HÁ UMA NOVA razão para se preocupar com o PFOA e o PFOS, componentes tóxicos utilizados em panelas antiaderentes, produtos à prova d’água e espumas de combate a incêndio: eles prejudicam a saúde reprodutiva masculina, segundo um estudo divulgado no início de novembro.
Pesquisadores já haviam documentado que o PFOA e o PFOS, dois componentes de uma classe conhecida como PFAS, reduzem a fertilidade de camundongos, ratos e coelhos machos. O novo estudo, publicado no Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, mostra que homens jovens expostos aos produtos químicos possuem uma série de problemas em seus aparelhos reprodutivos – e também explica, pela primeira vez, como esses produtos interferem nos hormônios dentro da célula.
A pesquisa foi conduzida no Vêneto, na Itália, um dos diversos locais no mundo onde o uso industrial de PFAS já causou contaminação em água potável e levou os componentes químicos a se acumularem no sangue das pessoas. A região central do vale do Ohio, onde uma fábrica DuPont jogava os produtos tóxicos no rio Ohio, é outra.
Os pesquisadores compararam estudantes secundários que haviam sido expostos a altos níveis de PFOA e PFOS no Vêneto com homens jovens que não haviam sido expostos e descobriram que os que foram expostos aos produtos tinham pênis menores, menor contagem de espermatozoides, menor mobilidade dos espermatozoides e uma redução na “distância anogenital”, a distância entre o ânus e a base dos testículos, uma medida que os cientistas veem como uma marca de saúde reprodutiva. A porcentagem de espermatozoides de formato normal no grupo exposto era pouco mais da metade comparada ao grupo de controle.
Os produtos “possuem um impacto substancial na saúde masculina já que interferem diretamente nas vias hormonais, potencialmente levando à infertilidade masculina”, concluíram os cientistas no artigo, que foi avaliado por outros especialistas e publicado em 6 de novembro.
Após observar as anormalidades nos homens jovens, cuja idade média era de 18 anos, os pesquisadores foram mais fundo para ver como os produtos químicos poderiam estar afetando seu desenvolvimento reprodutivo. Experimentos conduzidos por eles em laboratório mostraram que o PFOA e o PFOS podem se ligar a receptores de testosterona dentro da célula e interromper a função normal do hormônio.
“As estruturas de testosterona e dos PFAS são muito, muito parecidas,” disse Andrea Di Nisio, biólogo da Universidade de Pádua e um dos 12 autores do artigo. “E nós dissemos: ‘elas parecem as mesmas, então é possível que os PFAS ajam como a testosterona dentro da célula.’ E eles agem.”
O estudo foi pequeno, comparando apenas 212 jovens expostos com 171 dos do grupo de controle nessa parte do norte da Itália. Ainda assim, com comunidades ao redor do mundo descobrindo a cada dia que sua água está contaminada com PFAS, a pesquisa tem implicações internacionais para pessoas que foram expostas aos componentes químicos nas últimas décadas.
“Como o primeiro relatório de contaminação de água por compostos perfluorados é de 1977, a magnitude do problema é alarmante pois afeta uma geração inteira de jovens de 1978 em diante”, escreveram.
De fato, o estudo sugere uma possível resposta para um fenômeno que tem intrigado pesquisadores nos últimos anos: uma preocupante queda global nas contagens de esperma. Nas últimas quatro décadas, contagens de espermatozoides nos EUA, Austrália, Europa e Nova Zelândia caíram mais de 50%, de acordo com um estudo conduzido em 2017 por pesquisadores da Mount Sinai School of Medicine e da Hebrew University School of Public Health. A tendência mundial é vista em geral como um mistério, ainda que haja um crescente consenso de que contaminantes ambientais tenham alguma responsabilidade.
“Nós temos vários outros candidatos” além do PFOS e do PFOA, disse Pete Myers, fundador e cientista-chefe do Environmental Health Sciences, que escreveu sobre os danos que outros produtos químicos, particularmente aditivos plásticos ftalatos e BPA, apresentam à saúde reprodutiva masculina. “A diferença desses dois PFAS [em relação aos outros químicos] é que eles são mais duradouros”. Tanto o PFOS quanto o PFOA podem permanecer no corpo humano por anos e continuam no meio ambiente indefinidamente.
As exposições a todos esses poluentes ambientais podem ter um efeito cumulativo, segundo Myers. “Ter PFOA e PFOS com ftalatos e BPA, só piora a situação”, disse.
PFOA e PFOS foram conectados a diversos outros problemas de saúde, como a redução na função da imunidade, obesidade, câncer nos rins, câncer nos testículos e ainda aumento nos níveis de colesterol.
Para os efeitos reprodutivos vistos no Vêneto, pelo menos parte do problema provavelmente ocorreu antes mesmo de os jovens nascerem, segundo Di Nisio, que começou a pensar como prevenir futuras exposições aos PFAS.
“Nós ficamos com a pergunta de como remover os PFAS do sangue”, disse. Porque os produtos químicos são transferidos de mães para bebês durante a gravidez, “nós temos que encontrar uma maneira de eliminá-los.” Se não o fizermos, diz Di Nisio, as constantes exposições aos produtos tóxicos afetarão ainda mais meninos no que pode ser uma vida inteira de dificuldades reprodutivas.
Tradução: Maíra Santos
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Visual journalism, in its many forms, is a vital part of news: It can provide evidence that allows us to hold people and institutions accountable, and it can help us build empathy for the plight of others. This year, The Intercept sent photographers and video journalists into the field to bring viewers to places they might not otherwise see, and to move them with human stories — from the release of Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi to the reunification of families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. Our illustrations and data visualizations helped elucidate complex issues, from the scope of sexual abuse in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention to the National Security Agency’s hidden network of spy hubs around the country.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones
By Liliana Segura, Jordan Smith
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By Trevor Aaronson
Photo: Matthew Cassel
By Matthew Cassel
Photo: Alex Potter
By Laura Kasinof
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By Alice Speri
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By Sarah Kinosian, Carlos Pérez Osorio
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas
By Melissa del Bosque
Illustrations: Matt Rota
By Simona Foltyn
Still: Lou Marillier and Daisy Squires
By Lou Marillier and Daisy Squires
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Photo Illustration: The Intercept
By Jim Risen
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By Alex Potter
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The post Seeing Is Believing: The Intercept’s 2018 Visual Journalism appeared first on The Intercept.
Tens of thousands of U.S. residents were displaced by climate change-fueled disasters in 2018. California saw a string of massive wildfires — from the Mendocino Complex in July, which became the state’s largest wildfire on record, to the Camp fire in November, which was the deadliest. Meanwhile, Hurricane Florence, the second rainiest storm in 70 years of U.S. record-keeping, was quickly forgotten as Hurricane Michael slammed into the Gulf Coast, the third strongest ever to make landfall in the U.S.
The survivors of the disasters have resorted to camping in tents in retail parking lots, sleeping on friends’ couches, parking trailers on the lawns of their destroyed homes, or renting overpriced apartments in communities where housing has become increasingly scarce. Safety nets like flood and fire insurance or the Federal Emergency Management Agency routinely fall far short of providing the support needed to keep survivors housed, fed, and on their feet. A climate refugee’s pathway to recovery is determined by their savings, family wealth, community connections, and credit scores.
While storms and wildfires reduced thousands of homes to ash and rubble, or left them covered in mold, slower-moving disasters, like sea-level rise on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and erosion driven by melting permafrost in Alaska, are giving scores of communities expiration dates.
But the climate refugees left most vulnerable live outside the U.S. The yearslong drought in Central America’s Dry Corridor, for example, is quietly driving subsistence farmers and agricultural workers toward the increasingly militarized U.S.-Mexico border. And although the U.S. is responsible for more climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions than any other country in the world, its asylum system does not account for those escaping drought. Indeed, in a world where climate change is already fueling massive movements of people, hardly any nations officially recognize the existence of the climate refugee.
Photo: Talia Herman for The Intercept
Michelle Teixeira is living in a 300-square-foot trailer with her husband, her father, two daughters, and four dogs. Her husband’s boss owns a residential development made up of empty lots, where the Teixeiras and four other families have made camp, calling themselves the “trailer treasures.” They’re all refugees from the Camp wildfire, which leveled Paradise, California, killing 85 people, including many retirees.
They’ll soon have to find a new camping spot. Four days after the fire, most of the lots had offers from people seeking new homes. Housing was already scarce in the area, and the wildfire, which destroyed 13,792 residences, sent values soaring as refugees attempt to resettle nearby.
According to climate scientist Daniel Swain, the summer of 2018 was hotter than usual in that part of California, and autumn’s fire season-ending rains came late. Communities like Paradise, located on the edge of forested land, are particularly vulnerable to wildfires fueled by climate change.
When Michelle woke up on the morning of the fire, the bedroom, usually filled with white light from the skylight, was glowing orange. She nervously drove her 14-year-old to school, with her 4-year-old wrapped in a blanket in the backseat.
Photo: Talia Herman for The Intercept
When they arrived, Michelle asked her daughter to check that classes would be in session. The teenager came back with her boyfriend in tow. School was out, and ash was falling from the sky, but there was still no clear warning that evacuation was necessary — that is, until Michelle swung by to check on a friend who struggles with anxiety. The friend’s husband met her as she pulled up. “The fire is three streets down. You need to go home now, grab what you can, and get out,” he said.
Stopping at home would not be an option. The sky went black and the car rocked because of the speed the smoke was blowing. Traffic stalled as people abandoned their cars in the streets, because they’d run out of gas or because they’d jumped into neighboring vehicles. Michelle saw a lone woman who looked to be in her 80s in the car next to her. “I roll down the window, and I’m like, are you OK?” She begged the woman to get in their car. “She told me, ‘I’ve lived a long life. If it’s my time, it’s my time.’”
Soon, houses were burning around them. Michelle handed the kids water bottles. “I tell the kids, ‘You gotta put the water on the blanket and then you gotta use that to cover your face, because the smoke can kill you,’” she recalled. “I had a moment where I thought, would it be fast if we died? Would my kids suffer? Would they die from the smoke, or would they die from the fire?” Finally, the cars moved.
Spot, the bearded dragon lizard, didn’t make it, and neither did the 13 cichlid fish, but Michelle’s father escaped with the two pit bulls, a chihuahua, and a dachshund. And when she was able to return to what was left of her house (ashes, glass, and warped metal), her four ducks and five of the seven chickens greeted them, somewhat skinnier than before.
Since they had insurance, FEMA denied them support, but the policy took more than a month to deliver any funds. Money for their $17,000 trailer was scraped together with help from friends and family.
Her 62-year-old father’s health has declined since the fire. “In a month, his kidney function has dropped rapidly and to the point where the doctors need him to go on dialysis right away,” she said. They’ll need another trailer so that he has space to take care of himself. Her 4-year-old has struggled with night terrors, haunted by a red monster.
Some of the Teixeiras’s neighbors will not be rebuilding, but Michelle can’t imagine doing otherwise. “That’s my home — I’ve never felt OK anywhere else,” she said.
Photo: Tracie Williams for The Intercept
About two months ago, Davíd decided to sell his metal bed with its thick mattress and join the migrant caravan alongside seven others from his community in Lejamaní, Honduras. Things didn’t go as he expected. By the beginning of December, Davíd, whose name has been changed because of concerns for his safety, found himself stalled in Tijuana, blocked by the U.S. from entering the country and applying for asylum. Having lost his friends, the 29-year-old slept in a large red and tan tent with eight other people, sharing a blanket with another man, sometimes two. When rain flooded the tent, the men brought in chairs and tried to sleep sitting up, shivering.
For Davíd’s family in Honduras, life and death is determined by how many sacks of beans the land produces. For the last three years, it hasn’t been enough. The rains come too infrequently, and the plants grow but refuse to flower.
“More than anything else, it’s climate change,” Davíd said, explaining how he ended up joining the migrant caravan. “I’m here because of the drought.”
Davíd’s son is about as old as the drought, and he has asthma. When he was 5 months old, he became gravely ill, and it was only because of the family’s three spare sacks of beans that they were able to afford to take him to a hospital. The doctor told him that if they’d waited any longer, the baby likely would have had a heart attack.
This was when the land was still producing a little. In the good years, Davíd used to get around 10 sacks of beans a year; last year, he couldn’t fill a single one. At times, he sent his 10-year-old daughter to school without having eaten anything at all. The heightened economic insecurity made it easier for gangs to move in, recruiting children and shooting off firearms in the streets.
Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
Davíd’s home is in the middle of what’s known as the Dry Corridor, which runs through Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The area is marked by a dry season, which roughly corresponds with winter in the U.S., then a wet season, which corresponds with summer. In the middle of the wet season, there’s typically a drought known as the canícula. According to Chris Castro, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, it’s the midsummer drought that has been most impacted by climate change, becoming hotter and drier over the past 20 years.
“What’s really scary,” he added, “is that we’re getting these drier and hotter midsummer droughts during years where natural climate variability would not otherwise suggest that that should be happening.”
The drought falls in the middle of the growing season. “Who is most impacted? It’s going to be subsistence farmers, who have relatively small plots of land in rural areas and function on a very thin margin,” he said.
Back in Honduras, Davíd’s wife was now two months behind on rent, but it had become difficult to communicate with her because a bag with his phone had been stolen. Anxious, he began looking for work in Tijuana and joined a hunger strike relay, to convey the desperation of the members of the caravan to the U.S. politicians that had blocked them from crossing the border.
But things only got worse. When Davíd was finally able to borrow a phone, he learned that his mother had had a heart attack. He decided the only thing to do was to turn himself in to Mexican authorities and go back home.
“If I knew it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have come,” he said. “Now I just have to be with my family, my mom.”
Jamie Johansen, Burgaw, North CarolinaThree months after Hurricane Florence left black mold creeping up the walls of Jamie Johansen’s home, and piles of yellow and white mold growing out of the carpet, her family still hasn’t been able to move into the FEMA trailer that’s installed on their property. The storm left 53 people dead, more than 4,000 residential properties destroyed, and over 74,000 more damaged, with entire neighborhoods decimated, their residents displaced.
The week before Christmas, an inspector came to approve the trailer’s electrical wiring, but water was leaking out of the walls — FEMA officials provided the family with no explanation why. The FEMA trailer had apparently become the source of its own flood. Jamie, her husband, her mother, her 5-year-old son, and her 93-year-old grandmother instead spent the holiday in their rental in a nearby town, away from their five horses and two ponies.
Eight years ago, the three generations pooled their funds and moved to North Carolina from Pennsylvania. Housing was cheaper there, and it would be easier to house their animals. That chapter is over now. “We’re looking into moving back up north,” Jamie said, “because they don’t flood.”
Hurricane Florence, which made landfall in North Carolina on September 14, was the second rainiest storm the U.S. has seen in the past 70 years, falling just behind last year’s Hurricane Harvey in Texas. A study by scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that the impacts of climate change had pushed the storm’s rainfall forecast 50 percent higher than it would have been otherwise.
The Johansens, like many of those most impacted by the storm, lived outside the floodplain, so they had no flood insurance. Their neighbors had lived in the area their whole life and had never seen the property flood, so when Hurricane Florence rolled in, they had no plans to evacuate.
When the rain stopped, the neighborhood looked fine. The Johansens rode their horses, surveying the downed trees. But at 3 a.m. the following Monday, when the dog whined to go outside, the world had been transformed. Water was flush with the front porch, which sat four feet off the ground. The overflowing Cape Fear River had flooded their land. Jamie’s mind immediately went to their mini pony, who she knew by then would be chin-deep.
Floodwaters are dangerous in a situation like this — among the hazards are floating fire ant balls, which form to protect the colony when there’s a flood. If you touch one, they can spread over your body, taking you for dry ground. Since the community uses septic tanks, sewage mixed with the rain and river water. Her husband waded into the dark and let the horses free, so they could find higher ground. They settled on a rise in front of the house.
In the morning, a helicopter arrived to rescue the family. A company called Oracle volunteered a hovercraft to save the ponies, Lady and Hook, who were close to drowning. But the horses weighed too much, so they remained marooned on the small hill for 10 days, before the water went down enough for them to get out.
Finding housing proved difficult, especially with pets. Jamie worried that separating her grandmother from her dog would be too much for her, so they settled for seedy motels before they found a bed-and-breakfast where the dogs could stay and finally, a rental home. Rentals that once cost $1,000 a month were now $1,500 or $2,000. They relied on support from community members and settled deep into credit card debt.
Initially Jamie was told that they didn’t qualify for a buyout from FEMA because their home lay outside the floodplain. It was only because she happened to call back that they learned the agency had shifted its policy and now was willing to consider all the homes that flooded. They decided to cut their losses and give the land to the river.
“Going through this again isn’t something we can ever do,” she said. “I can’t ever look out my front door and see my horses almost drowning.”
John Washington contributed reporting from Tijuana.
The post Climate Change Refugees Share Stories of Escaping Wildfires, Floods, and Droughts appeared first on The Intercept.
Nike released its first sports hijab last December, heralded with sleek, black-and-white photographs of accomplished Muslim athletes wearing the Pro Hijab emblazoned with the iconic swoosh. The same month, TSA pulled 14 women who wear hijab out of a security check line at Newark Airport; they were then patted down, searched, and detained for two hours.
From February to March, Gucci, Versace, and other luxury brands at autumn/winter fashion week dressed mostly white models in hijab-like headscarves. Around that time, two women filed a civil rights lawsuit against New York City related to an incident in which the NYPD forced them to remove their hijabs for mugshots.
Gap, a clothing brand known for its all-American ethos, featured a young girl in a hijab smiling broadly in its back-to-school ads this past summer. Meanwhile, children were forced to leave a public pool in Delaware; they were told that their hijabs could clog the filtration system.
Muslim women and Muslim fashion currently have unprecedented visibility in American consumer culture. Yet women who cover are among the most visible targets for curtailed civil liberties, violence, and discrimination in the anti-Muslim climate intensified by Donald Trump’s presidency.
By selling modest clothing or spotlighting a hijabi in an ad campaign, the U.S. clothing industry is beckoning Muslim women to be its latest consumer niche. In order to tap into the multibillion-dollar potential of the U.S. Muslim consumer market, large retailers have positioned themselves as socially conscious havens for Muslims, operating on a profit motive rather than a moral imperative.
Many Muslim women, especially those who grew up post-9/11, may find inclusion as consumers to be a reprieve from everyday Islamophobia. However, the representations circulated by retail companies are reductive of Muslim-American identity. Certain Muslim women who conform to expectations of patriotism and consumption are granted visibility, while others, like black Muslim women, are erased from the narrative of Islam in America. Meanwhile, Muslims whose labor is exploited overseas are disappeared from corporate conscience.
The Muslim Consumer MarketIn February, Macy’s became the first U.S. department store to sell a modest clothing line, called the Verona Collection. Macy’s was widely praised as “inclusive” and “taking diversity very seriously.” Refinery29 raved, “It’s great to see Macy’s really taking the steps to champion the causes it says it believes in.”
Macy’s Verona Collection.
Photos: Lisa Vogl/Courtesy of Lisa Vogl
Macy’s debuted the Verona Collection shortly after the retailer announced that several stores would close in 2018 (more than 120 stores have shuttered since 2015). A week before the launch, Macy’s stock hit its lowest point of 2018. But soon after the announcement, things seemed to be looking up for the flailing company. A business analyst said, “At this time for investors the new clothing line should be treated with cautious excitement for what it may mean for the company moving forward.”
Macy’s financial instability when starting to sell hijabs and modest clothing calls into question the motive behind suddenly catering to Muslim consumers. Why now?
“It feels like a way of generating publicity by putting out an inclusive image, trying to make themselves seem more relevant,” Sylvia Chan-Malik, author of “Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam,” told The Intercept. “But perhaps that’s cynical, because I know a lot of Muslim women who were very happy about it. I just don’t know what the intentions are.”
In addition to Nike, Gap, and high-end designers, there are several recent examples of the U.S. retail and fashion industry courting Muslim women who dress modestly. In 2016, New York Fashion Week presented its first all-hijab runway show from Indonesian designer Anniesa Hasibuan. That November, CoverGirl brought on hijabi beauty blogger Nura Afia as its latest brand ambassador. This past May, H&M released a modest clothing line leading up to Ramadan.
Since the early 2010s, multinational Western companies have catered to Muslim consumers after marketing consultants identified them as an influential demographic with growing spending power. According to the latest Thomson Reuters State of the Global Islamic Economy Report, Muslims worldwide spent about $254 billion on clothing in 2016, which was predicted to increase to $373 billion by 2022.
Western retailers have mostly concentrated their Muslim outreach to foreign consumers. Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, and DKNY are among the brands that have sold Ramadan capsule collections or stocked modest clothing exclusively in their Middle East outlets. This past summer, MAC Cosmetics put out a glamorous makeup tutorial for suhoor, the pre-dawn meal during Ramadan, targeted at women in the Gulf region.
Consumer research on the U.S. market revealed a similar opportunity for profit. In 2013, Ogilvy Noor, the “Islamic branding” division of advertising company Ogilvy, estimated American Muslim spending power to be at $170 billion. DinarStandard and the American Muslim Consumer Consortium reported that Muslim-Americans spent $5.4 billion on apparel that same year.
Photo: Courtesy of Rawan Al Sadi
Ogilvy Noor has determined that Muslim millennials are driving consumption with their collective belief that “faith and modernity go hand in hand.”
“If I was to pick one person who represents the cutting edge of Muslim futurists, it would be a woman: educated, tech-savvy, worldly, intent on defining her own future, brand loyal and conscious that her consumption says something important about who she is and how she chooses to live her life,” explained Shelina Janmohamed, vice president of Ogilvy Noor, who is Muslim. “The consumers these brands are targeting are young, cool and ready to spend their money.”
Ogilvy Noor’s approach inches toward essentializing who young Muslims are, which can then be monetized by corporations. The staggering economic power of the Muslim market is the determining factor in retail efforts to tap into it — less so a response to what Muslims could actually benefit from. But for many young Muslim women, consumer visibility can signal mainstream recognition and belonging, regardless of corporate intention.
“Maybe I’ll Feel More Safe”While retailers are ultimately incentivized by profit, clothing and cosmetics brands are also providing more options for women who choose to cover, as well as fulfilling some hijabis’ desires for representation, said Elizabeth Bucar, author of “Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress.”
“Muslims are a large part of the American population today — they’re visible,” Bucar, an associate professor at Northeastern University, told The Intercept. “They’re running for office, they’re our co-workers, they’re our neighbors, and, from a retail point of view, they are also consumers.”
Many Muslim women celebrate, and actively participate in, efforts to acknowledge them as consumers. Muslim beauty and fashion bloggers on Instagram and YouTube promote brands to hundreds of thousands of followers. Verona Collection designer Lisa Vogl and model Mariah Idrissi are among those who have found commercial success in collaboration with large brands.
In September, the de Young Museum in San Francisco opened the first major museum exhibition on contemporary Muslim fashions, signaling that Muslim women’s clothing is a legitimate topic of interest in the U.S. “We wanted to share what we’ve been seeing in Muslim fashion with the larger world in a way that could create a deeper understanding,” the de Young’s former director, Max Hollein, told the New York Times.
Photo: Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Consumer visibility can also signal a step toward the inclusion of Muslims as American in politically hostile times, particularly for the generation who grew up during the war on terror, when most representations have cast Muslims as foreign terrorists and a threat to national security.
“It’s incredibly validating on an individual level to Muslim women who wear the scarf, who have to struggle with the comments and the vitriol and the violence that they encounter every day,” said Chan-Malik, an associate professor at Rutgers University. “It’s almost a very practical sense of relief, like, ‘Oh, if this becomes more normalized, maybe I’ll feel more safe.’”
That increased representation is meaningful to some Muslim women cannot be ignored. However, who gets to be seen and how exposes the underlying logics of capitalism that flatten visibility into which Muslim women are the most marketable.
The “Hijab Fetish”The market homogenizes Muslim women, collapsing tremendous diversity into a product that can be easily digested. “Certain kinds of representation and visibility are privileged, while others are rendered undesirable,” write Duke University associate professor Ellen McLarney and University of North Carolina associate professor Banu Gökariksel. “Muslim identities unpalatable to the sensibilities of the market are excluded, often leading to further marginalizations at the intersections of class, race, and ethnicity.”
This is evident in how the fashion and beauty industries grant visibility to certain Muslim women. Writing about the “hijab fetish” in consumer culture, Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described how representations of Muslim women in advertising conform to “an image of an over-filtered, hot, bourgeois, fair-skinned hijabi woman, whose highlight is ‘on fleek’.”
In fact, most Muslim women in the U.S. do not always wear a headscarf in public; one-fifth of American Muslims are black; almost half of Muslim-Americans reported incomes under $30,000 last year; and many American Muslims identify as queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming.
Despite the fact that black Muslim women are largely absent from mainstream consumer culture, said Kayla Wheeler, an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University, the women of the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple laid the foundation for Muslim fashion in the U.S decades ago.
“The Nation of Islam tried to use clothing to give black women a new respectable identity that they had been denied by white supremacy, so they could … push back against stereotypes of black women as promiscuous or asexual or not real women or humans at all,” said Wheeler, who researches black Muslim women’s fashion.
Somali-American model Halima Aden and Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, along with designers Nzinga Knight, Eman Idil, and Lubna Muhammad, are among the few black Muslim women who have been given visibility in the fashion industry.
Black Muslim women are triply vulnerable in the U.S. to racist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic attacks.Wheeler said that black Muslim women’s headscarves can be racially distinctive in wrapping styles and fabrics — nuances that are obscured among the commercial images of predominantly Middle Eastern and South Asian women. Meanwhile, black Muslim women are triply vulnerable in the U.S. to racist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic attacks (last month, a white man pulled a gun on a group of black Muslim teenagers, including headscarf-wearing girls, at a McDonald’s in Minnesota).
“Black Muslims are not seen as sympathetically as brown Muslims,” Wheeler told The Intercept. “Everyone faces Islamophobia, but when you add anti-blackness and suspicions about black Islam not being real Islam, they become not only a foreign threat, but a domestic threat.”
Corporate posturing to marginalized groups — what University of Denver law professor Nancy Leong describes as racial capitalism — has long been a business practice to persuade minority groups to become brand loyal and liberal consumers to buy products as a political statement.
A still from a L’Oréal Paris advertisement featuring Amena Khan.
In January, L’Oréal Paris announced its “unique and disruptive” hair care ad campaign, featuring model and social media influencer Amena Khan. In the ad, she wore a pale pink hijab, with a pink blazer, in front of a pink background. Within a week, Khan left the campaign after her tweets criticizing Israel for its attack on Gaza in 2014 were surfaced. In a statement, L’Oréal Paris agreed with her decision to step down, saying that the company is “committed to tolerance and respect towards all people.”
Brands “want the face, but they don’t want the complex politics or the identity or the voice behind it,” Hoda Katebi, a political fashion blogger and community organizer, told The Intercept, pointing to her own experiences with brands that have approached her to collaborate or model their clothing. “Once a Muslim woman asserts her agency, they’ll strip that away.”
The fetishization of the hijab descends from decades of stereotypical images that have been used to fortify imperial projects in the Middle East and Islamophobic policies and attitudes at home. U.S. meddling in Muslim-majority countries and the war on terror have been the political backdrops against which retailers and advertisers have commodified Muslim women and their clothing.
Photo: Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images
The representation of Muslim women and the veil in U.S. consumer culture has historically shifted alongside the agenda of U.S. empire. The veil, which encompasses myriad forms of head covering, has been attributed multiple, often contradictory, meanings: empowering, oppressive, threatening, fashionable, subversive.
For decades, the myth of imperial benevolence has informed U.S. foreign policy, alongside feigned concern about Muslim women and their material conditions, which has advanced agendas that benefit the political and economic elite.
The veil became fetishized in the U.S. during the Iranian women’s movement after the 1979 revolution, Chan-Malik told The Intercept. Women mobilized for a week of protests after Ayatollah Khomeini, who replaced the U.S.-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi, established compulsory veiling, rather than allowing women to choose whether to cover.
Muslim women are gathered near a sign bearing an image of the Ayatollah Khomeini, during a rally early in February 1979 in Tehran, Iran.
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The U.S. media focused on the chador as the symbol of oppression that the “poor Muslim woman” was forced to suffer under the ayatollah’s rule, Chan-Malik writes in her book. “Women’s rights became a rallying call that could be employed by the United States to explain the ills of the Middle East and the ‘terror’ of Islam.”
The images produced and circulated during this time established an American Orientalism that continues to inform ideas about Muslim women as oppressed and in need of a U.S. savior.
In her book “The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture,” University of Texas at Austin professor Faegheh Shirazi lists pre-9/11 marketing strategies based on Orientalist stereotypes, which were used to sell cars, computers, perfume, and even soup: “the mysterious woman hiding behind her veil, waiting to be conquered by an American man; the submissive woman, forced to hide behind the veil; and the generic veiled woman, representing all peoples and cultures of the Middle East.”
In the wake of 9/11, the burqa became the most visible symbol of the Afghanistan War, weaponized to serve the Bush administration’s imperial agenda. In her infamous radio address, first lady Laura Bush claimed that the Taliban would “threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” a harrowing detail suggesting that even beauty products were subject to tyrannical policing. The unveiling of Afghan women would come to represent their “freedom,” as well as their transformation into consumers.
After the Taliban fell, the U.S. beauty industry acted as an arm of empire and seized the opportunity to export Western products and techniques to Afghanistan. Marie Claire and Vogue magazines, joined by beauty companies like Paul Mitchell and Estée Lauder, funded the humanitarian-inflected “Beauty Without Borders,” a beauty school in Kabul meant to teach women how to perform salon services, despite the fact that salons had already existed. American shampoo and makeup became tools to liberate Muslim women.
Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
By the early 2010s, the veil was still viewed with suspicion when worn by Muslim women, but had otherwise become an edgy, often sexualized, commodity. “Burqa chic” in fashion magazines and runway shows played upon the veil’s shock value, McLarney writes. Jeans brand Diesel released an ad in 2013 featuring a topless, tattooed white woman wearing a niqab, and non-Muslim celebrities, including Rihanna, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, toyed with wearing veils as if they were costumes. Capitalist manipulation, McLarney writes, had transformed the veil “from emblem of utter dehumanization to expression of fashion, protest, and even personal freedom.”
Muslim women’s clothing has acquired new significance under the Trump administration, which tacitly endorses the exclusion, hatred, and criminalization of Muslims. Trump’s call for a Muslim registry and a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” on the campaign trail, which manifested as the de facto Muslim travel ban, set the tone for his approach to U.S. Muslims.
In response, liberals have turned the Muslim woman into a feminist icon. The stylized image of a woman wearing an American flag as a hijab, created by street artist Shepard Fairey, hovered above crowds at the Women’s March as a symbol of multicultural inclusion and political resistance. However, as many have pointed out, the image distorts the history of state violence and injustice against Muslims in the U.S. and abroad — and the American feminist movement’s complicity in that. The poster’s conspicuous presence at anti-Trump demonstrations also invoked how Muslim-Americans are rendered visible in ways that can be harmful to the community.
The Politics of VisibilityThe selective visibility of hijabis reinforces a false binary between “good” and “bad” Muslims, upholding liberal, flag-waving Muslims as tolerable and benign without rectifying deeply entrenched perceptions of Muslims as terroristic and fanatical. While most Americans do not personally know a Muslim, Pew Research Center reported that Muslims are regarded with the most negativity among religious groups. A recent study also found that terror attacks with an alleged Muslim suspect receive 357 percent more media coverage.
“People love good, patriotic Muslims who don’t threaten whiteness, who don’t challenge the historical and systematic violence that this country is built upon,” said Aqdas Aftab, who wrote about the hijab and capitalism as a fellow for Bitch Media.
As Muslim women are increasingly embraced in consumer culture, Nazia Kazi, author of the book “Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics,” said that Muslim men are still regarded as “sexually frustrated, violent, inherently patriarchal figures” — stereotypes that materialize in the ongoing criminalization of Muslim men.
Muslims in the U.S. have been monitored via state-sponsored policing and surveillance, Kazi writes in her book, as well as through “everyday curiosity, concern, and watchfulness.” When it comes to Muslim women, she writes, observation turns into “voyeuristic fascination.”
“Muslim women, specifically those who wear hijab, are a unique source of curiosity and sympathy and bigotry and Islamophobic assumption,” Kazi, an assistant professor at Stockton University, told The Intercept.
That bigotry has increased in the Trump era, when flagrant Islamophobic rhetoric and policies have coincided with a reported increase in discrimination and abuse against Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a 17 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents from 2016 to 2017, a trend that continued into 2018. This year alone, there have been numerous reports of hijabis being harassed, verbally abused, pushed in the subway, and assaulted by having their hijabs pulled off.
Kazi called the approach that retail companies have largely taken to address Islamophobia “leveraging hypervisibility,” or harnessing the heightened scrutiny of Muslims to highlight the most exemplary. That has the effect of rendering invisible “just how devastating Islamophobia is for the most marginalized among Muslim women around the world,” she said.
The clothing industry, for example, magnifies visibility of certain Muslim women, while hiding others from public view — those whose labor is exploited in garment factories overseas.
Photo: Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images
The global production of fast fashion depends on sweatshop labor to bring the latest runway trends to clothing racks. Gap and H&M use factories in Muslim-majority countries that have been accused of gender-based violence and labor abuses. Nike, notorious for its decadeslong dependence on sweatshop labor, also uses factories in predominantly Muslim countries.
“Who will hold them accountable for underpaying, overworking, and harassing their vulnerable employees when the same companies are being lauded for being inclusive and liberal?” Aftab said.
Muslims who applaud the commercialization of the hijab should be cognizant of the exploitation of Muslim garment workers, as well as how large corporations are taking away from small, Muslim-owned businesses, said Katebi, who organizes a sewing cooperative for refugee women in Chicago. That includes companies like Haute Hijab and Sukoon Active, which have been making modest clothing and activewear for years.
Ilhan Omar celebrates with her supporters after her 5th Congressional District victory in Minneapolis, Minn., on Nov. 6, 2018.
Photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
Increasing Muslim representation is not just an ineffective strategy for fighting Islamophobia, but a dangerous one, Kazi said, as it misunderstands Islamophobia as an individual bias, rather than a structural apparatus.
“The hypervisibility of Muslims is undeniably linked to the political climate,” she said. “So while the public is casting this gaze over Muslims in the U.S., what falls out of the conversation are political histories, regional inequality, the histories of white supremacy and race.”
Muslim women are at the forefront of pushing such issues into mainstream political discourse, particularly in electoral politics and grassroots organizing. Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, who next month will become the first Muslim women in Congress, ran on progressive platforms that included a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for All,” and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Katebi described her vision for systemic change: those who make art and those who do politics partnering with impacted communities to secure material gains. “Our liberation,” she said, “is not going to come from multibillion-dollar, capitalist corporations headed by white people.”
Freedom and justice, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, will be won at the polls and on the ground — not in the checkout aisle.
The post Marketing the Muslim Woman: Hijabs and Modest Fashion Are the New Corporate Trend in the Trump Era appeared first on The Intercept.
A four-hour wait is nothing in the face of nostalgia. When Matt Fligiel learned in 2013 that the future of Blimpyburger was in jeopardy, he knew he had to savor one last meal at the local institution before it closed. “They said they were going to reopen, but nobody actually believed them,” said the 24-year-old native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who now lives in Chicago. “I waited with two of my friends … on the third-to-last night to get some. We got there at 6, and we got our food at 10:30.” To his surprise, Blimpyburger did later reopen. But Fligiel, who had eaten at the spot since childhood, speaks of his quest for a final feast with a sense of duty and no regret.
Such dedication to a haunt frequented since grade school is hardly unique, particularly among those who’ve moved away from where they grew up. Despite the countless food blogs, ratings websites, and Instagram posts at diners’ fingertips, there’s not much incentive to be an adventurous eater when traveling back home for the holidays. While this season’s most elaborate rituals tend to revolve around lovingly prepared meals shared with family and friends, a trip home also offers a much-anticipated chance to visit treasured local establishments. Nostalgia and regional pride—not to mention the nature of memory itself—can make these outings feel both magical and obligatory.
For many, the ritual of heading to a cherished hometown spot after time away is akin to a pilgrimage; consistency is key. “I don’t go home enough now to try anything new or switch it up,” said Maylin Meisenheimer, a 25-year-old New York City resident who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, which she visits once or twice a year. “I’m only [there] for four days, [so] if I’m going to eat out, I only want to go to my favorite places, and I get the same thing,” she added, singling out a restaurant called Taqueria Acapulco.
Earlier this month, AAA forecast that 112.5 million Americans would travel this holiday season, from December 22 to January 1. For those who sojourn home, the trips mark an opportunity to enjoy meals they once took for granted—especially if they’ve moved somewhere that lacks a signature food or cuisine they were raised with. When Ryan Harrington, an adjunct professor of food studies at New York University, returns home to Santa Barbara, California, there’s no question that his first stop will be the fast-casual Mexican spot Freebirds.
“My plane could land at 2 a.m., and I would still go, get in line, and get my arm-size burrito, and just devour that thing,” said Harrington, who has lived in New York for more than a decade. “Mexican food had always been something I was really partial to … Freebirds especially was a place that my friends and I—from middle school riding bikes to high school when we would cut class to go get a longer lunch—this was a place that we often went to.”
While traditional holiday fare such as Christmas hams and Hanukkah latkes tend to dominate the discussion about festive eating, subtler food-related customs can reveal a lot about a place’s culture and history. If you grew up in the northern Chicago suburbs like I did, for instance, you might know to call the Chinese restaurant Yen Yen in Buffalo Grove at 5 p.m. on Christmas Day just to have a shot at eating by 7 p.m. Local favorites might become fixtures because they showcase what makes a place unique, such as its migratory history or its economic underpinnings. The decadent Oberweis milkshakes I gladly slurp in the dead of a Chicago winter are made possible by the rich dairy industry in Illinois and Wisconsin. Sometimes the adage holds true: You really are what you eat.
“Food has long been a reflection of who we are and what we believe,” Harrington said. “Because eating is such a central part of our everyday lives, even the small greasy-spoon diner you have in your hometown and the hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurant … are strong indicators of what people in the town hold dear to themselves and how not only they think about food, but how they think about themselves.”
For those who traveled home this season, local pride, more than actual flavor, might dictate restaurant decisions, and standby spots become the natural settings for annual reunions. It’s common to see fans of regional chains such as Whataburger and In-N-Out posting tributes on social media after finally getting their hands on their beloved grub. “As a California native, one of the best moments of the year is when I visit home for Christmas, and take that first bite of In N Out,” reads one tweet. Fittingly, these smaller franchises also have intense fandoms that are convinced that their favorite reigns supreme. (David Silberberg, who grew up in Westlake Village, California, and now lives in Washington, D.C., told me In-N-Out was the clear winner and Whataburger “doesn’t even come close”; Meisenheimer, who declared those “fighting words,” said, “A Texan will choose Whataburger over In-N-Out every time.”)
Best part about coming home for the holidays = @Whataburger
— Miss Thang (@cierraramirez) December 26, 2016To be sure, regular old nostalgia—a force that is as commonplace as it is amorphous and deeply personal—shapes people’s connections to the food they grew up eating. Sometimes specific meals hark back to the first exuberant moments of adulthood, so that a plate of nachos tastes less like cheese and more like teenage independence. For Katy Wahl—who is from Mount Juliet, Tennessee, but went to college in Indiana—the Nashville taco joint Taqueria del Sol is indelibly tied to her adolescence. “There was one five minutes from my high school, so that would be our Friday after-school ritual,” Wahl recalled. “They have outstanding queso and guacamole, and we would get tons for the big table.” While Nashville’s food scene has exploded in recent years, Wahl finds herself returning again and again to her old stomping grounds, as if pulled by an invisible line.
While this sort of affection makes intuitive sense, there’s also research to help explain it. In 2014, scientists at the University of Haifa found a link between the part of the brain that stores memories of new tastes (the cortex) and the area that records memories of where and when an eating experience happens (the hippocampus). They concluded that where people eat something has implications for how much they’ll enjoy the food itself—so just because they hated the rib eye at one restaurant doesn’t mean they actually dislike steak. It’s reasonable to conclude, then, that forming positive early memories in connection with a restaurant might make someone more inclined to fall in love with the food there.
As for Harrington, he thinks that people return to, and extol the virtues of, their hometown favorites partly because they’re stuck in a dance between their past and present selves, and because they subconsciously want to reaffirm the conclusions they came to as children. “Childhood is really an important time in forming your own identity,” Harrington said. “If I go back and eat [food I loved when I was 14], it’s going to be a lot harder for me to say, ‘This isn’t that good,’ because in some ways, that’s saying who I was and who I am is mistaken or incorrect.”
As the holidays come to an end and travelers return to their regular routines, social media can help ease the pain of separation while offering a reminder that the love we feel for any restaurant goes beyond the food itself. For me, scrolling through photos of Homer’s Ice Cream—the shop in Wilmette, Illinois, that is so special I wrote my college-admissions essays about it—is like getting an intimate look at all the casual moments of joy that sustain a community. By sharing photos of meals or tweeting at establishments, people can take a little piece of their favorite spots back with them. And whether or not an order of animal-style fries or a thick chocolate shake is actually as delicious as one might remember, the comfort of a familiar meal can serve as a much-needed salve for the less sweet memories of life.
Over the next week, The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy cinematic moment from 2018. Next up is Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born. (Read our previous entries here.)
By the time Ally (played by Lady Gaga) and Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) are sitting together in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night, they’ve already been through an odyssey. Jackson, a famous musician, crossed paths with Ally when she performed “La Vie en Rose” at a local watering hole. Enchanted by her charismatic stage presence, he takes her to another bar, interrogates her about her passions, and then, after she starts a fight with a drunken patron and hurts her hand, whisks her away to a supermarket to get a field dressing of frozen peas and gauze. All this happens within the first 30 minutes of A Star Is Born.
During this whirlwind meet-cute, Ally opens up about her thwarted efforts as a songwriter and her insecurity about her prominent nose. “Everybody’s talented … but having something to say, and a way to say it so that people listen to it, that’s a whole other bag,” Jackson tells her, as Ally looks on with a mixture of interest and incredulity. But it’s only when they’re sitting side by side on a concrete curb, with Ally nursing her hand, that Jackson starts to open up in return.
“Nobody ever asks you about you, huh?” Ally asks, as Jackson tells her about growing up on a pecan ranch, his screw-up dad having him late in life, and being raised by his brother. She sings her next line. “Tell me something, boy: Aren’t you tired trying to fill that void? Or do you need more? Ain’t it hard keeping it so hard-core?” It’s the scene the whole movie hinges on, whether or not the audience realizes it. If Ally’s sudden creative outburst seems ridiculous, or disrupts the realism of the encounter, the rest of the film won’t really be able to take flight. But Lady Gaga somehow makes the moment feel genuine, and Cooper helps sell it by looking at her dumbstruck.
Jackson has been peppering Ally with questions all night, nudging her about her ambitions, dismissing her perceived shortcomings, and flirting with abandon (including a particularly charged stroke of her nose). But Ally’s been taking stock of his character, too, and after their short time together, she’s emboldened enough to sing about it. “I’m falling, in all the good times, I find myself longing for change,” she adds, finally standing to belt out the chorus of “Shallow,” the film’s signature song. “Holy shit,” Jackson says, temporarily standing in for the audience.
The kind of tenderness on display here is hard to pull off in a totally naturalistic film, but A Star Is Born is also a musical of sorts, where characters can articulate their emotions far better through song. Cooper, who co-wrote and directed, manages to merge the two storytelling styles without sacrificing the distinct power of either. The parking lot is hardly a romantic spot, Ally’s hand is awkwardly wrapped in a bandage, and Jackson’s driver (Greg Grunberg) is leaning against the car and eating Cheetos 20 feet away. Still, the entire scene is imbued with a mystical air, as though these two characters have been struck with divine inspiration.
That’s exactly the magic of creativity—of “having something to say”—that Jackson has been monologuing about, and it’s mesmerizing enough to spur the two to fall in love, both with each other and with the songs they make together. A Star Is Born is one of the oldest Hollywood stories, and it takes a notoriously dark turn in its final act; but the film’s bigger ideas about the price of fame would feel hollow if they weren’t threaded through a relationship that the audience is sincerely invested in. The parking-lot scene—at once understated and soaring—is what seals the bargain for Jackson, Ally, and the viewer, and it could have just as easily been where the movie lost hold of all three.
Previously: Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Next Up: Burning
At his confirmation hearings for the position of U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, the nation’s chief trade negotiator, promised to fight for all of America’s great industries. Yes, he acknowledged, he had built his three-decade career by lobbying for the steel industry. But he was ready, he said, to make the world safe again for good old-fashioned American capitalism, in all its forms. He recalled a caution he’d received from a senator: “As you go through doing your job, remember that you do not eat steel.”
The senator wanted Lighthizer to concede that, despite its hold on the national imagination, steel’s contribution to the American economy has waned. Even back in 2003, when Lighthizer made his first major bid to control the rules of global trade, neither of the two leading American steel companies was worth more in the stock market than the nascent Amazon, despite employing a dozen times as many employees. Today, the two shiny new headquarters Amazon plans to build could house the majority of the 81,000-odd workers who work in America’s remaining iron and steel mills, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As America’s steel workforce has shrunk, the industry has maintained and even tightened its hold on Washington. Lighthizer has played no small part in steel’s political endurance; he has been working for years to yoke steel’s interests with the nation’s. Through a spokesperson, Lighthizer declined to comment for this story. But more than two decades of his writing, speeches, and interviews give a sense of how he has come to view the global economy, and the perils he believes America faces as China grows more dominant.
[Read: The elusive ‘better deal’ with China]
Lighthizer believes that the shrinking of the American steel industry isn’t a mere by-product of technological shifts, but the result of a war China has been waging for decades. He and his allies think the growing superpower will now take the fight to other U.S. interests, threatening the nation’s economic hegemony. Now he’s preparing his own battle plan, refined over a career of lobbying. He plans to bend the rules of the global economy in America’s favor—even if that means breaking the system America itself created.
It’s easy to forget how new our global economic system is.
In the early 1980s, when Lighthizer first got the call to join the executive branch, there was no nafta, no European Union, no World Trade Organization. Within America’s cozy trade community, Lighthizer was already established. When he was nominated to serve as President Ronald Reagan’s deputy trade representative in 1983, the Senate Finance Committee that was to vet him greeted his introduction with knowing laughter, according to The New York Times. The inside joke was that he was an inside man—he was already a staffer on the committee.
Under Reagan, Lighthizer’s key assignment was to use American leverage in one-on-one talks to persuade trading partners like Japan to accept terms that favored U.S. firms. He came away with a reputation as a blunt, effective negotiator, and a nickname to match: “missile man.” Japanese negotiators slapped him with the moniker, according to The Wall Street Journal, after he folded one of their proposals into a paper airplane and threw it back at them.
In 1985, Lighthizer joined an elite law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he would stay until his formal return to government under Donald Trump. He quickly settled down into the client work that would define his career: representing the American steel industry in its trade disputes. Technically, that made him a lobbyist, but any aspersion implied in that label misses the point. “He enjoys being part of the exercise of power,” his brother James Lighthizer, a Maryland Democrat, told The Washington Post in 1987. “Like me, that’s his passion. This lobbying stuff pays great, but it’s secondary. He didn’t get involved in government to do lobbying, he got involved in lobbying to get back in government.”
Lighthizer’s methods of waging war were vicious, but not strictly underhanded. “Honest isn’t quite the right word,” the trade lawyer Donald Cameron told me, searching for an adjective to describe the Skadden team he had worked against over the years. “I found that their representation was actually stronger and just more reasonable in the way that they approached it than some of the other firms that represent U.S. steel interests.” Their gift was knowing where the money was and going after it with verve. In 1992, Lighthizer and Alan Wolff, a frequent collaborator from another law firm, planned a gluttonous feast for the creatures of Washington’s swamp. Together, they sent the Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission “two million pages of documents in 650 boxes” according to The New York Times. The filings documented allegations of unfair trading practices, which, if upheld, would lead to tariffs against American firms’ overseas competitors. To save their business, foreign steelmakers would have to join in the legal feeding frenzy, making Washington’s trade lawyers the one guaranteed winner. “This is a fat pig, and they all want a slice of it,” Lighthizer told the Times. “Every single person in town will be working on this, every single one.”
When the World Trade Organization was established in 1995, its objective was partly to tame the wild capitalism that Lighthizer and his allies so expertly practiced. It built on an edifice of trade negotiations hammered out since World War II, and the result resembles a monument to a certain ideal of capitalism. The vision holds that trade is best when goods and services can move across borders unhindered by tariffs or other government meddling. Companies that do business internationally are expected to operate free from most government aid and to avoid anticompetitive tactics such as dumping, or selling below cost to capture market share. If they don’t, other governments can retaliate within the law.
The WTO provides a venue for negotiations among its members but, crucially, it also established a judicial system that can issue binding rulings. The genius of that judiciary, with the seven-person Appellate Body as its final arbiter, is that it lets rival powers see their ambitions reflected back in it. The small countries of the world could envision themselves, like the Lilliputians, tying down America’s outsize strength. And Gulliver, why would he sign up to be ensnared? To give America’s expert trade negotiators the force of law. Pre-WTO, Lighthizer recalled in a speech at the New America Foundation, America’s lawyers would fight out a trade agreement, only to find they had no way to hold the other side to it. But here was a fix, he said. “The best way to do it was just to say we will use sort of a U.S. system. We will have kind of a court. And in everybody’s mind was, well, we will create international panelists who will be basically like American judges.” The United States was a creating a weapon it could wield best. What was there to lose?
Left unanswered on the occasion of the WTO’s creation was the question of whether China would join it. Then-President Bill Clinton was a proponent of welcoming the fast-growing economy into the new global trading regime, if its leaders would agree to a handful of concessions. Lighthizer, a staunch opponent of China’s entry into the organization, campaigned for Senator Robert Dole against Clinton’s reelection. (In 1996, The Baltimore Sun found Lighthizer with a pair of binoculars, gazing out at Clinton’s golf game on the South Lawn of the White House.) After Clinton’s reelection victory, Lighthizer took to the Times’ op-ed page to warn of disaster: “If China is allowed to join the W.T.O. on the lenient terms that it has long been demanding, virtually no manufacturing job in this country will be safe,” he said. China’s “leaders view economics the same way they view defense, foreign policy or human rights. It is a means of expanding the power of the state and maintaining control of its population,” he wrote in another Times op-ed.
But Lighthizer’s dire warnings about global government and threats to U.S. sovereignty were no match for Clinton’s sunny paeans to the American ideal of capitalism. “By joining the W.T.O.,” Clinton said in a speech, “China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people.” Over Lighthizer’s objections, China sped toward full-fledged membership in the WTO. But as Clinton’s presidency neared its end, Lighthizer and his clients readied new ways to ensure their success in the new economic order.
While Lighthizer and his fellow lobbyists feasted in the late 1990s, the American steel industry was going lean. U.S. Steel had become the world’s first billion-dollar company within a year of its creation, in 1901. A century later, its steel shares were worth virtually the same in total, a significant decline in value after decades of inflation. Its pension obligations had combined with aging technology—like other old-line producers, it made steel from raw materials—to weaken its place in the market. New-line producers such as Nucor Corporation were making steel from scrap, at lower costs. And steelmakers of all kinds were producing more than ever.
By 1998, all that supply was chasing a smaller global market. The bottom fell out of Russia’s post-Soviet economy. Fast-growing Asian markets tumbled into financial crisis. American companies suddenly faced stiff competition. In response, the industry, led by its union workers, opted for the most patriotic of American business traditions: Create a slick marketing campaign and pressure Washington to step in.
The national campaign was called Stand Up for Steel. Lighthizer and other industry lawyers filed case after case in U.S. trade courts. Lobbyists pushed to get the president to launch a so-called Section 201 investigation, a defensive action known as “safeguards,” which would raise tariffs on competing imports. With a Democrat in the White House—and another aiming to keep it—the unions hoped for a favorable hearing, but the Clinton administration resisted. A union lobbyist recalled making a Hail Mary visit to the White House six hours before George W. Bush’s inauguration. But in the Clinton administration, Susan Rosegrant recounts in a study of the protection campaign, economic policy trumped politics. “Our hearts bled for the steel industry, but we didn’t think they were being damaged by imports,” Robert Lawrence, an economic adviser to Clinton, said, according to the study. William Klinefelter, a union lobbyist, believed that decision might have doomed Al Gore’s presidential run. “It would have gone a long way if he could have walked into West Virginia saying that this administration has initiated a 201 to save the basic steel industry,” he said in the study. Instead, Bush took the state, and the White House.
For Bush’s new administration, the steel industry’s plight created a political opportunity that was too good to miss. Republicans had been the party of WTO-style free trade: law-bound and globally minded. But the political incentives to favor protectionism were enticing. Klinefelter explained in the study: “In 2004, Bush could go into Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and West Virginia and say, ‘I’m the president who saved your job.’ Now it doesn’t make any difference what the leadership of the steelworkers union says about the next Democratic presidential candidate. If Bush comes through on this 201, he’s going to get our guys.” And that’s exactly what the president did, setting in motion a long-term realignment in the politics of trade.
Bush directed the International Trade Commission to start an investigation. The government’s intervention, he said, was “designed to restore market forces to world steel markets.” The safeguards required formal review, but Bush’s declaration put the president’s imprimatur on the industry’s cause. Even opposing lobbyists had to hand it to American steel. Lewis Leibowitz, an adversary, told The Washington Post in 2001, “This is an industry that has something like 160,000 workers, and the market [value] of all the companies is smaller than that of Amazon.com, and they’ve turned this town upside down. So my hat is off to them.” Leibowitz understated steel’s position. Because of the dot-com collapse, a few firms, including Nucor, briefly outpaced Amazon. But protecting steel’s market cap meant throwing some nasty elbows.
At the time, Christine McDaniel was putting her freshly minted economics doctorate to good use in the Office of Economics at the International Trade Commission. Despite its somewhat misleading name, the commission is a domestic American agency. Its commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to nine-year, nonrenewable terms, removed from the heat of trade politics. For that reason, the commission is frequently described as a “quasi-independent” agency. It sorts through allegations of unfair trade practices and says which ones really did damage. The commission sided with Bush in his 201 investigation, and sometimes sided with Lighthizer and his colleagues on cases filed on behalf of U.S. Steel and others. Some cases, however, got a little more complicated. For McDaniel, what should have been an anodyne research assignment became a political shouting match that threatened her entire agency.
One of several claims of unfair foreign competition the steel industry filed with the ITC concerned cold-rolled steel, the kind of material used to make products such as lockers or car roofs. An ITC commissioner on the case asked McDaniel to look into an economic model supplied by one of the foreign companies involved—just the type of service to her country a young economist might relish. But before the case was even decided, McDaniel received an alarming phone call. A lawyer for the steel industry was on the line, yelling at her to back off the research. “ITC is an independent agency, and I knew that this lawyer should not have been calling me directly,” she told me. “For him to do that suggested that he felt that he could circumvent the process, which—it just didn’t seem right. And I never forgot that.” Then the American steel companies lost the case. And with the president in their corner, they didn’t take kindly to being stopped by a clutch of no-name trade technocrats. Members of Congress with close connections to the industry—including, according to National Journal, the chair of the Congressional Steel Caucus, Representative Ralph Regula of Ohio—issued a report that recommended identifying McDaniel publicly. Congress also considered cutting the entire budget of the department where she worked.
“They’re for their bottom line, just like everyone else,” McDaniel said. “But they just don’t seem to respect the checks and balances of the system. They’re not transparent in how they operate.” And attacking her agency’s budget wasn’t playing fair. “I think that was a new low. A very sneaky thing to do. And threatening, too.” It sent a warning to the commission to play by steel’s rules. “The steel folks, they’ve really succeeded in trying to limit any economic analysis in these cases,” she said. (The trade lawyer William Barringer documented the episode in his book, Paying the Price for Big Steel, but this is the first time McDaniel has spoken publicly about it.) It’s not clear whether any one individual was responsible for the decision to accost a civil servant. But it was Lighthizer’s case. And according to lobbying disclosures, people and PACs associated with his law firm, Skadden, and his client, U.S. Steel, gave tens of thousands of dollars in sum in political donations toward the reelection of Senator Jay Rockefeller, whose state of West Virginia was home to an ailing corner of the steel industry, and who paid an in-person visit to the commission, declaring, “I find this deeply disturbing.”
(Skadden did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for U.S. Steel wrote in an email after this story was published, “U.S. Steel has long supported the comprehensive and effective enforcement of our country’s fair trade laws and supports the actions taken by the president and the U.S. Department of Commerce to use all of the tools in existing U.S. trade law authority to limit steel imports to ensure our national and economic security.” Skadden does not currently represent the firm on trade matters, she said.)
All these years later, what the participants in this episode took away is a sense that they were misused in service of narrow ends. “The bad guy in this story is the steel industry,” McDaniel said.
By 2003, the Bush administration’s Section 201 safeguards for the steel industry had survived domestic review, but in the American-made global order, they now had to pass muster with the WTO as well. The Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and others had all complained that Bush’s protectionism was an illegal handout to American steel. And they won, in a headline case. America was Gulliver after all.
Robert Lighthizer had cemented his reputation as one of the most vocal critics of WTO law and the lawyers who practiced it. That an international body, unanswerable to the people of any nation, should have the ability to veto a democratic nation’s policies was a dangerous incursion on U.S. sovereignty, he argued. The WTO’s ruling against the Bush administration’s safeguards helped to reinforce the case.
The administration made an audacious move. In 2003, it nominated Lighthizer to the WTO’s high court, the Appellate Body. Lighthizer spoke of the opportunity to join the institution he often delighted in tearing down as a turning point—the chance to pivot from years of outsider criticism into a public-spirited role. “Do you criticize the system and hope to kill it,” he told the journalist Gregory Rushford, “or do you think it is worthwhile to go to Geneva and apply a strict constructionist’s perspective, and add a certain credibility?”
There was no question of Lighthizer’s legal talent—indeed, to this day, few are more skillful practitioners of the dark arts of trade law. But others who have served on the Appellate Body saw him as far outside the mainstream of globally oriented trade lawyers. James Bacchus, a former American congressman who was the outgoing occupant of the job Lighthizer was nominated for, recalled briefing him on what to expect from the nomination process. Lighthizer is sincere in his beliefs, Bacchus told me, but doesn’t seem to believe in the very existence of international law: “I was in favor of establishing an understanding about what is right in international trade, and then upholding it. Mr. Lighthizer was in favor of reserving our right to use our might to make right in international trade.” Jennifer Hillman, a former ITC commissioner and Appellate Body member, had trouble imagining a man so committed to the pursuit of a particular set of interests serving on the judicial body. “In Geneva, when you’re on the Appellate Body, you’ve checked your nationality at the door. And your job is not in fact to protect the United States; your job is to render fair decisions,” Hillman told me.
The WTO denied Lighthizer’s nomination, choosing instead his fellow Skadden alum and trade lawyer Merit Janow, who embodied an opposite set of ideals. While Lighthizer was the consummate lobbyist, Janow took pains to shun even the faintest impression of a conflict of interest. “In my years on the Appellate Body,” Janow wrote in a reflection on her time at the WTO, “I had no contact with the U.S. government and, in fact, U.S. officials would avoid even extended pleasantries at the occasional cocktail party lest even such idle conversation generate any misimpression.” Lighthizer’s quest to become the Antonin Scalia of international trade law had ended, for the moment, in rejection.
Yet now, 15 years later, Lighthizer has leapfrogged the position he was denied. He can nominate Bacchus, Janow, and Hillman’s successor—or deny one entirely.
In office, Lighthizer’s goal is simple to state, if somewhat more complicated to achieve. He wants to roll back China’s advances on the global economy. His zeal for that mission comes directly from his years working on behalf of American steel interests. According to Dan DiMicco, the former CEO of Nucor Corporation and a trade adviser to President Trump, steel jobs were the first casualties of a quiet war China has been waging on the American worker. “We’ve been in a trade war for 25 years. We haven’t engaged; it’s been waged on us. They’ve done it by sleight of hand, by lying, by using short-term greed to undermine long-term success. And Trump knows all of that, and he’s put Bob in charge,” DiMicco told me.
America’s economists will tell you that bilateral trade deficits are nothing to worry about. They’re certainly not fixable by measures like tariffs. But for Lighthizer, America’s trade deficits are the symptom of a growing problem. Trade deficits “raise serious concerns about America’s global leadership role,” he has argued. Imbalanced trade was behind the decline of American manufacturing, he told the Senate Finance Committee in 2007. “U.S. policies are effectively propping up manufacturers in the rest of the world, while placing our own manufacturers at a major disadvantage,” he said. America’s “massive trade deficit,” he continued, results from “the fact that U.S. manufacturers find it more and more difficult to compete with their international rivals.”
[Read: Does Trump even understand how tariffs work?]
Lighthizer sees China, more than any other country, as the heart of America’s misguided global strategy. “It seems clear that the U.S. manufacturing crisis is related to our trade with China,” he testified to a congressional commission in 2010. “U.S. policymakers also underestimated China’s ability to manipulate the WTO system to its advantage.” American officials believed companies would sell to newly affluent Chinese consumers. “This assumption failed to account for the many incentives Western companies had to bet on the other side, and use China as a manufacturing platform to serve the U.S. market,” he continued. Americans should be concerned, he wrote, that “our enormous trade imbalances — which require us to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in assets each year — will leave our children dependent on foreign decision makers.”
In 2016, DiMicco urged Trump to take Lighthizer into the fold. “I will say this about Bob Lighthizer: He’s no spring chicken,” he said. Lighthizer has come out of a comfortable semiretirement to take the fight to China, DiMicco said. “It’s no different than a Marine charging up Pork Chop Hill. He’s committed, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is.” The metaphor is telling. Hundreds of U.S. Army infantrymen (not Marines, granted) died in a pair of battles on Pork Chop Hill in 1953 in Korea—in direct combat with Chinese troops. At his confirmation hearings in 2017, Lighthizer bantered with a senator about his ability to push the U.S.-China conflict to the top of the political agenda: "I will bet you, you and I will sit down in your office between now and the time I leave, and you will say, ‘Bob, you were right; he really is going to change the paradigm on China. I believe he is going to change the paradigm on China.’ If you look at our problems, China is right up there.”
Lighthizer, like Trump, believes in the politics of grievance. The two men are close, according to The New York Times. When Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, tried to broker a deal with China early in the administration, Lighthizer talked the president out of it. “People who know me know I’m a bit of a contrarian myself,” Lighthizer joked shortly after his confirmation. But he has allies, including Peter Navarro, a stridently anti-China economist who also has long-standing ties to the steel industry. “In my judgment, we have the finest U.S. trade representative we have had in our history,” Navarro told an audience at a recent speech. Navarro also denounced “Wall Street bankers and globalist elites” who have been trying to head off conflict with China, aiming a shot at individuals like Gary Cohn, the former head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.
In a scene in Bob Woodward’s Fear, Cohn tries to convince Trump that the WTO isn’t biased against the United States, because, he argues, the U.S. wins most of its cases in the WTO’s Appellate Body. “This is bullshit,” says Trump. It’s not, says Cohn: “This is data from the United States trade representative. Call Lighthizer and see if he agrees.” Cohn was right on the data, but wrong on Lighthizer’s interpretation of it. As far back as 2000, Lighthizer has insisted that America found itself on the wrong side of the institution it built in its own image. “I think now we are largely defendants,” Lighthizer said at the time. “We find ourselves with our, in my judgment at least, democratic process under attack wherein we make certain decisions through a democratic process, and we find a non-democratic body now overturning those decisions. And to me that is very troubling.” What matters isn’t the cases America wins; it’s the cases America loses.
In the trade community, few actions under the Trump administration have been more controversial than the decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. After the Commerce Department initiated the tariffs, Lighthizer put them to good use as a foil in his negotiations with Canada and Mexico. Section 232 is a special legal provision that allows the United States to take defensive trade actions on national-security grounds. Before Trump, presidents were careful to avoid letting courts test the precedent the exemption would set. Once the U.S. plays the national-security card, there’s nothing stopping any other country from doing the same. And that’s not to mention the absurdity of claiming that countries like Canada and Mexico—America’s trading partners in nafta—are threats to national security. “There’s a difference between safeguarding an industry, and saying America’s national security is at risk,” Carla Hills, who negotiated nafta as one of Lighthizer’s U.S. trade representative predecessors, told me. “It puts us in the category of, ‘We are going to be bombed if we don’t fix this.’ And who are we going to hit, our closest allies?”
Lighthizer has pushed the World Trade Organization to the limit in his attempt to regain American primacy. As of October, the WTO Appellate Body no longer has enough members to hear all possible cases. The United States has vetoed all appointments to the body, citing what Lighthizer and his office have described as judicial overreach, and is resisting efforts by American allies to resolve the impasse. “This poses a grave systemic risk which could affect all areas of our work,” Roberto Azevêdo, the director-general of the WTO, said in September. American officials have long seen squeezing the Appellate Body as a way to gain power over the WTO. Barack Obama’s administration blocked one appointment entirely and refused to renominate Hillman. But, according to Bacchus, who served on the Appellate Body for eight years, including as its chief, the current administration has crossed a line. ”Trump has taken a long-standing issue and turned it into a crisis,” he said.
The United States has raised a number of procedural concerns in its complaints about WTO Appellate Body members. But Hillman said she suspects that Lighthizer “wants to return to the old days in which the dispute-settlement system was fundamentally not binding.” (Lighthizer has been circumspect about the issue in public lately, but said as much in his 2000 New America Foundation speech: “I guess my prescription, really, is to move back to more of a negotiating kind of a settlement. Return to WTO and what it really was meant to be. Something where you have somebody make a decision but have it not be binding.”) For Lighthizer, a WTO judiciary that is more amenable to American pressure is likely a good thing. The U.S. is facing two major cases now that could have adverse effects. One deals with the Section 232 national-security tariffs. The other is about China, and whether the United States can force it to follow special rules. If the top court can’t rule on those questions, then they’ll be settled the traditional way, through raw power.
At the moment, Lighthizer is still riding a nafta high within the administration. The still-unratified U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement would produce largely cosmetic changes to the underlying economic relationship among the three countries. (“I would describe it as a face lift and a boob job,” Susan Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University, told me) But the deal has two particular provisions that stand out. One threatens automotive manufacturers with higher costs if they don’t return manufacturing jobs to the United States. The other makes it difficult for the negotiating partners to strike new trade deals with China. By implication, the overarching strategy of American trade policy is to start bringing back the manufacturing jobs that have migrated from the U.S. to China since the latter joined the WTO—whether businesses like it or not.
[Read: Donald Trump’s real endgame with China]
Lighthizer’s campaign against China relies on an illicit trade weapon: Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. It allows unilateral action by the American president against trade policies he deems unfair or overly burdensome. For that reason, the WTO has limited its use, a stricture Lighthizer sees as yet another way China has undercut America’s power to defend its interests, which he told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2010.
Although the WTO’s limits on Section 301 remain, Lighthizer quickly reclaimed its power upon taking office, ordering an investigation into China’s trade practices. In March, his office issued a 200-page document known as the Section 301 report, something akin to a charge sheet of allegations of economic crimes by China. It documents systematic efforts by Chinese companies and officials, often acting on the mandates of the Communist Party, to force unfair terms onto American companies, to steal their technologies, and to spy on their corporate secrets. The incidents in the report are difficult to verify, but experts who have read it say the alleged actions appear consistent with recent Chinese behavior.
Among the claims Lighthizer’s office has leveled against China are charges that it has engaged in outright attacks on American interests. A November update to the 301 report features two alleged Chinese intelligence officers who discuss targeting American aerospace technology by planting a Trojan horse in a French company’s network. “I’ll bring the horse … to you tonight,” one officer reportedly says. “Can you take the Frenchmen out to dinner tonight? I’ll pretend I bump [sic] into you at the restaurant to say hello. This way we don’t need to meet in Shanghai.” According to DiMicco, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president who recently had the constitution changed to remove his term limits, has been explicit about his overall goal: “He came out and said, as dictator-in-chief for life, that China was going to dominate all the industries of the future, not be a competitor, not be a partner, but to dominate the global industries—semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and aerospace, you name it. They were going to use all the tactics and economic aggression and trade mercantilism and predatory pricing that they had used against the steel industry for all these other industries.”
Based on the 301 report, Trump has issued a series of escalating tariffs against Chinese imports. As of December, $200 billion worth of goods from China face 10 percent tariffs at the U.S. border; Trump has threatened more. The tariffs appear to have been designed to target not just the Chinese government, but also American and other firms that manufacture in China, according to the researchers Mary E. Lovely and Yang Liang. A list from Bloomberg features 62 companies that reported higher costs due to the tariffs, including General Electric, which has said they will cost it as much as $400 million.
China has challenged the use of Section 301 at the WTO, marking yet another case that would be impossible for a diminished Appellate Body to decide. Of the body’s three members, one is from China, and another is from the U.S. If either recused themselves, the case could not proceed.
American tech firms with global supply chains are in a difficult position. In the sweeping view of history held by Lighthizer and his allies, it’s no accident that manufacturing jobs can’t return to America. This view holds that the Communist Party has used China’s membership in the WTO to draw companies in, making them unwitting accomplices to the pillaging of the American economy. Trump has singled out Apple, which makes iPhones that carry the label “designed in California” and are assembled in China. “Make your products in the United States instead of China,” he tweeted in September. In a submission to Lighthizer’s office, Apple made the case that it does assemble products in China, but “every Apple product contains parts or materials from the United States and is made with equipment from U.S.-based suppliers.” Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has said the firm wants to help support more jobs in the United States, but is limited by the nation’s lack of high-skilled workers. Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, was more blunt, according to The New York Times. Asked by President Barack Obama if Apple could ever bring its overseas facilities back to the U.S., Jobs replied, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” (Laurene Powell Jobs, Jobs’s widow, is the founder of the Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic.) After the spat with Trump, Lighthizer’s office announced that some Apple products like the Apple Watch would be exempt from tariffs, and Trump later praised Cook for hiring more Americans. Apple did not respond on the record to a request for comment.
The WTO risks irreparable damage from Lighthizer’s battles with China. In an influential article, Mark Wu, a Harvard Law professor who negotiated intellectual-property deals for the U.S. government, made the case that China’s accession to the WTO was premised on a mistaken assumption that the organization could accommodate the country’s authoritarian system. China’s path, the WTO’s creators assumed, would resemble other countries’. “Instead, Chinese leaders have developed a unique economic model ... which WTO rules are not adequately equipped to address,” Wu told me. The WTO has rules for South Korea’s family-run conglomerates, but not for Chinese banks that answer to unwritten orders from the Communist Party. Correcting such an omission wouldn’t necessarily be fatal for the WTO, but would require both the U.S. and China—among others—to make concessions, and little in the United States’ negotiating posture suggests a willingness to do so. “Another option is to resort to power politics to try to force these changes, and possibly risk breaking the system while trying to save it,” Wu said. “If we do neither, then the reality is that the WTO's relevance will gradually diminish as China rises, because China’s size and trade impact are just too large for others to wait patiently for market reforms to play out.”
Lighthizer has said he doesn’t want to kill the WTO. But it stands in the way of his objectives with China, and his history suggests he won’t be gentle with anything that gets in his way.
“Law is good if legal rules are what you want,” the UC Irvine law professor Gregory Shaffer said to me, discussing Lighthizer’s approach to the WTO. “And that’s basically the way the U.S. viewed it when it created the institution. But once other countries learn how to use the law against the powerful, then the powerful start thinking maybe the law isn’t such a great thing.” Of course, the less powerful haven’t always been thrilled with the WTO even as it’s currently constituted. Winning a case doesn’t entitle a country that’s been wronged to enact punishment; it only allows them to put up retaliatory tariffs worth as much as the original damage. That lawful pain is intended to persuade the other party to back off. The system advantages vast economies such as the United States, which can afford the costs of issuing retaliatory tariffs. But for small economies, retaliating can do as much harm as good. In 2004, Antigua and Barbuda won a case over online gambling against the U.S., but it’s never been willing to swallow the $21-million-a-year cost of retaliating against the the country. “The small nation of Antigua and Barbuda, has good reason to join Mr Lighthizer in questioning [the WTO],” Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the U.S., wrote last year. “But for different reasons.”
Lighthizer’s criticisms have crystallized the divisions among supporters and critics of the WTO. Even if the bulk of the 301 report is accurate, what matters is how the United States responds to it. “We had better think about what it is we’re really trying to accomplish. Are we trying to deal with some very real and very irritating trade concerns, or are we trying to contain the rise of China?” asked Bacchus, the former Appellate Body chief. “China’s rise is not our decline.” Hillman believes that the United States should employ a never-before-used legal strategy and argue that China’s efforts violate the spirit of international trade law, if not always the letter. She wants the U.S. to take the issues outlined in the report to its allies, and go together to Geneva to force China to defend itself. “You should at least give the WTO a serious try before saying it can’t handle this kind of a case,” she said.
When Donald Trump met with Xi Jinping in Argentina in December, the two presidents tried to reduce the tensions. Lighthizer will lead the U.S. side in 90 days of talks that were widely described as a kind of truce. But he has cautioned that he will quickly return to arms when the clock runs out on March 1 if China doesn’t restructure its economic relationship with the U.S. and stop stealing American technology. “We will protect that technology and get additional market access from China,” he said on a recent Face the Nation. “If that can be done, the president wants us to do it. If not, we'll have tariffs.” Lighthizer intends to take the fight to China. With James Mattis’s resignation, he has become one of the most influential figures in American foreign policy. Unlike Mattis, there was never any doubt that Lighthizer sees his role as furthering the president’s ambitions rather than checking them. But can a lobbyist whose career was devoted to fighting for protectionism be trusted to fight for national interests bigger than any one man?
The trade lawyer and Cato Institute scholar Scott Lincicome recently reviewed surveys of Americans’ attitudes on free trade and protectionism, which he found to be wide but shallow. “Most Americans generally support freer trade, globalization, and even oft-maligned trade agreements,” he wrote. But that support is vulnerable to being influenced by organized campaigns on specific issues, such as Trump’s steel tariffs: “As a result, protectionist policies emanating from the United States government today are most likely a response not to a groundswell of popular support for protectionism but instead to discrete interest group lobbying (e.g., the U.S. steel industry) or influential segments of the U.S. voting population (e.g., steelworkers in Pennsylvania).” That lines up with a recent paper by the economist Dani Rodrik. Economists tend to reflexively support anything described as a “free trade agreement,” Rodrik argued, but modern trade deals have little to do with reducing barriers to trade. After all, the negotiations that created the WTO resulted in the biggest trading countries ending the vast majority of their tariffs and quotas. What’s left is a fight to change local rules and regulations. “Rather than reining in protectionists, trade agreements empower another set of special interests and politically well-connected firms, such as international banks, pharmaceutical companies, and multinational corporations,” Rodrik wrote.
In a sense, that makes Robert Lighthizer the most honest man in Washington. He doesn’t believe in unregulated free trade, but the very idea of free trade is a chimera. America’s trade laws have always served America first—at least for those lawyers who know exactly whom to lobby and how. Generations of American trade negotiators have voiced lofty ideals at the same time as America’s global power and prestige swelled, but they rarely had to prove that their principles wouldn’t bend when pressed. The law serves the weak, they could say, while never having to contemplate the experience of real weakness. Now, as America is eclipsed by China, Lighthizer has arrived to say the law should favor those who make it. Who is to tell him he’s wrong? China? If you’d rather China’s laws, he might well say, go ahead and live under them. In the meantime, the rest of us will go on living in Lighthizer’s world. And if you don’t like its laws, at least you know who made them.
CARY, N.C.—One Saturday morning this past fall, a handful of progressive voters were seated in a neat circle, pondering why more people don’t agree with their preferred policy solutions for the country.
This kind of hand-wringing has been common among Democratic voters since the 2016 election, especially in liberal enclaves (like urban Wake County, where Cary is located) in red states (like North Carolina). But there were a few things different about this particular klatch that were unusual—chief among them the concentric circle of conservatives sitting just behind the Democrats, listening intently.
The 20 or so people, both the inner circle of liberals and the outer circle of conservatives, had gathered at a suburban church for a workshop hosted by Better Angels, a group that seeks to promote understanding across the country’s yawning partisan divide. And this “fishbowl exercise” was showing some of the challenges in that task. The liberals—“blues,” in Better Angels parlance—were supposed to be outlining why they thought progressive policies were best for the country, as well as what hesitations they had about them. And they were supposed to do both without referring to or blaming conservatives, or “reds.”
As the exercise showed—or as you probably already know, if you’ve had a political debate any time in the past year, or three years, or decade—that’s uncommon. In Cary, one participant kept unwittingly critiquing the Republican Party, nearly to the point of slapstick. As a chuckle spread through the group, his face fell. “Am I doing the same thing again?” Leslie Selbst asked, with mild exasperation.
He’s hardly alone in this binary view of politics. Even more than the standard understanding of polarization—the widening chasm between preferred political outcomes—the U.S. is riven by negative polarization, a loathing for the other side. To cite the classic metric, the number of Americans who wouldn’t want their child to marry someone of the other political party has skyrocketed since, roughly, the 2008 election.
This is not a novel insight. There’s so much pearl-clutching about polarization and the need for centrist solutions that it has spawned a cottage industry of groups peddling ideas for compromise, along with a counter–cottage industry of commentators who argue that civility is overrated and polarization underrated.
What is intriguing about Better Angels is that it isn’t seeking to formulate a broadly acceptable centrist platform, nor appeal to the vast middle who (Americans are told) really truly just want the country to work. It’s not trying to end partisanship; the group’s very concept, with its red versus blue structure, presupposes polarity. Its premise is not that everyone needs to agree, but simply that they need to be able to talk to one another, and that such a skill has been lost. That seems more manageable and realistic than getting everyone to see eye to eye on policies, but it’s still no easy feat—and even if the group is successful, is fostering an open dialogue within a polarized system enough to fix American politics?
Sometimes it takes an unexpected leader to reach across the political divide, like Richard Nixon going to China. David Blankenhorn, the president of Better Angels, is not that type of leader.
He’s traversed the aisle several times in his career. Blankenhorn was reared in conservative Mississippi, attended Harvard, then became a community organizer. The think tank he established and led for many years, the Institute for American Values (IAV), found allies on the center-right. In 2010, Blankenhorn served as a witness defending California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, during a court challenge. Two years later, he changed his mind, announcing the switch in a New York Times op-ed. “That experience was pretty searing for me,” he told me, wryly noting that he has the rare distinction of managing to lose friends on both sides of the debate.
On November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election, Blankenhorn woke up to a morose mood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where he lives. He called David Lapp, a friend and colleague from IAV, who was in South Lebanon, Ohio—between Cincinnati and Dayton— where, by contrast, the atmosphere was buoyant and hopeful. The men decided they needed to do something to bridge that emotional gap, and within a few weeks, they’d gathered 10 Trump voters and 10 Hillary Clinton voters for a discussion in Ohio. With a nod to the notion that the U.S. was a house divided against itself, they recruited Bill Doherty, a veteran family therapist, to design and lead the talk.
“It was just really for all of us a transformative experience,” Blankenhorn said. “We felt we had lightning in a bottle. You remember right after the election, emotions were very high. Words of real anger, passion, fear. At the end of the day, they decided that they wanted to continue to talk together. They said it was the first time they’d actually talked together after a year and a half of talking at and about each other.”
So the nascent Better Angels hosted another session. And then another. Then they had a bus tour. They created a day-long workshop, and then a three-hour truncated alternative. They began recruiting members and held a national convention in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in summer 2017. The group has now hosted hundreds of workshops and claims roughly 5,400 dues-paying members.
Post-Trump searches for the national soul are nearly as numerous as broken presidential norms. Many of these have involved coastal elites going on what my former colleague Molly Ball called safaris in Trump country, with actors from HuffPost to Third Way to Mark Zuckerberg venturing into the heartland and trying to make sense of the people who live there. They joined an already crowded field of people and groups concerned about polarization. Many of these groups, such as No Labels, have argued that the problem with American politics is that a silent majority of centrists are marginalized. “The far right and far left are holding America hostage—becoming ever more strident, uncompromising and making governance impossible ... while the vast political center has remained on the sidelines,” No Labels says. The commitment to centrism brings risks, though. No Labels, for example, granted Donald Trump its “problem solver” honorific in 2016. As Ball reported, Third Way cherry-picked evidence from a tour of Wisconsin that supported its centrist premise.
Better Angels dispenses with centrism from the start. “We’re very clear that we’re not asking people to change their mind on issues,” Blankenhorn said. “We’re not trying to develop a centrist political philosophy; we’re not trying to create a centrist political movement.” (He acknowledged that this claim may be met with skepticism: “A lot of people who say that really are trying to create a centrist movement.”)
The goal is simply to create a space and method for people who disagree to talk politics, conversations that have become surprisingly rare. A 2017 study by political scientists at the University of California at Davis found that three in four Americans almost exclusively talk politics with people with whom they agree. More and more, Americans avoid discussing politics with people they know hold opposite views—if they mix with them at all.
Accepting political disagreement as a fact of life means embedding a bipolar setup into everything Better Angels does. Its leadership is half red and half blue. So are delegates to its conventions, and attendees at its workshops. Of course, many voters are certain they’re some form of purple, or at least reasonably independent. So rather than try to force participants into adopting either “conservative” or “liberal” or “Democrat” or “Republican,” Better Angels uses the consciously contrived red-blue binary. Years of opinion research show that most voters pretty consistently favor one party or the other, even if they sometimes cross over.
The workshop I attended in Cary was the three-hour version. What immediately jumped out was how little time blues and reds spent talking about the opposite side. Instead, the format forced them to speak almost exclusively about themselves. Local organizers had recruited 10 blues and 10 reds, and a pair of facilitators led the group. After introductions, the reds and blues split up, each with a facilitator, and were asked to list stereotypes that they believe the other side has about them. Then they were asked to assign a “kernel of truth” to each stereotype—that is, to accept why the other side might hold it.
[Read: On safari in Trump’s America]
It will come as no surprise that the groups ended up with very different results. What was surprising was that rather than just come up with different answers, they almost seemed to have been answering different questions. The red group compiled a list almost entirely composed of feelings—“closed-minded,” “racist.” The blue group, meanwhile, brought back a list of policy-heavy words, such as “socialist.”
The exercise also demonstrated how difficult self-critique is. I sat with the red group, and while the crew quickly named racism as a stereotype, they were deeply reluctant to identify the kernel of truth. Linda Gupton, a member of the red group, tried to argue that there are white-supremacist elements in the Republican coalition, but was shut down. Only as the exercise finished did she convince the rest of the reds, pointing to the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
After a break came the fishbowl exercises, as participants laid out why they believed their side’s policy prescriptions were good for the country, and then what reservations they had about those ideas. Observing a group of mostly strangers, united by nebulous partisan agreement, discussing politics as their opponents looked on was strangely riveting. Watching them try to do so without criticizing the other party—sorry, color—was a little like watching amateur gymnasts on a slackline: You knew they’d fall off eventually, but you were rooting for them all the same, and it was gripping to see them try to hang on.
The fishbowl exercises seemed to build real goodwill. The reds were excited to hear blues voice concern about self-righteousness on the left, and about their fears that a social safety net might create a culture of dependency. The blues were heartened by red concerns that conservative social policies would leave people behind. Of course, one possible reason this exercise was popular was that it allowed each side to have its critique of the other articulated, without having to say it themselves. Nonetheless, there was a warm, fuzzy feeling as the workshop wrapped up. I left feeling a little better about partisans’ ability to have reasoned conversations. That’s exactly what Blankenhorn said Better Angels workshops can provide. The goal is to lower negative partisanship.
The following week brought Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Senator Lindsey Graham’s outburst in his defense, and the final confirmation vote—perhaps the most viscerally polarized moment in American politics in my lifetime.
Are those warm, fuzzy feelings durable, and are they strong enough to build a social movement?
“We want to change the country. We don’t want to simply be the organization that has some workshops and people feel better about having gone to the workshops,” Blankenhorn said. He points to the impact of groups such as the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, and the Tea Party as what he wants to emulate. That’s a delicate balancing act, especially without creating a political agenda, because all those groups are defined by policy advocacy. Blankenhorn thinks Better Angels can find a workaround.
“Our members are never going to agree on a climate-change policy or a gun policy or anything like that,” he told me. “We might be able to agree on some procedural changes that would reduce polarization.” For example, the group could decide to advocate for federal judicial term limits—an idea that has some supporters on both sides of the aisle and might lower the stakes of judicial appointments, thus reducing a polarization pinch point.
A bigger reach also means expanding offerings. In addition to holding workshops and national conventions, Better Angels has started local chapters where people can get together on a semi-regular basis, in a less structured format. Better Angels is also working to establish debates, having found that some reds prefer that to the arguably touchy-feely vibe of the workshops.
And it means expanding who comes to programs of all sorts. Demographically, Blankenhorn said, Better Angels tilts older, whiter, and more white-collar than the population (though so does the electorate), and he’s hoping to rectify that. The group I observed was not quite representative of the general population in the Raleigh area, but it had a mix of younger and older voters, as well as people of color in both the red and blue groups.
The bigger problem is that the kind of people who are willing to spend a morning or a day on such an exercise are the kind of people who are already convinced that dialogue is important, and are more willing to hear the other side out. As participants went around, many had strong political views, but many had also participated in other efforts at cross-partisan dialogue. Reducing affective polarization will require getting more of the affectively polarized to show up at events like this. Still, even this group found the exercises useful, if largely as self-abnegation.
[Greg Martin and Steven Webster: The real culprit behind geographic polarization]
“There were parts where I just wanted to jump in and say, ‘This is a misrepresentation of the facts!’” Neel Mandavilli, a 20-something who’s worked for Democrats in the state and federal governments, told me a few weeks after the session. “The whole point was to just listen. I found that helpful. I left reminded that there are people on the other side, so to speak, who share that. That leaves some measure of hope for me.”
Gupton, who had gently but firmly pushed the reds to acknowledge racism, said she mostly avoids political conversations for fear of getting into contentious arguments. Although she identifies as a moderate, she told me her more conservative friends might like a Better Angels setup.
“I have a lot of friends who are much more conservative than me, and they are very hesitant to come to a table with people from the other side of the table because they’re afraid they’re going to get beat up,” she said. “But here, you’re not debating people from the other side of the table.”
There was also a conspicuous absence of strong Trump supporters. The reds mostly fit into the more classic business-friendly conservatism of, say, Mitt Romney. They weren’t necessarily Never Trumpers, but many were Reluctant Trumpers. The exception was Mary Ruth Dana, who had the most interesting political backstory in the group: She’s a former liberal who remains strongly anti-war and skeptical of corporate power in America. Her political switch made her an asset to the workshop, because she was, in effect, bilingual—able to communicate with both sides.
In 2016, Dana shocked even herself by supporting Trump. People in her social circles—she’s a painter—didn’t take it well. “I was actually quite distressed by the response I got from people I had known 10, 20, 30 years,” she told me. “They weren’t interested in why I had done it. They were just so appalled at it. The lack of open-mindedness blew me away.”
The benefit of the workshop, she said, was that she didn’t feel like she was walking on eggshells, as she often does in daily life when politics comes up. But although Dana had positive things to say about Better Angels—this was her second workshop—she was reserved in her enthusiasm.
That would come as no surprise to Selbst, from the blue group, who’d struggled during the fishbowl exercise. “I don’t believe everyone had a kumbaya moment at the end,” he said. “People said what they thought was appropriate to say.”
Selbst thought the format was good as far as it went, but he worried it didn’t go very far. “[The facilitators] tended to give equal weight to everyone’s argument and were not interested in any negativity toward that argument [from] the other people,” he said. “I firmly believe everyone should be treated with respect, but not every opinion is equally valuable.”
That’s the rub, even if you don’t agree with Selbst about which opinions are valuable and which aren’t. Ultimately, politics is about issues—not just the ability to talk, and not just procedures. Even if Better Angels can succeed in getting a large swath of the population to speak civilly, who knows if they’ll be able to convert that into productive conversation on real policies? Blankenhorn is disarmingly open about these challenges, though he told me, “I’ve worked for lost causes in this country. I know what it’s like to not get much response for something you’re trying to do. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The stakes are certainly lower now than they’ve been in earlier eras. It’s easy to forget that Better Angels’ name comes from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural speech. Lincoln’s phrase endures, but his plea for comity was unheeded: Barely a month later, the Civil War broke out. The country is not as divided today, and it’d be better to avoid getting there.
President Donald Trump’s decision to quickly withdraw troops from Syria has sparked deep concern about an Islamic State revival, Iranian gains, and a Turkish attack on America’s Kurdish allies. For months, in both public and private, top aides—including Trump’s national-security adviser, his special envoy for the ISIS coalition, and his special representative for Syria—had all insisted that American troops were there to stay. Just one phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was all it took to upend the administration’s approach.
Trump’s tendency to agree spontaneously to requests pitched by foreign leaders, overruling his advisers, wreaks havoc on his administration’s agenda. His highly personalized, on-the-spot decision making disempowers and alienates his diplomatic team. But if past is prologue, there will be many more such episodes to come.
Jarring as the Syria decision was, it hardly marked the first time Trump suddenly agreed to a foreign suggestion over the explicit warnings of his officials.
In April, the U.S. Commerce Department slapped sanctions on the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, charging that it had violated sanctions on Iran and North Korea and then lied about doing so. “This egregious behavior,” said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, “cannot be ignored.” The sanctions were tough, barring U.S. suppliers from exporting parts to ZTE. Within a month, ZTE’s operations ground to a halt, and the company looked done for.
[Kori Schake: Trump just messed up the one thing he did better than Obama]
Until, that is, a call to Trump from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Xi urged a solution that would resuscitate ZTE, and within hours Trump tweeted that he was working “to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast.” The Commerce Department, he added, “has been instructed to get it done.” The White House issued a statement reassuring all that the president “expects Secretary Ross to exercise his independent judgment … to resolve the regulatory action involving ZTE,” but the die had been cast. The “personal favor” Xi asked for was granted, the sanctions were modified, and ZTE was put back in business.
Then there was the June Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un. Ahead of it, China for months floated a “freeze for freeze” scheme in which North Korea would halt its nuclear program while the United States suspended military exercises on the peninsula. Trump administration officials were unanimous in dismissing the proposal: Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called it “insulting,” and then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson rejected an “approach in which legitimate defensive military exercises are placed on the same level of equivalency as the DPRK’s unlawful actions.” Privately, military leaders suggested that suspending exercises would degrade U.S. and South Korean readiness to fight if necessary.
No matter; ask, and Kim received. Immediately following their meeting, Trump announced at a press conference that he would halt the “war games” after all, catching administration officials, military leaders, and South Korean policy makers completely off guard. The exercises, the president said, are both expensive and “very provocative,” and so suspending them “is something that I think they very much appreciate.” The Pentagon subsequently canceled Freedom Guardian drills in August and another set of exercises in October. Freeze-for-freeze remains in place.
[Read: Much ado about 2,200 troops in Syria]
Spontaneous, personalized diplomacy isn’t always bad; it can break through decades of entrenched habit. In his famous 1986 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan offered to eliminate all nuclear weapons within 10 years—a bold idea that would have set heads spinning among the high priests of deterrence. While the proposal at Reykjavik foundered on differences over the Strategic Defense Initiative, the talks paved the way for a 1987 ban on all intermediate nuclear forces, limits on nuclear testing, and the 1991 START treaty.
In Trump’s case, the merits of each decision are debatable; it’s the impulsive nature of his personalized diplomacy that’s the real problem. His pattern of behavior provides an incentive for allies and adversaries alike to bypass the very officials trying to carry out the president’s directives. Few countries will wish to negotiate with the White House or the State Department if they believe a better deal from the boss might be in the offing. This may be one reason Pyongyang has refused work-a-day negotiations over its nuclear program and is instead focused on holding a new, leader-to-leader summit.
Trump’s pattern also encourages pie-in-the-sky requests. In Helsinki, Trump entertained Vladimir Putin’s appeal for Russian investigators to question Americans—including Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Moscow—about “illegal activities.” Trump rejected the idea after a bipartisan outcry, but other leaders surely learned from the episode that when the boss is in the room, anything is possible.
Successful foreign policy requires the president to fully empower a team that speaks for him. Trump’s habit of on-the-spot course reversals is like so much in our current political era: immediately satisfying but damaging in the long run. Expect more to come.
In 1970, crosstown busing came to Richmond, Virginia. Richard Cohen, then only a teenager, persuaded his parents to let him attend an integrated public school instead of private school. He ended up leaving high school a year early to begin college at Columbia University, where he studied philosophy.
Cohen, now the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, worked in private law for seven years before starting at the SPLC as its legal director. He’s worked at the organization for more than half of his life. I spoke to Cohen recently about his career trajectory and how watching the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a 13-year-old changed him. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Lola Fadulu: Could you tell me about your parents and their jobs?
Richard Cohen: My father ran an interior-decorating firm, and my mother was a legal secretary. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. I was born about seven months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and I went to public schools in Richmond.
In 1970, the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, massive crosstown busing came to Richmond. They had been operating basically under a freedom-of-choice or a districting plan, but it was proving inadequate to desegregate the schools, and a very famous judge ordered crosstown busing. Now, there were a lot of people in the white community who abandoned the public schools. They moved out of the city or put their kids in private schools. My parents were really pushing me to go to a private school, and I just basically said no, and made a couple of speeches in that day to Jewish groups about the importance of staying with the public schools. Sometimes I wonder, when I look back on it, whether that was out of principle or whether it was a product of youthful belligerence. Then I left high school a year early, and then went off to college, and then into law school back in Virginia.
Fadulu: Why did your parents want you to go to private school?
Cohen: I don’t think my parents were racist people. I just think they thought, “Gosh, Richard’s a smart kid. The situation in the public schools seems uncertain, and we want to make sure he gets the best education he can. And we just don’t know what’s going on in the public schools, because of a lot of change and disruption.” So I think those were the basic reasons. I didn’t think of it as a particularly racist thing, although I just think they were concerned about how the school system was working. In the end, we argued and they relented, and I’m so glad they did.
Fadulu: How was public school for you?
Cohen: My school before that had been integrated, but had been predominantly white. My public school, by the time I was in my junior year, was probably predominantly black.
Fadulu: What was it like for you to be in the minority, as a white student?
Cohen: I don’t know if I thought about it so much as a young person. These were my classmates. These were people I knew. These were people who I smoked cigarettes in the back of the school with and things like that. So I don’t want to describe it as kind of nirvana or anything like that, but it was a different experience than I think some people had.
You know, we’re at the 50th anniversary this month of the 1968 Democratic convention. That convention was, I think, in some sense a coming-of-age moment for me. That was the convention in Chicago. Dr. King had been killed. Robert Kennedy had been killed, and the 1968 convention was a very tumultuous time. Mayor Daley is cursing at speakers from the front row of the convention. The police are rioting in the streets.
In that entire time, there were two people who stood out at the convention as kind of voices of sanity: A guy named Jesse Unruh, who was the head of the California delegation, and the other person, of course, was Julian Bond. Julian was, I think, 28 years old at the time, but he spoke with such moral force that at the convention, someone placed his name into nomination for the vice presidency of the United States. It was largely a symbolic act, because Julian was too young to be the vice president of the United States. But the nomination, of course, though symbolic, was a reflection of Julian’s stature. Three years after that, Julian helped to found the Southern Poverty Law Center. When I came here in 1986, he became a great friend. I don’t find it completely coincidental that I’m here.
That was a really important moment for me. It was really the first time I had watched a political convention, and the first time that I think I paid a lot of attention to and was excited about politics and civil rights and issues of fairness.
Fadulu: How old were you at that time?
Cohen: Thirteen.
Fadulu: Wow.
Cohen: I went to college at Columbia, and then I came back to Virginia to go to law school. I think my law-school tuition was $1,000 a year as an in-state student, which was one of the world’s most incredible deals. And I practiced law for about seven years in Washington, D.C., with a very famous civil-rights lawyer, although some people might think that we were on the wrong side of certain cases. His name was Charles Morgan. He actually represented Julian when the Georgia legislature refused to seat Julian because of his stance against the Vietnam War. He represented Muhammad Ali in the lower courts when Ali was being prosecuted for so-called draft evasion. He argued a lot of early civil-rights cases, such as Reynolds v. Sims, a case well known for establishing the principle of “one man, one vote.”
[The ]unlabeling of an “anti-Muslim extremist”
I practiced law with them for about seven years. Julian was friends with people in the firm. Then, frankly, I got a little bored doing that, too. In 1986, I found the job of my dreams as the legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. We were a very small organization at the time. I think we had 25 people in a single location. Today we have 300 in 10, and I never expected to be here for all this time. I’ve been here for 32 years now. In fact, I’ve been here more than half my life; I’m 63.
It’s been a remarkable experience. I think all honest work is useful. It helps make the world go round. Right now I’m looking out of our building. I see a big bank tower, and I mean, I think it’s important that our financial institutions be secure, that the legal system be predictable so people can rely on the contracts that they make with people. So I think the work that they do at that bank is important. But it’s probably not the kind of work that touches their souls. The banker might be interested in his work, might get some satisfaction from it, but I think it’s rare that you find a job that expresses your values and touches your soul, and that’s one of the great privileges I have, doing what I do.
Fadulu: Rewind a bit. You said you were practicing law for seven years and then you got bored and you moved to be the legal director. How did you decide to act on that boredom and find a new job?
Cohen: When I was in private practice, we had some very big cases that were very interesting to me. Those were kind of over at one point. I don’t want to name the company, but it came to see us to try to help them out of a jam they were in. I did some research about the company, just some background, and I did not particularly want to represent them. They would have paid us well and all that, but they had a little bit of a history of anti-Semitism. The case that they wanted us to deal with, it wasn’t a case of discrimination. It was simply a commercial dispute. But I just didn’t want to do it.
And so I started talking to some of my colleagues. I took a walk in Lafayette Park across from the White House with Joe Levin. Joe had practiced law with me for a while in Washington. He had gone off to a different firm by the time we had that walk. He told me about the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that he had helped to co-found with Morris Dees and Julian Bond in 1971. He said that the organization was looking for a new legal director, and he thought I ought to at least give it some thought and talk to Morris about it, and that’s what I did.
Fadulu: Did you have any jobs before college?
Cohen: My first-ever job was probably working for my father in his warehouse, the warehouse at his store, unloading trucks and putting cans of paint away. That was probably the first thing I ever did. And working on the delivery truck to deliver supplies to construction sites and people who were building homes.
Fadulu: Did you like it?
Cohen: I was 14. I appreciated earning a little money. The people who I worked with were good folk with a sense of humor. Yeah, I was the boss’s kid, so maybe they didn’t give me as hard a time as they could have, but it was fun. I worked hard. You would get deliveries of paint. Paint comes in four-gallon sleeves and five-gallon cans. In some ways, it was backbreaking work. I’d put hundreds of those things away over the course of the day, so it was hard work.
Fadulu: Did you learn anything from those jobs that became part of the way you approach work?
Cohen: I don’t know if I learned anything there that I didn’t learn in school just as a good student. I had an interesting teacher in the 11th grade for civics. I took the course for advanced credit. And in order to get that, I had to read Supreme Court cases and outline them. I read lots of Supreme Court cases in my junior year.
Fadulu: Can you tell me some of the highlights of your career, things that stand out to you?
Cohen: In the first summer that I was here in 1986, Morris [Dees] and I were appointed as special U.S. attorneys to prosecute two Klansmen for contempt of court. What had happened was we had secured a consent decree with them basically saying they could not operate a private army. This was a guy named Glenn Miller. He later killed two or three people in Overland Park, Kansas. None of the people he killed were Jewish, but he thought they were.
We didn’t know this at the time, but while we were trying the case, they had actually staked out the home of our local counsel, intending to kill us if we showed up. Glenn Miller went underground and declared war on the country and offered a bounty on Morris’s head. Then some of his people were arrested in connection with the plot to blow up our building. So being involved in a case with people like that was scary and memorable.
Over the years we’ve sued a number of neo-Nazi and other hate groups for the violence of their members. And for us, when we see now the kind of hate in the mainstream, when we see things like Charlottesville, it just tells us that our work is not done.
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