No dia 31 de agosto de 2018, jipes blindados alinharam-se ameaçadoramente ao longo de uma rua da Cidade de Guatemala. No meio da manhã, começaram a circular imagens dos veículos diante do escritório de uma comissão anticorrupção patrocinada pela ONU que havia ajudado a derrubar políticos corruptos. Jipes e soldados também foram vistos nos arredores do Palácio Nacional. Em um país com uma história relativamente recente de golpes militares e massacres, as fotografias e vídeos se espalharam como fogo em mato seco, gerando preocupação em uma população desorientada.
Para Feliciana Macario, essa demonstração de força lembra os piores anos do regime militar guatemalteco, durante os 36 anos de conflito armado entre forças militares e paramilitares apoiadas pelos EUA e guerrilhas de esquerda. Macario é uma das coordenadoras nacionais da Conavigua, uma organização de direitos humanos fundada por mulheres cujos maridos morreram ou desapareceram na guerra.
“É como se estivessem nos ameaçando com uma volta aos anos 1980”, diz Macario, uma mulher quiché (um dos grupos étnicos maias) que trabalha com vítimas e sobreviventes do período de repressão.
O conflito armado deixou mais de 200 mil mortos e 45 mil desaparecidos. Mais de 80% das vítimas eram civis indígenas, e o responsável, na esmagadora maioria dos casos, era o exército. Uma comissão da verdade patrocinada pela ONU e dois tribunais guatemaltecos classificaram os atos do exército no início dos anos 1980 como genocídio. O conflito terminou em 1996 com a assinatura dos Acordos de Paz, mas Macario diz que o atual presidente da Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, está violando os termos do tratado.
“Um dos compromissos que destacamos é o do papel do exército na sociedade. Nos termos do acordo, o exército devia reduzir seu efetivo, orçamento e tudo o mais. Mas Jimmy Morales está indo na direção contrária. Ele está aumentando o orçamento do exército e quer remilitarizar o país”, disse Macario ao Intercept.
Cerca de duas horas depois que os primeiros jipes foram avistados do lado de fora do escritório da Comissão Internacional Contra a Impunidade na Guatemala (CICIG), Morales apareceu no Palácio Nacional, rodeado de comandantes militares e policiais, e anunciou a não renovação do mandato da CICIG, o que provocou ações judiciais, protestos e uma crise política ainda em andamento. A mobilização dos jipes aumentou a preocupação de muitos guatemaltecos com Morales – ainda mais depois da revelação, por parte da embaixada dos EUA, de que os veículos haviam sido cedidos para serem usados nas fronteiras, e não na capital. Morales e seus apoiadores vêm tentando obter o apoio do governo Trump e do Partido Republicano contra a CICIG, e o tradicional apoio dos EUA à comissão parece estar enfraquecendo.
“Os veículos foram doados pelos EUA para combater o narcotráfico na fronteira, mas foram usados para intimidar a CICIG, violando completamente a letra do acordo”
Dois meses depois, as justificativas oficiais para a mobilização de veículos blindados do dia 31 de agosto continuam desencontradas: segundo o ministro do Interior, tratava-se de uma patrulha de rotina para combater a criminalidade; segundo documentos da polícia, o objetivo era proteger instituições e repartições públicas; para o presidente, os veículos estavam lá para evitar protestos violentos. A cada declaração ou documento oficial que vem a público, a história dos J8s fica ligeiramente – ou bastante – diferente.
Apesar das explicações cambiantes, uma coisa já está clara: o governo guatemalteco violou o acordo de doação de jipes J8 assinado com os EUA. Tanto o Departamento de Estado quanto o Departamento de Defesa americanos confirmaram ao Intercept que os veículos foram cedidos para operações específicas de combate ao narcotráfico nas fronteiras da Guatemala. Segundo ambos os órgãos, a transferência e emprego dos veículos fora desses parâmetros constituiriam uma violação do acordo de doação. E, segundo documentos da polícia guatemalteca obtidos pelo Intercept, foi exatamente isso que aconteceu no dia 31 de agosto – e nos meses anteriores.
“Os veículos foram doados pelos EUA para combater o narcotráfico na fronteira, mas foram usados para intimidar a CICIG, violando completamente a letra do acordo”, afirma Jordán Rodas, chefe da Procuradoria de Direitos Humanos da Guatemala, que acionou o Tribunal Constitucional do país contra a mobilização de 31 de agosto.
O presidente Jimmy Morales anuncia a não renovação do mandato da comissão anticorrupção da ONU em uma coletiva de imprensa na Cidade da Guatemala, no dia 31 de agosto de 2018.
Foto: Orlando Estrada/AFP/Getty Images
O antagonismo entre Morales e a CICIG vem crescendo há mais de um ano. A comissão atua em conjunto com o Ministério Público há mais de uma década, mas foi nos últimos anos, durante a chefia de Iván Velásquez, um ex-procurador e juiz colombiano, que essa parceria acumulou êxitos em casos de grande notoriedade. Graças às investigações, dezenas de políticos, advogados e executivos do setor privado foram presos por corrupção, incluindo um ex-presidente.
Morales, um ex-comediante de TV apoiado por militares linha-dura de direita, foi eleito presidente no fim de 2015, aproveitando-se de uma onda de fervor anticorrupção e prometendo apoiar o trabalho da CICIG. Um ano e meio depois, contudo, a promessa foi esquecida quando Morales, dois de seus parentes e seu partido viraram alvo de investigações criminais. Em agosto de 2017, Morales tentou expulsar Velásquez do país, mas foi impedido pelo Tribunal Constitucional.
Desta vez, Morales agiu para impedir que Velásquez voltasse ao país, mas o decreto também foi declarado inconstitucional. O presidente e vários membros do governo reclamam de ordens ilegais e manipulação internacional, e dizem que não vão permitir a volta de Velásquez. O Ministério da Defesa e o exército anunciaram que vão respeitar a decisão da Justiça, mas Morales e seus aliados mais próximos continuam desafiando o Tribunal Constitucional. Com o apoio da ONU, Velásquez continua chefiando a CICIG do exterior.
“Jimmy Morales está aumentando o orçamento do exército e quer remilitarizar o país”
Com o aumento da instabilidade e dos protestos, o governo mudou sua versão sobre o envio de carros blindados para o escritório da CICIG no mesmo dia do anúncio do fim do mandato da comissão. Em uma coletiva de imprensa, o ministro do Interior, Enrique Degenhart, a ministra das Relações Exteriores, Sandra Jovel, e outros membros do gabinete de Morales afirmaram que os J8s estavam em uma patrulha de rotina, parte de uma operação de combate ao crime. Um relatório do Ministério do Interior redigido depois do incidente, ao que o Intercept teve acesso, descreve planos de operações que vão de um mês antes até um mês depois do 31 de agosto. No entanto, a operação dos dias 30 e 31 de agosto, segundo o documento, foi diferente das outras. A missão do destacamento teria sido monitorar e proteger instituições e repartições públicas. Membros do governo usaram essa versão dos acontecimentos em declarações posteriores.
Porém, no dia 3 de outubro, em uma entrevista no rádio, Morales contradisse publicamente seus ministros – e relatórios de seu próprio gabinete obtidos pelo Intercept – e declarou que os jipes haviam sido mobilizados para evitar protestos violentos.
Oscar Pérez, porta-voz do Ministério da Defesa, encaminhou o Intercept ao Ministério do Interior para quaisquer perguntas sobre os J8s, recusando-se a comentar a contradição entre as diferentes versões oficiais do ocorrido. Mesmo após a insistência da reportagem, Pérez não quis dizer se havia soldados ou funcionários do exército presentes nas operações do dia 31 agosto. Segundo ele, os jipes e a força-tarefa estariam sob comando civil. O Ministério do Interior e Morales não responderam às inúmeras tentativas de contato da reportagem.
Por e-mail, um porta-voz do Departamento de Estado americano afirmou que o órgão monitora atentamente o uso dos veículos cedidos pelos EUA, acrescentando que a embaixada manifestou sua preocupação em um comunicado público quando os jipes foram vistos pela primeira vez. “O governo dos EUA leva muito a sério toda acusação de uso indevido de material bélico americano, e vai tomar as devidas providências após o término das investigações”, disse o porta-voz.
Segundo outro porta-voz do Departamento de Estado, o acordo determina que os J8s devem ser usados na luta contra o narcotráfico. Além disso, ainda segundo o porta-voz, as operações de combate a atividades criminais, principalmente ao tráfico de drogas, devem ser realizadas nas fronteiras da Guatemala. Já o Departamento de Defesa ressaltou a mesma questão, só que de maneira mais detalhada.
“Os jipes J8 foram cedidos entre 2013 e 2018 para dar apoio às operações de três Forças-Tarefas Interinstitucionais [IATFs, na sigla em inglês] guatemaltecas – Tecún Umán, Chorti e Xinca –, compostas por unidades policiais, militares e aduaneiras e lideradas por um chefe de polícia sob a tutela do Ministério [do Interior]”, disse ao Intercept Johnny Michael, porta-voz do Departamento de Defesa, em um e-mail de resposta a uma série de perguntas.
“Os contratos de cessão desses veículos determinam que as IATFs se concentrem no combate a atividades criminais, principalmente ao tráfico de drogas, nas fronteiras da Guatemala. O emprego dos J8s deve priorizar a segurança das fronteiras e áreas com alto índice de criminalidade. Os documentos determinam que os J8s devem ser usados em operações antidrogas”, escreveu Michael.
Segundo ele, o governo da Guatemala não notificou os americanos de nenhuma transferência ou alteração na missão dos veículos cedidos, mas o Departamento de Defesa dos EUA estaria investigando “comentários que apontam para uma aparente transferência e ampliação dos usos do J8” e consultando o Departamento de Estado sobre futuras providências a tomar.
Não há dúvidas de que essas transferências aconteceram. O Intercept teve acesso a mais de 100 páginas de documentos e relatórios da polícia e do Ministério do Interior da Guatemala entregues ao Tribunal Constitucional, que havia exigido uma explicação para a presença dos veículos em frente ao escritório da CICIG no dia 31 de agosto. Segundo relatórios policiais, os jipes foram deslocados para a Cidade de Guatemala no início de abril de 2018 “com o objetivo de reduzir a criminalidade”.
“Cada país tem três chances antes de sofrer alguma sanção? As ajudas futuras são interrompidas? Não sabemos”
A transferência de quatro J8s das forças-tarefas Chorti e Xinca foi requisitada no dia 23 de abril para uma operação de segurança de dois dias na Cidade de Guatemala. A polícia continuou transferindo mais veículos das forças-tarefas para diversas operações na capital nos quatro meses anteriores ao 31 de agosto.
Essas transferências demonstram que o emprego dos jipes pela Guatemala desrespeitou todos os três itens ressaltados pelo Departamento de Estado e pelo Departamento de Defesa dos EUA: finalidade (combater o narcotráfico), geografia (regiões fronteiriças) e comando (forças-tarefas interinstitucionais).
O acesso a dados sobre o monitoramento das doações de equipamento militar americano a forças de segurança estrangeiras pode ser difícil, segundo Adam Isacson, diretor do programa Defense Oversight, do Washington Office on Latin America. Entre 1990 e 2005, o governo dos EUA impôs restrições às ajudas militares à Guatemala devido ao histórico de violações de direitos humanos no país.
Desde então, segundo Isacson, a maior parte da ajuda recebida pelos guatemaltecos – onde estão incluídas as forças-tarefas interinstitucionais – tem vindo do Pentágono. “Mais especificamente, de um programa do Departamento de Defesa. Antes chamado de ‘Seção 1.004’, ele foi rebatizado de ‘Programa de Combate às Drogas e ao Crime Organizado Transnacional’. Como o nome indica, as ajudas só podem ser usadas para isso”, diz.
Para Isacson, o Departamento de Defesa é menos exigente em termos de prestação de contas do que o governo federal. O único relatório apresentado ao Congresso é uma planilha contendo apenas o nome do país e a categoria, sem entrar em detalhes sobre o conteúdo da ajuda.
“Não temos acesso ao acompanhamento desses acordos. Nunca temos. Essas informações são confidenciais, como de costume”, afirma Isacson. Como resultado, as consequências das violações de contrato são desconhecidas. “Cada país tem três chances antes de sofrer alguma sanção? As ajudas futuras são interrompidas? Não sabemos”, lamenta.
Manifestantes protestam contra a decisão do presidente da Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, de não renovar o mandato de uma comissão anticorrupção patrocinada pela ONU. Cidade da Guatemala, 14 de setembro de 2018.
Foto: Luis Echeverría/Reuters
Na tarde do dia 31 de agosto, Rodrigo Batres, pesquisador do grupo de análise política El Observador, compareceu a uma manifestação improvisada na praça principal da capital poucas horas depois do anúncio de Morales.
Não era a primeira vez que a população protestava contra as tentativas do governo de sabotar a comissão anticorrupção, e algumas pessoas já tinham até preparado cartazes de apoio à CICIG. Outras agitavam bandeiras da Guatemala. Foi nesse momento que a embaixada americana emitiu o comunicado sobre os jipes doados. Mais cedo, a representação diplomática dos EUA já havia reagido à notícia de que o mandato da CICIG não seria renovado.
Os EUA estavam “cientes” da decisão, afirmava o comunicado inicial, acrescentando que o governo americano acreditava que a CICIG era “uma parceira importante e eficaz na luta contra a impunidade, melhorando a governança e fazendo com que os corruptos respondam por seus crimes na Guatemala”. Para depois afirmar que os EUA “continuarão a apoiar a luta da Guatemala contra a corrupção e a impunidade”, considerada “parte indissociável” das relações bilaterais entre os dois países. Para muitos guatemaltecos, ao não condenarem inequivocamente a decisão de Morales e continuarem a apoiar a luta do governo contra a corrupção – mas sem a CICIG –, os EUA estavam defendendo o presidente.
“Aquele comunicado foi muito importante. Os EUA disseram que iriam respeitar a decisão do governo e que continuariam a apoiar o combate à corrupção. Acho que foi uma forte declaração de apoio a Morales, e essa mudança foi concomitante à mudança de governo aqui nos EUA”, disse Batres ao Intercept.
Os EUA são o maior financiador da CICIG, tendo contribuído com 44,5 milhões de dólares de 2007 a 2017 – mais de um quarto do orçamento total da comissão. No passado, os EUA faziam coro com os outros grandes doadores – Canadá e União Europeia –, na defesa da CICIG. Mas desta vez o país ficou de fora da declaração conjunta dos financiadores, que lamentava a decisão da Guatemala de proibir a entrada de Velásquez no país. Alguns observadores suspeitam que a mudança de tom seja consequência do intenso lobby de Morales e seus apoiadores, que apresentam o presidente como um aliado fundamental dos EUA na região.
A Guatemala foi um dos únicos países que apoiaram a decisão de Donald Trump de reconhecer Jerusalém como a capital de Israel. Dias depois da transferência da embaixada americana para a cidade, a Guatemala fez o mesmo. Morales também foi o último líder centro-americano a condenar a política do governo Trump de separação familiar na fronteira. A direita guatemalteca alega que a CICIG é um terreno fértil para agentes estrangeiros radicais, e essa visão tem ganhado força no Congresso dos EUA. O senador republicano Marco Rubio bloqueou 6 milhões de dólares destinados à CICIG em maio (os fundos já foram liberados).
Em sintonia com o primeiro comunicado da embaixada americana, membros do governo Trump têm reiterado seu apoio a Morales. O secretário de Estado, Mike Pompeo, tuitou no dia 1º setembro: “Temos muita admiração pelos esforços da Guatemala na segurança e na luta contra as drogas” – sem nenhuma menção à CICIG. Cinco dias depois, Pompeo ligou para Morales para manifestar o apoio dos EUA à soberania da Guatemala e “o contínuo apoio dos EUA a uma CICIG reformada”. Pompeo prometeu trabalhar com a Guatemala na implementação de uma reestruturação da comissão no que vem, segundo o Departamento de Estado. Mas os detalhes dessa reforma não foram revelados.
Batres acha que os EUA vão continuar apoiando Morales enquanto defendem, da boca para fora, o combate à corrupção e à impunidade. “Embora defendam as instituições, eles não vão deixar de respaldar um dos governos mais submissos da região”, disse ele, levantando a voz em meio aos gritos dos manifestantes.
Tradução: Bernardo Tonasse
The post Cedidos pelos EUA para combater o tráfico de drogas, veículos militares foram usados para intimidar comissão anticorrupção na Guatemala appeared first on The Intercept.
Republican leaders in the House of Representatives undercut a bipartisan effort to end U.S. involvement in Yemen by sneaking a measure that would kill an anti-war resolution into a vote about wolves.
On Tuesday night, the Republican-led House Rules Committee voted to advance the “Manage Our Wolves Act,” which will remove gray wolves from the endangered species list. The Rules Committee waived all points of order against the bill and voted to advance it to the floor.
The catch: Republicans inserted language that would block a floor vote on whether to direct President Donald Trump to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi- and UAE-led intervention in Yemen. The intervention has been highly destructive, flattening homes, roads, markets, hospitals, and schools, and leading to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
On Wednesday evening, the House approved the rule 201-187, largely on party lines, successfully blocking a vote on the Yemen resolution.
In September, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced the Yemen resolution, which would have directed the Trump administration to remove U.S. forces from “hostilities” related to the Saudi-led intervention. Because it invoked the 1973 War Powers Act, Khanna’s resolution was “privileged” under House Rules, meaning it could bypass a committee vote and, barring any interference from the powerful Rules Committee, get a vote on the floor. The Republican gambit caused Khanna’s resolution to be stripped of its “privileged” status, meaning that it did not come up for a vote on its own.
If the Yemen measure had come up for a vote, it would have been the first time a chamber of Congress, which is notorious for avoiding votes on issues of war and peace, took an up-or-down vote that could end U.S. involvement in the conflict in Yemen.
On Capitol Hill, outrage against Saudi Arabia is at an all-time high following the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents last month. The measure had 81 co-sponsors, including four Republican members and several top Democrats. Two Democratic aides told The Intercept that Khanna’s measure needed about 30 Republican votes to pass, and they were optimistic about getting them.
“Republican leadership had to kill the bill in a surprise, underhanded maneuver,” Eric Eikenberry, advocacy officer at the Yemen Peace Project, told The Intercept in an email. “If they didn’t, they risked further rank-and-file Republican cosponsors and a floor vote, a prospect which leadership, always bent on ensuring impunity for the administration, could not abide.”
After a strong showing in last week’s midterm elections, Democrats can revive Khanna’s resolution after January, when the House switches to Democratic control. The top Democrat on the Rules committee, Jim McGovern, D-Mass., is a co-sponsor.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates began their intervention in Yemen in March 2015, aiming to retake the capital from a rebel group called the Houthis. The Trump and Obama administrations have stood by the coalition, providing weapons, intelligence, and midair refueling of coalition aircraft. The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Trump administration would cease midair refueling amid a growing outcry, but that did not satisfy many of the war’s critics on Capitol Hill.
Update: November 14, 2018, 6:07 p.m. EST
This story has been updated to include the results of the House vote on the rule removing gray wolves from the endangered species list and blocking a resolution to withdraw U.S. support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen.
The post Republicans Used a Bill About Wolves to Avoid a Vote on Yemen War appeared first on The Intercept.
Cuba anunciou hoje que vai encerrar o contrato que tem com o Brasil no programa Mais Médicos. Declarou o governo da ilha em nota oficial: “O presidente eleito do Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro, com referências diretas, depreciativas e ameaçadoras à presença de nossos médicos, disse e reiterou que modificará os termos e condições do Programa Mais Médicos, desrespeitando a Organização Pan-Americana da Saúde e o que esta acordou com Cuba, ao questionar o preparo de nossos médicos e condicionar sua permanência no programa à revalidação do título e como única forma de se contratá-los a forma individual.”
A saída dos médicos cubanos do Brasil é uma porrada política forte no novo governo que ainda não começou. Talvez a mais forte delas até agora porque, dessa vez, por mais que tente, Bolsonaro não controla a narrativa.
O problema objetivo: os médicos cubanos atuam, sozinhos, em 1575 cidades (lembrem que o Brasil tem 5.570 municípios). Esses médicos cubanos cuidam de 24 milhões de pessoas. Ainda não há data para que os profissionais parem de atuar no Brasil mas, de uma hora pra outra, muita gente pode ficar sem médico. É uma crise gigantesca sem solução fácil. As bravatas de Bolsonaro, dessa vez, não servirão para nada além de agradar ao fandom. Isso abre as portas para que milhões de pessoas comecem o ano irritadas com o novo governo.
Leiam o que escreveu a repórter Nayara Felizardo em uma reportagem sobre a cidade de Guaribas, no interior do Piauí, publicada no mês passado:
“Outro programa que os moradores temem que termine é o Mais Médicos. Os médicos cubanos, contam, estão disponíveis todos os dias e ainda visitam as famílias em casa, se for preciso. Antes, não havia nenhum médico residente na cidade, e o atendimento acontecia uma vez a cada um ou dois meses.”
Guaribas não é exceção. Muitas cidades não tinham médicos antes do começo do programa, em 2013.
Do ponto de vista da retórica de Bolsonaro, as opções postas na mesa até agora são péssimas:
1. Ele pode voltar atrás de suas declarações (pra variar) estapafúrdias e sem pé na vida real e negociar com Cuba pra manter os 8.612 médicos por aqui – e se tornar automaticamente aquilo que critica, um “financiador de uma ditadura comunista®”, o que deve pôr boa parte de seus eleitores em tilt ideológico.
2. Ele pode ver os cubanos indo embora e começar a lidar nos primeiros meses de governo com a insatisfação de milhões de pessoas em todo o país.
Bolsonaro fala demais. Verba volant, mas às vezes é um bumerangue que volta direto na sua cara.
Bom feriado.
The post O desembarque de Cuba do ‘Mais Médicos’ embretou Bolsonaro entre o comunismo e a desaprovação popular appeared first on The Intercept.
Chicago detective Dante Servin shot Rekia Boyd in the back of the head late on a warm night in March 2012. Servin was an off-duty detective, a 20-year Chicago police veteran who lived on the block of the shooting, just off Douglas Park on the city’s West Side. Boyd was a 22-year-old African-American woman hanging out in the park with some friends. She was unarmed.
As police converged on the scene, Servin told his fellow officers that he had asked Boyd and her friends to quiet down as he drove out of the alley next to his house. According to Servin, a man in the group, Antonio Cross, responded by pointing a gun at him. Servin then fired five shots over his shoulder from inside his car. One hit Cross’s hand. Another hit Boyd, who fell to the ground.
Ambulances rushed both victims to the hospital while detectives prepared charges against Cross. Officers, including a canine team, spread out to look for the gun Servin claimed he had seen. Meanwhile, Servin freely wandered the scene, talking with a succession of detectives and police supervisors.
Soon, a deputy chief named Eddie Johnson took command of the crowd of officers outside Servin’s house. As the designated on-call incident commander, Johnson assumed responsibility for the department’s initial investigation of the shooting. The OCIC is a central part of the department’s response to police shootings, operating at the scene “with the authority of the superintendent of police,” according to Chicago Police Department regulations.
Johnson faced a difficult task. The first hours after the shooting were marked by conflicting accounts from Servin and multiple civilian witnesses. The undisputed facts of the case were also disturbing: An off-duty officer had shot an unarmed woman in the head. And he had fired into a group of civilians, typically a violation of department rules.
Yet Johnson and the officers under his direct command proceeded to make a number of troubling decisions. In the days after the shooting, witnesses told investigators that Servin appeared to have been drinking. When asked several months after the shooting if he had been drinking that night, Servin told a film crew, “That’s my damn business.” Police investigators waited six hours to administer a blood alcohol test.
Detectives also discovered cameras mounted on Servin’s house that looked directly over the scene of the shooting. When Servin said the cameras didn’t work, instead of insisting on inspecting them or obtaining a search warrant, detectives dropped the matter, eventually asking him to sign an affidavit swearing that the cameras were inoperable.
Detectives also quickly uncovered evidence that Cross had been unarmed. Civilian witnesses denied that Cross had a weapon, and although there was a trail of blood and dashcam footage clearly showing Cross’s path after the shooting, police were unable to find a gun. Despite these findings, police asked prosecutors to charge Cross with felony assault and issued a press release falsely claiming that Servin had fired only after Cross began to “approach him with a handgun” and “pointed the weapon in the direction of the detective.”
At 10:40 a.m., about nine hours after the shooting, Johnson concluded his initial investigation into Servin’s use of force and endorsed the detective’s account in his official use of force report. “Based on the facts available at this time, Officer Servin acted in compliance with department policy,” he wrote, approving Servin’s decision to open fire. “Officer Servin fired his weapon at the offender after the offender pointed a firearm at Officer Servin.” Johnson did not check the box in his report that would have recommended the case for further investigation. The official use of force report Johnson signed never mentioned Rekia Boyd.
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Boyd died the next day. In the weeks that followed, the official police narrative unraveled. Search teams never found Cross’s alleged gun at the scene. Cross also continued to insist that he had been holding only his cellphone. Five people eventually testified that he was unarmed that night. Police dashcam video also shows that Cross flagged down a police car within moments of the shooting. “I wanted police to catch the person who shot me,” he later testified. Within a week, 200 protesters rallied in Douglas Park, and Boyd’s case helped fuel a national movement to end police violence against black women. Eventually, prosecutors dropped charges against Cross, and the city paid Boyd’s family a $4.5 million settlement. Servin was eventually indicted for involuntary manslaughter, but charges were abruptly dismissed after a judge ruled that prosecutors should have charged him with murder.
On November 23, 2015 — three and a half years after the shooting — Superintendent Garry McCarthy initiated the process of firing Servin. Less than 24 hours later, faced with a court order, his department also released video footage of the police killing of Laquan McDonald.
That grainy dashcam footage of Officer Jason Van Dyke firing 16 shots into a teenager upended Chicago, sending thousands of protesters into the streets. Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired McCarthy and delivered an emotional speech, in which he apologized for McDonald’s death and acknowledged the existence of a police “code of silence” — a stunning admission in a city where the political establishment has long paid deference to the police. Emanuel promised that the CPD’s next leader would be a transformational figure, declaring that he was “looking for a new leader for the Chicago Police Department to address the problems at the very heart of the policing profession.”
Four months later, Emanuel announced his choice: Eddie Johnson, the 27-year police veteran who had approved Rekia Boyd’s shooting as a justified use of force.
Photo: Chicago Police Department via AP
In early 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a comprehensive report on the Chicago Police Department, concluding an investigation opened in the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald video release. Finding a “pattern of unlawful force” by officers, the DOJ declared that “the failure to review and investigate officer use of force has helped create a culture in which officers expect to use force and not be questioned about the need for or propriety of that use.”
Craig Futterman, a civil rights attorney and law professor at the University of Chicago Law School who helped lead a lawsuit that sought to force the CPD to undergo court-monitored reform, said that Johnson’s actions on the night of Rekia Boyd’s shooting could be described as “investigation as cover-up.”
“My assessment is that he did indeed in this case endorse a false report in affirmatively writing and documenting, despite the absence of evidence of a gun, that this is a justified shooting because the person had been pointing a gun,” Futterman said.
At least one CPD official has been punished for making a similar decision: Chicago’s inspector general recommended that Deputy Chief David McNaughton be fired in part for signing off on a false use of force form in the killing of Laquan McDonald. McNaughton quietly retired soon after.
In an interview with CBS Chicago shortly after his selection as superintendent, Johnson insisted that he could direct Chicago’s police reforms, declaring, “I’ve actually never encountered police misconduct, ’cause you got to understand, officers that commit misconduct don’t do it in front of people that they think are going to hold them accountable for it.”
The statement was widely mocked, with one columnist questioning whether the superintendent had “come down with a case of temporary misconduct blindness.” But few publicly considered another explanation for the baffling statement — that Johnson was telling the truth and saw shootings like Boyd’s not as misconduct, but as acceptable police procedure.
In fact, the Rekia Boyd case was not an aberration. An investigation of Johnson’s record, drawing on documents obtained by the Invisible Institute via litigation and included in the Citizens Police Data Project, shows that he repeatedly approved police shootings or ignored allegations of excessive force over his years as a supervisor, consistently finding that they did not qualify as misconduct.
Dante Servin’s use of force report from the night of Rekia Boyd’s shooting. Servin did not mention Boyd in his report. Eddie Johnson approved Servin’s decision to use force about nine hours after the shooting.
In a decade as a senior CPD supervisor, Johnson personally investigated or commanded the officers responsible for six controversial shootings that left five people dead — all young African-Americans — and cost Chicago more than $13 million in misconduct payments. Moreover, Johnson’s tenure as commander of Chicago’s 6th Police District from 2008 to 2011 was marred by serious allegations of misconduct by an elite tactical squad led by a scandal-plagued lieutenant named Glenn Evans. During six months in 2010, members of the roughly 45-person team participated in the fatal shootings of three men, all unarmed or fleeing. During the same period, the entire rest of the CPD killed four people. Another of Johnson’s officers was credibly accused of killing a teenager and planting a gun on his body. After his promotion to deputy chief in 2011, Johnson reviewed and approved more disputed shootings, including the killing of Boyd and a case in which an officer fatally shot a teenager in the back. Johnson was recently called to testify in that final case, but otherwise neither Johnson nor Emanuel has ever acknowledged the superintendent’s involvement in some of the department’s most notorious recent police shootings.
Johnson’s history in the department raises troubling questions about the future of police reform in Chicago. Although Emanuel has announced that he won’t be seeking re-election, he will nonetheless wield considerable power over Chicago’s new police oversight agreement during his remaining half-year in office. Emanuel also appointed Johnson with the unanimous approval of Chicago’s City Council, circumventing the official process and ignoring two outside reformers carefully vetted by Chicago’s Police Board. No politician or newspaper raised the issue of Johnson’s involvement in some of the department’s most notorious scandals. Can a man whose career embodies the CPD’s failure to rigorously review and investigate officers’ use of force — the unlawful pattern the recent Department of Justice report placed at the center of the reform agenda — transform the department?
Photo: Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images
Johnson first took charge of Chicago’s 6th District in March 2008. The predominately African-American district stretches from blocks along West 79th Street that rank among the city’s poorest to the tidy, middle-class bungalows of Chatham that have been home to generations of the city’s black political, business, and civic leaders.
Johnson had risen quickly through the ranks of the CPD. Just a year earlier, he had been a sergeant, a position that typically directs up to a few dozen officers. As a district commander, he was now responsible for approximately 350 police officers serving 105,000 residents.
As the CPD — like departments nationwide — places increasing emphasis on data-driven policing, its commanders face relentless pressure to produce good numbers: high arrest figures and declining reports of crimes. Upon assuming his new post, Johnson made changes, picking a new leader for his tactical team. Such teams — usually composed of roving plainclothes officers — handle more aggressive police work, serving warrants and targeting high-crime corners. The size of the tactical team varied slightly over time, but typically there were between 40 and 45 officers. Assignment to a tactical team is often a step up for patrol officers, but it also brings extra risks. Johnson chose a hard-charging lieutenant named Glenn Evans to lead his tactical team.
“These kinds of units are almost by definition likely to be involved in more use of force incidents,” said Sam Walker, a policing expert from the University of Nebraska who consults with police departments, including the CPD. “Departments have to take special precautions in terms of clear policies, much closer supervision, than would be the case with just regular patrol units.”
Many officers and residents respected Evans’s dedication to police work — he was known to sleep in his office and patrolled the streets alongside his officers — but he also racked up dozens of complaints and several lawsuits as he rose through the ranks. A formal investigation into a 2005 complaint by Evans’s ex-girlfriend found that he called her a “whore” and damaged her car. The city also paid a nearly $100,000 settlement after a partially paralyzed city worker accused Evans of beating him up. Those cases were not outliers. A report on 1,500 CPD officers compiled by a former epidemiologist and obtained by WBEZ showed that Evans garnered more excessive force complaints than any other officer between 1988 and 2008.
In a sworn deposition taken in 2015, Evans displayed a cavalier attitude toward CPD procedures, declaring that “department orders are a guideline and nothing more.”
Johnson knew Evans long before he moved him to the tactical team. Early in their careers, the two served together as patrolmen in the 6th District. Both were also among the small number of black officers in the CPD’s upper ranks. Johnson explained his support for Evans in a 2017 deposition: “He had a reputation as being a good aggressive officer.”
Evans’s approach to policing soon triggered a backlash, and allegations of excessive force began to swirl around his tactical team as a cadre of younger officers with lengthy complaint records joined the squad. Among the new additions was Jason Landrum, who had shot three people in five years, including a man he shot in the stomach after his partner handcuffed him to a fence.
The new officers appear to have had a major impact on the squad. By mid-2011, toward the end of Johnson’s tenure as commander, officers serving on his tactical team had received an average of seven complaints each over the previous three years, a 70 percent increase from when he took over the district and four times that of the average CPD officer.
Graphic: Moiz Syed/The Intercept
A string of lawsuits accompanied the complaints. The city paid a settlement of nearly $500,000 after allegations that a 6th District officer shoved a man down a flight of stairs — fracturing his leg — and a tactical officer shot his dog. A nearly $41,000 settlement followed allegations that tactical officers handcuffed a man with a heart condition and then tased him twice, and a $60,000 settlement came after a man alleged that tactical officers illegally searched him and then harassed him after he filed a complaint. A woman named Rita King alleged that Evans fractured her nose inside the 6th District headquarters, repeatedly telling her, “I’m going to push your nose through your brain.” The city of Chicago paid King $100,000 to settle her case.
Beyond the lawsuits, Johnson reviewed many of the formal complaints in his capacity as commander. In one case, a woman accused Evans of unjustly shooting her dog. Investigators cleared Evans despite acknowledging that all five non-police witnesses had provided accounts that “drastically contradict” Evans’s explanation of the shooting. Johnson affirmed that the shooting was justified.
The growing stream of brutality complaints and lawsuits against the tactical team reached its peak in 2010, when tactical officers were involved in three fatal shootings — all of which killed young men who were unarmed or fleeing — in just six months.
The first took place in July, when two tactical officers approached a young black motorist named William Hope Jr., who was parked outside of a Popeyes around lunchtime. According to the officers, Hope responded by trying to run over one of the officers with his car. The officer’s partner then fired four shots, fatally wounding the 24-year-old.
A lawsuit brought by Hope’s family presented a starkly different account. On the witness stand, one of the officers admitted that Hope’s car had been moving at three miles per hour, matching eyewitnesses who claimed that Hope presented no danger to the officers. Ultimately, the jury ruled that the shooting was unjustified and awarded Hope’s family over $4.5 million. The verdict also ordered the officers to present the case to police recruits as an example of bad policing.
Less than two months later, officers took off in pursuit of a motorist named Garfield King. King had fled a routine traffic stop, worried that officers would find his illegal gun. The multi-car pursuit ended in a collision between King’s vehicle and a police car. King’s car caught fire, and two officers suffered fractured bones. Seven officers, including three tactical officers and two 6th District patrolmen, then opened fire, killing King and wounding his girlfriend, one of three unarmed passengers who had been trying to convince King to surrender. She later told investigators that King never tried to use the gun. The officers who chased King and fired 30 shots into his car knew only that he had fled a traffic stop.
A photograph of Garfield King’s car. After a high-speed chase, his car collided with an unmarked police vehicle. Officers claimed that he then tried to hit officers with his car. Seven officers fired 30 shots at King, killing him and wounding his unarmed girlfriend who had been trying to convince King to surrender.
Photo: Chicago Police Department
Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, ruled the shooting justified, but the department’s policy at the time stated that “when confronted with an oncoming vehicle and that vehicle is the only force used against them, sworn members will move out of the vehicle’s path.” The Department of Justice later raised concerns about shootings of motorists as well, pointing out that “shooting at a moving vehicle is inherently dangerous and almost always counterproductive.”
Troubling details also emerged about the third tactical team shooting, when tactical officer Tracey Williams shot and killed Ontario Billups in December 2010. Williams claimed that Billups menaced her with a dark object, possibly a handgun. Investigators eventually confirmed that Billups was unarmed. The dark object Williams saw was likely a plastic bag of marijuana. The city paid Billups’s family $500,000 to avoid a trial.
Reached by phone, Glenn Evans said that both his lawyer and the CPD superintendent’s office, “told me not to speak, but I will until they give me a direct order not to.” Evans proceeded to defend his officers, highlighting a 2010 case in which a suspect opened fire on tactical officers, including Evans. Officers resolved the situation peacefully. “We were able to talk it out. … We didn’t beat anyone up, we didn’t torture anyone, we didn’t abuse anyone.”
Evans said that the officers involved in the three fatal shootings in 2010 were “exceptional officers, exceptionally decorated … extremely good officers.” When asked about the names of the three men killed by his officers — Ontario Billups, William Hope Jr., and Garfield King — Evans said, “I don’t even know who these guys are.”
Chicago Police officers serving on the 6th District Tactical Team in May 2011. Graphic: Invisible Institute
The killings of Billups, Hope, and King within a six-month period by members of a single squad of 45 officers was highly unusual. During the second half of 2010, the other members of the CPD — nearly 13,000 officers — killed just four people. “If [a tactical squad] has more of these incidents compared with other tactical squads, there’s an obvious issue there related to supervision,” said Walker, the policing expert.
Commanders are generally “very aware” of misconduct investigations involving their officers and have wide authority over their tactical teams, said Robert Lombardo, a 30-year CPD veteran who later served as deputy chief of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department and is now a criminal justice professor at Loyola University Chicago. “If they have a personal concern, as they’re called, you put them back in uniform. You take them off the TACT team,” he said. “They have no right to the TACT team, it’s not in the contract. You serve at the pleasure of the commander, so if he doesn’t like the way you’re working, you go back in uniform and he puts someone else there.”
Following the fatal shootings, none of the officers were moved off the squad or off the street. Nor was Evans, their supervisor, reassigned, choices that had serious consequences. Over the next five years, the seven 6th District officers who fired shots in the three fatal shootings would open fire another eight times — nearly 30 times the CPD average. Those subsequent shootings, many in the 6th District, wounded four people and left 19-year-old Niko Husband dead.
The officer who shot Husband was Marco Proano, a non-tactical officer who had also fired shots in the killing of Garfield King. Proano was one of a number of regular patrol officers accused of serious misconduct while serving under Eddie Johnson.
Proano killed Husband outside a South Side dance hall in July 2011. Officers claimed that the teenager was holding a young woman hostage and brandishing a gun. The same woman testified in court that she was a childhood friend of Husband’s and that the two had been hugging when the officers approached. She also denied that her friend had a gun. A jury awarded Husband’s family $3.5 million after a trial in which the family’s lawyer alleged that Proano and two other officers had planted a gun on Husband’s body after killing him. Under Johnson, Proano was not punished. The CPD instead awarded him a medal for valor for the shooting.
Former Chicago police Officer Marco Proano leaves the federal building in Chicago on Aug. 28, 2017.
Photo: Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune via AP
In November 2017, a federal jury convicted Proano on charges of using excessive force for firing multiple shots into a car full of unarmed black teenagers, injuring two, while on patrol in the 6th District in 2013, after Johnson had left his role as commander. Charges against Proano came after a retiring judge in a criminal case involving one of the teenagers leaked video of him shooting into the car to the Chicago Reporter, calling Proano’s actions one of the worst things he’d seen in over 30 years as a judge and public defender. He told the Reporter that “I’ve seen lots of gruesome, grisly crimes, but this is disturbing on a whole different level.”
Proano’s shooting of Husband was one of four controversial shootings by non-tactical officers working in the 6th District under Johnson. These cases included two other fatal shootings in which either the autopsy or eyewitnesses raised questions about the police account. The city also paid a man $100,000 after he claimed that two 6th District officers shot him and then planted a gun on him.
Abuses by 6th District officers outside the tactical team during Johnson’s time as commander also led to major misconduct payments and criminal cases. A jury awarded $750,000 to a woman beaten by a 6th District officer who accused the 20-year-old of violating curfew. An Internal Affairs investigation also found that 6th District officers, including a lieutenant, covered for a drunk officer named Richard Bolling — the son of a retired CPD commander — after he struck and killed a 13-year-old out riding his bike. One unidentified officer promised Bolling that “I’m gonna try to help you out as much as possible.” Sixth District officers on the scene waited over two hours to administer a sobriety test. Bolling was eventually sentenced to three years in prison.
The shootings and other misconduct allegations cost taxpayers millions. The Invisible Institute analyzed unit assignment data and a Chicago Reporter database that tracks all police misconduct payments from 2011 through 2016. Johnson’s 6th District was just one of 25 police districts but accounted for roughly $8 million, fully one-sixth of the entire CPD’s misconduct payments during his time as commander. Since the end of 2016, Chicago has paid at least another $3.7 million related to misconduct by 6th District officers during Johnson’s time as commander.
Over Johnson’s tenure, dozens of officers serving on the tactical team were involved in lawsuits that led to settlements totaling $6 million. That total accounted for a huge share of overall CPD misconduct payments, costing the city about $130,000 for each of the team’s roughly 45 officers — nearly 40 times the average for all other CPD officers.
Walker, the University of Nebraska police accountability expert, argues that Johnson’s handling of misconduct as a commander has a strong bearing on his role as superintendent. “It’s another reason why he’s probably not qualified for his current job,” he said. “He just doesn’t think in terms of these kind of problems or see them as problems and take corrective action. … He’s just not qualified to be the chief executive of a police department, especially one as large and complex as Chicago.”
Photo: Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images
Johnson left the 6th District in August 2011, and from 2012 to 2014, he served as deputy chief of patrol for Area Central, directly supervising nine district commanders.
Johnson’s time as a deputy chief followed a similar pattern as his tenure as commander. He was credited with major reductions in gun crime and murders in 2013 (though only after a spike in 2012), while continuing to sign off on cases like the shooting of 17-year-old Christian Green. As the on-call incident commander in that shooting, Johnson took aside the four officers who witnessed the shooting and interviewed them one by one. The officers all gave Johnson similar accounts: Green had turned around and pointed a gun at pursuing officers, prompting one to return fire. Johnson also conferred with detectives on the scene. He did not speak with any civilian witnesses, he said in a deposition.
Security cameras captured images of Green running from the police and carrying a gun. At one point, Green tried to throw the weapon in a trash can, but it bounced out. Green hurried back to collect it before sprinting off again. Green and his police pursuers then moved out of the cameras’ view. Moments later, he was dead.
One of the pursuing officers had fired 11 shots at the teenager. An eyewitness later testified that the officer stood over Green’s body and shouted, “Motherfucker! You wanna run? Huh? Huh? … You see how fucking far you got?” The same witness said that Green was running away and not facing the officer when he opened fire. Green’s gun was found in an abandoned lot, 75 feet from his body.
Johnson approved the officers’ use of force. While on the scene, he also gave a walkthrough to investigators from IPRA, telling them that Green had been shot in the chest when he turned to point his gun at officers. An autopsy would later reveal that Green had been shot in the back.
Photo: Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images
In 2017, a jury found that the officer who killed Green had shot without cause and awarded his family $350,000. After the trial, the family’s attorney criticized the investigation overseen by Johnson, declaring that it “fell short on every level.”
Prior to the trial, Johnson testified in a deposition that he did not know that the shooter had previously belonged to a notorious crew led by Sgt. Ronald Watts. Just a year before Green’s shooting, Watts and his partner had been arrested for stealing money from an FBI drug informant. After Watts’s arrest, some questioned why the rest of his team — which included three of the four officers Johnson interviewed — remained on the street. Years later, as superintendent, Johnson placed all three on desk duty after Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office found serious problems with over a dozen cases tied to Watts’s team, leading to the largest mass exoneration in Cook County history.
Aggressive officers like Glenn Evans also continued to receive Johnson’s support, even as allegations of excessive force followed him as he entered the highest ranks of the CPD. Evans took charge of the 3rd District in August 2012, becoming one of the nine district commanders who reported directly to Johnson. Former CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy said in a deposition obtained by WBEZ that he likely promoted Evans based on a recommendation from Johnson, though Johnson has disputed this.
Evans ultimately garnered nine complaints in two years as a commander, an exceptional amount for a senior official, who tend to receive far fewer complaints than street-level officers. Only 23 of Chicago’s roughly 13,000 officers received more complaints. One of the complaints against Evans concerned a man named Ricky Williams, who claimed that in 2013, Evans cornered him in an abandoned building and shoved his gun down his throat. Johnson directly supervised Evans at the time, but he and McCarthy took no action — even when IPRA recommended Evans be stripped of police powers after finding Williams’s DNA on his gun.
Evans was eventually indicted over the Williams incident in the summer of 2014. After a controversial acquittal the next year, the department demoted him to lieutenant. During Evans’s brief time as a commander, his subordinates killed two teenagers in troubling circumstances. Investigators ruled one shooting unjustified — though Chicago’s Police Board recently overturned their ruling — and recently reopened an investigation of the second after finding video contradicting officer accounts from the scene. The first shooting — a 15-year-old named Dakota Bright shot in the back of the head — took place while Evans reported directly to Johnson and led to a $925,000 settlement paid to Bright’s family.
“CPD standard operating procedure is, and has been for years, when an officer is accused of misconduct, when an officer uses force, it’s to justify it and circle the wagons and get the officer’s back,” said civil rights attorney Craig Futterman. “You don’t even need a conspiracy, it’s just standard operating procedures, and [Eddie Johnson] has been a part of that for 30 years.”
In response to a detailed list of questions for this article, Johnson provided the following statement:
During my entire career with the Chicago Police Department I have and will always approach every decision, action and investigation with the highest level of integrity and thoughtful deliberation of available facts and evidence. The trust between police and the community is paramount to everything we do and it is vitally important to me as the Police Superintendent and as a lifelong resident of Chicago. Since becoming Superintendent, I implemented a comprehensive reform agenda to solidify CPD’s path toward becoming a model agency that all of Chicago could be proud of. I support the federal consent decree and have embraced and advocated for investments into our police officers including, better training, support and mentoring. I also reinvigorated our community policing philosophy because CPD is only as strong as the community’s faith in our officers and we cannot create a safer Chicago without standing shoulder to shoulder with the people that live and work here.
All of the use of force incidents you reference have gone through an independent use of force investigation, a review by state or federal prosecutorial agency and independent deliberation by the then-Superintendent and Chicago Police Board. All of the answers to your inquiries can be found in the publicly available case records and court transcripts for those incidents.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Johnson took charge of the CPD in 2016, the same year Chicago endured a massive increase in homicides, with the murder rate jumping nearly 60 percent. Though homicides declined in 2017, they remained well above historic levels. Other types of crime also rose, with reported carjackings more than doubling between 2015 and 2017.
In the first months of his tenure, Johnson moved to implement some of the mayor’s key reform promises, greatly expanding the use of body cameras and supplying Tasers to more officers. The department rewrote its use of force rules, which reform advocates largely praised. Johnson also responded to some police shootings more forcefully than his predecessors, immediately suspending officers in a handful of officer-involved shootings, including a case in which an officer killed an unarmed teenager named Paul O’Neal.
But in the context of rising violence, calls to let the police return to their old ways are growing louder. Addressing the possibility of court oversight of the CPD, Fraternal Order of Police President Kevin Graham last year declared, “Already facing an explosion of crime because the police have been so handcuffed from doing their job by the intense anti-police movement in the city, this consent decree will only handcuff the police even further.”
Former CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy, now running for mayor, has voiced similar sentiments, denouncing the DOJ report and insisting that “the problem in Chicago is not the police.”
Faced with pressure from within his own ranks, Johnson has returned to a familiar approach to police shootings. He defended Officer Robert Rialmo, who shot and killed Quintonio LeGrier, a college student in the midst of an emotional disturbance, and Bettie Jones, a 55-year-old bystander, sparking pushback from several African-American aldermen. Johnson’s move to prevent Rialmo’s firing came after he also sought to block the firing of the officer who shot and killed 15-year-old Dakota Bright.
Two and a half years into Johnson’s appointment, Chicago’s police department is far from reformed. Three separate lawsuits filed last year — one by a broad civil rights coalition, including the Chicago branches of Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and the Urban League, represented by civil rights attorneys Craig Futterman and Sheila Bedi; one from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and community groups such as the Community Renewal Society; and one from Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office — all insisted that only court-overseen reforms will truly change the department. (Andrew Fan provided pro bono data analysis of a CPD use of force database to the first coalition suing the CPD).
The Madigan lawsuit pushed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to begin negotiations to accept formal court oversight of police reforms in Chicago. In July, Madigan and Emanuel announced a 225-page draft consent decree that outlines sweeping changes that the department must complete in the coming years.
In early September, Emanuel’s announcement that he would not run for re-election jolted the mayoral race, prompting many of Chicago’s most prominent politicians to consider jumping into the contest. Many observers pointed to the approaching trial of Jason Van Dyke, the officer who killed Laquan McDonald, and the likelihood of renewed public attention toward Emanuel’s record on police misconduct as a key factor in his decision to step down.
Still, Emanuel will remain in office for over six months, during which time the city will finalize and begin to implement its historic court-ordered reforms. Emanuel’s unwillingness to embrace police reform is now as important as ever, with the mayor in a position of power but unconstrained by the threat of an election. Despite his repeated reform promises, in the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Emanuel sought to strike a deal with then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions that would have staved off court oversight of the CPD. Even after public pressure ended that effort, Emanuel spoke openly of his fear that reform could worsen the city’s crime rate, worrying that “other cities have done this to the police department and it’s come at the expense of public safety.”
The support of Emanuel and Johnson is crucial even with a formal consent decree. Chiraag Bains, a former DOJ attorney who worked on the federal investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department, argues that “the orientation of the political leadership and the leadership of the police department are key to whether the reform process is successful or not.”
Futterman echoed Bains’s point, but lamented that “sadly under this administration, I’m seeing the antithesis of that. A failure to own [the problem] and a lack of genuine commitment to address the realities that brought the DOJ to Chicago in the first place.”
Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times via Redux
The problems posed by Eddie Johnson’s leadership extend far beyond the mayor who appointed him. When Emanuel appointed Johnson in early 2016, his hold on the mayor’s office was in jeopardy. After the release of the Laquan McDonald video, one poll showed that a majority of Chicago voters wanted him to resign. The selection process was a rare opportunity for Chicago’s City Council and the media to check the mayor during a moment of weakness, especially after the mayor picked an insider to run the police department even as he promised Chicago “nothing less than complete and total reform of the system.”
Rather than digging into Johnson’s record, political leaders and media outlets, in a deeply familiar Chicago process, instead fixated on Johnson’s political ties and loyalties. A Chicago Tribune editorial congratulated Emanuel on the politics of the pick, noting that “the mayor scored the support of the Black and Latino caucuses and the Fraternal Order of Police, a rare trifecta.”
None of the city’s major news outlets connected Johnson to his role in approving Rekia Boyd’s killing, despite devoting major coverage to Dante Servin’s trial less than a year prior. Chicago media also failed to report on Johnson’s record as a senior CPD leader, including the troubling pattern of killings hanging over his time as commander of the 6th District. Chicago’s aldermen, fresh from helping to push out McCarthy for his role in the McDonald shooting, approved Johnson by a vote of 50-0.
Chicago will soon decide on new leadership for the city and its police. With Emanuel’s retirement, voters have a wide range of options, including Garry McCarthy, Bill Daley — brother and son of former Chicago mayors — and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, a supporter of police reform who once condemned McCarthy as a “racist bully boy.” With neither an incumbent nor an obvious frontrunner, the city faces perhaps its most wide-open mayoral contest since 1983.
Six years after Rekia Boyd’s killing jolted Chicago activists and three years after video of Laquan McDonald’s shooting channeled activist anger into a citywide movement, Chicagoans face a momentous choice on police reform.
How to fix Chicago’s police is a longstanding and difficult question, but this time the decision lies not in the hands of a powerful mayor, but with the people of Chicago.
This story will appear on the cover of next week’s issue of South Side Weekly, a nonprofit newspaper based on Chicago’s South Side.
Roman Rivera contributed data analysis.
The post Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s Long Record of Justifying Police Misconduct and Shootings appeared first on The Intercept.
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Donald Trump is waging a political counterinsurgency. This week on Intercepted: Columbia University professor Bernard Harcourt lays out the multidecade history of paramilitarized politics in the U.S., how the tactics of the war on terror have come back to American soil, and why no one talks about drone strikes anymore. Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore talks about his recent visit from the FBI in connection to the pipe bomb packages and who he thinks should run against Trump in 2020. Journalist and lawyer Josie Duffy Rice analyzes the battle over vote counts in Florida and Georgia, the Republican campaign to suppress black voters, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and why she isn’t protesting the firing of Jeff Sessions. Jeremy Scahill explains why Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer need to go away.
Transcript coming soon.
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Yutu: Or, what we weren’t following: A super typhoon that destroyed the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands several weeks ago was a relative blip in U.S. media coverage. Tens of thousands of Americans were affected—what happened while few eyes were turned to the region?
Deal or No Deal: The original referendum on Brexit took place more than two years ago. Since then, the actual process of leaving has been throttled by impasses, infighting, indecision, and resignations. Britain is poised to leave the European Union in fewer than 140 days. What does the embattled U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May now need to do to pass her plan for Britain’s life after the EU? And what will hold up the deal before the finish line?
Private Practice: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West reportedly hired private firefighters to help save their home and neighborhood as wildfires continue to burn across swaths of California. Celebrities aside, the incident has spotlighted the American system of privatized firefighting operations. Another often forgotten contribution to firefighting efforts: prison inmates.
Snapshot
The writer and critic Karina Longworth injects new life into the stories of classic cinema, and the myths and stars of Old Hollywood, through her podcast, You Must Remember This, introducing a new generation to forgotten figures—including many women whose talents had been overshadowed in most retellings of the history of the entertainment industry. Sophie Gilbert profiles Longworth and explores how she came to have such a cult following. (Image collage by The Atlantic)Evening ReadPresident Donald Trump’s appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general goes against the U.S. Constitution, argues John Yoo, who was deputy assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and has been known for his expansive view of presidential powers:
Whitaker’s appointment must still conform to a higher law: the Constitution. As the Supreme Court observed as recently as this year, Article II provides the exclusive method for the appointment of “Officers of the United States.” The president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” The appointments clause further allows that “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.”
Read the rest of Yoo’s reasoning.
What Do You Know … About Science, Technology, and Health?1. Every year, American cities and states spend upwards of how many billion dollars in tax breaks and cash grants to encourage companies to move among states?
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2. When Jeff Sessions was forced to resign last week, stock prices for businesses in which industry went up?
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3. Where did the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive fire in California state history, get its name?
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Answers: 90 / cannabis / Where the fire started: On Camp Creek Road
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Today in 5 LinesHouse Republicans elected Representative Kevin McCarthy as minority leader. Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer were each reelected to their respective positions as Senate majority leader and minority leader. House Democrats will vote for Speaker of the House later this month.
The Trump administration defended its choice to revoke CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass in a court filing, asserting that it has “broad discretion” to limit reporter access to the White House.
The Justice Department issued a memo stating that the appointment of Matt Whitaker as acting attorney general is constitutional. President Donald Trump chose Whitaker to replace Jeff Sessions last week.
Democrat Andy Kim officially defeated Republican Representative Tom MacArthur in New Jersey’s third district. Democrats have brought their House gains to a net total of 34 seats, and that number could increase, since several more races are undecided.
Trump announced his support for The First Step Act, a criminal-justice reform bill that has already passed the House.
Today on The AtlanticMeet Peter Navarro: He’s the madman behind President Trump’s “madman theory” approach to trade policy, and one of the most important generals in the U.S.’s trade war with China. (Annie Lowrey)
Who Booted Scott Walker?: Early data shows that increased black and Latino voter turnout might have helped defeat Scott Walker in last week’s midterm elections. (Vann R. Newkirk II)
Part of a Broader Pattern: On October 25, a super typhoon struck the Northern Mariana Islands and left thousands homeless. U.S. media outlets barely covered it. (Alia Wong and Lenika Cruz)
Not All White Women: After the midterms, many progressives held white women responsible for several high-profile Democratic losses. But the actual results were more nuanced, argues Conor Friedersdorf.
Still Waiting: A dramatic intervention by the Vatican at this week’s conference of American Catholic bishops highlighted the difference between Rome and the United States on how to address the Church’s ongoing sex-abuse crisis. (Olivia Paschal)
Who’s Responsible?: Americans are too quick to place moral blame for political violence on public figures, argues David French: “To hold anyone morally responsible for acts he did not condone, encourage, or seek...is to risk becoming what we hate.”
Snapshot
Jason Coffman, right, father of Cody Coffman, is comforted by Anthony Ganczewski at a funeral service for his son in Camarillo, California. Cody was among a dozen people killed in last week’s shooting at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, California. (Jae C. Hong / AP)What We’re ReadingThe Vaporware Presidency: More than any president before him, Trump is an expert in saying he’ll do things that never end up happening. (Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard)
Eyes on Miami-Dade: While an overall strong showing for Democrats, the midterms reveal several of the party’s weak spots going into 2020. (Nate Cohn, The New York Times)
A Conscious Uncoupling: Heading into 2018, the new Congress is more divided than ever. Is it time to split up the states? (Sasha Issenberg, New York)
An Activist Lineage: You can’t understand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez without understanding the long history of Latino organizing in New York, writes Pedro Regalado. (The Washington Post)
VisualizedWhat’s Left?: These are the races that have yet to be called, over a week after the midterm elections. (Emily Stewart, Vox)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
Old habits die hard.
As House Republicans settle into their new status in the minority—a post in which members typically unify to obstruct policy proposals from the majority—intraparty tensions remain as strong as ever, and could spell trouble for the GOP’s efforts to reclaim the chamber sooner rather than later.
In a conference-wide election on Wednesday, Republicans anointed their leaders for the 116th Congress. Outgoing Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy won minority leader with 159 votes, besting House Freedom Caucus co-founder Jim Jordan, who won 43. Rounding out the party’s top three positions, Republicans also elected Steve Scalise as minority whip and Liz Cheney as conference chair, a position once held by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“We serve in a divided government, in a divided country,” McCarthy told reporters following his election. “Our goal is to unite us back together again.”
McCarthy might have added that he serves not just in a divided government and country, but also in a divided party. In the last week, many of the ideological factions that have stymied House Republicans’ legislative efforts in recent years also threatened to complicate McCarthy’s rise. The California Republican had long been the favorite to lead the conference. Even so, conservative members and outside groups spent their post-midterm days attempting to gin up support for his challenger, Jordan, a perpetual gadfly of House Republican leadership. And, as Politico first reported on Wednesday, McCarthy faced overtures from President Trump himself to help Jordan acquire a prominent committee post following his expected failed bid for minority leader.
Nevermind that McCarthy has little say in committee leadership, something determined by the committee members themselves. The implication of Trump’s move was clear: Even in the minority, the lower chamber’s most conservative members will still attempt to exert whatever influence they have left over their leadership. It’s a sign that House Republicans could struggle even in the most basic tasks of unifying against the Democrats’ legislative agenda. And as Democrats consider opening investigations into the executive branch, that could mean trouble not only for Trump, but for the GOP’s attempts to reclaim the majority in the speedy timeframe McCarthy said he hopes for.
A telling sign that conservatives still intend to make life difficult for leadership came on Tuesday night, when candidates gathered to make their pitches to the conference. According to two sources in the room, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the gathering, conservatives lobbed a round of hostile questions at McCarthy after he laid out his vision for the next year. Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, the sources said, accused McCarthy of “spending money to promote himself over the team” ahead of the midterm elections. Gohmert cited ads that aired on conservative radio promoting McCarthy’s Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act, largely seen, among even Republicans, as a show bill to fund Trump’s border wall. The sources said Gohmert criticized McCarthy for “talking up” the wall even as Republicans had failed for two years to adequately fund it.
That grudge will likely carry into the lame-duck session over the next two months, where in their last days in the majority, Republicans will have to cobble together a funding bill in order to avoid a government shutdown. During a conference meeting on Wednesday morning, according to two sources in the room who asked not to be named because of the private nature of the meeting, a handful of conservative members echoed Gohmert’s remarks from the night before, arguing it was incumbent upon leadership to take wall funding and other immigration measures seriously while they still have the chance.
In other words, McCarthy will round out his time as majority leader engaging in the same battles he’s fought for two years now: attempting to placate Trump and his allies’ desire for aggressive action on immigration, while putting together a funding bill that can pass muster with the rest of his conference. He’ll avoid those responsibilities as minority leader once the next Congress begins. But, as Gohmert indicated, he may still enjoy the ire of conservatives who believe leadership lost them meaningful progress on immigration—and control of the House altogether.
Following the leadership elections on Wednesday, McCarthy acknowledged his party’s crushing defeat to reporters. He noted that Republicans had lost ground in suburban areas, and suffered for it in the midterms.
But neither he nor any other Republican leader mentioned Trump by name, or engaged in good faith with the question of just why the party had, for example, lost ground in the suburbs. Instead, McCarthy and Scalise explained their loss by stressing that “history was working against [them],” citing the fact that the president’s party usually loses control of one or both chambers of Congress in the first midterm election after he or she takes office.
Even if GOP leadership can expect intraparty scuffles in the months to come, they made clear that Democrats would surely face the same. Jason Smith, the newly elected conference secretary, alluded to the youth crisis, of sorts, roiling the soon-to-be majority. “This team right here, the average age of all of us combined is 52 years old,” he said. “The average age of the top three leading candidates on the other side is 78 years old.” Republicans may not have maintained control of the chamber, Smith seemed to suggest, but they had fresh faces ready to take over the next time they do.
And in an apparent acknowledgement of reports of party fissure, McCarthy told reporters after his victory that he hoped the early date of their leadership elections would signal Republican unity. “It’s healthy to have a debate,” McCarthy said. “I want to thank Jim Jordan for running.”
With all the problems plaguing America today, it can be difficult to prioritize which to address. But just because a problem may not be headline-worthy doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem.
Take gas-powered leaf blowers, for example.
In a new Atlantic Argument, writer James Fallows advocates for phasing out the machines—which emit noise up to a dangerous 112 decibels—in favor of quieter and safer battery-powered leaf blowers.
This shift, says Fallows, “has community interest, worker interest, public health, and technological momentum on its side. To really ‘make America great again,’ we need to ban gas-powered leaf blowers.”
As the mail-in votes are counted and the recounts finished, the Democratic advantage in the 2018 elections grows and grows.
In the House, the biggest swing to the Democrats since Watergate on the strength of a 7 percent advantage in total votes cast. In the Senate, Republican gains capped at perhaps two instead of the election-night projection of four. Large pickups in state legislatures, in ways that offer Democrats hope of halting or even reversing the gerrymandering and voter suppression imposed after 2010.In light of these changes, should we revisit immediate post-election analysis that struck a more muted note? I wrote then:
The midterm elections delivered a less than fully satisfying result for Democratic voters, but an ideal outcome for the Democratic Party.
For Democrats, Election Night must have felt like the world’s slowest championship baseball game. Runner on base; runner on base; strike out; runner on base; run scored; fly out—and so through the night.
And I added:
Almost every candidate in whom Democrats at the national level invested emotional energy—Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, Stacey Abrams in Georgia—appears to have lost. Almost every detested Republican appears to have survived: Devin Nunes, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, even Duncan Hunter, a California Republican under indictment.
Putting the cat truly among the pigeons, I also wrote:
There is no progressive majority in America. There is no progressive plurality in America. And there certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in America.
Even as Democratic vote totals climb, those observations still seem to me to hold true. Democrats racked up their most important gains in suburbs and among better educated voters, especially women. They won seats like the seventh district of Texas, a seat won by George H.W. Bush in 1966 and held continuously by a Republican until now. The winning Democrat in the seventh, a business-oriented attorney named Lizzie Fletcher, gained her party's nomination by first winning a brutal primary against a rival fiercely backed by local activists and veterans of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Anti-Trump Republicans will swing against his party if offered an acceptable alternative—but if not, not.
[Read: House progressives celebrate a “new kind of centrism”]
Here’s the loudest warning I draw from the midterm elections in retrospect:
In past “flip the House” elections—2010, 2006, 1994—the party of the president suffered large-to-calamitous drops in vote total as compared to the previous presidential election. Democrats lost 44 percent of their vote between 2008 and 2010. Republicans dropped 42 percent between 2004 and 2006. And even in 1994—a three-way election which Bill Clinton won with the narrowest share of the vote of any president since before the First World War—the Democrats still managed to shrink a further 30 percent beneath their already underwhelming total two years before.
In 2018, however, Republicans dropped only 20 percent of their votes cast as compared to 2016. To put it another way: In the painful loss of 2018, House Republican candidates won five million votes more than in their landslide win of 2010!
The secret to the Republican raw-vote success is that 2018 proved itself a uniquely high-turnout midterm election, again apparently the highest since before the First World War.
[Read: Why young, talented Democrats flee the House]
And behind that success is this not-to-be-forgotten fact: Donald Trump’s strategy of division and provocation is working for him, and will likely continue working for him at least so long as the U.S. economy remains strong. Very possibly, it may continue working even if the economy weakens. Trump remains only a minority president, yes. But it’s not only a uniquely robust minority—but also a minority favored by the increasingly unequal American electoral map.
Even as Democratic vote totals climb, the party’s progressive heart throbs—O’Rourke, Gillum, Abrams—still appear to number among the defeated (although two of those races are not formally resolved), not because they did not boost progressive vote totals to previously unimagined heights in tough states, but because the very strength of the progressive challenge mobilized opponents to an even greater degree. “Anti-Left” still beats “anti-Trump” in Texas, Georgia, and Florida, and in many other places besides. To their credit, the Democratic Party’s unillusioned congressional leadership recognizes this truth. The outcome of the 2020 election will depend on how successfully those leaders can impress that lesson on their commentariat and presidential primary electorate.
As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.
The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.
The TMZ story feels uniquely 2018—financial capitalism, inequality, KimYe, the fires of Armageddon—and it is, for Americans at least.
“If the idea of private firefighting strikes us as an oddity nowadays, it should,” Benjamin Carp, a historian at Brooklyn College CUNY, told me. “While other societies throughout history have relied on private firefighting companies to protect the property of the upper classes ... for the most part we ... have accepted the idea that fighting fire ought to be a public good.”
In London, firefighters worked explicitly for insurance companies during the 18th and 19th centuries. “Each insurance company maintained its own fire brigade, which extinguished fires in those buildings insured by the company and, in return for a fee to be paid later, in buildings insured by other companies,” the economist Annelise Anderson has written.
[Read: The simple reason that humans can’t control wildfires]
The United States might have been expected to inherit a similar system, but instead, volunteer fire departments became the most common means of fire protection. Insurers might give bonuses or other support to these groups, but firefighting was primarily a civic rather than commercial enterprise. These fire clubs were important social institutions, often commingling middle-class and working-class men of many ethnicities in the virtuous activity of defending their city from conflagration, according to the historian Amy Greenberg’s Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City.
David Torgerson, the president of Wildfire Defense Systems, disputed any characterization of his particular company as only fighting fires on behalf of the rich. Ninety percent of the homes they protect, he said, were “average-value homes,” contracted through normal insurers, not the specialty companies who take on high-net-worth individuals’ properties. “If the fire hits Malibu, there will be a lot of high-value houses,” Torgerson told me. “If it hits somewhere in Utah, there won’t be.” In either case, he says, Wildfire Defense Systems will respond. Many types of regular old fire insurance can come with his company’s service. “We serve nearly a dozen [insurance companies],” he said. “If anybody wants to have this supplemental response capability during a fire, they need to pick an insurance company that has it.”
“There are not that many solutions in climate change,” he argued. “If we have a growing problem with wildfire—and it is statistically getting worse—why limit the ability to bring resources that the taxpayer doesn’t have to pay for and policyholders don’t have to pay for?”
* * *
In the 19th century, there were obvious reasons for residents to fight fires all together. Great calamities of many kinds wiped out huge chunks people and property within new industrial cities. The Stanford historian Richard White calls the rough-hewn communal politics of these urbanities “a democracy of defecation.” “Like feces and urine, neither fire nor disease respected property boundaries,” White wrote in The Republic for Which It Stands. “Water and sewer systems had to cover and protect everyone. Cities were like ships; they sailed, and sank, as a whole.”
And thus the first metropolitan fire services were born. Professionals, paid by the city, took over from the volunteers. They got a push from the new technological possibilities of steam engines, which reduced the need for human labor, but required more specialized technicians to operate them. Pro firefighters were needed, and municipal governments centralized the power to wield them and the funds to pay them.
This is the system that urban Americans encountered in the 20th century. The trusty fireman, the firehouse, the Dalmatians, all that. But over decades, urban firefighting benefitted from stricter building codes and strong unions that kept departments staffed up. The development of wildfire management has been quite another thing, as the Arizona State fire historian Stephen Pyne has noted.
From the early years of the 20th century until the late 1960s, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a line of fire suppression. Every fire was supposed to be put out, even in wildlands that scientists later discovered need to burn. “An estimated 54 percent of California ecosystems are fire dependent, and most of the rest are fire adapted,” Pyne wrote in California: A Fire Survey. Fuel built up and natural cycles ground to a halt. Finally, after 1968, the Forest Service reversed course and began haltingly walking back its no-fire-is-good policy.
Wildland firefighters have to manage forces that are fundamentally beyond their control. Urban firefighters, on the other hand, still want to put out every fire. Meanwhile, urban sprawl and exurbs continue to push farther and farther into rural and wild areas.
Problems arise at the wildland-urban interface, where sprawl or exurb—which has to be protected like a city—meets backcountry that evolved to burn, and should do so.
This interface is exacerbated by a troubling chasm. Since 1968, when the Forest Service started taking a more naturalistic approach to letting wildfires burn, it has also cut full-time fire staff. But the fires—driven by climate change and an expansion of that same wildland-urban interface—have grown more destructive. The Camp Fire has killed more people and destroyed more buildings than any before it. And two months before the fire started, CalFire had already exhausted $431 million of its $443 million budget fighting earlier devastating fires.
[Read: The worst is yet to come for California’s wildfires]
So, beginning in the mid-1980s and accelerating in recent years, Forest Service budget cuts and increasingly prevalent wildfires opened the door for private contractors to assume roles formerly held by government employees. In some cases, that looks like insurance companies sending crews out, a la 18th-century London, or KimYe ordering up some firefighters to tend to their manse.
But the change is broader and deeper than that, too. “The trend to privatize fire operations began seriously under the Reagan administration. It is now a full program, complete with lobbyists,” Pyne told me. “This goes far beyond private companies hired by insurance companies.”
The National Wildfire Suppression Association represents 250 private wildfire-fighting companies, who provide on-demand services to federal, state, and local governments. Budget cuts have forced privatization onto the Forest Service, as the NWSA itself explains. “The emergence of private contract resources—national and regional 20-person firefighting crews, engines, dozers, tenders and other specialized equipment, and support services such as caterers and shower/handwashing units—gives agencies the flexibility they need to increase or decrease support with the most cost effective solution,” their media backgrounder says.
The association claims that now “40 percent of the resources across the United States are provided by private wildland fire services.”
Not everyone would say this is a bad thing. The late libertarian economist Fred McChesney argued that “private, for-profit production of fire services yields lower average costs than the costs of government provision, for equivalent levels of output.”
Several libertarian economists have become fascinated with privatizing fire departments. It’s not hard to imagine why. If you could prove you don’t need the government to provide collective protection from conflagration, then what do you need government for at all?
Torgerson, the president of Wildfire Defense Systems, painted a more complex portrait of emergency response, generally. With all kinds of public perils, private companies are already frequently responsible for protection and cleanup. “If you look at HAZMAT, trains, or oil spills, that’s not a government action. Those who are responsible end up hiring private companies under the incident command,” he said. “Wildfire is just this unique kind of thing where it is a government-managed incident with government resources which hire lots of contractors.”
[Read: Power lines are burning the West]
That firefighting remains a bastion of public-goods provision might be precisely why private companies’ increasing involvement feels so controversial. “This isn’t a story of the kooky Kardashians doing things in the most publicity-friendly manner possible. It’s a story of the ramifications of economic disparity in this country. Frankly, I’m flabbergasted,” Greenberg wrote in an email. “Firefighters are consistently ranked the most beloved public servants, not just because they look good on calendars but because they treat everyone equally. Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”
Or, as one local firefighter in California summed up the case for public provisioning of fire protection to NBC earlier this year: “I could care less who owns the house, I just want to save as many as possible.”
Carp, the Brooklyn College CUNY historian, expanded on the collectivist case, drawing in other prominent examples of areas of life that have undergone or could undergo privatization. “If we allow schools, libraries, policing, and firefighting to become a two-tiered system (with one tier for the elite and another tier for everyone else),” Carp said, “then that threatens the democratic-republican ideal of everyone contributing their fair share for the greater needs of the commonwealth.”
Even in the early days of the American city, when volunteer and private fire companies were dominant, in the case of an emergency, every citizen capable of helping was expected to do so. “If we don’t fight fires together, then someday we’ll all burn together,” Carp concluded.
Victor Bailey, a historian at the University of Kansas, noted that this very ambivalence pervades American culture, arguing both sides. “In the face of devastating forest wildfires, the public services are inevitably stretched thinly. Why not add to those services by private ones?” he wrote to me. “At another level, is it not better to put any extra resources into fighting the wildfire in the best way for everyone?”
And so, even an asinine celebrity story can act like a fault, slicing deep into the bedrock of what the United States is, and exposing what different groups of Americans want it to be. It’s 2018, after all.
“Are the present examples (Kanye West et al.) the thin end of a wedge that will lead to the wealthy buying better services in all these realms: education, policing, healthcare, firefighting?” Bailey wondered. “Or are we already a long way down this path?”
According to reports issued by several market-research firms, including Forrester Research, the total number of smartphone users worldwide will reach 3 billion this year—40 percent of the human population. For many, these versatile handheld devices have become indispensable tools, providing connections to loved ones, entertainment, business applications, shopping opportunities, windows into the greater world of social media, news, history, education, and more. And of course, they can always be put to use for a quick selfie. With so many devices in so many hands now, the visual landscape has changed greatly, making it a rare event to find oneself in a group of people anywhere in the world and not see at least one of them using a phone. Collected here: a look at that smartphone landscape, and some of the stories of the phones’ owners.
LONDON—With less than 140 days left before Britain leaves the European Union, negotiators have reached a provisional Brexit deal. The agreement, which was backed by U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet on Wednesday, marks a breakthrough in often fractious talks, and could offer businesses, officials, and private citizens a sorely-needed roadmap on what life looks like for Britain outside the EU.
There is still one major hurdle for May to overcome, though: Will it pass muster with parliament? No one—not least the prime minister herself—appears certain of the answer. And if it doesn’t, what then was the point of her government rushing to get a deal past the finish line before it could guarantee political support?
The draft has already received widespread criticism from many of the lawmakers who could decide its fate in parliament. From within May’s own Conservative Party, leading Brexiteers like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have denounced the deal as “vassal-state stuff” and a “failure” that would see the U.K. beholden to European rules and regulations. At the opposite end of the party, pro-Remain lawmaker Justine Greening told a rally calling for a second Brexit referendum Tuesday night that she would not support a deal that is “second best for this country.”
Sentiment is little different elsewhere in Parliament. In the opposition, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn criticized the government’s “shambolic handling” of the negotiations, noting that “this is unlikely to be a good deal for the country.” Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon urged the government to reject a deal that “satisfies no-one and can’t command a majority” and return to the negotiating table instead. Arlene Foster, whose Democratic Unionist Party props up May’s governing majority in Westminster, signaled her party would also vote down the deal.
[Read: The small party threatening to topple Theresa May’s government]
Still, the government did have plenty of reasons for pushing to secure a deal (even if, publicly, few say they will vote for it).
One is economic. Though negotiations with the EU could technically be drawn out until the New Year, prolonging the process would force the government to step up its no-deal preparation and spending—a move that could spur additional economic uncertainty. “The longer we go with uncertainty,” Georgina Wright, a Brexit analyst at Chatham House, told me, “the more likely businesses are going to kick in their contingency planning for no deal, because they need to ensure that they can continue to trade.”
Another is leverage. Up until this point of the negotiations, Britain’s politicians—both in and out of government—had been hopelessly divided. A deal, though unlikely to overcome those divisions, could give May an upper-hand at home. “The mood, the context, the dynamics change once we have a deal,” Anand Menon, the director of the London-based U.K. in a Changing Europe think tank, told me. “Business will come out in support, the pound will rally, the Treasury will release forecasts that show” that this is a good deal, he added. “Things will look up all of a sudden,” he noted, “and that might put pressure on MPs.”
May needs at least 320 lawmakers to back her deal in a final vote for it to pass. Without a parliamentary majority or a unified party behind her, it’s estimated May can only count on as many as 235 party loyalists, as well as four to five Labour lawmakers. Those who have already pledged to vote against her deal include a group of as many as 40 Hard-Brexit Conservatives, a majority of Labour lawmakers, as well as the SNP (35 lawmakers), Liberal Democrats (12), Plaid Cymru (four), and the Greens (one).
The remaining number needed for May’s deal to pass must then come from other sources: Labour defectors, begrudging Tories who oppose May’s deal but prefer it to none, or Foster’s DUP.
The deal has already overcome one major hurdle: the cabinet. After a more than five-hour meeting at Number 10 on Wednesday night, May announced the deal received ministers’ collective backing. “This is a decisive step which enables us to move on and finalize the deal in the days ahead,” May said.
Though May appears to have avoided the high-profile cabinet resignations that have plagued these negotiations, a figure who could be key to the deal’s success in the days and weeks ahead is Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, the prime minister’s pick to usher the deal through to its final phase after Davis’s resignation over the summer. A committed Brexiteer, Raab has been among the most vocal in cabinet against a deal that risks keeping the U.K. closely aligned with the EU. If he is able to accept a provision to maintain some regulatory and customs alignment with the bloc to maintain the status quo at the Irish border, there is a chance others will too.
“If she doesn’t lose her Brexit Secretary at this crucial moment, I think that will put her in a much more powerful position facing Parliament,” Henry Newman, the director of the London-based think tank Open Europe and a former adviser to Environment Secretary Michael Gove, told me. “She already lost one. To lose a second would be very careless and very difficult for her.”
[Read: The incredible staying power of Theresa May]
“I believe that what I owe to this country is to take decisions that are in the national interest,” May said outside Number 10, “and I firmly believe, with my head and my heart, that this is a decision that is in the best interests of our entire United Kingdom.”
Ultimately, however, the fate of May’s plan won’t be decided by cabinet, but by parliamentary calculus. Conservative Brexiteer Peter Bone warned the prime minister in the House of Commons on Wednesday that if reports of the draft deal’s contents are true, the agreement could be dead on arrival. “You are not delivering the Brexit people voted for,” he said, “and today you will lose the support of many Conservative MPs and millions of voters across the country.”
If only a handful of lawmakers agree, he could soon be proven right.
In the 1960s, the astronomer Peter van de Kamp announced that he had discovered a planet orbiting Barnard’s star, one of the nearest stars to Earth at just six light-years away. It was, at the time, the first credible claim of an exoplanet—a planet outside our solar system—and it riveted the astronomy community. The thought of another planetary neighborhood so close to our own fueled science-fiction daydreams. Perhaps someday, if human beings had to abandon Earth, they could travel to the planet around Barnard’s star, a short journey on cosmic scales.
The thrill didn’t last. Although van de Kamp published a series of papers refining his findings, other astronomers couldn’t verify his measurements, and papers questioning van de Kamp’s claim began to appear in the ’70s. In 1973, astronomers discovered that the signal van de Kamp had detected was actually just a glitch in the telescope he had used to photograph the star.
Van de Kamp’s findings were abandoned, and astronomers grappled with the disheartening thought that our cosmic neighbor may not have any planets at all.
Astronomers continued to study Barnard’s star anyway, amassing hundreds of observations using instruments mounted on telescopes around the world. Now, decades after van de Kamp shocked the astronomy community with his claim, they have one of their own.
Astronomers announced Wednesday that they have detected a super-Earth—a planet about three times the mass of our own—orbiting Barnard’s star.
The research relied on 20 years’ worth of observations of the star, gleaned from seven different instruments. When they stitched all the data together, an intriguing signal emerged—the distinct mark of a planet. “It kept getting stronger as measurements accumulated,” says Ignasi Ribas, the lead researcher and scientist at the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia and the Institute of Space Sciences in Spain. “A slowly growing signal, right before our eyes.”
The planet, referred to as Barnard’s star b, completes one orbit in 233 days. The findings are published in Nature.
It’s too soon to say whether Barnard’s star b definitely exists: The research must be independently verified, by other astronomers, with more data. But some astronomers are hopeful. “I think they’ve genuinely detected a planet,” says Leslie Hebb, an astronomy professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, who was not involved in the study.
If confirmed, Barnard’s star b will become the second-closest known exoplanet to Earth, after Proxima Centauri b, which orbits one of the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system, about 4.4 light-years away.
The distance between the alleged planet and its parent star is about the same as the distance between Mercury and the sun. But these celestial bodies have little in common. Barnard’s star is much cooler and smaller than our sun, which means it doesn’t blast its planet with punishing heat. Despite its close proximity, Barnard’s star b is a frozen world, with an estimated surface temperature of -170 degrees Celsius (-274 degrees Fahrenheit). Brrr.
While astronomers have estimated the mass of Barnard’s star b, they don’t know its size or its density, properties that can provide clues about an object’s composition. Ribas says he suspects the planet is mostly made of rock; most known exoplanets with a similar mass to Barnard’s star b have turned out to be rocky, according to findings from the Kepler mission, the exoplanet-hunting telescope that ran out of fuel last month after nearly a decade of operations.
An artist’s concept of the view from Barnard’s star b (M. Kornmesser / ESO)Barnard’s star b orbits well outside of its system’s habitable zone, where temperatures would be just right for liquid water to exist on a surface. Instead, it resides near the edge of what astronomers call the “snow line,” where starlight is minimal and gases, including water vapor, become solids. Astronomers believe this type of region, which falls somewhere between Mars and Jupiter in our own system, is quite conducive for planet formation.
Ignasi and his colleagues found the exoplanet in the data using the radial-velocity method, a similar technique to the one van de Kamp used in the 1960s. Sometimes, when a planet orbits a star, the planet’s gravity tugs on the star and makes it wobble slightly. The wobbling motion produces changes in the star’s light that can be detected with instruments on Earth, even at great distances. Astronomers use this phenomenon to find planets and estimate their orbits. Van de Kamp had mistaken a technical error in his observations for this tell-tale wobble.
Small, cool stars like Barnard’s star, known as red dwarfs, are popular targets for exoplanet searches using this method. “If a planet is orbiting that star, the planet is able to tug on the star more than if the star were heavier, and so the amount of wobble of the star that you can measure is larger,” says Keivan Stassun, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the new study.
There’s a catch. Large planets close to their star are easier to spot than small planets farther out, like Barnard’s star b. “The farther they are, the smaller the perturbations, and the harder [it is] to notice them,” says Abel Méndez, the director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the Arecibo Observatory, where observations of Barnard’s star are ongoing. “That is why most of the detected exoplanets are hot worlds. I was surprised by the detection of this planet around Barnard. It was not easy to detect.”
There’s also the matter of starspots, which can flare up on a star and cause fluctuations in its brightness and mimic the wobbling signal. Barnard’s star is an old star, perhaps twice as old as the sun, so it exhibits less of this erratic stellar activity. But the researchers still had to take star spots into account. “We are 99.2 percent sure” the signal is a planet, Ribas says, “but there’s still that 0.8 percent chance that this could be due to the spots on the surface. We cannot claim this is for sure, and that’s why.”
Ribas says his team took great pains to account for starspots and the kind of technical mistake that felled van de Kamp. “These authors take a very cautious approach,” Stassun says. “They’re not claiming anything definitively here, but it is very exciting.”
Astronomers will have to wait for more research to determine whether Barnard’s star b is the real deal. They know to be skeptical—more skeptical than usual—but they’re optimistic. “It’s been a 60-year-long emotional roller coaster,” Stassun says. “And maybe we finally got it.”
The very first Neanderthal to be described in the scientific literature, back in 1856, had an old elbow injury—a fracture that had since healed, but had deformed the bone in the process. Such injuries turned out to be incredibly common. Almost every reasonably complete Neanderthal skeleton that was found during the subsequent century had at least one sign of physical trauma. Some researchers attributed these lesions to fights, others to attacks by predators. But whatever the precise reason, scientists collectively inferred that Neanderthals must have lived short, stressful, and harsh lives.
In 1995, the anthropologists Thomas Berger and Erik Trinkaus cemented that impression by showing that Neanderthal injuries were concentrated around the head and neck. Of 17 skeletons, around 30 percent had signs of cranial trauma—a far higher proportion than in either prehistoric hunter-gatherers or 20th century humans. Only one group showed a similar pattern of fractures—rodeo riders.
[Read: Neanderthals suffered a lot of traumatic injuries. So how did they live so long?]
“This is not meant to imply that Neanderthals would have met the behavioral qualifications for membership in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association,” wrote Berger and Trinkaus. Rather, it suggests that they hunted large beasts like mammoths, using spears that were more suitable for thrusting than throwing. They engaged their prey at close range, and had to cling on to wounded, thrashing targets. “Given the tendency of ungulates to react strongly to being impaled, the frequency of head and neck injuries… in the Neanderthals should not be surprising,” the duo wrote.
Even then, the duo noted that their conclusions were based on small and possibly unrepresentative samples. And after 17 years, Trinkaus doubled back on his idea completely, noting that later studies had found similar injury patterns among the Pleistocene humans who lived alongside Neanderthals. The rodeo rider hypothesis, he said, should be “further qualified if not simply retracted.” (Trinkaus declined to be interviewed for this story.)
But the hypothesis, and the broader notion of highly traumatized Neanderthals, clung to the popular consciousness as tenaciously as an imagined Neanderthal to a mammoth’s back. Some researchers have argued that their frequently broken bodies would have stopped Neanderthals from effectively passing technological skills to each other. Others have argued that they could only have survived their common wounds through medical savvy.
But in a new study—the largest of its kind—Katerina Harvati and her colleagues at the University of Tübingen have shown that head injuries really weren’t that common in Neanderthals, and certainly no more so than in contemporaneous Homo sapiens. “This implies that Neanderthal trauma does not require its own special explanations, and that risk and danger were as much a part of the life of Neanderthals as they were of our own evolutionary past,” writes Marta Mirazon Lahr from the University of Cambridge, in an accompanying editorial.
“The [high frequency of] head trauma has been used to argue that they were more violent with each other, or hunted in a more particular way,” says Harvati. “We’ve taken away one piece of evidence for that. It’s important to re-examine our assumptions about their behaviors.”
Other studies had come to similar conclusions, but none have looked at such a large number of skeletons, says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archeologist from the University of Bordeaux who studies Neanderthals. “It really [helps] to push back against the stubborn image of Neanderthals as having massively battered bodies,” she says. That image persisted partly because “it seemed to be a believable reason why we were supposedly more successful. Having clear data to disprove that, based on a really good sample size, [adds to] the growing view that there were many similarities in behavior between the two species.”
This study adds to the continuing image makeover of Neanderthals, which had long been pictured as brutish and unsophisticated. It’s now clear that they made tools, used fire, made art, buried their dead, and perhaps even had language.
By combing through previous studies, Harvati’s colleague Judith Beier compared the skulls of 114 Neanderthals and 90 modern humans, all of whom lived in Europe and Asia between 20,000 and 80,000 years ago. (The term “modern human” here refers to Homo sapiens, rather than present-day people.) She estimated that between 4 and 33 percent of Neanderthals would have had some kind of head injury, compared with 2 to 34 percent of contemporaneous modern humans.
[Read: Ancient DNA is rewriting human (and Neanderthal) history]
These ranges are large because Beier tried to account for how whether the fossils were found, how well-preserved they were, and other factors that could influence the odds of detecting old injuries at all. (“You can’t just look at the raw frequencies,” she says.) But it’s clear that earlier estimates of head injuries among 30 to 40 percent of Neanderthals represent the very extreme of what Beier thinks was likely. It’s also clear that Neanderthals and modern humans were equally likely to severely bonk their heads.
Beier found that in both groups, males were more likely to have head injuries than females—a pattern that still exists among today’s humans. Perhaps they were more likely to hunt, fight, or get into accidents. More intriguingly, the team also found that Neanderthals were more likely to accrue head trauma before the age of 30, while modern humans experienced such injuries more evenly throughout their lives. That difference is harder to explain. “We struggled with it a lot,” says Harvati.
One possibility, she says, is that Neanderthal youths were just more likely to get knocked in the head than similarly aged modern humans. It’s also possible that modern humans were better at taking care of head injuries, while Neanderthals were more likely to die early from the lingering effects of their wounds. And Wragg Sykes adds that the pattern might reflect differences in how the two groups treated their dead, which in turn would affect how likely we are to find their injured remains.
She adds that the team’s study wasn’t comprehensive. They didn’t include any children under the age of 12. They also omitted the oldest specimens from both groups, including the numerous 125,000-year-old Neanderthals from Krapina, Croatia, or the Homo sapiens skulls from Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel, which were between 80,000 and 120,000 years old. And they only looked at skull injuries, rather than those affecting other parts of the body. (“It became clear very quickly that we couldn’t look at everything,” says Harvati. “It would have taken an extraordinary amount of time, so we had to limit ourselves.”)
“As our samples grow and our research methods become more sophisticated, the gap between them and us is shrinking,” Wragg Sykes said.
This article contains spoilers for the plot of the film Burning.
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, a promising contender in the Foreign Language Film Oscar race, takes place in two South Koreas. The first is a country of leisure, where 20- and 30-somethings stroll through elegant cafés and bob to K-pop club bangers. The second faces ongoing economic turmoil. Billions of dollars constitute average household debt, millions of citizens have gone to the streets to overthrow a president cozy with conglomerate interests, and hundreds of thousands of young people remain jobless. Burning brings to focus the clash between these two countries through the life of a working-class man named Jong-su (played by Yoo Ah-in).
Jong-su is a silent, masculine type whose life is a sum of losses. His hometown of Paju is one of many small-town regions in South Korea facing overwhelming change amid urbanization. His mother abandoned the family when Jong-su was a child, returning only to request money from her unemployed son. His father faces trial for assaulting a local government official, leaving Jong-su with the neglected family house and a diminished cattle farm. Even when Jong-su wins the affection of his childhood acquaintance Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), he quickly loses this fledgling romance to a wealthy urbanite named Ben (Steven Yeun).
Throughout the film, Jong-su scuttles between Paju—a mere checkpoint away from the DMZ—and Seoul, hoping to salvage his relationship with Hae-mi and monitor the ever-mysterious Ben. With its striking juxtapositions between the rural and urban, embodied by Jong-su and Ben, Burning rejects the glamorization of Asian wealth and the notion of a universal Asian identity as recently depicted onscreen by Crazy Rich Asians. Instead, Lee concentrates his film on the extreme class inequality in South Korea, underscoring the economic desperation that destroys families, ravages homes, and consumes dispossessed individuals.
Burning takes its basic plotline of boy-meets-and-loses-girl from Haruki Murakami’s 1992 short story “Barn Burning.” In both the film and the original story, the male protagonist loses a love interest from his hometown to a Gatsby figure with a penchant for arson. When the beloved vanishes without a trace, the protagonist suspects the new boyfriend is to blame. But unlike Jong-su, Murakami’s narrator is a middle-class man who lives on the outskirts of Tokyo and remains indifferent to the world around him. He can afford to detach from material and emotional concerns; Jong-su, meanwhile, cannot. Appropriately, while Burning follows Jong-su as he crisscrosses South Korea in search of Ben and Hae-mi, Murakami’s “Barn Burning” slices away the physical details of the story’s urban setting, situating the ultimately unvexed narrator in a cosmopolitan way of life.
[Read: ‘Burning’ is a patient, spellbinding mystery thriller]
Ben shares the rootlessness of Murakami’s style when he asserts a personal philosophy of “simultaneous existence.” “I’m here and I’m there,” he explains to Jong-su in one of many patronizing conversations. “I’m in Paju, and I’m in Banpo. I’m in Seoul. At the same time, I’m in Africa.” Ben never reveals how he supports this lifestyle, but he owns a Porsche and a high-rise apartment in Seoul’s wealthiest district; he clearly isn’t hurting for money. Ben’s identification with the global elite dovetails with his Americanness, as suggested by his unusual name and accent. When he extends his hand for a casual (American) handshake and Jong-su bows, as per Korean custom, this moment further marks Ben as a flâneur who comfortably maintains distance from society.
The external setting of Burning speaks to its characters’ hidden biographies. Ben’s nonchalance indicates the control afforded by his wealth. His dissociative coldness maps onto his immaculate Gangnam apartment. Jong-su’s impassivity, on the other hand, is a defense mechanism that holds at bay familial drama, financial woes, and heartbreak. His barely concealed anxiety manifests in his family’s farmhouse, the rooms of which overflow with dirty dishes, instant ramen containers, and old photographs that conjure jarring memories.
It is on Jong-su’s turf, during Ben and Hae-mi’s visit to Paju, that the two men hold a conversation that develops into a tit-for-tat showdown. While Hae-mi is asleep, Jong-su reveals that he hates his abusive father, who had once forced him to set his mother’s belongings ablaze. Ben offers no words of condolences. Instead, he casually boasts about being a serial arsonist. The real reason for his visit is not to see Hae-mi’s hometown, as she believes, but to “scout” another greenhouse for burning. Ben explains that he never gets caught because “Korean police don’t pay attention to those sorts of things.” The nature of these secrets emphasizes just how different the men’s worlds are: Jong-su is trapped by trauma, while Ben wreaks havoc without consequence. This disparity is reflected in other scenes, too: We see Ben smoking marijuana (a highly banned substance in South Korea) and speeding in his Porsche. Yet, it is Jong-su who is stared down by two Seoul policemen for simply loitering in his pickup truck.
Jong-su’s paternal angst is a significant detail that connects back to the inspiration for Murakami’s short story, William Faulkner’s 1939 “Barn Burning.” Set in the stratified American South of the 1890s, the story follows a poor white boy who must decide where his loyalties lie—with his abusive arsonist father, or with an indifferent law. But if Jong-su at first appears as the dutiful, law-abiding son in contrast to the previous man of the house, everything changes after his final moments with Hae-mi. When Hae-mi disconnects her phone, then vanishes without a trace, Jong-su suspects Ben is to blame, yet lacks enough evidence. Unlike Faulkner’s protagonist, Jong-su ultimately decides to take justice in his own hands and begins stalking Ben.
The devolution of psychological obsession into a cat-and-mouse hunt allows for a remarkable cinematic revision of Murakami’s aesthetic of placelessness. Lee’s camera follows Jong-su and Ben as they snake through the well-paved streets of glittering Seoul which, by day’s end, transform into the dirt paths that cut through Paju’s hills. These lengthy takes play out the irreconcilable distance between urban wealth and rural dispossession, conjuring a vastness that speaks not to endless possibility, nor to Ben’s “simultaneous existence”—but rather, to Jong-su’s all-consuming despair.
The tragedy of Burning is that luxuries of imagination are reserved, first and foremost, for wealthy men. When asked about his career, Ben tells Jong-su, “Even if I said it, you wouldn’t understand. To put it simply, I ‘play.’” Lee establishes the irony: Ben can spin lies and blithely commit crimes while Hae-mi and Jong-su, by the film’s end, must abandon their dreams of turning their own innocuous artistic interests into careers. At the start of the movie, Hae-mi explains to Jong-su, over soju and beer at a pojangmacha, that she has been taking pantomime classes. She goes silent, gulps air, and peels imaginary fruit, explaining to a puzzled Jong-su, “Whenever I feel like eating, I can always eat a clementine.” While she admits that not everyone can be an actor, pantomime offers a fantastical abundance of resources—endless clementines for Hae-mi, an outlet for financial and social escape.
Though Hae-mi is a captivating storyteller and tenacious pantomime, Ben and his snooty friends scorn her earnest attempts at living out her creative dreams. On the other hand, when Jong-su discloses that he’s a writer, they interpret this aspect of his identity as some index of social capital. Some film reviewers have noted that Jong-su is only a writer by name; there’s no evidence to the contrary, as he spends only a fraction of screen time at a keyboard. Yet, Jong-su’s status as a writer is crucial to his character. When Ben suggests Jong-su write a story about Ben’s life, and when a lawyer advises Jong-su to write a novel about his father, Jong-su rejects these advances. Instead, he writes on his own terms, feverishly drafting a petition in a last-ditch attempt to rescue his father from jail.
Jong-su’s act of writing suggests that the burden of protecting a home from political and economic change ultimately supersedes his aspiration to use writing as an act of imagination. Even as he lacks the stability, resources, and connections to turn his novel-writing fantasy into reality, the film, as a work of expression and documentation, picks up where he leaves off. Like the directors Wong Kar-Wai and Edward Yang, who have trained an impressionistic eye on politically tumultuous Hong Kong in the 1960s or post-industrial Taiwan of the 1980s, respectively, Lee (a former novelist) applies a similarly patient, artistic gaze that takes in extreme class stratifications in present-day South Korea.
By the end of the film, Jong-su has sold his family’s last calf. His petition fails to rescue his father. But if Jong-su has forfeited his livelihood and lost the relationships most familiar to him, Hae-mi’s sense of shelter and stability is even more fraught, in large part because Hae-mi is a woman. She is no Rachel Chu, who, in Crazy Rich Asians, can ultimately maintain a loving relationship with her immigrant mother, keep her tenured professorship in New York, and marry into Singapore’s upper echelons. Rather, Hae-mi severs her ties with her Paju family and flits from gig to dead-end gig. She has likely squandered her life savings traveling overseas, and her boyfriend Ben may be a serial killer. Her eventual disappearance can possibly be read as her final hurrah as a pantomime, her defiant magnum opus in a cruel world. But it’s also tragic: When Jong-su notifies Hae-mi’s loved ones, they are unsurprised, and suggest that she must have run away to escape her crippling debt. No missing-persons report is ever filed.
[Read: One way that ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is a step backward]
Jong-su may care immensely about Hae-mi, but their friendship is bookended by the devastating harm he inflicts on her in formative moments. During childhood, he calls her ugly, driving her to shell out for plastic surgery years later. Then, right before her disappearance, Jong-su calls her a whore for dancing topless. In between these cruelties, he unleashes his frustrations of maternal absence—loss of mother, loss of motherland—by invading Hae-mi’s space (initially while cat-sitting), even masturbating under her window while gazing out at Seoul’s iconic Namsan Tower. “There is no country for women,” Hae-mi’s female coworker laments, drawing attention to the fact that the women are expected to alter their identities, bodies, and space to fulfill others’ needs.
In the middle of the film, Hae-mi returns to Paju, only to find her childhood home demolished. But she finds its likeness while standing inside Jong-su’s house just down the road. “It's like I’m at home,” she marvels, revealing a grim truth: Any two people can live in the same country, even the same town, and have clashing material experiences of home. If this is overly obvious, one need only remember that Burning arrives in a Hollywood that still struggles with meaningful portrayals of Asian and Asian-diasporic lived experiences. Often the industry prefers to collapse histories of colonization, overlook ongoing wealth inequality, and ignore diverging cultural mores in over-the-top celebrations of Asian unity and representation.
This is not to say that Hae-mi, Jong-su, and Ben do not engage in escapism and imagination as destructive tactics. But Burning never entertains the possibility of disgruntled youth assimilating into South Korea’s upper crust. Home cannot be restored—but neither can it be a fantastical, cosmopolitan world when Hae-mi’s childhood house has been reduced to rubble and when Jong-su grew up with an abusive father and no mother.
During his earlier fateful visit to Jong-su’s house, Ben finds himself sitting in a dusty front yard, battered with North Korean propaganda blasting from a speaker nearby. He courteously comments that Paju “isn’t bad,” but Hae-mi dismisses his phony grace and quips, “Except for the smell of cow pat.” She and Jong-su burst into laughter, while Ben smiles like a blank fool. Though Ben sees all of rural South Korea as a field of “dirty greenhouses,” and though Paju diminishes in the national and global landscape, economy, and memory, Burning offers this fleeting moment—a shared nod to the smell of dung—to affirm that the particularities of home and geography do matter after all.
BALTIMORE—This week’s fall assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was supposed to be the first high-profile occasion for the Church’s top leaders to take steps toward rebuilding public trust after a series of revelations this summer in the ongoing sex-abuse crisis. The assembly was slated to vote this week on a series of reforms to address the crisis, but its plans were quickly upended by the Vatican, throwing the reforms’ future into doubt.
Had they passed, the proposed measures would have created a code of conduct for bishops and a special commission, including six lay members, tasked with working with the apostolic nuncio, the pope’s diplomatic representative to the United States Church, to investigate allegations of bishop misconduct. These would have been small but significant moves toward making bishops more accountable when they fail to report abusive priests, or when they are accused of abuse themselves. But even these limited actions were delayed.
On Monday morning, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the conference’s president, announced that the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops had asked the bishops to delay a vote on the reforms. They would wait until a February meeting between Pope Francis and the heads of bishops’ conferences around the world. The Holy See’s request came as an unwelcome shock to many of the bishops, and may further strain the already tense relationship between American bishops and the papacy.
[Read: Pope Francis is still equivocating on the sex-abuse crisis]
“There was a lot of disappointment among bishops, a lot of disappointment among priests, a lot of disappointment among the laity,” Paul Coakley, the archbishop of Oklahoma City, told me. During a Monday-afternoon press conference, DiNardo called the Holy See’s letter “quizzical,” and said he and other bishops were frustrated that their hands had been tied by the Vatican’s intervention.
On Tuesday, the bishops advanced the proposed reforms ever so slightly, discussing them and filing amendments, despite not being able to take a vote. At the outset of an open discussion session in the afternoon, DiNardo also announced the formation of a small task force that will compile a report on the mishandling of abuse allegations, which it will present at the bishops’ next assembly. The task force will include DiNardo and three currently active bishops who have previously served as presidents of the bishop’s conference.
The Vatican’s top-down involvement is far different from the way the Holy See approached an earlier iteration of the sex-abuse crisis in 2002, under Pope John Paul II, when American bishops were essentially left to their own devices after The Boston Globe’s explosive reporting on clergy’s abuse of children. That year, the bishops conference wrote the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, known colloquially as the Dallas Charter, which set forth guidelines for addressing child abuse by members of the clergy. During Tuesday’s discussion on the proposed reforms, DiNardo said the measures would fill gaps in the Dallas Charter relating to bishop oversight and where people should go to report allegations of abuse by bishops or bishops’ failure to address alleged abuse.
To some, the unprecedented level of Vatican engagement in the scandal suggests that the papacy no longer trusts the Americna bishops to play by their own rules. The latest round of developments in the crisis began when Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was removed from ministry in June, followed by a Pennsylvania grand-jury report in August detailing a long history of mismanagement and abuse by clergy in the state.
Massimo Faggioli, a historian at Villanova University, believes that the Vatican is putting together its own proposals for bishop oversight, which it could deploy worldwide in February, rather than let bishops of each country develop slightly different solutions. “I expect that [Vatican officials] are preparing guidelines that they will issue as mandatory,” Faggioli said. “At this point, [the February meeting] seems it will not just be a moment for sharing ideas.” Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago told me that there was also some concern from the Vatican that the American bishops’ proposals, as written, were not in accordance with canon law.
Cupich said the Vatican’s actions are a reflection of the fact that, for the first time, it’s treating the crisis as something that the Church must reckon with worldwide. “Pope Francis is making this issue a global issue,” Cupich told me. In the past, he said, the Church has viewed the sex-abuse crisis as a problem confined to “Anglo” and Western churches. But in Pope Francis’s hands, he suggested, the crisis is receiving the attention that will be necessary to effectively address it.
Other bishops, however, felt differently about the Vatican’s motivations.
“I think maybe they just didn’t want the American bishops, the Church in the United States, to get too far out ahead of what will undoubtedly affect all of the churches around the world,” Coakley said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t want to see any contradictions in ways of moving forward. I can only imagine that’s their reason for asking us to slow down. I suspect in some form these are the same measures that will come out of that meeting in February.”
Even before the Vatican’s intervention, there were bureaucratic and organizational hurdles to the reforms. The measures might not have passed the assembly even if they had come to a vote, Cupich said. “There were a lot of issues,” he told me, noting that the bishops did not receive the proposals from the conference’s administrative committee until the end of October, less than two weeks before the assembly. And when the proposals were brought for discussion on Tuesday, the special commission in particular sparked criticism from Cupich and several other bishops. They questioned whether a commission composed primarily of laypeople would represent the “outsourcing” of bishop oversight, and whether the commission itself would even be useful without buy-in from the Vatican, with which it would need to work closely.
On Monday, after the Vatican’s announcement, Cupich made two requests of the assembly: first, that it take a nonbinding vote on the proposals, and second, that the next meeting of the conference of bishops be pushed up from June to March, right after Pope Francis’s meeting with the presidents of bishops’ conferences worldwide. These steps combined, he said, would allow DiNardo to be “informed about the mind of the [American] bishops” going into the February meeting, and would also reassure Catholic laity that American bishops are committed to addressing the crisis in the interim, even if they can do so only at the level of their individual dioceses. He told me that his suggestions had been met with enthusiastic approval from many bishops he had spoken with, though it’s not yet clear whether either will actually be put into place.
[Read: The Catholic sex-abuse scandal takes down a cardinal]
Many bishops echoed Cupich’s push for action in some form. They include Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who resigned from his position as head of the Archdiocese of Washington last month amid criticism of his handling of priest abuse when he previously served as bishop of Pittsburgh. He told the gathered bishops that they “have to take personal responsibility, and we simply need to say, ‘Hey, this is done.’” He added that this is a time for the Church to continue a process of “purification” begun in 2002, one that is “not just personal, but institutional.”
Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston was insistent that regardless of the Vatican’s request, the assembly must produce something, so that people don’t think “the Church is incapable of governing itself.” Bishop George Thomas of the diocese of Las Vegas told the assembly that there is “an urgency” for bishops to take steps to address the crisis. “I hope that we will emerge in one voice, an advisory vote perhaps, and emerge with an answer to remove this cancer from the body of Christ,” he said.
For American Catholics, the dysfunction on display at the conference between the Vatican and the United States bishops could feel as if the Church is kicking the can down the road yet again on the issue of abuse. Many Catholics had hoped that this fall assembly would give the bishops an opportunity to take action—and that they’d seize it. “I think that the Church is at a crossroads in how it’s going to deal with an educated laity that has demands to make in terms of justice,” says Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a practicing Catholic and a religious-studies professorat Manhattan University.
And advocates for survivors of sexual abuse worry that the in-house oversight proposed by the Church hierarchy won’t be enough. “These protocols, if they put them in place—are they going to follow them?” asks Becky Ianni, the Washington and Virginia director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “And if they’re not followed, then what?”
On the whole, bishops and observers seemed to have two very different reactions to the Vatican’s request to delay the vote. On the side of some bishops, the Vatican’s move is bad for American Catholicism, because it prevents the bishops from taking any cohesive, large-scale action until the spring. But many liberal Catholics, such the National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters, believe this could be good for the Church, and for American Catholics, in the long term, because it shows that the Vatican is taking greater responsibility for sexual abuse than it has in past decades. The Vatican, they believe, has an opportunity to change the culture of the Church—and will keep the bishops more accountable than they could keep themselves. Either way, however, the ball is now unquestionably in the Vatican’s court.
“The Vatican will own the success or the failure of this February meeting,” Faggioli said. “This is something that will make the public position of the bishops … a bit easier. At least right now they can say, ‘We wanted to do something, but we couldn’t.’”
Several hours before Super Typhoon Yutu struck the morning of October 25, Harry Blanco was making final preparations for the storm. He boarded up the windows of his house, secured loose objects outside, gathered his valuables in a backpack, and locked his black Labrador, Lady, in the laundry room, where he felt she’d be safe. Then, he—along with thousands of his neighbors in the Northern Mariana Islands—waited in their homes. The remote American territory in the western Pacific would soon face the biggest storm to hit U.S. soil since 1935.
As night fell, Yutu swept toward Blanco’s village on the island of Saipan. The howling outside intensified, and Blanco’s partially wooden home began to buckle in the sustained 180-mph winds. “The house started shaking,” recalls Blanco, a 56-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel. “I started getting scared because it was not fully concrete.” But his bathroom was, so he retreated there. Just after midnight, the roof that covered half of his house was ripped off, and Blanco felt the furious winds trying to suck him up into the air. “I jumped in the bathtub,” he said. “I was holding myself down using the spout ... It was wet, so it was slippery.”
Finally, there was a small break in the wind. Blanco ran to collect a shaking and crying Lady, dashed into a bedroom where the roof was still intact, and took cover under a three-foot desk. The pair crouched together in the dark as the room flooded and the winds screamed. Blanco braced himself for the rest of the roof to tear off. But it held. “We hung in there for the entire typhoon,” he said. “It was close to eight and a half or nine hours, but at least we were safe.”
Harry Blanco’s house and garage in As Lito, Saipan, after Typhoon Yutu struck (Harry Blanco)Blanco was one of more than 50,000 people living in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands when Yutu hit. Typhoons are a fact of life in the region—so much so that people commonly judge a storm’s strength by whether the banana trees are still standing afterward. Many residents had only just finished recovering from Super Typhoon Soudelor, which hit three years ago. Yutu, according to Blanco and others, was even more monstrous. The eye of the cyclone alone engulfed the entire island of Tinian and the southern part of Saipan at once. The two islands, along with Rota, are the major population centers in the CNMI.
Lady, safe after Typhoon Yutu (Harry Blanco)Two people were killed, hundreds were injured, and more than 3,000 houses were destroyed, leaving thousands homeless. Much of Saipan and Tinian is expected to go without power for months, and severe water shortages remain—an especially dangerous situation given the intense heat and humidity in the tropical islands. The vital work of debris-clearing continues for an area that several residents, including military veterans, have likened to a battlefield: Massive power lines lie strewn across roads. Metal roofs curl around poles like bits of foil. Homes in village after village have been reduced to rubble. Damage to local airports and logistical decisions that prioritize inbound recovery workers have choked off tourism, which drives the economy here. Elections were postponed to make way for highly coordinated relief efforts from the CNMI government, FEMA, the American Red Cross, the Department of Defense, and local charities.
Despite the tens of thousands of American citizens affected, mainstream-U.S. media coverage of Yutu has been woefully limited. This reality is at once disappointing and expected for those living in the CNMI and on the nearby island of Guam. Together, the two U.S. territories make up the Mariana Islands—an archipelago about a three-hour flight from Japan and at least 13 hours from California. Home to the indigenous Chamorro people as well as many other Asian and Pacific Islander ethnic groups, the Marianas can seem like an abstraction to those in the continental U.S. Many Americans know these islands either as distant sites hosting major U.S. military bases (as highlighted by North Korea’s nuclear threat to Guam last year), or as postcard-perfect tropical paradises.
[Read: What people on Guam think about North Korea]
National coverage of Yutu—from outlets including The New York Times, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and ABC News—was largely limited to republished stories from wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters. Many of these papers or networks had few or no original stories about the typhoon and its aftermath. (This is The Atlantic’s first story about Yutu.) A three-person team from The Washington Post wrote a couple of longer, deeply reported Yutu pieces, and the paper also ran multiple weather-related articles. But when the typhoon was covered, stories tended to be cursory or focused more on Yutu’s meteorological significance. Considerably less attention has been paid to the realities of recovery for typhoon victims, who will be rebuilding for years to come.
A satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the moment the eye of Super Typhoon Yutu passed over Tinian, one of the three main islands in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. (NOAA / AP)After the typhoon, some media critics called out the industry’s failure to adequately cover Yutu, while acknowledging that it happened the same week that a shooter killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue and pipe bombs were sent to high-profile Democratic figures. The HuffPost reporter Chris D’Angelo noted that the silence about Yutu echoes the meager coverage another U.S. territory, Puerto Rico, initially received when Hurricane Maria struck last year, killing nearly 3,000 people. D’Angelo pointed out that President Donald Trump, despite having tweeted about other natural disasters in the U.S., posted nothing about Yutu. Though Trump signed emergency and disaster declarations freeing up federal aid for the region, CNMI residents we spoke with remarked on his silence about the typhoon.
Anita Hofschneider, a Honolulu-based reporter from Saipan, wrote for Columbia Journalism Review about the dearth of Yutu stories, speaking with people living in the Marianas and tracking the extent of media coverage. In a recent piece on the ethics of attention, our colleague Megan Garber mentioned Yutu as one of many crucial events that Americans may be overlooking, given the relentless news cycle.
In the days after Yutu, many people on Saipan and Tinian were too busy thinking about food, water, medical care, and housing to engage in much media criticism. G. Van Gils, the executive director of the educational nonprofit Marianas Young Professionals, has been leading a massive grassroots relief effort in Saipan. Not long after Yutu, he watched as a row of homes that had survived the storm caught fire; there wasn’t enough water on hand to put out the blaze. “A single mother with three children under the age of 10 watched every single possession burn one week after a typhoon,” Van Gils said. Afterward, he brought the family to a temporary shelter, where two of the children drew a picture of their home. “Before …,” they wrote, over an image of a house covered in smoke and fire. “After …,” they wrote, over some black scribbles. “No more house.”
How top U.S. online-news outlets covered various natural disasters (Media Cloud)Joey P. San Nicolas, the mayor of Tinian, said in an email that he doesn’t have much of an opinion on how mainstream news media covered Yutu; these institutions, he added, rarely cover the region to begin with, despite its importance to U.S. trade and national security. “I do know that media outlets in Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan provided accurate and extensive media coverage on Super Typhoon Yutu,” said San Nicolas, who has been preoccupied with rebuilding the island. Tinian restored 100 percent of its water production earlier this week.
Saipan Mayor David M. Apatang echoed some of San Nicolas’s sentiments. “National media coverage is not too high on the priority list of the people that live in the Mariana Islands after a devastating typhoon,” he said in a statement. “Although it is still necessary to have the exposure, the immediate need is assistance to help everyone get back on their feet again.” Unfortunately, he noted, the lack of coverage meant the family members of people in Saipan and Tinian living elsewhere had to rely heavily on social media to fill in the gaps.
Many people with ties to the CNMI living in the continental U.S. have turned to their local media outlets for help. “Everyone! Let’s call our local radio stations and see if they’ll help us spread awareness about what’s happening back home,” a Boise-based woman from Saipan named Shella Johnson wrote in one Yutu-recovery Facebook group with more than 1,000 members. Some attempts to garner attention were successful, with a smattering of local pieces publicizing relief efforts in the area. But Johnson said she contacted five Christian or news radio stations, most of them based out of Idaho, to try to promote donation drives in the area, and as of Tuesday had heard back from only one outlet.
Johnson’s story appears to be part of a broader pattern. We spoke with eight Yutu relief volunteers in the continental U.S., most of them based in or around Pacific Islander enclaves in California, Idaho, and Oregon. Each reported failing to get local news coverage. Manny Tenorio, a Saipan native in Salem, Oregon, emailed a TV station in Portland saying that Yutu survivors needed urgent supplies such as water, nonperishable food, and blankets. Tenorio received a response, but didn’t hear back after an initial exchange. Virtually every other advocate we spoke with who contacted their local news station told us they were met with crickets, despite sending several emails and emphasizing the gravity of the disaster. We reached out to all 12 outlets and received responses from three journalists, including one who said the issue was beyond the scope of her responsibilities and another who explained that his newspaper doesn’t cover “pop-up charities” that aren’t registered as official nonprofits.
A man repairs damage to a home from Super Typhoon Yutu in Saipan. (Edwin Propst / AP)Reflecting on the paucity of media attention, many advocates expressed anger and disillusionment, feelings exacerbated by news updates about ongoing struggles in the CNMI. Many survivors of natural disasters go on to face economic havoc, the spread of disease, and political dysfunction. Poorer communities—especially in the Asia-Pacific region—are especially vulnerable to natural disasters: Yutu went on to kill at least 25 people in the Philippines, where 127 people had died as a result of Typhoon Mangkhut only weeks earlier. In addition, the Pacific islands are increasingly threatened by rising sea levels, warming ocean temperatures, and other climate-related changes.
For some in the Marianas, things only got more dire after Yutu. Elena Relox, a 49-year-old Saipan resident originally from the Philippines, lost her apartment and everything inside of it to the same fire Van Gils witnessed. “It’s all gone,” Relox kept repeating in a phone conversation the following day. “Everything is gone.” When we spoke, Relox had just found temporary shelter at a hotel. All of her loved ones on Saipan—including her son, who was helping to lead recovery efforts on top of dealing with the loss of his home—were in triage mode. She struggled, however, when reminiscing about her destroyed photos, namely those of her now-adult children from when they were young. That her daughter is 3,700 miles away attending college in Honolulu made this new void even more painful.
The Pacific Ocean is just one of the many chasms between the continental U.S. and its territories in the Marianas; there are cultural, political, and economic rifts, too. Many people from the area move to the mainland “for college and then they have to figure out when are they are going to come back, and what does it mean to come back,” says Sophia Perez, a 25-year-old Chamorro who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but now lives on Saipan. The Chamorro diaspora throughout the continental U.S. and beyond is significant, partly because of the educational and professional opportunities available off-island, but also because of the territories’ famously high rates of U.S. military service.
Geography may be the simplest explanation for why even epic disasters like Yutu get overlooked. Essentially, the islands are so far away from the rest of the U.S., and so small, that they’re easy to forget. Even the language sometimes used to talk about these territories subtly frames them as unimportant. Tiara R. Na’puti, a Chamorro who is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said she doesn’t like using the term mainland, for example. “Mainland doesn’t make you think of these seemingly faraway, disparate islands where some people live, and that lack of attention really has devastating impacts,” Na’puti said. Mainland, she added, frames the continental U.S. as the center of discourse and everything else—particularly island territories—as peripheral. Which is to say that language matters because it helps translate hierarchies of geography into hierarchies of attention. Notably, some stories about Yutu don’t even mention that the CNMI is part of the U.S.
Debris is scattered around the village of Garapan, Saipan, after Yutu. (Dean Sensui / AP)This erasure is compounded by limited political representation for citizens in U.S. territories (three of which are still considered colonies by the United Nations). Na’puti and others pointed to Puerto Rico, which accounts for the vast majority of the 4 million or so Americans living in territories with no voting representative in Congress. An analysis published by FiveThirtyEight demonstrated that the catastrophic Hurricane Maria garnered little media coverage relative to Harvey and Irma, which ravaged communities in the continental U.S. The piece cited Puerto Rico’s territory status, and a general ignorance of the fact that most of the island’s 3.4 million residents are American citizens, as potential key factors.
[Read: A year after Maria, Puerto Rico finally knows how many people died]
Race and class, too, may play a role in the Marianas’ relative invisibility in political and media arenas. People in the CNMI are predominantly Chamorro, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Carolinian, Bangladeshi, and members of other ethnic groups that are often marginalized in the U.S. As of 2015, 51 percent of people in the CNMI were living below the poverty line, a figure that’s only exacerbated by traumas like Yutu. Keith Camacho, an associate professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, sees parallels between the CNMI and other impoverished groups across the U.S. “The way the United States treats the territories in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Islands is very much akin to how the U.S. government treats poor and working communities in Detroit, in the heartland, in the rank and file of white workers in the South, in poor communities in Los Angeles, in disenfranchised communities in Philadelphia,” he said.
People in Saipan and Tinian painted a vivid picture of the on-the-ground crisis. But nearly everyone was careful to also highlight the local culture of resilience. Marianas Young Professionals has mobilized an army of volunteers to deliver thousands of hot meals, distribute water door-to-door, house several families, and take care of people’s emotional and psychological needs. “People are moving all over the island seeking shelter,” Van Gils said. “That means their communities and strength networks have been displaced as well. They used to go ask their neighbor for a can of Spam and a cup of rice. Those neighbors are gone now, so who do they ask?” He said many of those leading relief efforts are young people who currently can’t go to work or school. By getting to run such a large-scale project, Van Gils said, they’re gaining valuable professional experience while also bolstering local institutional knowledge of typhoon relief.
Volunteers help deliver water and supplies after Super Typhoon Yutu hit the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan. (Office of the Governor, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands / AP)While mainstream U.S. media have all but forgotten Yutu, local journalism has been robust: The Saipan Tribune—as well as the Pacific Daily News, Pacific News Center, Marianas Variety, and KUAM—has been covering the typhoon and its aftermath relentlessly. Mark Rabago, the associate editor of The Saipan Tribune, said that when Yutu arrived, he and his colleagues communicated using Facebook Messenger and posted updates about the storm to the Tribune website until the power went out early the next morning. Once the weather cleared, their work continued. “As reporters and editors, you’re supposed to be even-keeled when observing events,” Rabago said in an email. “But seeing former haunts and houses of friends turned into what looked like a war zone was overwhelming.” He said the Tribune went two days without a physical paper because the entire island had no power. Other local photographers, such as Leni Leon, have been documenting the experiences of people putting their lives back together.
Those from the Marianas living in the continental U.S. have long relied on workaround means of organizing and spreading information, with much of their approach built on indigenous cultural values. Roz Guerrero, a Chamorro from Saipan who lives in Vancouver, Washington, described this system as a “phone tree.” She and others throughout the mainland diaspora “activated” this tree as soon they learned of Yutu, spurring relief drives across the country. In the days since Yutu, Guerrero has been literally living according to “Saipan time,” which is 18 hours ahead of her time zone in the Pacific Northwest. Although she was infuriated by the lack of media coverage, her resentment was overshadowed by the “outpouring” of support from the local Pacific Islander community. “The one term I could use is [the Chamorro word] Inafa’maolek, and that means ‘to come together, to be together, to support each other,’” she said. “It doesn’t matter how far or how near we are.”
This story was updated on Wednesday, November 14 at 9:13 pm
It’s an all too familiar pattern. Every time there’s an act of political violence or threatened political violence, there’s a brief pause as both sides of our polarized nation wait to see who’s responsible. Then, the instant the attacker is identified, he becomes yet another rhetorical club in perhaps one of the most divisive debates in modern American politics. Who else is to blame?
When the violence comes from the right, is it Donald Trump? Is it Fox News? When the violence comes from the left, is it Maxine Waters? Is it Bernie Sanders?
On and on it goes. At the core of the argument is a contention—your rhetoric is motivating your radicals to do terrible things. Each act of violence from your side reaffirms the systematic moral deficiency of your position. Moreover, each act of violence from your side has many fathers—those whose rhetoric makes them “complicit” or creates a “climate” that breeds violence. On the other hand, each act of violence from my side is an aberration—an incident so isolated that it’s outrageous to pin any responsibility for it to any idea or any important person. My rage doesn’t inspire violence. My rage is righteous.
But what’s the truth of the matter? When does political rhetoric cause violence? When can we hold politicians (or movements) morally responsible for their words in the aftermath of threats or tragedies? And is there a risk in making that connection too broadly—can the argument for complicity breed its own excessive response?
[David Frum: A president who condones political violence]
These questions are difficult to answer in part because of some good news. It’s truly hard to find prominent politicians, pundits, or activists who explicitly advocate the use of violence. Politicians and activists in the contemporary United States don’t argue for bombings, shootings, and riots. This has not always been the case.
In spite of the fact that we live in a land awash in angry rhetoric and led by a man who sometimes seems to delight in inflicting suffering on his enemies, we still enjoy relative political peace—certainly as compared to other contentious times in American history. There is no “bleeding Kansas” in contemporary America, and we are nowhere close to the staggering level of political violence of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when groups like the Weather Underground attempted, in the words of the historian Jeremy Varon, to “bomb old ideologies out of existence.”
It’s hard for modern Americans to comprehend the scale of that era’s violence. From January 1969 to October 1970, according to The New York Times, there were 370 bombings in the state of New York alone. Between January 1969 and April 1970, “the United States sustained 4,330 bombings—3,355 of them incendiary, 975 explosive—resulting in 43 deaths and $21.8 million in property damage.”
Why the difference between then and now? Well, for one thing, the political stakes are lower. In the run-up to the Civil War, America was confronting its original sin, slavery. In the ‘60s it was confronting slavery’s dark legacy—through the civil-rights movement—while fighting over American involvement in the bloody and contentious Vietnam war.
The words matched the moment. Those two periods, a century apart, were not the age of the dog-whistle. The calls for violence were unmistakable, direct, and relentless.
[Adam Serwer: Trump’s condemnations of violence aren’t convincing his supporters.]
Those were periods of actual incitement—when people engaged in speech that was “directed to inciting and producing imminent lawless action” and were also “likely to incite or produce such action,” meeting the Supreme Court’s Brandenburg test. But true incitement (think of the man at the head of the pitchfork brigade leading the charge on City Hall) is unlawful. Some activists—including prominent figures in the violent edges of the civil-rights and anti-war movements—found ways to engage in constitutionally protected speech that specifically advocated violent acts. In other words, they intentionally and unmistakably tried to persuade people to bomb or loot or kill without breaking the law.
Today, the situation is different. While political anger abounds, it is rare to hear politicians or other public figures openly advocating actual political violence. Trump encouraged direct physical attacks in a number of campaign rallies, but even he has lately pulled back from that brink. Politicians and activists call for votes, for protests, and sometimes even for incivility, but they do not call for violence.
So, instead of debating whether activists, politicians, and other public figures are inciting violence or persuading people to breach the peace, we’re debating whether hateful or angry words inspire violent acts, and if they do, whether the politician or public figure bears at least part of the blame when evil people do terrible things.
We should be very careful before we say yes.
In a passionate and eloquent piece written the day after the Pittsburgh shooting, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer argued that Trump shared at least some blame for the massacre. Trump’s rhetoric about the migrant caravan marching through Mexico, including implying the presence of possible terrorists or gang members, ignited public fear. His allies in the media fanned the flames. All of this is true. Serwer says “the shooter merely followed the logic of the president and his allies.”
The argument has appeal. After all, if an actual “invasion” by criminals and terrorists looms, don’t you use force to repel it? Isn’t that the logic that follows from that rhetoric?
[Peter Beinart: Trump shut programs to counter violent extremism.]
But angry rhetoric is quite common in politics. And politics often deals with high-stakes controversies—even if they don’t reach to the magnitude of slavery or Jim Crow. In 2017, for example, during the heat of arguments about Obamacare repeal, Bernie Sanders said that “thousands of Americans would die” if the GOP health-care bill became law. Then one man attempted to massacre a group of GOP lawmakers.
Sanders certainly made an alarming claim, but I utterly reject the notion that Bernie Sanders bears even a single scintilla of moral responsibility for the shooting. No person possessing even a modicum of reasonable moral thought would think that Sanders was calling for a massacre of GOP members of Congress. He was trying to motivate his followers to express political opposition to a specific GOP bill by pointing to a projection of its consequences.
But that same logic should apply to Trump. When the president used absurd rhetoric to oppose the caravan (and yes, I believe his rhetoric has been absurd) no person possessing even a modicum of reasonable moral thought would believe that he was calling for the execution for Jewish worshippers in an American synagogue. He’s trying to motivate people to vote, not kill.
So even if one could argue that Trump’s rhetoric in some way inspired an evil man (a claim made harder to argue in the Pittsburgh case given the shooter’s obvious loathing for Trump), it’s a stretch to argue that Trump bears any moral responsibility for that inspiration. The shooter not only hated Trump, he targeted a group of people Trump has never targeted before. (Critics have accused Trump of employing tropes associated with anti-Semitism, or of failing to condemn anti-Semites, but never of using language explicitly targeting Jews, much less calling for violence against them. After all, his daughter, brother-in-law, and three of his grandchildren are Jewish. It’s hard to argue that Trump is seeking to make their lives more perilous.)
But is there any instance where a politician may bear at least some moral responsibility for inspiring violence, even when he’s never explicitly called for it? Yes, there is. The argument about Trump and Pittsburgh has obscured a different argument—about Trump and the string of mail bombs that dominated the news until the horrific synagogue massacre.
The bomber was a Trump superfan who targeted the specific political enemies who Trump had targeted with his own extreme rhetoric. (After the publication of this story, I learned from the FBI that he had searched for my home address.) Moreover, the existence of a vicious and intimidating Trump superfan community was well-known before the attempted bombings, and parts of that community were intentionally nurtured during the Trump campaign by important Trump officials, like Steve Bannon.
So when the Trump team knows about his radical supporters and knows they target critics for campaigns of intimidation and threats—yet Trump never dials back his rhetoric—do they bear any moral responsibility when one of those supporters actually moves from threats to attempted murder?
In that unusual case, I think so. But notice the differences. The bomber, a Trump supporter—part of a well-known radical Trumpist community—attacked specific Trump targets. The Pittsburgh shooter, a Trump hater, attacked people who were not Trump targets. To argue that Trump bears responsibility in the latter case is to extend moral culpability for independent evil acts far beyond the breaking point.
And consider where the logic of holding Trump complicit in the Pittsburgh massacre ultimately leads. What would a disturbed person do with the idea that Trump or his allies bear responsibility for mass murder? Especially if he knows that they will avoid any meaningful legal or political accountability?
Those who argue that Trump and his allies are complicit in murder are trying to motivate people to oppose Trump and his allies peacefully and lawfully. But they also know that there are disturbed people who’ve launched their own attacks and threats against GOP officials and other conservative targets. If Trump and Fox should keep in mind the presence of radicalized and angry allies, shouldn’t their critics do the same? If someone tries to harm Trump or any of his allies, do their most angry critics share any blame?
Last week, a group of protesters trespassed onto Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s property, banged on his door, chanted in the street outside his house, and vandalized his driveway. His wife was home alone and was terrified that they might face a home invasion. She called the police. While there were no violent acts that night, lest anyone think the intent was benign, in a deleted tweet the protesters declared their intention to “remind you [Carlson] that you are not safe either.”
Did these protesters follow the logic of critics of Fox News? Those critics never criticized Carlson’s wife. They never sanctioned threats. But they have expressed very deep anger against Fox. For example, in the days after the violence in Charlottesville, Bill Maher said that Fox was “the Jurassic Park that took the DNA of the Nazis and reanimated it.” After the Pittsburgh massacre, Robert Reich wrote that “this lineage of cause and effect begins with Trump and his Fox News propaganda machine.”
The knowledge that there are disturbed minds agitated by volatile times should cause us all to take great care before we allocate to any politician or pundit responsibility for violent acts. The cure for bad speech isn’t to amplify the bad speech, exaggerate its effect, and assign the worst of motives not just to the speaker but also his allies and supporters. The answer to bad speech is better speech—including rebutting fear with reason, applying selective anger when the facts are clear, and always responding with a degree of proportion and historical perspective.
In short, if a politician or public figure actually incites violence, we should prosecute him. If he tries to persuade people to engage in acts of violence, we should reject him. If he engages in irresponsible or extreme speech, we should rebut him. To go farther—outside the most unusual circumstances, to hold anyone morally responsible for acts he did not condone, encourage, or seek—is to risk becoming what we hate, the person who could inspire the very extremism we so rightly condemn.
After Democrats gained a House majority, causing most of them to celebrate the biggest check on Donald Trump’s power since he was elected, a tiny faction in the progressive coalition reacted in anger and frustration, fixating on races that would have made their “wave” even bigger: Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
In all these Democratic defeats, there was an easily identifiable group that voted overwhelmingly against the progressive candidate: Republicans. But members of this progressive faction did not lash out at Republicans. They instead directed their ire at another group, defined by race and sex. They lashed out at white women.
[Read: The glaring blind spot of the “MeToo” movement]
And their vitriol surprised many observers. It reached its apotheosis in a graphic tweet by the actress Heather Matarazzo. “What the fuck is wrong with you fellow white ladies???!!!!!” she demanded. “May you choke to death on the white supremacist patriarchal cock.” It’s hard to conjure a more counterproductive approach to intersectional feminism than for one white woman to shout insults at other white women based on the results of a single Senate race fought between two men. Yet that tweet was inspired by this widely circulated CNN image:
The conversation that chart provoked captures the distortions of identity politics, as its presently practiced by an influential faction of progressives. Overall, white women in 2018 split their votes evenly between Republicans and Democrats. That Ted Cruz improved substantially on national partisan voting patterns is explained by the composition of the Texas electorate—not any generalized trait of white womanhood in America.
The votes of white women varied widely by region, religious identity, and educational background, among other salient variables.
To lash out at “white women” based on the CNN chart is to express hostility to the 39 percent of white women in Texas who voted for the Democrat, yet get stereotyped with the rest of their cohort, while ignoring the 71 percent of white men, 39 percent of Latino men, 34 percent of Latino women, 16 percent of black men, and 4 percent of black women who voted for the Republican.
The principle at work: Let us judge them not on the content of their votes, but by the candidate who was backed by a majority of the people who share their skin color. In this way, Democrats turn on their own allies.
[Peter Beinart: The growing partisan divide over feminism]
Some conservatives insist that performatively hyperbolic white-woman bashing is broadly representative of the Democratic Party or the political left. It is not. This rhetorical mode is widely seen as wrongheaded. In my experience, it elicits eye-rolling from most residents of deep-blue neighborhoods and most Democrats in all racial groups. It is the work of a tiny, largely white, mostly privileged vanguard.
The extent to which that narrowness surprises you, as Wesley Yang once wrote in another context, “is a measure of how successfully the toxic rhetoric of warring elite cliques has gaslighted you into submitting to a narrative that is brazenly false.” Indeed, this mode of discourse is alienating to many who voted for Democrats, and obviously isn’t winning any converts, for reasons The Stranger’s Katie Herzog adeptly explains.
Still, this accusatory mode can’t simply be ignored. On social and digital media, where algorithms optimized for engagement boost views that are unusually anger-inducing, accusatory, and tribally divisive, it is overrepresented. The percentage of Democrats who buy its assumptions is tiny, yet it has the power to shape perceptions of the coalition, to derail its internal arguments, and to lead many astray about the truth.
As a non-Democrat, that final drawback is the one that bothers me the most. Set aside the moral case against disparaging groups in sweeping, stereotyped ways and its tactical foolishness. Blaming “white women” for progressive electoral losses causes people to lose touch with reality.
After all the ballots were cast in the 2018 midterm elections, the Pew Research Center reported on exit-poll results showing a gender gap in voting that was “at least as wide as at any point over the past two decades.”
Overall, 59 percent of women voters cast ballots for Democrats in House races. But that one-dimensional statistic is misleading in some ways. So exit polls broke down results based on race and education, too.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Too much stigma, not enough persuasion]
Among college-educated white women, 59 percent voted for Democrats. Among all white women, the split was 49 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican. Ninety-two percent of black women and 88 percent of black men voted for Democratic Party candidates. The vast majority of black women voted for Democrats at all educational levels, at all incomes, and regardless of religious affiliation, making them the most reliable of all progressive constituencies. Race and gender are obviously factors that bear on elections and that demand our attention if we want to understand them fully.
But what sorts of generalizations do those figures justify? Certainly not these:
It’s 'The Year of the Woman,' No Thanks to White Women (Elle) Why Do White Women Keep Voting for the GOP and Against Their Own Interests? (Vogue) The betrayal of white women voters: in pivotal state races, they still backed the GOP (Vox)Alluding to GOP victors who won more votes from white women than did their rivals, Lyz Lenz, a writer at The Columbia Journalism Review, commented, “If any of your blue wave stories don't include the fact that white women still uphold white supremacy then you aren't doing your job.” Recall, only 49 percent of white women supported GOP House candidates; they were no less likely to support Democrats than Republicans. Even setting aside the assumed equivalence between voting GOP and upholding white supremacy—an equivalence no newspaper would or should assert as fact—this demands attributing to “white women” what fewer than half of them ostensibly did.
Shouldn’t coverage of the election be as precise as possible?
“Muting anyone who pulls a #NotAllWhiteWomen,” Lenz declared in a followup tweet. Never mind that #FewerThanHalfofAllWhiteWomen gets closer to the mark, or that the unqualified formulation that Lenz prefers makes it more difficult for readers to understand what happened.
Journalists aren’t doing their jobs when they lose sight of those people. Imagine a grocery-store clerk trying to organize a Democrat-aligned neighborhood group, or a first-time office-seeker of color and a friend trying to help her gather signatures and raise funds. They see a group of white women, and wonder whether or not to invest any time in outreach. Which understanding better serves them? That “white women still uphold white supremacy”? Or that #NotAllWhiteWomen do? Surely it would be useful for them to know that the white women in question are more likely than not to reject Donald Trump and to support Democratic candidates if they are in California, or unmarried, or at a college alumni event, or are millennials.
#NotAllWhiteWomen would afford those Democrats a more nuanced grasp of reality that would prove hugely useful as they tried to achieve their goals. Nevertheless, political discourse is rife with comments like this one:
White Women.
I swear to God.
Y’all are infuriating.
And before you #NotAllWhiteWomen me (which will get you blocked) tell me you are COMMITTED to flipping 10 of your alabaster friends from red to blue by 2020. It’s not enough to be “not racist.”
You must be *anti-racist.*
That we might agree is not enough. Emphasize our agreement and I will block you. You are responsible for the actions of people who share your skin color. But set aside that wrongheaded principle. Set aside the tone as irrelevant. Engage the substance of the admonition, as Jill Filipovic did.
She wrote this in a tweet thread:
I'm seeing a lot of calls for white women to come get other white women, and I agree… what that analysis misses is just how divided white women are, especially by education & location (rural vs. urban especially).
I look around my friends, family, and even acquaintances and I don't really know women who voted for Trump or who support the GOP. That's because my community is urban and educated (and diverse, but we're talking about white women here). Maybe there's a high school rando on FB?
Among the most retweeted and liked responses to Filipovic was this thread:
Don't trust the white women who tell you they don't know anyone who voted Trump because their friends are urban and educated. I can point you to 5 urban educated wealthy white women in their circle who are racist as fuck. Including them. Y'all keep acting like Trump isn't straight out of Queens. Like f the "dapper" bigots supporting him don't have Ivy League degrees & a place they keep in the city.
It's not poor white people that are his base beloved. It's the same rich white folks that drive past hunger daily. And white women that claim the problem is the lack of focus on white men? We know they're a problem. We've been challenging them. The reason the focus is on white women is because they demand sisterhood and solidarity and stab WOC and their communities in the back. Repeatedly.
Y'all are passing around the tweets of @JillFilipovic like she wasn't one of the primary triggers for #solidarityisforwhitewomen and I need you to ask yourself why so many white feminists are trying to pass the buck instead of step up and do the work.
In this telling, the educated, wealthy white women of New York City are surrounded by friends who voted Trump. In fact, Hillary Clinton won 86 percent of the vote in Manhattan, 79 percent of the vote in Brooklyn, and 75 percent of the vote in Queens; and she everywhere outperformed Trump among women with college degrees. The narrative blinds those who embrace it to uncontested facts.
As for Filipovic, one could hardly invent a character more credibly able to make such a claim. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from NYU. Her bio notes that she is “a journalist based in Nairobi and New York City, and the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, she is also a weekly columnist for Cosmopolitan and CNN. Formerly a columnist for the Guardian and Cosmopolitan.com’s senior political writer.” Her profile fairly screams my personal bubble is devoid of Trump supporters.
Were she to dedicate 40 hours to trying to win voters for Democrats in 2020, canvassing in a heavily Latino neighborhood in any swing state would be a much better use of her time than talking to the educated urban white women she knows. Most anything else would be time better spent than that. Notice I am not complaining that she was forcefully challenged or that she was accused of being racist. The core problem is one of substance. The premise that she can be most effective in persuading voters by talking to the white women around her is simply mistaken.
Such errors are inevitable because the mode of discourse in question lends itself to domination by people who are not ultimately aiming for the truth. Insofar as they shape the Democratic understanding of the 2018 election and that coalition’s approach to 2020, they will add heat but subtract clarity.
Consider another social media exchange––one that began when the institutional account of Vox.com tweeted: “The midterm election confirmed once again that black women show up for progressive candidates. But white women? Not so much.”
That caught the attention of my colleague Ron Brownstein. He replied that it is astonishing “how invariably critiques like this from left never mention the huge gap” between the voting behavior of college-educated white women and the very different behavior of white women without college degrees, especially since the former are indispensable to understanding Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms.
“As a liberal educated white woman, I’m aware of this,” one person retorted, “but honestly, white people in general need to get out of the way. Waving our hands in the air and yelling ‘But not me!’ isn’t the conversation we need to be having. Let’s talk to each other, not get defensive on Twitter.” She assumed Brownstein’s tweet was born of defensiveness.
To which someone else replied, “Thank you! Can black women get one second of praise without white people storming in with their ‘well actually’?” This person assumed Brownstein was denying black women their due.
Said another like-minded respondent, “It's astonishing that Black women, college educated or not, historically vote for the good of the entire country. It's not so astonishing that even some of the most liberal White people won't credit Black women for their faithfulness and fortitude.”
Some background on Brownstein is useful here: He isn’t just a two-time Pulitzer finalist who has been covering national politics for 35 years; he is the rare sort of journalist who once won the Excellence in Media Award from the National Council on Public Polls—an association of public polling and media organizations whose mission is “to advance the understanding among politicians, the media, and general public of how polls are conducted and how to interpret poll results” and “to promote better understanding and reporting of public opinion polls.”
That doesn’t make him right in any given debate. But one could hardly invent a person who is more likely to be motivated by earnest interest in accurately conveying the most nuanced possible truth about voters and their motivations—it’s been among his recognized, award-winning professional obsessions for many years. He’s concerned with advancing clarity.
Yet even Brownstein, responding to a tweet from a site known for its wonky political coverage, is accused of discussing the subject in order to apportion social credit and blame, as his critics were doing, rather than to advance public understanding with facts. To such critics, discussing the degree to which white women did or did not vote for progressive candidates is not about adjudicating the truth of the matter. It is about scolding the privileged for their shortcomings and extolling the marginalized for unsung heroics. As a result, they mistook and mischaracterized truth-seeking as racist villainy. And if a professional journalist like Brownstein can’t be granted the benefit of the doubt, what hope does an average person seeking to advance clarity have?
Ordinary people who want to understand the politics of the moment are confused as to why individuals would get credit or derive blame from how others who share their skin color voted. They can’t understand why the literal truth of “not all women” is no justification for saying it (or why progressives must preemptively apologize for meekly clarifying a fact). They are less able to parse the truth because of the opaque, ever-changing language codes of educational and cognitive elites.
Imagine if one were to say, “Women are Democrats––59 percent of women cast ballots for Democrats in 2018 House races.” And imagine a critic’s reply: “fewer than half of white women voted for Democrats, while a far higher percentage of black women voted for Democrats. Eliding and neglecting the distinction paints an incomplete, misleading picture.” Imagine retorting, “Stop it with your #NotAllWomen stuff.”
That would be silly. The intersectional insight that black women support progressive candidates at much higher rates than white women adds to our understanding of reality—as does the insight that college-educated white women support progressive candidates at very high rates and that many sorts of white women are highly reliable Democrats.
Going beyond gender adds useful information. So does going beyond race/gender.
That’s the irony: At bottom, the mode of discourse critiqued in this article is a failure of intersectional thinking, and just a step removed from failures of intersectional thinking that its adherents find obvious and infuriating.
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.
Doug McLeanJohn Wray might never have finished his new novel, Godsend, if he hadn’t stumbled across a technical manual on bear attacks, abandoned on a Brooklyn street. A harrowing primer intended more for wilderness backpackers than for struggling writers, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance is the furthest thing from a literary self-help guide. But in a conversation for this series, Wray explained how it came to redefine his approach to writing, helping him to complete a book that posed profound creative challenges. We discussed what writers can learn from the strategies used to ward off grizzlies, and why sitting alone with a manuscript can be like playing dead as the ultimate predator looms overhead.
Godsend is Wray’s fifth novel, but the book’s fraught subject matter could scare off even the most experienced writer. It’s the story of Aden Sawyer, an 18-year-old woman who, in mid-2001, decides to leave home and join the Taliban, swapping the languid California of her childhood for the remote villages of Afghanistan. For her father, a professor of religious studies, the Muslim world has been a source of an academic interest. For Aden, Islam represents something else entirely: beauty, ritual, revolution, and an overpowering sense of the sacred that she’s rarely felt in American life.
Godsend is a 9/11 novel unlike any other—one in which the cataclysm at the World Trade Center registers as a far-off rumble, something rumored in hushed Pashtun rather than replayed infinitely across TV screens. The New Yorker’s James Wood writes that Godsend offers “a profound understanding of the demands of religious practice—of religious submission, especially—which has eluded almost every serious contemporary American novelist” since the towers fell.
John Wray is the author of four other novels, including Lowboy, The Lost Time Accidents, and The Right Hand of Sleep. He spoke to me by phone.
John Wray: When Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance entered my life, I was in a period of real despair and self-doubt concerning the book I was hoping to write next. I’d stumbled on what I felt was a good, sound idea for a novel, but I was deeply afraid that I was the wrong person to write the book that I had in my mind.
It started when I was traveling in Afghanistan for Esquire magazine about four years ago, and came across this fascinating scrap of information: a rumor about a girl—American or Dutch or British, depending on whom I spoke to—who’d been involved in the army of the Taliban right around the time of 9/11.
I was trying to write a story from the point of view of someone like the person I’d heard about: a girl, probably a teenager, who felt such passion for religion, and for Islam specifically, that she abandoned a cozy life in suburban California, and the Christian religion of her parents, to do this borderline-unthinkable thing: travel to Pakistan, and from there into the mountainous tribal regions of Afghanistan, to throw in her lot with some of the most extreme and uncompromising militants on the planet.
The mind-boggling nature of this decision was exactly what most made me want to write the novel I was dreaming of. But when the initial excitement wore off, it was also what made me uncertain that I could write the book at all. I had a clear idea of what the project was and where it needed to go, in terms of structure—much clearer, in fact, than I normally do. This time, the challenges related to identifying with the protagonist. This was the first protagonist I’d ever attempted to write who was a woman, but it wasn’t just that. I’d only spent a few months in Afghanistan, which is an extremely diverse, heterogeneous society with a long and complex history. It’s a very difficult place for an outsider to understand. And I couldn’t have been more of an outsider.
Most daunting of all, there was the fact that I’m not Muslim. I wanted desperately not to add to all of the misrepresentations that are already flooding the market—with regard to Islam, with regard to the concept of jihad, with regard to extremism of any kind. I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire, so I froze. Basically, I think I just got scared.
But then, when I most needed it, a book came along: a how-to book of sorts, an unexpected source of insight. And it came in the most unexpected way.
I distinctly remember it being a sunny spring day in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, where I was living at the time. People put the most outrageous things out on the street in Park Slope—Danish modern furniture, fur coats, priceless first editions. And that day, literally on my own block, right there on the curb, one book in particular caught my eye. It was far from a priceless first edition, and a bit the worse for wear. But it appeared at a moment when I was feeling, well, the kind of feeling when it seems you have nothing to lose. So I impulsively picked it up.
The book was called Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance by a certain Stephen Herrero—an expert, apparently, in animal behavior. I remember thinking, Oh, this might be fun to have lying around the house. I took it home for its novelty value, basically. It was destined for the stack of random books on my coffee table, or for the bookshelf in my guest room, full of books I’ve never read, and never will.
So I took Bear Attacks home. For weeks, if not months, I didn’t open it again. But one day—I’m not sure exactly why, or when—I began paging through its first chapter. Its gag aspect faded quickly: This was a serious text about a serious subject. And as its novelty receded, Herrero’s book began to make a profound impression on me.
Bears can be scary—everyone knows that—but Leonardo DiCaprio’s rotten luck in The Revenant notwithstanding, I don’t think I’d fully realized the true horror of bear attacks before. It should be said, at this point, that attacks are extremely rare, and that the vast majority of interactions between bears and humans, even with grizzlies, result in nothing more serious than an exciting glimpse of a beautiful animal. But when grizzlies do attack, the danger is extreme. When bears do battle with each other in the wild, their first instinct is to disable the weapons of their opponent, and a bear’s primary weapon is its jaws. This means that what fighting bears try to do—what their sense of self-preservation directs them to do—is to target their victim’s mouth. This applies to humans, too, under certain circumstances. An attacking grizzly bear may very well attempt to take your face off.
[Read: Grizzly bears have a human problem.]
The book held me spellbound, for a time, purely with its gore factor—but my relationship to the text continued to evolve. And this paradigm shift was accelerated by one line in particular, a description of grizzlies from a man named Henry Kelsey, one of the first European bear hunters in America: “He is man’s food and he makes food of man.” For some reason, that quotation seemed to capture the fear, and the joy, of the creative process for me. For a novelist, writing is the one reliable source of creative nourishment, not to mention our financial bread and butter. Yet there’s a sense, at times, that the work is somehow pursuing you—and it’s a quarry dangerous enough to disfigure you forever, or pick you clean, down to the bones.
That sounds pretty dramatic, I know. But I was in a melodramatic state of mind: I really felt I’d lost my way, that I couldn’t do my job. As I tried to work, I found myself returning to Bear Attacks again and again. The book opened up something for me. The concept of a bear attack itself, at different points in my reading process, came to represent various aspects of the writing process. Over time, the text took on an I Ching–like quality, and I started opening it at random, searching for something on whichever page I opened that might speak to me.
There were passages I found, on certain hopeful days, in which the bear clearly represented this great unwritten—and borderline unwritable—novel that I dreamed of writing. There were times, on darker days, when the bear represented failure, self-doubt, even self-disgust. There were times when the bear was something to be sought for, contacted, engaged with; and others when the bear was a thing to be avoided at all costs.
[Read: Why writers are the worst procrastinators]
But the definitive moment for me—the real eureka moment of Bear Attacks, and the one I’ll remember as long as I write—came when I reached the chapter about playing dead.
Playing dead is a concept that doesn’t have a particularly attractive ring to it, at least in our culture. It connotes giving up; we tend to think of it as an act of timidity, even cowardice. But I changed my mind about that in a hurry after I’d read a chapter called, “Sudden Encounters with Grizzlies.” It includes the first-person account of a man who was attacked by a bear in Montana’s backcountry, and how he survived:
I had only moved maybe 20 feet when [the bear] saw me, let out a most electrifying vocalization that I could only call a “roar,” and bolted after me. … I began to run for the heavy timber but, after a few steps, realized it was futile. The choice was then to get knocked down or lie down myself and play dead …
I lay absolutely still. At the time, I fully expected to be mauled or at the least bitten a couple of times. I also knew quite well I might be killed. I was terrified at my circumstance but calm in that I knew what I was trying to do. The difficulty was going to be to carry it out if things started to get painful.
The bear ran up and stopped by my left leg and stood there for a moment. Then it nosed my left leg and I tried to brace myself mentally for the beginning of a mauling. … There was no sound … except for the heavy breathing of the bear. I could hear the saliva bubbling in his mouth as he breathed. I lay still, face down, eyes closed, while my heart threatened to leap out of my rib cage.
What ends up happening, to the man’s astonishment, is that the bear chooses to move on after this close encounter. Herrero then writes: “Not everyone would have the mental toughness to play dead under such circumstances. Given the choices of running, getting ready to fight the bear, and playing dead, I feel that [this man] did the right thing. Although he could have been mauled, he played the odds and won.”
I had never thought of playing dead as something that takes courage and fortitude and strength of character. But, of course, it’s incredibly difficult not to run away or to try to hit this thing that’s essentially considering whether or not to consume you.
Later in the book, Herrero explains how, in order to play dead effectively, one has to be extraordinarily present—and even, strangely, open—to what is going to happen, while still having the clarity of mind to protect all of one’s most vulnerable areas from mauling. I started to think that the process shouldn’t be called “playing dead,” really, but “remaining alive”—it’s so much more active than I’d always imagined. If you just lie there, letting your body go completely flat and limp, you’ll most likely get eaten. You have to interact with your potential killer in a very conscious way. I came to realize that playing dead is, at its heart, a creative act—and for me it became a kind of artistic ideal.
I tried to imagine myself playing dead while this enormous, all-powerful entity sniffed around my motionless, fetally curled body. I tried to imagine the sound of the saliva bubbling—that amazing, very writerly detail—in the mouth of the thing I most feared. I’d even say to myself sometimes, embarrassing as this is to admit, “Can you hear the saliva bubbling?” In other words, are you allowing this terrifying force to get close enough that you can actually hear it breathing?
Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t. But for me, playing dead came to mean not resisting, not running away from anything in my work, no matter how much it might scare me. And I can’t think of a more valuable survival rule than that.
[Read: How writing fiction masters fear]
I was just down in Austin for the Texas Book Festival, and in a Q&A after one of the events, someone in the audience asked our panel what we thought about writer’s block. All of us had the same reaction—namely, that writer’s block does not exist. The mystique around the concept and the term “writer’s block” makes it seem as though some kind of magical condition can just pop up out of nowhere, like an aneurysm or a food allergy, and that there’s nothing you can do about it. But what we’re really talking about when we talk about writer’s block, all of us agreed, is fear. It’s unbelievably difficult for us—any of us, no matter what our job happens to be—to open ourselves up to judgment. That’s why houses have blinds. It’s why we don’t walk down the street naked. And it’s why writing is such intimidating work.
Writing, simply put, is the most frightening thing that I do. This is my fifth book, and that hasn’t gone away. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that I don’t fear the judgment of every last individual who might potentially come across the book I’m writing, but of course I do. But that’s exactly what playing dead is about, to me, as a writer. It’s about not trying to escape the thing that you fear, and also about not trying to fight it. It’s about learning not to flinch from whatever scares you shitless. It’s about learning to tolerate proximity to an alpha predator—one that is stronger than you are, faster than you are, essentially omnipotent, as far as you’re concerned—and allowing the closest of all possible encounters to take place.
The possibility that, at the very least, you could conceivably emerge from this experience enriched—rather than disemboweled—is just so incredibly useful to me as a writer. Because the bear, of course, is inside your own head. You can’t escape it. Not ever. Being alone with yourself, trying to do something very difficult, means being alone, for long stretches of time, with the bear. What writing is—and what meditation is, not to mention what musical composition is, or thinking about anything intensively, really—is learning to be alone with that terrifying silence. Which, once you learn to calm down and listen, reveals itself as full of sound and light.
“Did you hear about Michelle Obama?” my mother asked me last Friday morning. “Her girls were born through in vitro.” Despite the awkwardness of her phrasing—born through in vitro—I knew my mother was pleased by this connection to the former first lady. Two of her own favorite people, my daughters, were also born through IVF.
I hadn’t heard, and was as surprised as many others were by the news revealed by the prepublication discussion of Becoming, Obama’s new memoir. In a televised interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, Obama shared the story of the miscarriage, more than 20 years ago, that led her to seek treatment for infertility.
“I felt like I failed,” Obama told Roberts. “Because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were. Because we don’t talk about them.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Ten to 25 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, after all, and in the 40 years since the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test-tube baby,” more than 8 million children have been born via in vitro fertilization. Plus, it was really none of our business: The Obamas had every right to protect their daughters and family life from additional scrutiny.
But it’s interesting to consider why Michelle Obama kept her miscarriage and fertility treatment private for so long, and what it means for her to reveal it now.
[Read: Belle Boggs on when the “miracle of life” doesn’t happen]
“Imagine all the pressure of being in that position, as the first African American first lady,” says my colleague Ronisha Browdy, an English professor at North Carolina State University. Browdy studies black women’s rhetorical strategies and has written about Obama’s messaging as first lady. “Now she can tell her story independently of her husband and without the additional risk of her story affecting, or being affected by, his administration.”
When the Obama family became the first family, Sasha and Malia were 7 and 10, their parents nearly a decade past the fertility struggles the first lady writes about in her memoir. There were new challenges, especially for Michelle, who entered the White House doubly—or even triply—constrained: as a woman, an African American, and a professional. Browdy argues that as first lady, Obama focused on doing ordinary things that in fact had great significance, such as recycling her outfits, growing vegetables on the White House grounds, and encouraging children to exercise and eat healthfully. Her self-appointed role as “mom in chief” set an example for American parents, and was particularly significant for other black women.
“There’s a historical system that has been used to deny black women the status of true womanhood,” Browdy told me. “Mothering is also attached to black women in stereotypical ways, whether they have children or not—they were situated within slavery as ‘mammy’ and sexually exploited as breeders.” A black woman in the White House, shaping parenting norms in the U.S., was a powerful counternarrative to these long-held racist ideas.
And now, out of the White House, Obama is shaping norms again, for those trying to become parents. In Becoming, she writes about the specific tasks and sacrifices of fertility treatment, which fell almost all to her: injecting the hormones, going in for daily ultrasounds and blood draws, canceling work meetings to make room for clinic appointments. “Did I want it?” she writes. “Yes, I wanted it so much.” Like so many of Obama’s rhetorical choices, the image she presents of herself, determined to become pregnant even as she is aware of an inescapable gender imbalance in the labor it takes to do so, does something more than tell us about her own particular circumstances: It shows that, as Browdy puts it, “the work of motherhood begins way before there are children.”
In 2008, the year the Obamas moved to Washington, watching the adorable Obama girls was a national obsession. I can remember Barack Obama’s tight grip on mischievous-eyed Sasha at campaign events; postelection, there were unfounded but exciting rumors that the Obamas were considering sending Malia to the D.C. charter middle school where I worked. (Our principal fantasized about calling her parents in for a conference.)
That year, my own fertility problems were becoming apparent. I was 32, the same age that Obama began trying, and failing, to conceive. Like her, I felt lost and alone—more so as months, then years, passed without a baby. I thought I was too young to have fertility problems—wasn’t IVF something undertaken by women in their late 30s? In their early 40s?
It wasn’t until I began researching a book about fertility and assisted reproduction that I learned the truth: Infertility is not only common, affecting one in eight American couples, but also often looks different from the narratives offered by media and popular culture.
[Read: 5 predictions about the future of reproduction]
Film and television portrayals of infertile women, like Tamara Jenkins’s widely praised Private Life, again and again show women from the same demographic: older, heterosexual, upper-middle-class, educated, white. This image is so common that many doctors have internalized the stereotype, assuming that white women are most at risk for infertility. This misperception can affect research, referrals to reproductive endocrinologists, and outreach to potential patients. The law professor Jim Hawkins’s 2012 study of fertility-clinic advertising found that 97 percent of clinics included photographs of white babies on their website, and 62 percent featured only photographs of white babies. Hawkins speculated that this skewed advertising risked driving away minority patients, and warned of the possibility that treatments themselves “entrench racist norms.”
In fact, infertility is not only just as likely to be a male problem as a female one; it is more likely to affect minorities, the poor, and those with less formal education. African American women, who have higher rates of uterine fibroids, are almost twice as likely as white women to suffer from infertility. A recent study concludes that African American women wait twice as long as white women to see a doctor for infertility, and are less likely to seek treatment. This makes the news of Michelle Obama’s miscarriage and IVF treatment especially significant.
For Regina Townsend, the founder of the Broken Brown Egg, a blog devoted to infertility awareness for women of color, Obama’s disclosure last week was “such a good moment. Liberating.” Townsend began her blog not only to document her own experience with infertility—like Obama, she became a mom through IVF—but also because she knew many other African American women were struggling in silence. “I was seeing all these stereotypes of super-fertility and oversexualization in the black community, when I was also hearing personal stories of women and families who were struggling to become parents and who felt like they were anomalies,” Townsend told me. “There needed to be some balance.”
“For [Obama] to say, ‘No, this is a thing, and it’s a thing that affected me, and I’m not going to be silent about it’ is not only going to give some women the permission to speak up that they feel they need, but it will also help to normalize the conversation,” Townsend said.
“So many black women live in silence and in shame,” agreed Stacey Edwards-Dunn, a reverend and the founder of Fertility for Colored Girls, a national organization that provides education, support groups, and financial support to African American women facing infertility. Edwards-Dunn began FFCG after spending years as a health educator in Chicago—and seven years (and seven IVF cycles) trying to get pregnant. She saw women battling multiple obstacles—financial, cultural, biological—and wanted to create what she calls a “safe space” for women who were often left out of the fertility conversation. Obama’s announcement “gives black women an opportunity to realize, No. 1, I’m not alone, and No. 2, she dealt with infertility, and that gives me hope.”
In Becoming, Obama writes of the surprising realization that “fertility is not something you conquer,” and that “two committed go-getters with a deep love and a robust work ethic can’t will themselves into being pregnant.” She describes Barack “flooring it up the interstate after a late vote” in the Illinois legislature, just so they didn’t miss her ovulation window. When Michelle finally became pregnant, it ended in miscarriage, an experience she describes as “lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level.”
What helped her cope with the experience was talking about it with women friends, who in turn shared their own miscarriage stories. Talking with other women helped her see that miscarriage was common, not a personal failure or even a tragedy. It was, in her words, “a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.”
“It didn’t take away the pain,” she writes, “but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine.” One of these friends suggested a fertility doctor, and the Obamas began the path that led them to IVF, and their daughters.
By unburying her own struggle, it seems Obama is trying to return the favor, to steady those grappling with their own fertility challenges.
When Jemele Hill went to vote, she discovered that her name had been removed from the rolls over something she’d tweeted. “In another election year, this incident would just be a funny story for me to repeat at parties,” she wrote, “but this was the most serious election of my lifetime.”
I am 21 years old, a university student, and a Florida resident. I voted in the 2016 presidential election, or at least I think I did. I sent in my absentee ballot ahead of the deadline, but I never checked to make sure it was counted. I never thought to.
For the 2018 midterm elections, I again sent in my absentee ballot ahead of schedule. This time I checked. It still hasn’t been counted. I put extra stamps on it and a return address so that I would at least know if something went wrong. I’ve called my county office a number of times, to no avail. I was proud to vote as a young person in that infamous 18–29 bracket, but this only made me lose even more faith in our government. This is our voice; we are encouraged to use it, and yet, even if we follow all instructions, we are not heard. After reading your article, I don’t think it’s outlandish to wonder whether someone saw that the ballot was addressed from Berkeley, California, and simply disposed of it. And that is the most disheartening feeling.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Kendall Fitzgerald
North Palm Beach, Fla.
A similar situation happened to me! I have lived at the same residence for 30 years, and was able to vote in the primary without issue. My daughter and I went to our polling place yesterday to vote together, and mysteriously I was no longer on the rolls. I provided my Florida driver’s license, my voter-registration card, and a copy of the sample ballot that had been mailed to my home, which listed my voter-ID number. When that ID number was queried, it pulled up someone in West Palm Beach. I was also given a provisional ballot and a number to call to confirm that my vote would be counted. When I returned home, I called the office of the Supervisor of Elections to voice my concern. I was told that the “other” county made the error, and now that it was aware, it could confirm that my vote would be counted. I expressed my lack of confidence in the process and suspicions regarding something like this happening on Election Day.
P. Bennett
Winter Springs, Fla.
Nic Niewart wrote: This is the sort of behaviour you associate with Kafka type evil governments, whether ultra right or ultra left. To discover it’s from the USA, is chilling.
Milla P Vue wrote: That happened to me in 2016. I was pretty vocal about the DNC and come voting day, my name wasn’t on the list even though I was registered. Had to fill out a paper ballot.
Sandra Jane Spear wrote: If ever there was an argument against tweeting, this is it!
Jemele Hill replies:A quick update: Since my piece on my voting experience in Florida was posted, a number of people have reached out, and all had the same question: Did your vote in Florida actually count?
The answer is yes, per the Tampa Bay Times, which got to the bottom of this entire ordeal. My provisional ballot was accepted last Friday. Most astonishing is that out of the 420 provisional ballots received by the local elections office, only 86 were approved—and mine was one of them.
I wanted to bring to light just how easy it is to question someone’s vote and how dangerous that can be in swing states, where in some cases African American political candidates have had to overcome enormous hostile forces, including widespread voter suppression.
Voting has always meant more to me than the performance of civic duty. My ancestors have shed blood and suffered immense humiliation to help guarantee me the right to vote. Thankfully, their shoulders have been broad and strong enough to support me.
“No one’s more careful about what they buy,” Peter Navarro told me recently. The director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy was explaining that he reads labels closely and avoids products made in China. “People need to be mindful of the high cost of low prices,” he said. In Navarro’s telling, those cheap flip-flops are supporting an authoritarian state, and that cut-rate washing machine might be mortgaging America’s future.
Such wariness of foreign goods is not just one man’s consumer preference—it’s United States policy. In the past year, the Trump administration has embarked on a trade war with sweeping geopolitical aims: The entire government now has a mandate, if a murky one, to make China play by the rules—and also to slow its rise. Trump has slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods imported from the People’s Republic. And China is not the only front in the war. To aid American businesses and stop other countries from growing at America’s expense, the administration has renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement and initiated bilateral talks with the European Union, Japan, and other allies.
Navarro is among the most important generals in Trump’s trade war, and a seemingly improbable one. He is a business-school professor, a get-rich guru, a former Peace Corps member, a former Democrat, and a failed candidate for public office several times over. He holds no formal role in trade negotiations, and controls no levers of policy. He is not in the Cabinet.
Navarro’s influence stems instead from a combination of bold ideology and lock-jawed dogmatism. He and Trump share a series of out-of-the-mainstream convictions, among them that China has spent the past two decades ripping off the United States, that aggressive trade policies will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and that America’s trade deficit is bleeding the country dry and even undermining its national security.
A handful of Trump’s top officials share this perspective, among them Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is actually negotiating America’s trade deals. Many others—including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow of the National Economic Council—do not. They want China to stop stealing intellectual property and to open up its markets, sure. They do not see decoupling the Chinese and American economies as a good and necessary goal.
But in Navarro and Trump’s view of the world, the United States is not starting a trade war so much as it is belatedly joining one. “We’re a tributary state to China, right? We’re the Jamestown to their Great Britain,” the former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who remains close to Navarro, told me. “We’re finally engaged in the economic war that they’ve had against us for the last 25 years.”
In this conflict, Navarro’s role is to shepherd Trump’s more extreme ideas into reality, ensuring that the president’s convictions are not weakened as officials translate them from bully-pulpit shouts to negotiated legalese. He is the madman behind Trump’s “madman theory” approach to trade policy, there to make enemies and allies alike believe that the president can and will do anything to make America great again.
“The reality is, unless the president talks tough on trade and has possible concrete actions to back up that talk, these people won’t talk to us,” Navarro told me. “They had no incentive to talk to us, none, because they’re winning and we’re losing.”
Navarro grew up an East Coast latchkey kid. He went to Tufts University on a scholarship, spent three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand, then headed to Harvard to get a doctorate in economics, later decamping to Southern California to teach.
But his was never a sleepy professor’s life. In the late 1980s, Navarro became a crusader against what he saw as the ticky-tacky overdevelopment of San Diego, and ran for office—for mayor, city-council member, county supervisor, U.S. representative, and council member again.
He lost each time, but won a reputation for being “the cruelest and meanest son of a bitch that ever ran for office in San Diego.” That, at least, is how Navarro himself put it in his political memoir, San Diego Confidential—200 pages of name-calling, score-settling, dad jokes, and dirty jokes. His mayoral opponent broke down in tears at a prime-time debate while describing the viciousness of Navarro’s negative campaigning. (Crocodile tears, he says.) During the same campaign, he shoved a female political aide working for the rival candidate, a moment caught on camera. (She started it, he says.)
By the early aughts, Navarro’s political career was over, as was his marriage. Teaching at UC Irvine’s business school, he reinvented himself as a groovy, stock-picking wise man. He became a frequent television commentator, started a firm called Platinum Capital Management, and distributed a weekly newsletter called The Savvy Macrowave Investor. He wrote several books on grokking markets and getting rich, among them 2004’s If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks.
It wasn’t until the mid-aughts that Navarro developed an interest in China, inspired by the fact that his students who were studying for M.B.A.s at night started losing the jobs they held down during the day. In his mind, unfair competition from across the Pacific was one of the root causes. He did not speak Mandarin and had spent little time in China. But he nevertheless produced three hawkish books and one hawkish documentary, Death by China, which argue that Beijing cheated its way to global preeminence by selling the United States dangerous goods and ignoring global trade regulations. Among the claims in Death by China (narrated by Martin Sheen, available on Amazon): that the country has “stolen” American factories and jobs, that the Sino-American economic relationship makes the U.S. more likely to be hit by a nuclear strike, and that American companies are compromised because many of their executives are foreign.
Not all of Navarro’s views are quite so outré. Even his critics allow that he gets some important things right. China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization did jolt the Rust Belt far harder than elites in Washington predicted. Its tolerance of environmental degradation and lax labor standards do make its exports cheaper and therefore more competitive on the global market. To fuel its ascent, Beijing has broken trade rules, devalued its currency, and brutalized its own citizens.
But economists on both the left and the right say that Navarro’s fundamental views of trade are outdated, misguided, or just plain wrong. For instance, he has argued that reducing America’s trade deficit will lead to economic expansion. In some circumstances, a smaller trade deficit might go hand in hand with a stronger economy—if American businesses sold more airplanes and advanced computer systems to foreign buyers, say. But in other circumstances, a smaller trade deficit would go hand in hand with a more sclerotic economy—if, say, U.S. government policies encouraged investors to build cheap-junk factories here in the United States, diverting corporate resources from higher-value and higher-margin enterprises. As Greg Mankiw, a top economist for President George W. Bush, put it, Navarro’s understanding of trade economics would not make sense to “even a freshman at the end of ec 10.”
Moreover, economists argue that there is simply no way to bring back jobs from China; companies’ supply chains are far too complicated for that. For instance, all “made in America” cars have foreign parts—from Canada, China, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea. Parts and components cross international borders as many as eight times during production. “You can’t unscramble this globalization omelet,” says Jared Bernstein, formerly the chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden.
Foreign-policy wonks, for their part, worry that Trump might squander his leverage over Beijing in his effort to increase it. The bipartisan consensus in Washington, which dates back to Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China, is that it’s better to treat the country as a kind of frenemy than as a flat-out foe. Trade agreements and diplomatic engagement have allowed the U.S. to encourage Beijing to open its markets and liberalize its society.
Navarro’s revanchism has made him few friends among Washington’s economic experts, trade experts, and Asia experts. Yet it paved his way into the administration, where he has found a boss simpatico with even his most outlandish positions. The president and his trade adviser also share personality traits that may have helped Navarro ingratiate himself with his notoriously mercurial patron. “If Trump wasn’t the biggest asshole in Washington, Peter could be,” says Larry Remer, a San Diego political operative who worked on Navarro’s congressional campaign. He is indelicate, to put it mildly. His political memoir devotes a full chapter to chuckling about Al Gore’s love handles; elsewhere in the book, he posits that a “gay hairdresser” who put gobs of makeup on him may have cost him votes in one of his failed political runs. He tends to describe women by their looks and to have little patience for political correctness. The Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson appears in Death by China, accompanied by his wife, Judith Herr. When Herr recounts her own efforts to avoid buying Chinese goods, the chyron below her reads, “Intelligent woman for the record.”
Trump surely also admires Navarro’s disdain for elite opinion and his hedgehoglike sense of conviction that China is the enemy. “Peter was saying things about China which people didn’t agree with,” Gordon Chang, a friend of Navarro’s and a longtime China critic himself, told me. “He didn’t mince words. He didn’t change his views to become popular.”
During the campaign, Navarro, along with Wilbur Ross, was a central architect of Trump’s trade policies, fleshing out his vision of China as a malign actor and coming up with plans to hem in the rising superpower. When Trump took office, he created the National Trade Council and named Navarro to lead it. There were rumors that it would end up on equal footing with the powerful National Economic Council or even the National Security Council. But as the saying goes, personnel is policy, and it was never just Ross and Navarro making decisions. Steven Mnuchin and Goldman Sachs’s Gary Cohn also joined the administration, which immediately got bogged down in vicious fights about trade policy.
For a while, the doves won. Cohn played defense against Navarro’s most aggressive moves, including three attempts to get Trump to withdraw from nafta. Chief of Staff John Kelly eventually sidelined Navarro: The National Trade Council was eliminated, and Navarro was put under Cohn’s watch.
Then the hawks got the upper hand. Though Navarro had been exiled from the inner sanctum, he earned a reputation among colleagues for skulking around the White House after hours, hoping to catch the president and bend his ear. (Navarro has disputed this characterization.) Nudged by Navarro, Trump realized that his views were being undermined by his own people. “My Peter,” as Trump sometimes calls Navarro, came back into favor. Cohn quit. Trump finally got his trade war.
Navarro is not working on nitty-gritty policy or handling negotiations. His team is tasked with “buy American” and “hire American” initiatives. His mission, he told me, “is to strengthen our manufacturing and defense industrial base, and to create good jobs for men and women to work in American manufacturing.” But that undersells his influence. His power derives from his willingness to go to the mat for his boss’s harshest ideas, much as Stephen Miller does on immigration policy. “There’s only a few people that, from a policy standpoint, understand the president as well as Peter does,” says David Bossie, who worked with Navarro on the campaign and transition. In the White House, colleagues describe him yelling, bullying trade traditionalists in meetings, and writing hang-tough memos.
The administration has argued that its tough negotiations—including its new nafta-type deal with Mexico and Canada—are bringing nations around the globe together to confront the Chinese menace. “All the actions that the administration has taken have resulted in people around the world coming to an agreement that China needs to be dealt with,” says Dan DiMicco, one of Trump’s trade advisers.
Are the Chinese intimidated? They’re certainly confused. American officials raise issues only to later drop them. They contradict one another. The ideological warfare within the White House, as well as the lack of experience on the international economic team, has left China and others unsure of U.S. policy, or even its goals. “If we’re not going to go back to the way things were, we have to have an idea of where we’re going,” says Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute. “And, due to the disagreements within the administration, no one does.”
Navarro counters that the administration’s goals are clear: It is trying to reduce Chinese imports, strengthen American exports, and scare Beijing straight. It is not, he says, trying to execute a divorce between the two countries. “That’s a corrosive narrative not coming from any of the principals,” he said. “All we’re doing is defending this country from economic aggression by China and others.”
Perhaps. But American allies are alienated. Foreign countries talk about trying to wait out the Trump administration. As the tariffs come into effect, companies that rely on imported parts are initiating layoffs. Consumer prices are starting to rise, and there is mounting evidence that the trade war is slowing down the economy. Meanwhile, the trade deficit is growing, not shrinking.
“I fully expect over time, as we get all of our trade policies in place, that trend will strongly reverse,” Navarro assured me. “China keeps engaging in the worst forms of unfair trade practices. Same with Europe. We’re talking to them, but they’re still sticking it to us.” The war, it seems, has only just begun.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “Trump’s Trade Warrior.”
These days, the closest thing Los Angeles gets to Old Hollywood magic comes from a converted closet in a guest house in Los Feliz. There, in a space swaddled with thick black padding, using just a microphone and an iMac balanced precariously atop a pile of wooden crates, Karina Longworth conjures cinematic ghosts back into existence.
The ritual always begins the same way. Longworth once compared the ambience of You Must Remember This to a séance, and there’s something eerie about the way the podcast begins, with the quiet scratch of an old record, the fragments of murmurs layered together, and a distorted Dooley Wilson singing “As Time Goes By.” When Longworth’s voice comes in, it’s clipped and almost comically precise, welcoming listeners into her aural investigation of classic film and its most indelible characters. Her catchphrase is less an invitation than an imperative: “Join us, won’t you?”
If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who listen to You Must Remember This (Longworth is cagey about specifics, but says that each episode’s downloads reach six figures), you’re aware of the distinct project that Longworth has formed her career around. She described it to me as “writing and research about old movies,” which doesn’t exactly do it justice. Longworth is Old Hollywood’s most vital historian. Four years in, You Must Remember This has spawned more than 140 episodes over multiple seasons, delving into Hollywood lore in all its sticky, self-replicating, unreliable complexity. “Dead Blondes,” released in 2017, mined the careers of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Grace Kelly, while reintroducing lesser-known actors such as Barbara Loden and Dorothy Stratten. Longworth’s 2015 series on Charles Manson’s murders was so intricately researched that it was frequently cited as a definitive source on Manson after his death last year.
Since Longworth started podcasting in 2014, out of a simple desire to produce something that might get her a programming job at a film festival or Turner Classic Movies, You Must Remember This has found a cult following. Part old-timey radio show, part reportorial deep dive, it picks lovingly at the stars in the Old Hollywood firmament. Longworth has brought a new perspective to some of the most overexposed stories and characters in film history, producing chronicles that incorporate her narration and research with fragments of actors reproducing real dialogue. But she’s also introduced a new generation of cinephiles to less-enduring actors like Linda Darnell and Olive Thomas, giving credence to women whose talent and biographies were buried. With an academic’s approach to research and a critic’s eye for quality, Longworth interrogates Old Hollywood: its myths, its icons, its injustices.
In that sense, she’s become the interpreter that classic cinema deserves. “Karina’s mapping out the history that will shape how we understand Hollywood not just today, but 20 years from now,” the film critic Amy Nicholson told me. You Must Remember This has delved into the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio system and its influence on the film industry. It’s explored the anti-communist blacklist of the ’40s and ’50s, and the highly sensationalized trial of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle for the manslaughter of Virginia Rappe, among other chapters in history. Longworth has considered the lives and careers of people from Humphrey Bogart to Jane Fonda to Rudolph Valentino. In her new book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, she uses the legendary producer and aviator as a frame (a “Trojan horse,” in her description) to tell stories about what she’s really interested in: the many women in Hughes’s orbit.
(Custom House)The project is characteristic Longworth, in that it takes a subject who’s been relentlessly scrutinized and uses him as a springboard into richer terrain. It’s essentially, she says, an empathetic series of stories about actors in the first half of the 20th century, disguised as a book about Howard Hughes’s sex life. Hughes himself is present, documented from his precocious beginnings to his isolated, codeine-addicted end. But he’s not the point. The stories Longworth uncovers—about Katharine Hepburn and Jane Russell, yes, but also Ida Lupino and Faith Domergue and Anita Loos—are so rich, so compelling, that they urge you to question how much else in history has been lost within the swirling vortex of Great Men.
They also present a compromise, at least when it comes to thinking about Hollywood and the badly behaved men who’ve made most of its masterpieces. Longworth is a detective, investing exhaustive efforts into separating fact from fiction—when possible—and exposing the truth about how women in the classical Hollywood era were treated. (Some of the more remarkable documents cited in Seduction include a studio press release issued about Lupino’s weight and a memo Howard Hughes once drafted about Jane Russell’s breasts.) But she’s also a genuine fan. “More than anything,” the director Rian Johnson—Longworth’s fiancé—says, “she loves finding the unexplored corners of film history, or the unseen angles of stories we all thought we knew … When she’s found something like that, she lights up.”
And learning more about those behind-the-scenes stories doesn’t contaminate how she feels about the films themselves. For her, it makes them seem more valuable, more fascinating as cultural artifacts. If anything, she says, “the more I do this, the more I feel passionate about doing it. Because there’s so much more to say, and there’s so much more to correct.”
You Must Remember This is a production, but it’s one specifically tailored to its presenter’s requirements. Longworth mostly writes the scripts, those paeans to cinematic glitz, in a rented office in what she describes as “a bad neighborhood along a freeway.” If she sounds like she’s delivering her monologues while sporting a Veronica Lake side-sweep and crimson lipstick, in reality she’s wearing “the softest cotton clothes ever” so she doesn’t feel uncomfortable while working. She records the podcast in the closet at the back of the home she shares with Johnson, and she’s resisted building a more permanent studio because “I don’t know how long I’ll be doing the podcast, you know? It’s not like podcasting itself is my life’s work.”
And yet there’s an indisputable kind of magic to the way she does it. Each episode is loaded with research and facts, stuffed with everything Longworth has gleaned from her intensive reading and archive dives, but somehow reanimated into storytelling. The actor Noah Segan, who voices many of the real-life characters in You Must Remember This, describes Longworth as a gifted director who has an uncanny sense of the components required to bring her writing to life. “She directs like a journalist,” Segan says. “She’s looking for very specific information in the read, she’s looking for something that feels authentic, and she’s also aware that performing the lines and the characters does have an X factor.”
When Longworth first created the podcast, it was the natural manifestation of what felt like her lifelong fascination with classic film and its characters. She grew up in Studio City, Los Angeles, where film stars were mentioned on the local news and everybody was interested in movies. Her mother had a passion for films from the ’50s and ’60s that she shared with her daughter. If Old Hollywood feels like a niche interest now, Longworth says, it didn’t always: When she was growing up during the 1990s, “it was as important if you wanted to be part of the cultural conversation to have seen Citizen Kane as it was to have listened to the Velvet Underground.”
After studying art at the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Art Institute, Longworth moved to New York to pursue a master’s degree in cinema studies. Her initial plan was to enter academia, but she didn’t enjoy writing in an academic voice and found the performative aspect of teaching to be uncomfortable. “It’s very difficult for me to teach,” she says. “I’ve tried it at different points in my life and it’s just not for me.” She was working at a pasta factory in New York when she started writing for a blog about independent film that became Cinematical. After the journalist who was hired to edit it left the project, Longworth was hired as editor in chief before she’d even finished her graduate degree, running a film site that had previously paid her five dollars per post as a writer.
Longworth’s résumé is a fascinating illustration of how much media has changed over the past 20 years. Longworth was a blogger before blogging was mainstream, an experience she parlayed into her dream job of film critic at LA Weekly. As alt weeklies across the U.S. began shrinking and cutting talent at the top of the masthead, Longworth lost most of her mentors, along with her enthusiasm for contemporary criticism. “I’m not somebody who’s excited to generate opinions,” she says. “In any given year, there are probably 20 to 30 movies that I’m excited about, and there are 12 to 15 movies that come out each week.”
In 2014, after she had been writing and editing for almost a decade, and a little more than a year after she left LA Weekly, Longworth started working on You Must Remember This. Podcasting wasn’t quite the dominant force it would soon become (Serial, for context, debuted later that same year), and Longworth didn’t have a plan beyond making something that could be a showcase for her particular skills. Her first episode was an examination of the interrupted trajectory of Kim Novak, the actor who played what Longworth described as “the ultimate Hitchcockian icy blond fetish object” in Vertigo, and whose appearance at the 2014 Academy Awards had sparked the same kind of obsessive dissection of her physicality that defined Novak’s acting career in Hollywood.
The swiftness with which You Must Remember This gathered attention and acclaim took Longworth by surprise. The A.V. Club’s Podmass blog quickly praised her “compelling stories” and thoughtful examination of the “often corrosive effect Hollywood has [on] those who choose to live in it.” Entertainment Weekly followed suit. You Must Remember This was recruited to join American Public Media’s podcast network, and it quickly grew a substantial audience. What Longworth describes as a “personal art project” was suddenly a hit. “The only thing that I can say is that it’s very genuine,” she says. “It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is. And for the first time, of anything I’ve done in my career, I’m not trying to appeal to any specific format or any specific audience, and I think people respond to that.”
What makes You Must Remember This so distinctive is its marriage of so many different elements. Longworth’s friend, the culture critic Rachel Syme, says that she is “the most amazing researcher … but then her synthesis is so beautiful, taking all these disparate facts and weaving them into a story.” In a place and an era where myth is more deeply engrained in the historical fabric than truth can ever be, Longworth is rigorous about checking facts but transparent about what can’t be known.
She’s also constantly informed by an awareness that film history has always lionized men as brilliant, complex entities while reducing women to component, easily replaceable parts. “The thing about Old Hollywood stars is that they calcify so easily. They become these images, like Marilyn, forever stuck in time in the white dress,” Syme says. “Karina is really good at helping you contextualize what people’s lives were like, women’s lives especially. She reanimates people from black-and-white and puts them into color.”
Then there’s the voice. Longworth downplays any question of a podcasting persona—she’s just acting, she says, to the limits of acting that she’s capable of, and the voice is simply a controlled way of speaking that seems to happen when she’s standing up to record. But in a medium where “podcast voice” has become its own phenomenon, she does something different, specifically enunciating certain letters and imbuing her text with a plosive, expressive emphasis. Her delivery has won its own legion of fans (“My friends and I were talking once about how we have an ASMR response to her voice,” Syme says), while contributing to the dramatic nostalgia of You Must Remember This. Longworth’s delivery transports listeners to the 1930s, even if her critical analysis and deconstruction of Hollywood couldn’t come from any moment but the present.
In one chapter of Seduction, Longworth describes Howard Hughes and Katharine Hepburn taking pleasure in the eternal Hollywood “tug-of-war with the press.” Both craved notoriety and attention, but without their accompanying cost. And both “wanted to be the most talked-about and celebrated person in their respective fields,” Longworth writes, “without ever having to reveal themselves to anyone outside of their immediate circle.”
The concept of fame, and what actual value it represents, comes up again and again in Longworth’s work. At one point in the actor Billie Dove’s career, Longworth writes in Seduction, Dove was receiving 37,000 fan letters a month, a number that was “as valuable a measure of popularity then as an actress’s number of Instagram followers would be now.” Fame is presented in the book as its own distinct entity—separate from talent and success, if not wholly separable. It also tends to have a more pronounced and lasting impact than either.
If Howard Hughes is best known now as an aviator and a producer, his real genius, Longworth told me, wasn’t related to either—it was in his ability to manipulate Hollywood’s publicity machine in ways that still resonate a century later. Even as a very young man, his instincts told him that he could succeed by manufacturing his version of the truth and repeating it enough until others did, too. “Hughes may have been irresponsible, reckless, tacky, and dangerously ignorant,” Longworth writes in Seduction, “but he was also entertaining.” And he understood the value that could be gleaned from that ability to draw people in, even if he also repelled them.
Longworth’s career thus far has been defined by looking at Old Hollywood through a modern lens, examining heroes and legends from a contemporary perspective. But her mission also seems to be to pinpoint and correct fame’s distortions. For every Hughes and Hepburn, skilled manipulators of the media who used fame to their benefit, there are forgotten actors like Linda Darnell, whose husband once tried to sell her to Hughes, and whose own biographer diminished her talent.
The irony is that Longworth’s success has increasingly meant that the podcast host and author has had to navigate fame for herself, trying to balance privacy with acclaim and success in a public-facing profession. At this point in her career, she’s often recognized. In the most recent season of the Netflix drama Dear White People, two characters rhapsodized about You Must Remember This and even mimicked Longworth’s presentation. But Longworth seems to resist hype. She doesn’t have a publicist; she tries to minimize the events she participates in, like film screenings and panel discussions.
A decade ago, when she was a film critic for LA Weekly, she wore distinctive cat-eye glasses and sported a more retro aesthetic (an interviewer for The Guardian once described her as being “like something straight out of a 1950s edition of the Hollywood Reporter”). But Longworth seems frustrated now that people often expect her, in person, to be “cosplaying the 1940s.” She’s had Lasik eye surgery and the glasses are long gone. She still carries herself with a discreet, slightly fierce kind of glamour—her Instagram page bears a handful of photos in which she radiates both intensity and reticence.
Even those photos seem to be a kind of negotiation: Longworth told me in one interview that she’d quit Instagram because she disliked feeling pressured to present herself for public consumption, and she didn’t think what she looked like should have anything to do with what she did for a living. “When I was 25 I wanted to be famous, and now that I’m 38, I don’t,” she says. “I want to have just enough notoriety to be able to keep working. I don’t want people to take pictures of me, I don’t want to be on TV. I just want to be able to work.” (A few days later, she posted two more pictures to her page, seemingly out of an obligation to promote her book.)
There’s some irony in the fact that Longworth’s career is now embodying the same kinds of tensions that she’s spent more than a decade exploring. Finding success in the entertainment industry, even as a writer, increasingly requires selling an image, even if your specific comfort zone involves mostly working inside a soundproof closet, alone. Longworth is adamant, too, that there’s a gendered element to what people expect from her: Because she’s a woman, she’s supposed to be the face of her work and her product in a way that men might find it easier to avoid.
The thing about Hughes that Longworth most empathizes with, she says, is his desire to be recognized for his achievements while not wanting people to know too much about who he actually was. Her long-term goal is to ultimately move into film and television, using archival film to tell visual stories about Hollywood history. She cites the British documentarian Adam Curtis as an example. For one thing, he has what seems like open access to the BBC’s archives. For another, she says, “I don’t think anybody knows what that guy looks like.”
What seems certain is that she’ll continue her work of trawling through Hollywood history, correcting instances where myth outlives the truth, and elevating the actors, writers, and directors who merited more glory than they received during their lifetime. It’s work that adds texture to the historical record of classic film without dampening its perpetual luster. Darnell is an example of somebody “who had an incredibly tragic story, somebody who was really destroyed by fame,” Longworth says. And [knowing this] doesn’t make her movies less interesting or repellent to me at all. It makes them more fascinating, and it makes it easier for me to empathize with her as a human being trying to do a job. It makes me want to champion her.”
Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin eight years ago. He’s survived a recall attempt, a reelection bid, a brief flirtation with running for the GOP nomination for president, and years of bitter opposition from Wisconsinites who fought against his hard-line policies on voting rights, health care, education, and the state safety net. He’s led what might be considered the model of a Republican state takeover in the era of Trumpism. And he lost the 2018 election to his Democratic challenger, Tony Evers, by a margin of 1.2 points, a total of just over 30,000 votes.
As the dust settles from the midterm elections and political observers attempt to divine exactly what happened across the country, that result is worth a closer look. In particular, the limited data available on the Wisconsin race suggest that increased turnout among black and Latino voters was one of the biggest shifts from the 2014 midterms to this election. If that indication holds true, it would mean that in a state characterized over the past decade by Walker’s racial politics, and in a country currently facing rising bigotry and voter suppression, minority voters were Scott Walker’s bane.
The early evidence indicates that in 2018, black and Latino voters in Wisconsin were extraordinarily active in the midterm elections. The CNN exit poll of the state gubernatorial race calculates that black voters composed about 9 percent of the electorate, and Latino voters about 4 percent. According to the Census Bureau, black people only make up about 6 percent of the voting-age population in the state, and Hispanic people about 5 percent—although Hispanics compose a smaller percentage of registered voters, about 4 percent. That means that proportionally, black voters significantly outperformed white voters, and Hispanic voters reversed long low-turnout trends. These numbers appear to show higher shares of minority voters than in previous midterms: A CNN exit poll from the 2014 gubernatorial election found that black and Latino voters made up 6 and 3 percent of the electorate, respectively.
[Read: I respected Scott Walker. Then I worked for him.]
To be sure, exit polls aren’t entirely reliable. The election data and preelection surveys that we do have complicate the story a bit. Wisconsin’s counties report different levels of data, and only Milwaukee provides a statistically useful data set broken down by discrete geographic areas, the city’s wards. The results of course don’t contain demographic information on individual voters, but one side effect of the city’s staggering level of racial segregation is that the wards themselves are reasonable proxies for racial groups. And according to John Johnson, a research fellow at the Marquette University Law School, both plurality-black and plurality-Hispanic wards did see turnout markedly increase. Of Milwaukee’s 327 wards, black people are the largest group in 148. Turnout in those wards increased from 64.5 percent in 2014 to 68 percent in 2018. But that actually didn’t keep pace with plurality-white wards, where turnout increased from 66.7 percent to 78.7 percent, meaning plurality-black wards might have actually made up a slightly lower percentage of the Democratic vote share than in 2014.
One particularly interesting aspect of the voter data is the strong increase in turnout and vote share among wards with large Hispanic populations. Turnout in those wards rose 14 percentage points from 2014 to 2018, going from 50 percent to 64 percent and making those wards almost identical to plurality-black wards in terms of turnout. Latino voters in Milwaukee are a much smaller population than black voters, but Johnson’s preliminary analysis found that the vote share of plurality-Hispanic wards in the overall results tripled from 0.2 percent to 0.6 percent, a substantial amount in a state where election margins are often narrow. And that’s as the candidate preference among voters in those plurality-Hispanic wards shifted strongly away from Walker and toward Evers.
[Read: Even Scott Walker says he’s “at risk” in Wisconsin.]
These data aren’t complete either. Milwaukee’s wards are only a rough proxy for race across the state, and their usefulness could be limited by demographic shifts over the years, such as any displacement of black residents to the suburbs or internal population movements within the city. One major confounder is the fact that there are 25,000 fewer registered voters in the state than there were in 2014, a result of a widespread voter-purge program that opponents claim disproportionately disenfranchised black and Latino voters. In June, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to similar purges across the country, but the upshot for minority voters in Wisconsin is that they might have showed up to the polls in spite of increased barriers against doing so.
Further analysis from the Marquette Law School captures some of that enthusiasm. Using an aggregate of each election year’s polls, Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, calculated that 67 percent of all black respondents said they were certain they’d vote in 2018, with 29 percent indicating they were not likely to vote. That’s compared with 60 percent of black respondents who said they were certain to vote in 2014, and 39 percent who said they weren’t likely, Franklin explained in an email to me. Indeed, these results appear to be positive signs after troubling returns on black likelihood of voting from the 2012 and 2016 elections, in which the proportion of respondents who said they were certain to vote dropped five percentage points. It appears that at the very least, 2018 was a reversal of a mini-trend of disengagement among communities of color, and that result alone will have significant meaning in elections in the state.
Organizers and canvassers attest that voter enthusiasm was remarkable in communities of color, and that in those communities the election functioned as a rejection of Walker and his politics. According to Reyna Gengler, voters in northwestern Milwaukee started off tentative. She is a lead canvasser with the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization, a group of service and hospitality workers and Milwaukee Bucks stadium employees born out of the Fight for $15 national minimum-wage movement. “They were hesitant at first to even listen and get a conversation with me,” Gengler says of her initial canvassing, when she knocked on doors in June on behalf of the Democratic candidate Mahlon Mitchell, a prominent firefighter who lost to Evers in the Democratic primary. Early on, even politically engaged minority voters had been demoralized by Walker’s political resilience, especially after the 2014 recall attempt failed.
[Read: Democratic governors will lead a majority of Americans.]
But even after Mitchell, a black candidate with deep connections to the urban black power base, lost, Gengler says black and Latino communities responded positively to the policy platform that grounded the anti-Walker movement—including proposals from Evers to implement a $15 minimum wage and to expand Medicaid. “I spoke to a woman; she was working at Popeyes and another restaurant,” Gengler told me by phone. “She was working two $7.25 jobs, and I said ‘Ma’am, do you realize if we win, you’ll only have to have one of those jobs and you’ll be able to spend more time with their children?’” Gengler says that woman immediately warmed to the campaign and pledged to get her siblings to vote for Evers, too. It didn’t hurt Evers that his running mate, Lieutenant Governor–elect Mandela Barnes, is a black Milwaukee native with deep activist roots.
For minority voters, Walker embodied the dysfunction and the racial disparities that have come to characterize Wisconsin’s government. During his first term, Walker appeared on a conservative talk-radio show with a host who’d called Latino voters “wetbacks.” He’s presided over an incredibly polarized government in which Milwaukee has become a hyper-segregated, racialized target of the rest of the state, which is overwhelmingly Republican. Opponents blame his policies for the fact that Milwaukee contains the zip code with the highest incarceration rate for black men in America. He’s refused to expand Medicaid, even as the state has become the worst in the nation for black-infant mortality. Under Walker’s tenure, Wisconsin has suffered one of the largest racial achievement gaps of any state. And perhaps above all, Walker has been the face of a conservative welfare-reform program that has utilized dog-whistle attacks to implement work requirements and drug tests and severely curtail public benefits.
According to Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, a Milwaukee organizing group that’s the scion of the progressive national organization CPD Action, dissatisfaction with Walker provided an opening, but one that still required plenty of work to exploit. “It meant prioritizing and centering black voices early on, in a way that really hasn’t been done before,” Lang told me. “It took a constant drumbeat. All the time, people are saying it is labor intensive, but it’s all about building relationships.” As has been a common theme in several other races centering on minority voters and low-propensity voters—from Stacey Abrams in Georgia to Andrew Gillum in Florida—the work of expanding the electorate and mobilizing people was an involved process that required time and resources, but one that seems to have paid real dividends nationally and locally.
“Once we started getting to early voting, you could just see people who had gotten their early votes in and then they were trying to get their family members,” Gengler tells me. The result appears to have been a surge in enthusiasm, turnout rates that kept pace with statewide results, and an electorate that looked almost like that of a presidential year. “It was so exciting to see the community go from ‘Get off my grass; get away from my door’ to being all-in,” Gengler said. Gengler, who is of a mixed-race background and identifies as part Latina, is married to a black man and lives in the black community in Milwaukee where she canvassed. She voted for the first time ever in this election.
What activists saw was a referendum on Walker and his policies. “Even for me, personally,” Lang says, “the idea of just getting rid of a governor that has not centered our community and has quite frankly ignored our community was powerful.” But the result also shows the value of interfacing and engaging with residents early and often about policy, and also the enduring value of helping voters of color navigate barriers and moving low-propensity voters into the “likely” column. There may be national implications to those lessons, but for now Evers and Barnes face a long-overdue reckoning with Wisconsin’s communities of color, who’ve now perhaps handed the two a mandate to govern in their interests.
There was a time when Charlie Baker, the popular Republican governor of Massachusetts who won his bid for reelection by a wider margin than did the stalwart progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, might have been considered one of the GOP’s leading lights. As it stands, he is an oddity. Though the Republican Party still commands the allegiance of some secular, college-educated, upper-middle-income voters in the suburbs of big cities, such voters represent a shrinking share of its coalition.
Admittedly, this is not an entirely new development. Voters who describe themselves as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, or rather socially progressive and fiscally pragmatic, have been gravitating to the Democrats since the Clinton era. But the 2018 midterm elections really do feel like the culmination of this decades-long trend. Rockefeller Republicans have fully given way to Bloomberg Democrats, a shift that seems especially pronounced among younger elite-educated professionals, and it is hard to envision a reversal. Henceforth, the Republican Party will either win working-class voters or lose its grip on power.
In Grand New Party, published a decade ago, Ross Douthat and I argued that the Republican Party was evolving into the party of the white working class, and that its path forward would be to craft a more populist economic agenda that could secure the loyalty of working-class voters of all colors and creeds. We warned that if the party’s leadership failed to reflect the material interests and cultural sensibilities of its working-class base, Republicans would find themselves doomed to defeat. What we failed to anticipate is that the thermostatic rejection of congressional Democrats in 2010 and 2014 would delude at least some Republicans into believing that there was a large working-class constituency for shrinking the safety net and expanding temporary guest-worker programs, both pet causes of the party’s erstwhile rising stars. The rise of Donald Trump put those illusions to rest.
[Eliot Cohen: The Republican Party abandons conservatism]
In some respects, Trump’s rise vindicated our thesis: Here was a candidate who spoke to the party’s working-class base, and who managed to breach the “blue wall” as a result. In others, though, it underscored the inability of the Republican policy-making apparatus to adapt to the new dispensation. As an undisciplined political outsider, who takes great pride in his improvisational approach to governing, Trump is singularly ill-equipped to drive the Republican agenda in new directions. In short, Trump has cronies, not cadres. That is, he has a small coterie of loyalists who aren’t especially experienced or knowledgeable when it comes to policy making, who’ve since been joined by Republican regulars who champion ideological nostrums that are always unpopular and often discredited. The GOP has yet to develop a cohort of policy professionals capable of reconciling egalitarian populism and market conservatism in an attractive program, and the result is that Trump’s taste for invective has filled a vacuum that might otherwise have been filled by a creative and unifying new nationalism.
This is not to suggest that Democrats don’t face challenges of their own. To Democrats who came of age when memories of the New Deal were still fresh, the realization that the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt has become the party of the metropolitan rich has proved more than a little discomfiting. Shortly after the midterm elections, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist published a column recounting conversations Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York had with various friends while traveling to Washington, D.C., on the Acela. Having pored over the results, Nadler, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, worried that the Democrats’ growing reliance on affluent voters made them “more vulnerable to the charge they are no longer the party of the working person.”
This is not entirely fair. Democrats fared well with a wide range of voters in the midterms. Indeed, one of the more striking patterns to have emerged is that, as the statistician Andrew Gelman recently observed, Democrats saw their biggest gains in strong Republican districts, where Democratic candidates received less than 40 percent of the vote in 2016. Nevertheless, Nadler had a point. Anti-elitism has a long and storied history in American life, and if politics is fundamentally about “knowing who hates who,” as the political strategist Kevin Phillips once said to Garry Wills, to be seen as the party of a smug and self-satisfied elite is a real vulnerability. Trump is only the latest in a long line of self-styled populists to have capitalized on the supposed elitism of his political rivals.
[Neil J. Young: Here’s why white women are abandoning the GOP]
Nadler might have added that as HENRYs—Shawn Tully’s ingenious acronym for “high earners, not rich yet”—go from swing vote to core Democratic constituency, they might stymie efforts to greatly increase the scope and generosity of the safety net. While HENRYs might accept the creation of boutique social programs that leave their federal tax burdens untouched, there is reason to believe they’d resist more ambitious domestic-policy initiatives that threaten to eat into their disposable incomes. Recognizing that Democrats were poised to capitalize on suburban discontent with the Trump presidency, the historians Lily Geismer and Matthew Lassiter warned that “Democrats haven’t paid enough attention to the substantial policy costs of turning affluent suburbs blue.” Writing in The New York Times in June, they noted the tension between the political culture of upscale suburbs, which, in their words, “revolves around resource hoarding of children’s educational advantages, pervasive opposition to economic integration and affordable housing, and the consistent defense of homeowner privileges and taxpayer rights,” and the promotion of a more forthrightly egalitarian agenda, as championed by the party’s socialist wing.
Judging by past experience, this intra-party tension will be resolved in favor of the interests of tax-sensitive suburbanites. Democrats will surely make symbolic concessions to the priorities of socialists and environmentalists, who will continue to play an essential role in marketing centrist candidates to the young and the intelligentsia. But they seem most likely to rely on negative partisanship, which is to say deep-seated opposition to the Republican Party, to keep their coalition intact.
As HENRYs cement their central role in the Democratic Party, we can expect Republicans to be less solicitous of their wants and needs, and to go hunting for new voting blocs that might be more receptive to conservative cultural appeals. Doing so will be exceptionally difficult in the near term, as President Trump is an intensely polarizing figure about whom most voters and potential voters have long since made up their mind. For now, as I argued in the immediate aftermath of the midterms, the best Republicans can hope for is to win back some of the Obama-Trump voters of the industrial Midwest, many of whom have since returned to the Democratic fold.
Looking further out, though, Republicans will have no choice but to attract a far larger universe of working-class voters to address the upper-middle-class exodus. Regardless of the outcome of the next presidential election, younger members of the party need to start thinking about the post-Trump landscape, and what it will take to expand the Republican coalition. The loss of HENRYs could, in theory, free Republicans to pursue policies that might cut against the interests of affluent voters while serving the interests of other voters with more modest incomes. Again, skepticism is warranted as to whether the incumbent GOP political class is capable of adapting to this new political landscape. But as Trump demonstrated in his 2016 presidential campaign, political entrepreneurs are always lying in wait to exploit unrealized opportunities.
[David Frum: The Republican party needs to embrace liberalism]
How should newly elected Republican senators position themselves for the political battles to come? How should Republican lawmakers reckon with the fact that the conservative bromides that served them so well in the days of Tom DeLay now fall on deaf ears? The short answer is that they need to recognize that Democrats have a growing advantage in economic policy, which is why they’ve made such significant gains in previously safe Republican districts. Short of a large and very visible shift to the center along these lines, Republicans might be shut out of winning the House for some years to come.
With the possible exception of the botched effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) has proved the biggest missed opportunity of the Trump era so far. No one doubts that the capping of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction helped drive HENRYs into the arms of Democratic candidates in high-tax communities across the country. What Republicans failed to do, however, is channel some of the revenue raised as a result into providing more federal help for poor states that are badly in need of it, a policy advocated by the sociologist Joshua McCabe. Drawing on his work, I’ve made the case for a “fiscal equalization” program that would help ensure that states with low average incomes have the resources they need to provide their citizens with high-quality services, and that would have the added benefit of deepening support for the GOP in hitherto neglected regions of the country.
Then there is the fact that the TCJA’s tax cuts for low- and middle-income households were meager in comparison to its sizable corporate tax cuts, a decision that, regardless of its (debatable) substantive merits, amounted to political malpractice. Trump himself seemed to recognize that this was so when he confidently asserted that he would slash taxes for middle-income families on the campaign trail late last month, a promise that has yet to be borne out. So far, Republican proposals for Tax Reform 2.0 have played to type by centering on measures that would do precious little for most low- and middle-income households.
[Tom Nichols: Why I’m leaving the Republican party]
But it’s not hard to imagine a simple swap that would prove a boon to millions of families. In short, Tax Reform 2.0 ought to hike taxes on HENRYs to finance tax cuts for those who were left out of Tax Reform 1.0. First, lower the threshold for the 37 percent tax bracket, which now sits at $500,000 for single adults and $600,000 for married couples filing joint tax returns, to $157,500 for singles and $315,000 for married couples, which is currently the threshold for the 32 percent bracket.
Though this tweak would increase marginal rates for a modest number of HENRYs, it is very unlikely to have a large aggregate economic effect, according to Kyle Pomerleau of the center-right Tax Foundation. Simply put, these workers have typically devoted their lives to building successful professional careers, and they’re not going to drastically reduce their work hours in response to a modest increase in their taxes. As for the highest-income workers, who might be somewhat more sensitive to marginal rates, their marginal rate would be left unchanged. The next step would be to use this revenue to defray the cost of doubling the maximum value of the earned-income tax credit (EITC) for childless workers, a policy that would do a great deal to incentivize work and reduce poverty, and to eliminate the Social Security payroll tax for workers over the age of 62, a reform that would come very close to paying for itself by encouraging delayed retirement.
Wouldn’t Democrats try to outbid Republicans bearing tax credits? Absolutely. But that’s to be expected. While Democrats might promise
more redistribution, Republicans can and should promise labor-market policies that actively promote work. The key is to be in the fight on economic policy while maintaining an edge on national security, gun rights, immigration control, and other issues where Republicans are generally on the right side of the enthusiasm gap.
In a similar vein, consider the GOP’s utterly ineffective response to the labor-backed push to increase the minimum wage, possibly the most successful policy campaign of the past decade. In state after state, minimum-wage referendums have attracted the support of liberal and conservative voters alike, most recently in Arkansas and Missouri. Democratic lawmakers are understandably eager to pass a large increase in the federal minimum wage, perhaps with the expectation that their efforts will be blocked by Republicans in the Senate.
[Read: Boycott the Republican party]
There are good reasons to oppose a truly drastic increase in the federal minimum wage. For one, such a policy wouldn’t take into account differences in local wages and prices between, say, Massachusetts and Mississippi; a higher federal minimum wage would likely have a more deleterious effect in low-wage, low-productivity regions than in high-wage, high-productivity regions. Even so, Republicans ought to consider at least softening their opposition. In lieu of a sudden, sharp increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, savvy Republicans could back the establishment of a federal wage standard, which would yield higher minimum wages in rich regions than in poor ones. HENRYs in rich regions would have to pay somewhat higher prices for the labor-intensive services on which they depend, but low-wage service workers would enjoy (modest) wage increases.
Some conservatives might object that the federal wage standard would still be too much of a one-size-fits-all solution. To make it more flexible still, the standard could be understood as a default rather than as a floor, as the policy analyst Oren Cass suggests in a recent piece for the right-of-center Economics21. “In workplaces where workers have no collective representation and thus a limited ability to bargain, government rules are a necessity—though, of course, we should strive to improve their quality and reduce their cost wherever possible,” writes Cass. “But in workplaces where employees bargain collectively with management, the sides should be free to depart from this default when they find it mutually beneficial to do so.” Unions have been seeking exactly this sort of carve-out from minimum-wage laws in Los Angeles County and, more recently, in San Mateo County. Would adopting this approach suddenly cause pro-union workers to vote Republican en masse? Of course not. What it might do instead is soften the antagonism between organized labor and the GOP, and lay the groundwork for a partial rapprochement. Given rising support for organized labor, this would be an opportune time for such a shift.
There is much more to be said about the sorry state of the Republican domestic-policy agenda and what might replace it. The truth is that the past two years of unified Republican control of Congress and the executive branch have been largely wasted, the remaking of the federal judiciary aside. The Paul Ryan generation is leaving the stage having accomplished far less than its members had hoped, and the HENRYs they courted so assiduously have left the GOP outright. A new coalition is forming, and it will need new ideas to rally around.
LOS ANGELES—Democrats had already reclaimed the House of Representatives before California’s election returns came in last week, but since Election Day, the party has racked up a nice bonus here: After the counting of vote-by-mail ballots, Democrats appear to have won four of the state’s six most competitive congressional races. In the remaining two, a Democrat has just taken a slim lead in one, while another Democrat barely trails in the other.
That means California is bluer than ever, with Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom becoming the first Democrat since 1887 to succeed a fellow partisan as governor of this state, and with “California Democrats Set to Dominate Congress,” as a Breitbart News headline put it with alarm. Not only is Nancy Pelosi, the newly reelected representative of California’s Twelfth District, poised to resume the speakership, but vocal critics of Donald Trump in the state’s newly expanded 43-member Democratic delegation will be in line to chair key committees.
Just imagine what grief “low IQ” Maxine Waters, as Trump calls her, might cause the president as the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, which controls banking regulation. Or the difference it will make to have Adam Schiff as the chair of the Intelligence Committee, replacing Devin Nunes, one of Trump’s most reliable supporters.
Zoe Lofgren, a seven-term incumbent from San Jose, will likely head the House Administration Committee and the subcommittee on immigration, while Anna Eshoo, a 26-year veteran from Palo Alto, seems poised to chair the subcommittee on energy and commerce. Mike Thompson, a 10-term member from St. Helena in Napa Valley, will probably head up the Ways and Means Committee’s subcommittee on health care.
More trouble for Trump could come from the state’s Democratic attorney general, Xavier Becerra, appointed two years ago to fill the vacancy created by the election of Kamala Harris to the Senate. He easily won election to a full term, and seems ready to continue the dozens of lawsuits he has already filed contesting Trump-administration legislative and regulatory policies on issues from climate change to immigration. No Republican has won statewide office here since Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.
All that is on top of the Democrats’ strong performance in Republican-leaning House districts where the party hoped to make gains, fueled by Trump’s unpopularity here. So far, four Democrats have officially won: Katie Hill, who beat the GOP incumbent Steve Knight in a district in northern Los Angeles County; Mike Levin, who defeated Diane Harkey for an open seat in Orange and San Diego Counties vacated by the retirement of Darrell Issa; Harley Rouda, who beat the 30-year Republican incumbent Dana Rohrabacher in another Orange County district; and Josh Harder, who defeated the Republican incumbent Jeff Denham in the state’s agricultural Central Valley.
[Read: Putin’s favorite congressman has lost his reelection.]
At the same time, two races in which Republicans held the edge on Election Night have tightened dramatically, as mail ballots of younger and late-deciding voters are counted. In an Orange County district, the Democratic challenger Katie Porter has opened a slight, 260-vote lead over the GOP incumbent Mimi Walters. Similarly, in a neighboring district that spans three counties and includes the birthplace of Richard Nixon, Gil Cisneros is trailing the Republican Young Kim, a former aide to the retiring representative Ed Royce, by just over 700 votes, half the margin on Election Night, or 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent.
[Read: “This election in California may make all the difference.”]
Most of these six hotly contested races have been close. Only Levin racked up a comfortable five-point Democratic victory. Meanwhile, in a seventh district that some had thought might be competitive, Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican incumbent who is under indictment for misusing campaign funds in a district in San Diego and Riverside Counties, easily defeated his half-Latino, half-Arab challenger, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a devout Christian and former Obama White House aide, after running a strident anti-Muslim campaign in the final stretch.
[Read: Hunter is running the most anti-Muslim campaign in the U.S.]
Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic strategist here, noted three factors in the Democrats’ strong performance: anti-Trump sentiment, the recruitment of “good candidates and nonpoliticians,” and demographic changes. “At the end of the 10-year reapportionment cycle, congressional districts move closer and closer to the overall California demographic norm,” he said.
But if Walters and Kim wind up winning, it will be because Republicans still have an edge in voter registration in such districts, where Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 2016. And candidates like Walters and Kim, the GOP contenders who ran most strongly, did not position themselves as hard-edged Republicans, while their opponents, Cisneros and Porter, ran more or less as unabashed liberals in districts where that meant an uphill climb. For example, Walters’s district still has about a nine-point GOP edge in registered voters, and Porter, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and a Harvard Law School protégé of Senator Elizabeth Warren, has gambled that she could win by campaigning on issues like “Medicare for all.”
The math in such districts is growing steadily more favorable for the Democrats, and the GOP will have to defend its latest victories again in just two years, when a presidential election is likely to inspire higher turnout among the minority and younger voters who tend to underperform in the midterms.
In the near term, California’s newly empowered congressional Democrats might cause no end of headaches for Trump. Schiff has made it clear that while leading the Intelligence Committee he intends to dig into Trump’s complex ties to Russia, an inquiry that has been stymied in the past by Nunes’s unwavering fealty to the White House.
And while Trump’s virulent anti-immigration rhetoric in this campaign’s homestretch may have helped his party hold the Senate this year, California history provides a vivid reminder that short-term political gains can sometimes turn into long-term losses. Twenty-four years ago, the state’s incumbent Republican governor, Pete Wilson, rode to reelection partly on the back of Proposition 187, a ballot measure to deny state services to undocumented immigrants. But the backlash against that proposal among the state’s growing Latino electorate also planted the seeds of the decline of the Republican Party in the state—a decline that continued apace last week.
GILGIT, Pakistan—On a July morning, Saqlain Abbas, 26 years old, stood before rows of students, Mandarin textbook in hand, while a Pakistani soldier sat silently at the back of the classroom with a gun at his side. Hanging on the wall was a collection of idyllic Chinese landscapes—the reddish-orange mountains of Gansu, the placid waters of a lake in Xinjiang. Here, at Karakoram International University, in a remote, rugged terrain that is still contested territory between India and Pakistan, the Pakistani military has been sponsoring free Mandarin courses for indigent students.
“Previously, students were more inclined toward English,” Muhammad Ilyas, the director for the university’s Institute of Professional Development, told me. Today, that’s changing, as young Pakistanis increasingly gravitate toward Mandarin in search of jobs and degrees. As part of an infrastructure development plan inked with Pakistan in 2013, China has pledged $60 billion to build what’s known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)—a network of roads, pipelines, power plants, industrial parks, and a port along the Arabian sea. Intended to increase regional connectivity and trade between the two countries, CPEC is part of Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). BRI aims to create land and maritime trade routes integrating 70-odd countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe, including politically turbulent states like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
In many ways, CPEC is a bellwether for this broader global initiative. Prior to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s trip to China this month, the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, Yao Jing, boasted that the program had already generated 75,000 jobs for Pakistanis. The Karachi-based Applied Economics Research Center and Pakistan’s Planning Commission say that in the next 15 years, 700,000 to 800,000 jobs may be created under CPEC, largely in the infrastructure, energy, and transportation sectors. It’s a hope the country desperately needs to pan out: As many as 40 percent of youth are unemployed, and Khan’s trip to Beijing hinged on the hope that the Chinese might inject more cash into Pakistan’s battered economy. The South Asian country is currently seeking a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund, an organization which previously said it will review the extent of Pakistan’s debt to Beijing.
[China is quietly reshaping the world]
On the ground, young Pakistanis are already investing in the language skills to capitalize on future job opportunities with the Chinese. “Chinese has become as important as English to learn,” Sherullah Baig, a student in Gilgit, told me. The military provided him free accommodation and tuition to attend three levels of Mandarin classes. Almost everyone in his course joined because of CPEC; Baig’s classmates are a mix of engineers, teachers, retired army officials, and fresh college graduates.
Saqlain Abbas taught Mandarin at KIU this past summer. (Sabrina Toppa)In the past, English was the sole language of upward mobility in Pakistan, both a relic of British colonial rule and a means of accessing Western markets, educational institutions, and jobs. Now, Mandarin has become the “hot new trend,” said Abbas, the Mandarin instructor in Gilgit.
In many countries along the BRI, China’s rising economic influence has provided it with an opportunity to exercise soft power through the dissemination of Chinese language and culture. In Thailand, Mandarin language education has seeped into universities, vocational institutes, the Royal Palace Secretariat, and even the immigration bureau. In Pakistan, the growth in Mandarin-language learning has been fueled by direct funding from the Chinese and Pakistani governments, as well as a mushrooming cottage industry of private teachers and institutes claiming to provide “the Chinese edge.”
In Pakistan, CPEC has been built upon historically high levels of partnership between the two nations. Both Pakistani and Chinese officials have characterized Sino-Pakistan ties as an “all-weather friendship” that’s “higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the ocean, and sweeter than honey.” In 2014, a Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 80 percent of Pakistani respondents had a favorable view of China—the highest public opinion rating of China in the world. While cultural and linguistic exchange have not traditionally been a centerpiece of the relationship, many young Pakistanis are now increasingly looking toward China for education and employment, necessitating learning Mandarin.
In May, Pakistan hosted the first CPEC Chinese Job Fair on Punjab University’s sprawling campus in Lahore, the country’s second-largest city. More than 30 Chinese businesses interviewed students for jobs as interpreters, tax assistants, and more. “CPEC has created enormous jobs,” Aisha Noor, a 25-year-old engineer waiting in line to submit her resume to a construction company, told me. Noor had completed a free Mandarin course sponsored by the Punjab government, and in front of her several Pakistanis were being interviewed in the language. “I would give the job to the person who speaks my language,” she said, as we watched another Pakistani student introduce himself to the company in Mandarin.
Rana Ahmad, the host director of the Confucius Institute at Punjab University. (Sabrina Toppa)Pakistanis have long been aware of the differential opportunities afforded to a person based on language. Under British rule, the colonial administration was heavily reliant on native manpower, and English-language missionary schools became surprisingly popular—although their administrators were disappointed by a general lack of Christian converts. Today, the country’s education system is splintered along two parallel language tracks, English and Urdu. The languages lead to vastly different economic opportunities, with many students in Urdu-speaking classrooms feeling they suffer disadvantages in the job market. Fearing what might happen if China dominates the global economy, many Pakistanis are embracing Mandarin to have a head start in the so-called “Chinese Century,” said Rana Ahmad, the host director of the Confucius Institute at Punjab University.
Nonetheless, Pakistan’s extravagant borrowing from China has drawn some concern. China’s economic promises to Pakistan have not always come to fruition. Between 2001 and 2014, China pledged $135 billion to Pakistan, only 4 percent of which materialized, according to Eric Warner, an adjunct policy researcher at the RAND Corporation who has been tracking China’s foreign aid. Today China accounts for nearly half of Pakistan’s trade deficit, and Pakistan is among the countries most vulnerable to debt distress on China’s new Silk Road.
A lack of transparency regarding the terms of CPEC loans and investments still worries many Pakistanis, and some express skepticism about bullish job creation figures. “The jobs are an illusion,” Ahmad said. “People believe they can get a job, so maybe they should learn the Chinese language. And I always ask them, ‘If that’s so, why are there still unemployed Chinese? They have to first give jobs to themselves, and then they will give them to you.’”
Along the BRI, similar anxieties are playing out, with Malaysia recently pulling out of Chinese projects, citing fears that repaying the loans could plunge Malaysia into bankruptcy and leave it perilously indebted to the Chinese government. In Sri Lanka, a failure to pay Chinese loans spurred the Chinese government to seize Hambantota Port under a 99-year lease last year. In August, in its annual report to Congress, the U.S. Department of Defense warned that BRI might simply turn into a tool for advancing China’s own political or military agenda: “Countries participating in BRI could develop economic dependence on Chinese capital, which China could leverage to achieve its interests.”
Still, Ahmad is optimistic that China’s deals with Pakistan will receive more transparency and review under the tenure of Prime Minister Imran Khan, who previously called for placing CPEC’s financial details before parliament. His party’s election manifesto said it was imperative for domestic industries and laborers to benefit from CPEC as much as Chinese businesses, even saying that China should work toward knowledge transfer to allow Pakistani businesses to thrive on their own soil. “If the Chinese are thinking they can dictate anything to Pakistan with respect to CPEC, they are living in a fool’s paradise,” Ahmad told me.
[Is China becoming the world’s most likeable superpower?]
Today, over 30,000 Chinese work in Pakistan, and Chinese companies have had to contend with the cultural challenges of operating in a new milieu, including Pakistani requests for religious accommodation.
Some Pakistanis also question why the onus to learn a new language falls on them, rather than the Chinese. However, the Confucius Institute’s Ahmad understands why the Chinese are not rushing to learn local languages. “They don’t need us,” he said. “If you find anything in the market, it says ‘Made in China.’ That means our markets need Chinese goods, not that their markets need Pakistani goods.”
The exchange has not been entirely one-sided, however; China has also offered scholarships and other benefits to young Pakistanis. “Students are going where they can easily advance their education and seize economic opportunities,” Abbas said. While the U.S. and Europe may loom large as attractive destinations, obtaining visas is difficult even if one learns the language. China, on the other hand, is making itself open to young Pakistanis by offering scholarships and jobs.
In 2016, Abbas himself received a scholarship to spend two years at the Beijing Language and Culture University in China. On the streets of Beijing, he was struck by the city’s development and the diversity of the students, some of whom were also on scholarships. As his Mandarin improved, Abbas was excited to engage locals in conversation. However, when he told young Beijingers where he was from, he was taken aback by how little they knew about Pakistan. From their childhoods, Pakistanis are taught about their ironclad friendship with China, he told me. “The friendship is very strong.” On the other hand, he said, the youth in Beijing have a dim awareness of China’s role in Pakistan. “They don’t even know a country exists called Pakistan.”
Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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