sanders-esque policy ideas like a guarantee of a job for all able adults. For another, the priority for Democratic voters as a whole in 2020 is likely to choose a candidate who can beat Trump, regardless of what particular platform he or she proposes.
However, given the party’s increasing reliance on minority and women’s votes, it is difficult to imagine Democrats nominating a white man to lead their ticket in the next election, and perhaps for several cycles to come. There are some members of the party who believe the best way to beat Trump is to win back the blue-collar white voters who once backed Democrats but flipped to Trump in 2016. But the prevailing view at the moment holds that in a party with a large crop of women and minority candidates, and given Trump’s divisive rhetoric about women and minorities, nominating a white man is politically untenable.
That may be true. If so, the result will be that the party leans hard on driving turnout among minority voters, just as Obama did. The Democrats will also be able to rely on heavy turnout in large, strongly liberal states such as California, Illinois, and New York—which will inflate the vote for the party’s presidential nominee but won’t affect the Electoral College, since all three states are reliably Democratic. But the Democrats will still have to fight to win back the Rust Belt states Trump clawed away in 2016. The Democratic candidate in 2020 could win the popular vote by a landslide or by a small margin, but if they win the Electoral College, it’s likely to be a very tight victory. Or they could find themselves stunned and defeated by Trump once more.
This story was originally published in Berlin Policy Journal.
A Stranger’s Pose, a new book by the Nigerian author and photographer Emmanuel Iduma, presents photography as an art concerned with both confrontation and comfort. It is, to him, a limber, choral form. “Photography is a charismatic medium,” he writes. “Sometimes it takes five decades for a photograph to unravel itself.”
Iduma’s book, like the subjects within, resists simple categorization. A Stranger’s Pose is part travelogue, part memoir, part poetry collection, part photo essay culled from Iduma’s own work and those of other visual artists. In sum, it is a portal. The book traces Iduma’s travels around Africa through a series of snapshots and short, written vignettes. The accounts jump from Accra to Casablanca to Addis Ababa and back again. In most locales, Iduma encounters strangers; in some, he reconnects with family. Iduma’s travels follow no easily mapped route. The organizing logic of the book is not guidance so much as it is evocation. It asks readers to submit to the pleasures of wandering without the guarantee of a fixed destination.
With reverence and sincerity, Iduma relays the words of the celebrated Malian photographer Malick Sidibé: “Photography is like hunting.” Iduma sits at Sidibé’s feet; he offers the reader a glimpse into the late visionary’s life and philosophies. In A Stranger’s Pose, as in life, the only constant is death. The book hums with a kind of gorgeous melancholy. Iduma recounts the deaths of many people he encounters, often writing letters to the deceased or their relatives after encountering a photograph of the departed.
In this artful rendering of grief, the book is reminiscent of an essay in which the Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole eulogized his grandmother. In the 2017 dedication, Cole ponders photography’s role as an accelerant to mourning: After the loss of his “Mama,” Cole fixated on photos of her, most urgently the image of her shroud. “They were a shock. … I burst into sudden hot tears,” Cole wrote of the pictures a cousin forwarded to his wife via WhatsApp, the verdant lifeline of the African diaspora. “Imagination can be delicate, imposing a protective decorum. A photograph insists on raw fact and confronts us with what we were perhaps avoiding.”
Cole similarly considers the revelatory power of photography in the foreword to Iduma’s book. “Imagine a ballad with travelling companions who flit in and out like instrumental voices, so that you don’t know if you are hearing something improvised or through-composed, so that the distinction between the two becomes irrelevant, a song that double as a melancholy history of West African photography, but without the starchiness of undigested scholarship,” Cole writes. “Softness, sensibility, gentle surprises.”
The book’s serene compositions—both written and photographic—transport the reader with a warmth that feels rare for a travel title. In its attention to visual detail and the ebbs and flows of human connection, A Stranger’s Pose shifts conventions in travel writing about Africa. Iduma does not cast himself as a guide explicating the untold wonders of the Dark Continent. He offers no recommendations for what to eat, see, touch, or experience while one visits the continent. He tenders no warnings about animals or Africans. He writes of “long, loose-fitting garments, mostly white, sometimes light blue” and how the men wearing them move him, how he envies “the ardour in their gait, a lack of hurry, as if by walking they possess a piece of the earth.” On pages where glossaries and detailed maps might normally stake a claim, Iduma instead places portraits.
ERIC GOTTESMAN / courtesy of cassava republic pressThrough his choices in both photography and his language, Iduma offers an image of Africa that is prismatic. His vision is fragmented but not disjointed. A Stranger’s Pose doesn’t seek to reflect the whole continent so much as it refracts the most common gaze, that of the white outsider.
Iduma observes; he does not gawk. His eye is familiar, his lens most often trained on subjects with whom he shares both instinctive kinship and punishing loneliness. In one reflection, he shares a tentative note to a lost lover: “I’ve made my days into dispatches and unsent letters. I sleep little,” Iduma writes across two doodle-covered postcards. “I switch beds, and night after night hope is gathered in sacks of the unknown.” There are no grand pronouncements about the state of Africa, no attempts to debunk well-trodden stereotypes by curating images of prosperity and innovation. A Stranger’s Pose maps only the complex terrain of human emotion.
Because Western renderings of the continent (even contemporary ones) have been mired in condescension, benevolent or otherwise, the African artist enters a distorted frame. The psychic toll of challenging historically racist depictions—those that originated during colonial eras but still proliferate now—disturbs the work of many photographers from the continent. “I want to reach the point where we are not burdened with this thing called African photography and the unfair expectations of it,” the South African photographer Gulshan Khan recently told The Washington Post. “I say this not because I am not proud to be African but because there is a freedom, I think, that comes with being able to photograph anything without having to correct or respond to the wrongs of the past.”
Iduma’s work constitutes an unburdening in this sense. The book can be read as a corrective of sorts, but not because it posits this auxiliary function as the most important pursuit of African art. Like the contemporaneous work of Nigerian-Malaysian siblings Akwaeke and Yagazie Emezi, A Stranger’s Pose presents an alternate viewpoint of the continent quietly. Where Akwaeke harnesses the potency of indigenous spiritual practices through fiction set in various corners of the diaspora and Yagazie disarms with regal portraiture, Iduma upends monolithic views of Africa through the arresting specificity with which he describes his travel experiences. The book is immersive; it looks inward. It revels in the small moments that constitute a journey, in the many chance meetings that slowly add up to something resembling a family.
In one such instance, Iduma reunites with Egwu, an acquaintance from his teenage years, in Umuahia, the capital city of Abia state in southeastern Nigeria. Their first meeting in 11 years, the encounter is fraught with the nervous energy of mutual appraisal. The men marvel at one another and exchange pleasantries, but Iduma’s true reconnaissance begins out of the other man’s sight. It starts with photographs:
Later, alone, I browse his photos on Facebook. He works with a government paramilitary organisation. In many of the photos he poses with a gun, and underneath the photos he has written “Black Boy.” I am amused by his outrageous showmanship. But I am, in fact, envious. Of how divergent our lives remain, for while I amble along, moving from place to place, he holds himself with steadiness, as self assured as the boy who helped negotiate for my shoes and wristwatch.
Here, Iduma troubles the very idea of stillness, of staticity—on the continent and within people themselves. The two men have drifted away from one another, and Iduma has drifted away from the place that first brought them together. Boys who once shared the same stomping grounds have become men whose lives seldom intersect. Iduma’s boyhood friend may very well remain as confident as he was during their youth—but the writer slyly notes the imperfection of this assessment. The gun-toting photos function as evidence of either Egwu’s confidence or its facsimile. By posing for a photograph, Iduma suggests, the subject participates in—or challenges—his own projection.
Emeka Okereke & Emmanuel Iduma/Courtesy of Cassava Republic PressWeaving his book together with this batik fabric of human interactions, Iduma reaches toward freedom—for himself, for the genre, and for depictions of the continent writ large. “I hoped ... that the cities appeared untethered to their countries—an atlas of a borderless world,” he writes in one email to an unnamed relative. The effect is liberating. A Stranger’s Pose resists the rigid structuring of travelogues. It refuses to organize its insights by region, activity, or season. It dispenses with these discrete categories in favor of a lofty premise:
I can recite distances
by heart feet memory
I can tell wanderlust
rounded as the eyes
A walking eye sees itself blind
A roving leg crumbles into a pause
The only thing a man needs
is a suitcase and a soul.
It is a somber relief that the book goes on to challenge this assertion, too. A Stranger’s Pose doesn’t fall into the glitzy category of African writing sometimes labeled Afropolitan. No jets zoom between Lagos and London to usher Iduma into the upper echelons of African diasporic society. Iduma takes care to complicate the pull of migration both throughout the continent and beyond. In Rabat, the Moroccan capital, Iduma contrasts the discomfort he feels when failing to communicate adequately in Arabic with the acute danger he knows this deficiency would entail for black Africans traveling through the North African country:
I wore my language deficiency like a veneer, like gauze, like stratum. Underneath was tangible communication, out of reach. Yet I did not bemoan this. My deficiency was benign in comparison. For migrants arriving in Morocco from countries south of the Sahara who have to make a living or wait almost interminably for a better for life, to acculturate is to survive.
This moment of intra-continental reckoning is a sobering contextualization. There can be no “African travel writing,” of course, without an acknowledgment of how unevenly the continent’s internal borders are policed. What can “Africa” mean to the African who cannot traverse it freely? A Stranger’s Pose doesn’t offer a clear answer, but Iduma’s words and photos alike underscore the futility of attempting to capture a continent’s depth in one flourish. Operating in concert, the different mediums urge the reader to find satisfaction in the boundlessness of individuals.
A Stranger’s Pose complicates assumptions of kinship—between people of African descent, between photographer and subject, and between an artist and his audience. The only salve, Iduma suggests, is to keep moving.
David Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) will be on the block at the upcoming Post-War and Contemporary Art auction at Christie’s in New York on November 15, and there is speculation that it may sell for upwards of $80 million. If it does, the price would shatter the previous world record for a work sold at auction by a living artist—Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, which went for $58.4 million back in 2013. What do those kinds of prices say about the state of the art world, and of the world in general?
The Hockney painting is an unquestionable and probably timeless masterpiece (perhaps unlike the previous record holder). One can make an argument that it is one of the two or three most crucial canvases of the ever-youthful, now-81-year-old British master’s career. As the people at Christie’s (the ones putting forward the $80 million figure) are delighted to point out, the work marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool and a double portrait.
Swimming pools had transfixed Hockney since he first arrived (from cold, gray northern England) in sunny Los Angeles in 1964. The young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things that everyone else in the southland had been taking for granted. The way the turquoise water moved and gleamed and eddied was manifestly beautiful, but it was also, for Hockney, something altogether more fascinating. What really interested him was the way light scattered across the surface of the water, a wide, two-dimensional skin that could nevertheless be seen through—not unlike a painted image splayed across the canvas itself.
Meanwhile, for all its colorful seductions, Portrait of the Artist served as the culmination of a half-decade-long series of neorealist double portraits—studies of pairs of friends and, at the same time, investigations of the relationships between those friends. And in this instance, that investigation was especially fraught. This painting is in fact the second version (he’d abandoned and destroyed the first version) of an image that Hockney had, by that point in 1972, been working on for well over a year—a year that saw the traumatic breakup of his five-year relationship with the image’s principal subject, Peter Schlesinger, in that pink jacket, arguably the love of his life.
What are we to make of the swimmer coursing underwater as he approaches the pool’s rim at Schlesinger’s feet? Just any old model, shimmering away, like memory itself? Or the vexed fantasy of a specific new love interest on Schlesinger’s part? And what are we to make of the painting’s title, Portrait of an Artist, in this context? Might the underwater swimmer be a wistful stand-in for the artist himself? Or is the real relationship in question the one between the artist standing outside the image, rendering it into being, and the pink-jacketed man now eternally removed on the far side of the picture plane?
This would prove to be one of the last in that particular series of double portraits, but, curiously, it was to point the way toward a fresh Hockney passion and perhaps the hinge moment of his career. There were all sorts of complications in the production of this second version of the image. For one thing, Hockney was no longer in California at the time, but rather back in London, so he had to travel to the south of France for the nearest approximation of such a sun-drenched pool. And because Schlesinger was no longer with him, he’d had to use a stand-in for his quick photographic studies of the scene in question. Back in London, Hockney had then had to ask his estranged lover to wear the pink jacket for a photo shoot in a nearby park. He’d also had to meticulously recalibrate the time of the shoot to match the shadow splay of the original southern shots.
Photo of the author’s copy of David Hockney Photographs (Lawrence Weschler)And the thing of it is that by then he’d come to understand that single photographic snaps of standing figures distorted the actual proportions, the figures being trapped in their inevitably projected one-point-perspective. He’d therefore begun stacking quick sequences of chopped-up details from the snapshots, an especially disconcerting procedure in this context, as was evident from the result (you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to wonder about the third of those five shingled images).
The point is, there’s a direct through line from that shingled column of snapshots to the subsequent photo collages that would famously come to dominate Hockney’s career several years later and launch him off on an inquiry into the limitations of one-point photographic perspective, whose hegemony in European art over the past 500 years has come to constitute the focal point of much of his wider work ever since.
So, okay—the painting is important. As is its creator, all the more so since his recently concluded Tate-Pompidou-Met blockbuster retrospective. But what about that predicted price?
For starters, it should be noted that when it comes to assigning a fair and just monetary value to a work of art, any and every work is somewhere between worthless and priceless, and any specific numerical assignation beyond that comes under the category of comedy, as in Puck’s insight regarding the eternal folly of mere mortals.
Having said that, there is such a thing as a market, and the immediate price of any given work of art depends on what the current market will bear, a number that in turn depends on all sorts of variables. In the current instance, those variables include: the relative scarcity of such blue-chip works compared with the upsurge in the number of mega-millionaires from all over the world in a position to vie for them (including many new ones from Russia, China, and the Middle East, and not a few from the U.S., their balance sheets enhanced by their recent tax windfalls); the rise of contemporary art as a fungible commodity (perhaps no more precarious an investment than many of its alternatives, especially in the case of a record-setting work that then becomes even more valuable for being the one to set such a record); the seeming conviction among dealers and collectors that prices can only keep going up (although we all know where that sort of thinking leads); the ancillary value of the ownership of a work of art in validating or laundering the cultural credentials of its owners (not to mention, in the current market, a work of art’s value in actually laundering the monetary gains of some of its more shady international bidders); and so forth. The market simply is what it is.
And yet surely the main word summoned forth by the prospect of a single work of art by any living artist commanding these sorts of prices is scandal. The first and most obvious scandal is that there are not just dozens but hundreds of individuals with so much disposable wealth (quite a term, that, come to think of it) that they can afford to bid one against the other, lustily cheering at the prices as they climb higher and higher, in a world where millions go hungry and homeless, not a few in the immediate vicinity of the galleries and auction houses.
The lesser scandal is that the artist in question hardly ever partakes in the profits of such a sale—these purchases constitute transactions between idle millionaires, usually mediated by middleman dealers or auction houses (though to be sure, such transactions can help jack up that artist’s own prices in the future, which is its own kind of scandal in a hypercharged and often seemingly arbitrary winner-take-all art market, where only the top few percent of players can afford to make any kind of decent living).
And, finally, there is the scandal that such an iconic work of international culture will now be disappearing into the domain of a private individual (rather than living in public in a museum, because hardly any museums can afford to bid at such heights) or else into the vaults of some dedicated storage facility near the Frankfurt or Abu Dhabi or Shanghai airport, potentially not to be seen again in the flesh, as it were, for generations.
Richard Ojeda is running for president. Ojeda, a West Virginia state senator and retired U.S. Army major, lost his congressional bid in the state’s 3rd District on Tuesday, but saw the largest swing of Trump voters toward Democrats in any district around the country — overperforming 2016 by more than 35 points. Still, in a district Donald Trump carried by 49 points, Ojeda, who rose to prominence leading teacher strikes in West Virginia, lost by 12 points.
Ojeda’s case for his candidacy is straightforward: The Democratic Party has gotten away from its roots, and he has a unique ability to win over a white, black, and brown working-class coalition by arguing from a place of authority that Trump is a populist fraud. He’s launching his campaign with an anti-corruption focus that draws a contrast with Trump’s inability to “drain the swamp.”
His authority — and one of his greatest liabilities — would come, in part, from his own previous support of Trump in the 2016 general election. After backing Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary, Ojeda refused to support Hillary Clinton, seeing her as an embodiment of the party’s drift toward the elite.
“The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that fights for the working class and that’s exactly what I do.”“I have been a Democrat ever since I registered to vote, and I’ll stay a Democrat, but that’s because of what the Democratic Party was supposed to be,” he told The Intercept. “The reason why the Democratic Party fell from grace is because they become nothing more than elitist, that was it. Goldman Sachs, that’s who they were. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that fights for the working class and that’s exactly what I do. I will stand with unions wholeheartedly and that’s the problem — the Democratic Party wants to say that, but their actions do not mirror that.”
Ojeda turned on Trump early in his term, concluding that the president’s interest in improving the lives of working people like those Ojeda grew up with in West Virginia, or served with in the military, was fake. Now, he wants to break the spell Trump still holds on half the country.
“We have a person that has come down to areas like Appalachia and has tried…and has convinced these people that he is for them, when in reality the people that he has convinced couldn’t even afford to play one round of golf on his fancy country club,” Ojeda said.
As a state senator, Ojeda led a push to legalize medical marijuana and played a central role in this year’s teacher walkouts that resulted in a rare pay increase for educators. In his congressional race, he ran on a thoroughly pro-labor, progressive platform despite the partisan lean of the district, framing issues as pitting people against corrupt, out-of-touch elites. He focused heavily on the role of Big Pharma in sparking the opioid epidemic.
His energetic campaign style and pull-no-punches approach made him the focus of national attention during his congressional run. His announcement that he will run for president, which is first being reported by The Intercept, makes him one of the first Democrats to formally declare their intentions for 2020. Moves are being made early this year. As The Intercept reported over the summer, former Obama administration official Julián Castro floated a run as early as last summer, and there are already close to a dozen people considered likely to join him on the trail, including Sanders; Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Jeff Merkley; and former Vice President Joe Biden. A handful of billionaires, including Michael Bloomberg, have also floated the possibility.
Ojeda made his decision to run after surveying the field of potential presidential contenders, and concluding that none of them would be able to stand up to Trump in the way that he could and draw the contrast that’s needed. “We’re going to have quite a few lifetime politicians that are going to throw their hat in the ring, but I guarantee you there’s going to be a hell of a lot more of them than there are people like myself that is, a working-class person that basically can relate to the people on the ground, the people that are actually struggling,” he said. “I’m not trying to throw stones at people that are rich, but once again, we will have a field that will be full of millionaires and I’m sure a few billionaires.”
Speculation in Washington has begun to focus on the possibility that the ultimate Democratic nominee for president is not someone currently being discussed as a frontrunner. A recent poll found “none of the above” topped the list of presumed candidates.
Ojeda was backed in his House bid by the People’s House Project, a PAC run by former congressional candidate and MSNBC host Krystal Ball. She’s supporting his presidential run, but acknowledged in an interview that he’s an unusual candidate for today’s Democratic Party. “I think the biggest challenge for Richard is whether or not people actually want real change. Whether they actually want a nation. Or if they’d prefer to just keep their tribes and their grievances,” she said.
Ojeda said he has never been to Iowa or New Hampshire — the states whose caucus and primary, respectively, formally kick off election season — but plans to make trips to both soon. As he prepares to campaign, Ojeda, who first assumed political office in 2016, will have to grapple with multiple likely immediate objections to his candidacy beyond his vote for Trump: political experience, identity, and his ties to coal country among them.
The Democratic Party’s coalition is fueled by women and an increasingly diverse base. When I asked if a white man from West Virginia could understand what was behind the Black Lives Matter movement, he argued that his experience living in and among the working class — which is heavily made up of black and Hispanic people — gives him insight into that struggle. “I can understand it far better than the millionaires and billionaires sitting around the conference tables in Washington, D.C. That’s a fact. Guess what? I’ve worked side-by-side with those people, I’ve served in the military with the people that lived in those communities,” he said. “I know far more about that life than [elites in Washington] know about that life. So when someone stands up that has a bank account that’s got 50 or 60 million dollars in it, I personally could care less what they have to say about how they’re gonna…how they know what a single parent who is trying to put food on the table feels. Because they don’t.”
His identity, meanwhile, is not so simple. While both his grandparents worked in the West Virginia mines, as is common in the state, one of them immigrated illegally from Mexico to do so. One of his grandparents, after fighting in World World II, died in a mining accident. The Spanish pronunciation of the last name — O-Hayda — was tricky for people in the region, and it has evolved to O-Jeddah. Ojeda’s father, meanwhile, did not follow the career path into the mines, becoming instead a certified registered nurse anesthetist.
His lack of political experience, he said, should not be mistaken for a lack of organizational leadership experience. While he enlisted in the Army as a private out of high school, he said, he rose through the ranks to oversee a vast operation. “When I started in the military, I started as a private, the lowest rank you could possibly go, but I was also the chief of operations for the 20th Airborne engineers in Iraq, where we were in control of over 7,000 engineers. And every single operation that went on throughout the entire country of Iraq went through my JOC, and I was the chief of operations,” he said. The military helped put Ojeda through college and graduate school, and he now uses his experience overseas to argue against militarism and in favor of a diplomatic approach.
Another objection to his long-shot bid could come from the environmental community, which may worry that his advocacy for coal miners, and his roots in Logan County, West Virginia, would mean that he would push a fossil-fuel dependent energy economy. Ojeda said that wouldn’t be the case, but he did note that he sees a limited use for metallurgical coal — which is mined in West Virginia — in the production of steel.
“If we can bail out the banks, there’s no reason we can’t create opportunity for the people who brought light to this country.”“I think it’s time for us to stop lying. Coal in terms of energy is gonna be overtaken; [natural] gas can do just as much far cheaper — it’s not gonna come back the way it was,” he said. “In terms of things like coal production, I just want to bring something to be able to replace, to give them an option. The fault lies in the leadership of the past; coal operators never wanted anything to challenge them. The truth is we’ve got to offer these people options so they can transition to other jobs, and it can’t be minimum wage jobs…If we can bail out the banks, there’s no reason we can’t create opportunity for the people who brought light to this country.”
His campaign will roll out a climate and environment plank soon, he said, but he wants to launch his campaign with a focus on lobbying and corruption in Washington, which he sees as a major obstacle to progress. To that end, he’s proposing a typically atypical suite of policy solutions: Members of Congress, he proposes, should be required to donate their net wealth above a certain threshold — Ojeda puts it at a million dollars — to discourage using public office for private gain. In return, retired members of Congress would get a pension of $130,000 a year and be able to earn additional income to reach $250,000. Anything above that would be donated.
“When you get into politics, that’s supposed to be a life of service, but that’s not what it’s been. You know, a person goes into politics, they win a seat in Congress or the Senate and it’s a $174,000 [salary], but yet two years later they’re worth $30 million, and that’s one of the problems that we have in society today. That’s how come no one trusts, or has very much respect for politicians,” he said.
The notion of sacrificing for public service may seem radical, but it’s anything but that for millions of people in the military, said Ojeda. “Our servicemen that are in the military right now, staff sergeants in the United States Army out there in harm’s way, qualify for food stamps, but they truly live a life of selfless service,” he said. “Where I come from, the average family income is $44,000. So to me, this right here is something that everybody can relate to. We’re sick and tired of watching people that say that they’re going to fight for the people and run for office, but in reality they get in there and all they do is increase their wealth and power.”
He plans to pair that with other provocative ideas, such as requiring lobbyists to wear body cameras.
Ojeda, in positioning himself against Trump, is meeting right-wing populism with a left-wing variety. He uses language that is as direct as Trump’s, but unlike the president, he targets the nation’s elites, rather than vilifying vulnerable communities.
“The filthy rich convinced the dirt poor the filthy rich are the ones who care,” he said. “We need someone in Washington, D.C. who’s going to be a voice for these people.”
The post Richard Ojeda, West Virginia Lawmaker Who Led Teacher Strikes, Will Run for President appeared first on The Intercept.
Rosana Gonçalves não dirige. Ela dá aulas de manhã, à tarde e à noite em um colégio de Osasco, na grande São Paulo. Era uma quarta-feira, 9 de maio de 2018, quando ela saiu da escola no horário habitual – 22h40 – e, daquela vez, preferiu chamar um Uber em vez de esperar pela carona do marido. O carro chegaria em cinco minutos. Veio mais rápido do que o previsto. Quando o motorista parou, ela checou seu nome e se sentou no banco de trás. Começou ali o maior pesadelo de sua vida.
Gonçalves conta que motorista era parecido fisicamente com a foto que aparecia no app. Ele teria pedido que ela se sentasse no banco da frente porque a porta de trás estava com problema. Isso já tinha acontecido outras vezes, por isso Gonçalves não estranhou. O celular estava no painel. Nada parecia incomum para um motorista de aplicativo. Mas ele desviou do caminho. “Achei que ele tinha errado e tentei corrigir”, lembra. “Até que ele anunciou o sequestro.”
Gonçalves diz que foi ameaçada com uma arma e que o motorista jogou sua bolsa no banco de trás. Ela tentou abrir a porta e pular, mas ele teria a segurado pelos cabelos, a ameaçado de morte e obrigado a colocar o cinto. “Comecei a chorar e perguntar o que ele queria. Se fosse dinheiro, eu dava”, ela contou.
O motorista perguntou se a professora era casada e exigiu que ela mostrasse a aliança, de acordo com o relato de Gonçalves. Ela implorava para que ele a soltasse e falou do filho e do marido. “Se você colaborar eu vou te soltar”, ele teria dito. Eles rodaram de carro por alguns minutos até chegarem em uma casa. “Quando percebi, caí em prantos”, ela lembra. Só então percebeu a intenção do motorista. Ela foi estuprada. Quando terminou, o agressor pediu que a professora colocasse a roupa e voltasse ao carro. Ele a deixou no local de origem, teria feito nova ameaça e deu a ela R$ 20. E desapareceu.
Transtornada e desorientada – mas aliviada por estar viva –, Gonçalves encontrou um bar, contou o que aconteceu e ligou para o marido e para a cunhada. Ao contrário do que normalmente acontece, ela foi bem tratada na delegacia. Fez o tratamento preventivo para vítimas de estupro no hospital Pérola Byington, que tem coleta de material genético, antiinflamatórios, vacinas contra hepatite, coquetel anti-HIV e pílula do dia seguinte.
Quando a polícia entrou em contato com o Uber, entretanto, a empresa se recusou a liberar as informações sobre a corrida e exigiu uma ordem judicial.
O Intercept pediu às secretarias estaduais de segurança pública de todo o país o número de crimes e delitos sexuais envolvendo transportes por aplicativo a partir de 2016, até julho de 2018. Das 27 solicitações feitas com base na Lei de Acesso à Informação, só oito foram respondidas, e poucas de forma satisfatória. No Acre e no Espírito Santo, por exemplo, não há diferenciação entre o tipo de transporte envolvido na ocorrência – o local é classificado apenas como “veículo automotivo” ou “veículo”, impossibilitando a análise. No Rio de Janeiro, há duas classificações: “Táxi” e “Veículo de transporte alternativo”. O estado enviou dados referentes a janeiro de 2015 a dezembro de 2017. Só consideramos os números a partir de 2016. Na Bahia, os casos vieram organizados sob a etiqueta “Uber, Cabify ou Táxi”.
Filtramos entre os dados enviados apenas os casos de estupro ocorridos em corridas de aplicativos e táxis e chegamos ao total de 46 casos ocorridos na Bahia, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo (estados que enviaram dados padronizados e que puderam ser comparados). Nos últimos dois anos, pelo menos 70 pessoas relataram ter sido vítimas de algum tipo de violência sexual em táxis e veículos de transporte particular (assédio sexual, ato obsceno, estupro, importunação ofensiva ao pudor e violação sexual mediante fraude – quando alguém droga a vítima, por exemplo, ou toma alguma outra atitude para dificultar ou inviabilizar a manifestação de sua vontade). O número, no entanto, pode ser muito maior – a polícia não contabiliza os dados específicos ocorridos dentro de veículos, e as empresas se recusam a divulgar os casos à imprensa.
Líder em número de usuários, com mais de 20 milhões de passageiros cadastrados, a Uber também é campeã de denúncias em todos os estados – talvez exatamente por ser a líder em usuários. Em São Paulo, 143 dos boletins mencionavam o aplicativo, contra seis da 99, que reúne 14 milhões de clientes. A Cabify, com 3 milhões de usuários, não foi citada em nenhuma das respostas que permitiram análises separadas por aplicativo.
Em nota enviada pela assessoria de imprensa, a Uber fez questão de ressaltar que, por conta da popularidade do app, haveria vítimas que citam a empresa por engano, chamando qualquer transporte por aplicativo de “uber” – o que, segundo a assessoria, pode elevar injustamente o número de boletins em que a empresa é citada.
Os números, embora altos, são certamente uma pequena fração dos abusos envolvendo aplicativos como Uber, Cabify e 99 e os táxis de rua. Segundo o Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 65% dos estupros, por exemplo, não são denunciados à polícia – e essa é a estimativa mais otimista. A Pesquisa Nacional de Vitimização estima um número bem mais preocupante: 92,5% dos estupros não são notificados no Brasil. As demais formas de abuso, como o assédio, embora mais comuns, são ainda menos denunciadas.
Nos aplicativos, parte da sensação de segurança vem do perfil de cada motorista. Se ele tem boa pontuação e fez muitas corridas, por exemplo, o usuário se sente mais protegido. Mas, em agosto deste ano, repórteres do jornal O Povo investigaram a venda de perfis de motoristas e conseguiram comprar um cadastro antigo da 99 a meros R$ 100. Testando o aplicativo, um dos jornalistas percebeu que era o terceiro proprietário daquela mesma conta.
Reprodução de captura de tela publicada originalmente pelo jornal O Povo, mostrando um anúncio de venda de contas de motoristas da Uber e da 99.
Foto: reprodução
Em 2016, a Uber afirmou ao Nexo que não conscientiza seus colaboradores, como chamam seus motoristas, sobre violência sexual, porque são “os motoristas que contratam a Uber para utilizar o aplicativo”, o que os tornaria “totalmente independentes” da empresa.
Em vez disso, a Uber se restringiu a dizer que os casos de abuso são avaliados um a um e, a depender “da gravidade”, o motorista pode ser tirado de circulação – os critérios dessa avaliação, no entanto, não foram explicados. Se o abuso for registrado em delegacia, a Uber garante que passa a colaborar com as autoridades. Mas, na prática, não é bem assim.
Depois do que aconteceu, Rosana Gonçalves percebeu que seu motorista havia cancelado a corrida um minuto depois do pedido. O carro que parou era de um falso motorista – que provavelmente tinha informações de que ela estaria esperando um Uber na rua. Como ela avaliou que o motorista era fisicamente semelhante ao que aparecia na foto no seu celular, a professora não estranhou quando entrou no carro.
Depois de procurar a polícia, Gonçalves entrou em contato com a Uber. A empresa se negou a enviar informações sobre o motorista e afirmou que só divulgaria os dados a pedido da justiça, de acordo com a professora.
O agressor teria ficado solto por mais tempo se o celular de Rosana não tivesse com o GPS ligado quando tudo aconteceu. O aparelho gravou todo o histórico de deslocamento e, em poucos dias, a polícia chegou na casa onde o estupro ocorreu, que pertencia ao irmão do agressor. Ele foi preso pouco depois. Ele ainda teria feito outra vítima, dois dias depois de estuprar Rosana, e também já havia sido condenado e cumprido pena pelo mesmo crime, segundo a polícia. Estava em condicional.
‘Me senti desamparada em primeiro lugar. Desrespeitada, principalmente por ser mulher. Casos assim acontecem, e a Uber sabe disso.’Segundo a Uber, a política da empresa é não expor o motorista sem checar as informações. A empresa disse que não havia um cadastro de motorista com o nome do agressor e não respondeu sobre a possibilidade de um perfil falso. A professora e os policiais perguntaram em que momento a corrida original foi cancelada e o porquê. “Deram uma explicação bem superficial. Como eles não se sentiram implicados, não deram muita importância”, disse Rosana, que está atrás de um advogado criminalista. “Eles tiraram o corpo fora.”
Não está descartada a hipótese de o agressor ser um aproveitador que deduz que a vítima está na rua distraída. A dúvida, porém, atormenta Rosana. “Me senti desamparada em primeiro lugar. Desrespeitada, principalmente por ser mulher. Casos assim acontecem, e a Uber sabe disso. Não serei a primeira e nem a última.”
Há dois anos, o BuzzFeed teve acesso à base de dados da Uber americana. Ao buscarem o termo “assédio sexual” na plataforma, encontraram mais de 6,1 mil pedidos de suporte de usuários, feitos entre dezembro de 2012 e agosto de 2015. Pesquisando estupro, a reportagem encontrou mais de 5,8 mil mensagens.
A Uber passou a investigar não o grande número de ocorrências – taxado de “exagerado” pela empresa – mas, sim, a identidade do funcionário que vazou os dados ao Buzzfeed. Segundo o aplicativo, só cinco das mais de 10 mil mensagens relacionadas a denúncias de violência sexual atendiam ao parâmetro – não revelado – que usam para classificar esse tipo de “incidente” como verdadeiro. Diante da resposta, o Buzzfeed prontamente pediu acesso aos procedimentos de análise de dados da Uber. Mas a empresa, mais uma vez, optou pela falta de transparência.
Procurada pelo Intercept, a Uber afirmou que repudia qualquer tipo de abuso contra mulheres e acredita na importância de enfrentar casos de assédio e violência. “Segurança é prioridade para a Uber e mesmo um único incidente seria demais”, escreveu a assessoria de imprensa, ressaltando que a empresa leva “muito a sério” relatos de assédio e bane o agressor quando eles são confirmados. A Uber não respondeu qual o procedimento padrão para apurar essas denúncias e alegou novamente que “colabora com as autoridades no curso de investigações ou processos judiciais”.
A empresa acrescentou ainda que “não há qualquer base metodológica para vincular os dados levantados ao número de ocorrências no aplicativo”. O Intercept sugeriu, então, que a Uber enviasse o número de casos de violência sexual relatados ao aplicativo, como contraponto aos dados enviados pelas secretarias de segurança. Não recebemos a resposta.
A Cabify afirmou que ouve os envolvidos em cada denúncia recebida por sua central de atendimento e faz “as recomendações devidas”. Para os motoristas, há uma central diferente para situações de emergência. “Da mesma forma que suspendemos os motoristas em caso de suspeitas até que se conclua a operação criminal, o mesmo é feito para os usuários.” Como a Uber, a Cabify não divulga os dados relacionados à violência sexual, mas diz estar “sempre à disposição das autoridades para trabalhos em conjunto”.
Já a 99 não retornou nossos contatos.
A estudante de jornalismo Roberta Carvalho* conta que sofreu assédio em táxis de rua nas últimas duas vezes que usou o transporte. Na primeira, em novembro de 2016, o motorista teria passado todo o percurso de 10 minutos que separa a estação de metrô do Maracanã do Shopping Tijuca, ambos na zona norte do Rio, pedindo à jovem de 21 anos que lhe mostrasse fotos de biquíni ou de calcinha em seu celular. “A minha reação inicial foi sair de perto, eu precisava fugir daquele cara”, lembra Carvalho, que disse ter passado um tempo sozinha no banheiro do shopping para se acalmar antes de encontrar sua amiga.
A estudante disse que só viria a pegar um táxi de rua novamente dois anos depois. Era seu aniversário de 23 anos, e ela não conseguia pegar seu ônibus nem chamar um Uber. Com medo de se atrasar para o trabalho, pegou um táxi e pediu que o motorista parasse em um caixa eletrônico antes de deixá-la no destino final. O taxista passou direto. “Ele falou: ‘Não se preocupa com isso, não. Qualquer coisa eu volto no seu local de trabalho para buscar o dinheiro.” Assim que chegaram, ela disse que deixaria o dinheiro com o porteiro do prédio. “Mas aí você almoça comigo”, ela conta ter ouvido. Ela teve que recusar diversas vezes até que ele desistisse. “Fiquei completamente sem reação.”
Em nenhuma das duas ocasiões Roberta quis ir à polícia, ainda que a possibilidade de o segundo taxista voltar a procurá-la a amedrontasse. Depois da primeira, ela chegou a escrever um depoimento em um grupo de mulheres para alertá-las, mas decidiu não fazer uma denúncia formal. “Eu vou chegar na polícia e falar que o cara me pediu foto de calcinha e eles vão rir da minha cara”, justificou.
Roberta nunca mais fez sinal para um táxi na rua. Hoje, ela só pega carros de aplicativos e faz questão de compartilhar sua rota com grupos de amigos, para que várias pessoas tenham acesso à viagem. “Tem sempre alguém acompanhando as corridas.” O fato de os aplicativos registrarem a corrida e terem os dados do motorista a faz sentir mais segura. “Você tem onde reclamar e como comprovar que aquela corrida aconteceu”, explica. “Quando você pega um táxi na rua, o máximo que vai conseguir é pegar a placa do carro. É sua palavra contra a do cara, sabe?”
*Nomes alterados a pedido das vítimas.
The post Descobrimos 46 registros de estupros em Uber, táxis e 99 – e números denunciados à polícia podem ser bem maiores appeared first on The Intercept.
Quando Trump ligou para parabenizar Bolsonaro pela eleição, não havia nenhum integrante da campanha preparado para traduzir a conversa. O filho de um empresário amigo do presidente eleito foi escalado para a missão. A primeira conversa entre o presidente eleito e o presidente da economia mais forte do mundo foi intermediada por um youtuber de 24 anos. Parece uma cena de filme do Mazzaropi, mas é o jeitinho estabanado com que o bolsonarismo tem lidado com a política externa.
Bolsonaro mal foi eleito e já apresentou seu cartão de visitas para o mundo. E a primeira impressão não foi nada boa. Apesar do seu programa de governo prometer uma política externa “sem partido”, o que vimos até agora é ideologismo puro e simples. O capitão falastrão e seus comandados ainda não se deram conta de que não há mais espaço para retórica eleitoral e já colocaram o país em muitas saias justas mesmo antes de assumir o poder.
Como aquele tiozão do churrasco que não sabe de nada, mas tem uma opinião ruim para tudo, Bolsonaro e sua equipe causaram estragos nas relações com diversos países. Criticaram a China, o Mercosul, criaram atrito com os países árabes e ameaçaram sair do Acordo de Paris. “Mas ele tem voltado atrás de quase todas essas decisões, talquei?” Acontece que não é mais possível dizer e desdizer a todo momento como fez durante a campanha, mas Bolsonaro continua fazendo. No âmbito das relações internacionais, declarações têm efeitos imediatos e criam fatos políticos. Ficar apertando “Ctrl + Z” só reforça o quanto o novo governo desconhece questões básicas das relações exteriores.
Mesmo sabendo que diplomacia não é o forte da turma, ainda assim é espantoso ver o desdém com que tratam importantes parceiros comerciais, principalmente no momento em que a economia brasileira luta para sair do buraco.
Mercosul
“Mercosul, como foi feito, é totalmente ideológico. É uma prisão cognitiva. De novo: pergunta mal feita. (…) Mercosul não é prioridade. É isso o que você quer ouvir?” Foi assim, em tom agressivo, que Paulo Guedes tratou uma jornalista da Argentina, o país que é o nosso terceiro maior parceiro comercial e o principal destino de exportação dos nossos produtos manufaturados. Guedes disse ainda que o Mercosul é uma “prisão cognitiva“.
O bloco, criado durante o governo Collor, não é um convescote de países bolivarianos como parece crer Paulo Guedes. Apesar do bloco ter perdido o vigor nos últimos anos e precisar de reformas, ainda é importante para a economia brasileira. Como lembrou o economista Alexandre Andrada, nossa relação comercial com o Mercosul é bastante vantajosa e fundamental para a indústria automobilística internacional. Traz dinheiro e gera empregos. Talvez o nosso futuro ministro da Economia acredite que o Mercosul é uma espécie de Foro de São Paulo. Isso é o que eu chamo de “prisão cognitiva e ideológica”.
Embaixada em Israel
Em 2016, o católico Bolsonaro foi batizado pelo Pastor Everaldo no Rio Jordão em Israel. Ali o capitão começava a estreitar relações com o país e com evangélicos brasileiros. Seus filhos nutrem uma obsessão pelo exército israelense e costumam desfilar por aí com camisetas do Mossad — o serviço secreto mais temido do mundo.
Bolsonaro anunciou o plano de mudar a embaixada de Tel Aviv para Jerusalém. A decisão contraria a ONU — que considera ilegal a ocupação de Jerusalém por Israel — e reverte uma posição histórica de neutralidade do Brasil nos conflitos do Oriente Médio. Por afinidades ideológicas e motivos religiosos, Bolsonaro pretende alinhar o Brasil aos interesses do governo israelense, mesmo que para isso signifique comprar briga com importantes parceiros comerciais da região.
Se para o primeiro-ministro israelense, Benjamin Netanyahu, a decisão de Bolsonaro foi considerada “correta, histórica e emocionante”. Para os palestinos e os países árabes, soou como “provocação”. Os únicos países que peitaram a lei internacional e mudaram suas embaixadas para Jerusalém foram os EUA e a Guatemala. Acontece que o Brasil não é os EUA nem a Guatemala. O país mantém uma importantíssima relação comercial com os países da Liga Árabe. No ano passado, o superávit da balança comercial com esses países foi de US$ 7,1 bilhões para o Brasil, o que representa 10% do superávit da nossa balança comercial com o mundo. Nós somos hoje os maiores exportadores de carne halal, cuja produção atende normas específicas do islamismo. Os frigoríficos brasileiros se prepararam e investiram muito para atender esse mercado.
O Egito, nosso maior importador de carnes da Liga Árabe, repudiou as declarações de Bolsonaro ao cancelar a visita que o chanceler Aloysio Nunes faria ao país. A Liga Árabe enviou nota à embaixada brasileira no Cairo condenando as declarações de Bolsonaro. Após a repercussão internacional negativa, Bolsonaro tentou amenizar e disse a decisão ainda não foi tomada, mas o estrago já estava feito. Se o presidente eleito decidir de fato pela mudança da embaixada, muitos negócios brasileiros serão prejudicados e milhares de empregos podem ser perdidos.
Acordo de Paris
Delírios conspiracionistas parecem nortear a nova geopolítica brasileira. Assim como Trump, Bolsonaro contesta o incontestável aquecimento global e ameaçou retirar o Brasil do Acordo de Paris. Para ele, o país paga “um preço muito caro” para atender as exigências ambientais. Já se tornou comum ver Bolsonaro e seus filhos debochando do aquecimento global como se fosse uma teoria fabricada para atender interesses escusos, e não fruto de um consenso da comunidade científica internacional.
Em um vídeo gravado nos EUA, Eduardo Bolsonaro aparece em meio à neve defendendo o rompimento de Trump com o Acordo de Paris: “Que aquecimento global é esse? Existem fortíssimos indícios por trás do Acordo de Paris que querem fazer o quê? Eles não querem permitir que países desenvolvidos continuem a poluir, enquanto países sub poderiam continuar a poluir. Isso busca uma maior igualdade entre os países. Então, a população norte-americana seria punida por já ter se desenvolvido muito. Enfim, um conceito totalmente novo que não faz sentido. (…) É por isso que Trump saiu do Acordo, porque ele não é globalista”. Esse tipo de conspiração maluca, emergida das profundezas mais obscuras da internet, pode ser a nova cara da política internacional brasileira.
A ameaça de abandonar o acordo enfureceu Erik Solheim, chefe de meio ambiente da ONU: “A rejeição do Acordo de Paris é uma rejeição da ciência e do fato. É também uma promessa falsa, porque os políticos que apresentam a ação climática como um custo para a sociedade entenderam tudo errado.” Carlos Rittl, secretário-executivo do Observatório do Clima, uma das principais ONGs do mundo, afirmou que o rompimento com o Acordo do Paris pode trazer “sérios problemas para os interesses econômicos” e que o Brasil “passaria a ser visto como um problema para o mundo”.
A possível saída do acordo arranha a imagem do país e pode trazer problemas para a economia brasileira, principalmente nos negócios com países europeus. Não custa lembrar que nós não temos uma economia forte como a dos EUA para comprar essa briga com o resto do planeta. O presidente francês, por exemplo, defendeu na última Assembleia Geral da ONU, a exclusão de acordos comerciais com países que deixassem o Acordo de Paris.
Depois, como já virou hábito, Bolsonaro voltou atrás e garantiu que o Brasil continuará no acordo, mas continuou sendo dúbio ao dizer que é possível alcançar as metas ambientais sem precisar fazer parte de “acordo nenhum“.
China e os Brics
Durante a campanha, Bolsonaro pintou a China como um país predador que pretende dominar setores da economia brasileira. Não deixa de ser uma preocupação plausível, mas uma declaração dessas vinda do futuro presidente é assustadora. A China é o nosso principal parceiro comercial. Analistas em comércio exterior projetam um superávit de mais de US$ 25 bilhões a favor do Brasil em 2018. Os chineses lembraram o óbvio em editorial de um jornal estatal: “Se a opção do Brasil em 2019 for por seguir a linha de Donald Trump e romper acordos com Pequim, quem sofrerá será a economia brasileira”.
A patacoada com a China causou preocupação nos demais integrantes do Brics. Nelson de Sá relatou em sua coluna na Folha a repercussão na imprensa dos países do bloco: “Análises agressivas surgiram em sul-africanos e russos, chamando-o de ‘candidato da Manchúria, um político usado como boneco por outra potência’, os EUA, e até de ‘cavalo de Troia nos Brics’. A agência Tass ouviu especialistas brasileiros para arriscar que “Brasil vai reduzir sua participação nos Brics”.
Se cumprir todas as suas promessas no campo das relações exteriores, Bolsonaro causará grande instabilidade com mercados importantes, conflitos diplomáticos sérios e um enorme prejuízo aos brasileiros e à economia. É bastante provável que a maioria dessas loucuras não serão cometidas, mas o novo governo assumirá sob a desconfiança internacional.
Até agora, os sinais enviados por Bolsonaro ao mundo é de sabujismo em relação aos EUA, o que contradiz o lema “Brasil acima de tudo” que marcou sua campanha. Parece que não foi à toa que ele bateu continência para a bandeira americana. Eleger como principal aliado um país que tem adotado políticas protecionistas não é um bom caminho a se tomar. Serve para aplacar os desejos do seu eleitorado ideológico, mas coloca a economia do país em uma posição arriscada na geopolítica internacional.
A imagem transmitida até aqui é de que nossa diplomacia será marcada por muito amadorismo e ideologismo tacanho. Resta saber quem será o ministro das Relações Exteriores. Eu só espero que não seja o youtuber que mediou a conversa com Trump.
The post Amadorismo e delírios conspiratórios marcam primeiros passos da política externa de Bolsonaro appeared first on The Intercept.
When Mariela Cerrato saw her daughter and son-in-law on the evening news in late July, flanked by masked police and described as terrorists, she was not surprised. She knew the authorities had been hunting the couple.
Their business had been burned to the ground just days before and a wanted poster with their faces had been circulating on social media. Paramilitaries in balaclavas had come to Cerrato’s house demanding that she disclose their whereabouts. But she didn’t know — the pair had been moving from safe house to safe house. The last time she had seen them in mid-July, they were preparing to flee their small city of Masaya, Nicaragua with hope of reaching Costa Rica.
Now Cerrato’s daughter, Maria Peralta, and her husband, Christian Fajardo, are in a maximum-security facility in the country’s capital, Managua, facing over 30 years in prison. They are just two of more than 400 activists arrested and being prosecuted as part of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s crackdown on protesters who have been calling on him to resign.
Mariela Cerrato, whose daughter and son-in-law have been accused of terrorism after participating in protests against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
Still: Carlos Scopio
Nicaragua plunged into violent upheaval after protests began on April 18, sparked by an unpopular change to the social security system. The demonstrations soon broadened, ballooning into a nationwide, student-led movement against Ortega, who critics say has imposed increasingly authoritarian rule during his 12 consecutive years in power. Thousands in the streets were met with well-armed police and paramilitaries, who fired into crowds, tortured and raped detainees, and arbitrarily detained leaders, the United Nations found. Over 300 people have been killed, more than 2,000 injured, and 2,000 arrested.
While the streets have now been cleared of barricades and there is a veneer that the crisis is over, the country remains deeply troubled. Over 40,000 Nicaraguans are seeking refuge in Costa Rica, according to authorities, about 13,700 of which have formally sought asylum. The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights says that over 550 Nicaraguans are still imprisoned, and the government continues to track and capture its opponents — among them students, farmers, and family members of those killed. Last month, police recently released a statement that banned protests without authorization.
Many of those arrested will be tried as terrorists, thanks to a law passed by the Ortega-controlled Congress in July that expanded the definition of terrorism to include a broad range of crimes, such as damaging property. Those found guilty will get 15 to 20 years in prison. According to Roberto Larios, director of communication for the courts, over 200 people have been accused of terrorism. At least 18 people have so far been found guilty. The cases mark the first time anyone in Nicaragua has been convicted of terrorism.
The state says the law was passed to comply with recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, an international body concerned with terror financing. Former prosecutors, lawyers, activists, and protesters say that no matter the origin, the law is now being used to criminalize protest and is a thinly veiled excuse for Ortega to silence critics.
“It is so open that it could apply to any activity, up to passing a bag of water to someone in a barricade. … Here we are facing a citizen rebellion, a social rebellion, this is not terrorism,” said Alberto Novoa, a former attorney general of Nicaragua, in an interview with a local paper.
Nicaragua is not alone in widening its definition of “terrorism” so far that activists and protesters end up behind bars. Ortega is just the latest in a line of leaders to pass sweeping counterterrorism laws that activists say can be used to infringe on civil liberties. Over the past few decades, more than 140 countries have adopted counterterrorism measures, but increasingly states have been using these laws as a “shortcut to targeting democratic protest and dissent,” Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the U.N. special rapporteur on the protection and promotion of human rights while countering terrorism, has explained. A 2018 U.N. report highlighted this trend of branding human rights defenders, activists, and experts as “terrorists,” in Algeria, Egypt, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has also noted that several countries besides Nicaragua have used compliance with FATF counterterrorism measures to justify passing restrictive laws in recent years.
“From Brazil and Nicaragua to France and the U.K. to Kyrgyzstan and Australia, we’re seeing clampdowns that make it all too easy to label protesters, journalists, activists, political opponents, and others that the authorities want to neutralize as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists,’” said Letta Tayler, a senior researcher on terrorism at Human Rights Watch. “We’ve seen a dangerous global spread of draconian counterterrorism laws since the September 11, 2001 attacks. … Because the word terrorism is associated with atrocities, it’s now easy to get public buy-in to responses that break the law in the name of security.”
“When leaders need an enemy and need to mobilize people against that enemy, confuse people about the truth, and shut down debate, ‘terrorism’ is now an option.”Fears related to the Islamic State spurred a recent spate of laws in many countries, said Tayler, but even in Latin America, where the threat of an ISIS attack is remote, the word “terrorist” has seeped into the discourse. Honduras passed anti-terror legislation last September that could send protesters to prison for 15 to 20 years. Unlike Nicaragua, Honduras has not used the law against those who participated in protests in the wake of its electoral crisis, although some protest leaders remain imprisoned. In Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile, indigenous and environmental activists have been charged with terrorism. In 2016, Brazil passed an anti-terrorism law that came under fire from the U.N. and other experts for its broad definition of terrorism. El Salvador’s supreme court has classified gang members as terrorists and modified existing anti-terrorism legislation to implicate anyone collaborating with them as well, a move that some say has been used to justify repression and request international aid. Venezuela passed a controversial anti-terrorism law in 2012, and President Nicolás Maduro declared that the 2017 protests that swept the country were carried out by “terrorist groups.”
Guatemala is currently considering broad anti-terrorism legislation that would restrict civil liberties and freedom of expression, according to civil society groups. Under the law, those who block roads, damage property, or use social media for “political or economic ends,” among a range of other actions that cause “panic and fear in the population,” could be tried for terrorism.
“After 9/11, terrorism became the enemy. When leaders need an enemy and need to mobilize people against that enemy, confuse people about the truth, and shut down debate, ‘terrorism’ is now an option,” says Adam Isacson, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America.
A Nicaraguan man is arrested by riot police during a protest against the Ortega government, in Managua, Nicaragua, on Oct. 14, 2018.
Photo: Inti Ocon/AFP/Getty Images
There is no universal legal definition for terrorism, but in Nicaragua, terrorist acts are now defined as those that result in death, injury, or property damage — public or private — when the purpose of the act was “to intimidate a population, alter the constitutional order, or compel a government or an international organization to perform an act or abstain from doing so.”
Novoa, the former attorney general, is challenging the new anti-terror measure in court, arguing that the law is unconstitutional and should not apply to protesters. “I’m challenging the law because I wanted to see if one day they tell me what the logical legal arguments are for weakening the rights of citizens, established in the social pact called the Nicaraguan Constitution,” he wrote to The Intercept in an email. “Independence, autonomy and impartiality does not exist in the Nicaraguan state, since all formal powers are controlled by Mr. Ortega and Ms. Murillo,” he said, referring to Ortega’s wife, who is the vice president. “The judicial system is a political arm of repression used against those who are think differently from Ortega and Murillo.”
Julio Montenegro, a human rights lawyer who is handling Christian Fajardo and Maria Peralta’s cases, said that some of the individuals accused of terrorism were merely part of a street barricade, brought supplies, food, and water to other protesters, or provided medical care for those injured. The U.N. has also raised concerns about the prosecutions, noting in a scathing report that “the trials of people charged in relation to the protests have serious flaws and do not observe due process, including the impartiality of the courts.”
As Maduro has done in Venezuela, Ortega has used classic autocratic tactics to stamp out dissent. The government has denied the state’s role in violence, and Ortega has changed his story multiple times about whether the masked paramilitaries seen in videos working alongside police are his supporters. He has painted protesters as the sole actors causing chaos and portrayed government forces as the country’s peaceful defenders against terrorists destabilizing the nation.
While rights groups say the death toll of the unrest reached at least 300, with some putting it as high as 500, the Nicaraguan government recognizes just 198 victims, including 22 police officers who were killed — in one case, an officer was stripped and burned. At pro-government rallies, his supporters chant, “They were terrorists, not students!” Ortega himself has called for justice for those killed on the pro-government side, saying that the country has entered “a moment of justice and reparation for the 198 victims of coup-inciting terrorism.” To date, not one paramilitary or member of the police has been tried for terrorism or any other crime.
A photo of Maria Peralta and Christian Farjado, who remain in prison as they await trial.
Still: Carlos Scopio
As she swiped through videos of Fajardo leading hundreds through Masaya at an anti-government march, his mother-in-law, Cerrato, described his role as a leader in the movement. When protesters took control of the city in June, Fajardo and Peralta oversaw the logistics of the campaign, Cerratos explained. “If there wasn’t water, food, lights, etc., Christian was responsible. … But he wasn’t in the barricades — he didn’t have time. … Taking declarations, taking care of sick people … they were stocking the medical clinics that were here in Masaya,” she continued, pointing to a corner of her house stacked with IVs, bandages, and crutches.
Masaya, which sits 15 miles southeast of Managua, was long ago a bastion of support for Ortega and his leftist Sandinista rebels when they overthrew right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. But in 2018, it became the center of the anti-Ortega resistance. Protesters managed to overtake the city, but police, paramilitaries, and government snipers were able to wrangle back control after a particularly brutal and bloody offensive, in which state forces set off explosives, shot at protesters, and captured leaders.
“What is terrorism? When there is will and intention to cause panic in citizens,” said Montenegro, Fajardo and Peralta’s lawyer. “Aggressions causing panic weren’t carried out by Christian and Maria, but by paramilitaries who are associated with the police.”
Along with terrorism and financing terrorism, Fajardo and Peralta have been charged with organized crime and hindering public services — crimes for which the state has yet to provide evidence, according to Montenegro. Montenegro and Cerrato, who is also a constitutional lawyer, say the government has violated rights and skirted due process from capture to trial.
“The paramilitaries come by and I look at them, ask them what they want. If they want to kill me, they can kill me.”On the first day of Fajardo and Peralta’s hearing in August, Cerrato arrived outside the courthouse at 6 a.m. By 9 a.m., she was joined by activists waving banners bearing the couple’s faces, as police in balaclavas with M16s slung across their chests looked on. As the hearing continued to be delayed, she waited 10 hours before finally entering the building. By then, the activists and TV cameras had gone and she was joined by a group of around 25 women, all waiting in the pouring rain to drop food off for imprisoned loved ones. At 8 p.m., she emerged to report that she had never been let into the hearing.
The next morning, Cerrato walked through her daughter and son-in-law’s unfinished house, which is next door to her own. Clothes were still all over the bed and an orange-and-white cat lay splayed out in the middle of the kitchen.
Court proceedings for the couple are now scheduled for mid-November. In the meantime, Cerrato has started working on behalf of Santiago Fajardo, Christian’s brother, who has also been captured and charged with terrorism. The effort is not without its dangers. At a demonstration she attended in September calling for the release of imprisoned protesters, police shot tear gas and rubber bullets while armed Ortega supporters opened fire — one person was killed and five others were wounded.
“I’m proud that these kids have participated in this fight,” she said. “I’m not afraid. I leave my door open. The paramilitaries come by and I look at them, ask them what they want. If they want to kill me, they can kill me.”
The post How Nicaragua Uses Anti-Terror Laws Against Protesters to Suppress Dissent appeared first on The Intercept.
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