Corey Robin's Blog, page 28

I have a piece in The Guardian on the meaning of Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House:

Once upon a time, conservatives plotted a path that began with the magazines and ended in the White House. With Steve Bannon’s departure from the Trump administration on Friday to head the Breitbart News Network, we seem to be witnessing the reverse: an unspooling of history that begins in power and ends in print.

In 1955, William F Buckley launched National Review, declaring war against liberalism and the Democratic party but also, and more immediately, a civil war on the right.

…

Since Charlottesville, pundits and historians have wondered whether we’re headed for a civil war. With Bannon’s exit, it’s clear that we are. Only it won’t be between North and South or right and left. It will be within the Republican party itself.

The question is: will it be like the war Buckley launched, a purgative struggle as a prelude to a new era of conservative power and rule? Or will it mark the end of the Reagan regime, unveiling a conservative movement in terminal crisis as it strives to reconcile the irreconcilable?

…

In the wake of the Charlottesville controversy, Bannon laughed at liberals and leftists who called for taking down Confederate statues. “Just give me more,” he told the New York Times. “Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I can’t get enough of it.”

As he explained to the American Prospect, “the longer [the Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got ‘em. I want them to take about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Ironically, as the Republicans flounder in their attempt to get anything done – much less enact a program of economic nationalism – Trump emits tweet after plangent tweet about “the removal of our beautiful statues.” It is the Republicans, in other words, and not the Democrats, who are saddled with identity issues, while their economic program (on healthcare, the debt, and taxes) remains stalled.

Before he left, Bannon’s parting words to Trump were to resist the siren calls of so-called moderates, who were pushing him to soften his stance on things like Charlottesville. Moderation would never win over Democrats or independents. The best thing was to appeal to the base: “You’ve got the base,” Bannon said. “And you grow the base by getting” things done.

But appealing to that base is precisely what is preventing things from getting done. As one top Republican strategist told the Wall Street Journal: “By not speak out against” Charlottesville and the white supremacy of the Republican party, “it is bleeding into the party, and that is going to make it far more difficult to pass anything.”

The right-wing racial populism that once served the conservative cause so well is now, as even the most conservative Republicans are acknowledging, getting in its way. Whatever the outcome of the civil war Bannon intends to fight, it’ll be waged against the backdrop of a declining rather than an ascendant movement, with the tools of yesterday rather than tomorrow.

That is why, having had seven months in the White House to prosecute his populist war on the Republican establishment – something Buckley and his minions could only dream of in 1955 – Bannon now finds himself staring into the abyss of a website, hoping to find there a power he couldn’t find in the most powerful office of the world.

And don’t forget to buy the second edition of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (yes, you read that subtitle correctly), now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Tonight, Trump gives an address about Afghanistan. The tone/style will be either trademark bombast (fire and fury) or “presidential” or both. Regardless of the style, it’ll entail a commitment, according to the latest reports, of roughly four thousand US troops, a fraction of the number of troops committed to Afghanistan under Obama, with no mention of private contractors. In the grand scheme of things, it’ll be a status quo operation packaged in high-octane rhetoric.

Social media will focus entirely on the rhetoric. The theme of the commentary will be something like: Trump consolidating his shaky presidency with imperial violence abroad! Media falls for new Trump presidency grounded in imperial violence abroad! And then by Wednesday, it’ll all be forgotten. The discussion will have moved on to Trump’s latest tweet, whatever surge in the polls Trump got from his announcement will be countermanded by whatever barbarity he utters in his tweet.

But while everyone will be talking about the “insanity” of this presidency and this moment, there’ll be almost no discussion of the real insanity of this moment: that yet another US president continues, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, the longest war in US history—a war that shows no sign of being winnable—simply because no US president wants to be the one who lost Afghanistan.

Everyone is aware of the real insanity. We just call it normal politics. Trump frothing at the mouth? That’s norm erosion.

“i sent a piece about hitler to Reader’s Digest (sales 3.5 million) for their series ‘my most unforgettable character’. it came back very promptly. feuchtwanger tells me thomas mann and werfel, who has been very successful here, had their contributions sent back too. the magazine submits readers’ contributions to half a dozen experts. one checks whether the thing is brown, a second whether it stinks, a third that there are no solid lumps in it etc. that is how strictly it is checked to see that it is real shit before they accept it.”

—Brecht, Journals, 04/21/42

The day he learned of the fall of Bastille, the ever-punctual Kant was late for his morning walk. That’s what the frenzied pace of the French Revolution did to people’s experience of time. It’s now been almost a week since we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation with North Korea. I wonder how cultural historians of the future will record or register the changed sense of felt time in this era.

Here’s a pop quiz for you: What’s the connection between Lytton Strachey and Monica Lewinsky? No googling!

Answer: There’s a Bloomsbury tale, immortalized by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Old Bloomsbury,” about how she, her sister Vanessa, and her brother-in-law Clive were sitting in the drawing room at 46 Gordon Square one evening in spring, when “suddenly,” as Woolf tells it, “the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s dress. ‘Semen?’ he said.”

For Woolf, this incident seemed to inaugurate or announce a new era in human affairs, a revolution in manners and mores, the kind of sexual candor and frankness she may have had in mind when she wrote, elsewhere, “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”

Looking back on the Lewinsky affair, and the semen-stained blue dress in particular, one wonders if Woolf was right.

Anyway, there’s an essay to be written on “Lytton and Lewinsky: Two Stains That Changed the World. Or Not.”

I’m about 2/3 of the way through Marcel Ophuls’s long-lost documentary The Memory of Justice, which is now playing on HBO. I had been alerted to it by this mostly appreciative review from Ian Buruma.

If I can be permitted an opinion without having quite finished the film (that comes tonight), part of me is disappointed with what I’ve seen.

The first half covers fairly well trodden ground, without unearthing much that’s new. Much of it feels like a director being put through his paces, or a director putting his subjects through their paces.

Despite his reputation as an interviewer, Ophuls doesn’t extricate a lot from Telford Taylor that you wouldn’t know from reading Taylor’s articles and books. Or from Albert Speer, for that matter, that you didn’t know from the hundreds of interviews Speer gave or the many biographies and meditations on him. If anything, Ophuls allows Speer an even greater dignity than Speer managed to conjure for himself through all his savvy manipulation from Nuremberg to the years of his comfortable retirement upon his release from Spandau.

Which is why Buruma’s specific appreciation of that particular treatment in the film (of Speer) seems odd.

Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.” In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.

Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

As a warning and reminder in the Age of Trump, when right-minded people seem more alarmed by the president’s vulgarity than they were by Cheney’s ruthlessness, this is an important point. But as a treatment of Speer, it’s familiar territory, an easy massage hitting all the right pressure points. H.L.A. Hart wondered what was the point of writing something everyone already knew. I guess it’s because there’s always a market for it. (There’s a scene in a postwar sauna, where naked men and women are interviewed about the gas chambers, and it, too, feels a little familiar and on the nose.) Conversely, because there are many ways to state a falsehood but only one way to state a truth, Kierkergaard (at least according to Robert Paul Wolff; I’ve yet to find the original), said the truth will always be boring. So perhaps repetition is the price we pay.

That said, there are four things about the film that make it worth watching.

First, there’s documentary footage there I’ve never seen, and it can be revelatory. I’ve read many times, for example, about how Göring dominated Nuremberg. But I never really had a sense of it, till now. I’ve read many times about how Robert Jackson, despite his (justifiably) luminous reputation as a rhetorician here at home, was tongue-tied by Göring’s rhetorical mastery during the cross-examination. It’s something else to see it on screen.

Second, and relatedly, in some of his interviews, Ophuls does capture something you simply couldn’t have known merely by reading. For example, Dönitz, in his interviews on camera, exhibits not only the prickliness and the defensiveness you might expect, but also the haplessness. He defeats himself on screen—similar to what Arendt describes Eichmann doing at his trial—but which it’s hard to get a sense of, merely on the page.

Third, once you get to part 2 of the film, which deals more aggressively with how the postwar generation grappled with Nazism—there’s an extended focus on actors in Germany, both during and after the Nazi era, that’s just chilling; likewise, Ophuls’s interviews of wife, who was the daughter of a Wehrmacht officer, are almost cruel in their demand for and receipt of clarity—the documentary comes into its own. This to me is the heart of the film: the presence of the past (no surprise, given The Sorrow and the Pity.)

Last, and this is a small moment in the film, but telling. Ophuls interviews a woman in Berlin who’s quite jolly. In an unsettling way: she laughs when she shouldn’t, she seems inappropriately hail fellow well met. But at one point in the interview Ophuls asks her what it was like when the Russians came into Berlin. She says, in that jolly fashion, that she was raped. Every woman was raped, she adds. He asks her how that was or something like that (the question itself is unnerving). She says, oh, it wasn’t too terrible. But her face says otherwise: the jolliness drains out with the blood. And Ophuls, trying I think to mirror what she’s saying, says something like, well, things happen in war. As if he’s describing a summer storm. She agrees.

The reason it’s such a powerful moment is that this is the early 1970s, long before there was such an extensive literature and discourse about the Russians’ raping of women in postwar Berlin. It gives a concrete sense of how important it is to have that literature, that discourse, on a buried topic, to name things, to give them a political shape—and thereby elevate them, bring them to consciousness, as personal experience.

If I have any other thoughts on the last 1/3 of the film, I’ll let you know.

In 1941, Hella Wuolijoki, an Estonian-born Finnish writer and friend of Brecht’s, submitted a play to a literary competition in Finland. She didn’t win the prize. Brecht’s explanation? “she didn’t lobby. as if it weren’t the best things that most need publicity, intrigue and manipulation…”

Update (7:30 pm)

As someone pointed out in the comments thread, the play Wuloijoki submitted may actually have been a play Brecht wrote or wrote in collaboration with her. A little confusing from the journal entry itself.

John Harwood has a good piece about Trump’s downward spiral of weakness:

Increasingly, federal officials are deciding to simply ignore President Donald Trump. As stunning as that sounds, fresh evidence arrives every day of the government treating the man elected to lead it as someone talking mostly to himself.

…

“What is most remarkable is the extent to which his senior officials act as if Trump were not the chief executive,” Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, wrote last weekend on lawfareblog.com.

“Never has a president been so regularly ignored or contradicted by his own officials,” Goldsmith added. “The president is a figurehead who barks out positions and desires, but his senior subordinates carry on with different commitments.”

…

The disconnect between Trump’s words and the government’s actions has been apparent for months.

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s Quinnipiac poll—showing Trump’s approval ratings at an all-time low (33%), with drops in support among Trump’s triad of support: men (40%), whites without college degrees (43%), and Republicans (75%)—and two week’s worth of articles demonstrating an increasingly restive Republican Party in Congress bucking Trump’s will (on Russia, war powers, health care, Jeff Sessions, and more), Harwood adds one more tile to the developing mosaic of Trump’s epic fail of a presidency.

It seems like we’ve gone, in a mere six months, from to this meme/scene from April 1945—

—without any of the promised the features in between: no Reichstag Fire, no Enabling Act, no Night of the Long Knives, and so forth.

Meanwhile, as I’ve argued before, where Trump is actually having a lot of policy and personnel success—long-term success, of the sort that will be impossible to reverse by his successors—is in appointing judges. While Trump has managed to reverse a lot of Obama’s regulatory regime, we should remember that that is the sort of thing presidents can do independently. And as Obama has now discovered, what one president can do, his successor can undo. And vice versa.

Judges are different. As Ronald Klain argued last month:

He [Trump] not only put Neil M. Gorsuch in the Supreme Court vacancy created by Merrick Garland’s blocked confirmation, but he also selected 27 lower-court judges as of mid-July. Twenty-seven! That’s three times Obama’s total and more than double the totals of Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton — combined. For the Courts of Appeals — the final authority for 95 percent of federal cases — no president before Trump named more than three judges whose nominations were processed in his first six months; Trump has named nine. Trump is on pace to more than double the number of federal judges nominated by any president in his first year.

Moreover, Trump’s picks are astoundingly young. Obama’s early Court of Appeals nominees averaged age 55; Trump’s nine picks average 48. That means, on average, Trump’s appellate court nominees will sit through nearly two more presidential terms than Obama’s. Many of Trump’s judicial nominees will be deciding the scope of our civil liberties and the shape of civil rights laws in the year 2050 — and beyond.

Which makes for an interesting irony.

Since Trump’s election, we’ve heard a lot of concern from intellectual and journalistic worthies about the dangers of populism. What might a strongman armed with the instruments of the people and propaganda—legislatures, rallies, speeches, and tweets—do? Specifically, what might he and his populist crowds do to the courts, ever upheld as the bastions of liberty against a rampaging, marauding people?

As it turns out, that question gets it exactly backward. It’s not what Trump will “do” (in the sense of illicit browbeating or intimidation) to the courts that matters; it’s what the courts will do for him and his legacy that matters. Far from strongarming an independent judiciary into submission, Trump will secure his legacy simply by nominating judges and having them approved by the Senate, exactly as the Constitution prescribes.

It will be the independent judiciary, the Constitution, the counter-majoritarian Senate, the rule of law—all those instruments and institutions, in other words, that the Trump-as-fascist crowd loves to uphold as the safeguards of freedom or as imperiled flowers of the moment—that will be the most critical sources of Trumpism’s long-term power and effects.

This campaign commercial for Amy McGrath, who is running for Congress in Kentucky, has got the Twitterati excited.

The campaign of McGrath seems in line with a decision, leaked last June, by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to field candidates who had seen combat, along with “job creators” and “business owners.”

The question is: does it work?

In the last ten presidential elections, only one candidate who actually fought in a war has won: George HW Bush.

All the rest either served their country by shooting flicks (Reagan) or manipulating family connections or deferments to avoid combat (Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump) or simply weren’t eligible for a draft (Obama).

Meanwhile, enlistees, soldiers, and war heroes, Republican and Democrat alike, have repeatedly lost: Mondale, Dukakis, Dole, Gore, Kerry, and McCain.

In the most spectacular face-off’s between a genuine war hero and a draft-dodger-ish type—Clinton v. George H.W. Bush in 1992, George W. Bush v. John Kerry in 2004—it was the draft-dodger-ish type that won. (And if you think the same rules don’t apply at the congressional level, just google the names Max Cleland and Saxby Chambliss. Though as Matt Countryman pointed out, Tammy Duckworth is an excellent counterpoint to my claim.)

Despite our sense that Americans respond best to warriors and war heroes, it may be the confidence man who commands the most confidence. Something has shifted in this country. Whether it’s the passing of World War II as a touchstone of the political imagination or the end of the Cold War or the rise of neoliberalism, the elections of the last several decades have shown that while the consultant class and the image-makers continue to fantasize about an electorate cobbled together from a Spielberg film and a Sorkin script, the citizenry is far more taken by the conman and the scam artist than they are by the virtuous soldier.

Yet the dream dies hard, particularly among Democrats.

I get that this commercial is supposed to be different: a woman candidate, discriminated against, defending health care and the like. But, still, the main message is in the visuals and voiceover of that first minute of the video—all aircraft carriers and bombers, with the punch line being this: “I flew 89 combat missions bombing Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

My gut sense is: it doesn’t work. It doesn’t even work for Republicans anymore. Just ask Bob Dole. Or John McCain.

Back in 2012, Barack Obama made so much hay out of Mitt Romney’s connection to Bain Capital that a distraught Cory Booker was inspired to cry out, “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.” Booker called Obama’s attacks “nauseating” and “ridiculous,” which earned him a supportive tweet from John McCain.

Fast-forward to 2017. The Obama people are now pushing hard for Deval Patrick, the former two-term governor of Massachusetts, to run for the Democratic nomination in 2020. Guess what Patrick has been doing since he left the governor’s mansion? Working at Bain Capital.

It’s something. The combined forces of Wall Street and the Hamptons—sorry, Clinton and Obama—are pushing hard, variously, for Joe Biden (who’s making strong noises that he’ll be running in 2020), Kamala Harris, and Deval Patrick.

What do these three people have in common? None of them is the most popular politician in the United States.