Em momentos de folga, Jair Bolsonaro costuma estacionar perto de algum rio, arregaçar a barra da calça e entrar na água. Leva junto um jogo de peneiras e uma bateia, recipiente com fundo cônico usado para revolver água e cascalho, que carrega no carro. Ele vai em busca de ouro. “Sempre que possível eu paro num canto qualquer para dar uma faiscada”, disse ele em um vídeo que gravou para garimpeiros, de julho deste ano. “Faiscar” é o ato de procurar metais preciosos. Ele já expressou algumas vezes que “garimpo é um vício, está no sangue” – apesar de não ter permissão para isso.
Não é à toa que Bolsonaro é entusiasta da atividade: o garimpo já ajudou no sustento da família. Seu pai, Percy Geraldo Bolsonaro, foi um dos garimpeiros de Serra Pelada. O próprio Jair esteve lá, como o próprio presidente eleito afirmou no vídeo citado acima. Os representantes do clã Bolsonaro se juntaram aos mais de 100 mil garimpeiros que buscavam fortuna fácil na selva do Pará nos anos 80. Mais de 56 toneladas do metal precioso foram encontrados na região.
‘O garimpeiro é um ser humano e não poder continuar sendo tratado como algo de terceira ou quarta categoria.’Eleito presidente, Bolsonaro sinaliza que irá ceder aos apelos dos garimpeiros, diminuindo restrições ambientais e liberando o garimpo em terras indígenas ou quilombolas. Ele também disse que quer flexibilizar a legislação que regula a exploração econômica de áreas verdes preservadas, como na Amazônia.
Garimpeiros que ainda hoje vivem na região de Serra Pelada dizem que o pai de Jair, que atuava como dentista protético sem diploma no interior de São Paulo, foi garimpeiro no começo da década de 1980, no auge da corrida do ouro. “O povo mais antigo lembra do pai do Bolsonaro por aqui, já faz muito tempo. Agora recentemente um dos filhos dele veio nos visitar durante a campanha”, me disse José Henrique Botelho Marques, 62, um dos diretores da Cooperativa de Mineração dos Garimpeiros de Serra Pelada, que representa cerca de 40 mil garimpeiros.
Marques se mudou do Maranhão para Serra Pelada em 1982, após ouvir falar das facilidades em encontrar metais valiosos no local. Ele calcula ter recolhido cerca de um quilo de ouro em um ano – o equivalente a R$ 148 mil em valores atuais. “Isso foi pouco. Imagina quem pegou uma tonelada, 700 quilos…”, compara.
Foto: Luiz Novaes/Folhapress
Em julho, o Jair Bolsonaro recebeu em mãos um abaixo-assinado de mais de 500 garimpeiros de Serra Pelada, que pedem o fim das restrições ambientais que proíbem o trabalho de garimpo mecanizado em uma área de 100 hectares que compreende a antiga mina.
Os signatários sonham com a possibilidade de uma nova corrida pelo ouro e acreditam que a antiga mina, submersa desde 1992, ainda guarda toneladas do minério e seus derivados abaixo de 190 metros de profundidade. De acordo com a Cooperativa dos garimpeiros, o máximo alcançado até agora foram 150 metros.
“O garimpeiro é um ser humano e não poder continuar sendo tratado como algo de terceira ou quarta categoria. Se Deus quiser, vamos buscar meios para que vocês possam trabalhar com dignidade e com segurança”, disse Bolsonaro ao receber o abaixo-assinado.
É impossível precisar o número de garimpeiros que atuam de modo ilegal no país – a estimativa é entre 80 mil e 800 mil. Eles se concentram em regiões ermas, em terras indígenas preservadas, muitas vezes só acessíveis por helicóptero ou barco. A atividade clandestina destrói a vegetação e os rios. Um relatório recente da Polícia Federal mostrou que o garimpo de ouro no Pará despeja o equivalente a um desastre do Rio Doce a cada 11 anos.
‘O que seria do Brasil sem os bandeirantes que exploraram os diamantes?’O mercúrio (usado no garimpo para “grudar” partículas de ouro) contamina águas e peixes por milhares de anos e causa uma série de doenças. O último levantamento sobre o assunto mostra que até 160 toneladas de mercúrio foram emitidos à atmosfera apenas em 2016.
O Ibama se esforça para combater os garimpos ilegais, colocando fogo em máquinas e destruindo pistas de pouso ilegais. Mas a tarefa parece infinita. Outra promessa de Bolsonaro, a de unir os ministério do Meio Ambiente e da Agricultura, pode dificultar as ações e aumentar os conflitos.
Em várias ocasiões, Bolsonaro já disse que as riquezas minerais devem ser liberadas para extração pelos brasileiros. “O que seria do Brasil sem os bandeirantes que exploraram os diamantes? Teríamos um terço do território atual se não fossem eles. É preciso parar de tratar o garimpeiro como bandido no Brasil”, já afirmou.
A associação de garimpeiros levou suas demandas apenas a Bolsonaro. Segundo Marques, houve tentativas de diálogo com o ex-presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, mas ele não cedeu aos apelos. Por isso, o petista Fernando Haddad nem foi procurado.
Por causa da receptividade à causa, Bolsonaro é idolatrado em Curionópolis, cidade que abriga Serra Pelada. Algumas montagens na internet alteram o nome da cidade para “Bolsonópolis”, como uma brincadeira. Moradores de um bairro sem asfaltamento fizeram uma vaquinha para instalar um outdoor em apoio a ele. Esperam que, no governo do militar, a bonança volte a reinar.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Um kit para garimpo, como o usado por Bolsonaro, é vendido por R$ 310 no Mercado Livre. Se tiver sorte e achar três gramas de ouro, o equivalente ao peso de uma moeda de um centavo, já se paga o kit e ainda sobram R$ 134. A cotação do ouro em 1° de novembro estava em R$ 148 a grama.
A atividade garimpeira é tida por muita gente como promessa de dinheiro fácil e rápido. A ambição de enriquecer rapidamente e ter poder chegou a constar na ficha de Bolsonaro no Exército Militar. Em 1983, ele resolveu passar as férias em Saúde, na Bahia, para garimpar. Estava com outros cinco militares, sendo que dois “estavam sob seu comando”.
A situação foi registrada na avaliação feita pelos superiores na época. Segundo as anotações, eles atestaram que Bolsonaro tinha grande “ambição e imaturidade”, e que se percebeu “pela primeira vez sua grande aspiração em poder desfrutar das comodidades que uma fortuna pudesse proporcionar”. Na época, Bolsonaro respondeu aos superiores que não teve lucro.
Ligação antigaEm 1986, o então deputado federal Sebastião Rodrigues de Moura, o Major Curió, do PMDB, enviou uma carta cheia de elogios a Bolsonaro. Dizia que desejava “passar o bastão” ao capitão, que na época tinha 31 anos. Curió era o interventor da região de Serra Pelada. A cidade que abriga a mina, de 18 mil habitantes, foi batizada de Curionópolis em sua homenagem. Ele comandou o massacre da guerrilha do Araguaia, no Sul do Pará, entre 1972 e 74, em que pelo menos 52 pessoas morreram. Bolsonaro e Curió se conheceram em Serra Pelada, segundo o próprio Bolsonaro.
Na carta, que faz parte dos registros do Arquivo Nacional, em Brasília e pode ser lida na íntegra aqui, Curió afirma que reconheceu em Bolsonaro um parceiro na luta contra a “maior das ditaduras, o comunismo”. “Competirá a você, meu jovem companheiro, carregar este bastão, levando-o à vitória, com a graça de Deus e a ajuda dos homens de bem desta Nação”, diz o texto.
Na época, Bolsonaro ainda era um desconhecido. Sua única ação de projeção nacional havia sido escrever um artigo na revista Veja reclamando do salário baixo dos militares. Acabou sendo preso pela crítica, acusado de “transgressão grave”. Poucos meses depois, a mesma Veja revelaria que ele planejava explodir bombas em quartéis para pressionar o comando – o que ele sempre negou.
Major Curió é hoje coronel da reserva. Aos 83 anos, vive em Brasília praticamente isolado, tem problemas de saúde e quase não se comunica mais com a população de Curionópolis.
Ex-agente do Serviço Nacional de Informações, o SNI, Curió tinha prestígio junto à ditadura militar por causa do “bom serviço” prestado na guerrilha do Araguaia. Por isso, foi o indicado para administrar Serra Pelada quando o local teve um boom demográfico durante o apogeu do garimpo. Como uma espécie de interventor da comunidade, ele definiu regras rígidas, como a proibição de bebidas alcóolicas e de mulheres na região do garimpo. Costumava dizer que “o seu revólver soava mais alto”.
‘Cantamos não a canção da infantaria, mas o Hino Nacional. E as vozes daqueles homens mal barbeados e sujos pela lama avermelhada da maior mina de ouro do planeta, ecoaram pela selva amazônica.’A mão de ferro garantiu ordem e estabilidade. Em 1980, o presidente João Batista Figueiredo visitou o local. O Jornal Nacional da época noticiou que uma multidão de garimpeiros recebeu Figueiredo cantando o hino nacional diante da bandeira do Brasil.
O momento é narrado por Curió na carta a Bolsonaro: “Vibrantes, patriotas, dignos e honrados, cantamos não a canção da infantaria, mas o Hino Nacional Brasileiro. E as vozes daqueles homens mal barbeados e sujos pela lama avermelhada da maior mina de ouro do planeta, ecoaram pela selva amazônica, impressionando o mundo”.
Em 2000, Curió foi eleito prefeito de Curionópolis. Em 2008, teve o mandato cassado por compra de votos e abuso de poder econômico. Ainda assim, os moradores lembram com saudade do cacique político. “Naquela época não tinha bagunça como tem hoje”, disse Marques, que ainda mora na localidade.
Hoje, os ex-garimpeiros que permanecem na região se dedicam principalmente à lavoura, à criação de peixes e abelhas. “Não sobrou nada de todo o dinheiro que fizemos naquela época. A gente pensava ‘vou gastar tudo hoje, que amanhã tem mais’. Mas uma hora acabou”, conta o diretor da cooperativa.
Depois do garimpo, Bolsonaro e Curió voltaram a se cruzar em Brasília. Curió foi deputado federal até 1987 e continuou residindo na capital federal durante a década de 1990. Bolsonaro foi eleito pela primeira vez para a Câmara em 1989. Eles não se cruzaram nos corredores da Câmara, mas em momentos de lazer. Partilhavam, pois, dos mesmo ideais.
Foi Curió o autor da frase “quem procura osso é cachorro”. Ele tentava desqualificar a tentativa de encontrar os corpos de mortos da guerrilha do Araguaia. A frase de Curió estampou um cartaz que Bolsonaro pendurou na porta de seu gabinete como tentativa de afrontar os trabalhos da Comissão Nacional da Verdade, que buscava recuperar a história do Araguaia.
Na época, alguns deputados disseram que o hoje presidente eleito estava tentando aparecer na mídia. “Seria uma omissão tratar o caso apenas como desequilíbrio mental. Até os desequilibrados mentais têm limite”, disse a então deputada Jô Moraes (PCdoB) ao Estado de São Paulo. De qualquer maneira, a busca era pelos desaparecidos não tinha muito como prosperar: os militares desenterraram os corpos, arrancaram os dedos e os dentes e jogaram tudo em rios para não serem identificados.
The post O passado garimpeiro de Bolsonaro – e o perigo que essa paixão representa para a Amazônia appeared first on The Intercept.
On October 17, the third day of early voting in Georgia, Gabriel Velazquez was waiting in line with a friend at the only poll site open in Hall County. The two were speaking Spanish, and after a bit, a man ahead of them turned around and asked for help. Salvador told Velazquez that he had just moved from California, where there was always a bilingual poll worker to assist him, but he now realized that wouldn’t be the case in Hall County. With roughly an hour left to wait, Velazquez grabbed a sample ballot and started translating. A few minutes in, a middle-aged white woman accused him of telling the man how to vote, an odd accusation because, Velazquez assumed, the woman didn’t speak Spanish.
Velazquez told her to mind her business and kept translating, but she continued to interrupt. Finally, the woman appealed to a poll worker, who called over a county marshal. It’s against the law to assist a voter outside of the booth, the officer reminded them, so Velazquez stopped translating. “I didn’t want to do anything to risk this man’s opportunity to vote,” he said. “If I kept talking, I was thinking that maybe they’ll kick us out of line.”
In the booth, Velazquez flew through the translations for individual races, like the gobernador and vicegobernador, but slowed down when he came to the referendums, like the one that asks about a new homestead exemption from ad valorem taxes. Velazquez had signed an oath forbidding him from influencing the man’s vote, so when Salvador periodically asked him for guidance, Velazquez would repeat the question, clause by clause. In total, the two spent an hour in the voting booth.
Velazquez was happy to help but frustrated that he was needed at all: “If Hall County provided Spanish-language ballots, this wouldn’t have happened.”
For the first time in Georgia’s history, there is one jurisdiction offering a bilingual ballot for the general election: Gwinnett County, roughly 30 miles south of where Velazquez was. In 1990, Gwinnett was 90 percent white, but after decades of immigration, it is now one of the most racially diverse counties in the Southeast, and by 2040, it’s projected that there will be more Hispanic residents than white. Yet, the decision to offer a Spanish-language ballot was not Gwinnett’s.
Photo: Kevin D. Liles for The Intercept
After the 2016 American Community Survey, run by the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Hispanics reported in Gwinnett triggered Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark federal legislation passed at the height of the civil rights movement that protects against racial discrimination in voting. Section 203 ensures that citizens of substantial language minorities can access the polls in their native language, and it currently applies to 263 jurisdictions across 29 states, predominantly for Hispanics in Texas, California, and Florida, but also in places you might not expect, like the 10 counties in Mississippi that include the Choctaw Indian Reservation. In total, almost 69 million voting-age citizens, nearly a third of the national voting-age population, live in a covered jurisdiction.
As Georgia (and the rest of the nation) continues to become more diverse, Section 203 will only become more relevant — an irony considering that, at the same time, many of the other provisions of the Voting Rights Act have effectively been neutered. Since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, jurisdictions like Georgia, which couldn’t make any changes to its election administration without clearance from the federal government, have now been able to act however they see fit.
A day after Georgia’s early voting started, I sat down with Andrea Young, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. With Georgia’s illustrious history of voter suppression, it was difficult to know where to start, especially considering the stakes of the race: If elected, Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams would become the nation’s first female African-American governor.
Already, counties, most notably Randolph, but also Albert, Morgan, and Fayette, have been closing poll sites, predominantly in minority neighborhoods. And this year, the Republican candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, is also the secretary of state, the official who oversees the state’s elections.
However, what’s getting the most publicity is Georgia’s “exact match” system, which has held up 47,000 voters’ registrations because of a discrepancy between the information they registered with and their entries in other state and federal databases. “This is a problem particularly with Hispanic-Americans because they have a different naming tradition,” said Young, “and whenever you’re dealing with two last names, the computer itself doesn’t accept them properly.”
What most media reports failed to mention about the “exact match” system is that a voter’s registration is on hold until she brings a valid form of ID to the polls and confirms her identity — a requirement that already applies to all voters under Georgia’s ID laws. However, the perception of legislation is often as important as its content. According to Sean Young, the legal director of the ACLU of Georgia, “Any laws that create voter confusion result in disenfranchisement.”
And create confusion they have. Over the course of two days, I spoke with roughly 50 voters outside of three polling sites across Gwinnett, and almost all had heard about one of the problems in Georgia generally or Gwinnett specifically. Of those, the majority mentioned the “exact match” system, but none fully understood what that meant. Some said it permanently removed the thousands of voters from the rolls. Others told me that their ballots would be invalidated.
Reasonably so, voters expect that once they’ve registered to vote, their name will appear in the poll book. When that’s not the case, those who are informed and motivated and affluent enough can usually make themselves whole again by petitioning for a provisional ballot, requesting that a supervisor intervene, or involving a lawyer. In Gwinnett’s case, however, those least equipped to bear those burdens are most likely to have to advocate for themselves. To do so, they must confront a community that is uncertain of how or whether to embrace the diversity that’s come knocking at its doors.
Photo: Kevin D. Liles for The Intercept
As the executive director and I chatted in the ACLU’s office, Sean Young knocked on her window and flashed a thumbs-up. He’d just filed a lawsuit against Gwinnett County for rejecting absentee ballots without giving voters adequate opportunity to prove their identity. Coincidentally, the county’s Board of Elections was hosting a public meeting that night, and I asked the attorney what he would ask if he were there. He thought for a moment. “I know this may seem like a small question,” he said, “but how quickly are they giving voters notice when their ballot or application has been rejected?”
Board of Elections meetings typically attract few spectators, but when the meeting adjourned in Gwinnett, sitting and standing throughout the room were three-dozen people, including representatives from the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the NAACP. In contrast, the members of the board, like every other county-level elected official in Gwinnett, are all white.
Like with “exact match,” a rejected absentee ballot isn’t inherently fatal. The status of every absentee is publicly available on the secretary of state’s website, and in theory, the county notifies affected voters, who can then re-cast their ballots or vote in person. However, the board refused to say when it would notify those affected, many of whom are elderly, disabled, or immigrants. Hispanics have been rejected at almost twice the rate of white voters; African-Americans, more than three times the rate; and Asians, nearly six. Though Gwinnett accounts for 12 percent of the state’s absentee ballots, it has been responsible for 40 percent of absentee rejections.
At the meeting’s start, the chair announced that because of the lawsuit, the board couldn’t discuss the absentee ballots, which satisfied no one. “I’m appalled at what Gwinnett County is doing,” said Penny Poole, the president of the local chapter of the NAACP. “I’m appalled that we have to be in this room. I’m appalled that you guys sit up there and smile at us like you’re our friends when you have the right, as a county, to choose how these things are handled.” When she finished, the room applauded.
“Our hands are somewhat tied by what the law says we can and cannot do,” the board chair told Poole. As he continued, Poole interrupted — “That’s not true.” Eight days later, a federal judge agreed with Poole and the ACLU and issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting officials in Georgia from rejecting absentee ballots or applications without giving voters an opportunity to contest. On Friday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals concurred.
The day after the Board of Elections’ meeting, I got a tour of its headquarters, a repurposed Walmart that, for the first week of early voting, was the only polling site for the county’s 521,492 registered voters. I met with Lynn Ledford, the Voter Registration and Elections director, who started working at the board as a temporary employee in 1987. By 1990, there were 8,470 Hispanics total in Gwinnett. Today, there are over 40,000 registered to vote.
Ledford showed me the county’s Spanish-language material, not just the ballot and registration forms, but every external document the board produces, including a bilingual, peach-centric voting sticker. To make the transition, she said the county received no guidance on Section 203 compliance from either the state government or the Department of Justice. They also had to foot the $1 million bill themselves, though Ledford said that the Board of Commissioners essentially provided a blank check, an unusually plush situation for election administrators (by comparison, New York City’s BOE has been asking for more money for its poll workers since 2010).
However, these additional resources haven’t led to what is arguably the most important provision of Section 203 coverage: bilingual poll workers. At the BOE meeting, Ledford reported that they’d hired 60 to 90 temporary workers, well below her initial goal of 350 and a range that’s so large because many poll workers, hired as one-day temporary employees, fail to show on Election Day.
Ledford freely admits that the Spanish she knows is largely confined to counting to 10, which she learned as a kid watching “Sesame Street.” However, running elections is an exhausting, thankless task that requires a multitude of skills, and being bilingual, even in a county as diverse as Gwinnett, isn’t necessarily a requisite — as long as you can connect with the necessary communities. And in that regard, Ledford has come up short.
Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, on Oct. 17, 2018.
Photo: Kevin D. Liles for The Intercept
In 2015, Jerry Gonzalez, the executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, or GALEO, asked the board to voluntarily provide Spanish ballots and offered to help with the translations. According to Gonzalez, “They said not just no. They said, ‘Hell no, you’re going to have to force us with litigation.’” For those asking the county to proactively include Korean, most likely to be the next language covered by 203, the response has been the same: “Our take here, always, is we follow the law,” said Joe Sorenson, the communications director for Gwinnett County. “We’re not going to do something the law doesn’t require us to do.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. In 2002, Montgomery County, Maryland, fell under 203 and hired Gilberto Zelaya as its compliance officer. A fluent Spanish speaker, he didn’t just connect with the Hispanic community. He also targeted speakers of French, Chinese, Korean, and Amharic (the official language in Ethiopia) and expanded services in American Sign Language and braille. In addition, he created Future Vote, a program that recruits students from sixth to 12th grade to serve as assistant poll workers and translators, which has expanded the board’s language capacity tenfold. He told me that Ledford’s reluctance to act proactively was counterproductive: “The more you prepare for the unique culture and language needs of your electorate,” he said, “the smoother Election Day goes.”
But, Gwinnett is not Montgomery. Since 2009, the county has participated in 287(g), a federal program that deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. By 2010, more than 3,000 undocumented immigrants arrested by the county had been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody; more than half were arrested for traffic violations or driving without a license. According to Brenda Lopez, a state representative from a district in Gwinnett, the program became a pretext for racial profiling. “I used to get plenty of clients where the only citation was driving without a driver’s license,” she said. “Well, how did the officer know you were driving without a driver’s license?”
Especially under the current administration’s immigrant policies, Lopez encourages her constituents to exercise their rights: If a stranger asks to come into your home, demand to see a warrant. However, when that person is a census taker, not an ICE officer, the strategy reaps fewer benefits. Referring to Hall County, where Gabriel Velazquez spent an hour translating the ballot, Jerry Gonzalez of GALEO said, “I think the only reason why it wasn’t designated [under Section 203] this time around was the lack of response rates.”
Photo: Kevin D. Liles for The Intercept
When talking about suppressed votes, the easy assumption is that they’re exclusively Democrats. That’s generally the case in parts of Atlanta, but the reality in Gwinnett is more complicated. The county has a significant Cuban population, which tends to lean more conservative, and, especially on social issues, Latinx voters are not uniformly liberal. According to Mike Seigle, the chair of the Gwinnett County Republican Party, the immigrants moving into the area now tend to be more affluent than the waves before them, and Asian voters, especially older ones from Communist nations, generally vote Republican. For his part, Seigle says he’s proud of the diversity in Gwinnett and supports the Spanish-language ballot.
Likewise, it’s easy to believe that a county accused of racial profiling (and currently being sued for allegedly drawing its county-level election districts in order to dilute the influence of minority voters) is uniformly against immigrants. But, the day after Velazquez had to translate the ballot in Hall County, a middle school in Gwinnett was translating its PTA meeting from English to Spanish.
While at the middle school, which was celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, I spoke with Jon Valentine, the director of foreign languages for Gwinnett County Public Schools, the 12th-largest school district in the nation. He said that the Board of Commissioners has been nothing but enthusiastic in its support for multilingualism. Seven elementary schools have dual-language immersion programs, where students learn for half the day in Spanish and half in English, and Valentine’s goal is to make native Spanish speakers bilingual at a professional level. In addition to offering literature courses aimed at those students, he plans on adding a full Spanish-language natural science curriculum to one of the high schools. “Be a bilingual nurse in this state,” he said, “and you can write your own ticket.”
Valentine has made a compelling case for how bilingualism benefits Gwinnett’s bottom line, which is perhaps why the county has embraced Spanish in schools more so than on the ballot. For both, though, the goal is the same: to help immigrants integrate by meeting them halfway. Doing so requires time and resources, which is why the most common argument I heard against Section 203 coverage — if you’re a citizen, you should speak English — is so hard to swallow.
Downtown Norcross, in Gwinnett County, Ga., on Oct. 17, 2018.
Photo: Kevin D. Liles for The Intercept
And so far, those party invitations have not been extended freely. In DeKalb County, which borders Gwinnett to the southwest and voted for Hillary Clinton by a 63-point margin in 2016, officials admitted that 4,700 applications to vote by mail have been lost. In Louisville, southeast of Atlanta, about 40 black senior citizens were ordered off a bus that was taking them to vote early. Across the state, newly naturalized voters who provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote were told that they would have to do so again before a deputy registrar. On Friday, a federal judge called that requirement a “severe burden” and cleared the citizens to vote without the additional verification.
Technically, these incidents didn’t disenfranchise anyone, but they do demand that citizens know their rights, assert them when necessary, and persevere until their vote is counted. However, that last point is also no guarantee. Georgia is one of five states in which every county uses electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail, and already, the state chapter of the NAACP has sued the secretary of state’s office for irregularities. Partly to ensure physical proof of their votes, many black citizens participated in a church-led vote-by-mail campaign this year, but, especially in highly segregated Atlanta, anyone who wanted to disenfranchise voters of color could do so, quite reliably, based on their ZIP codes. And, should a candidate ask for a statewide recount after November 6, that petition would fall before the secretary of state.
In Gwinnett, not everyone is thrilled with the Spanish-language ballot, which Ledford recognizes. She instituted cultural sensitivity training as part of this year’s poll worker curriculum, but it remains to be seen how much an online course can combat deeply ingrained beliefs.
Signs in both English and Spanish hang on the walls as voters participate in early voting at the Gwinnett County Voter Registration and Elections office on Oct. 17, 2018.
Photo: Kevin D. Liles for The Intercept
She clearly had more to say, so I motioned for her to continue. “If you’re a citizen of this country, you need to speak the language,” she said, pointing a finger at me. “You think if I went to their country and became a citizen, they’re gonna give me a ballot in English?” I asked if I could have her name in order to quote her, and she said she better not. After all, they both serve as Gwinnett County poll workers.
The post It’s Already Hard to Vote in Georgia — and Even Harder If You Speak Only Spanish appeared first on The Intercept.
Rupert Murdoch, center, leaves the News Corporation building with his son Lachlan Murdoch, right, on July 21, 2016 in New York City.
Photo: Kevin Hagen/Getty Images
In the early 1990s, some of the smartest people resisting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic worked out of a chaotic office in the center of Belgrade. The office was filled with a haze of cigarette smoke, ringing phones answered with shouts, off-kilter desks scarred by abuse, and half-empty bottles of liquor. This was the nerve center of Vreme, an opposition magazine presided over by the wise-cracking Milos Vasic.
A cross between Seymour Hersh and Ida Tarbell, Vasic saw beneath the surface of things. He realized that his small magazine made little difference to Milosevic, who had instigated and fueled the brutal wars in neighboring Bosnia and Croatia. There was just one media platform that mattered: state-controlled Radio Television Serbia, which was a relentless promoter of the Serbian strongman and his eliminationist agenda.
Vasic had a sharp analysis of how Serbs, in their susceptibility to indoctrination, were not unique. “All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinist, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years,” Vasic said. “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line — a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.”
Instead of a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, we have Rupert Murdoch as the founder of Fox News, which for years — starting long before Donald Trump’s presidency — injected racist, anti-Semitic and anti-liberal tropes into the American mainstream (remember the war on Christmas?). Fox isn’t watched by everyone, but for those who do watch, Fox is everything. As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote the other day, it’s possible to imagine the political violence of the past weeks occurring even if Hillary Clinton had been elected president — we can take Trump out of the equation, and we still might have crazed Americans trying to kill other Americans because of their religion, skin color, or party affiliation. But it’s impossible to imagine these attacks occurring without years of Fox News spreading the ideology of white nationalism. The network promotes conspiracy theories that begin in the bowels of the internet, and it feeds into those bowels an army of converts willing to go further than Fox & Friends dares.
The latest terror attacks in America have provoked a new wave of indignation against the network, culminating in a widely noted call by the U.S. editor of the Financial Times, Edward Luce, for an advertiser boycott. “The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox,” Luce tweeted. “They bankroll the poison that goes from the studio into Trump’s head.” It’s a worthwhile idea, but its impact will be limited, because as a Bloomberg article pointed out, the network’s main source of revenue is from cable subscribers, not advertisers. Some sponsors, heeding public pressure, have withdrawn from Laura Ingraham’s show after she mocked a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, but the show’s ratings have surged since then — a condition that can lead, theoretically, to more subscriber revenue.
How can Fox News be pressured?
The Murdoch family is absolutely central — without their support, and particularly Rupert Murdoch’s support, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson would be off the air. The curious and condemnable thing, however, is that whereas Steve Bannon became persona non grata in polite society for his role in spreading far-right ideas, Rupert Murdoch and his heirs are welcomed into the halls of power and money even though their network has done irreparably more damage to America than Breitbart News, the media platform Bannon once controlled. Few doors (if any) are closed to the Murdochs, with little questioning of whether they should be shunned rather than solicited by the various nonprofit organizations they patronize and support.
This point was highlighted in a recent exchange in which NBC reporter Ben Collins pointed out that “extremist talking points may get workshopped on fringe sites, but they’re platformed on and reach the most dupes on Fox News. Never forget that Sean Hannity was literally tying Hillary Clinton to actual Satanism three days before the 2016 election.” Bill Grueskin, a journalism professor at Columbia University, aptly responded on Twitter, “As so often, it returns to the toxicity of Rupert Murdoch, and the complicity of his heirs.”
We can’t wait for the younger Murdochs to make their move, if they even want to make a move. The emergency is now.The key heirs are Murdoch’s sons, Lachlan and James. Each of them has held senior positions in the Murdoch empire in recent years, though James has been edged aside in a restructuring that leaves Lachlan with direct control over the news side, albeit under his father’s eye. The other Murdoch children — Prue, Elisabeth, Grace, and Chloe — are not involved in managing the empire (Grace and Chloe are minors), though they are beneficiaries of a family trust that holds an estimated $12 billion in Murdoch assets.
Media coverage of the Murdoch sons has been inexcusably indulgent. Lachlan was a featured guest at the New York Times DealBook conference in New York on Thursday, where he was welcomed with applause and had a generally amiable chat with DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin. This is in contrast to what happened when it was merely announced that Bannon would appear at the New Yorker Festival not long ago; after a surge of protests, editor David Remnick was forced to withdraw the invitation.
In a lengthy article in 2017, the Times reported that while Rupert Murdoch remained in control, the sons “seem determined to rid the company of its roguish, old-guard internal culture and tilt operations toward the digital future. They are working to make the family empire their own, not the one the elder Murdoch created to suit his sensibilities.” This friendly narrative bends reality. While shedding itself of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes due to their sexual harassment of women, Fox News has not throttled back its xenophobic content. Indeed, it’s actually gotten worse (just watch Tucker Carlson’s show). Lachlan Murdoch even refuted the Times’s reformist narrative when he was asked at the DealBook conference — held in the Times headquarters — whether he was embarrassed by Fox News. “I’m not embarrassed by what they do at all,” he replied.
Moreover, the don’t-worry-we’ve-got-this narrative hinges on the notion that the elder Murdoch, now 87, won’t be around much longer — that his sons will be in charge soon and things will get better. But guess what? Rupert Murdoch’s mother lived until she was 103 years old. If he lasts that long — and he appears to be in good health right now — he’ll be calling the shots until 2034. We can’t wait until then for the younger Murdochs to make their move, if they even want to make a move. The emergency, and the time for action, is now.
What would ostracism of the Murdochs look like? To begin with, it would probably involve the rescinding of invitations to all the conferences and galas they regularly attend. They would become as toxic to business-as-usual as Bannon has become. Their presence and their money would not be accepted by any organization that aspires to stand against the poison that Fox News continues to unleash on the country, including the Democratic Party, which has reportedly received a number of contributions from James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn.
Here’s one potential scenario.
After neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year and one of them drove a car into a crowd of pro-democracy protesters, killing Heather Heyer, James Murdoch wrote in an email to a group of friends that “vigilance against hate and bigotry is an eternal obligation. … I can’t believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis.” He announced that he and his wife would donate $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL confirmed that it received the donation.
But should organizations dedicated to fighting hatred accept money from the owners of a company uniquely guilty of spreading hatred?
James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 10, 2015 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Here’s another potential scenario for ostracism.
Kathryn and James Murdoch have established a foundation, Quadrivium, that provides funding to organizations that are involved in and, among other issues, environmental protection. Kathryn Murdoch is also on the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, which fights climate change. Yet Fox News is the only major media institution that regularly expresses skepticism about the science of climate change (it told one guest, an editor from Scientific American, to not discuss it), and the network cheered the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.
Should organizations dedicated to fighting climate change accept money from the owners of a company that’s uniquely devoted to lying about it?
James and Kathryn Murdoch are akin to the Javanka of the Murdoch family — the supposedly reasonable (or not reactionary) ones who do what they can to quietly rein in their bigoted patriarch. Kathryn Murdoch, in fact, has a Twitter account that is decidedly liberal. “Literally the only consistency that Trump has shown is to be against all forms of evidence-based or even rational thinking,” she tweeted last year, just before Trump’s inauguration. Earlier this year, she shared an anti-Trump story from the New York Times and wrote, “Worth reading.”
But there are only two tweets in her account that mention the word “Fox,” and they date from 2016. In both, she shared Fox stories that were abnormal for the network: one that admitted climate change posed a big risk and an opinion piece arguing for Hillary Clinton’s election. It does not appear that she, her husband, or any other member of the Murdoch family has publicly criticized the 800-pound gorilla of hate that has helped turn them into billionaires.
The question now is whether America’s great and good, having deplored the rising tide of far-right violence, are willing to confront the family that controls the largest platform of intolerance.
The post Fox News Is Poisoning America. Rupert Murdoch and His Heirs Should Be Shunned. appeared first on The Intercept.
The extraordinary life of war reporter Marie Colvin would have merited a biography even if she had survived the Syrian army’s bombardment of Homs in February 2012. Long before her fatal trip into the city’s rebel-held Baba Amr quarter, producers had proposed turning her life into an action-packed movie. It was only after her death that two films, a documentary and a drama, appeared. Now, Lindsey Hilsum has written the book “In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin,” and it is one of the best biographies I have read about any journalist. Colvin’s trajectory, personal as much as professional, was fascinating by any standard for the passion and turmoil that shadowed her from birth to untimely death. This is a great story, well told.
The controversy surrounding Colvin’s death partially overshadowed her achievements in life. Her family, friends, and Syrian opposition believe that the Syrian government assassinated her by targeting the Homs Media Center, where she and other correspondents were sending vivid reports of civilian suffering. Yet countervailing narratives persist. One is that the insurgents put journalists in harm’s way to create Western martyrs for their cause. Another is that Colvin and 28-year-old French photographer Rémi Ochlik were unlucky casualties of a military campaign that took thousands of civilian lives.
While no interpretation diminishes Colvin’s work or her bravery, Hilsum opts for the version based on testimony by an informant code-named Ulysses, apparently a Syrian security defector who sought asylum in the United States and claimed to have been present when Gen. Rafiq Shahadah of the military intelligence branch “hosted a celebration [of Colvin’s death] in his office.” His account included one officer calling Colvin “a blind bitch,” a reference to the patch she wore after she lost an eye when Sri Lankan soldiers shot her in 2001; and another receiving a new luxury sedan as a “reward for the successful operation” that killed her.
Whether her death was accidental or deliberate, it has become a point of dispute between supporters and opponents of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, rather than a mystery requiring a serious investigation of the kind Colvin herself was well-suited to undertake. One aspect of Colvin’s life emerges above all others in the pages of “In Extremis”: She courted death so often that it was ready to take her on one battleground or another.
Hilsum’s tale begins with Colvin’s birth on January 12, 1956, in Queens, New York, and an idyllic childhood by the sea in Oyster Bay, Long Island, “quintessential suburbia.” Her parents, Bill and Rosemarie, were “lace curtain Irish,” 1950s American parents along the lines of “Leave It to Beaver.” Colvin, the oldest of five children, emerged as the most independent and ambitious. Fortunately for the author, as well as the reader, she kept a revelatory diary from 1969, when she was in high school, until she died. Its many entries provide insights into her moods and preoccupations to add to the accounts of the many family members, friends, and colleagues (myself included) whom Hilsum interviewed.
Photo: Courtesy of Farrar Straus & Giroux Publishing
Colvin worried, like many teenagers, about her looks and her weight. She was also interested in the world beyond Oyster Bay and resolved to get out. Her intellectual gifts took her to Yale, and her capacity for love and adventure led her into many well-recorded and often painful love affairs. She emerges as someone it would be difficult not to love, reckless in romance as on her many sailboats. Tempests on the high seas invigorated her, and getting back to shore was a minor concern.
She dabbled in journalism at Yale, took local news assignments in New York, and landed a job with United Press International in Washington and Paris. From Paris, she flew to Libya for her first taste of war when Ronald Reagan bombed Muammar Gaddafi’s residence and civilian quarters of Tripoli. Gaddafi courted her, often calling her in the middle of the night to ramble incoherently but failing to seduce her. She became the sometime girlfriend of my friend David Blundy, who bequeathed her his flat in London and his job as roving correspondent for Britain’s Sunday Times when he moved to Washington. Blundy would be killed in El Salvador in November 1989, a loss felt by countless friends and lovers. Colvin was more fortunate in her female friends than her male lovers. Lovers sometimes became friends, and vice versa.
Both of her husbands, Englishman Patrick Bishop and Bolivian Juan Carlos Gumucio, were fine journalists. The marriages didn’t last, and Hilsum blames no one for their failures. Bishop, a distinguished correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, met Colvin while covering the Middle East. He admitted later to making mistakes that wrecked the marriage, and he was jealous when she began her romance with Gumucio. Gumucio, whom I met in Beirut when he worked for the Associated Press, called me from Jerusalem one day to announce he was going to marry Colvin. I blurted, “You can’t. She’s one of the guys.”
I meant it as a compliment. She was a great companion on a story, could drink all night, had a contagious laugh, and set standards that forced some of us to work harder. Shortly afterward, in Jerusalem, I accompanied Colvin and Gumucio on a pub crawl. They were Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, dancing in ill-lit wine shops, singing on the stone lanes of the old city, and making me jealous of whatever they had between them. Like the Fitzgeralds, their romance was doomed. They moved to London, where Gumucio felt it demeaning to be viewed as Colvin’s consort and Colvin became terrified of his drunken, violent temper. Hilsum tells this story straight, not taking sides and showing especial sympathy for Gumucio’s daughter, Anna, by his previous marriage to the formidable Swedish journalist Agneta Ramberg.
Hilsum takes the reader with Colvin on her many dangerous assignments to Chechnya, the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli siege, Iraq, Sri Lanka, East Timor, and the other modern wars where she risked her life, as she said, “because we believe we do make a difference.” What makes the biography and the life on which it is based so impressive is the truly heroic proportions of Colvin’s dedication to getting the story of human beings trapped in war. She saved lives by arousing public outrage at the fate of Palestinian refugees under siege by Amal militiamen in Beirut, of Kosovars attacked by Serbs, and of Timorese terrorized by the Indonesian army. Awards and plaudits came in abundance, even as she suffered from too much alcohol and a heart too often broken. Hilsum weaves the accomplishments into the personal story: “Her real struggle was with herself — her fear of being alone, and a sense that her public persona as a brave war correspondent was out of kilter with the insecurity she felt inside.”
Marie Colvin was the Dorothy Parker of war correspondence, a woman who towered over male colleagues, yet neglected to produce the book everyone expected of her. Like Parker, her life taught her:
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
a medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
and I am Marie of Romania.
The post Marie Colvin Dedicated Her Extraordinary Life to Describing “What Really Happens in Wars” appeared first on The Intercept.
O jornalista Maurício Stycer lembrou: “Em 9 de novembro de 1989, o TSE, presidido por Francisco Rezek, barrou a candidatura Silvio Santos. Eleito presidente, Collor convidou Rezek para ser ministro das Relações Exteriores, que aceitou”. Em 1992, Rezek seria indicado por Collor a uma cadeira no STF. É exatamente esse plano de carreira que Bolsonaro ofereceu, e Sérgio Moro aceitou.
A repetição da História deveria ser motivo de preocupação geral, mas, em um país com baixa cultura democrática, intoxicada pelo maniqueísmo, o fato está sendo encarado por boa parte da população como o fortalecimento do time do Bem na luta contra o do Mal. Deve estar em algum lugar da Bíblia. Lembre-se que o lema do medievalismo contemporâneo é “Brasil acima de tudo. Deus acima de todos.”
Enquanto Rosângela Moro fazia campanha para Bolsonaro nas redes sociais, Paulo Guedes oferecia para seu marido uma nova carreira na política. O juiz passou semanas projetando sua estréia na política enquanto ainda vestia a toga, o que é apenas mais uma acintosa imprudência para a coleção de acintosas imprudências praticadas pelo magistrado nos últimos anos. Na última quarta-feira, General Mourão disse que o convite de Paulo Guedes aconteceu “há algumas” antes da eleição. Quantas semanas antes? Terá sido antes de Moro liberar trechos da delação de Palocci às vésperas do primeiro turno? Não se sabe, mas a suspeita por si só já deveria ser considerada inaceitável. Segundo os próprios procuradores da Lava Jato, a delação de Palocci não tem “provas suficientes” e as “expectativas não vão se revelar verdadeiras”. Não havia, portanto, nenhum motivo jurídico para a divulgação. É legítimo acreditar que Moro atuou com uma agenda eleitoral debaixo do braço e calculou os efeitos políticos enquanto vestia a toga. Haddad foi para as cordas no noticiário, enquanto Bolsonaro faturou eleitoralmente com a ação do seu futuro ministro da Justiça.
Além da suspensão do sigilo da delação de Palocci, outras ações tomadas por Moro influenciaram decisivamente o processo eleitoral. Depois de um processo repleto de incoerências jurídicas, o juiz determinou a prisão de Lula, retirando da disputa o candidato favorito dos brasileiros nas pesquisas, faltando 6 meses para o pleito. Chegou a interromper as próprias férias para contestar a decisão de um desembargador que determinou a soltura de Lula, impedindo que o ex-presidente participasse da campanha. Com a eleição definida, Moro não esperou nem a fervura eleitoral baixar e aceitou de imediato fazer parte do governo Bolsonaro, cuja candidatura inequivocamente foi a principal beneficiada pelas ações do juiz durante o período eleitoral.
A suspeita de que Moro atuou nos tribunais calculando efeitos políticos que beneficiassem o candidato que lhe ofereceu um ministério torna-se enorme. Parecer imparcial, tanto quanto sê-lo, é um preceito básico para um juiz. E a história recente mostra que Moro despreza esse conceito, não vendo problema em desfilar em eventos organizados por tucanos ou aparecer cochichando com Aécio Neves em evento público. O juiz aceitou o figurino de antagonista de Lula e fez questão de viajar pelo mundo cumprindo esse papel. Durante muito tempo se cogitou que ele tinha um projeto político pessoal. Agora é possível dizer, fora do campo das cogitações, que esse projeto existia. Resta saber quando que ele começou a ser desenhado. Bolsonaro já vinha cogitando levar Moro para Brasília pelo menos desde outubro do ano passado. A possibilidade, portanto, já estava há algum tempo no horizonte do juiz.
Como todo bom político que nega que será candidato, Moro negou ter pretensões políticas por pelo menos oito vezes. Em uma entrevista para a Veja em novembro de 2017, foi categórico: “no momento — e também não vejo isso no futuro — não seria apropriado da minha parte postular qualquer espécie de cargo político. Isso poderia, vamos dizer assim, colocar em dúvida a integridade do trabalho que eu fiz até o presente momento.” A jornalista pergunta se seria inapropriado “neste momento”, mas Moro faz questão de reforçar: “no futuro também”. Podemos dizer, então, que o Moro do passado concorda que o Moro do presente está colocando em dúvida o seu trabalho frente à Lava Jato.
A condição de super-herói do combate à corrupção foi definitivamente colocada em xeque. Moro topou integrar o governo de um presidente que recebeu 200 mil da JBS e encaminhou esse dinheiro para o seu partido, o PP, o mais enlameado pela Lava Jato. Que conseguiu empregos (alguns deles, fantasma) em gabinetes do Legislativo pro irmão, ex-mulheres, ex-cunhado, ex-sogro. Que usou o auxílio-moradia “pra comer gente”. Que desviou verba da Câmara durante 15 anos para pagar o salário da sua caseira, a Wal do Açaí. O nosso herói da luta contra a corrupção aceitou de bom grado ser subordinado a um político com essas credenciais éticas. O convite para integrar o governo bolsonarista foi intermediado pelo seu futuro colega Paulo Guedes, que está sofrendo uma investigação criminal no MPF por suspeita de gestão fraudulenta em fundos de pensão ligados a estatais. Fico imaginando também como serão as reuniões de Moro com o chefe da Casa Civil, Onyx Lorenzoni, que admitiu ter recebido caixa 2 da JBS. É que, no ano passado, o juiz afirmou que “caixa 2 é pior que corrupção”. Será que o Moro do passado concorda com o Moro do presente nessa questão?
As qualidades democráticas de Sergio Moro também entram em xeque. Ele se disse “honrado” com o convite de um homem que fala em fuzilar e varrer seus opositores políticos. Que cujo filho afirmou que resolveria um problema com o STF mandando militares fazer uma visitinha ao tribunal. Que considera a ditadura militar um período de ouro do país. Que cujo livro de cabeceira é da autoria de um torturador. Ou seja, Sergio Moro aceitou com muito orgulho ser subordinado por um sujeito que reiteradamente despreza a democracia e que passará o mandato inteiro com a carta do golpe militar na manga. Isso diz muito sobre Sergio Moro como cidadão, como juiz e como político.
A escolha no novo ministro da Justiça teve repercussão internacional. Grandes jornais como Le Monde, El País, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times e BBC lembraram que a atuação de Moro nos tribunais teve consequências políticas que ajudaram a pavimentar o caminho de Bolsonaro ao Planalto. A manchete do britânico The Times não poderia ser mais cirúrgica: “Jair Bolsonaro promete alto cargo a juiz que prendeu seu rival”. Já a grande imprensa nacional, que serviu de palanque para Moro durante toda sua trajetória até Brasília, se mostrou bem mais tímida em contextualizar a indicação de Bolsonaro em suas manchetes. A sacralização do juiz e a a construção do seu projeto político não seriam possíveis sem os holofotes sempre generosos da imprensa.
A mosca azul da política picou Moro. Largou uma aclamada carreira jurídica pela metade para assumir um dos principais cargos de poder do governo federal. Se tudo der errado, tem garantida a promessa de pular para o STF assim que liberar uma vaga. Até lá, Moro terá sob suas rédeas um super-ministério. Com a fusão da Justiça e da Segurança Pública, o ex-juiz comandará a Polícia Federal, a Controladoria Geral da União e o Conselho de Controle de Atividades Financeiras. A operação Lava Jato, que sempre atuou com independência em relação aos governos Dilma e Temer, foi levada para Brasília e agora atuará dentro do governo de Jair Bolsonaro. Não me parece um bom caminho.
Moro ocupará o segundo cargo mais poderoso do país, o que o coloca diretamente na fila dos presidenciáveis para 2022. É a posição perfeita para quem tem um projeto político e sonha com voos maiores na política. Se perguntarem hoje para ele se existe essa pretensão, Moro provavelmente dirá o que disse para o Estadão há exatos dois anos sobre uma possível migração para o mundo político: “Não, jamais. Jamais. Sou um homem de Justiça e, sem qualquer demérito, não sou um homem da política. (…) Então, não existe jamais esse risco.”
Palavra de juiz.
The post O Sergio Moro do passado concorda que o Moro do presente está colocando a Lava Jato em dúvida appeared first on The Intercept.
Weapons makers are moving last-minute money to the Democratic congressman in line to chair the defense industry’s key House committee, as he is under assault from a fellow Democrat, who is attacking his pro-war record just ahead of a rare intra-party general election.
If Democrats take the House of Representatives, the next chair of the Armed Services Committee, which oversees military affairs and defense spending, will likely be Rep. Adam Smith, a hawkish Democrat from Washington state who represents a district in the Seattle-area, where important elements of the military-industrial complex are concentrated.
But standing in his way is Sarah Smith, a working-class activist and democratic socialist, hoping to channel progressive momentum to dislodge the incumbent lawmaker in an unusual Democrat versus Democrat general election matchup.
In a year that has seen several high-profile incumbent Democrats challenged, this race stands out for its focus on foreign policy and the pernicious influence of the weapons industry.
Sarah Smith has mounted a surprisingly spirited bid, attacking the “corrupting influence of the military-industrial complex” and demanding that the country shift “away from our economy of violence toward an economy of peace.” She has singled out Adam Smith’s votes in favor of war and against restrictions on cluster munitions, as well as his support for bills that have expanded the reach of the sprawling homeland security and surveillance state.
You don’t spend money on a losing battle.
The defense industry wouldn’t spend this kind of money if they thought he was going to slim down their CEO’s paychecks.
I’m tired of endless defense spending with no checks and balances.
I believe the people of WA9 are, too. https://t.co/KfiO0bZnfK
— Sarah Smith (@SarahSmith2018) November 3, 2018
Sensing an opportunity to influence the race and the potential future committee chair, major weapons contractors have given the lawmaker last-minute campaign support. Lobbyists and executives associated with General Dynamics, one of the largest weapons makers in the world, have given over $10,000 in recent weeks, in addition to the $9,500 from the company over the last quarter.
In just the last week of October, Teresa Carlson, an Amazon industry executive overseeing the company’s bid for a $10 billion military IT contract, gave $1,000; Bechtel, which managed Iraq reconstruction contracts, gave $1,000; Rolls-Royce, which manufactures parts for a variety of military jets, including a model of the controversial F-35, gave $3,500; and Phebe Novakovic, the chief executive of General Dynamics, gave $2,700.
Adam Smith has served in Congress since 1997 and has compiled a relatively interventionist voting record. He cast a vote in favor of the Iraq War during George W. Bush’s administration and initially warned against winding down the war in Afghanistan during Barack Obama’s administration.
In 2016, in one of the first major floor votes to prevent the transfer of American arms to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, Adam Smith was one of only 16 Democrats to join Republicans in voting the measure down. The bill explicitly restricted the use of cluster munitions, which often kill and injure civilians because the ordinance is designed to detonate and spread miniature explosives over a wide area.
Textron, the Rhode Island-based defense contractor that has long served as a leading producer of cluster bombs, has given Adam Smith $24,500 in campaign contributions over the last decade. The company announced two years ago that it would end the production of the weapon.
Last year, the lawmaker signaled a shifting attitude, telling The Intercept that the U.S. has no business “taking sides in the civil war in Yemen.” He soon signed onto a resolution to bring an end to American military support for the conflict.
In a statement to The Intercept, Adam Smith firmly rejected his opponent’s criticism.
“Throughout my career in Congress, I have cast key votes against defense interests,” he said. “I voted to end both the B52 and F22 programs. I have voted eight times against the defense budget. It is clear from my record that I put the national security of our country and the interests of my district first.”
In an interview, Sarah Smith said the shift has been too little, too late.
“We helped destabilize that region. Suddenly, these folks like Adam have reversed their position after they’ve received a progressive challenger, but the damage is already done,” she said.
“The bombs are still being sold and these defense companies are still making money. When he had a chance to do something, he failed,” Sarah Smith added.
Adam Smith’s campaign has massively out-raised his progressive challenger by an 11 to 1 margin, giving the incumbent a significant advantage, as he’s been able to air campaign commercials to get his message out. The local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as several local activist groups, have volunteered for Sarah Smith’s campaign, giving the young challenger a boost of enthusiasm despite the moneyed gap in political resources.
Political prognosticators are giving Sarah Smith little chance: FiveThirtyEight projects Adam Smith has a better than 99 percent chance of winning the race.
But Sarah Smith’s campaign notes that the 9th Congressional District is one of the most diverse in the country, a dynamic that appears to favor insurgent candidates. The district is home to many refugees and those fleeing wars in the Middle East, conflicts, Sarah’s campaign has pointed out, that are rooted in the wars supported by her opponent.
The post Weapons Makers Rushing Campaign Cash to Democrat in Line to Chair Defense Industry’s Key House Committee appeared first on The Intercept.
Front companies, barter deals, oil transfers on the high seas: These are just some of the methods that Iran could employ to keep its economy limping on after American sanctions targeting the country’s oil industry went into effect at midnight on Monday.
Iran has plenty of experience here, having already been subject to stringent international sanctions over its nuclear industry, which choked its economy. That changed in July 2015, when it signed a deal―the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action―with major world powers, including the United States. That accord has legal standing and the imprimatur of the United Nations.
Washington’s withdrawal from the agreement in May—coupled with its decision to not only reimpose sanctions on Iran, but also punish nations that continue to trade with it—has all but guaranteed that Tehran will return to its old playbook.
Read: How Iran can evade sanctions this time
Here are some of the steps that Iran has taken in the past to evade U.S. sanctions. (Spoiler alert: Richard Nephew, a sanctions expert who helped negotiate the JCPOA, told me that most of these efforts will likely fail.)
Hiding Its Oil Tankers in Plain Sight
An automatic identification system is a safety feature on vessels that allows them to be tracked almost in real time. The catch? It can be turned off. A vessel that doesn’t want everyone to know that it is delivering oil to a particular port will simply switch off its transponders and switch them on again once it has left the area.
“It's a pretty effective tactic, keeping the customers shielded as well,” said Paulina Izewicz, a London-based researcher who studies Iran and North Korea at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
Iran is employing this tactic again by turning off transponders on its tanker fleet, she said. This allows the tankers to serve as floating oil storage for those willing to buy Iranian crude in violation of U.S. sanctions.
Ship-to-Ship Transfers
This is a commonly used—and legal—method to break up a large shipment of cargo into smaller ones. But Iran has used it to conceal oil sales.
It works like this: An Iranian tanker is stationedy either near a port or in the open sea, and it transfers oil directly to a second vessel. The second vessel then travels to a port, where it sells the oil. The goal, the U.S. Treasury Department said in 2013, is “to mask the fact that the true origin of the oil is from Iran and to introduce it into the global market as if it were non-Iranian oil.”
Obscuring Ownership
Iran has used shell corporations and front companies, and it has registered its vessels in third countries to bypass international scrutiny. These measures are perfectly legal in the shipping world, but are murky and difficult to police.
Izewicz said that in the past, Iran managed to effectively obscure the country’s ownership of ships by transferring its vessels to other state-run companies while retaining control of operations.
“The actual owner or manager would in reality remain the same, just not on the paperwork, which is what mattered,” she said.
[Read: The biggest sanctions-evasion scheme in recent history]
Iran has also used flags of convenience on its vessels. This is a common practice in the shipping industry, whereby the owners of a vessel may register it in a country with looser regulations. But in Iran’s case, a flag of convenience complements its effort to prevent scrutiny of ownership. The Islamic Republic also frequently renames its ships, “much more so than normal practice would dictate,” Izewicz said.
Money Laundering
Iran has previously taken advantage of places with weak central authority to launder and repatriate money, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, who studies Iran at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Before the JCPOA went into effect, Babak Zanjani, an Iranian billionaire, used a Malaysian bank and dozens of front companies to sell Iranian oil, earning billions for the regime, according to the Treasury. (Zanjani was sentenced to death in 2013 for withholding more than $1 billion from those sales. He is awaiting execution.)
“This time around, Iran is likely to draw on this wealth of sanctions-busting expertise and grow its illicit networks, hoping that it can outpace the U.S. when it comes to enforcement,” Ben Taleblu said.
Wild Cards: Barter Deals, European Efforts, and Iran’s Influence
Iran could continue to sell oil to its largest customers by simply carrying out the transactions through bartering or by using a currency other than the U.S. dollar.
It has previously traded oil for goods like cars and telephones with China and sold crude to India for Indian rupees. China and India, two fast-growing economies with a substantial demand for oil, represent the two biggest customers for Iranian supplies. They could seek U.S. waivers to continue to buy Iranian oil, but Donald Trump’s administration, which wants to strangle the Iranian regime, opposes allowing Tehran to profit from oil sales.
Europe has talked about creating a special-purpose vehicle to process Iran’s trade-related transactions. The mechanism would circumvent the U.S. financial system and allow European companies to continue to do business with Iran. So far, the European Union has taken few demonstrable steps to set one up. Additionally, large European companies have said that they will comply with the sanctions. For them, the choice between Iran’s domestic market and U.S. consumers is simply no choice at all.
[Read: Germany’s foreign minister just proposed a way to skirt U.S. sanctions]
News reports say that the Iranian regime might also send its oil to Russia, where it can be refined and supplied to European countries. Those countries could then exchange that oil for goods that Iran needs, such as medical instruments and industrial machinery. The U.S. says that it opposes such a mechanism, though how it might change Russia’s mind is unclear given, as Taleblu put it, “all the other outsized issues in the bilateral relationship with Russia.”
Most significant, perhaps, is Tehran’s ability to respond through other means to U.S. pressure. The Islamic Republic’s influence in the Middle East is wide, but its clout in Iraq is particularly significant. Most of Iraq’s senior political leadership and its Shia militia are close to Tehran, and Iraq relies on Iran for electricity. Iran also has influence, albeit to a lesser extent, with Afghanistan. Simply put, it has the means to block U.S. efforts to stabilize those two countries..
The U.S. sanctions take effect Monday, but Iran and the international community’s next steps will unfold slowly—over months.
“The crucial part of what's happening on this issue isn't happening on” the first day of sanctions, Nephew, the JCPOA negotiator, said. “The crucial part is what's going to be happening in February, March, and April, when some of these things have started to settle in, and now everyone has to plot their next move. And that next move is potentially where a lot of intense politicking is going to happen.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of The Deuce.
“Heaven,” The Talking Heads informed us on their seminal 1979 album, Fear of Music, is “a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.” Not even the most dedicated fan of HBO’s The Deuce would likely describe the show as heaven. But up until Sunday night’s finale, the second season of the prestige drama—about sex work and the rise of the porn industry on 42nd Street (a.k.a. “the Deuce”) in the 1970s—was pretty much a place where nothing ever happened.
That’s not quite right. Things “happened” on The Deuce. They just rarely seemed to have any meaningful impact on the circumstances of the show’s principal characters. Whatever weekly misunderstanding Vincent (James Franco) might have with mob boss Rudy Pipilo (Michael Rispoli), he’d still wind up back behind the bar at his disco, Club 366, precisely the same as before. Likewise, Abby (Margarita Levieva) would reassume her spot behind the bar at the Hi-Hat. And despite their occasional extracurricular indulgences, Vincent and Abby would return to the bed they somewhat halfheartedly share.
Sex-worker-turned-porn-director Eileen/“Candy” (Maggie Gyllenhaal) spent essentially the entire season making her art-sex flick, Red Hot; Vincent’s pal and former bartender Paul (Chris Coy) spent it building his own posh, gay nightclub. Vincent’s brother-in-law, Bobby (Chris Bauer), would grouse about tending to the “massage parlor,” but he’d always find his way back to a stool at, yes, its bar. (The T-Heads song I cited earlier actually begins, almost too aptly, “Everyone is trying to get to the bar.”) Vincent’s ne’er-do-well twin Frankie (also played by Franco) would persist in making Frankie-like errors in judgment that somehow never seemed to carry any meaningful consequences. And Chris (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), the incorruptible patrolman from Season 1, would keep us on tenterhooks over whether he’d eventually accept an assignment in the Deuce and return to the show as a meaningful character. (Final answer: maybe next season?)
[Read: ‘The Deuce’ is David Simon’s best work since ‘The Wire’]
There were plenty of narrative land mines planted along the way. If Lori (Emily Meade) decided to leave her pimp C.C. (Gary Carr), what would he do to her? If Darlene (Dominique Fishback) decided to leave her pimp, Larry (Gbenga Akinnagbe), what would he do? Can Paul really break free of his mob attachments? Will the advocacy of former-sex-worker-turned-activist Dorothy (Jamie Neumann) benefit her former colleagues? Or will it bring down the wrath of the pimps?
Yet for almost eight full episodes (out of nine), the showrunners David Simon and George Pelecanos seemed determined to leave all these land mines undetonated. The girls stayed with their pimps. The many barkeeps continued keeping their bars. And Frankie’s various scams, larcenies, and other poor life choices never seemed to leave a mark. He married impulsively, and then his wife left, and then she evidently came back—and nothing seemed remotely to change as a result.
There is always plenty to enjoy about the show. The performances are excellent, in particular Gyllenhaal’s: She may be doing the best work of her career here. (As for Franco, his presence—in two roles!—on a show about the sexual exploitation of women is, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert has noted, problematic at best.) The writing, with occasional exceptions, is excellent, and the production values top notch.
[Read: Life and art collide in ‘The Deuce’]
But there was an odd sameness to the episodes this year, a sense that characters and viewers alike were somehow trapped in time, and that the show’s many plot arcs would remain essentially flat. My wife and I were pulled away from one episode 20 minutes in by dual child-homework emergencies and wound up bailing on the show for the evening. But when we returned to it a night or two later, we literally didn’t remember we’d watched only half the episode and so moved on to the next one, which we enjoyed without any sense that we had missed anything at all. It was only days later that we recognized our mistake and went back to watch the half-episode we’d inadvertently skipped over.
All of this changed, of course, at the end. C.C. was killed at the closing of episode 8, and he was quickly followed in the finale by Dorothy and the pimp Rodney (Method Man). Lori and Darlene both broke free of their pimps, albeit in very different ways. Eileen found immense—and immensely public—success with Red Hot and, as a consequence, utter disaster with her teenage son and her parents. We even had the pleasure of briefly seeing Zoe Kazan as Vincent’s ex-wife and the mother of his children—a familial tie that for long stretches the show seems to forget even exists.
More “happened,” in short, in the finale of The Deuce than in almost the entire season that preceded it. It was a great episode of television, easily the best of the season and perhaps of the show so far. But it achieved its success by finally plucking the fruit that The Deuce had left on the vine all season, almost past ripeness. It was a cornucopia of delayed feasting.
And even now, where does the show leave us? A few characters have departed for good, and a few others—Eileen, Lori, Larry—seem prepared for another life-stage. But everyone else? Vincent is still at Club 366 and Abby at the Hi-Hat. Vincent is taking the parlor money again, and Paul is back in business with the mob. Frankie has been brought down from his brief ascent to porn producer and is now back to precisely where he was at the beginning of the season: running a peep show for which customers pay with quarters. It almost gives new meaning to the phrase plus ça change.
Tickets sold out within 15 minutes after Toronto’s Munk Debates announced I would debate Steve Bannon on their platform. The negative reaction arrived slower, but it was just as emphatic. A few days before the debate, a member of Parliament for Canada’s left-wing New Democratic Party called for its cancelation. The rest of the party—the third largest in Parliament—later signaled agreement with the no-platform demand.
The Munk debates hold a special place in Canadian public life. For more than a decade, they have brought the learned, the preeminent, and the notorious to Toronto’s 2,800-seat symphony hall to test controversial ideas before a highly informed audience. Never before, though, had they ignited the fierce controversy that exploded around the scheduled debate between Bannon and me.
Over the next hours, I took calls from television and radio bookers: Would I come on their air to defend the debate?
I declined, again and again. I’d written an answer, and I wanted to deliver it once—at the debate itself. Some did not want to hear that answer or any other. They decided to shut down the debate by force and threat. They tried to block the entrance to the debate venue, then harassed attendees as they sought to enter. One police officer was punched in the face. Fear that protesters would slip into the event obliged the organizers to search every bag and wand every entrant—delaying the start time by 45 minutes. Even with that delay, many ticket-holders were unable to take their seats. One protester nevertheless managed noisily to disrupt Bannon’s opening statement, before being drowned out by audience applause and removed by police.
Forceful interruption of public events is almost always wrong. If I see you reading a book I dislike, I have no right to grab it from you. In a free society, there can be no equivalent of the Saudi religious police, monitoring public behavior and discourse and interrupting things of which they disapprove.
Yet the illegitimacy of violent interruptions of debate in general does not of itself justify any particular debate in specific. In 1860, Oxford University invited the biologist Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce to debate Darwin’s theory of evolution versus God’s design of the universe. No secular university would or should do such a thing today.
So, no, I personally would not accept an invitation to debate “Resolved, husbands should be allowed to beat their wives,” or “Resolved, the white race is the best race,” I would strenuously object if any organization in which I had a role proposed to mount such a debate. If your group undertook to do it, I’d of course pay the taxes for your police protection, but I would not be happy about it, and I would not think you were contributing anything except mischief to our public life.
Obviously, I did not think I was doing anything like that in debating Steve Bannon. Bannon is not a marginal figure. He is a central personality in the history of our times, who helped to elect a president of the United States and is now advising competitive political parties across Europe. If you think his—and their—influence is pernicious, well, that influence does not become any less pernicious if you refuse to argue why it is wrong.
The debate in Toronto focused on a prediction: whether the future belonged to populist politics (the polite term for the politics of Donald Trump and the many Little Trumps in power or competing for power across our Earth) or to liberal politics, in the broadest sense of the word liberal. As I told the audience, I’ve spent my life as a conservative, but what I’ve sought to conserve is not the Spanish Inquisition or the powers of kings and barons. I’ve sought to conserve the free societies that began to be built in the 18th century and that have gradually developed and strengthened—with many imperfections and hypocrisies and backsliding—in the 250 years since. When I was young, the most important challenges to those free societies seemed to come from Communists and Marxists. When I was not so young, the most important of those challenges seemed to come from Islamists. Today, they seem to come from—again, speaking politely—populists. The vector of the challenge changes, but the thing to be cherished and protected remains the same.
Why share a platform, then, with Bannon, one of the most adept and successful of the challengers to all I hold dear?
I told the audience in Toronto that I hoped to speak to three groups of people:
I hoped to speak, first, to the small numbers of the genuinely undecided, to those who might imagine that populism offers them something. This is not true. The new populist politics is a scam and a lie that exploits anger and fear to gain power. It has no care for the people it supposedly champions and no respect for them. It will deliver nothing—not only because its leaders are almost invariably crooks (although they are), but because they have no plans and no plans to make plans.
I hoped to speak, next, to the many people who see populism for what it is—and who resist it. Since the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 and the Euro currency crisis that began in 2010, the so-called populists have won election after election in this country and in Europe. Even when the anti-populists have won, as they won in France in 2017, they have won by dwindling margins. Countries that formerly seemed secure against populism, like Germany, have been trending in ominous directions. But hope is not lost. On Tuesday, the American electorate has the opportunity to set the limit: This far have you gone, you will go no further. The tide turns here. What’s most urgently needed now is courage and confidence, and I hoped from the platform to do a little part to inspire even just a little more of each.
I hoped to speak, finally, to those who see populism for what it is—and support it. I hoped to look in the face of their most self-conscious and articulate champion, Steve Bannon, and tell them: You will lose. You will discover what so many thugs, and bullies, and plunderers, and people who elevate themselves by subordinating and humiliating others have discovered before you: Liberal democracy is tougher than it looks.The cruel always believe the kind are weak. But human decency and goodness can also move human affairs. They will be felt. And today’s “populists" will follow their predecessors into what President George W. Bush so aptly called, “history’s graveyard of discarded lies.”
Yes, the populists spoke to authentic concerns: about the after-shock of the Great Recession and the Euro crisis, about the dislocations of mass immigration, about failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the frustrations of the middle class, about the selfishness and irresponsibility of financial and political elites across the developed world. Demagogues succeed by talking about things that people authentically care about, not things they don’t.
Bannon and I had met once before, a decade ago. He interviewed me for one of his films back in 2009. We shared then a perception that something had gone terribly wrong with both the American system and conservative politics. To me, that perception called for a constructive program of reform and renewal. It equally seemed to me that Bannon had seen an opportunity to be seized to bring dangerous people and ideas to a power they could never use for good.
As a debater, Bannon proved engaging and entertaining. When one of his lines gained lonely applause from a single audience member, Bannon quipped, “Thanks, Mom.” That lit up the room.
But the longer Bannon spoke, the more clear it became how empty the populist program is. It could observe and exploit the failures of the past 15 years. Trump in 2016 promised that he would provide better health insurance to all Americans at lower cost both to individuals and to the government. That promise has been dishonored. When asked to explain why, Bannon could only point to Paul Ryan and say, "His fault." Ditto for Trump's failure to keep his promise to cut taxes for middle-income people by raising them on the financial industry. Ditto for the broken promises to build infrastructure and save lives from opioid addiction. Ditto for the fact that illegal immigration and trade deficits are rising under Trump, despite his emphatic promises to lower both.
The populists identified real concerns—but their answers amount to a fraud and a scam. The failures of a basically good system do not justify overthrowing it and replacing it with something evil.
So I argued, and as I argued, I believed I carried the room with me. But the room had a trick up its sleeve.
Like many public debate series, the Munk Debate measures results by tallying support and opposition for the motion at the beginning of the evening and then again at the end. The winner is the side that most moves the room. I once took part in a debate at the IQ Squared series in London. At the start of the evening, 80 percent thought my side was wrong. At the end, 60 percent thought my side was wrong. My side won the evening even though, of course, the room still decisively rejected our point of view.
At the November 2 debate, the Munk Series introduced for the first time electronic voting in place of paper ballots. The new devices offered the promise of a faster and more certain tally.
At the start of the evening, the 2,800-capacity hall voted against the resolution—that is, for the liberal rather than the populist side—by a margin of 72 percent to 28 percent. The numbers flashed on large screens above the stage.
Taking advantage of the rapid-fire capability of the new technology, the moderators then asked a follow-up question: Are you open to changing your mind? The audience said it was, 57 to 43 percent. The numbers again flashed on the screen.
Ninety minutes later, after the final exchanges, the room voted again. And the result was stunning: Bannon had triumphed, crushing my side of the argument, 57-43.
The hall gasped. As an attendee told me later, people looked at their neighbors with surprise and fear. Bannon grinned in triumph. We shook hands, I congratulated him on his upset victory: “Just like 2016,” I said. Inwardly, though, I felt dismay. The room had not applauded or laughed any more approvingly at the end of Bannon’s presentation than at the start. He had not carried his hearers. Through some horrible fault of my own, I must have lost them.
But that loss, although my fault, was not my problem alone. I had by my apparent failure confirmed every criticism of the debate critics. I had helped to provide a platform in an inhospitable city and country to Bannonism—and instead of offering hope, I had contributed to despair. I had lent my name and my energy to powerfully disseminating and legitimating exactly what I had hoped to expose and refute. I had undertaken a great responsibility and had somehow bungled it.
Worse, I could not even diagnose how I had bungled it. Speak from platforms often enough, and you develop—or believe you develop—a sense of a room as acute as your sense of sight or smell. Through the evening, I had felt the room was with me, and in growing numbers, too. Yet obviously, I had gotten that wrong. I had not only failed, I had been blind to my own failure.
You’ve probably already guessed what happened, but in the tumult and upset it took the event organizers somewhat longer to recognize the truth. They had reposted the second vote as if it were the third.
As for the actual third vote, it’s not clear whether it had been counted at all. The organizers announced that the final tally was again 72-28, exactly the same as the first. No change: A draw!
Or was it? Because of the delay caused by the protests, many people who had been admitted before the exterior doors were closed took their seats only after the first vote had already happened. It’s theoretically possible that the larger audience at the end of the debate voted in exactly the same proportion as the smaller audience at the beginning. But the precise replication of the first tally is not confidence-inspiring.
Of course, as so often happens in our age of fake news, the false report traveled faster—and will travel further—than the correction. I have remained in Toronto on other business for a few days after the debate, and continue to encounter people who watched some or all of it, and had heard the first wrong result, not the later amended one. And of course, many people who have heard both the false report and the correction will choose to believe the false report, because for one motive or another, it suits them better to believe the false report.
Scrolling through the online and social-media discussion of the debate, I’ve had to accept that the false report will never be entirely overtaken. Even if through no fault of my own, I’ve still been party to spreading discouragement rather than—as I believed—sparking faith and hope.
The story ends, then, in a great irony. Integral to the liberal project, again in the broad sense of the word liberal, is confidence in the power of reason. Words and arguments can overbear ignorance and prejudice. Over the long term, words and arguments can even overcome oppression and violence. That’s why liberals in the broad sense are so uniquely horrified by official lying: How can reason prevail unless words connect to reality? How can we argue against people who will spread fictions, if serviceable to them, without a qualm?
Illiberals and anti-liberals, on the other hand, appreciate the dark energy of human irrationality—not merely as a fact of our nature to be negotiated, but as a potent political resource. People do not think; they feel. They do not believe what is true; they regard as true that which they wish to believe. A lie that affirms us will gain more credence than a truth that challenges us. That’s the foundational insight on which Trump built his business career. It’s the insight on which Trump’s supporters built first their campaign for president and now their presidency itself.
It’s the foundation that I had hoped to expose in Toronto. By a cunning plot twist, I did expose it—but in a way that may have strengthened that foundation rather than attacked it.
The formal portion of the debate between Bannon and me was brought to an end by a stroke of the clock. But the strange result ensured that the actual debate continues. Can we reason our way out of the political nightmare into which unreason has led us? That question remains open still.
When Meggen Massey learned that she would be able to vote in the 2016 presidential election, she was “ecstatic.”
She had always thought of herself as a voter, but when she arrived in jail in Los Angeles County with an arson charge, some of her fellow detainees told her that she had lost that right. “I was devastated,” Massey remembered. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m never going to be able to vote again.”
But that turned out to be wrong. With the help of Susan Burton, the founder of the women’s-reentry program A New Way of Life Reentry Project, and a group of voter-registration volunteers, Massey was able to request and cast a vote by mail ballot.
It’s reasonably common knowledge that most states prohibit people incarcerated for a felony conviction from voting. Twenty-two states also bar people on parole and/or probation, and 12 impose various sanctions that continue post-sentence.
But those restrictions rarely apply to people held in jails, who are usually either awaiting trial or serving time for misdemeanor offenses. Legally, detainees such as Massey, who filled out her ballot before she was convicted and sentenced, are still eligible to vote, but confusion, fear, and a long list of logistical complications often stand in their way.
The exact number of people in American jails who are legally permitted to vote is unknown, but it’s safe to say that Massey is far from alone. Chris Uggen, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied what he refers to as “practical disenfranchisement,” posits that “a good portion” of the U.S. jail population, which hovers at around 600,000 people, retains the right. Jail populations fluctuate constantly, which makes pinning down an estimate of the voting population inside especially difficult.
Similarly, it’s hard to know what portion of those eligible voters are not voting because they are unaware of their rights or because their rights are being denied. The 1974 Supreme Court decision O’Brien v. Skinner protects the right of certain inmates to vote in elections without interference from government. But the Court left it up to state and local jurisdictions to decide how exactly to comply with the law.
“There is no national organization that is the anchoring institution to ensure that residents that happen to be in jail on Election Day never lose their voting rights,” Nicole Porter, who leads state and local advocacy at the justice-reform group the Sentencing Project, told me. Ongoing efforts to help potential voters in jail register or request voting materials “are very grassroots conversations,” she said.
In reporting this story, I spoke with people running voter registration, education, and access programs in county jails in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas. Among organizers, “a lot of the work has been focused on trying to expand rights to [disenfranchised] people in tough states, regressive states,” Porter said. “But it calls into question that we don’t really know what’s happening in jurisdictions where people have the right to vote.”
The chief reason for that obscurity is that the process for voting in jails varies widely: from state to state, from county to county, and even from institution to institution. For example: In California, Illinois, and Texas, detainees have to submit a voter-registration form and an absentee or vote-by-mail request. But in Massachusetts, people in jail are considered “specially qualified”: They don’t have to register to vote before casting a ballot, though the relevant town clerk has to believe that the would-be voter’s legal residence is accurate.
Other states and counties allow voters to list their place of residence as the jail itself. Michelle Mbekeani-Wiley, a former staff attorney at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law who led voting efforts in the Cook County Jail, explained that Illinois voters can check a box on their registration form to identify themselves as homeless voters, provided that they include the address of a recognized shelter. Mbekeani-Wiley worked with the county election authorities to ensure that detainees could identify the county jail as their shelter. I asked her if she knew what was happening in the rest of the state. “No, no, we don’t know,” she said. “That would be up to the election authority within that jurisdiction.”
How quickly cases awaiting trial or other court processes are resolved (and therefore how swiftly people leave jail) varies. That complicates matters for people doing voter-registration work inside, because a detainee they’ve signed up might not be there come Election Day. And some jurisdictions have an extra layer of complexity: Ex-detainees have to re-register to vote once they’re out of jail.
Nitty-gritty legal and policy differences aside, one dynamic was universal across the states and counties I examined: A local sheriff’s support could make or break a voter-registration drive or ballot-request program.
Take Illinois: Mbekeani-Wiley said that access to both registration and the ballot itself is not consistent statewide. That was one of the key reasons she advocated for a recent bill in the Illinois state legislature, HB 4469, that would have required every sheriff and county election authority in the state to come up with a way to enable voting from jail. It also would have required sheriffs to share voting information with people being released from jail, and it would have made the Cook County facility an official polling location.
Sheriff Thomas Dart, a Democrat who has overseen the jail since his election in 2006, supported the bill. “It’s beyond tortured as to why a citizen of [another] county in Illinois, if they’re incarcerated, should have less of an opportunity to vote than someone in Cook County,” he told me.
Ultimately, though, HB 4469 didn’t become law. After a contentious debate on the assembly floor, Republican Governor Bruce Rauner vetoed the bill in August, sending it back to the legislature. “Every citizen eligible to vote should be able to exercise that right, and I fully support this expansion of access to the democratic process,” he wrote. “However, this legislation also mandates that the Department of Corrections, as well as county jails across the state, take part in voter registration and education efforts that exceed the legitimate role of law enforcement, corrections and probation personnel.”
The question of the “legitimate role of law enforcement” is not a new concern in the push to do voter registration and education programs in jails. After all, a sheriff is an elected official, meaning that the person with significant authority over the voting process in jail—not to mention the conditions of detention in the first place—could also be on the ballot. The possibility of a conflict of interest was one of the concerns raised by New York state in the O’Brien case, but it was thoroughly dismissed by Thurgood Marshall in his concurring opinion. “[I]t is hard to conceive how the State can possibly justify denying any person his right to vote on the ground that his vote might afford a state official the opportunity to abuse his position of authority,” Marshall wrote.
Still, that’s not to say that a sheriff doesn’t have real power in structuring how people vote and how they get the information that shapes those decisions. In Cook County, for instance, Dart oversees what gets broadcast onto televisions in the jail’s living units.
Then there are the logistical hurdles presented by a voter registration or education program. Durrel Douglas, a former prison guard who now leads a voter-rights effort in Houston called Project Orange, suggested that his knowledge of correctional-safety protocols helped persuade officials at the Harris County Jail to permit a registration drive. In his pitch, he laid out a program structure designed to minimize potential challenges for corrections officers. Two selling points: The volunteers would all be vetted and trained by the county, and they’d be in and out of the jail in a short window of time.
Some sheriffs have expressed concern about having the staff capacity to support voting programs, particularly in smaller facilities outside major cities. In Cook County, Dart said that the real challenge was sorting out how exactly to orchestrate moving whole tiers of people to and from where the early-voting program was administered. “The smaller jurisdictions, I can see where maybe that would be an issue. But it’s more of a speed bump,” he explained. “It’s just going to be tricky because you’re so small you just have four correctional officers and one sergeant.”
Ultimately, what makes or breaks a program is supportive personnel. “They’re the ones that actually implement,” Mbekeani-Wiley said. “You can have leadership saying ‘We want to do this,’ but it can fall completely apart if the people actually charged with the task of implementing the policy are not on board.” She noted one crucial moment in particular, when correctional officers in the Cook County Jail go person to person asking if they want to meet with voter-registration volunteers—it could be the first exposure detainees have to the idea of voting.
Perhaps the biggest practical hurdle to in-jail voting is the one Massey ran into in L.A. County: confusion over who’s eligible, which varies from state to state. elly kalfus, who has been organizing voter-registration drives in jails as part of the Ballots Over Bars initiative in Massachusetts, recalled interviewing a formerly incarcerated man who had been involved in prisoner’s-rights work for years—and telling him that his assumption that lifetime parole barred him from the ballot box in Massachusetts was wrong.
Nearly every voter-registration advocate that I spoke with had a similar experience, where detainees hadn’t realized that they were eligible to vote. Interestingly, nearly all of them pointed to the publicity around Florida’s voting-rights-restoration amendment as a major point of misunderstanding. Next week, voters in the state will consider a state constitutional amendment that would restore the vote to people who have completed their sentence, including parole and probation. Currently, Florida disenfranchises felons for life unless they successfully argue their case to the governor and the state clemency board.
[Garrett Epps: The ‘slave power’ behind Florida’s felon disenfranchisement]
Scott Novakowski, a policy director at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said that many people mistake the Florida law for a national one because it’s on the national news. “Florida gets a lot of attention in the media … so people here are like ‘Oh, well, you know, I heard on the news that you can’t vote if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony,’” he said.
It’s not just detainees who don’t realize that they’re eligible to vote; corrections departments, courts, correctional officials, and even voting authorities can also be confused, according to several people I spoke with. Colleen Kirby, a member of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts who helped detainees request ballots in 2016, described several cases where town clerks weren’t clear on whether they could accept ballots from people held in jail, and had to check with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office.
Organizers have added training sessions for public servants and officials to their repertoires. In L.A. County, the board of supervisors passed a motion last February that created a countywide voter-registration initiative for people with criminal records. According to Esther Lim, who leads the ACLU of Southern California’s registration efforts in the L.A. County jails, one of the key aspects is training sheriff’s deputies, public defenders, probation officers, reentry personnel, and relevant community groups to understand California’s eligibility requirements and to be able to assist people in filling out a registration form.
Chris Uggen, the researcher from the University of Minnesota, says that because the jail population skews younger, many detainees have never cast a ballot before and are unfamiliar with the regular voting system, much less what’s available to them inside. Youth and inexperience with voting can create more technical barriers in the registration process, too. Mbekeani-Wiley said that she regularly worked to register 18-year-olds who didn’t know their own social-security numbers.
On top of all that, many would-be voters in jails are concerned about voting improperly—and being prosecuted for it. Crystal Mason is a high-profile case in point: She was on parole in Texas when she voted in the 2016 presidential election, unknowingly breaking Texas law, which prohibits anyone serving time or on parole or probation from casting a ballot. She’s now facing five years in prison for voter fraud. Several other cases in North Carolina have also received national attention.
And if some of the felony-rights-restoration campaigns, such as the one in Florida, succeed, knowing exactly who is eligible to vote could get even more complex, as detainees and officials play catch-up with an evolving status quo.
Not all would-be voters are as excited as Meggen Massey was when she discovered that she had retained her voting rights while in jail. Susan Burton, who runs A New Way of Life Reentry Project in L.A. and is the person who registered Massey, says that she sometimes finds “individuals who have completely lost faith in the system” in her registration visits. That’s something Burton, who was once incarcerated herself, understands. I asked her if she had ever thought about voting while she was behind bars. “I cut off everything emotional,” she replied. “I didn’t think about those things. I just tried to get through the time.”
Faced with voter skepticism, Mbekeani-Wiley and Lim both point detainees to the parts of the ballot that have direct effects on the criminal-justice system, such as races for district attorney, sheriff, and judicial positions. “I started telling them, ‘You can vote for judges,’ and that is something that sparked a lot of people’s interest … People who are defendants know who the good judges are,” Mbekeani-Wiley said.
For now, the voter-education options inside jails are limited; many detainees face the challenge of figuring out who and what to vote for without access to a computer, newspaper, or TV. Massey explained that when she registered, she was given a sample ballot, which she said provided only the most basic information about what she’d be voting on. She wanted more. She asked her mother to send her printouts of the information she needed. “I would ask her, ‘Hey, could you look up this proposition that’s going on on this ballot?’ and ‘Can you look these people up so that I know exactly what their positions are and their history?’”
With all these barriers to voting, the number of people who vote from jail is typically modest.
It’s impossible to know what voter turnout in jails looks like across the board given the lack of national data, but county-level numbers provide some detail. To give some examples: In Middlesex County in Massachusetts, Colleen Kirby said that 13 out of the 24 people who requested ballots in the 2016 presidential election submitted them, of a total population of around 800 people. In Cook County, 1,200 ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election came from the jail, where the population hovers at around 7,000, according to The Chicago Reporter. And in Houston, Durrel Douglas said that 29 people out of the 662 they registered ended up casting a ballot in this year’s primary elections.
But, as Esther Lim points out, the voting population inside jails could have considerable electoral impact, particularly on tight races. “There are 17,000 people incarcerated [in the L.A. jail system] and over 10,000 who are actually eligible to register,” she says. “Say, for example, all 10,000 registered. I mean, they could really swing an election.”
Which direction would such an election swing? Chris Uggen, who has researched how different felon-voting laws in Florida might have affected the outcome of the Bush-Gore presidential election in 2000, says it’s “not straightforward” to determine how the jail population might vote. But he did add that “the jail population tends to be very low income and is drawn disproportionately from communities of color,” characteristics that tend to skew Democratic.
But if the actual numbers of people voting from jails are small, the symbolic power of their vote is not. Mbekeani-Wiley called it “a glimmer of hope in a very trauma-filled environment”: “You get to demonstrate that you participated in the political process, and you’ve exercised power despite being in such a powerless place.”
It has weighty historical meaning, too. The practical disenfranchisement of voters in jails is another chapter in what Nicole Porter called the “long history of undermining voter participation in the United States,” and especially of denying or discouraging people of color from voting. That includes some of the first felony-disenfranchisement laws, which were part of a host of post-Civil War restrictions aimed at preventing newly enfranchised African Americans from voting. It’s no wonder that the myth that people who are behind bars can’t vote is hard to shake—and why any single vote from jail is remarkable. “It’s something their ancestors have fought and died over,” Mbekeani-Wiley says.
A practical societal dimension exists here, too. Some academic research, from Uggen and others, suggests that voting correlates with lower recidivism rates. That’s not the same as causation, Uggen cautions, but he does believe that voting is a positive experience. “I don’t think it’s some magical act of pulling the lever or filling in the little dot on the form that transforms the individual,” he says. “It’s more that voting is an expression of identification with the community and standing shoulder to shoulder with your fellow citizens.”
That’s how Meggen Massey seems to look at it. Because she’s on parole after serving her sentence, she’s unable to vote in California. But she will be again once her parole is up. “Now if we can get it to where I can serve for jury duty—that would be great, too,” she told me. “We all have a civic duty, and I want to be part of that.”
Updated on November 4, 2018.
Everyone’s panicked. That’s how Saturday Night Live summed up the final days before the midterm elections, from both sides of the spectrum, in an episode that felt a little more knowing and sharp than the show’s broad, goofy portrayals of the Kavanaugh confirmation and its aftermath. The episode began with Kate McKinnon’s parody of Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, The Ingraham Angle, as she warned of the approaching migrant caravan in apocalyptic terms, villainizing the “dozens—maybe millions” of Central American refugees to fire up her viewing base and get them to the polls.
Following that was a parody ad in which Democratic voters, burned by 2016’s polling misfire, looked into the camera and shakily proclaimed their belief that this time, things would be different. “There’s a blue wave on the horizon, and I have never … felt more … confident … ” said Heidi Gardner, playing a mom, holding up a trembling thumb. With Alec Baldwin perhaps unavailable due to his recent arrest, the show swerved away from its vaudevillian portrayal of President Donald Trump and instead animated the country’s climate of fear ahead of the November 6 elections. From the right-wing media, an implausible warning of impending doom; from progressive voters, a total lack of resoluteness that things could ever swing in their direction.
“Of course, the liberal media is trying to label President Trump a racist, but except for his words and actions throughout his life, how is he racist?” Ingraham asked the audience incredulously. “All of a sudden, the term ‘nationalist’ is bad. The word ‘white’ is bad. The phrase ‘white nationalist’ is bad!” Then she brought in Fox News regulars like Jeanine Pirro (Cecily Strong) and David Clarke (Kenan Thompson) to back up arguments that the migrant caravan contained “Guatemalans, Mexicans, ISIS, the Menendez Brothers, the 1990 Detroit Pistons, Thanos, and several Babadooks,” playing footage of zombie swarms from World War Z as a final coup de grace.
In its 44th season, SNL has struggled to parody a presidential administration that’s already given to extreme bombast. Though Baldwin’s performance as Trump was initially startling and a much-needed jolt of energy during the 2016 campaign, Baldwin has grown increasingly listless in the role as Trump’s presidency drags on. Sketches about Trump’s cabinet members have felt similarly one-note, portraying them mostly as brainless simpletons rather than actively polarizing figures. In contrast, SNL’s take on cable news can be surprisingly pointed, and last night’s sketch was unafraid to present Fox News as a malevolent force, even as it threw in ludicrous jokes about the migrant caravan walking “at a normal pace of 300 miles a day.”
The Democratic get out the vote commercial was very much in SNL’s wheelhouse, mocking liberals who are afraid to make even the broadest guarantee of their party’s success, no matter what the polling says. “It’s a win we need, and a win we’re going to get, I’m sure of it,” said Beck Bennett’s office worker as he tried to sip coffee from his quaking hand. “They say don’t trust the polls, but I’m choosing to,” added McKinnon’s small business owner, later screaming with enough anguish to shatter her shop windows.
Another segment, a monologue by Pete Davidson on Weekend Update mocking several Republican candidates for office, stirred up some controversy by targeting Dan Crenshaw, who is running for Congress in Texas and lost an eye in combat in Afghanistan and wears an eyepatch. “This guy is kinda cool … You may be surprised to hear he's a congressional candidate from Texas, and not a hitman in a porno movie,” Davidson said, adding, “I'm sorry, I know he lost his eye in war, or whatever,” with a trademark shrug. Davidson’s unvarnished approach to stand-up has felt particularly frayed in recent weeks (since his now-imploded relationship with Ariana Grande put him in the tabloid spotlight all summer), but it was still a joke along typical lines for him, and sheer shock value is never a particularly useful element to good satire.
Still, it was an altogether strong episode for SNL, held together by host Jonah Hill, who made his fifth appearance and was inducted into the “five-timers club” by other five-time hosts like Tina Fey, Drew Barrymore, and Candice Bergen. Hill mostly dominated the show’s apolitical sketches, like one featuring the return of his grandstanding six-year-old comedian Adam Grossman. Broadly silly material like that is a crucial part of the mix as the show fosters newer talent and tries to identify future stars.
Along those lines, this season has had a number of more absurd sketches that really sang, like the debut of Bayou Benny in Seth Meyers’s episode, or Adam Driver’s tour de force as a grumpy oil prospector in “Career Day.” If it can hone its political edge again, SNL will officially be on the rebound after a couple of years that leaned way too heavily on stunt casting and tired recurring characters. Maybe making fun of Donald Trump isn’t the way to do that—instead, the show can point the camera at the ways he’s warped political discourse beyond recognition.
Illustration: Celina Pereira; Nationaal Archief / WikimediaThere’s a mountain recluse who appears twice in Lucia Berlin’s prose, once in a story from her 2015 collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, and once in an autobiographical scrap from a new book, Welcome Home: A Memoir With Selected Photographs and Letters. She describes meeting the man when she was a little girl; her father had befriended him and, before the snows began, would visit with Berlin in tow, lugging stacks of magazines with them through the woods. While the men talked, Berlin was given a task: tearing out the pages of the magazines and using them to wallpaper the man’s cabin.
All through the dark days of winter Johnson would read the walls. It was important to mix up the pages and magazines, so that page 20 might be high on a north wall and 21 on the bottom of the south wall … Whenever he read a page he had to invent the story that went with it, amending it sometimes when, days later, he would find a connected page on another wall. When he had exhausted the potentials of his cabin he would repaper it with more pages in a similarly random order.
FSGIn Welcome Home, Berlin suggests that this was her first lesson in literature. It’s a touch too poetic an origin story, maybe, but you can see its motifs—isolation, wilderness, a ragged narrative that needs to be reassembled—all over her body of work. Berlin’s short fiction came to wide attention, 11 years after her death in 2004, with the posthumous publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, which is joined this fall by Welcome Home and another set of stories, Evening in Paradise. These two additions reveal how powerfully Berlin’s literary imagination was shaped by the twin beliefs seeded in her encounter with the recluse’s wallpaper: that stories can keep you company—keep you sane—during periods of deep loneliness, and that stories improve when they’re fractured and opened up for intervention.
This scene’s appearance in both story and memoir also highlights the now apparent overlap between Berlin’s fiction and her extraordinary, difficult life. She was born in 1936 in Alaska, and her father, who worked as a mining engineer, moved the family every few years throughout the American West until the family settled in Chile when Lucia was a teenager. Her mother suffered from debilitating depression and alcoholism, and her maternal grandfather, whom they lived with for a time and who appears in Berlin’s stories, drank and sexually abused Berlin.
Her adult life, what is known of it, was as peripatetic as her childhood. She had three husbands and four children before the age of 30, and roamed between New Mexico, New York, and Mexico, picking up for months at a time to live on the beach in Jalisco in a thatched hut with a white-sand floor, or to drive a Volkswagen van through Oaxaca down to Guatemala, kids asleep in the back. After divorcing a second jazz musician, she never married again, and to support her sons she worked as a physician’s assistant, a cleaning woman, a teacher, writing when she could manage it between bouts of devastating alcohol abuse.
Until the publication of Welcome Home, it might have been presumptuous to assume that Berlin’s stories were largely autobiographical or that characters resembling her were her ciphers. But nearly everything in the stories is echoed in Welcome Home, sometimes to the point of direct repetition. Here’s a line that appears in her story “Sometimes in Summer”: “I used to be terrified of going to the bathroom until Uncle John taught me to start at the front door, whisper over and over to myself, ‘God will take care of me. God will take care of me,’ and run like hell.” Here it is in Welcome Home:
At night I was afraid to go down the dark hall to the bathroom, afraid of unseen ghosts and of Granpa and my mother, who would often burst from their doors like deranged cuckoos. John told me to pray “God will take care of me. God will take care of me,” and then run like hell. He’d come home drunk too at night, but sweet, teary drunk.Now we might call what Berlin did metafiction or autofiction, but one senses that, in the 1960s, she was writing without the privilege of formal irony. Her stories contain the observations and concerns of impermissible experience: what heroin dealers looked and spoke like in Juárez in the ’60s; how a woman of that era might change husbands as nimbly as changing cabs; what the cleaning lady thinks about as she gets blood off a bedroom wall after a murder; what lies behind the precarious hauteur of a 14-year-old girl asked to entertain parties full of powerful men; what it feels like to have “a diabolical urge to, well, mess it all up.” These are dangerous subjects for women, even now. It’s no accident that many critics looking for Berlin’s peers compare her primarily to male authors (Hemingway, Raymond Carver), though the comparisons rarely do justice to her humor or her quirky, lavish prose style.
Welcome Home also gives a sense of the joyousness of her personality, which is as urgently expressed in all her writing as loneliness and desperation are. Her writing loves the world, lingers over details of touch and smell. She devotes paragraphs to how her childhood homes filled her ears—the “cheerful sound of the percolator, the flick of a match on my mother’s thumbnail, chunk of my father’s Zippo.” Writing of her family, she notes:
[Granpa] smelled of Camels and bay rum and Jack Daniel’s. My mother smelled of Camels and Tabu and Jack Daniel’s. Uncle John smelled of Delicado cigarettes and tequila. Mamie had many smells, all of them suffocating … her skin itself was white and moist, the exact texture and temperature of Ethiopian bread.This precision is characteristic of Berlin, whose descriptions are usually both peculiar and funny. Of a mother-to-be: “Marjorie made everything pink, which was too bad, because it came out Steven.” Of the house shared with her first husband, a sculptor: “Our dishes were black, our stainless a daring modern style. The forks had only two tines, so it was difficult to eat spaghetti.”
FSGEvening in Paradise revisits familiar places, characters, and plot threads, like the neighbor friend from Syria named Hope, the teenage lover, the controlling sculptor (owner of the two-tined forks) who makes her sleep facedown to correct her upturned nose, “a slight imperfection.” This second collection is so consistent with Manual in tone and plot that together they read like four or five novellas that have been disassembled, jumbled, and spread across two volumes—a puzzle to be solved. Evening in Paradise is even more fragmented than its predecessor: Several of the pieces—including the title story—might most truthfully be described as sketches for stories, or brilliantly drawn scenes from a larger, coherent work that doesn’t exist. Others have the sweep and inner architecture of perfect stand-alones.
Nearly every story contains a woman matching Berlin’s description and autobiography, but details change in random, almost impish ways. Recognizable characters swap names like alibis. From one story to the next, the book swerves from a chic private school in Chile in the 1940s, to Puerto Vallarta, to a cramped apartment in Oakland in the 1970s, to a drunk tank, to the Louvre. The effect, at first, is of an author dropping into a dozen different lives; gradually you realize this is one life broken into many pieces, examined shard by shard.
One constant among the stories is the alienation of the character who resembles Berlin. She is typically isolated from friends, at odds with a love interest, cast out of polite society, or geographically in the middle of nowhere. Wherever she goes, the writing observes her. In “My Life Is an Open Book,” a neighbor across the street peeps disapprovingly at her through the window as she writes, cares for her four children alone, studies late into the night and falls asleep with her head on her typewriter, and then begins an affair with a 19-year-old. “Now we all would have understood if she took up with some nice man, but this was sicko,” the narrator huffs. In “Lead Street, Albuquerque,” another narrator says of her,
You got the feeling no one had ever told her or shown her about growing up, about being part of a family or being a wife. That one reason she was so quiet was that she was watching, to see how it all was done.These stories have the austerity of a steely mental exercise, Berlin scrutinizing herself through the kind or not-so-kind eyes of others, but they also offer reassurance. The character may feel alone, but the story refutes her fear: Someone is seeing her.
More often than not, the narration expresses what its isolated female protagonist cannot. This is especially pointed in “Andado,” which is the longest and most magisterial story. Laura, a 14-year-old enrolled in a fancy Chilean private school, is sent by her father to spend a weekend at the home of his colleague and superior, Don Andrés, the senator of mines and one of the wealthiest men in the country. Laura is used to standing in for her mother, who holes up in the bedroom with gin, and is adept at dressing herself up to look “at least twenty-one, pretty, and a little cheap.” Don Andrés—who we gather is older than her father—takes an interest and slowly seduces her. Laura is a child; she’s never been kissed: “Where did noses go?” But she knows, instinctively, “there was no one she could talk to.”
The story builds to the moment when Don Andrés and Laura are caught in a violent storm, thrown from their horse-drawn carriage (the story is cheekily subtitled “A Gothic Romance”), and make love. Afterward, he won’t look at her. “What about me?” she thinks. When she presses him, he tells her, “I am not angry with you, mi vida. I have ruined you.” The narration, which has until this point been in the third person, swerves out of it to form the question Laura will never ask aloud. “Ruined? Am I ruined? For such a quick confusing moment? Will everyone know, looking at me?”
I’ve been thinking a lot since reading these two books about the question of the ruined woman, and about the female artist who spends her career examining her own abjection, because her fear that everyone will see her shame is less than her fear that no one can see her at all. Berlin seems to be one of these, and she is a master at capturing women in states of disintegration: those who are being damaged, physically or emotionally, by men; those who are immersed in scandal or disdained by society; and those who are intentionally self-destructing. Her oeuvre contains, among lots of other things, a profound record of what shame, trauma, and hanging on by your fingernails looked like on a particular woman—or a particular kind of woman—half a century ago.
Does it matter where her material came from? Does it disrespect the writer to consider the question? Or is it a failure to consider this work without probing its apparent function as witness to the pieces of a real life that could be acknowledged no other way? In a recent interview, the writer Elif Batuman described reevaluating her desire to hide behind the modesty screen of fiction, realizing that it was “based on an idea of propriety and privacy that involved covering up a lot of ways in which women traditionally take the hit” for the brutality of the world. Choosing to portray that brutality and its fallout as imagined fiction rather than as facts of one’s experience can reinforce the notion that “women are just supposed to kind of swallow … and gracefully disappear.” Much of the world that Berlin describes is harrowing for women, and yet her stories—even more than the fragments in Welcome Home—cheerfully refuse to erase either the women or the brutality that deranges them.
Instead, she rips them up further and pastes them together again, making ruined, radiant chimeras summoned from an unfrequented corner of 20th-century America. The stories should feel like period pieces, but they’re strangely familiar. The woman who refuses to swallow and disappear is having quite the year, as is addiction, as is scandal, as is the suspicion that we are alone in a fascinating world intent on our undoing. Berlin’s writing has the advantage of approaching these themes from a time less exhausting than the present, and she also has a gaze tender and precise enough to make her characters feel like people and not archetypes or sermons in disguise. They wonder where the noses go. Their voices sound like ours.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “Portraits of Women Coming Apart.”
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the Whole Foods in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was absolutely bereft of celery.
Conventional, organic, whatever—Hilary Sloan was out of luck. Sloan, a former colleague of mine who works in marketing, was looking for celery because a friend had evangelized to her about the health-promoting properties of celery juice. That friend had learned about the juice’s magic in the well-trafficked wellness corners of Instagram.
The claims circulating about the juice are indeed enticing: Depending on who you talk to, it promises to relieve inflammation, improve your microbiome, alkalize the body, kill mold in your gut, cure chronic mystery illnesses, and banish “toxins.” Suddenly, everyone from Vogue magazine to Good Morning America recommends you give it a try.
For wellness-focused businesses, celery juice’s exploding popularity has been impressive and sudden. Zach Berman, the co-founder of the popular Vancouver-based juice business The Juice Truck, told me his company added the drink to its official menu two weeks ago as a result of overwhelming consumer demand. “This has been the most interest in a cold-pressed juice since green juice originally became popular in 2011,” he says.
The American chain Pressed Juicery also added bottled celery juice to its menu a few months ago. When I recently asked the cashier at one of its New York locations if it had been popular, her eyes widened. “Yes. Extremely.” I was there to try celery juice for myself. It cost $6.50 and tasted like celery. I don’t know what I was expecting.
[Read: The Jordan Peterson all-meat diet]
Sloan, for her part, wasn’t expecting much, but was also hoping she was wrong. “It could help rebuild my immune system, which is terrible right now,” she says. “At the very least, I’ll be more hydrated.” After an accident last winter, she has had five surgeries and been on months of antibiotics, and although skeptical about the promised benefits, she felt open-minded about trying something that seemed, at worst, totally innocuous.
And that’s just the mix of emotions and circumstances that can make nutritional trends so tempting—and that medical-adjacent gurus might capitalize on. As strange as “celery juice is a miraculous health elixir” sounds, the way it’s become a burgeoning trend might be even stranger.
Anthony William calls himself the Medical Medium. He has a million Instagram followers and the affection of the kingmaking wellness website Goop, which has published him expounding at length on the topic. By his description, the upsides of drinking the juice daily (always by itself, always first thing in the morning, always before eating or drinking anything else) border on the magical. William lacks any sort of medical or scientific training or certification, according to the legal disclaimers on his website and his Goop contributions, but he claims a spirit he’s been in contact with since childhood has given him knowledge of health and wellness beyond what science can confirm.
No matter whose interest in celery juice I try and trace back to its source, it always ends up with William, and in his writings, he also claims to be the trend’s originator.
William did not return my requests for comment, and he seems not to engage frequently with traditional press. He’s written three books and built a considerable following across social-media platforms and his own website, where he offers paid phone consultations to sick followers for hundreds of dollars apiece, according to the journalist Rae Paoletta. In addition to that, he uses revenue-generating Amazon affiliate links extensively, including to 177 nutritional supplements and additives he recommends.
The Medical Medium website also features testimonials from A-list celebrities like Robert DeNiro and Naomi Campbell. I wasn’t able to independently confirm these specific endorsements, but there’s no question William has his admirers in Hollywood. Goop, which has significantly raised William’s profile, is owned by the actor Gwyneth Paltrow. A reporter for InStyle heard the actors Debra Messing and Allison Janney discussing their adherence to William’s celery-juice regimen at a party in August. They also follow him on Instagram.
On a platform like Instagram, where there’s few forces mediating the information that’s passed from a celebrity or influencer to their followers, it’s notoriously easy for health information of questionable veracity to spread like a game of telephone—losing attribution and context as it moves. When I mentioned to Sloan that William appeared to be the trend’s originator and that his background was questionable, she was surprised. “He’s not a doctor?” She’s only been on celery juice for five days, but she says she feels pretty good—at least, more hydrated.
I asked the registered dietitian Ashley Koff what she thought of celery juice, and she wasn’t impressed, even though she was enthusiastic about celery as a healthy snack in general. “There is no one food that will cure your cancer, inflammatory disease, or other ailment, so don’t believe the hype you see and hear on Instagram.” That was echoed by Lisa Young, a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and professor of nutrition at New York University. “You’ll see something take off where you just have to have celery, or you just have to have kale—one vegetable is really not better than another.”
The nutritionist and author Kimberly Snyder, on the other hand, was more optimistic. She praised celery juice as hydrating, vitamin-packed, and anti-inflammatory. She also pointed out that recent research showed celery seed as a helpful check on hypertension for people dealing with blood-pressure problems.
A recent study out of the Cleveland Clinic bears out celery’s blood-pressure benefits, but the researchers recommend consuming full stalks instead of extracts in order to get maximum benefits. Young, too, mentioned that maybe celery might be better intact, as a snack or an addition to a meal rather than as a medicine. “You don’t have to drink it, you can also chew it,” she says. “Whatever happened to chewing?”
The celery juice I bought listed four vitamins. Of those, the most abundant was vitamin A, and the bottle promised 30 percent of what the average person should have in a given day. As far as hydration goes, most of celery juice’s proponents cite solid celery’s 95 percent water composition as a way of proving the juiced version’s promise. Regular water is 100 percent water. I drink a bunch of that every day anyway.
By age 12, Kehinde Wiley had a reputation in his Los Angeles neighborhood for being a talented artist. Teachers at his school recommended him for a program during which he spent the summer of 1989 in Russia with 50 Soviet kids and 50 other Americans, creating murals, learning the Russian language and culture, hiking, swimming, and picking mushrooms. “It was a strange, magical time,” he recalls.
Wiley went on to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale. He now has a studio in Brooklyn, and Barack Obama chose him to paint a lively portrait of the former president that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
I recently spoke with Wiley about traveling to Nigeria to meet his father for the first time after having painted portraits of him for years, dealing with criticism, and the importance of slowing down. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Lola Fadulu: What was your mom’s work schedule like?
Kehinde Wiley: My mother, while raising six kids, had a number of small-business activities. The most prominent one in my memory was sort of like a junk store.
She would be away, in the earliest years, much of the day. Then she would be around more in the late afternoons, evenings. When we weren’t in school, we would be around the shop, and I remember learning Spanish dealing with a lot of the customers there.
Fadulu: Aside from learning Spanish, was there anything else you learned from those times you helped out in the store?
Wiley: I think I learned a sense of making something out of nothing, trying to dust off old items and seeing some level of value in them, recognizing that no one is going to help you.
Fadulu: Did your mom have any particular field or industry that she wanted you or your siblings to go into?
Wiley: Well, I remember as kids, we all had different passions, and she encouraged all of them. My twin brother and I would be going to art school as kids because there was a free program that allowed us to get off of the streets of South Central Los Angeles and spend our weekends studying art.
I remember my mother wanting me to go into preaching. She was taken by the fact that I was quite successful at some oratory competitions. She was going through a particularly religious fervor at that point in her life, and she encouraged me in that direction.
Fadulu: At that point, were you thinking about turning art into a career, or was it more of a hobby?
Wiley: In the beginning, it was much more of a hobby, and much more about just having an outlet for creative energy. Only later did it start to have real personal consequence.
Fadulu: When did that start to change?
Wiley: I was 12 years old. Russia was one of those programs that was a free program. It was an opportunity for me and 50 other American kids to go off into what was then the Soviet Union, and to study art in the forest outside of what was then called Leningrad, and is currently called Saint Petersburg.
We created a series of murals, and we had language classes and cultural exchange. And we would hike off into the forest, pick mushrooms, and swim. It was a strange, magical time. It allowed my sense of what was possible to blossom, at that very important age.
Fadulu: Did you know that you were a good artist when you were 12?
Wiley: Of course. That was my one bit of power in the world. That was the thing that got me positive attention, as opposed to so much negative attention that was coming at so many of my classmates at the time.
Fadulu: Would you consider helping your mom out in the store your first job?
Wiley: It was definitely my first job. I remember thinking about all of those bags and bags of clothes, and trying to figure out how to sort out different colors, and different types of fabrics, and how to organize things in terms of style and age. I remember looking at things that to me seemed like junk, but with a little bit of TLC, a coat of paint or something, is repositioned as something that people are willing to spend good money on.
That was my first job as a kid, but it wasn’t really positioned as a job, because it was just what you do. You lend a hand.
Fadulu: So, what was the first job you had that was positioned as a job?
Wiley: I think my first real job was actually going to work for the art school that I used to go to as a kid. While I was once an 11-year-old student at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts’ Summer Arts Conservatory, which was housed on the campus of Cal State Los Angeles, I was later as a high-school student recruited, at first, as a teacher’s assistant, and then later as a teacher to teach drawing and painting to youngsters. I was 17 and 18, teaching 9- and 10-year-olds how to paint.
Fadulu: Is that when you were beginning to think about a career in art?
Wiley: My first thought was that no one makes it as a painter. I was just looking around at the landscape of contemporary art, which was pretty dry in Southern California during the ’90s. There was no modeling for success when it came to a job in the arts.
So I thought that my best option would probably be in arts education. So when I went to do my bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute immediately after high school, I assumed that I would probably study art and become an art teacher. While I enjoyed it very much as a high-school student, I didn’t really have a burning desire to be a teacher. I just knew that that would enable me to support my art habit.
Saul Loeb / GettyFour years of arts education in San Francisco, then going off to graduate school on the East Coast at Yale, opened up a whole new set of possibilities. And perhaps for the first time I started to glimpse what it might mean to launch a successful career as a painter.
Fadulu: And where did you catch those glimpses of those other possibilities? I know you said you were at Yale, but what exactly were you seeing?
Wiley: What happens there is that while I’m painting in the graduate art studios, I’m also taking trips into the city with my classes, and having conversations with artists in their studios. I remember having classroom trips to art galleries and seeing actual exhibitions I was excited about. Being in the class with professors who are working artists, the light slowly started to turn on, and that sense of imagining myself as one of those people.
[Futher] reading: ‘I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life’
But still, there’s a lot of self-doubt, and there was also a really tough regime of criticism that arts education put me through, which enabled me to develop a really thick skin, but also caused me to doubt whether or not I had the chops to make it as a professional artist.
Fadulu: How did you deal with the self-doubt?
Wiley: I think a lot of it was being able to recognize the relative nature of a lot of the arguments that were being made in large classrooms. One art object could give rise to five different arguments, and depending on who was the most convincing, the success or failure of that art object would announce itself. It became increasingly obvious that it had very little to do with the art, and more to do with the environment in which the art was being consumed.
I had a strong sense that this school was an immense place to learn new ideas and histories, but also a potentially toxic place in which you can get caught up within the incredibly specific politics that each school gives rise to, and lose track of the broader target.
Fadulu: And didn’t you go to Nigeria to reconnect with your dad?
Wiley: Well, I connected, period. My father and mother broke up before I was born. He returns to Nigeria, and I’m never to see him until I’m 19. So, 1997, I just decide on a whim that I’m going to go find him. A lot of it was a lot of buildup, emotional buildup. This constant desire to see who your father is, and just to know that connection. I think on another level it was about pushing myself, and knowing what I’m made of, whether or not I’m capable of pulling something like this off. There was a lot of teenage bravado going on there.
There was this incredible curiosity as a portrait painter, just—what does he look like? I began going to different universities asking if they knew who this guy was. I knew that he studied architecture in America.
So I would go to universities and go to their architecture departments and ask if anyone knew my father, and that didn’t work. Someone finally said that I should go, based on his last name, to southwestern Nigeria, where I then went to the University of Calabar. And his name was on the door of the department. He was the head of the architecture department. And nothing’s been the same since. There was a series of paintings that I did shortly after meeting him for the first time, where I was just obsessed with painting him, getting that out.
Fadulu: Was that trip what you thought it would be?
Wiley: No, not at all. I had this illusion that there would be arms wide open, and music would be playing, and that I would quickly and quite easily recognize this lost side of my African ancestry. And in fact, it was an incredibly difficult and exhausting process to find him. And by the time we did find each other, there was that strange moment of trying to figure out what each other and who each other was. What were my intentions as I showed up? What were my feelings toward him? It was incredibly complicated.
I think I was a bit naïve to think that all of those emotions would just simply be resolved by seeing him. In fact, it became much more difficult to come to terms with the feelings of resentment and abandonment than I had anticipated.
Fadulu: You said you became obsessed with painting portraits of him.
Wiley: There were a number of those that, to this day, I can’t find, because I sold off so much work as an undergrad. One of these days, I have to track this stuff down.
Fadulu: What was going through your mind when you heard from Obama about his portrait?
Wiley: Well, there was never really any point where I had the job. I heard they were considering a number of artists for this, and I was welcomed to be interviewed as they were down to a smaller group. But there was never any point where I just knew, until I knew. Back in 2016 even, I was in the Oval Office, incredibly nervous. And I was interviewing with the president about this potential job, still not knowing what it was going to be, but just feeling incredibly grateful for having been invited to have the conversation.
So every step along the way, it just became more and more real, and more and more possible.
Fadulu: So what was the interview like?
Wiley: Of course the president wanted to know what it is that I would bring to the picture. I spoke really honestly about what excited me about him and me being involved in this historical moment: the sense in which we both share that story of having African fathers and American mothers. That sort of journey to find the father, that yearning to try and create some sort of internationalist presence in our work.
I spoke about the possibilities, allegorically, of telling his story in a painting. And so what you end up with in that painting are some amazing botanicals that are visually captivating, but they also nod toward certain flowers that are prominent in Indonesia, certain leaves that are prominent in Hawaii, the state flower of Illinois, the flowers that are most commonly seen in the grasslands of Kenya.
All of those strange, forest-like spaces are behind him and pushing up and forward. Those were the things that I was discussing as a possibility, and I think that it must’ve set something right.
Fadulu: You said it became more real as you went through the process. Were you working at all on it before it was official?
Wiley: Oh, God, yeah. I had gone to photograph him, and that wasn’t quite right, so I went back and I photographed him again. There were months of just trying to figure out how to artificially create this type of image on the computer and approximate what it would look like, and then start doing studies and see what it looks like in the actual paint. It was a long time coming. But in the end, it was all worth it.
Fadulu: Those months of trying to figure out how to create it—were there any big lessons from that?
Wiley: Just slow down. The more important the portrait, the more nuance the likeness has to have, the slower you have to get. So I had to get smaller brushes, really concentrate on just doing small passages per day, rather than trying to do broad strokes. And so it was a very different type of painting. You can feel it, almost, when you look at that painting, it's a much more contemplative piece. But I got very familiar with his face.
Fadulu: How did you feel about its reception?
Wiley: Well, he told me, “This is what I do, I’m used to the national spotlight, the global spotlight, but you’re new to this, so get ready. It’s gonna be a big deal.” And boy, was it ever.
I’ve never seen a work of art go viral that way and become a global sensation. And, of course, you’re dealing with the culture wars, and powers and principalities, and the Republicans and the Democrats. It did come as a shock to see that people would get so excited as to start sending death notices and threatening letters and all of this.
It’s surprising, but when seen in the proper context, when seen as a type of cultural signpost, when that painting is seen as what it is, which is a moment of celebration for him and his high-water mark within our culture, then you recognize it’s bigger than you are.
For decades, technology entrepreneurs have established their headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, created products that changed the way we live, and reaped millions doing so. But at the same time, the cities around these companies have become harder and harder to live in. Housing prices and homelessness are rising, roads are clogged, transit is over capacity. Tech companies aren’t necessarily causing these problems, but they do have a lot more money than anyone else in today’s economy. So cities are asking those who benefit the most in this economy to pay more money to help solve urban and suburban problems.
Not all companies have proven willing participants. When Cupertino proposed charging companies, including Apple, $124 per employee to raise funds to relieve traffic congestion, Apple pushed back, saying it had contributed $70 million to “public benefits” over the course of completing its headquarters in Cupertino. Cupertino shelved the referendum until 2020. Amazon and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce lobbied so vociferously against a head tax passed in Seattle that the City Council repealed it less than a month after it was passed. Google and LinkedIn contribute a lot of money and services to Mountain View—Google sponsors the city’s community shuttle, for example—but “other companies, not so much,” the mayor of Mountain View, Lenny Siegel told me. “New wealth doesn’t give as much money as old wealth.”
But tech companies’ ability to decide what they contribute and don’t contribute to communities on their own terms may be ending. In San Francisco, Mountain View, and East Palo Alto, ballot referendums would impose additional taxes on big companies in order to solve problems related to a lack of affordable housing and funding for transportation. And tech companies are being forced to ask themselves whether they’re willing to play an active role in changing their neighborhoods, not just the world at large.
“We have to come to some kind of reckoning that when you make millionaires out of people, and they buy houses for millions of dollars, other people are going to be on the end of that,” Glenn Kelman, the president and CEO of Redfin, which supported the Seattle head tax, told me, about tech leaders. “We’ve always viewed ourselves as the hero of every story, and we’re about to see that we may be the enemy of this one.”
In San Francisco, voters are being asked to approve Proposition C, which would levy a tax on businesses with receipts of over $50 million in order to fund housing and homelessness services. In Mountain View, it’s Measure P, a per-employee tax on companies with more than 5,000 employees; Google, which has more than 20,000 employees, could be saddled with about $3.3 million annually. And in East Palo Alto, residents are voting on Measure HH, which would charge companies with more than 25,000 square feet of commercial office space a tax of $2.50 per square foot to raise money for affordable housing and job-training programs. The tax could hit Amazon, which is opening new facilities there.
For decades, tech entrepreneurs have portrayed themselves as change agents creating world-altering products and then using their wealth to advance liberal policies. Yet their philanthropy is often focused on big projects that have national or global impact. When it comes to paying higher taxes to fund local projects, some companies have begun acting less like revolutionary organizations that are changing the way society works and more like, well, companies: opposing new local taxes based on the argument that they will hamper their ability to do business.
The initiative that has drawn much of their opposition is Proposition C in San Francisco. If passed, it would levy a tax of 0.175 to 0.65 percent, depending on the type of business, on gross receipts of companies making more than $50 million, to be used for homelessness services. It would raise around $300 million, doubling the city’s homelessness budget.
The hundreds of millions of dollars raised could house 4,000 households, keep 7,000 people in their homes, and eliminate the waitlist at homeless shelters, Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, which put forth the initiative, told me. She argues that large companies just got a 14 percent reduction in their corporate tax rate, and that the federal government is divesting funding in housing for poor people, so big companies “have a responsibility as corporate citizens to pay.” Though some companies have given to charity in the city, others have not, she told me. “Charity is one time. Systemic change is forever,” she said.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the companies and individuals that would be hit by the tax oppose it. “Prop c is the dumbest, least thought out prop ever,” Marc Pincus, the chairman and co-founder of Zynga, tweeted Saturday, urging voters to “get the facts and vote no,” while himself tweeting some incorrect information, including that 60 percent of homeless in the city are from outside of California. Stripe, the payments company, has given $419,000 to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce group opposing Prop C, according to the San Francisco Ethics Commission, which tracks election spending. Lyft gave $100,000, Visa gave $225,000, and Square gave $25,000. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, gave $125,000; Paul Graham, an entrepreneur who founded YCombinator, gave $150,000, Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist with the firm Sequoia Capital, gave $100,000.
Dorsey tweeted that he wanted to see long-term solutions rather than “quick acts to make us feel good. ” Stripe said it didn’t think spending more on anti-homelessness problems was the solution, and that the $770 per person that San Francisco spends per person on homelessness is far greater than what other cities spend. Both companies have emphasized that some prominent San Francisco politicians, including newly elected Mayor London Breed, and state senator Scott Wiener, oppose Proposition C.
But others in the tech community have called this opposition to new taxes a cop-out, and chastised people like Dorsey for trying to defeat Prop C without coming up with any other meaningful plan. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff chided fellow entrepreneurs in San Francisco for embracing the “myopic” view that businesses exist only to make shareholders money, not to help the community where they’re located. “It’s absurd to believe that these businesses can’t afford one half of 1 percent of gross receipts to help address the most important problem facing our community,” he wrote. He sparred with Dorsey about Prop C on Twitter—Dorsey called him a “distraction.”
Benioff has a history of giving charitably in San Francisco, but he told me that it can be hard to get everyone in tech to do the same. In 2014, he tried to get local companies to donate to a campaign he called SF Gives that funded an anti-poverty campaign in San Francisco. What he found asking for money then, and talking to local entrepreneurs about Prop C recently, is that “it turns out to be there are two kinds of people, those who give, those who don’t give.”
“Right now, we have a crisis of inaction, a crisis of indifference,” he said.
Most tech companies have actually seen their tax rate fall in San Francisco over the last few years. In 2012, voters approved an initiative to switch San Francisco from collecting a payroll tax on businesses to collecting a gross receipts tax, a change that favored tech companies over higher-grossing businesses like hotels and construction companies. But as tech companies paid less than they had before, the city collected less money, so much so that it hasn’t been able to fully phase out the payroll tax because it isn’t collecting enough money from the gross receipts tax. The city will likely have to change the way it collects business taxes in the next few years, said Molly Turner, an urban planner who lectures at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and is also on the board of SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, which supports Prop C. Turner said that passing Prop. C might make it harder to negotiate those new taxes, but that few tech leaders have come up with any new suggestions for solving San Francisco’s homelessness problem.
“Benioff made a really strong point, which is that many tech companies have not been very engaged on this issue,” she said. “Their first time weighing in is a rejection of the proposed solution, without any new ideas.”
Read: [How Amazon Killed Seattle’s Head Tax]
For Benioff and some other tech leaders, giving to improve the community around them can also be good business. If a city has good public schools, rapid and affordable transit, and safe streets, talented employees will want to live and work there. If employees have to navigate around homeless people on their way to work and see open drug use on the streets—as all but the most sheltered San Franciscans currently do—they will not want to stay. “We cannot separate our business from that of the city—we have to advocate for all our stakeholders, not just our shareholders,” Benioff told me.
I reached out to 15 of the biggest technology companies in San Francisco to ask if they were taking a position on Prop C , or if they had given to any other housing or transportation initiatives in the Bay Area. Many told me that they were supporting local nonprofits, but often, this support was in the form of employee volunteer hours, rather than in cash. (Local nonprofits have expressed frustration to me with tech volunteer days, in which crowds of untrained volunteers descend on their nonprofit for a day, and for whom staff has to spend days preparing; most nonprofits would much prefer cash.)
Some companies—including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Cisco—have donated tens of millions of dollars to affordable-housing initiatives in the Bay Area.
But other companies’ donations are more amorphous. Twitter, for instance, referred me to #TwitterforGood, a company Twitter account highlighting the company’s various efforts in the community, which seems to vary from teaching educators how to use Twitter, and days of service at local charities. Twitter has also created a community learning center called NeighborNest in the Tenderloin that teaches local residents about technology and coding, but the center was part of Twitter’s obligations under the Twitter tax break, which exempted the company from payroll taxes in exchange for community-outreach programs. In 2017, 257 Twitter employees volunteered for NeighborNest. (The company had 3,372 employees in 2017.) Twitter also trained nonprofits in how to use Twitter, and gave seven nonprofits promoted tweet campaigns as part of its community outreach.
Dropbox told me its foundation, volunteer program, and company matching program work with community organizations; Uber says it’s donated “in the tens of thousands of dollars” to various nonprofits; Lyft skirted the question of work in the community altogether and said it supported Mayor Breed “in implementing fair approaches that most effectively address homelessness.”
Notably, a number of tech companies, including Google and Facebook, also gave to a campaign supporting Regional Measure 3, a June referendum that asked voters to raise tolls on Bay Area bridges. The initiative, which passed, was criticized for passing the costs of transportation projects onto commuters, rather than to the companies that employ them, and for failing to address the housing shortages that forced commuters to live further and further away.
There are many reasons why companies may not give a lot to the community where they’re located. Some are still start-ups who are trying to make a profit and provide returns to venture capitalists who would view it unwise to spend extra money on charitable endeavors. Even some public tech companies aren’t in the black—Twitter said in its annual report last year that it had a deficit of $2.67 billion. (Then again, Jack Dorsey’s net worth is nearly $5 billion.) It may be fairer to ask companies to give back when their finances are more stable, and indeed, it is the big, established companies like Cisco, Facebook, and Google, that have given the most voluntarily. Some tech founders may not give liberally to housing or transit issues because they’ve been trained in the world of business and technology, but don’t feel comfortable taking positions on public policy.
But some companies and individuals can afford to give and aren’t. Many seem to prefer to divert money to a private foundation rather than handing over money to the city or to local nonprofits whose solutions—like giving someone a home—can’t necessarily be scaled. “Whether a company really decides to invest in some of these housing initiatives comes down to the culture at the top, who that leader is, how invested are they in San Francisco, as well as how liquid is their wealth, and do they have a lot of cash to donate to philanthropy or not,” Turner, the Haas professor, said.
That’s why many cities have decided that merely expecting wealthy companies to pitch in to help solve pressing problems does not work. This is the problem inherent in entrusting philanthropists with saving society—even when they do spend their money, they can spend it on whatever they want, often beyond their backyard. Many Silicon Valley founders are fans of effective altruism, for instance, which seeks a way to make their money do the most good, which often means spending it in the developing world. A 2016 report found that 90 percent of philanthropic dollars from Silicon Valley donors are leaving the region.
[Read: The ‘Black Hole’ That Sucks Up Silicon Valley Money]
Philanthropy alone also can’t solve all the problems facing some of these cities. Benioff and Friedenbach, of the Coalition on Homelessness, say that the only way to solve San Francisco’s homelessness problem is to spend more—treat more severely ill people, permanently house more people, prevent more evictions, create more emergency shelters and more public restrooms. “With 7,500 homeless, this has gotten way beyond any one particular philanthropist,” Benioff told me. “We all have to come together to make this happen.”
* * *
Mountain View decided to put its head tax on the ballot because its problems were too great for the city or one philanthropist to solve alone as well, Siegel, the mayor, told me. While the city is extremely grateful for the work that Google and LinkedIn do there, the costs of congestion are becoming so high in Mountain View that it’s threatening the ability of companies to be able to continue to prosper, he said. Though two business groups asked Mountain View not to put Measure P on the ballot, none have actively lobbied against it, and LinkedIn and Google said they would not oppose it.
That’s because the companies see that Mountain View bringing in more money for transit and housing projects is actually good for business, he said. “The biggest threat to the continuing viability of our tech companies is their ability to attract employees, and they can’t attract employees if there’s no place for them to live,” he said. Mountain View’s measure only affects companies making more than $5,000, and is graded so that companies making the most pay the highest per-employee tax. Another difference between donations and taxes: The city can bond against anticipated tax revenue. Mountain View won’t phase in the business tax—if it passes—until 2020, but it can still sell bonds based on the revenue it will reap, and make major capital investments in transportation.
It’s possible that as problems grow in places where tech companies are located, voters will expect more public officials to follow Mountain View’s lead. In 2014, Mountain View voters replaced three council members who had opposed a planned housing development with Google with three members who supported it. But other cities may face more vociferous pushback from local companies—Siegel pointed out that Apple has not given very much to Cupertino. “They take the attitude that we gave you the iPhone and we pay taxes, and that’s enough” he said.
Employees might push their employers to step up more too. Catherine Bracy co-founded the Tech Equity Collaborative, which brings together employees of tech companies to advocate for public-policy solutions to some of the region’s biggest problems. She thinks that asking workers and citizens, rather than companies, to get involved, is a more democratic approach. “Tech didn’t create this problem, asking them to fix it singlehandedly is not fair,” she said. Already, tech workers have helped gather signatures for a possible 2020 ballot referendum that would end tax breaks for corporations embedded in Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax bill that has hamstrung California communities from raising money for more than three decades.
It’s still unclear how Prop C will fare at the ballot box on Tuesday. The last time a major West Coast city tried to tax business to fund homelessness services, the counterargument was essentially the opposite of the one Benioff is making now: That throwing more money at the problem isn’t the solution.
“I do not know that more revenue would solve” the homelessness problem, the chair of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, told me in June. After pressure from big businesses and the Chamber, Seattle repealed its head tax and council members pledged to find another solution. Since then, no new housing initiatives have been put forward, according to Katie Wilson, the General Secretary of the Transit Riders Union, which had been involved in head-tax negotiations. Meanwhile, Seattle’s homelessness problem is getting worse. This year, the city is on track, she said, to set an annual record for how many homeless people die outside.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.—There’s nothing quite like the cacophony of the homecoming parade at a historically black university. Here at Florida A&M, children run between floats, yelling and laughing as they chase down pieces of hard candy. Bass from car speakers and from roadside DJs rattle trunks and ear drums. Frying fish crackles and street vendors hawk orange and green shirts. And at the center of it all is the marching band, the legendary Marching 100. Shiny trumpets blare, drum majors strut, and dancers twirl. That’s what people come to see.
But this year, at Florida A&M’s homecoming, things are different. It’s Andrew Gillum who gets most of the applause. Tallahassee’s mayor and one of FAMU’s most famous sons has turned the Saturday-morning parade into his own campaign rally. Gillum, the Democratic nominee for the state’s governor, is at ease in the electrified atmosphere of his alma mater. He and his wife, R. Jai Gillum, take turns pushing their 1-year-old son, Davis, in his stroller, in front of dozens of volunteers who march behind. Children yell “There he go!” from blocks away. Gillum kisses babies, shakes hands, and takes selfies. Among the masses of black people lining the street, several tell me it’s been a decade since they’ve been this enthusiastic about a candidate.
Lost in much of the national coverage of the Florida governor’s election is the fact that, well, it’s about Florida. In a bellwether election year, where the effectiveness of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant, white-backlash-fueled nationalism is being put to the test as a top-to-bottom electoral strategy across the country, Gillum has emerged as one of the favorite figures among the opposition. A black man who has faced a slew of blatantly racist attacks and who, in a viral moment during a debate, said that racists believe that his opponent, Ron DeSantis, is a racist, Gillum reflects a new potential pathway for that opposition, one that sees combating racism and bigotry as an opportunity and not as a political minefield.
But here in Florida, his potential reflects the deeper possibilities of the state’s electorate. An urgency seems to be animating the applause of the mostly black crowd at FAMU homecoming, born both of a sense of the magnitude of the opportunity at hand, and anxiety about letting it slip away. In a place still bound in many ways by the strictures of old Jim Crow, the changing demographics of a growing black and brown population meet the realities of a statewide carceral machine and widespread structural disenfranchisement. Over years and years of tight gubernatorial races, razor-thin presidential margins, and efforts among activists to match Florida’s politics to its demographics, the biggest political issue in the state in 2018 is the size and structure of the electorate itself.
Vann Newkirk II / The AtlanticGillum’s candidacy is a turning point for the state’s black and Latino populations, and his campaign hopes rest on expanding the electorate as much as possible. His success could mean the realization of a major political shift in Florida—one that will most certainly have major repercussions nationally in 2020 and beyond.
Andrew Demese Gillum’s perfect storm began 17 years ago, in the exact same place where the 39-year-old is now greeted as a local hero. In 2001, he was elected the president of FAMU’s student body, and subsequently became the first student member of the university’s board of trustees. From there, while still in school, in 2003 Gillum ran for an open position on the city commission and won. A decade later, he launched a successful bid to become mayor of Tallahassee. Four years after that, he threw his hat into the Democratic primary for governor. If he wins this race, it’ll be possible to trace his entire career path along two miles of the same street, from FAMU, to City Hall, to the governor’s mansion.
According to people close to Gillum, running for office was always in the cards. “I’ve known him since freshman year,” says Yarbrah Peeples, an educator who entered college in the same class as the mayor. “Andrew started at FAM campaigning. We absolutely knew that he would get here one day.”
“People have known him here and in the community since he stepped on this campus,” Peeples told me during the parade. She’d walked over from an event commemorating a special anniversary of her induction into the Beta Alpha chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, the sorority of which R. Jai Gillum is also a member. “It’s just become something where people feel proud and feel connected to him … it feels like he’s ours, even in a different way than Obama.”
After the parade, I asked Gillum about that sense of kinship and ownership among his longtime supporters, and whether it felt more distant as he approached the big time. “The community is coming with me,” Gillum answered. “We may be of different races and may be from different parts of the state, but there is something that’s real common between me and a lot of people.”
“Now that the circle is widened, does it lessen the hold that this community—in particular, the FAMU community—has on me?” he continued. “I just have to say, I would find that quite impossible to divorce myself from. Not that I would try to anyway, but I’d find that very difficult. In fact, this is the kind of experience that I think a governor does need when going into office and leading a state.”
No Florida governors have had experiences quite like Gillum’s. The state has never had a black governor. In fact, Gillum would be the second black statewide elected official since Reconstruction, in a state where 13 percent of all voters are black. There are no HBCUs represented among the alma maters of those who’ve lived in the governor’s mansion. Relatively few recent Florida governors were even born and raised in Florida. It’s been two decades since the last one.
There are few politicians of prominence—in Florida or otherwise—who share comparable life experiences with Gillum. Born in Miami to a lower-working-class family, he has intimate experience with the safety-net, health-care, and criminal-justice systems that he has pledged to reform. Four of his brothers—Terrance, Eric, Chuck, and Patrick—have faced serious criminal charges and convictions. “Most would say I probably shouldn’t have made it out of the neighborhood,” he told me. In the language common to many black working-class neighborhoods, where relatively few young men manage to maintain the escape velocity needed to leave, Gillum is chosen.
Vann Newkirk II / The AtlanticThat personal story and connection with voters of color gives supporters hope that Gillum will be able to break the hold that the GOP has had over the office since Jeb Bush’s inauguration in 1999. Nationally, the Republican Party has become almost explicitly a party for white men, a consolidation of demographic strength that has accelerated in recent years with the advent of Trumpism. In Florida, that dynamic has been made clear with the GOP’s nomination of DeSantis, who began his attacks against Gillum with an ill-advised warning to voters not to “monkey this up.”
Read: Andrew Gillum, Ron DeSantis, and the fight for Florida
But in tandem with those developments, efforts to constrain the political strength of nonwhites—who have become an ever-greater voice in Florida’s electorate—have gained new relevance. The staggering democracy-warping effects of policies such as Florida’s policy of stripping people with felonies of their right to vote have been well studied. And, since 2013, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder destroyed most federal proactive oversight of election laws in the old Jim Crow South, mounting evidence points toward increased efforts to suppress votes. Gillum’s path has involved figuring out how to navigate those barriers, and how to solve a decades-old problem of low turnout among black and Latino communities in midterm elections.
Lovell Lee was born in 1967 in Miami Beach, just two years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that guaranteed the right for black people to vote. He’ll be 51 in November, and he has not been able to vote for more than a decade.
In 1987, at the age of 19, Lee joined the United States Marine Corps. He received an honorable discharge four years later, but after returning to Florida from Okinawa, Japan, Lee says that he had trouble adjusting to civilian life. Within a few years, he had picked up a serious addiction to crack cocaine, which landed him in prison in 2005. “I served two years in prison for felony crimes,” Lee told me. “I have not committed any crimes since, but I still have found it difficult to apply for jobs. It was still being held against me, even though I have paid my debt to society.”
According to The Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice research and advocacy group, Lee is one of the 4.7 million Americans who are not incarcerated but will be ineligible to vote in this election because of a felony conviction. Three million of those are people who, like Lee, have completed parole or probation and live in states where disenfranchisement, even after the completion of all sentence and post-sentence obligations, is permanent or conditional. Of those 3 million, half live in Florida.
As my colleague Gabby Deutch writes, the twin policies of permanent felony disenfranchisement and mass incarceration have combined to keep 10 percent of Florida’s population from voting. As one might expect, the effects have been particularly damaging for Florida’s black population: More than 20 percent of all black people of voting age are disenfranchised because of felonies. This is not incidental or accidental. Felony disenfranchisement was a part of the state’s 1868 Constitution, a single component of a suite of provisions designed to keep the state from becoming “niggerized,” according to one legislator. Over the years, as the Voting Rights Act and other legislation have wiped out many of the other components of the Jim Crow regime, felony disenfranchisement has actually become a more powerful influence on the electorate, mostly because of Florida’s strict carceral policy for both violent and nonviolent crime.
Lee was one of the people caught up in that dragnet of disenfranchisement. Even as he got clean and embraced a role as community leader mentoring young black men in Fort Pierce, Lee never applied to the governor for restoration of his rights, both because he was certain that he’d never be approved, and because he “just didn’t know how important the vote was.”
But the campaign for a November ballot initiative—Amendment 4, which would grant all people with felonies except convicted murderers and sex offenders the right to vote once they complete their sentence—has given him a sense of political purpose. He volunteered to lead a group of canvassers called Hard Knocks, which attempts to spread the gospel of Amendment 4 in and around St. Lucie County, on behalf of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which has championed the ballot initiative on the state level.
The stakes of the amendment, which has to garner 60 percent of the votes on Tuesday to pass, have been made abundantly clear to Lee when he visits black neighborhoods. “When we go to homes and apartments, just about all of them have a relative or friend or know somebody who has been impacted by the felony system,” Lee told me. And also, invariably, he hears about Andrew Gillum, both from people who can’t vote, and from people who don’t often vote—but might want to.
For Lee, for the people leading the initiative, and for Gillum himself, the two campaigns are bound together, both unlikely products of a remarkable time, and each reliant on the mobilizing potential of the other. Lee sees Gillum as a champion of rights restoration, and views his candidacy—along with the gubernatorial campaigns of Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Ben Jealous in Maryland, and Sean Shaw’s campaign for Florida attorney general—as correctives to the old older. “I let the young folks know that this is a game-changer for us,” Lee said. “When you have all these people of color running for office, it’s a sign that we can really change something.”
Gillum’s homecoming coronation didn’t end with the parade. He hustled back and forth all over a tight quadrant of Tallahassee streets, using his home church, the Bethel AME sanctuary just off campus, as a base. He went to a fund-raiser that new Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms—a FAMU graduate—also attended, and shuttled in and out of the sticky Florida heat, which by noon had already burned the backs of my hands. At the church, I overheard volunteers working through the logistics of finding him new white shirts—his wardrobe signature—to wear for the afternoon, to keep up with the humidity and the stains from the dozens and dozens of hugs.
At the temporary headquarters, Gillum slowed down for a moment to talk about the symbiotic relationship between rights restoration and his own campaign. “Florida’s one of four states that still has these vestiges of the Jim Crow South, and I believe that more than 60 percent of voters are going to vote to repeal and to change the Florida Constitution to automatically restore rights for a class of former felons,” he said. “But the rights-restoration process, which is an absolute necessity, is the beginning, and then there are the whole other range of public policies.”
He listed those policies, the kinds of progressive reforms that have truly marked his campaign as something new, even way back during his long-shot win in the Democratic primary. He wants to “ban the box” to prevent employers from discriminating against people with felonies. His education policy involves utilizing a revamped state corporate tax code to establish higher minimum wages for teachers. Unlike Abrams, whose health-care platform revolves around a statewide Medicaid expansion but who has remained quiet on the prospect of a “Medicare for All” scenario, Gillum embraces both policies. With a new influx of Puerto Rican residents after the disastrous fallout of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Gillum pledges to seek federal housing assistance for displaced residents. And he intends to dismantle the infamous “Stand Your Ground” policy, Florida’s self-defense law that played a central role in the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
“I have not concluded that my position on Stand Your Ground is the popular position in the state,” Gillum told me.“It probably isn’t. But hell, during the time of the civil-rights legislation and the crumbling of Jim Crow, it was not popular to dismantle those systems of racism.”
Gillum talks a lot about the legacy of Jim Crow. But it’s not just him: Each person I talked with for this story mentioned the old regime by name when discussing the current moment. Much of the historical resonance seems to have to do with a renewed national conversation around voting rights, and in places across the Deep South, the return of voter suppression for communities of color. In Florida, the veil between the Old Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow is thin. And it all shows in just who votes, and who doesn’t.
According to a review of census data from the Brookings Institution, minorities suffered a six-point drop in voter turnout from 2012 to 2016, even as white turnout rose. At least some of that appears to be a result of targeted policy. A report from the liberal Center for American Progress found that “in 2012, after the Florida Legislature cut the state’s early voting period from 14 days to 8 days and eliminated voting on the last Sunday before Election Day, early voting participation for African Americans dropped by 4.1 percent relative to 2008, while participation for Latinos dropped by 4.6 percent.”
Those numbers are even more concerning for Democrats in the 2018 election. Florida gubernatorial races are always held during federal midterms, which means that the underlying electorate is always whiter and older than it is in presidential elections, in which Florida is a true swing state. The path to victory for Gillum and other Democratic hopefuls is relatively straightforward: The more that they can make the election look like a presidential election, the greater chance they have of winning. And that means ensuring that nonwhite voters, who make up 23 percent of the citizen voting-age population, vote at rates comparable to that percentage.
Andrea Mercado, the executive director of the aptly named advocacy group the New Florida Majority, sees this election as an opportunity to reverse the electoral losses by minorities. “We registered over 30,000 people this year alone,” she told me. During the hotly contested Democratic primary, when Gillum squared off against party favorite Representative Gwen Graham, the New Florida Majority hosted one of the debates between the two. “That night after witnessing Andrew Gillum speak about an unapologetic people’s platform, our members voted unanimously to endorse him,” she said.
Since then, the group has been a reliable source of organizing muscle for the candidate, seeking to turn out new voters and unlikely voters alike, and using the kind of resource-intensive voter mobilization of black and brown voters that characterized other recent paradigm-shifting races in Alabama and Virginia. Part of that effort has included some more-unconventional methods, such as commissioning Miami-based artist Disem to paint a mural of Gillum in his birthplace of Miami.
The mural’s purpose was clear. “A lot of people in the primary didn’t know that there was a black man running for governor,” Mercado told me.
In a time when pundits of all political stripes have attempted to mothball “identity politics” as a weapon against Trumpism, the strategy in Florida has countered some of those arguments. “He’s from here, and that resonates with people,” Mercado said. For the potential voters she’s encountered, Gillum’s race and story are material, as are the policies he champions for them.
“His campaign really is energizing and electrifying people who don’t feel they are being spoken to and don’t have their needs met,” Mercado said. That electrification was illustrated in Gillum’s surprising primary win. “In the 50,000 people that we targeted, only 200 of them had voted in the 2014 midterm, and we saw a 2,000 percent increase [in turnout]. And we know it was because people were excited to vote for a black person from a working-class family who we believe will really fight for us in Tallahassee.” Gillum’s campaign estimates that 150,000 of the ballots cast for him in the primary belonged to people who’d voted for the first time in at least three election cycles.
[Read: Why did the polls get the Florida primary so wrong?]
At the end of the day, turnout is still the major issue in play. Turnout was probably the biggest factor in Trump’s win in 2016, and it’ll be the biggest for Gillum’s chances. On that issue, he has taken turns both advancing the party’s—and Barack Obama’s—developing rhetoric of voting as a moral mandate, and levying a more structural critique about the nature of American elections and voting.
“What is not acceptable is for you to sit back and complain about everything—hoping, and wishing, and praying—and then not participating in it,” Gillum told me. “And I don’t mean the people who don’t have the right to vote. There’s a role for them to play too, but I recognize that they need their relatives and friends to vote for them, so that they can then go out and exercise their right to vote.”
“It’s unacceptable for me, for anybody, to conclude that ‘I’m just going to sit it out; it doesn’t matter anyway.’ There are too many examples of how it matters for people to conclude that it doesn’t,” he added.
But then, Gillum gave me his “to be sure” clause. “The system in and of itself keeps turnout confined, because politicians frankly want to control who participates in the process,” he said. “For a lot of Republicans, particularly in these off-cycle or midterm elections, they’re very happy with who turns out, how they turn out, and how they vote when they do turn out. On the Democratic side, we’re trying to change the margins only slightly by getting folks who are already expected to participate in the process to choose us. We’re just moving marbles rather than adding to it.”
“I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish about why people are disengaged,” he continued. “A lot of people are disengaged not because they believe voting in and of itself doesn’t have an impact, but because nothing changes in their lives as a result of voting, and therefore, why vote?”
Gillum sees his own mission as adding to the universe of marbles, and providing a glimpse at what politics can do to break through the amalgamate structures of apathy and suppression. He recognizes that expanding overall turnout might be dangerous—there are Republican-leaning voters who might be mobilized too—but says that he trusts that expanding democracy will serve him and the state in the long run: “Our win is premised on expanding the electorate.”
After the parade, after an exhausting slate of fund-raisers and tailgate campaigning, Gillum had one more stop. The football game itself was something of an afterthought—as are many HBCU homecoming games—but he was due to preside over the opening coin flip. Just after the ceremony, he and his small army of aides and volunteers marched off the field to take a flight to West Palm Beach, where he was due to headline the annual Truman-Kennedy-Johnson Dinner, now a staple of the state party machine. But there, flanked by the Marching 100 and by drum majors leaning so low the crests on their helmets touched the turf, the message was clear: He’s still one of yours.
That’s the message his team hopes will win out on November 6. It’s one wrapped up with some fundamental questions: Just who counts in Florida? Just who counts in America?
The 2018 election will be a reckoning on those issues. Mercado said that in the past year, her group and its affiliates have knocked on more than a million doors, informing them both of Gillum’s campaign and of Amendment 4’s possibilities. In many ways, in many jurisdictions, the two are functionally running mates, and she told me that the possibilities of a governor and a government that intend to reflect a larger pool of people have moved several nonvoters to reconsider participation. And, both for Gillum and for the state, proving that strategy can work has national implications.
Vann Newkirk II / The AtlanticBut for people like Lovell Lee, the consequences are more intimate. He’s got big plans for when he gets his rights restored. He plans to vote for Gillum whenever he sees his name on the ballot. But he wants to start locally, by voting against entrenched officials in the local criminal-justice system, whom he holds responsible for the disenfranchisement that left him locked out for years.
“Hopefully you’ll be hearing about us in Fort Pierce years down the road,” Lee told me. “We’re starting a movement.”
The question of how to define the middle class is one of the perennial mysteries of American social life. Most people say they’re “middle class,” so how can we know what this really means? Every few years some intrepid social scientists venture a new definition.
This September, the Brookings economist Richard Reeves and Katherine Guyot argued that the middle class is “the middle 60 percent of households on the income distribution” which represents $37,000-$147,000 for a three-person household. Full stop. Downplaying the importance of education, they wrote that income is the most useful measure of class because it captures all of the other conditions that make a person middling, including consumption, education, and relative social standing; it is not only how much money individuals take home.
Definitions that conflate income and class are all too common. For instance, in a well-cited 2015 article, “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground,” the Pew Research Center used the terms “middle class” and “middle income” interchangeably; by “middle class” they meant households that take home “two-thirds to double the national median” income.
[Read: Why Americans all believe they are middle class]
The main problem with this approach is obvious: The same income buys a vastly different quality of life in different parts of the country. That is to say, $60,000 goes much farther in Missoula, Montana than in Brooklyn, New York.
There’s another problem: Class has always been about more than earnings. For many decades, social scientists and historians have debated how jobs, education, politics, consumption, and, yes, income, come together with values, habits, geography, and social status to create class in America. In other words, the question is not who, but what makes the middle class. Today, there can be no pretending that middle class status is anchored by a single economic reality. Instead, it is primarily an aspiration.
Being middle class means striving for the stability and respectability that older generations achieved by holding down steady jobs, owning a home, and raising upright kids who could take their place. These benchmarks are no longer simple to attain. Instead, middle-class desires are marred by an insecurity historically associated with the American working class. Definitions should reflect that.
In his 1951 landmark book White Collar, the sociologist C. Wright Mills offered a way to study the middle class that remains useful today, despite vastly changed circumstances. He did not seek merely to delineate the middle class, but to explain what it is like—socially and psychologically—to live in the middle of the class structure.
Since the 1830s, clerks and small-scale entrepreneurs had been carving out a space between factory workers and factory owners in Northern cities. Men worked with their heads not their hands. They spent their days bent over account books in offices while their wives stayed behind to make sure that the home was clean, the cupboard stocked, and the children tended.
By the mid 1900s, this in-between class worked in large, impersonal bureaucratic organizations that changed little. They managed people and manipulated numbers and words, keeping corporate offices and government bureaus humming with activity.
[Read: The decline of social mobility in America]
Unlike laborers below them, white-collar workers were unlikely to send a piece of their paycheck to local AFL-CIO chapters. They enjoyed higher, more consistent pay, and were willing to accept company goals as their own. Mills’s colleague William H. Whyte found that these office workers identified so completely with their corporate and government jobs that he named a new social type for them: “the organization man.”
Organization men were attached to their firms— they were psychologically “dependent.” Beyond their personal commitments, moreover, these mid-rung workers were dependent in another crucial way: They did not make decisions about the shape of their jobs. Owners and high-level executives controlled and spelled-out white collar responsibilities, from pushing paper to smiling at potential customers.
This work contained little inherent satisfaction, so the fact that it provided income—putting Wonder bread on the kitchen table and a Buick in the driveway—became the singular reason to make the commute from the suburbs each morning. Stability on the job gave shape to the idealized nuclear family, one that white-collar men and women could imagine anchoring their children’s adulthoods, too. White collar privileges meant that parents could draw on the husband’s steady salary to send their children through high school or college and on toward their own constant suburban lives.
Americans have inherited their idea of middle-class work and respectability from this long-gone era. Even then, class could not be reduced to income—but white-collar stability made it possible to assume that income was a reasonable stand-in. A respectable family could be supported for decades on a good wage in a solid company. Income was not simply a snapshot in a moment of family life; it was a reliable predictor. But manipulating words and numbers isn’t what it once was.
To define class in 2018, it would be better to follow White Collar’s example by examining the conditions of work and status than to lean on an outdated proxy.
By the 1990s, the world that Mills had documented was coming apart as corporate downsizing and disinvestment upended the neat equation of secure work and praiseworthy home life. Social thinkers writing in that decade, including the sociologist Katherine Newman and the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, followed Mills in charting the social and psychological shape of that in-between class. But they found that loss had replaced dependency as the most conspicuous feeling associated with middling workers’ place in the hierarchy.
Today anguish over lost social standing has, in turn, been replaced by a pervasive sense of insecurity.
[Read: What it would take to save the middle class]
Contingent work has changed the landscape of employment. According to the economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Kreuger, today 15 percent of workers are in non-traditional or alternative positions, and between 2005 and 2015, “alternative” jobs accounted for 94 percent of net job growth.
Steady work can feel uncertain, too, as some jobs no longer hold real promise of financial stability, let alone upward mobility. Across many states, for example, tax and service cuts have left teachers without raises even as they grapple with outsized classes, crumbling infrastructure, and ancient textbooks. Nurses have also seen the growth of temporary work, which exposes these medical professionals to rapid-fire changes as they move from hospital to hospital for the next job.
Eroded work is such a cornerstone of middle-class life that middle-rung workers lean on contingent jobs to buoy their incomes. Uber has even built this into their business model. As the journalist Alissa Quart has reported, Uber actively recruits teachers and nurses into their ride service, especially in regions, like the Bay Area, where living costs are so high that even a secure income of more than $100,000 dollars can leave a family in tough straits to pay for the housing and daycare that they need to work in the first place.
The rise of contingent and eroded work is the result of a corporate strategy. Reducing the number of steady, dependent employees and replacing them with temporary workers or contractors relieves business leaders from having to offer expensive benefits and boosts profits. Work might still be boring, and now it can’t be counted on.
Uncertainty comes from other sources too.
Many white-collar workers, including loan officers, customer service representatives, and paralegals, live in the sights of artificial intelligence engineers. So do pilots, journalists, and lawyers. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute have estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk in the current wave of computerization.
[Read: Wages are low and workers are scarce. Wait, what?]
Insecure work has been matched by insecurity in family life as well. In mid-century, white collar parents wanted their children to make stable lives like that looked like their own, and they were able to do it too; today, that’s much more difficult.
A college education for the kids has long been at the core of respectability, but now it comes at a historically novel social and psychological cost. Because college is so expensive, students shoulder debts that follow them through their twenties, shaping their decisions about where to work, what to buy, and when to marry. Parents, meanwhile, find that the cost of college consumes savings and redirects funds that might have been socked away for retirement.
Although middle-aged Americans have always carried the most debt, relying on homes loans and credit card charges to build their families, now they must also take our loans to meet their children’s tuition responsibilities. As students hit the ceiling on their federal borrowing, parents are stepping in to fill the gap. Household debt is graying, the New York Fed has found. Borrowers in their later years—between the ages of 50 to 80— have propelled consumer debt to its new heights.
Aspiring to stability and respectability today means not only navigating the landscape of eroded and contingent work, but of managing debts. Trying to give children a shot, parents take on financial burdens that can destabilize their own future security.
Class has always been partly about income, but debt is now an equal component of the middle-class story, leading to a central paradox of aspirational lives: Striving for stability and respectability means inhabiting insecurity both socially and psychologically. Economic metrics alone can only tell a shallow story, but at the very least, debt should join income in any attempt at definition.
The deeper story lies beyond these metrics, however. The middle class is tricky to define today because the secure jobs and stable home lives that supplied its historical definition are now gone for most Americans.
Under these conditions, it may no longer even make sense to talk about “the middle class” at all. New concepts may be necessary to describe the social stratification in America’s polarized society.
Australia is one of the United States’ closest allies anywhere. Its soldiers fought alongside Americans in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It’s a member of the world’s most exclusive intelligence club, the “Five Eyes” (the other four are the United States, Canada, Britain and New Zealand). Its conservative prime minister says he wants to help the United States curb China’s growing domination of East Asia.
So why can’t Australia get more respect from the Trump Administration?
For more than two years, the United States has failed to send an ambassador to Canberra, and Australians who pay attention to foreign policy see the omission as a slight. “It’s starting to really grate, particularly for true believers in the alliance,” James Curran, a foreign policy scholar at the University of Sydney, told me. “They fear it is a signal from Washington that Australia might not be so valued a partner after all.”
“Australia, from President Trump’s perspective, is a second-class ally,” the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.
To anyone but a diplomacy wonk, this might seem little more than bungled protocol and hurt feelings. Except for this: Australia is debating its strategic future in a rapidly changing Asia. Should it stick to its traditional role as a military ally of the United States—or cast itself, instead, as a mostly-economic partner for China?
For decades, Australians have tried to play both roles at the same time, but that’s an increasingly difficult balancing act. As conflicts sharpen between Trump and Xi Jinping, Australians are beginning to worry that they will be forced to choose one side or the other—and they’re not sure which way to jump.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison asked for a meeting with Trump at this month’s ASEAN summit in Singapore, but the president decided to skip the event. Meanwhile, Xi invited Morrison to Beijing, part of a charm offensive that includes offering Australia a stake in economic projects around the Pacific.
“We are having a fundamental debate here about foreign and defense policy, because we are now starting to see that America will not play the role in Asia that we would like it to play,” Hugh White, the dean of Australian strategic thinkers, told me. Without a reliable U.S. presence, he warned, Australia will have no choice but to accommodate to the rise of China. “We have to accept the challenge of negotiating our place in the new Asia without U.S. support.”
Not an ideal moment to leave the U.S. Embassy in Canberra without an ambassador. Australia isn’t the only U.S. ally that feels underappreciated. Trump has made a specialty of abusing friends while he butters up adversaries. He’s accused Germany and other NATO members of cheating on their dues, denounced the European Union as a plot against the United States, and called Canada’s prime minister “dishonest.”
He’s left dozens of U.S. Embassies understaffed, too. Two years after his election, the president still hasn’t nominated ambassadors to two of the most important U.S. allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Turkey—as became apparent after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.
There’s no U.S. ambassador in Mexico, our troubled neighbor to the south. No ambassador in nuclear-armed Pakistan, arguably the most dangerous country on earth. No ambassador in Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world. No ambassador in Jordan, a vulnerable ally sandwiched between Syria and Israel. No ambassador in South Africa or Singapore.
In 18 countries including those, the White House hasn’t even designated anyone for the job. In 41 more, Trump has nominated a candidate who is stuck waiting for Senate confirmation. And those numbers don’t count special envoys or representatives at international organizations who carry the rank of ambassador.
The overall result: almost half the top-level jobs in the State Department are still empty almost two years into the administration.
There’s a long list of reasons all those posts are still unfilled. The Trump administration had a notably chaotic start. The president-elect arrived in Washington without a long list of friends he wanted to reward with embassies.
His transition team under former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie drafted lists, but the president discarded them. White House aides vetoed candidates from the State Department, rejecting foreign service officers who had worked on Obama administration projects and Republican foreign policy experts who had been critical of Trump.
Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, seemed bent on eliminating positions instead of filling them; he shoved dozens of senior diplomats out the door and sent morale in the Foreign Service plummeting. Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo, stopped the personnel cuts and has sped the lagging pace of nominations, but he still hasn’t cleared away the backlog.
[Read: Why CEOs Like Rex Tillerson Fail in Washington]
The process of nominating and confirming federal officials has been slowing down for years; the Obama administration had trouble naming ambassadors, too, especially after Republicans won control of the Senate in 2014. But the Trump administration appears to hold a modern record for the slows. At the end of 2017, Trump’s first year in office, only 64 new ambassadors had been confirmed, filling about one-third of 188 posts. At the end of Obama’s first year, 93 had been confirmed, according to the American Foreign Service Association.
Pompeo has blamed Senate Democrats for the problem, but that isn’t the whole picture. It began with the new administration’s tardiness in sending candidates to Capitol Hill. “We can’t confirm people who haven’t been nominated,” a Republican Senate aide noted wryly.
[Read: Mike Pompeo’s Worldview? Do As Trump Does.]
An unknown number of nominees have been blocked by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, some for what appears to be good cause. Trump’s nominee for Malta once delivered a bullet-riddled target sheet to her ex-husband’s doctor as part of a contentious divorce. The candidate for Chile, a former business partner of Jared Kushner, withdrew after learning how many holdings he’d be required to divest.
But others have been stalled by Republicans. And seven who made it through the committee are now marooned on the Senate floor, mostly because majority leader Mitch McConnell decided that in an election year, he wanted to confirm federal judges first.
In Australia, which shouldn’t be a difficult post to fill, the Trump administration has tried to find an ambassador, but it’s been snake bit. Trump initially nominated retired Admiral Harry Harris, the former U.S. commander in the Pacific, but switched him to South Korea even before he was confirmed. Then the president offered the job to Senator Bob Corker—an intriguing choice, since Corker once called the White House “an adult day care center”—but the Tennessean turned him down. So, the job remains empty more than two years after Obama’s last envoy departed.
Does it matter if the United States doesn’t have ambassadors in Ankara and Riyadh, Islamabad and Cairo, Mexico City and Canberra? Pompeo thinks so. “We need these people,” he said last month. “Getting America’s diplomatic corps into every corner of the world—it will impact our operations, our ability.” Diplomacy doesn’t grind to a halt when there’s no ambassador; there’s still a U.S. Embassy with lower-ranking diplomats doing day-to-day business. But as Pompeo suggested, without an ambassador the U.S. mission can’t operate at full strength.
Ambassadors don’t just represent the State Department; formally, at least, they are personal representatives of the president. That aura of clout often wins them access to high-level foreign officials—an asset when it comes to collecting information and solving problems. “You want to have someone representing you overseas who can knock on the foreign minister’s door or even the president’s door,” said John Feeley, a former ambassador to Panama. “You don’t have that now.”
When there’s no ambassador, the chief U.S. diplomat in another capital is usually a “chargé d’affaires ad interim,” a French/Latin title that’s less impressive in translation: “interim person in charge.”
“The chargé is often very good at what he does, but he doesn’t have the access,” said Barbara Leaf, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. “Places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt are very status-conscious societies. Say you have a problem in Turkey: Who can pick up the phone and call [Turkish President Recep Tayep] Erdogan? A good ambassador can do that; a chargé can’t.”
[Read: The Hollowing Out of the State Department Continues]
Access means an ambassador can often collect better information than lesser diplomats. “Had we had an ambassador in Riyadh, it’s not clear we could have avoided all this [crisis over the Khashoggi murder], but we might have had more advance warning,” Leaf said. “An embassy is your canary in the mineshaft. You want to be informed so you aren’t always caught by surprise.”
In Saudi Arabia, some diplomats suspect the White House has been slow to name an ambassador because Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, wanted to run the account through his personal relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the wake of Khashoggi’s death, that strategy doesn’t look so good.
“Personal relationships are a good thing; that’s how decisions get made in Saudi Arabia,” said Dana Shell Smith, a former ambassador to Qatar. “But you need information and implementation, too, and that’s where an ambassador is most useful. Getting updates every week? Jared isn’t doing that.”
One more thing an ambassador is useful for: handling problems that might otherwise land on higher officials’ desks. When the crisis between Saudi Arabia and Turkey erupted, Pompeo had to get on a plane and fly to Ankara and Riyadh. “If Pompeo wanted to launch a full-bore diplomatic campaign somewhere, who does he send? There isn’t anybody,” Leaf said. “It’s not just whether you have an ambassador in Riyadh; you have a threadbare structure at home. It’s a huge bandwidth problem.”
Ambassadors work on more mundane jobs, too, like helping American companies land contracts overseas. “Other countries often send cabinet ministers to pitch major contracts,” said Gordon Gray, a former ambassador to Tunisia now at the liberal Center for American Progress. “The next best thing to a cabinet minister is an ambassador. A chargé d’affaires? Not even close.”
In Central Asia, for example, China is building a gargantuan “Belt and Road” network to connect Europe to Asia, complete with massive investments in construction projects. But the United States has no assistant secretary of state in charge of the region, and no ambassadors in its two most important countries, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
“We’re not on the field, “said Geoff Odlum, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan. “I don’t know if China is winning hearts and minds out there, but they’re making a lot of alliances of interests—and we’re not.”
And that brings us back to Australia.
The Trump Administration says it wants stronger alliances in Asia and the Pacific to help constrain China’s expanding power. “We’re building new and stronger bonds with nations that share our values across the region … [in] a spirit of respect built on partnership, not domination,” Vice President Mike Pence said in a speech last month. But Trump’s on-again, off-again bromance with Xi Jinping, his decision to skip the ASEAN summit in Singapore, and his failure to fill the ambassador’s job have made Australians wonder whether they can count on the United States as a reliable ally.
The core problem isn’t that the U.S. ambassador’s office is empty; it’s that Australians worry that Washington’s promises of a steady partnership may be empty as well. “If Washington had a clear and credible plan to resist China … then a good ambassador to sell that policy would be great,” said White, the dean of Australian strategic thinkers. “But as things stand, all an ambassador would do is advertise the lack of a coherent policy in Washington.”
George P. Shultz, who served six years as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, is fond of saying that successful diplomacy is like gardening. “If you plant a garden and go away for six months, what have you got when you come back? Weeds,” Shultz said. “Diplomacy is kind of like that. You go around and talk to people, you develop a relationship of trust and confidence, and then if something comes up, you have that base to work from.”
That doesn’t sound much like the Trump administration’s style. In a new book, The Jungle Grows Back, Robert Kagan, who once worked for Shultz, extended the metaphor. “You don’t plant a garden and then just sit back,” Kagan said. “The forces of nature are always trying to take it over. The vines are growing. The weeds are growing. And that’s true of our international order, too.”
The Trump Administration fired dozens of its foreign-policy gardeners—otherwise known as ambassadors—and has been slow to get new ones into the field. It shouldn’t be surprised when the result is not a garden, but a jungle.
MIAMI—Whatever happens on Tuesday, there’s not much Democrats can do to assume control in Washington. They’re running as a check on Donald Trump’s presidency, playing defense, positioning themselves for the long term, at best. Take the House, and even the Senate, and it’s still about playing to a stalemate.
But if results break in their favor on Tuesday, Democrats could take control of state governments that have been in Republican control since 2010 or longer. That year, the GOP picked up six governor seats in what was considered a wave of its own. Democrats are expected to pick up at least that many across the country this year.
The result would rework all sorts of state policy, provide a massive injection of talent to the Democratic bench, force pundits to think anew about what the country wants, and through changes to gerrymandering, reshape the next decade in terms of who gets elected to state legislatures and the House.
At the heart of Democrats’ hopes: the states that made Donald Trump president. Michigan and Illinois look like two governor seats previously held by Republicans that should be easy wins for the party. And Democrats believe that they have a good chance to pick up the Republican governorship in Iowa, and possibly those in Ohio and Wisconsin. The Democrats also should take Minnesota, the state where Trump’s campaign came close in 2016 and had been hoping to expand to in 2020.
[Read: The biggest story of the midterms is one the Democrats aren’t telling]
“It’s a signal that Donald Trump has been a disaster as president, that he’s a failure as president, and the people of the Midwest are rising up in a big blue wave against him. That’s going to be disaster for his reelection,” said J. B. Pritzker, who’s widely expected to win the race in Illinois and move the biggest state currently under GOP control back to the Democrats.
Pritzker has put millions of his own fortune up against Bruce Rauner, the self-funding Republican who won the state in the 2014 red wave. “Think about the power of these large states and the ability to set standards for the nation,” Pritzker said. “That’s a great place for the Democratic Party to have rebuilt.”
Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington and the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, said that he’d like to see more than half the American population under Democratic governors after the midterms, which is very much in reach given the polls in currently Republican-held big states, including Michigan and Illinois. Through that, he said, Democrats will move further into what has effectively been an antifederalist stance that they’ve adopted since Trump took office, splitting from the federal government when they’ve disagreed with his policies.
[Read: Even Scott Walker says he’s ‘at risk’ in Wisconsin]
“People are thinking about health care, and they know their health care can be protected by governors, and they know that effectively Donald Trump cannot stop governors from providing health care for people in their states. And they know that Donald Trump cannot stop governors from fighting climate change and creating clean-energy jobs. And they know that Donald Trump can’t stop Democratic governors from building roads and bridges and public transit,” Inslee said Saturday, between campaign stops for Andrew Gillum in Florida. “He can’t stop us. He can create anxiety and tweets.”
Right now, just 16 states have Democratic governors; two of the bluest—Maryland and Massachusetts—have Republican governors who are the two most popular in the country, and both easily expected to win their own reelections. Most of the other Democrats are in other prime Democratic territories. But there’s been movement on the ground, backed up by quiet investment from Democrats in Washington, in places where Democrats don’t usually have a shot. Kansas, South Dakota, and Oklahoma all have candidates within the margin of error in polls, and leading in “favorability” ratings among voters asked whom they have a better opinion of. They are looking strong in New Mexico and Maine, and hoping for wins by Gillum in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Their races, both in big southern states, are seen as toss-ups.
There are just two currently Democratic-held states where Republicans appear to be in striking distance, though both are themselves deep blue: Connecticut and Oregon. Democrats already eyeing the national political potential of a new class of local stars, from Gillum, a 39-year-old African American progressive, to Gretchen Whitmer, the mother of high-school students who’s on track for a lay-up win in Michigan off a campaign where she’s repeated her “Fix the Damn Roads” slogan endlessly in her tight midwestern accent.
[Read: Iowa could turn blue again—just in time for 2020]
But the biggest change if Democrats win these races won’t have to do with governor races at all. The governors elected this year will be the ones in office in 2021 to sign off or veto the district maps drawn after the next census, giving them an opportunity to reverse the enormous structural advantage Republicans gave themselves after their 2010 wave, slicing up blocs of voters so that they have been winning more seats even though Democrats have been winning more votes. It’s a huge part of why Republicans were able to win 63 seats that year, but Democrats still see even 40 seats on Tuesday as a pipe dream, despite all the Democratic and anti-Trump energy around the country.
At an event in Columbus on Thursday, Rich Cordray, the Democratic candidate for governor, said 2021 redistricting is at the top of his mind in Ohio, where Republicans have drawn lines that have helped them keep control of the statehouse and many congressional seats.
“We need a governor and lieutenant governor who will push back, who will move us forward, and ultimately will redistrict that legislature,” Cordray said. “That’s the long game here.”
The governor seats won on Tuesday, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe said, will help determine the party’s future from 2021 to 2031.
McAuliffe finished his term as governor of Virginia in January and has been looking at running for president next year, but he’s spent this year on a mission for Democratic candidates for governor.
“Nothing impacts individuals’ lives more than the governor,” McAuliffe said. “More so than the president.”
After living for a year and a half trapped indoors in her father’s office building, the 14-year-old Anne Frank wrote of her longing to be a regular teenager who could go outside and “look at the world.” She expressed her envy of the people who enter the building “with the wind in their clothes and the cold on their cheeks.” Beyond the walls of the hiding place she shared with seven others in the heart of Amsterdam, the Netherlands and much of Europe were under Nazi control while World War II raged and Hitler’s regime sought to exterminate Jews and others it considered less than human.
Frank’s diary became one of the most famous narratives of the Holocaust, and because it’s written from the perspective of a normal adolescent living under the most abnormal circumstances, it humanized war and genocide. Although hers is not the only such chronicle of war, or even this war in particular, it has proven its lasting impact and extraordinary reach with more than 25 million copies sold and translations into more than 70 languages in about as many years. As the events that shaped Frank’s short life slip further into the past, it’s heartening that her account continues to captivate new generations.
So it was both thrilling and disappointing to read Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, illustrated by David Polonsky and adapted by Ari Folman. The book’s carefully crafted images interpret elements of Frank’s story with beauty and humor. But passages like the one that reads, “We still love life, we haven't yet forgotten the voice of nature, and we keep hoping,” are missing, and the girl who breathed dimension into an unfathomable history is flattened, her power diluted. Folman and Polonsky surely didn’t intend to replace the diary, but the shortcomings of the adaptation are illuminating in their way, and underscore what makes the original so potent.
A panel from Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation (Anne Frank Fonds Basel)Anne Frank and her diary are special in seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, she was a uniquely gifted writer and remarkably astute observer of people and the world, capable and discerning beyond her years. Folman seems acutely aware of the risks of translating Frank’s words into images, writing in his adapter’s note at the end of the book that “as the diary progresses, Anne’s talents as a writer grow ever more impressive ... It seemed intolerable to forgo these later entries in favor of illustrations, and so we chose to reproduce long passages in their entirety, unillustrated.” But the adaptation’s selective, late shift to the text obscures the very development Folman describes and gives readers a limited view of Frank’s skills.
On the other hand, Frank is also deeply relatable, especially for young readers. Masterful as her writing is, her musings make you feel like you’re in her head and she’s in yours. She’s you, or someone you know. Her early entries from home describe a familiar kind of daily life: friends, boys, school, family. As her situation becomes more extreme—and her writings weave back and forth between devastating world events and the typical but adeptly expressed introspections of a teenager—you follow along and begin to grasp how a real, whole person experienced inexplicable events. History no longer feels remote, and you start to understand not only how people faced the war, but how you might’ve faced the war while growing up.
In her 2009 book, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, Francine Prose looked closely at the diary as a literary work, marveling at the young writer’s adroit handling of character, detail, dialogue, monologue, and pacing. Likewise, John Berryman pointed to Frank’s “exceptional self-awareness and exceptional candor and exceptional powers of expression,” in his 1967 essay, “The Development of Anne Frank,” in which he also called the diary “the most remarkable account of normal human adolescent maturation I had ever read.”
While the graphic adaptation captures some of Frank’s personality, energy, pain, and creative ability, it’s so abridged that readers are shortchanged on her inner monologue, on the beautifully articulated and nuanced view of the world, and on the three-dimensional narration that brings you with Frank into the annex. And with only a fraction of the material included, the 25 months Frank spent in hiding pass by much more quickly.
On one of the Franks’ first nights in the annex, the family went downstairs to listen to a broadcast from England. The graphic adaptation shows a group of four gathered around the radio, but it leaves out Frank’s admission: “I was so scared someone might hear it that I literally begged Father to take me back upstairs.” The book contains some of the surprise and novelty of Frank’s first days in hiding, but none of the uneasiness and worry that occurred at that moment and would come to characterize the next two years, undermining the complexity that makes the story and its protagonist feel so real.
[Watch: Holocaust survivors remember Kristallnacht]
More than a year later, Frank writes in her diary about losing her appetite. The graphic adaptation depicts her strapped to a chair with machines on either side trying to spoon feed her cod-liver oil and brewer’s yeast (in reality, Frank’s fellow residents administered these remedies, not an industrial apparatus). Further, the book’s whimsical frame eschews the dread of Sundays in the annex, of which Frank writes, “the atmosphere is stifling, sluggish, leaden. Outside, you don’t hear a single bird, and a deathly, oppressive silence hangs over the house and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld.” In the illustrated book, there’s no mention of her wandering restlessly from room to room, feeling “like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage.” Nor does it explain that she opts to sleep, because it “makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly, helps pass the time, since it’s impossible to kill it.”
The reader of the graphic adaptation learns that Frank’s “greatest wish is to be a journalist and, later on, a famous writer.” But is that the same as knowing that she can’t imagine living like “all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten,” and wishes, through her writing, “to go on living even after my death”?
The discarded details and entries (dozens by my count, when compared to the definitive edition published in English in 1995 and updated with new entries discovered in 1998) add up to piles of unheard thoughts. And though adaptations are expected to condense original texts, the losses are tangible. Multiple break-ins and scares, as well as anxieties and bad dreams, are compressed into fewer, more superficially recounted incidents. Long, complicated arcs—like Frank’s relationship with Peter van Pels, the slightly older boy in the annex who later becomes her friend and love interest (and her first real kiss)—come off as flimsy. Frank, along with the rest of the people of the annex, becomes less nuanced, while much of her inner monologue—about herself, the fate of Jews in Europe, their heroic helpers, and more—is chopped up into sound bites or excluded entirely.
On August 1, 1944, Frank wrote a plaintive letter lamenting that she could show the world only her “exuberant cheerfulness,” and never her “purer, deeper, and finer” side. Her anguish seeps off the page, in stark contrast to one of her most optimistic entries about the war that came immediately before it. But what happens next is even more jarring. In both the adaptation and the diary, Frank’s voice is replaced by that of an impersonal narrator, recounting in the third person the arrest, deportation, and ultimate deaths of Frank and all the members of the annex family, save for her father.
[Read: The dark consequences of Poland’s new Holocaust law]
The difference between the two versions, however, is that by this point in the diary, you’ve been in her head for so long that her extinguished voice and sudden disappearance crush you with the weight of the world. You can imagine heavy boots on the stairs, pounding on the bookcase, and cruel orders spewed at the shocked residents. This scene isn’t described in detail in either version. In fact, the afterwords are virtually identical. But the diary itself sets the reader up to fill in the horrifying blanks in a way the adaptation does not. They weren’t coming for an unknowable character in hiding. They were coming for Frank.
It’s not that Folman and Polonsky haven’t added a valuable interpretation. They have. The volume contains some stunning and poetic drawings, such as a two-page spread that visualizes a passage in which the diarist describes “the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds” and “in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other.” But those images are poignant complements to Frank’s words, not sufficient replacements. To this point, Folman wrote in the adapter’s note that he had “grave reservations” editing “while still being faithful to the entire work.” On the whole, the story becomes shorter, neater, and more naïve. That might make sense if the adaptation were a primer geared toward children who aren’t ready to tackle the diary yet, but the inclusion of entries on sex and Frank’s lesson on the female anatomy indicates otherwise.
Neither is the point that illustrations or graphic novels are less suited to tell stories of the Holocaust. Those mediums and so many others, including AI and VR, offer opportunities to experiment with new ways to share narratives that humanize and resonate—all the more crucial as we get further from the history and those who lived it. But the format should be tailored to the story, and in the case of a story whose power lies squarely in the quality of the writing and the vividness of a teenager’s thoughts, the diary provides depth that is hard to replicate in other versions.
At a time when American students, adults, and government officials have shown staggering gaps in knowledge about the Holocaust, when anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. have risen steeply, and when Americans are reeling from the news that a gunman entered a Pittsburgh synagogue on a quiet, rainy Saturday morning and murdered 11 people—telling police he “wanted all Jews to die”—Frank should feel as real as possible.
[Read: A brief history of anti-Semitic violence in America]
The movies, plays, and graphic adaptations that Frank’s diary inspired are entry points, thought provokers, or conversation starters, not substitutes. The most promising way to keep her story in the forefront of our minds is to keep reading her diary, but also to continue allowing the original source to spark a broad range of retellings and interpretive works of art that might highlight different aspects and reach new audiences. All together, they foster discussion and remind readers of the smart, vivacious, and complicated girl who went into hiding at 13 and died at 15.
The graphic adaptation does contain long sections of Frank’s last entries—the ones that make it so distressing to see her account end as abruptly as it does. But the omissions leading up to them soften the blow. More than any particular fact or event, the graphic version is missing the sense of familiarity that slowly builds, more strongly and deeply than you realize, until the moment that this friend, this stand-in for you, confronts the thing she’d feared for so long: the moment that stole her fantasies of her life “after the war” out from under her. The last pages of the adaptation feel like the end of a story, not the end of a life.
No comments:
Post a Comment