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1There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.
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3In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.
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5It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.
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7The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.
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9Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.
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11The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.
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13Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt
14The consequence was a shift in liberalism's intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.
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16It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.
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18The origins of this shift are overdetermined. Richard Nixon bears a large part of the blame, but so does Bill Clinton. The Southern Strategy, yes, but the destruction of labor unions, too. I have my own sympathies, but I do not propose to adjudicate that question here.
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20Suffice it to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition?
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22Why did they abandon us?
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24What's the matter with Kansas?
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26The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all.
27The trouble is that stupid hicks don't know what's good for them. They're getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest.
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29As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty breakup knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away.
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31Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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33Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.
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35The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:
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37Study finds Daily Show viewers more informed than viewers of Fox News.
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40They're beating CNN watchers too.
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42NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.
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44You're better off watching nothing than watching Fox. He likes that even more.
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46The good news doesn't stop.
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48Liberals aren't just better informed. They're smarter.
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50They've got better grammar. They know more words.
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52Smart kids grow up to be liberals, while conservatives reason like drunks.
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54Liberals are better able to process new information; they're less biased like that. They've got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They've got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.
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56The smug style created a feedback loop. If the trouble with conservatives was ignorance, then the liberal impulse was to correct it. When such corrections failed, disdain followed after it.
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58Of course, there is a smug style in every political movement: elitism among every ideology believing itself in possession of the solutions to society's ills. But few movements have let the smug tendency so corrupt them, or make so tenuous its case against its enemies.
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60"Conservatives are always at a bit of a disadvantage in the theater of mass democracy," the conservative editorialist Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review last October, "because people en masse aren't very bright or sophisticated, and they're vulnerable to cheap, hysterical emotional appeals."
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62The smug style thinks Williamson is wrong, of course, but not in principle. It's only that he's confused about who the hordes of stupid, hysterical people are voting for. The smug style reads Williamson and says, "No! You!"
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64Elites, real elites, might recognize one another by their superior knowledge. The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing.
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66Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you're actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn't know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.
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68The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing. It is the smug style's first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. A politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from "imposing their morals" like the bad guys do.
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70Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style's culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn't get them. A culture that has come to replace politics itself.
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72The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important, but go no further: What is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch links and mockery at those who don't. The Good Facts are enough: Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns.
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74The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism "is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition," that "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse ... do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
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76The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing
77Richard Hofstadter, the historian whose most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this essay exists in some obvious reference to, advanced a similar line in writing not so well-remembered today. His then-influential history writing drips with disdain for rubes who regard themselves as victimized by economics and history, who have failed to maintain correct political attitudes.
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79But 60 years ago, American liberalism relied too much on the support of working people to let these ideas take too much hold. Even its elitists, its Schlesingers and Bells, were tempered by the power of the labor movement, by the role Marxism still played in even liberal politics — forces too powerful to allow non-elite concerns to entirely escape the liberal mental horizon. Walter Reuther, and Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph were still in the room, and they mattered.
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82Sixty years ago, the ugliest tendencies were still private, too. The smug style belonged to real elites, knowing in their cocktail parties, far from the ears of rubes. But today we have television, and the internet, and a liberalism worked out in universities and think tanks. Today, the better part of liberalism is Trillings — or those who'd like to be, at any rate — and everyone can hear them.
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84On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court found that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment. After decades of protests, legislation, setbacks, and litigation, the 13 states still holding out against the inevitable were ordered to relent. Kim Davis, a clerk tasked with issuing marriage licenses to couples in her Kentucky county, refused.
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86At the distance of six months, it is surprising that she was, beyond a few short-lived and empty efforts, the only civil bureaucrat to do so. One imagines a hundred or a thousand Kim Davises in the country, small administrators with small power, outraged by the collapse of a moral fight that they were winning just a few years prior.
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88In the days between the June decision and the July 1 announcement that the American Civil Liberties Union would represent four couples who had been denied marriage licenses by the Rowan County Clerk's office, many braced for resistance. Surely compliance would come hard in some places. Surely, some of the losers would refuse to give up. There was something giddy about it — at long last, the good guys would be the ones bearing down with the full force of the law.
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90It did not take long for the law to correct Davis. On August 12, a judge ordered a stay, preventing Davis from refusing any further under the protection of the law. The Sixth Circuit, and then the Supreme Court, refused to hear her appeal.
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92Despite further protest and Davis's ultimate jailing for contempt of court, normal service was restored in short order. The 23,000 people of Rowan Country suffered, all told, slightly less than seven weeks without a functioning civil licensure apparatus.
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94Davis remained a fixation. Dour, rural, thrice divorced but born again — Twitter could not have invented a better parody of the uncool. She was ridiculed for her politics but also for her looks — that she had been married so many times was inexplicable! That she thought she had the slightest grasp of the Constitution, doubly so.
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96When Davis was jailed for five days following her refusal to comply with the court order, many who pride themselves on having a vastly more compassionate moral foundation than Davis cheered the imprisonment of a political foe.
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98The ridicule of Davis became so pronounced that even smug circles, always on the precipice of self-reproach, began eventually to rein in the excess. Mocking her appearance, openly celebrating the incarceration of an ideological opponent — these were not good looks.
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100But a more fundamental element of smug disdain for Kim Davis went unchallenged: the contention, at bottom, that Davis was not merely wrong in her convictions, but that her convictions were, in themselves, an error and a fraud.
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102That is: Kim Davis was not only on the wrong side of the law. She was not even a subscriber to a religious ideology that had found itself at moral odds with American culture. Rather, she was a subscriber to nothing, a hateful bigot who did not even understand her own religion.
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104Christianity, as many hastened to point out, is about love. Christ commands us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. If the Bible took any position on the issue at all, it was that divorce, beloved by Davis, was a sin, and that she was a hypocrite masquerading among the faithful.
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106How many of these critiques were issued by atheists?
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108This, more than anything I can recall in recent American life, is an example of the smug style. Many liberals do not believe that evangelical Christianity ought to guide public life; many believe, moreover, that the moral conceits of that Christianity are wrong, even harmful to society. But to the smug liberal, it isn't that Kim Davis is wrong. How can she be? She's only mistaken. She just doesn't know the Good Facts, even about her own religion. She's angry and confused, another hick who's not with it.
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110It was an odd thing to assert in the case of Christianity, a religion that until recently was taken to be another shibboleth of the uncool, not a loving faith misunderstood by bigots. But this is knowing: knowing that the new line on Jesus is that the homophobes just don't get their own faith.
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112Kim Davis was behind the times. Her beliefs did not represent a legitimate challenge to liberal consensus because they did not represent a challenge at all: They were incoherent, at odds with the Good Facts. Google makes every man a theologian.
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114This, I think, is fundamental to understanding the smug style. If good politics and good beliefs are just Good Facts and good tweets — that is, if there is no ideology beyond sensible conclusions drawn from a rational assessment of the world — then there are no moral fights, only lying liars and the stupid rubes who believe them.
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116When Davis was first released from county jail, Mike Huckabee went to meet her. But the smug style sees no true ideology there, no moral threat to contend with. Only a huckster and a hick: one to be ridiculed, and the other to be refuted. What more, the smug man posts, could there be to say about it? They're idiots! Look, look: This Onion article nails it.
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118In November of last year, during the week when it became temporarily fashionable for American governors to declare that Syrian refugees would not be welcome in their state, Hamilton Nolan wrote an essay for Gawker called "Dumb Hicks Are America's Greatest Threat."
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120If there has ever been a tirade so dedicated to the smug style, to the proposition that it is neither malice, nor capital, nor ideological difference, but rather the backward stupidity of poor people that has ruined the state of American policy, then it is hidden beyond our view, in some uncool place, far from the front page of Gawker.
121"Many of America's political leaders are warning of the dangers posed by Syrian refugees. They are underestimating, though, the much greater danger: dumbass hicks, in charge of things," Nolan wrote. "...You, our elected officials, are embarrassing us. All of us, except your fellow dumb hicks, who voted for you in large numbers. You — our racist, xenophobic, knuckle-dragging ignorant leaders — are making us look bad in front of the guests (the whole world). You are the bad cousin in the family who always ruins Thanksgiving. Go in the back room and drink a can of beer alone please."
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123Among the dumb hicks Nolan identifies are "many Southern mayors" and "many lesser known state representatives." He cites the Ku Klux Klan — "exclusively dumbass hicks," he writes. "100%," he emphasizes — despite the fact that the New York Times, in an investigation of white supremacist members of Stormfront.org, found that "the top reported interest of Stormfront members is reading." That they are "news and political junkies." Despite the fact that if "you come compare Stormfront users to people who go to the Yahoo News site, it turns out that the Stormfront crowd is twice as likely to visit nytimes.com."
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125"They have long threads praising Breaking Bad and discussing the comparative merits of online dating sites, like Plenty of Fish and OKCupid," the Times reports.
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127In another piece, published later the same month, Nolan wrote that "Inequality of wealth — or, if you like, the distribution of wealth in our society in a way that results in poverty — is not just one issue among many. It is the root from which blooms nearly all major social problems."
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129He's right about that. But who does he imagine is responsible for this inequality? The poor? The dumb? The hicks?
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131Hamilton Nolan isn't stupid. He has even, lately, argued that even the worst of the rubes must be allies in class struggle. Yet the trouble is still swallowing what "motherfuckers" those people are.
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133Nolan is perhaps the funniest and most articulate of those pointing fingers at the "dumbass hicks," but he isn't alone. It is evidently intolerable to a huge swath of liberalism to confess the obvious: that those responsible have homes in Brooklyn, too. That they buy the same smartphones. That they too are on Twitter. That the oligarchs are making fun of stupid poor people too. That they're better at it, and always will be.
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135No: The trouble must be out there, somewhere. In the country. Where the idiots are; where the hicks are too stupid to know where problems blossom.
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137"To the dumb hick leaders of America, I say: (nothing). You wouldn't listen anyhow," Nolan writes. "My words would go in one ear and right out the other. Like talking to an old block of wood."
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139It's a shame. They might be receptive to his concerns about poverty.
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141If there is a single person who exemplifies the dumbass hick in the smug imagination, it is former President George W. Bush. He's got the accent. He can't talk right. He seems stupefied by simple concepts, and his politics are all gee-whiz Texas ignorance. He is the ur-hick. He is the enemy.
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143He got all the way to White House, and he's still being taken for a ride by the scheming rightwing oligarchs around him — just like those poor rubes in Kansas. If only George knew Dick Cheney wasn't acting in his own best interests!
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145It is worth considering that Bush is the son of a president, a patrician born in Connecticut and educated at Andover and Harvard and Yale.
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147It is worth considering that he does not come from a family known for producing poor minds.
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150It is worth considering that beginning with his 1994 gubernatorial debate against Ann Richards, and at every juncture thereafter, opponents have been defeated after days of media outlets openly speculating whether George was up to the mental challenge of a one-on-one debate.
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152"Throughout his short political career," ABC's Katy Textor wrote on the eve of the 2000 debates against Al Gore, "Bush has benefited from low expectations of his debating abilities. The fact that he skipped no less than three GOP primary debates, and the fact that he was reluctant to agree to the Commission on Presidential Debates proposal, has done little to contradict the impression of a candidate uncomfortable with this unavoidable fact of campaign life."
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154"Done little to contradict."
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156On November 6, 2000, during his final pre-election stump speech, Bush explained his history of political triumph thusly: "They misunderesimated me."
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158What an idiot. American liberals made fun of him for that one for years.
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160It is worth considering that he didn't misspeak.
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163He did, however, deliberately cultivate the confusion. He understood the smug style. He wagered that many liberals, eager to see their opponents as intellectually deficient, would buy into the act and thereby miss the more pernicious fact of his moral deficits.
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165He wagered correctly. Smug liberals said George was too stupid to get elected, too stupid to get reelected, too stupid to pass laws or appoint judges or weather a political fight. Liberals misunderestimated George W. Bush all eight years of his presidency.
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167George W. Bush is not a dumbass hick. In eight years, all the sick Daily Show burns in the world did not appreciably undermine his agenda.
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169The smug mind defends itself against these charges. Oh, we're just having fun, it says. We don't mean it. This is just for a laugh, it's just a joke, stop being so humorless.
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171It is exasperating, after all, to have to live in a country where so many people are so aggressively wrong about so much, they say. You go on about ideology and shibboleths and knowing, but we are right on the issues, aren't we? We are right on social policy and right on foreign policy and right on evolution, and same-sex marriage, and climate change too. Surely that's what matters.
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173We don't really mean they're all stupid — but hey, lay off. We're not smug! This is just how we vent our frustration. Otherwise it would be too depressing having to share a country with these people!
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175We have long passed the point where blithe ridicule of the American right can be credibly cast as private stress relief and not, for instance, the animating public strategy of an entire wing of the liberal culture apparatus. The Daily Show, as it happens, is not the private entertainment of elites blowing off some steam. It is broadcast on national television.
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177Twitter isn't private. Not that anybody with the sickest burn to accompany the smartest chart would want it to be. Otherwise, how would everyone know how in-the-know you are?
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179The rubes have seen your videos. You posted it on their wall.
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181Still don't get why liberal opinion is correct? This video settles the debate for good.
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183I have been wondering for a long time how it is that so many entries to the op-ed pages take it as their justifying premise that they are arguing for a truth that has never been advanced before.
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185We have long passed the point where blithe ridicule of the American right can be credibly cast as private stress relief
186"It's an accepted, nearly unchallenged assumption that Muslim communities across the U.S. have a problem — that their youth tend toward violent ideology, or are susceptible to "radicalization" by groups like the Islamic State," began an editorial that appeared last December in the New York Times. But "after all," it goes on, "the majority of mass shootings in America are perpetrated by white men but no one questions what might have radicalized them in their communities."
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188But this contention — that Muslims possess superlative violent tendencies — has been challenged countless times, hasn't it? It was challenged here, and here and here as far back as 9/11. The president of the United State challenged it on national television the night before this editorial was published. The Times itself did too. The myopic provincialism of anybody who believes that Muslims are a uniquely violent people is the basis of a five-year-old Onion headline, not some new moral challenge.
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190The smug style leaves its adherents no other option: If an idea has failed to take hold, if the Good Facts are not widely accepted, then the problem must be that these facts have not yet reached the disbelievers.
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193In December 2015, Public Policy Polling found that 30 percent of Republicans were in favor of bombing Agrabah, the Arab-sounding fictional city from Disney's Aladdin. Hilarious.
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195PPP has run joke questions before, of course: polling the popularity of Deez Nuts, or asking after God's job approval. But these questions, at least, let their audience in on the gag. Now liberalism is deliberately setting up the last segment of the population actually willing to endure a phone survey in service of what it knew would make for some hilarious copy when the rubes inevitably fell for it. This is not a survey in service of a joke — it is a survey in service of a human punchline.
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197As if only Republicans covered up gaps in their knowledge by responding to what they assume is a good-faith question by guessing from their general principles.
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199It may be easy to mistake with the private venting of frustrated elites, but the rubes can read the New York Times, too. It is not where liberals whisper to each other about the secret things that go unchallenged. Poll respondents are not the secret fodder for a joke.
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201This is the consequence of "private" venting, and it is the consequence of knowing too: If good politics comes solely from good data and good sense, it cannot be that large sections of the American public are merely wrong about so many vital things. It cannot be that they have heard our arguments but rejected them — that might mean we must examine our own methods of persuasion.
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203No: it is only that the wrong beliefs are unchallenged — that their believers are trapped in "information bubbles" and confirmation bias. That no one knows the truth, except the New York Times (or Vox). If only we could tell them, question them, show them this graph. If they don't get it then, well, then they're hopeless.
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205The smug style plays out in private too, of course. If you haven't started one yourself, you've surely seen the Facebook threads: Ten or 20 of Brooklyn's finest gather to say how exasperated they are, these days, by the stupidity of the American public.
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207"I just don't know what to do about these people," one posts. "I think we have to accept that a lot of people are just misinformed!" replies another. "Like, I think they actually don't want to know anything that would undermine their worldview."
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209They tend to do it in the comment section, under an article about how conservatives are difficult to persuade because they isolate themselves in mutually reinforcing information bubbles.
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211What have been the consequences of the smug style?
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213It has become a tradition for the smug, in editorials and essay and confident Facebook boasting, to assume that the presidential debates will feature their candidate, in command of the facts, wiping the floor with the empty huckster ignorance of their Republican opponent.
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215It was popularly assumed, for a time, that George W. Bush was too stupid to be elected president.
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217The smug believed the same of Ronald Reagan.
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220John Yoo, the architect of the Bush administration's torture policies, escaped The Daily Show unscathed. Liberals wondered what to do when Jon Stewart fails. What would success look like? Were police waiting in the wings, a one-way ticket to the Hague if Stewart nailed him?
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222It would be unfair to say that the smug style has never learned from these mistakes. But the lesson has been, We underestimated how many people could be fooled.
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224That is: We underestimated just how dumb these dumb hicks really are.
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226We just didn't get our message to them. They just stayed in their information bubble. We can't let the lying liars keep lying to these people — but how do we reach these idiots who only trust Fox?
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229Rarely: Maybe they're savvier than we thought. Maybe they're angry for a reason.
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231As it happens, reasons aren't too difficult to come by.
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233During a San Francisco fundraiser in the 2008 primary campaign, Barack Obama offered an observation that was hailed not without some glee as the first unforced error from then-Senator Cool.
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235"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania," Obama said, "and, like, a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
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237It's the latter part that we remember eight years later — the clinging to guns and religion and hate — but it is the first part that was important: the part about lost jobs and neglect by two presidential administrations.
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239Obama's observation was not novel.
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241The notion that material loss and abandonment have driven America's white working class into a fit of resentment is boilerplate for even the Democratic Party's tepid left these days. But in the president's formulation and in the formulation of smug stylists who have embraced some material account of uncool attitudes, the downturn, the jobs lost and the opportunities narrowed, are a force of nature — something that has "been happening" in the passive voice.
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243If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are they voting against their own self-interest?
244This, I suspect, will one day become the Republican Party's rationale for addressing climate change: Look, we don't know how the dead hooker wound up in the hotel room. But she's here now, that's undeniable, so we've gotta get rid of the body.
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246Today, it is the excuse of American smug mind: Where did all of these poor people come from?
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248If pressed for an answer, I suppose they would say Republicans, elected by rubes voting against their own self-interest. Reagan, Gingrich, Bush — all those Bad Fact–knowing halfwits who were too dumb to get elected to anything.
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250Well, sure. In the past 30 years of American life, the Republican Party has dedicated itself to replacing every labor law with a photo of Ronald Reagan's face.
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252But this does not excuse liberals beating full retreat to the colleges and the cities, abandoning the dispossessed to their fate. It does not excuse surrendering a century of labor politics in the name of electability. It does not excuse gazing out decades later to find that those left behind are not up on the latest thought and deciding, We didn't abandon them. The idiots didn't want to be saved.
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254It was not Ronald Reagan who declared the era of big government. It was not the GOP that decided the coastally based, culturally liberal industries of technology, Hollywood, and high finance were the future of the American economy.
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257If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are they voting against their own self-interest? But no party these past decades has effectively represented the interests of these dispossessed. Only one has made a point of openly disdaining them too.
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259Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the smug in turn.
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262The rubes noticed that liberal Democrats, distressed by the notion that Indiana would allow bakeries to practice open discrimination against LGBTQ couples, threatened boycotts against the state, mobilizing the considerable economic power that comes with an alliance of New York and Hollywood and Silicon Valley to punish retrograde Gov. Mike Pence, but had no such passion when the same governor of the same state joined 21 others in refusing the Medicaid expansion. No doubt good liberals objected to that move too. But I've yet to see a boycott threat about it.
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264Early in the marriage equality fight, activists advanced the theory that when people discovered a friend or relative was gay, they became far more likely to support gay rights. They were correct. These days it is difficult for anybody in a position of liberal power — whether in business, or government, or media — to avoid having openly gay colleagues, colleagues whom they like and whom they'd like to help.
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266But few opinion makers fraternize with the impoverished. Few editors and legislators and Silicon Valley heroes have dinner with the lovely couple on food stamps down the road, much less those scraping by in Indiana.
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268If any single event provided the direct impetus for this essay, it was a running argument I had with an older, liberal writer over the seriousness of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Since June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, this writer has taken it upon himself each day to tell his Facebook followers that Donald Trump is a bad kind of dude.
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270That saying as much was the key to stopping him and his odious followers too.
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272"Ridicule is the most powerful weapon we have against any of our enemies," he told me in the end, "but especially against the ones who, not incorrectly, take it so personally and lash out in ways that shine klieg lights on those very flaws we detest.
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274"If you're laughing at someone, you're certainly not respecting him."
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276"Anyway," he went on, "I'm done talking to you. We see the world differently. I'm fine with that. We don't need to be friends."
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278Ridicule is the most effective political tactic.
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281Ridicule is especially effective when it's personal and about expressing open disdain for stupid, bad people.
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284Political legitimacy is granted by the respect of elite liberals.
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287You can't be legitimate if you're the butt of our jokes.
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290If you don't agree, we can't work together politically.
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293We can't even be friends, because politics is social.
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296Because politics is performative — if we don't mock together, we aren't on the same side.
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299If there is a bingo card for the smug style somewhere, then cross off every square. You've won.
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301I would be less troubled if I did not believe that the smug style has captured an enormous section of American liberalism. If I believed that its politics, as practiced by its supporters, extended beyond this line of thought. If this were an exception.
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303But even as many have come around to the notion that Trump is the prohibitive favorite for his party's nomination, the smug interpretation has been predictable: We only underestimated how hateful, how stupid, the Republican base can be.
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305Trump capturing the nomination will not dispel the smug style; if anything, it will redouble it. Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the fuck happened?
306
307On March 20, Salon's David Masciotra wrote that if Trump "actually had the strength to articulate uncomfortable and inconvenient truths, he would turn his favorite word — 'loser' — €”not on full-time professionals in the press, but on his supporters."
308
309Masciotra goes on:
310
311Journalists found that in the counties where Trump is most dominant, there are large numbers of white high school dropouts, and unemployed people no longer looking for work. An alliance with the incoherent personality cult of Donald Trump's candidacy correlates strongly with failure to obtain a high school diploma, and withdrawal from the labor force. The counties also have a consistent history of voting for segregationists, and have an above average percentage of its residents living in mobile homes.
312
313The kicker: "Many conservatives, and even some kindhearted liberals, might object to the conclusions one can draw from the data as stereotyping, but the empirical evidence leaves little choice. Donald Trump's supporters confirm the stereotype against them."
314
315Here's the conclusion I draw: If Donald Trump has a chance in November, it is because the knowing will dictate our strategy. Unable to countenance the real causes of their collapse, they will comfort with own impotence by shouting, "Idiots!" again and again, angrier and angrier, the handmaidens of their own destruction.
316
317The smug style resists empathy for the unknowing. It denies the possibility of a politics whereby those who do not share knowing culture, who do not like the right things or know the Good Facts or recognize the intellectual bankruptcy of their own ideas can be worked with, in spite of these differences, toward a common goal.
318
319It is this attitude that has driven the dispossessed into the arms of a candidate who shares their fury. It is this attitude that may deliver him the White House, a "serious" threat, a threat to be mocked and called out and hated, but not to be taken seriously.
320
321The wages of smug is Trump.
322
323Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. That for every overpowered study finding superior liberal open-mindedness and intellect and knowledge, there is one to suggest that Republicans have the better of these qualities.
324
325Most damning, perhaps, to the fancy liberal self-conception: Republicans score higher in susceptibility to persuasion. They are willing to change their minds more often.
326
327The Republican coalition tends toward the center: educated enough, smart enough, informed enough.
328
329The Democratic coalition in the 21st century is bifurcated: It has the postgraduates, but it has the disenfranchised urban poor as well, a group better defined by race and immigration status than by class. There are more Americans without high school diplomas than in possession of doctoral degrees. The math proceeds from there.
330
331The smug style takes this as a defense. Elite liberalism, and the Democratic Party by extension, cannot hate poor people, they say. We aren't smug! Just look at our coalition. These aren't rubes. Just look at our embrace of their issues.
332
333But observe how quickly professed concern for the oppressed becomes another shibboleth for the smug, another kind of knowing. Mere awareness of these issues becomes the most important thing, the capacity to articulate them a new subset of Correct Facts.
334
335Everyone in the know has read "The Case for Reparations," but it was the reading and performed admiration that counted, praised in the same breath as, "It is a better history than an actual case for actually paying, of course..."
336
337Pretend for a moment that all of it is true. That the smug style apprehended the world as it really is, that knowing — or knowing, no inflection — did make our political divide. That the problem is the rubes. That the dumbass hicks are to blame. They can't help it: Their brains don't work. They isolate themselves from all the Good Facts, and they're being taken for a ride by con men.
338
339Pretend the ridicule worked too: that the videos and the Twitter burns and destroying the opposition made all the bad guys go away.
340
341What kind of world would it leave us? An endless cycle of jokes? Of sick burns and smart tweets and knowing? Relative to whom? The smug style demands an object of disdain; it would find a new one quickly.
342
343It is central to the liberal self-conception that what separates them from reactionaries is a desire to help people, a desire to create a fairer and more just world. Liberals still want, or believe they still want, to make a more perfect union.
344
345Whether you believe they are deluded or not, whether you believe this project is worthwhile in any form or not, what I am trying to tell you is that the smug style has fundamentally undermined even the aspiration, that it has made American liberalism into the worst version of itself.
346
347It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people from the duty to respect them. It becomes all at once too easy to decide you know best, to never hear, much less ignore, protest to the contrary.
348
349At present, many of those most in need of the sort of help liberals believe they can provide despise liberalism, and are despised in turn. Is it surprising that with each decade, the "help" on offer drifts even further from the help these people need?
350
351It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people from the duty to respect them
352Even if the two could be separated, would it be worth it? What kind of political movement is predicated on openly disdaining the very people it is advocating for?
353
354The smug style, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. Further: It is a failure to believe that empathy has any value at all. It is the notion that anybody worthy of liberal time and attention and respect must capitulate, immediately, to the Good Facts.
355
356If they don't (and they won't) you're free to write them off and mock them. When they suffer, it's their just desserts.
357
358Make no mistake: I am not suggesting that liberals adopt a fuzzy, gentler version of their politics. I am not suggesting they compromise their issues for the sake of playing nice. What I am suggesting is that the battles waged by liberalism have drifted far away from their old egalitarian intentions.
359
360I am suggesting that open disdain for the people they say they want to help has led them to stop helping those people, too.
361
362I am suggesting that in the case of a Kim Davis, liberalism resist the impulse to go beyond the necessary legal fight and explicitly delight in punishing an old foe.
363
364I am suggesting that they instead wonder what it might be like to have little left but one's values; to wake up one day to find your whole moral order destroyed; to look around and see the representatives of a new order call you a stupid, hypocritical hick without bothering, even, to wonder how your corner of your poor state found itself so alienated from them in the first place. To work with people who do not share their values or their tastes, who do not live where they live or like what they like or know their Good Facts or their jokes.
365
366This is not a call for civility. Manners are not enough. The smug style did not arise by accident, and it cannot be abolished with a little self-reproach. So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further.  They will choose the smug style.
367
368Maybe the cycle is too deeply set already. Perhaps the divide, the disdain, the whole crack-up are inevitable. But if liberal good intentions are to make a play for a better future, they cannot merely recognize the ways they've come to hate their former allies. They must begin to mend the ways they lost them in the first place.
369
370Give Bernie’s Distraught Supporters a Break
371The media is treating them like weirdos, but they're responding to Sanders's loss like ordinary human beings.
372BY EMMETT RENSIN
373July 27, 2016
374Cecile Perez’s head was spinning. A 25-year-old Bernie Sanders delegate from Idaho, she had just walked out of the Democratic National Convention to join a protest on the streets of Philadelphia that had been going on in one form or another all week: the dissidents unwilling, for the moment, to accept their candidate’s defeat.
375
376MOST POPULAR
377The Media Coverage of Hillary Clinton Is Out of Whack
378Me Oh My!
379Fox News’ War on Women
380Moral Hazard
381No Time For Comedy
382“I haven’t ever done something this outspoken before,” she says while riding the subway to a protest at City Hall. “We were on the floor and then we were leaving, and now, wow, we’re here, we’re on the subway, we’re going to join this protest.”
383
384Perez described how her frustration had grown over the past 48 hours, how the “unity” theme was forced on her, how party officials lied to her about what signs they could bring, how controlling they were.
385
386“It shocked me,” she said. “And I try to be gracious about everything. But there’s so much wrong, and it’s so unsavory, we just need to make ourselves heard saying so—that we don’t like it and we want to speak up about it.”
387
388Stories like Perez’s have been the trend in Philadelphia, especially since Monday afternoon, when it became clear that not every Sanders delegate was prepared for a nationally televised show of unity. In the halls of the Wells Fargo Center, camera crews pin down Sanders delegates; the more outlandish, the better. On Tuesday, there were as many as three or four such interviews occurring at any given time: a man with a beard dyed blue, another in a Technicolor hat with Bernie Sanders name across the brim. The delegates were peppered with questions: “Have you accepted Bernie’s loss?” “Is the convention treating you fairly?” “Are you considering voting for Trump?” When one delegate stopped mid-interview to shout hello at passing friends, the cameraman waved them over, too.
389
390“Bernie?” the cameraman asked.
391
392“Bernie!” they yelled back.
393
394“Great, we want as many of you as we can find.”
395
396Political writers have joined the hunt as well. For the past few days they have been wandering onto the convention floor, or out to the protests beyond the gate to locate quotable Sanders fans. Once they find them, there’s the matter of choosing an angle. In some cases, the contempt is barely contained. “Pinning the Bernie Delegates Network down on even the loosest facts has been an exercise in high farce,” wrote Gideon Resnick of The Daily Beast. “In fact, it would appear that they are entirely disorganized, have no specific plans…” In others, like Julia Ioffe’s Politico Magazine profile of a revolt in the New Mexico delegation, the tone is closer to bemusement.
397
398The reports are issued, and the commentators go to work, incredulously sharing the most outlandish passages, distilling the whole purported “Bernie or Bust” movement down to simple psychology: They’re “acting like children,” or they’re gender-privileged; they’re “the special-est of special snowflakes,” they’re ignorant of basic facts. They’re sad stuff, “literally crying” with “mildly witty signs.” Even the late-night hosts got in on it.
399
400This is, in theory, undertaken with a serious purpose: Dissent like this might help Donald Trump become president. But it is clearly fun, too. It’s hot in Philadelphia, which the media has relentlessly complained about, and this convention—bereft of any real surprise or violent conflict—is long and dull, at least until primetime. What better distraction, and what better story copy, than to interview angry naïfs on the threatening revolt?
401
402But speaking to delegates and protestors over the past few days, I’ve found ambivalence more common among the Sanders delegates, even those not ready for Hillary. Asked how they are feeling, they talk about frustration and uncertainty, a sadness that has not yet worn off. Some, like Illinois state Representative Will Guzzardi, have already committed to supporting Clinton, but nonetheless struggle to articulate their disappointment. Sitting on a bench outside the convention center, half an hour after Clinton’s nomination on Tuesday, the ordinarily articulate Guzzardi cut himself short several times before finding the right words. He eventually settled on “It sucks.”
403
404“It sucks,” he said again, “and you get mad for a while, and eventually you move on, but it sucks.” Guzzardi, at least, has some experience with this. In 2012, he was defeated in his first race for the Illinois state House, losing by an extremely narrow margin to a well-connected incumbent. “There were people on my staff then who were furious,” he said. “People telling me they cheated, they stole it, but we got past it.” He was elected to the same seat two years later. “It’s obviously a way smaller scale,” he told me, “but we went through it. Most of the Sanders delegates and supporters here, they’ve never been to anything like this before. They’ve never been through it.”
405
406
407Sanders supporters gather at FDR Park on the second day of the Democratic National Convention.Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
408Not everyone was so dispirited. Not the teenage delegate who told me to “fuck off, corporate media” as he walked from the convention center toward the chanting in the park. And not Cathy, a retired woman I met at a march on Broad Street, who was inspired by the Sanders campaign to become politically active only this past year; she had been arrested before, and intended to be arrested again. But even Cathy, and others like her, speak like agitated mourners, as if they are trying to make sense of what is going on in their own moral universe. It is not that they lack conviction—“I know what I believe and I believe Clinton would be a disaster for millions of people,” one protestor in a “Feel the Bern” T-shirt told me Tuesday night—but they are unsettled. They know that they are faced with a choice they find genuinely disconcerting, the possibility of feeling rotten either way, of being ridiculed by someone no matter what they choose.
409
410They are acutely aware that they are under pressure to reach hasty conclusions.
411
412“It’s tough, because the second I was right outside the Wells Fargo Center after the walk out, a reporter started asking, ‘Do you support Hillary now, do you support Hillary now?’” Perez told me. “And it’s like, ‘Hold on, hold on a second, I don’t know, I don’t know yet.’ But in a way it’s like, it feels someone saying, ‘Alright, move along, time to go,’ you know?”
413
414She believes she will vote for Clinton in the end, because she does not want Trump to become president. But there is a difference between the recognition of some future probable state of mind, and the fact of being there already.
415
416What we are seeing in Philadelphia is the ordinary course of emotional life, treated by the national press corps as alien phenomena. These people valued something, and lost it. They believed in something, and have seen it frustrated. They now believe, and perhaps rightly so, that this loss will bring more pain to themselves and others, will make the world worse than it might have been. That is: They were, in a way often reported but rarely taken seriously, genuinely committed to the importance of their politics. Like any human in the face of frustration and loss, they will cope differently. Some will become morose. Some will recover quickly. Some will refuse to concede it’s over, become angry, and keep fighting. Some will decide, ultimately, to compromise; others to abide by their principles. Many will change their minds more than once.
417
418
419Another Sanders supporter at FDR Park on the second day of the DNC.Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
420In the meantime, the press has become fascinated, at times scornful, of people who do not treat politics like the professionals, without too much investment or sentiment, without a pragmatist’s instinct for instantaneous rational decision-making. Thousands of people, many of whom did not think of politics as anything but the imposed whims of others came to believe, rightly or wrongly, that they might make a better society for themselves—then they lost, and reacted in a thousand different ways, are still reacting, are only in the first week of this fallout. For this, they have been told to consider the stakes rationally, to make the practical decision or at any rate the decision that others would prefer.
421
422All of this is unexceptional. The only unusual element is the spotlight on them, the constant scrutiny of journalists and staffers all around them, all day, inside the fence around the convention center.
423
424It is a certain type of hell for the press, too. What are you to make of thousands of people mourning? It resists analysis; resists efforts to predict where they might end up in a hundred days or what they might do tomorrow on the floor. It resists the way we are more and more inclined to consider politics: as data, and decision-making, and simple, weighed incentives.
425
426The reporters also feel an obligation to their readers: Something is going on here that we’ve got to make sense of. But there’s little sense to be made by interviewing anybody you can find and extrapolating the psychology of thousands. They do not know the future of their own hearts, either.
427
428Near the end of the night, on a train toward city center, a middle-aged woman carrying a blue Sanders sign is sitting alone. Another commuter, an older woman, asks her if she came from the convention.
429
430“A protest,” she says.
431
432“For what?”
433“Bernie Sanders.”
434
435“But didn’t he lose?”
436
437Yes, the woman says, “Yeah. Probably. Clinton is the nominee, he endorsed her, yeah. I guess. Yeah.” Her voice is flat.
438
439“Then what were you—?”
440
441She’s been asked this question before. “To show him support, to say we don’t want Hillary, or Trump, or any of these other people.”
442
443“So what are you going to do in the election?”
444
445“I don’t know.”
446
447 been lurking in a restaurant in the center of the city, the luxurious kind, with a staff in custom uniforms. They ask you who you are when they take you to your table. When the server comes, he calls you by your name. I paid fifteen dollars for an appetizer salad there. I’m not proud.
448It’s a Republican joint, or at any rate, it is where the upper crust Republicans of Philadelphia have been taking refuge this week while Democratic delegates and the liberal press corps occupy half the venues in the city.
449The restaurant is only a few blocks from City Hall, where almost every march of the past week has convened and taken off, headed for Independence Hall, or FDR Park, or the Wells Fargo Center—there are major streets in each direction. As a result, the whole area has been filled during daylight hours with protesting types: hippies and peaceniks, socialists carrying red flags, little Revolutionary Communist Party cliques walking lockstep in black T-shirts to stir up trouble. Even when nothing big is afoot, there are a few folks standing around, like some kids holding NO OLIGARCHY signs, shouting to anybody who will listen that Hillary Clinton is a war criminal.
450The first day I spent in the bar, a march against the drug war was headed south from City Hall. They were carrying enormous inflatable joints over their heads, at least a hundred feet long, and you could see them drifting down the street from the restaurant’s windows. A couple sitting next to me—GOP operatives, they’d spent the past hour talking about a House race they were working in New York that they thought might be an upset except the candidate was proving difficult to control—looked up. The man shook his head. The woman chuckled. “Oh God,” she said. “At least Republicans don’t do that.”
451It’s a popular belief: Right-wingers don’t protest like their left-wing counterparts. They haven’t got the same organizing culture, the same history of mass action—it doesn’t match their temperament so well. Our history is not marked by right-wing sit-ins or right-wing marches. There are no symbols of right-wing civil disobedience commemorated by national holidays, other than the Fourth of July. This is ordinarily justified with a kind of intuitive logic: The right, and particularly the Republican Party, represent the forces of reaction. They are the vanguard of the status quo. Even if they did march, what world would they be trying to overthrow?
452There are right-wing protest movements, of course. The pro-life movement has, for the past several decades, staged some of the largest protests in the United States and picketed abortion clinics with a dedication that puts half the left to shame.
453They are even here in Philadelphia. On Monday, when Broad Street and FDR Park filled up with marches, and more than fifty left-wing protesters were arrested attempting to enter the Wells Fargo Center, a Christian life contingent occupied the far side of the “free speech zone,” surrounded by a solid wall of outward-facing cops and arguing with Sanders dissidents. “I’m not smart,” one shouted into a megaphone. “In fact, I’m probably dumber than you. But I’ve got the Lord’s Grace. I know the truth revealed in holy scripture.”
454They’re not the only ones. As the left has staged its actions at the Democratic National Convention—delegate walkouts and perimeter sit-ins and march after march in defiance of every perceived failing of the Democratic Party—a small but solid number of right-wing dissidents have arrived to get in on the action.
455There are the men with buzzcuts and black T-shirts reading “WHO IS RON PAUL?” who hang around the anti-war groups, shouting about the real movement against American imperialism.
456There is the Russian woman I meet on the outskirts of a climate march, who shakes her head and talks to passing marchers like a mother trying to stop her sons from making a terrible mistake: “You are calling for socialism,” she says. “But you have not seen it. I have seen it, and it will not save you.” She tells me that this is not the first rally she’s crashed—she’s not even from Philadelphia. But she feels that she must “tell people the truth about the Soviet Union” before it’s too late, a truth she says Americans have forgotten.
457There are the seven or eight locals who unfurl a Trump banner in the protest zone on Wednesday night, marching around and attracting a crowd while Joe Biden speaks inside.
458There is the man who has set up a little tent outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center, halfway across town from Wells Fargo, with signs demanding that Democrats defend the Holy State of Israel. He isn’t Jewish, he tells me, but Israel is the only country “fighting the barbarians over there.”
459These right-wingers are not nearly as well organized as the leftists in town. They aren’t numerous. But they aren’t the vanguard of the status quo either. Like the typical abortion picketer, they do not come from the upper crust of their party. They are, in their own way, dissidents, compelled by frustration and urgency to come out in the streets and press their case despite the heat. Like the Bernie or Busters and the environmental activists and the migrant justice marchers in the park, they believe that they are in possession of some vital corrective, one that the powers who manage our political lives do not want getting out there. They do not come from the business wing of any party. Like the Democrats and socialists out here, they are yelling in the shadow of the Wells Fargo Center: Brought to You by Comcast.
460That isn’t to say that they’re equivalent. Similarity of status or of tactics does not entail similarity of moral clarity. But let us say what’s obvious: the impulse toward protest is not particular to reactionaries or revolutionaries. It is a matter of power and its absence.
461On Wednesday, on the convention perimeter, I find a middle-aged woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She’s wearing a Trump button on her shoulder, and she’s heckling passersby. “Ask a small business owner what they think of socialistic ideas from Hillary Clinton!” she says to a passing reporter, who is on his phone and ignoring her.
462I ask her why she’s here, and she tells me she lives nearby. She wanted to come down, she says, to “tell the Democrat Party what it’s like to run a business.” What kind of business does she run? I ask. “You wouldn’t understand it,” she says.
463“You’re voting for Donald Trump?”
464“You bet.”
465“Why?”
466She goes on for a while, but the gist is this: The Democrats are owned by Wall Street, the “liars” who used to run the GOP too. They don’t care about her; they don’t care about her kids (“but I take care of ’em, not like a lot of those people around here”); they don’t care about the United States of America. “All they care about is their TPP and Goldman Sachs,” she tells me. “You think they don’t have Hillary bought and sold? Trump knows.”
467We’re on the north side of the perimeter, the furthest point from the Wells Fargo Center. Beyond the black gate is an enormous parking lot, dedicated almost entirely to drivers who are waiting to pick up convention-goers from the Uber tent on the grounds. Beyond that, there are signs directing delegates to the Xfinity food and beverage lounge, a detour before the ramp to the convention center entrance, where the Comcast logo looms larger than the “Democratic National Convention” sign. Inside, protesters are shouting “No more war!” at Leon Panetta, but they are quickly drowned out by the majority chanting “USA.”
468Perhaps it’s true that Republicans do not protest so much because Republicans, by and large, are representatives of the status quo. But it should worry Democrats that this small business owner—who ultimately admits she’s a birther, and who eventually tells me that her business is a number of babysitting clients—has well more than half a point about what is going on here.
469The upper-crust Republicans protest too, in their own way.
470Sitting at the restaurant bar a few days after the enormous inflatable joint protest, I find myself next to an old man in a three-piece suit, napkin tucked in like a bib. He’s eating shrimp, he’s got beautiful cufflinks, and he’s heckling the shit out of CNN.
471On a small television over the bar, the news has just announced that all charges will be dropped against the Baltimore police officers who murdered Freddie Gray. A panelist talks about injustice. Oh, who gives a shit, protests Cufflinks. He was a degenerate drug dealer trying to sue, who the hell cares?
472I offer that Gray’s family may care.
473Oh, who cares about his family? He says, If you’re an upstanding productive citizen, you’re fine. Otherwise you get what’s coming. This guy was thug. He pauses. He’s got a lovely silk pocket square, precisely the right shade of red. What? You think everybody’s equal? He takes another bite of his shrimp.
474Evidently not.
475
476Peter, who has a temporary tattoo of the anarchy "A" on his upper arm, is ready for the age of reason. He fucking loves science. Or he loves logic, he says; it's the only thing he's interested in.
477
478He has come all the way from Madison, Wisconsin, to Washington, DC, to hear the nation's foremost atheists tell an expected crowd of 30,000 the good news: We are at a turning point in American life. Religion, the long-stubborn source of our national ills, is finally dying away.
479
480But there aren't 30,000 people here. The crowd extending from a stage at the base of the Lincoln Memorial stretches scarcely a quarter of the way up the Reflecting Pool and is thin on the sunny side. We are off to a slow start, one made slower by the loss, over dozens of speakers and days of events, of any kind of clarity or point.
481
482  
483How politics makes us stupid
484
485This is the second Reason Rally, the first since 2012. It is, according to its organizers, a turning point in history, an opportunity for the quarter of Americans who are atheists to "stand up and be counted."
486
487Peter says this is what he came for. He was a Republican during the Bush administration, but he couldn't stomach the religiosity. He doesn't like President Barack Obama either. Both Democrats and Republicans are getting the questions wrong, he tells me, and American politics won't get better until politicians give up their need to have an "all-powerful being tell them what to do," be that God or government.
488
489It is unclear, however, how many Americans are prepared to abandon those idols. Of the roughly 25 percent of Americans the rally insists constitute the new secular movement, only 11 percent are avowed atheists. Most only decline any particular religious preference.
490
491"When you read headlines about the rise of the so-called ‘nones,' or people who don't consider themselves part of a religion, that's what they're mostly referring to: the shruggers," wrote Emma Green in the Atlantic. "They might be intensely spiritual or perfectly apathetic about faith, but for some reason or another they don't self-identify as definitively atheistic."
492
493Most, certainly, are not at Reason Rally. And among those who are, it is not clear how many share Peter's vision of the state as a kind of replacement god. Many of the speakers today are Democrats; they are a slight majority among the crowd, as well. But they do largely share Peter's confidence: Once religion is banished from the public sphere, the most pressing difficulties in our national life will largely fade away, rationally debated and swiftly solved according to the dictates of reason.
494
495There is less agreement regarding the likely outcomes of those debates.
496
497The rally lineup is promising on paper. Among its stars are Penn Jillette, the magician and libertarian, and Bill Nye, who has built his entire reputation in popular science on the strength of his charisma, without even a master's degree behind his name.
498
499Bill Maher is on the lineup, as is the comedian Lewis Black. The heads of American Atheists and the Center of Inquiry and the Freedom From Religion Foundation are speaking. Members of the Wu-Tang Clan have come. Two members of Congress will be speaking, although their remarks will be confined to the case for secular pluralism in law.
500
501Is this only the Democratic Party, in secularly inflected tones?
502
503
504That case is not too far from the stated intent of the organizers. Since Thursday, smaller groups have been meeting on Capitol Hill and speaking to members of Congress; tonight, a VIP cocktail session and two parties will be held for ticket holders. Larry Decker, the executive director of Secular Coalition of America and an organizer of the rally, has high hopes. "We are going to promote secular values — values like freedom, equality, and inclusion", he told Reason magazine (no relation). "We hope to take those values and translate that into a strong voting bloc going forward."
505
506What that voting bloc looks like is less certain. Decker is not proposing the formation of a new political party, and from the long list of Reason Rally's sponsors his movement suffers no dearth of extant advocacy organizations. Among the stated goals of this year's Reason Rally are comprehensive sex education, acceptance of climate science, and an end to discrimination against the gay community.
507
508Is this only the Democratic Party, in secularly inflected tones? Several speakers in a row refer to what is being built as a "progressive" movement, but do speakers like Penn Jillette know? Do the attendees?
509
510The first Reason Rally was more strident. It was militant — a celebration of defiance animated by a clear purpose, a style more typical of New Atheism as it has developed in the United States over the past 20 years, fleshed out by leaders like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and lately as much dedicated to a disdain of the excesses of identitarian liberalism as to any particular account of empirical triumph.
511
512Four years ago, Dawkins encouraged attendees to "ridicule" the faithful. As the Atlantic's Green reported then, "a band fired up the crowd with a rousing sound that lampooned the belief in ‘Jesus coming again', mixing it with sexual innuendo … Attendees sported t-shirts and signs with slogans like 'I prefer facts' and 'religious is like a penis' (involving a rather extended metaphor)."
513
514
515
516  
517From Nietzsche to Richard Dawkins: a conversation on modern atheism
518
519This year, it is difficult to imagine that the organizers haven't asked the speakers to limit their politics, to remain "on-message" and positive. There is no denouncement of religion, only its consequences. There are no attendees holding signs that say "BAN GOD." There is nothing quite so pointed this time, but without this animating antagonism, what is left?
520
521
522The first officially scheduled event, on Thursday morning, was the screening of a John Oliver video.
523
524
525When David Garcia, the president of LGBT Los Angeles, speaks of how many young people are hurt and made homeless by reactionary religious sentiment, he's speaking the truth, but it's a truth no more incendiary than what one is liable to hear at a rally for a Democratic congressional candidate. Throughout the day, speakers will invoke Martin Luther King's March on Washington, will draw explicit comparisons between that rally and this, but nothing here is even half so radical. A rally to celebrate sensible policy goals is fine enough, but it's hardly a revolution.
526
527It is clear, too, that almost nobody who takes the stage at Reason Rally was ever trained as a preacher. The whole thing is languid, urgent words in measured tones. The goal is an "end to bigotry," in the pitch of a polite request, to "reject" a supernatural worldview with all the force of tepid applause.
528
529Jamie Raskin says the job of politicians is to "listen to scientists" and closes with, "Put your thinking caps on America!" Penn Jillette struggles to get a video playing, chokes up over Hitchens, then plays a Bob Dylan knockoff about his love for all people. The Amazing Randi devotes half an hour to a muted jeremiad against the obscure "facilitated communication" hoax. Peter says he does not know what "FC" is, but he'll look into it.
530
531The comedy isn't much either. Keith Lowell Jensen spends five minutes recounting the history of the restaurant Jack in the Box in order to reveal that he does not like the pope. A writer from The Daily Show jokes about eugenics for Twitter trolls. She takes a selfie and says fire was "invented" 10,000 years ago. Another comic says it's sad the aspirin-between-the-knees crowd doesn't know women can still have sex this way.
532
533Was this all edgy once? They talk openly about sex as if they are the first bawdy folks to do so. What puritanical America is shocked? Bill Maher cannot be bothered to appear at all. He sends a video, a five-minute riff on the burden of living in a nation of idiots, an old routine from a man whose own movie saw him owned by an amusement park Jesus.
534
535A Beatles cover band plays. They change some of the words in "Revolution" and struggle through "Imagine."
536
537Larry Drecker, when he finally takes the stage, tells the assembled that Reason Rally is "our wake-up call to the religious right," letting them know that if they want to "desecrate the dreams of our Founding Fathers," they'll "have to go through us." "
538
539I hope this rally will be remembered as a turning point in history," he adds. He says to "rise up." But he is using his inside voice, and the crowd nearest me is distracted: A woman in a Flying Spaghetti Monster costume is posing for photographs.
540
541We have four hours remaining.  Even an Easter Mass in Latin knows not to push three.
542
543The rally is livelier on the periphery. A few evangelizers, remnants from a planned and canceled counterprotest, have turned up to debate. Cellphone cameras are rolling on both sides for the benefit of YouTube followers. A man shouts about the true reason we're all here today — the grace of Jesus Christ. Another sits at the back on a bicycle, shirtless, with two megaphones, shouting: Jeeeeesus. JEEEEEESUS. He's alive!
544
545Somebody makes reference to a "fairy tale for adults," but, surprise: It's evolution.
546
547The argument descends into an extended metaphor about randomized text generators creating comprehensible pamphlets by selecting for readability.
548
549
550 Tyson
551Neil deGrasse Tyson has the wrong model of politics
552
553It's all very 2004, like something out of an old message board. A man tells another that the God of the Bible is a "comic book villain" whose moral code is incoherent. The evangelizer counters: How do atheists know right from wrong at all?
554
555"Scientifically. We can measure harm."
556
557"How?"
558
559"We can figure out when things harm people; we can study it."
560
561Neither thinks to ask what we might consider harmful in the first place.
562
563In the shade I meet a middle-aged woman named Samantha; she's got a sign that says "I'm Secular and I Vote" and a "Ready for Hillary" pin. She isn't debating anyone, she tells me; she gets enough of that on the internet. She doesn't want to dignify these people anyway — aren't they satisfied controlling public life? Can't they even let atheists have one day to have a rally for themselves?
564
565She says she wishes people understood that science is much cooler than the Bible. There's so much out there, she says; why limit the whole cosmos to a single book? Her first political priority is education, she tells me, although she means "getting these creationists out of the science classroom" and offers little more. She loves Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and public face for "science education." She is sad he isn't speaking here today.
566
567Many of the day's speakers are respected scientists, men and women involved in the highest levels of empirical research. But they are not here to discuss their latest findings; they are here to call, again and again, for a general triumph of science, and the man in the full-body devil costume with the cardboard crucifix reading Fairly Tale is drawing more attention.
568
569Some straw man from a Dawkins lecture shouts into a cellphone camera: "You're a religion too! You believe there's no God!" Samantha rolls her eyes.
570
571It was probably the Amazing Randi who gave New Atheists their favorite bit of cleverness: Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
572
573Is it? Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby, but half the philatelists think you'll suffer, think you'll burn, think you'll fuck and figure wrong because of it. Pew finds that for the first time, merely three-quarters of adults maintain stamp albums; this merits hand-wringing in the New York Times. Why should the secular movement want to be so trivial? They seem to want it both ways, at once a movement and not.
574
575There is no hobby with such organized dissent. There is no message board for stamp skeptics, no rally; nobody spoils Thanksgiving dinner over the legitimacy of a $5 1920 Lincoln. There are atheists for whom disbelief is not terribly dissimilar to an absent interest, but these atheists are precisely not the ones who find themselves quoting James Randi. They are not James Randi, who does not speak at public rallies for former stamp collectors.
576
577Perhaps atheism is as trivial as not keeping a stamp collection, but the atheists who come to Reason Rally don't believe it.
578
579Here is what I believe these days: There is no God, but this is perhaps the least interesting thing to say about the world. I can make you a list of things that aren't and never tell you anything at all — so what?
580
581On some days, disbelief seems to me a defiance, but a passive one, one I take no pride or fight in and one I didn't want. I've long wondered at the notion that by telling somebody I am an atheist, I have told them everything they need to know in order to understand what I believe about the world. In fact, I have told them nothing.
582
583A fact is not an answer. A fact, in this case, is just an absence.
584
585What atheism has never seemed to me is a sensible point of political organization. Let me go further: Atheism has never seemed to me to solve any political problems at all. Speakers at Reason Rally advance admirable goals: pluralism, reproductive rights, tolerance. But what about the absence of God tells me that these are civic virtues?
586
587It is not surprising that religion provides rhetorical urgency to reactionary causes, but what causes of any kind has it not at times imbued with moral purpose? Most people are religious. The talk appeals. What would surprise is a world where the absence of faith produced an absence of bad politics or bigotry. Only a narrow imagination supposes that the depravity of men will not find other cudgels; that an empty sky will make good policy visible to all.
588
589Set aside that such clear skies are improbable, that religion is a stubborn thing and one that persists too well in climates far more hostile than the present. The promotion of an improbable goal is not Reason Rally's sin.
590
591What is troubling in Reason Rally, in Movement Atheism, among Dawkins and Nye, in the throngs of free thinkers turned out on a dry Saturday to hear the talk of turning points and revolutions, what is troubling in all of this is the optimism of these free thinkers. The extraordinary credulity of skeptics.
592
593David Silverman, the president of American atheists and a "self-described firebrand," demands we all chant atheist! together as an act of political unity. This activity consumes roughly half his speech. And then?
594
595Banish superstition, and the major political struggles of the American state will solve themselves by measurement. Accept the facts, the prime fact, the fact of an imaginary God, and we will realize the dream of the Founding Fathers.
596
597But a fact is not an answer. A fact, in this case, is just an absence. We are only interested in logic, but what are your premises? Empiricism is the only way to know the truth about the world. Well, what do you want to know about it?
598
599The trouble with Reason Rally is how little it cares for what comes after; its hubris is the faith of so many attendees that pure reason will reward their politics.
600
601
602It's only us; we've only got each other. It's true, but it's not good news at all. One does not need to believe in any particular metaphysics of sin to believe in the depravity of mankind.
603
604The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn't, William A. Wilson writes in First Things:
605
606At its best, science is a human enterprise with a superhuman aim: the discovery of regularities in the order of nature, and the discerning of the consequences of those regularities. We've seen example after example of how the human element of this enterprise harms and damages its progress, through incompetence, fraud, selfishness, prejudice, or the simple combination of an honest oversight or slip with plain bad luck.
607
608
609This is not a condemnation of science, but it is true, and if the crowd at Reason Rally knows it, they are not letting on.
610
611When Lawrence Krauss tells us that children should be taught to question everything, the audience on the National Mall is all serene. Yes, one man says while he applauds, quiet and forceful and without any irony at all. Yes, his wife is nodding. These are the vanguard of a permanently uncertain revolution, but you wouldn't know it to hear them speak so surely.
612
613You wouldn't even think they understood the virtue of empiricism at all. Good science often troubles the world. It rarely solves it.
614
615
616Krauss says he wants to ask some questions about reason, but he means he wants to ask after the reasons of the hateful. What reason justifies suppressing education? Hating women, hating homosexuals, making bigotry in law? The answer is implied.
617
618
619 Chapel Hill police
620Chapel Hill shooting forces uncomfortable conversations among Reddit's atheists
621
622A question Krauss does not ask is if reasons may be found elsewhere, if hatred may find its rationalizations outside the language of God. Let us grant that all people accept the physical limitations of Earth. Now what will account for our moral conflicts?
623
624Tulsi Gabbard, who represents Hawaii in the House of Representatives, tells us that religious bigotry has turned the world to violence. Pluralistic secular government is the only way to ensure a lasting global peace, she says.
625
626Ensure it? A woman carries a painting of Bernie Sanders along the path up the Reflecting Pool; a young man holds up a sign he's made on cardboard: #BanIslam. Penn Jillette sings about his love for everyone but is a research fellow of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that has never encountered a rationale for welfare cuts beneath its dignity. Bill Nye says that we ought to "evaluate candidates based on their stand on science" and has made the majority of political contributions to President Barack Obama — was it only that the Democrats believe climate change is real? On the sidewalk under the trees I get a pamphlet — Follow Reason, Go Vegan — while families in free-thinker T-shirts sit on the hot grass, chewing hot dogs and nodding.
627
628By night, under more tolerable weather, the organizers succeed in at least one goal. They have been trying to get #ReasonRally trending on Twitter for hours, and it is finally No. 1.
629
630We are under the Lincoln Memorial, and the speakers can't get enough. Lincoln's legacy is invoked as often as King's, and the Reason Rally as his heir. "Lincoln, the kind of Republican who would have never made it out of the Iowa caucuses." Lincoln the "humanist." Lincoln, "who stood for reason," who "hated bigotry," who was a "free thinker."
631
632He is named in defense of rationality and for decency and to tell us here on the Mall that the greatest men do not fear conflict when it is the only way to achieve political justice.
633
634But Peter tells me libertarianism is the only reasonable position for a mind "finished with superstition," that Lincoln fought slavery, justified by Christianity, that logically nobody has the right to impose control on anyone else at all. Samantha tells me we're all in this together, that expanding the social safety net is how we help one another as best we can. "Religion helps conservatives," she says. A secular government will have an easier time extending welfare to all.
635
636A full quarter of Americans now live openly without a god. It's taken fewer folks to change the United States before; perhaps Decker and Krauss and Nye and Penn will have their turning point in history. The pews become empty, the temples go cold. Superstition gives way to a purely rational politics. Peter is ecstatic, and Samantha too. The war is over. But the reasons of both could not be answered.
637
638The latest victory is Pokémon Go, a mobile video game that, within a week of release, eclipsed Tinder and Twitter in active daily users and is now being used to add relevance to everything worth selling, from safe sex to the carceral state. It joins Star Wars, Hamilton, The Avengers, and nearly every other massively successful intellectual property of the past decade as an example of ostensible "nerd" culture that has thoroughly captured the mainstream.
639
640There were of course dissenters, but they were quickly dispensed with: Who could hate this honest fun, this special and important nostalgia for a generation of nerds? Didn't they know that Pokémon Go was encouraging exercise and boosting mental health by getting people outside? At best, the skeptics were snobs and pedants, typically and terminally not with it.
641
642But the ease with which criticism of Pokémon Go was dismissed wasn't reflected in the dismissals. Defenders of the game cast themselves as underdogs: culturally maligned nerds being shamed once again for their joy. In some cases, the defense even took on a social inflection, like an identity politics defined not by any immutable characteristic, but by consumption. Not liking this thing — worse yet, openly questioning its value — was not just a disagreement about taste, but an affront to a fan's politics and dignity.
643
644This has become familiar in recent years, as game after album after movie ostensibly servicing a maligned and mocked "nerd" culture has been defended viciously even as it was consumed by everyone.
645
646The underdogs win so often, you begin to wonder how hard the battle really is. They talk about standing up to a culture that ridicules their taste, but who precisely are they standing up against? Vanguards of "high art," who haven't wielded meaningful power over public taste in a generation? The general public, who by and large love Star Wars and Hamilton and Pokémon? The corporations selling them their rebellion in the first place?
647
648For all the rhetorical urgency of nerd culture rebellion, there does not seem to be much left to rebel against. Where are these snobs, sneering at any entertainment less serious than opera? If you can find one, you'll be even harder pressed to find his or her sympathetic audience. The last defenders of a high art/low art divide went out of fashion last century. The idea that adults, even educated and professional ones, can and should enjoy pop culture triumphed decades ago, and for the better. Bros and nerds, academics and presidents: We are all encouraged to love Game of Thrones and Beyoncé now.
649
650You would imagine the "nerds" — that is to say, most consumers of American media these days — would be happy. They won! But they're not. They remain on high alert for anybody trying to shame them, against a world of killjoys still out to spoil their fun.
651
652I have begun to believe that for a narrow sliver of society, the thrill of nerd culture in rebellion is an essential part of the fun. The belief that entertainment, consumption, and taste constitute meaningful political acts have become indispensable to the product being purchased. You're not just spending money a movie or an album or a game: You're sticking it to everybody who ever said you shouldn't, as powerless and few as they may be. You aren't just buying a popular bit of entertainment, you're buying the act of defiance.
653
654Some critics have identified nostalgia as a selling point, but that's not quite right. The nostalgia is not for the past but for the realized present: I am an adult now, and I can eat however many cookies I like.
655
656Movie studios and game makers are happy to encourage this tendency. A national media that has, in part, dedicated itself to celebrating the bravery of the prevailing taste consensus is a form of free advertising you don't contradict. But it is the prevailing consensus.
657
658There is, of course, nothing wrong with the mainstream. There is, of course, nothing wrong with fun. The most honest defenses of these products is that they function as pure escape, as pure comfort. And comfort is good and healthy! So is fun. I like all kinds of fun and comforting things, including some comic book movies. But that's all it is: just liking. Just taste. They are not politics.
659
660Is The New York Times out to get Hillary Clinton?
661There is a danger in the conflation. There may be no such thing as objectively good taste, but there is a such a thing as balanced taste. Comfort is good. Joy is good. Even nostalgia is good. But not everything can be nostalgia: That defies curiosity and denies the possibility of growth. Not everything can be a comfort: Any healthy culture contains art that challenges, that isn't fun, that complicates the world instead of solving it. Seeking out that kind of art is an essential function of adult life, not a burden imposed by snobs.
662
663When comfort is recast as rebellion, it deceives. It allows you to consume pure comfort and believe that it is something more. When fun is marketed as a challenge, when participating in that challenge becomes politics, becomes meaning, then you begin to feel that you are doing something more than just fun when you're not.
664
665That's enough for the marketing men. But it shouldn't be enough for you.
666
667Truth be told, they may be gathering a little moss after all.
668
669While it’s been a good year for the Rolling Stones — a smashing concert at the Glastonbury Festival in England, the 40th birthday of their seminal, triple-platinum LP, Goat’s Head Soup, and yet another special exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — let’s face it: the boys are getting up there. No, wait — they’ve already passed there. A combined 277 years old, Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie are fighting to stay relevant as their loyal but dwindling fan base rapidly discovers that, no, time is longer on their side.
670
671Does that mean that the graying quartet is destined for the discount dustbin at your local used record shop? Not necessarily. The Stones may in fact have a shot at renewed stardom, provided their arthritic devotees can still operate a mouse...and click their way to Kickstarter.
672
673SYNOPSIS: Since the early 1960s, The Rolling Stones have been one of the most iconic bands in the world. This year, we celebrated our fiftieth anniversary — not 50th wedding anniversary, or 50th anniversary of The Revolution — but the fiftieth anniversary of a rock and roll band!
674
675Feel old? So do we. That’s why we need your help. See, it takes a lot or euros to book venues, fill the tour bus with gas (and Gas-X), and buy drugs (well, whatever drugs are left — Keith pretty much polished off most of them in 1970). And don’t even get us started on our health coverage. Mick’s alone has surpassed the GNP of Greece.
676
677Many bands use Kickstarter to launch their careers: to fund independent tours, rent recording space, or distribute their records. While these pleas are well intentioned, there’s always the risk that these new bands suck, and that in the end your money will be wasted on a mediocre product. So why not contribute to a band you can trust, one with a multi-decade track record? Don’t gamble away your patronage — get Satisfaction, guaranteed!
678
679I think we’ve proven we deserve it.
680
681See you on tour,
682The Guys
683
684Pledge $5 - For $5, you will receive a limited-edition first pressing of every Rolling Stones album recorded between 1985 and 2002. While those weren’t exactly our best LPs, they’ll stack nicely next to your La-Z Boy, making the perfect TV tray table for your warm milk.
685
686Pledge $10 - For $10 you can have the crates full of the aforementioned first pressings. We’ve got tons laying around.
687
688Pledge $250 - For $250 dollars, you will receive one (1) standard ticket to the Rolling Stones concert of your choosing. We’ve got two scheduled for next year, one in a retirement home in Passaic, the other in....um...we forget.
689
690Pledge $500 - In addition to your one (1) standard ticket to the Rolling Stones concert of your choosing, you will receive an information pamphlet allowing you to become the only person on Earth who knows anything specific about Charlie Watts.
691
692Pledge $1,000 - For $1,000 dollars, Mick Jagger will spend five minutes on the phone with you, belligerently disputing any section of your choosing from Keith Richard’s memoir, Life.
693
694Pledge $5,000 - A used autographed copy of Keith Richard’s memoir, Life. Acquired for four dollars on eBay in 2011, it bears the autograph: “To Melanie. Sorry about Tuesday night. Jumpin’ Jack Flash ain’t exactly jumpin’ anymore. Love, K.”
695
696Pledge $10,000 - In addition to the above prizes, your mouth will be used as the model for the next Rolling Stones t-shirt. Your tongue will be featured prominently; denture wearers need not apply.
697
698Pledge $50,000 - For 50,000 dollars, in addition to the above prizes, you will receive an original vinyl copy of Sticky Fingers, retooled with Mick’s actual zipper. For an additional $5, somebody will help you unzip it.
699
700There are certain facts you learn in a day, or in a year. Facts not connected in any immediate way to your life, to what you do or say you care about; facts gathered from unexpected articles and idle conversation, facts you learn reading a magazine in some strange waiting room, waiting for a strange exam. 
701
702You become an expert, somehow, on subjects you never cared to study. You know a recipe exclusive otherwise to cooks, the civil code of some small town you passed through once. Sometimes you forget. Other times, these facts emerge with perfect timing at a party, on the job, in chitchat with a stranger who’s surprised to learn you know the proper formula for Coke. 
703
704These facts are tied to places and to circumstance. They were collected by accident when you went to such-and-such a pleasant party and stayed up all night talking to that economist who's there, or went to such-and-such a party, got too drunk, sorry for ruining everything again, and wandering on the street fell in with a gaggle of electioneers recounting the real secrets of their trade. You collect them when the party's cancelled and all there is is home and books you’ve meant to read.
705
706You collect them when you meet a pretty girl from some small, strange country on the border of somewhere and next thing you know you've got your nose in the fact book, finding out the capital and all the province names. Finding out what kind of liquor they like there, just in case it comes up. Just in case you find yourself caring and want to know these things.
707
708You do care, and you do learn. But then one day the pretty girl from the strange land leaves you, and all that's left are facts, picked up by accident again.
709
710Your friends will be surprised by your knowledge one day. It’s an odd thing for someone like you to know, isn’t it? You’ll shrug. You’ll say you don’t remember. You won't tell them about the geography that leads there, about the path from a party to a bedroom to the fact book to your heart, traced out on a map you got lost on, still in your pocket for the facts you scribbled in the margins.
711
712In a frightening alternative future, someday this might actually happen:
713
714In light of America’s libertarian revival, the Ayn Rand estate has leaked the synopses of several unpublished sequels to Rand’s Objectivist parable “Atlas Shrugged.” Strikingly prescient, the previously unknown novels have been optioned by Koch Films, which hopes to follow the success of the recent “Atlas Shrugged” films, and awaken the liberty-loving freedom fighter buried in the heart of every real American.
715
716Atlas Bugged: After Congress privatizes the NSA, John Galt buys a controlling share. When his workers attempt to organize, he listens in on their meetings and is able to thwart their efforts. He defends his actions on a special segment of Charlie Rose, which he also owns.
717
718Atlas Chugged: After going on a bender to celebrate his latest acquisition, a drunk John Galt realizes how dependent he is on the efforts of his employees. The next morning, he swallows his disdain for religion and attends AA – only to quit when he discovers eight of the 12 steps are philosophically incompatible with Objectivism.
719
720Atlas Fugged: John Galt’s steely, pitiless gaze is offended by the sight of obscenity in print. He buys a controlling interest in the Big Six publishers and sets out to bowdlerize all literature. The novel climaxes during a shareholder battle with Jeff Bezos, who refuses to modify Kindle editions.
721
722Atlas Mugged: Ungrateful citizens refuse to pay exorbitant private security fees, so the owners of the security corporation send their agents to collect.
723
724Atlas Drugged: The Zetas Drug Cartel creates a drug that induces intense euphoria with 10 times the addictive potential of crystal meth but it slowly causes irreversible brain damage. With no state to interfere in the drug’s manufacture and sale, the Zetas reap their gargantuan profits, leaving Mexico full of brain-dead addicts. Free of FDA meddling, GlaxoSmithKlein purchases the formula for the American market and instantly jumps 14 points on the Dow.
725
726Atlas Lugged: In an act of teenage rebellion, John Galt’s son tries his hand as a laborer in the Galt Industrial Empire. He develops a sense of kinship with the workers and agrees to bring their complaints before his father, who disowns him. The Huffington Post provides breathless, round-the-clock coverage of the ensuing family drama.
727
728Atlas Tugged: John Galt masturbates for 600 pages.
729
730Atlas Slugged: After striking out at his first at-bat, a young John Galt stalls his Littlee League game with a three-hour lecture on the rigid, statist oppression of grand-slamming princes. When the ump upholds the call, Galt takes his bat and goes home, teaching everyone a valuable lesson about alienating the true visionaries.
731
732Atlas Rugged: When the Supreme Court overturns DOMA, Galt’s would-be mother leaves his father. Free to live life as a lesbian, she never gives birth to John Galt, teaching everyone a valuable lesson about alienating the mothers of true visionaries.
733
734Atlas MTV Unplugged: Galt appropriates the music of local Negro children and sells it for millions on iTunes. When the children demand a share of the profit, Galt composes a folk ballad condemning their resentment and class envy. Unable to resist market incentives, Galt commits suicide in the climactic final chapter, ensuring the profitability of his music for all time.
735
736Atlas Humbugged: On Christmas Eve, John Galt enjoys a steaming plate of gruel, then advises a crippled boy to overcome his disability by working in a coal mine.
737
738Atlas Debugged: An Objectivist hacker leaks sensitive national security data to the press. To evade the vengeful state, he defects to China, a fact Chinese Internet users are unable to learn.
739
740Atlas Plugged: After an investment goes sour, John Galt loses 90 percent of his net worth. With no state to bail him out, he turns to Kickstarter. When that fails, he goes bankrupt, initiating an inescapable cycle of poverty for the Galt family.
741
742Atlas Hugged: While examining footage of society before Objectivism, a wealthy collector of old film and video documents discovers that at one time, human beings experienced a peculiar, irrational emotion they called “love.”
743
744“By the Grace of God,” the English used to say, when asked by what authority their monarch ruled. “Divine right” was the answer, and that was that – you didn’t have to like the queen, but God did, and that’s why she was in charge.
745
746Simpler times, those were.
747
748Today, former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced her belief that President Obama should be impeached. Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner announced his intention to launch the first congressional lawsuit against the executive branch since United States v. Nixon. Days later, the Republican Party of South Dakota became the first state-level party organization to formally call for Obama’s impeachment.
749
750If some Republicans are to be believed, the only rationale behind Congress’ tamer lawsuit route is feasibility: “If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it. But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted,” congressman Blake Farenthold told BuzzFeed last year.
751
752The occasional call is nothing new. Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt have faced the fringe demand for congressional removal, and despite two successful efforts in the House (against Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton), none has ever seen the bad side of a subsequent Senate trial. President Obama will not be impeached; despite their bluster, the GOP-controlled House will never even propose a trial in earnest. The Clinton years taught them well enough what happens when such an effort backfires and you become the guys who just wasted a year of the country’s time.
753
754What ought to concern us is not the serious possibility of the president being removed from office, but the sense of what – in a world where such a conversation occurs at all – suddenly seems reasonable by comparison. Consider an interview earlier this year, in which Fox News host and Santa Clause ethnicity specialist Megyn Kelly asked Mitch McConnell why he and the rest of the congressional GOP hadn’t seriously explored the “meaningful option” of impeaching President Obama for vaguely defined “abuse of power.”
755
756It doesn’t matter that McConnell said they wouldn’t: That the question was even asked on a major television network by a prominent (if not necessarily respected) member of the press to one of the most powerful figures in the federal government reflects something more than just fringe lunacy. It is indicative of a broader trend in our civic culture, one more subtly (but perhaps tellingly) betrayed in Senator McConnell’s then-contention that simply defunding every executive initiative and refusing to let the country function while President Obama remains in office would be a comparatively reasonable, “less dramatic” option.
757
758* * *
759
760We’ve gotten into the habit of delegitimizing our presidents — not just contesting their election or pushing back against their policies, but denying their very claim to the White House. From the farcical (birthers) to the faux-serious (“anti-American socialist!”), we’ve moved beyond mere opposition and into a deeper civic sickness, where casting aspersions on the policies of an opposition president has given way to challenging his very right to implement those policies.
761
762It didn’t start with Barack Obama. This new kind of cynicism has been gaining ground for years. The conspiratorial style is catching. Growing up during the Bush administration, I joined plenty of my fellow leftists in righteous conversations about hanging chads and Diebold-stolen votes. Before that? It was eight years of Bill Clinton: Whitewater murder suspect and blow job perjurer.
763
764That isn’t to say it doesn’t make a certain kind of sense. The impulse to delegitimize the president serves as a useful solution to an old dilemma in American politics: How do you respond to a leader who is at once enemy and ally — someone who was bitterly opposed in his ascension, but having nonetheless prevailed, is now not just their candidate, but your president, as well?
765
766As cynical as we’ve become, Americans still retain a certain reverence for the presidency. Watergate eroded it some, sure; and the ensuing soap operas — from Iran-Contra to Monica to Tallahassee 2000 have certainly tarnished the brand. But within our civic consciousness, the presidency retains a transcendent air, an office occupied by a politician, but still not entirely political. The president is the commander-in-chief. He is the head of government, yes, but he is the head of state as well. The office still retains that luster, and across table from prime ministers and kings, he speaks for all of us. There is a reason we still don’t tolerate his challengers attacking him when overseas.
767
768But pressed by a modern world into an unprecedented form of zero-sum politics, the tension between “our guy abroad” and “their guy at home” proved more difficult to sustain. So the delegitimizers found a work-around: If you can’t strip the presidency of its protective insulation, you can strip it from a chief executive by insinuating that he isn’t really the president in the first place. And that’s when the loyal opposition becomes a crusade against occupation, poisonous to a functioning government.
769
770It’s a dangerous game. When the “grace of God” gave way to “the grace of an electorate,” it was vital – if people were to be governed by consent – that that consent, once given, be respected. When we allow ourselves to start believing that consent is counterfeit whenever we disagree with our leaders, the national experiment breaks down. The well is poisoned.  Wars against usurpers involve no compromise, and so we see endless gridlock. We see politics as trench warfare. We see a polity where reaching across the aisle is a betrayal and defunding every initiative is the “reasonable” response. We see a system in which every year is little more than a battle to reclaim the throne from a fraud — the very thing we broke with Britain to avoid.
771
772God save the queen.
773
774It wouldn’t be a new year if the scornful glare of the American public hadn’t somehow found its way back to Arizona. As of Tuesday, SB 1062 – a law designed to allow businesses in the state to discriminate against LGBT patrons with newfound legal impunity – has passed both houses of the state legislature and is bound for Republican Governor Jan Brewer’s desk. (It remains unclear whether the bill will actually become law – as even Arizona’s Republican Senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, have weighed in against it.)
775
776So far, the backlash has focused almost exclusively (and justifiably) on the bill’s apparent endorsement of discrimination. Under the cover of protecting individuals from a “substantial burden” on their religious freedom, SB 1062 would allow Arizonans to refuse service to people who were out of line with their sincerely held religious beliefs.
777
778But there’s a second danger lurking in SB 1062. While less shiny an object than legally sanctioned bigotry, it is also treacherous and deserving of serious scrutiny.
779
780From the Arizona State Legislature’s fact sheet on the bill, explaining a key provision:
781
782“[This law would]…expand the definition of person to include any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, estate, trust, foundation, or other legal entity.”
783
784That means that the right to refuse service to potential clients on religious grounds wouldn’t be newly granted to ostensibly secular businesses on non-profits, but rather that such entities are “protected” under the old First Amendment because they – like individuals – are “people”.
785
786Had they wanted, lawmakers could have gone the other route to enshrine the corporate right to bigotry. They could have created a new legal shield for businesses, explicitly granting them an expanded interpretation of the “right to refuse service to anyone”.
787
788But that’s not what they did. Rather, they used the framework of First Amendment religious freedom to justify the right to refuse service, and specifically referred to “people” as the beneficiaries of this new “protection”. They chose that course because in doing so, it allows this bill to achieve a second, more insidious goal under cover of the headline-grabbing license to discriminate.
789
790Why? The First Amendment rationale was no doubt employed in part to better protect the legislation against legal challenge. A less Constitutionally grounded effort to the same end would more easily fall afoul of strict scrutiny. But it’s larger than that. For decades, conservatives have been advancing the notion that the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights apply not just to “people” in the ordinary sense of the world, but to less traditionally conceived persons, including corporations.
791
792The apex of that effort came in 2010, with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. By a 5-4 margin, the court declared that corporations were entitled to the same free speech protections as individuals, overturning decades of precedent.
793
794While far less flashy, the personhood provision in SB 1062 was designed to further this effort, granting legal entities another first amendment freedom in the form of religious liberty.
795
796A certain amount of practiced cognitive contortion will allow even a leftist to see how a corporation might be able to “speak.” But the idea that a business – not its owner, not its employees, not its customers or shareholders, but the business itself – can hold sincere religious convictions defies credulity. I’ve just never seen an investment bank get baptized — but I’d love to take one’s confession.
797
798Over the last four years, progressives have poured enormous time and energy into efforts to overturn or constitutional overrule Citizens United. Those efforts are important, but until they succeed, noticing and combating more subtle laws like this one in Arizona must be the better part of the fight.
799
800This is how the conservative movement carries out its counter-revolution. Like any effort to guide the course of history, high profile victories are only half the game. They must be built upon if they are to truly take hold; they must be made permanent through quiet steps. Real change comes not when an idea ekes out slim triumph in a divided court, but when that idea becomes ingrained into the fabric of society, its logic woven into a thousand unrelated measures. Revolution is complete when it is no longer revolutionary.
801
802Nowhere is this truer than in the American legal system, where the collective gravity of a thousand little precedents can make it impossible to remove a working concept without tearing the whole pyramid of logic down.
803
804When corporations become people, they become that much harder to control. They become that much harder to regulate so that they don’t repeat the kind of reckless endangerment that brought the country to its knees six years ago. In the conservative moral universe, such state powerless is ideal – but it isn’t for those of us who’d rather not repeat the consequences.
805
806We should fight SB 1062. We should fight it because it’s cartoonishly bigoted, of course, but also because it’s a small step in a long effort to redefine the kind of people this country is for at the expense of those it’s long been of and by.
807
808outside a small home in Yorba Linda, California, President William Jefferson Clinton delivered the final eulogy at the funeral of Richard Milhous Nixon. At first, the speech seemed to abide by the unspoken rules of decorum that had informed every eulogy before it: praise the former president in broad terms; highlight his triumphs in foreign policy. Pay homage to his enviable family life. Do not, under any circumstances, say “Watergate.”
809
810Do not talk politics. Do not talk resignation. China? Sure. Alger Hiss? Why not? A joke about Dick Nixon’s late-in-life affinity for rap music? That’d be okay. Any mention of the downfall that made the 37th president a synonym for corruption and a pariah even within his own party for the last 20 years of his life? Might dampen the mood — best to avoid it.
811
812For almost 10 minutes, Clinton did just that. He praised Nixon’s love for his wife Pat, for his valuable counsel to every subsequent administration  — including Clinton’s own — in matters of national security, for his many goodwill trips overseas. By all accounts, it looked like he was just trying to get through this thing with as little pain as possible and get back to DC. Then something happened: Clinton broke the rules. Halfway through a paragraph that began like yet another iteration of the deceased’s remarkable family life, the president paused. With a tilt in his voice that almost betrayed what he knew he was about to say, he continued:
813
814“Today is a day for his family, his friends, and his nation,” Clinton intoned, “to remember Nixon’s life in totality. To them let us say: may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”
815
816No, he didn’t use the word “Watergate.” But in a way that every member of the audience, both in Yorba Linda and on national television, understood, he said it.
817
818¤
819
820I knew Nixon the Idea long before I knew anything about Nixon the Man. As the child of baby boomers who had come of age cheering his downfall, some of my earliest lessons in American history had centered on Tricky Dick’s irredeemable fuckery. It wasn’t just me: by the time we millennials came to civic self-awareness, Richard Milhous Nixon had long been solidified as the archetypal villain of American political mythology, a consensus Bad Guy we inherited from our parents.
821
822Surveying my friends and peers confirmed it. Whether they had grown up in liberal or conservative families,  my fellow millenials’ earliest memories of Nixon were largely the same — the guy was a criminal, a crook, a paranoid madman; hell, most of them reported knowing the epithet “Tricky Dick” before they were even aware that it referred to a former president of the United States. One friend, a native of deeply conservative Alabama, summed it up by recounting his parents watching Nixon’s funeral on television:
823
824There was no, “now this guy was the President, but he made some mistakes,” or even that he’d been good in some ways but bad in many more. No. What I’d been told, as early as when I was a five-year-old, was that the guy they were burying on TV was a traitor to the office of the presidency, whose election was a national disgrace. And my parents are die-hard Republicans. I guess by the early 90s, Nixon-bashing was as important to child-rearing as weaning your kid off the bottle.
825
826There were, of course, other figures we were taught to hate — Reagan if your parents were Democrats, Carter if they were Republicans — but Nixon was different, and not just because the loathing was universal. Carter and Reagan were meant to be tried in the court of one’s political persuasion and found guilty of embodying its opposite. But with Tricky Dick, the cart came before the horse: we knew he was bad before we knew politics at all; indeed, in the realm of public life, millennials grew up with Richard Nixon not as an example of badness, but as its definition. Nixon was bad the same way that God is good, or that Trix are for kids. Sure, your parents might teach you to despise Hillary Clinton or the dreaded Speaker Newt, but they were just examples of malice, and what’s that compared to being malice itself?
827
828The archetype was useful. In my early life, the consensus around Richard Nixon frequently served as a much-needed salve when my peers and I began to develop our dueling political identities — no matter what, Nixon was still common ground. Take, for example, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. By the fall of 1998, the House had impeached Bill Clinton. He was facing trial in the Senate. The whole country was debating his worthiness to hold high office, from the talking heads on CNN down to me and the other students in my somewhat tony Los Angeles elementary school. It wasn’t exactly a fair fight. Out of 20-odd kids in our third-grade class, there was exactly one Republican: a prematurely grey-haired kid named Gavin who, by virtue of his minority politics, had faced more than his fair share of bullying and consequently knew his shit pretty well for an eight-year-old. He had been dispatching Clinton defenders left and right, and one day in the lunch line, he decided it was my turn. Standing behind me, he started in on the failings and corruption of President Clinton, telling me how in his (or at least his father’s) opinion, the president was a crook, a liar, and had done something bad with a lady who wasn’t his wife, even if he didn’t exactly know what that something was. Slick Willy, he said, should be thrown out of office, and we should all take this as a lesson in how untrustworthy the Democrats were in general.
829
830I still had some of my baby teeth; I wasn’t looking for a fight. Trying to find a way to diffuse the situation, I affected my best reasonable-grown-up voice (the one my parents used when they wanted to politely complain at a restaurant), and said, “Well, sure. But both sides have bad guys, don’t they? We’ve got Clinton, but what about you guys? The Republicans have Nixon.”
831
832“Fair enough,” Gavin said, and that was that. We ate lunch in peace, neither of us really having the slightest clue why that argument made sense, neither of us  — I’m fairly certain  — knowing any more about Watergate than we did about whatever President Clinton had or hadn’t done with that woman. It didn’t matter: we knew Nixon was a bad guy, and in this case, it balanced the scales.
833
834¤
835
836Our parents saw Nixon fall in real time. They saw him go from another Republican politician to a new American pariah. They watched as he fulfilled every suspicion they had entertained since his sweat-stained five o’clock shadow sold Checkers like a used car. They wrote the history of his condemnation, and made it so universal that I have never met a boomer who doesn’t swear they voted for McGovern in ’72 — an impossibility when you consider that Tricky Dick took over half the 18–25 vote that year. For them, the decision to despise Nixon was conscious, a result of seeing the man through the lens of not just their politics, but also their sense of decency. We didn’t get to do any of that. We didn’t get to see history; we just received it in the same way we received George Washington’s honesty. Unlike boomers, millennials know Nixon’s evil not as a conclusion but as an axiom of our political calculus, as a fundamental tenet of our civil religion. Why would our parents bother with the details? As Hunter S. Thompson said, “This is not a generational thing. You don’t have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.” So it was simple: Nixon was a crook, despite his renowned protestation to the contrary. That was how it was. It was how we’d always known it to be. For the first half of my life, I never doubted the conclusion; doubt didn’t even occur to me as an option. Until it did.
837
838¤
839
840My teenage descent into Nixonalia started the same way my Boomer parents got into drugs: with the toke that didn’t kill. Back in the 1950s and 1960s — before the golden days of comprehensive education, before D.A.R.E., before even Nancy Reagan had the gall to suggest that the nation’s drug problem was a matter of pure personal perseverance, willed behind thee as easily as Satan — America’s drug education was the stuff of “Reefer Madness.” The children of the Eisenhower era were told that marijuana led, at best, to heroin addiction and madness; at worst, it meant instant death. In the short term, the strategy worked: a generation of schoolchildren was successfully scared shitless. In the long term, as we all remember, it all backfired.
841
842When a young person finds out that taking a toke doesn’t unleash an unimaginable horror into their lives, it does violence to their faith in received wisdom. Boomers decided that everything they had been told about drugs was a lie. For me, it meant that, for about five years of my life, I absolutely loved Richard Nixon. It just took one toke.
843
844That toke was Nixonland. The second in a trilogy about contemporary movement conservatism by liberal Chicago historian Rick Perlstein, Nixonland presented itself not as a biography of the disgraced former President, but as the history of the American voting public between 1964 and 1972. As Perlstein puts it in his introduction:
845
846The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name — but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for President because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.
847
848I was 18-years-old and a budding American history buff. Newly high on a misguided enthusiasm for Howard Zinn’s genius, Nixonland seemed right up my alley  —  the “invisible protagonist” of the American voter tickled my sense of populism, if nothing else. The time was ripe. I was taking AP U.S. Government and, when I wasn’t taking non-lethal tokes, spent my free time reading my way through our nation’s history, maintaining and updating my personal “Top Five” lists (of presidents, battles, Supreme Court configurations, et al. I was like an overeducated, grossly uncool Rob Gordon). I’d just finished “A Conspiracy So Immense” on Joe McCarthy. The 1960s were next, and a people’s history of the Nixon years made perfect sense. Plus, I figured, I’d finally get the full story behind the man I’d hated all my life. It would be simple, it would be clear, and I’d finally have those long-absent facts on my side.
849
850Then something strange happened. In an early chapter of the book, Perlstein takes us through the buildup and fallout of Nixon’s infamous 1952 Checkers speech. In retrospect, it hardly feels like fact at all: Perlstein’s account reads less like an actual history of an actual man named Nixon giving a speech, and more like a critical analysis of a George Saunders story about a fictional candidate giving a fictional speech who just happened to be named Richard Nixon. All the tropes are there: a down-on-his-luck, ambitious, morally flexible sad sack is facing a potentially humiliating crisis. It is an irrevocable moment of decision, born of his own flaws, although he insists — and, one gets the sense, is not entirely wrong in insisting — that this moment came from an unfair world that wants to kick the Loser while he’s down. He’s scheming, sure, but he’s also being sincere. He doesn’t understand, but he’s fighting for his integrity and his life. Like in a Saunders parable, you want to hate the antihero for his corruption, you want to cast him out for his weakness, and sigh a little bit for the failings of the American Dream. But you can’t. You can’t, because in a way you feel for the embattled Loser; you identify, just a little more than you’d like to, with the old sad sack. You feel ambivalent. As Perlstein points out, the story does not lend itself to easy conclusions, because “this wasn’t just an act. And it wasn’t just sincere. It was a hustle; and it was from the heart. It was all of those things, all at the same time.”
851
852So maybe Thompson was right to eulogize Tricky Dick as a man with “the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds,” who “would kill you as a lesson to the others” because “badgers don’t fight fair.” But who doesn’t root for the badger in a dogfight, even if he is a duplicitous bastard?
853
854Of course, none of this proved that Nixon was a good guy or a great president — all it did was show that Nixon was complex. For me, that was all it took. By feeling the slightest identification with a man for whom I’d been taught reflexive disgust my entire life, the world changed. There was nothing to fall back on, no way to drown this tiny stirring in a sea of contrary evidence, precisely because I’d never received contrary evidence: Nixon-hating was a given. Suddenly, deprived of certainty, I had nothing left. My faith was shattered. My teachers had lied to me.
855
856From there, things went pretty quickly. With the reverse intensity of a convert, I began to see everything in Nixon’s favor. The press, the Democrats, the Ervin Committee, Woodward and Bernstein — they were all out to get my guy, my Nixon, the man who represented everyone who had ever been shit on by the establishment. He could do no wrong, and even when he did, it was fair play considering the treatment he was getting. My parents just didn’t get it. Nixon had become — for me — the misunderstood, tortured icon that every teenager must have been. Of course, in retrospect, I suppose I could have gone for Dylan, but it was 2008 and I wanted to be a rebel.
857
858What worried me most was what this would mean for my politics. Was my sudden adoration for Nixon the inciting incident that would lead me over to the right side of politics? That’s when I discovered the second, and ultimately more substantial, truth about Tricky Dick.
859
860As I kept reading, I rapidly concluded that the least interesting things about Richard Nixon are the very faults that inform his caricature. His anger, his resentment, his corruption and paranoia — they were the stuff of freshman psych, easily diagnosed by anybody who could even spell “Freud.” In fact, we can clear the whole thing up right here: why was Richard Nixon so defensive, bitter, and paranoid? He grew up so poor that, despite receiving a full scholarship to Harvard, he was forced to attend Whittier College because his family couldn’t afford books or transportation. Two of his brothers died in childhood. His mother was an unironic user of the plain speech. His father beat him regularly, and on at least one occasion came very close to drowning a prepubescent Richard in a ditch.
861
862Done.
863
864Far more interesting was just how progressive Nixon seemed to be. No less a liberal luminary than Gore Vidal endorsed in “Not The Best Man’s Best Man” as:
865
866The first President who acted on the not-exactly-arcane notion that the United States is just one country among many countries […] [Nixon] went to Peking and Moscow in order to demonstrate to all the world the absolute necessity of coexistence.
867
868The foreign policy accomplishments are well documented and, however begrudgingly, praised in left-wing circles. It was these very accomplishments that were seen as safe subject matter for the funeral. They are remarkable not just for their success, but for the fundamentally progressive content of their character: disarmament in the form of the SALT treaties, restraint in support of Israel, choosing trade with China over the ideological rigidity of absolute good versus evil — these are the things that today’s Democrats can only dream of, lest they be accused of weakness, appeasement, and surrender. To an Angeleno teenager living in the latter days of George W. Bush, it looked like saintliness.
869
870Moreover, Nixon’s unexpected leftism didn’t end at the water’s edge. On the domestic front, Nixon had instituted wage and price controls, founded the EPA, claimed that solar and wind power were the only option for the 21st century, rejected the extreme voices of his own party when they tried to give Spiro Agnew’s job to Ronald Reagan (who Nixon called a “know-nothing”) instead of the relatively moderate Gerald Ford. His record read like everything I wished my party could admit standing for and still get elected.
871
872On the economy, Nixon declared himself — and all of us — to be Keynesians, saying flat out that the government does create jobs, siding with Paul Krugman, not Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand. On civil rights, he broke the 1959 Senate tie over strengthening the black vote in the former Confederacy; Senator John F. Kennedy sided with the South. As President he required affirmative action for federal contractors; Senator Sam Ervin, hero of the Watergate Committee, swore to fight integration to his last breath. On the environment — beyond the EPA and renewable energy — he halted dumping in the Great Lakes, passed the Clean Air Act, and formed a cabinet-level Council on Environmental Quality. He founded the Legal Services Corporation to assist the poor, opposed an amendment to protect school prayer, gave 18-year-olds the vote, ended the draft (finally), and was the first American president to propose the universal insurance mandate so hated by today’s Republicans. Ted Kennedy killed the legislation (it wasn’t liberal enough).
873
874I began to play a game called “Guess Who Said It.” The idea was to put two quotations on a political issue next to each other — one from Richard Nixon, and the other from a well-known contemporary Democrat. Here’s one with John Kerry on the topic of gun control. Guess who said it:
875
876Let me be clear. I support the Second Amendment. I am a gun owner. I am a hunter.
877
878I don’t know why an individual should have a right to a revolver in his house […] the kids usually kill themselves with it and so forth. Why can’t we go after handguns, period?
879
880Richard Nixon — the Big Bad of American politics, the most universally condemned president of the last 100 years — was to the left of John Kerry on gun control. In 1992, near the end of his life, he went on record saying flat out that “[w]e need gun laws stricter than the Brady Bill.”
881
882Of course, on all of these counts, the Nixon legacy is more complicated than I gave it credit for all those years ago. But by the beginning of my freshman year at the University of Chicago, I was a clear-eyed apologist for Nixon the Complex; a foot soldier for Nixon the Surprisingly Liberal, acting out my revisionist crusade, full of zealotry. I volunteered for the Obama campaign while I filled my dorm room with 1968 campaign posters. I argued for socialism in my freshman sociology classes while debating (to my parents’ horror) any fellow liberal I could find on the 37th president. There didn’t seem to be a contradiction — my hero and my left wing values fell hand in hand.
883
884In 15 short months, I had come from reflexively loathing to unconditionally loving The Great Boogeyman of American politics. From “Nixonland” to Nixonalia. From a toke to the needle. I was a Nixon junkie.
885
886¤
887
888I wasn’t alone, either. If one bothers to look, strange pockets of Nixon sympathy — Gore Vidal’s is one — can be found in diverse corners of our national dialogue. Arch-libertarian and master magician Penn Jillette is another. (“Nixon […] was bugnutty, crazier than Charlie Manson’s shithouse rat but […] Nixon was still a strong, brave, smart human being, more fit to be president of the United States than I will ever be.”) A third is liberal millennial hero Stephen Colbert (on Nixon’s 1972 platform: “John Kerry couldn’t have run on this! What would I give for a Nixon?”)
889
890As long ago as 1995, a serious effort to rehabilitate Nixon’s image for the left was undertaken by Joan Hoff in “Nixon Reconsidered.” With the 100th anniversary of his birth this year, publications from The National Review (“Nixon at 100: Was He ‘America’s Last Liberal?’” ) to The New York Times have taken stabs at a more nuanced Nixon (Nate Silver rates him a 22 for conservatism on a scale that gives Mitt Romney a 39 and Barry Goldwater a 67, for comparison). When I first discovered these fellow travelers, I was elated. Perhaps my instincts hadn’t been wrong after all; perhaps my teenage apostasy was just one of 1,000 such conversions, signaling the first stirrings of a wave that would finally vindicate Dick Nixon. Perhaps my parents and my peers would see the light.
891
892But it wasn’t so. All of these efforts to salvage Nixon were limited in two ways: first, most turned out not to be so much defenses as admissions of complexity, gesturing at the limitations of the Nixon caricature but ultimately embracing it. The possibility of redeeming Nixon feels, in many of these essays, more intellectual than probable, more flashy controversy than real conviction. The editorial voice remains consistently skeptical. Vidal, despite his praise, still resigns Nixon to the “parade of mediocrity” that followed FDR. Jillette concludes that Nixon was — despite some nuance — a “crook,” “not fit to be president,” and a “sack of shit” to boot. It’s hard to know when Colbert is kidding. The National Review answered its own question with a simple “No.”
893
894Second, even the most valiant of these efforts had limited impact. “Nixon Reconsidered” did not, after all, result in much reconsideration of Nixon. Nothing has. The many essays published lately in his defense have not really breached the zeitgeist, and despite any inroads they may have made with the intelligentsia, most people — and especially most of my fellow millennials — still carry the simple view of Tricky Dick without a second thought. There hasn’t been a Nixonwave; there hasn’t hardly been a ripple, really. Despite all the attempts, I still find that defending President Watergate to your typical boomer is like telling them you don’t like the Beatles; praising him to a millennial is like saying Radiohead is overrated.
895
896Mickle Maher — the Chicago-based boomer playwright and consummate anti-Nixon liberal — summed up the prevailing attitude nicely when I raised to him the mere possibility of Nixon’s vindication: “Why is this even a question,” he asked me, “Nixon’s degenerate, reactionary, corrupt, false choked, and shriveled soul? Geez-o-pete.” A leftist millennial friend who is — on other issues — no stranger to strong disagreement with the liberal consensus, is less poetic: “You’re just fucking wrong,” he’s told me more than once. Most millennials I talk to think I’m being ironic.
897
898¤
899
900It isn’t irony, but there are levels. My admiration is no longer unconditional, and the case against President Nixon is not difficult to make — Watergate did happen, after all. He did try to firebomb the Brookings Institution. He had his cronies steal Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatric file, deliberately sabotage Ed Muskie’s 1972 campaign, and planted George McGovern literature in Arthur Bremer’s hotel room. He obstructed justice, and lied about it more than once to the people and the press. Despite what he said, he did have sex with those burglars. He was a self-serving politico who would stab you in the back as quick as he shook your hand and tell your mother about it in the same moment he pocketed her vote. Dick was a dick, sometimes.
901
902His sins are legion. Beyond the more overt criminality, there’s also his well-known, albeit expediently private, racism: believing blacks to be genetically inferior, the Irish mean drunks, the Italians not having “their heads screwed on tight,” Hispanics not real Americans, Jews “aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious” and unworthy of real trust. Kissinger and Safire — that is, the only Jews he actually spent time with — were exceptions, of course.
903
904And his liberal stances? Perhaps nothing more than acts of opportunism, more convenient than principled. He was a man who would say or do anything to win, friends, family, and principle be damned. Even a cursory review of his public statements between 1960 and 1968 seems to confirm as much: on civil rights alone, Nixon held more positions than the rest of the country combined, aping everyone from Barry Goldwater to Stokely Carmichael. It’s the same with wage and price controls. Where he was consistent — on busing, on gay rights, and on abortion, for example — his stands were mainly conservative. The only consolation is that Nixon probably didn’t care about these issues any more than he did about the ones where we agree: by his own admission, domestic policy was a nuisance that distracted a president from his true role as an international statesman, so he was happy enough to get behind whichever way the wind blew.
905
906This, my teenage hero? It only gets worse. In recent months, the declassification of Lyndon Johnson’s White House tapes has revealed perhaps the greatest of Richard Nixon’s sins: deliberately sabotaging Vietnam peace talks in 1968 in order to win the presidential election, purchased at the price of five more years worth of American blood. Even if his opportunism was understandable (what politician isn’t an opportunist?), even if his racism was somehow forgivable (he was born in 1913, after all), even if Watergate could be ignored (LBJ bugged Nixon’s campaign in 1968), this must be the thing beyond forgiveness, mustn’t it? As the BBC reported:
907
908In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris — concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.
909
910[Nixon adviser] Chennault was dispatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.
911
912So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.
913
914It seems nothing short of treason, committed by the very man who — say what you will about his sins at home — prided himself on being a peerless leader on the international stage.
915
916¤
917
918This could be just the poetic third act my story needs, and a nice ending: my hero fallen, my five-year journey over, I come home, new evidence in hand, to the position my parents taught me. The prodigal son: wiser for the experience, now cleaving to the axiomatic truth that Richard Nixon was a fucker beyond redemption, his place as our national reference point for evil well deserved. My liberal credibility restored, my membership on the millennial left renewed in good faith …
919
920But it just isn’t so. Despite the steady calming of my earlier enthusiasm, despite the encouragement of my entire generation, despite the old case against him and the new, despite everything, I still find myself at bat for Richard Nixon if only because I am drawn, indeed, drawn more confidently than ever, to Nixon the Complex. Despite finding the waters especially muddy, I still discover the scales tipped for Tricky Dick. I still see him as an unacknowledged hero of the American Left.
921
922I’ve been thinking about why.
923
924My Nixonalia was born during the dying light of the Bush administration — a consensus villain in his own right, who made Ronald Reagan look like a moderate in the school of Nelson Rockefeller. The height of my devotion coincided with the rise of the Tea Party, who make Bush Jr. look like a liberal in the school of George McGovern. It’s possible that in the face of a national discourse increasingly driven on the right shoulder, Nixon, despite it all, does appear reasonable. I don’t think that’s the reason, though.
925
926It could be that I simply refuse to have my assessment of the man burned down a second time — but I don’t believe that, either.
927
928In reading Nixon’s writing, in examining his positions, and in watching him speak, one more important truth consistently emerges. Whether you agree or disagree with any of his given positions, whether you find fault or favor with his actions, in every case you can’t help but see an engaged mind at work. Nixon was brilliant, and even in his most catastrophic choices his thinking never lacked deliberate complexity — in fact, an almost obsessive desire for nuance. Our worst presidents — from Jackson and Polk to Reagan and Bush Jr. — have suffered, at their core, from a rigidity of vision, from a preference for simple thinking and the comfort of unwavering ideology (Reagan’s aides famously noted how the man who entered the Oval Office with the most persuasive simple metaphor always won the aging actor’s ear). While this preference at times informed their greatest moments, it also crippled them — preventing reversals when the times demanded them. For me, at least, confidence in a president’s intellectual curiosity serves as a buffer against condemnation. It is what allows me to proceed with cautious optimism when President Obama makes decisions I don’t initially support; I may disagree, but, unlike with Bush Jr., I am at least convinced he thought about it, that he sought the best intelligence on the matter first. Nixon was, first and foremost, a thinker. Reagan couldn’t remember his own legislative agenda, and that was long before the Alzheimer’s set in; Nixon would’ve hated Sarah Palin (despite some pundits’ bottomless desire to compare the two), and not because of her positions, or even her loose relationship with the facts. He would’ve hated her for not even bothering to learn the facts before she lied about them.
929
930When I read the accounts of those who knew Nixon personally, it is this quality of intellect they always come back to: his knowledge, his devotion to detail, his unexaggerated genius. Jillette quotes Frank Gannon, a former Nixon aide, arguing that Richard Nixon was the smartest president we ever had. In “Nixonland,” Perlstein gives us this account from a young YAF staffer, recalling a meeting between Richard Nixon and his organization in 1966:
931
932No notes … He goes around the world. Rattling off names, connections, “this is what we have to look for here … Russia and China … the Sino-Soviet split,” and he starts mentioning names and names below names, and names below names below names, and “here is what France is saying,” and de Gaulle is saying this, and whoever was the British prime minister, and the prime minister of Japan … I mean, he was rattling off all these names.
933
934Nixon speechwriter Bruce Herschenson:
935
936He looked at [the world] as a world with 200 countries and 200 leaders, and he studied every one of those leaders, and he knew most of them … It’s a talent I have never seen equaled.
937
938Another well-known anecdote, appearing throughout the annals of Nixon accounts, claims that if you drew an arbitrary line through a map of the United States, Tricky Dick could tell you the political lay of the land in every Congressional district it passed through.
939
940Richard Nixon was, beneath all else, a mind at work. To be sure, it worked for evil as often as it did for good, and — no matter the moral equation — worked always for itself. But all other things being equal, it is this superlative mental quality that keeps me from totally abandoning Dick Nixon. The complexity of his own mind, mirroring the complexity of a legacy that cannot be done justice by any simple judgment — that cannot be assessed by looking at any single act. He’s complicated. At least I think so — it’s hard to know with Tricky Dick. That’s what keeps him interesting.
941
942¤
943
944In his 1978 memoirs, and for the rest of his life, President Nixon insisted that he would one day be vindicated by history. He believed, as I once did, that the balance of his triumphs would outweigh the memory of his downfall. But now? I don’t know if that’ll ever happen. I don’t know if it should. I know that a full and fair debate of Richard Nixon may never make him a hero, but I also know that a full and fair debate can never happen in my generation.
945
946The boomers’ disdain for Richard Nixon was reflexive, and by it they indoctrinated millennials with an a priori hatred. And this has deprived us — every politically-minded millennial, including me — of the opportunity to have a reasonable debate about the 37th president’s legacy, and thus about our own political history.
947
948“My name is Heather and hello thank you for coming.
949
950I see you and I ask myself: What did I do before I met you? A bunch of bullshit is what. That is the answer. I ate candy and squirmed at lovely things and spun silk smiling smalltalk. I looked and I said ‘The universe is so so big, you know, and everything is just how I please, everything is starscapes and folk songs and full of dancing when I want it and only quiet hugging tears when I do not. Everything is only folk songs singing down mossy green to halfway houses made of pumpkins and everybody sleepy like heather reading by the window seeping silent orange light, reading Nabakov and knowing like I know that everything will be green moss and pumpkins forever because we are all connected by quiet strings of universal majesty, and these are the most humble Gods, and everything will perpetuate our eternal youth and sing songs for everybody lovely on Facebook
951
952But this was naive. This was before I met you. Speaking of you:
953
954Look at the person next to you. Did you come with them? Why? Were they your first choice? Your second? The person you always go to these shows with? Are they a date? Do they say so or do you just know so? Are you denying your interest? Are you denying your secret wish that they will love this so much that they’ll have to skip the tepid drink and fuck you straightaway after?
955
956Speaking of you:
957
958You are probably not happy. You say you are, but you are not. You may feel OK most of the time but this is not the same thing as happiness because happiness is not a passive state. I am so happy these days. I am so happy now that I know you. This is not my natural condition, but through determination I force happiness upon myself because I force myself to see a world full of cheery things, of feeling good and the infinite mystery of joy by making joy from mysterious things. It is not that i ignore the ugly or the bad, I am not a coward, it is only that I deny it now. This is not hard. I deny it to its ugly, terrible face. I will do this to you too my friend. I will make you look in the mirror and I will say, ‘When you put yours pants on, your worn and torn pants, you terrible thing, do you think to yourself ‘My god I am a piece of shit, my God I will do poorly today’. No. You see your pock-marked scowling face and think that it looks good today, you terribly bad and ugly thing. I will make you find your self-esteem and natural goodness and if this fails I swallow it all with my smile and my sunshine dripping teeth which smile themselves with little pockmarks of yellow and gum, I will swallow you into a box called ‘complicated’ and from complication I will craft beauty and goodness and moss-green meadows, or dancing and revelry, or whatever it is that is my happiness today. There are no ugly things, only things to be marveled at for complication for awe is a lovely way to cover up the bad and ugly things. I see and swallow and now that you have paid to be here I will swallow you as well. I will swallow you and make my happiness for I am happy through the enduring force of will. Nothing is wrong. Wrong cannot stand with me by the mirror. I will not allow it. I will not see a dentist, either.
959
960I am so happy to be here. Speaking of you, you are not happy to be here. You would like to use the bathroom. You think you can control it but you cannot, you are uncomfortable and because of this you cannot appreciate me with your body. Your mind, maybe, enough to reflect later, but your squirming sack is too full of boozy urine to take me into you, to feel catharsis properly. That will come later. That will come when you return if you don’t drink so much next time but of course you won’t return because you only came to check this off your list anyway and now you would only go if a very pretty girl asked you to. Oh how I long to swallow you, dears. Oh how I will swallow you now, you sickly lovely complicated thing. No more bullshit. No more sadness now.”
961Chaos in Philadelphia! Unity shattered before the Democratic National Convention could begin! A fight brewing, a convention divided, a Revolt on the Convention Floor! Hot off a contentious weekend that saw Debbie Wasserman Schultz resign her position as DNC chairwoman, the convention had barely begun before reports began pouring out of booing and—
962Well, just booing, really. That became The Story of night one at the Democratic National Convention.
963But despite the reports of supporters “hijacking” the convention and turning it into an “ugly family feud,” of sore losers booing “so much that by halfway through the evening they began to grow hoarse,” of an “angry uproar” and “repeated disruptions,” this was not a convention in disarray. There were some boos early on, but those—after a quick text message from Bernie Sanders—subsided. It wasn’t until 9 p.m., when Sarah Silverman inexplicably announced from the stage that “Bernie or Busters” were “ridiculous,” that a renewed chant of “Bernie, Bernie!” broke out for nearly thirty seconds. Over the three hours that followed, all the way until Bernie Sanders managed to deliver a speech despite efforts by his supporters to filibuster a Clinton nomination via sustained cheering, and the convention was gaveled to a close for the night, basic peace prevailed. A few boos were heard, even a few for Bernie Sanders, but there have been C-SPAN segments in recent memory more contentious than last night’s convention proceedings.
964There wasn’t so much as a floor fight. No delegations walked out. When the platform came up for a vote, the ayes had it without any more protest than some scattered no’s. When speakers announced, one after another, their enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton, they were not interrupted or shouted down. When it was announced that a picture would be taken of the full convention and that this photo would require stillness from every person in the hall for well over a minute, it went off without incident.
965To the extent that any real protest was going on, it was outside the gates: a few thousand activists cordoned off in a park well beyond the enormous perimeter that has been erected around the Wells Fargo Center.
966This is not a raucous convention. It is not even contentious, at least not in comparison to the average party gathering of the latter twentieth century, before we became accustomed to the perfect choreography of recent years. Despite some early invocations, it is nothing at all like Chicago in 1968, and it never threatened to be. A few boos, while potentially embarrassing to party managers, do not constitute a rebellion. Inside the hall, they barely caused an inconvenience.
967Indeed, throughout Monday afternoon and night, it was not clear that most people inside of the Wells Fargo Center were aware that some kind of revolt was meant to be afoot. The ordinary jumble of people excited to find themselves at an important event stood in long lines for hot dogs, ran into old friends, and mobbed political celebrities for autographs and pictures. They played with the toys that tech companies were showing off at sponsored booths in the hallways, and asked who knew about the really good parties. Outside, in the early evening, a delegate smoking a cigarette by the fence asked if I was “press or something.”
968“Yeah.”
969“Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of Bernie people fight?”
970“I don’t know.”
971 “Well, I guess they passed the platform,” he said, shrugging, and went off looking for some new excitement. 
972But if the threat of a serious revolt by Bernie delegates had largely dissipated by primetime, you wouldn’t know it from the contempt. Beginning in the late afternoon, serious liberals took to social media to denounce Bernie’s diehards and continued well after any suggestions of disarray had passed. They declared that the discord on the floor was “on him,” a consequence of his failure to prepare his supporters for defeat. Even if they’d boo’d him earlier in the day, these were the delegates “he” had chosen. One journalist—an employee of the Center for American Progress, which has backed Clinton this year—declared the protesters “garbage people,” “children” who are “helping Trump,” and a reflection of how hard it is to get “100% of folks not to be dumb.” Another suggested, bizarrely, that heckling Bernie supporters are “so cynical they might actually qualify as Green Party members.” A third was more blunt: these mild booing delegates were “shitheads.” This was not terribly different from the feelings of some journalists on the convention floor, although their particular terms were less printable still.
973For hours, any odd sound remained suspicious. Anything not clearly a cheer sent murmurs through the press—were they at it again? When Elizabeth Warren emerged to deliver her keynote address, it took twenty or thirty seconds and a string of murmured oh jesus christ’s for one reporter to realize that the chanting from the rafter was the Massachusetts delegation shouting “We want Liz!” According to one staffer who was in the room, this nervous disposition even reached the Democratic leadership, with Clinton’s floor manager telling both campaigns that Bernie had lost control of his people, and that some “gains” might be lost if they weren’t brought under control.
974What is remarkable in all of this is the strange and schizophrenic insecurity it betrays. Sanders delegates are taken to be a mortal threat to both the success of the Democratic Convention and to the electoral prospects of Hillary Clinton in general, a force accused, day after day, and in spite of all available polling evidence, of tipping the election toward Donald Trump. Yet at the same time, they are regarded as a force so tiny and irrelevant that in the face of their shadow of a protest in the early hours of the DNC (an indication that something has gone sufficiently awry in the lives of ordinary people that a portion of its natural constituency is threatening to revolt on television over it), the response of liberal commentators was not “What has the Democratic Party done to motivate this kind of discontent among its own membership?” but “Why are they doing this? To hell with them.”
975The convention is mundane in Philadelphia, and this is not something to be taken too lightly. In a year during which the Republican Party’s governing establishment was forced to nominate Donald Trump, during which a serious and unexpected insurgency by Bernie Sanders nearly overthrew the establishment of the Democratic Party, the party leaders in Philadelphia have found themselves with something remarkably ordinary: the beginnings of a four-day television commercial, a renewal of the powerful’s lease on power, at least for the moment. And yet they have spent the day telling themselves that they are on the brink of some ugly, embarrassing disaster.
976Maybe they’re right. Despite a convention where discontent barely snuck in—and despite the victory of the expected nominee, the likely retention of the presidency, and the defeat, for the moment, of insurgents threatening to turn the Democratic Party over to the proposition that the United States could achieve a social welfare state comparable to the rest of the industrialized world—there may still be some subterranean instinct that tells the present managers of the Democratic Party not to trust their evident success, that the world cannot go on like this forever. And that has them spooked enough to scream and curse at every little boo.
977
978In The Washington Post, in May, E.J. Dionne Jr. offered a novel avenue of resistance to members of the American political establishment still unwilling to accept that Donald Trump had secured the Republican nomination for president. “Many forces will be at work in the coming weeks to normalize Trump,” he wrote, “and yes, the media will play a big role in this. On both the right and the left, there will be strong temptations to go along,” to grant Trump a legitimacy not won by merely dispatching 16 rivals and entering Cleveland with a sound majority of delegates. “Trump’s Republican primary triumph means that this cannot be a normal election,” insisted Dionne, and it was therefore “urgent” to “resist capitulation to every attempt to move Trump into the political mainstream.”
979
980MOST POPULAR
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986It’s still unclear precisely what Dionne wanted. He was not, after all, advocating any kind of political action. There was no mention of a convention coup, as some had called for, nor an endorsement offered for any candidate emerging from the caucus of Bill Kristol’s imagination. There was no call to extra-political action either. When pundits call for resistance, they usually mean more strongly worded condemnation, not anything so messy as protests in the street. Those are sanitized and sanctified later.
987
988Rather, Dionne appeared to want something slightly metaphysical. Quoting his friend Leon Wieseltier, denying Trump mainstream acceptance required the gatekeepers of our political life to express their “shame, anger and resistance,” to “preserve the shock,” in essence to withhold their grace by way of sustained incredulity.
989
990The punditry heeded the call. Through May, June, and early July, coverage of Trump continued as it had for most of the year before—a frenzied and not terribly challenging hunt for signs that the Republican nominee was a selfish, unstable, ignorant bigot, neither qualified nor evidently too interested in governing the United States of America. Last week, Vox’s Ezra Klein renewed the call explicitly, writing that Trump’s rambling announcement of vice presidential nominee Governor Mike Pence “helped” Dionne’s cause: “Trump’s introduction of Mike Pence was shocking. Forget the political mainstream. What happened today sat outside the mainstream for normal human behavior… We need to stay shocked.” Klein followed up the following Thursday, after the nomination of Trump: “I am, for the first time since I began covering American politics, genuinely afraid.”
991
992This was, more or less, the consensus view of the punditry, who have covered this week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland with a mix of horror and satisfaction, at once overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of provocations by which to stay shocked and newly bolstered in their confidence: They had, after all, predicted a mess like this, and after a year of humiliation at the hands of Trump, some vindication was sorely needed. First, it was Melania Trump’s plagiarism of Michelle Obama. Then, Chris Christie’s impromptu trial for Hillary Clinton and the subsequent suggestion by a Trump adviser that the trial be skipped altogether in favor of summary execution. Ted Cruz, an odd representative for the forces of stay shocked was widely praised for refusing to endorse Trump and being booed off stage for his trouble. Ben Carson used his short speaking slot to suggest that Clinton worships the Devil, and these were only the marquee attractions: speeches from grieving mothers, washed up stars, and an avocado saleswoman were declared embarrassing by default—exploited, self-seeking nobodies subbing in for the sensible Republicans who refused to attend.
993
994All of this, however, was overshadowed by the Thursday release of a New York Times interview with Trump, wherein the candidate said that he would not necessarily honor Article V of the NATO treaty, leaving Baltic member states like Estonia and Lithuania to fend for themselves against a theoretical Russian invasion. Here, it took no special effort for the sensible to stay shocked. The comment was “reckless,” “ill-informed,” and “disturbing.” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp called it “the scariest thing he’s said,” writing that “with a few thoughtless words, [Trump] made World War III—the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear holocaust—plausible.” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie asked if this was “the most dangerous thing a modern POTUS nominee has ever said.”
995
996But it wasn’t. Not even close.
997
998“Let’s move beyond the statement to the larger point it seems to be getting at,” the political theorist Corey Robin wrote in an essay responding to Bouie and others, “that Trump is like nothing we’ve ever seen before in the realm of foreign policy”:
999
1000This is a country, remember, where it was the operational policy of the government, at the highest levels, to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. That wasn’t just the crazy talk of Dr. Strangelove. That was the reality that Dr. Strangelove was satirizing.
1001
1002Up through at least the first term of the Reagan Administration—and probably beyond—high officials in the national security establishment were talking about fighting and winning a nuclear war.
1003
1004Robin goes on to offer a range of quotations, from Reagan, from Goldwater, even from the U.S. Army field manual, each of which is more overtly inclined toward the possibility of nuclear holocaust than Donald Trump refusing to escalate should Russian President Vladimir Putin annex Latvia. Robin sums up: “It should be possible to talk about the very real and undeniable dangers of Trump without ignoring or reinventing the insanity of American history.”
1005
1006It’s worthwhile to extend Robin’s line of reasoning to the whole shock-preservation project. If it is imperative to prevent Trump from becoming normal, then we ought to be able to identify what it is about Trump that is so abnormal to begin with. Surely an odd and often embarrassing convention is not enough—this one, at least, did not feature any lectures directed at empty chairs. It remains to be seen whether the American people found the whole affair as embarrassing as the punditry.
1007
1008The “Lock her up!” chants? Calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of political foes is hardly a new development in American politics. In living memory, Red Scares and McCarthyite purges subjected many Americans to investigation and often termination over their political beliefs. More recently, liberals have called for the war crimes prosecution and jailing of Bush administration officials, while conservatives impeached a sitting Democratic president on the flimsy pretense of perjury. Another president only escaped prosecution by resigning his office, and by way of a pardon that rightly outraged liberals. The merits of these cases and the case of Hillary Clinton vary, but the suggestion that the legal system can be weaponized for political ends is not “outside the political mainstream.”
1009
1010While bigotry in American political life might rightly shock us, it is not abnormal—not among Republicans, and not among Democrats.
1011The bigotry, then? Trump is surely a bigot, a sexist and a racist who cannot go more than a few weeks without new incident. But while bigotry in American political life might rightly shock us, it is not abnormal—not among Republicans, and not among Democrats, who have nominated a candidate who once referred to black teenagers as “super-predators” who must be “brought to heel.” Our history and our present policy are a history of racial plunder, one soaked and still soaking in blood. That Trump is unusually crude about this, that he is evidently incapable of speaking in the euphemisms ordinarily employed in the service of bigotry, does not mean “this cannot be a normal election.” Are we alleging that George W. Bush—or Ted Cruz—represented superior leadership in any fight against oppression?
1012
1013Policy? Trump promises mass deportations, exclusion, a foreign policy that may falter in the Baltic but finds no such restraint in the Middle East: He promises to shred the Iranian nuclear agreement, to flatten Syria in pursuit of ISIS, to return torture to the American intelligence portfolio. But “return” is the operative word there: It was not so long ago that “normal” types, well inside the “mainstream” of our political institutions, justified the practice from the halls of the Justice Department; it is today that the United States reserves the right to incinerate the body of a foreign national without warrant and without declaration of war. Trump does not offer anything unusual but an unusually inept progression toward accepted conclusions.
1014
1015None of this is to suggest that Trump is not dangerous. None of this is to suggest that Trump is not unqualified, incompetent, and grotesque. But it is to say that he is not some strange eddy in the current of American history. He is where the ordinary river flowed.
1016
1017When the serious and the sober say that Trump is beyond the decency of the mainstream, they are talking ultimately about aesthetics. He is vulgar. He is rude. He is feckless and inconsistent; another man or woman might make the same suggestions, but so long as this person made them in more elevated rhetoric, so long as we believed he could competently execute his goals, we might call it dangerous, or wrong, but there would be no general call to “preserve the shock.” We’d have nothing but a partisan disagreement, heads shaken at the “usual mudslinging,” business as usual.
1018
1019Trump must be fought. He must be defeated. But it cannot end there. The trouble with Dionne and the others is not that they have failed to recognize a threat. Trump is one. It is that by casting the threat as an aberration, as a challenge specific to the man, it is too easy to believe that merely dispatching that man will solve the threat he stands for; that if we “refuse” to make this normal, then normal can carry on.
1020
1021But should it? The logic that undergirds Trump’s threat to NATO is that a world of American de-escalation is as dangerous as one where we will escalate over the Baltics. The threat is that we’ve rigged up an unsustainable nightmare of a world that demands permanent empire to avert nuclear holocaust, a “normal” politics where a loose comment from Trump can constitute such a grave threat to human life.
1022
1023How did somebody so inept turn the GOP into something so obscene? He didn’t. It already was that way. He just showed up.
1024Trump may be dispatched. So what? The next Trump may speak a little better. The next Trump may seem normal, may not commit so many unforced errors that his opponent can remain the prohibitive favorite without advancing an agenda beyond “Well I’m better than that guy.” Extremists can stage a slick convention, too. It is not a coincidence that the rightward drift of the Democratic Party over the past 40 years has sent the GOP in search of oxygen in the extremities of its right flank. Trump is not a magician. He is not a hypnotist. How did somebody so inept turn the Republican Party into something so obscene? He didn’t. It already was that way. He just showed up.
1025
1026If Trump loses, it will not be because the grandees of our op-ed pages thought he was way out of line. That is not, and never has been, how politics happen. Perhaps most people are not consciously afraid of American politics, but they are afraid of its consequences, and they have been afraid for far longer than Trump has been the GOP frontrunner and now nominee.
1027
1028The task before us is not resisting a “new normal.” It is accepting that this is what normal has become. It is formulating a plan beyond the next election, beyond preserving the shock until this all goes away. The solution is not “anything better than this.” We cannot preside forever over a precarious world, hoping against hope that nobody like Trump ever wins an election. The “political mainstream” is the trouble. The point isn’t to protect it from the abnormal. The point is to see it as it is, and to change it, before a monster with a kinder voice comes along; before the already ordinary monsters take us even further down the road.
1029
1030The latest victory is Pokémon Go, a mobile video game that, within a week of release, eclipsed Tinder and Twitter in active daily users and is now being used to add relevance to everything worth selling, from safe sex to the carceral state. It joins Star Wars, Hamilton, The Avengers, and nearly every other massively successful intellectual property of the past decade as an example of ostensible "nerd" culture that has thoroughly captured the mainstream.
1031
1032There were of course dissenters, but they were quickly dispensed with: Who could hate this honest fun, this special and important nostalgia for a generation of nerds? Didn't they know that Pokémon Go was encouraging exercise and boosting mental health by getting people outside? At best, the skeptics were snobs and pedants, typically and terminally not with it.
1033
1034But the ease with which criticism of Pokémon Go was dismissed wasn't reflected in the dismissals. Defenders of the game cast themselves as underdogs: culturally maligned nerds being shamed once again for their joy. In some cases, the defense even took on a social inflection, like an identity politics defined not by any immutable characteristic, but by consumption. Not liking this thing — worse yet, openly questioning its value — was not just a disagreement about taste, but an affront to a fan's politics and dignity.
1035
1036This has become familiar in recent years, as game after album after movie ostensibly servicing a maligned and mocked "nerd" culture has been defended viciously even as it was consumed by everyone.
1037
1038The underdogs win so often, you begin to wonder how hard the battle really is. They talk about standing up to a culture that ridicules their taste, but who precisely are they standing up against? Vanguards of "high art," who haven't wielded meaningful power over public taste in a generation? The general public, who by and large love Star Wars and Hamilton and Pokémon? The corporations selling them their rebellion in the first place?
1039
1040For all the rhetorical urgency of nerd culture rebellion, there does not seem to be much left to rebel against. Where are these snobs, sneering at any entertainment less serious than opera? If you can find one, you'll be even harder pressed to find his or her sympathetic audience. The last defenders of a high art/low art divide went out of fashion last century. The idea that adults, even educated and professional ones, can and should enjoy pop culture triumphed decades ago, and for the better. Bros and nerds, academics and presidents: We are all encouraged to love Game of Thrones and Beyoncé now.
1041
1042You would imagine the "nerds" — that is to say, most consumers of American media these days — would be happy. They won! But they're not. They remain on high alert for anybody trying to shame them, against a world of killjoys still out to spoil their fun.
1043
1044I have begun to believe that for a narrow sliver of society, the thrill of nerd culture in rebellion is an essential part of the fun. The belief that entertainment, consumption, and taste constitute meaningful political acts have become indispensable to the product being purchased. You're not just spending money a movie or an album or a game: You're sticking it to everybody who ever said you shouldn't, as powerless and few as they may be. You aren't just buying a popular bit of entertainment, you're buying the act of defiance.
1045
1046Some critics have identified nostalgia as a selling point, but that's not quite right. The nostalgia is not for the past but for the realized present: I am an adult now, and I can eat however many cookies I like.
1047
1048Movie studios and game makers are happy to encourage this tendency. A national media that has, in part, dedicated itself to celebrating the bravery of the prevailing taste consensus is a form of free advertising you don't contradict. But it is the prevailing consensus.
1049
1050There is, of course, nothing wrong with the mainstream. There is, of course, nothing wrong with fun. The most honest defenses of these products is that they function as pure escape, as pure comfort. And comfort is good and healthy! So is fun. I like all kinds of fun and comforting things, including some comic book movies. But that's all it is: just liking. Just taste. They are not politics.
1051
1052MORE PERSPECTIVES
1053 
1054DAMON LINKER
1055A radical case for Trump
1056 
1057RYAN COOPER
1058How Trump beat the media into stunned quiescence
1059There is a danger in the conflation. There may be no such thing as objectively good taste, but there is a such a thing as balanced taste. Comfort is good. Joy is good. Even nostalgia is good. But not everything can be nostalgia: That defies curiosity and denies the possibility of growth. Not everything can be a comfort: Any healthy culture contains art that challenges, that isn't fun, that complicates the world instead of solving it. Seeking out that kind of art is an essential function of adult life, not a burden imposed by snobs.
1060
1061When comfort is recast as rebellion, it deceives. It allows you to consume pure comfort and believe that it is something more. When fun is marketed as a challenge, when participating in that challenge becomes politics, becomes meaning, then you begin to feel that you are doing something more than just fun when you're not.
1062
1063That's enough for the marketing men. But it shouldn't be enough for you.
1064
1065I stopped reading stories about the excess of Silicon Valley when I realized that even the most cartoonishly vile characters of the genre are just rich, boring assholes.
1066
1067A 29-year-old millionaire who finds San Francisco's Market Street "grotesque." A company that fires long-time employees via iOS notification. A young CEO who looks around San Francisco, a city he "loves," and calls for the mayor to help him protect his lovely parents from the traumatizing sight of a homeless man. I’ve heard more deplorable things in a dive bar, and more creative things, too. I have no objection to the ritual humiliation of the grotesquely wealthy. But after a time I could no longer love to hate the degenerate boy-king overlords of Silicon Valley. I was only bored to hate them.
1068
1069Rating
1070
1071I also began to worry there was something codependent about the whole "Silicon Valley jackass" subgenre. It happens to every class of beat reporter, but it's acute in the gossip columns: The rags need the marks they’re ragging on. The waggers need Silicon Valley. In the typical case it's just one genre of dull hipster making fun of a slightly worse one; the Bowdoin-to-Brooklyn type versus dropout-to-startup kind. In the worst, it is Aaron Sorkin capping off a career dedicated to valorizing a succession of increasingly pompous fictional assholes by writing "nonfiction" screenplays about real-life assholes, every one of which might well be titled You Jealous?
1072
1073Even the best entries, like Andrew Marantz's profile of "internet-media entrepreneur" Emerson Spartz, The Virologist, may make their subjects appear preternaturally vapid ("Asked to name the most beautiful prose he had read, he said, 'A beautiful book? I don’t even know what that means. Impactful, sure.'") but they do not dismiss them completely. Even Marantz doesn’t want to rob Spartz of all of his mystique. Yeah, Spartz is eminently hateable, yeah he was raised on dime-store biographies of successful people, and sure, he thinks making garbage go viral is a superpower, but hey! He’s made money in new and exciting ways, so maybe it is a superpower, a bit. Maybe he's a genius, too.
1074
1075I stopped because these stories are always the same story. They are always point-and-laugh — isn’t this awful? — but no further. Always, It’s kind of cool though, isn’t it? too. They roll their eyes at the brave new world, but always allow that it is the world, that it is inevitable, that it is brave in its own grotesque way.
1076
1077WHILE LYONS ENGAGES IN QUITE A LOT OF THE USUAL 'LOOK AT THESE LUNATICS' SCOFFING, HE DOES IT AS WELL AS I’VE EVER SEEN
1078All of this is to say that I did not know about Dan Lyons's Disrupted until after it was published earlier this month. I did not know that Lyons — the author of Fake Steve Jobs and a staff writer on HBO's Silicon Valley — was writing a memoir about his time at HubSpot, a real startup where he'd really worked, nor that HubSpot was forced to fire two executives in July 2015 after they allegedly attempted to steal an early draft of Disrupted, thereby confirming in advance that the worst allegations therein were likely to be true. I did not know that the theft triggered an FBI investigation, or that Lyons worries to this day what the alleged hackers managed to steal or whether they are still plotting against him.
1079
1080I had not heard of it all until the New York Times ran an excerpt of Disrupted on April 10 and I managed a few paragraphs before I realized what I was reading and was by then too entertained to quit. Then, halfway in, I found a sentence I never expected the New York Times would print. Speaking of Silicon Valley’s self-regard as a "model of enlightenment," Lyons wrote: "This 'new' way of working is actually the oldest game in the world: the exploitation of labor by capital."
1081
1082There was maybe something more to this book than its blurbs — "a savage burn!" — suggested. I ordered a copy. It did not let me down: While Lyons engages in quite a lot of the usual Look at these lunatics scoffing, he does it as well as I’ve ever seen. He does something else, too. Disrupted begins to chip away, a bit, at the superficial gawking I'd grown bored with and to argue that the trouble with Silicon Valley isn't the excesses of companies-as-adult-frat-houses — not really. It's the excess of capitalism, shredding a century of labor security and calling it a cutting-edge disruption.
1083
1084Disrupted's blistering approach to Silicon Valley excess doesn't reveal anything new, but it's a shining example of the form
1085
1086The first half of Disrupted is pure Valley wagging. Lyons, fired at 50 from his position as Newsweek's technology editor, decides that he will not sit out the second tech bubble: He’s going to cash in.
1087
1088"The tech market is going crazy again, and this time I’m not going to sit on the sidelines and write about it," Lyons writes, "I'm going to work at a start-up. I am going to feed the ducks, or surf the tsunami, and maybe I will fall off my surfboard and drown, or maybe, I don’t know, I’ll get eaten by ducks, but to hell with it — I’m going to try."
1089
1090The try takes the form of a job at HubSpot, an "inbound marketing" startup in Boston. He interviews with the company's founders and they seem like smart guys. Their company is growing — they have a "really hot" IPO coming in the next couple of years. The founders offer Lyons what sounds like a great gig: He'll be a senior journalist coming in to remake the company's in-house blog into something cutting-edge and professional. He's excited.
1091
1092Conditions rapidly deteriorate.
1093
1094On Lyons's first day, neither of the men who hired him, nor the senior manager he believes he was working for, are even there to greet him. Lyons is shown around by a 20-something who, it turns out, is his boss. His job is not remaking HubSpot's blog, it is generating "content" for it, content, it turns out, that is largely designed to convince inexperienced small business owners to fill out a form thereby allowing HubSpot to spam them with advertising. Lyons is twice HubSpot's average age. His peer coworkers are fresh out of college. Nobody likes him, and he doesn't like them.
1095
1096THE DEPTHS OF SILICON VALLEY ARE NOT MORE DEPRAVED THAN YOU IMAGINED; THEY ARE PRECISELY AS DEPRAVED AS YOU'VE HEARD
1097The following hundred pages are a catalogue of what might be called "bad culture fit" by way of Lyons savaging his co-workers, his company, and the entire Silicon Valley mentality. HubSpot employees are clowns, they speak in incomprehensible acronyms. They don’t seem bothered when employees are suddenly fired (perversely called "graduation") and disappear without another word. They believe HubSpot's ownership when it tells them they are "rock stars," "super stars with super powers" who are "inspiring people" and "changing the world." The bosses themselves are mendacious, self-deluded megalomaniacs so thoroughly proficient at their line of bullshit that Lyons cannot tell if they're running a racket or if they really do believe themselves to be revolutionary marketing geniuses.
1098
1099"Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language — even, to some extent, inventing their own reality," Lyons writes, noting that "…every tech start-up seems to be like this. Believing that your company is not just about making money, that there is a meaning and purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission and that you want to be part of that mission — that is a big prerequisite for working at one of these places. How that differs from joining what might otherwise be called a cult is not entirely clear."
1100
1101The inanity extends beyond HubSpot itself. "Maybe they like this rhetoric because it makes online sales and marketing seem like some kind of epic adventure rather than the drab, soul-destroying job that it actually is," he says, "Marketing conferences are filled with wannabe gurus and thought leaders working themselves up into a revival-show lather about connecting with customers and engaging in holistic, heart-based marketing, which sounds like something I made up but is actually a real thing that really exists and is taken seriously by actual adult human beings."
1102
1103"Which makes me want to cry," he adds.
1104
1105We later learn that it's all a lie, anyway: HubSpot's real core is a factory of telemarketers brute-forcing sales in precisely the "outbound" manner that HubSpot's disruptive "inbound marketing" software is meant to replace.
1106
1107The sheer volume of lunacy abounding at HubSpot consumes roughly half of Disrupted’s 258 pages. If you still have an appetite for such things, I can't recommend Lyons's book more: It is the funniest and most relentless iteration of the form, madcap and darker than I'd expected. Speaking of a job posting seeking a media relations superstar capable of landing HubSpot on the cover of Time, Lyons writes: "Take it from someone who worked at Time's primary competitor — the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings a bag of guns and shoots the place up." This is not the typical humor of a man who characterizes himself the way Lyons does, as a goofy, out-of-touch dad.
1108
1109But it is difficult, in the book's early sections, not to feel a kind of weariness. Ludicrous as HubSpot is, nothing in Lyons's account is revelatory. The lid isn't blown off anything. The depths of Silicon Valley are not more depraved than you imagined. They are precisely as depraved as you've heard.
1110
1111Even in the most savage moments — "Dreamforce [a marketing conference] turns out to be a four-day orgy worthy of Caligula, a triumph of vulgarity and wasteful spending, with free booze and endless shrimp cocktail and a rate of STD transmission that probably rivals Fleet Week" — we have only the consummation of the expected. Yes: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is the Michelangelo of Silicon Valley horseshit. Deepak Chopra is a "noted charlatan and hack." Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist giant Marc Andreessen is probably corrupt and certainly a narcissist. Yes, all of them are served by legions of white college grads too distracted by free beer and Awesome Culture!! to notice they're overpraised mediocrities. But didn't we know this already?
1112
1113"Give millions of dollars to young entitled assholes, provide no adult supervision, and what happens next is predictable," Lyons writes. He's right. It is.
1114
1115The book rises above the typical Silicon Valley rant by examining the tech industry's unfair labor practices
1116
1117There is, however, a deeper current to Disrupted, one that begins over 100 pages in and fulfills the promise made by Lyons's New York Times essay: Companies like HubSpots are not just crazy bins. They're avaricious financial rackets — barely about technology at all — dedicated to the eradication of even modest labor protections and the cynical exploitation of workers.
1118
1119"HubSpot's offices are in an old furniture factory, built in the middle of the nineteenth century," Lyons writes, "Except for the free beer, the job of a HubSpot BDR [a "business development rep, i.e., a sales monkey] doesn't seem much better than the job his great-grandfather might have had in this same room a hundred years ago. The old sweatshop has just been turned into a new sweatshop. In some ways, the new one is worse."
1120
1121He goes on:
1122
1123It turns out I’ve been naïve. I’ve spent twenty-five years writing about technology companies, and I thought I understood this industry. But at HubSpot, I’m discovering that a lot of what I believed is wrong. I thought, for example, that tech companies began with great inventions…Engineering came first, and sales came later.
1124
1125But HubSpot did the opposite … HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product … while people still refer to this business as "the tech industry," in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore, says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s … It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.
1126
1127The beer, the foosball tables, the corporate cult: These aren't the silly consequences of a self-important industry drenched in cash; they're a con. "How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages?" Lyons asks, "One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room, under constant, tremendous psychological pressure, for $35,000 a year."
1128
1129THE CHAPTER IS CALLED "THE NEW WORK: EMPLOYEES AS WIDGETS," AND IT ALONE IS WORTH THE COVER PRICE
1130You create a company where employees have few benefits and less job security. Where termination can occur at any time. Where stake-price stock options — the great payout if you stick around through an IPO — take longer to meaningfully accrue than the average tenure of an employee.
1131
1132The outcome is always the same: Investors get rich. Owners get rich. Managers get by. "Who does that leave to get hurt?" a friend asks Lyons. I'm not sure, he says. "Jesus, dumbass. The employees!"
1133
1134"Silicon Valley has a dark side," Lyons writes, "To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor … It's a world where employers discriminate on the basis of race and gender, where founders sometimes turn out to be sociopathic monsters, where poorly trained (or completely untrained) managers abuse employees and fire people with impunity, and where workers have little recourse and no job security."
1135
1136He goes on:
1137
1138There was a time, not so long ago, when companies felt obliged to look after their employees and to be good corporate citizens. Today that social compact has been thrown out. In the New Work, employers may expect loyalty from workers but owe no loyalty to them in return. Instead of being offered secure jobs that can last a lifetime, people are treated as disposable widgets that can be plugged into a company for a year or two then unplugged and sent packing.
1139
1140It may be the New Work to those who woke up at the end of the last century and realized there was a lot of money to be saved by brutalizing cheap labor, but as Lyons well knows, it isn't new at all. The time "not long ago" when companies cared about their employees was brief, a blessed period between the end of the Second World War and the Reagan Revolution, when American workers enjoyed the most equitable labor relations hitherto achieved in their country. But disposability? Job insecurity? The virtue of avarice, at the total expense of labor? Like Lyons said: It's the oldest game in the world. The "New Work" disrupters have only included free dry cleaning.
1141
1142The chapter is called "The New Work: Employees as Widgets," but it might as well be called "80 Percent of the World Is Explained by Vulgar Marxism," and if you read nothing else in Disrupted, it alone is worth the cover price.
1143
1144The one aspect of Silicon Valley's long con that Lyons fails to address is that which perpetuates the genre of writing about it
1145
1146 The main cast of HBO's Silicon Valley, which Lyons now writes for.
1147HBO
1148The main cast of HBO's Silicon Valley, which Lyons now writes for.
1149The second half of Disrupted dovetails neatly, Lyons keeps up the economic argument, diving into the particularly inept financial management of HubSpot (one that nonetheless yields a successful IPO). He riffs, at length, on ageism in tech. He tells more stories about wild parties and abusive managers, about how he took a leave of absence to join the writing staff of Silicon Valley and returned to find his sole former friend at the office had been (possibly) tasked with harassing him out of the company.
1150
1151The story has a happy ending: Lyons becomes a TV writer, departs HubSpot for Gawker, and sells a book about his experiences. He's no longer a humiliated boomer, working alongside idiots half his age. He's a success. He even clears about $60,000 when HubSpot goes public.
1152
1153All of this works, so far as Disrupted goes. But I finished it wondering if there wasn't something Lyons missed. For all the time he devotes to the con that companies like HubSpot run on their employees, the con they run on public investors and — when the bubble bursts again — the con they'll have run on the whole of the American economy, Lyons does not touch on the con closest to his own task: the one Silicon Valley runs on journalists and authors who write about what maniac bastards they all are.
1154
1155That, at bottom, is why I stopped reading about Silicon Valley. People like (former) HubSpot executive Mike Volpe, entrepreneurs like Andreessen and Spartz, even elites like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, seem happy enough to be called lunatics and cultists. It may not be their first choice, but it is better than nothing. As reviled "pharma bro" and Wu-Tang fan Martin Shkreli knows, if you can’t convince everyone you're Awesome, then let the cynics cast you as special kind of villain. An asshole, but a bit of a badass, too.
1156
1157"In the World According to Start-Ups," Lyons writes, "when tech companies cut corners it is for the greater good. These start-up founders are not like Gordon Gekko or Bernie Madoff, driven by greed and avarice; they are Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., engaging in civil disobedience."
1158
1159Perhaps that's true, and among the ranks of the Valley there really are 25-year-olds lamenting the visible existence of poor people just like Rosa Parks. But truthfully, they aren't even Gekko. They're not nearly so special, unless we paint them that way. They're mundane people making mundane money and selling their greed with a new flavor of old hype. They're not cool, even in a bad way. They're just rich. They're the latest adepts in the ancient art of rigging a financial system and throwing yourself a wild party with the profits. The nicest thing you could say about them is that some are no doubt very talented and very smart and very sadly dedicated to the grotesque accumulation of capital.
1160
1161Late in Disrupted, Lyons talks about conspiring with a co-worker to keep his job. The co-worker makes things exciting in a pathetic way, forwarding Lyons a clip from Donnie Brasco that reminds him of the petty corporate intrigue they’re pulling.
1162
1163But, Lyons says, "maybe we are just two dickheads working in a marketing department, and one of us wants that to seem a little less banal than it really is."
1164
1165I am proposing that the same is true of the whole industry. That there is not even novel villainy in hurting people to make money.
1166
1167It is not enough, then, to mock Silicon Valley. The whole enterprise distracts. If the conmen in the Valley can convince you that they are a new and exceptional kind of evil, you will spend time thinking up new and exceptional ways to fight back, intimidated and a little bit in awe of their bravado. It isn't necessary.
1168
1169The rigged contracts, the job insecurity, the abusive management, the racism, the harassment, the investment scamming and hardball, the criminal reaction to dissent — these are old monsters, to be slain with old weapons. They are the same weapons needed across the whole of the economy: regulation, labor laws, newly robust unions, a political apparatus dedicated to questions beyond the fairest way to grow GDP.
1170
1171If there is to be a rhetorical component, wagging to be done and a book to be written, so be it. Dedicate the wagging and the book to the proposition that there are interests not only outside of but contradictory to the pursuit of wealth, the fastest possible growth of the market. If we have to call it a disruption, fine, but don't let the cult-talk and the frat parties and the mystique of these new assholes fool you. We've beaten them before. We know how.
1172
1173Michael Herr, the author of Dispatches and co-writer of Full Metal Jacket, is dead at 76.
1174
1175His masterpiece, Dispatches, has been out of fashion for a while, but when it was published in 1977, it was widely regarded as the seminal work of new journalism about the Vietnam War. Today, aside perhaps from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, it is the seminal work about the war, full stop.
1176
1177It arrived late. Herr served as Esquire’s Vietnam War correspondent from 1967 to 1969, and returned to the United States intending to quickly produce a book about what he’d seen there.
1178
1179But 18 months after his return, he suffered a nervous breakdown and wrote nothing for five years. The book ultimately arrived in 1977, and Hunter S. Thompson’s reaction is as accurate as any: "We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived," he wrote, "but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade."
1180
1181I read Dispatches when I was 19 years old. I won’t try to prove to you how good it is, or how important it is, how it is one of the greatest works of the second great age of literary nonfiction in The United States. But I will say that I remember writing a very pained journal entry back then, at the end of my first year in college, something like, What’s even the point of trying to write after this?
1182
1183I will say that Dispatches is not an easy book to summarize or to draw cheap lessons from. It is about the war in Vietnam, of course, and it is a condemnation of the war, but like all excellent nonfiction, it is not a solution but a complication.
1184
1185It describes the world precisely, but it does not describe it easily. Dispatches leaves you with a keener sense of what happened to Herr and to the soldiers around him, but with this clarity comes a messy, difficult uncertainty, too. We’ve seen this world now. What do we make of it?
1186
1187I’ll leave you with this passage, from the first chapter:
1188
1189But he always seemed to be watching for it, I think he slept with his eyes open, and I was afraid of him anyway. All I ever managed was one quick look in, and that was like looking at the floor of an ocean. He wore a gold earring and a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material, and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair cut it fell below his shoulders, covering a thick purple scar. Even at division he never went anywhere without at least a .45 and a knife, and he thought I was a freak because I wouldn't carry a weapon.
1190
1191"Didn't you ever meet a reporter before?" I asked him.
1192
1193"Tits on a bull," he said. "Nothing personal."
1194
1195But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it:
1196
1197"Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened."
1198
1199I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he'd waste time telling stories to anyone dumb as I was.
1200
1201"I’ve never been personally that crazy about the name of the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show," David Mitchell, who is incidentally the star of Peep Show, said in a 2011 YouTube video. "It sounds a bit sexy. Taken along with the late-night slot on Channel 4, the first-time viewer would not be unreasonable to expect titillation."
1202
1203"Which seems to me to be writing a check with the title," he went on, "that the content — constant footage of two pallid men in their 30s aging in real time — will emphatically fail to honor."
1204
1205In the end, we got to watch those two men — Mitchell’s Mark Corrigan and his co-star Robert Webb’s Jeremy Usborne — age all the way into their 40s.
1206
1207After nine seasons, which all told required 12 years under notoriously lax British television production ethic to complete, Peep Show aired its final episode on December 16, 2015. There will be no Christmas special. Peep Show is over. Despite the series' regular lip-sucking-sound grotesquery of kissing and sex shot entirely in the first person, it was unsexy to the end.
1208
1209I have been watching Peep Show since 2008. In the seven years between then and now, there have been very few weeks in which I have not watched at least one of its 54 episodes, and few months in which I have not rewatched the entire available series. At present, I have only seen the final six episodes once. But by this time next year, it would not be unreasonable to assume I will have seen them each at least a dozen times. I do not decide to rewatch Peep Show. I am in a permanent state of rewatching. It is a process. Like forgiveness. Or sobriety. Or God.
1210
1211I have been trying to figure out why. I am not an obsessive viewer of anything; I have never seen another television series more than one time through. I’ve rarely even second-screened a single episode of anything, unless, and begrudgingly still, in the service of showing it to someone else. Of the half-dozen movies I call my favorites, I’ve watched only one of them twice. But then one of them I’ve only seen half of.
1212
1213Why Peep Show?
1214
1215It's funny, of course.
1216
1217But lots of things are funny. Fargo was funny. Seinfeld was funny. Failed vice presidential candidate turned Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s beard is hilarious, and I never want to see that again.
1218
1219Funny isn't the explanation. What else?
1220
1221Peep Show is troubling. When Sam Bain, who wrote the series along with Jesse Armstrong, was asked what sociological themes he hoped viewers would take from the series, he answered, "The stubborn persistence of human suffering." It was funny. But it was not a joke.
1222
1223Is that it? I do like troubling things. But many things are troubling. Like climate change. Or antibiotic resistance. Or Paul Ryan's beard.
1224
1225No.
1226
1227It isn’t the combination of the two elements, either. "Dark comedy," once a genuinely subversive kind of humor barely nudging its way into the periphery of the mainstream, has become in this decade the dull intentional standard for any comedy not literally shown on broadcast television and pitched to medical supply companies as a fine opportunity for reaching the catheter demographic. Even children’s shows, to review Cartoon Network's current offerings, are edgy these days.
1228
1229I SUSPECT, AT BOTTOM, THAT MY DEVOTION TO PEEP SHOW HAS TO DO WITH A GIMMICK. WHICH I HATE.
1230
1231Peep Show does execute its particular misery more effectively than its competitors. "I’m starting to get this feeling that I’m totally, totally fucked" is more succinct than anything I have ever heard on Parks and Rec. Louis C.K., for all his daring, issue-conscious sad-sackery, has never written a bit wherein a character remains sympathetic while earnestly saying he would rather rape his best friend than make love to him. An episode of Peep Show that ends with, "Did you really have to eat the dog?" "I keep asking myself that. In the moment, it really felt as if I needed to eat it," is at once more twisted and more humane than any juvenile shock on South Park. I empathize with why Jeremy had to eat the dog. I never empathize with Cartman.
1232
1233Still, at most, this mastery of the form might merit a single repeat viewing on my part — not the persistent, multi-year devotion of a person who routinely refuses to read comic books I'm fairly certain I would like because I suspect they’re taking the inner pain of caped, Randian space magicians too seriously.
1234
1235Peep Show doesn’t even have too much of a plot. In a time when "novelistic" is more and more the adjective thrown at television programs tuned in to the fact that many people do not actually watch individual episodes on television, Peep Show begins each episode at some indeterminate point following the previous one. Months and years pass between seasons without explicit mention. There are recurring characters, of course, friends and co-workers and love interests (if there is any overarching plot, it might divide the show into Mark’s "Sophie" period and his "Dobby" one), but the stories of the seasons have little connection to one another, except by the excruciating passage of time and a hundred variations on the line, "This is okay. This is just a moment that will haunt me forever."
1236
1237No. I suspect, at bottom, that my devotion to Peep Show has to do with a gimmick. Which I hate.
1238
1239For the unfamiliar, Peep Show is filmed entirely in first-person perspective. This can be jarring on first viewing. But more vital and more jarring is this: The viewer of Peep Show hears, throughout every episode, the interior monologues of Mark and Jeremy as they go about accumulating regrets.
1240
1241 Peep Show
1242Ordinarily I can’t stand this kind of cheap stunt — it feels a bit too much like throwing Smell-o-Vision at an ill-conceived but already wildly over-budget kid’s show. However, in Peep Show, it works. It works not only by delivering many of the series' best standalone jokes, but also by bringing its audience into collaboration with its protagonists.
1243
1244Many TV shows, especially TV shows about unhappy loners, attempt this by signaling: You’re meant to relate to the character who’s a bit misunderstood, a bit frustrated, just like you! But none manage it in the way allowed by direct access to the thoughts of the main characters and fulfilled by the meticulous choice and execution of those thoughts. Their eyes are your eyes. Their pain is your pain. If one objective of narrative art is to draw the viewer into conspiracy with the desires of its characters, then Peep Show succeeds in a manner rivaled only by pornography.
1245
1246EVERYONE IS AT LEAST SLIGHTLY DANGEROUS. EVERYONE IS POTENTIALLY DUPLICITOUS.
1247
1248The gimmick has another effect. If the show draws us into collusion with Mark and Jeremy by giving us access to their thoughts, it also excludes us from the thoughts of everybody else. This is fine in most other shows, where the motives of secondary characters are either portrayed in separate scenes or otherwise as mysterious to us as those of the theoretically more relatable protagonists, but in Peep Show the total silence of other minds breeds suspicion. We are accustomed to knowing precisely where Mark and Jeremy are coming from. We know their motives, their secret plans and thoughts. We do not know the same of anybody else. Thus everyone becomes suspicious. Enemies, of course; rival co-workers, certainly. But even love interests and friends, while apparently on our side, can never quite be trusted. Everyone is at least slightly dangerous. Everyone is potentially duplicitous.
1249
1250"Is she thinking about her ex?" we hear Mark think, in an episode where he has finally, after several seasons, secured a relationship with a woman he actually likes and who by all appearances is genuinely into him. "Bet she bloody is. When she goes quiet, is she always thinking about him?"
1251
1252He asks her. She demurs.
1253
1254"It’s impossible to know what’s going on her head," he thinks. "And if I ask her, she doesn’t necessarily have to tell the truth."
1255
1256He ruins the relationship within eight episodes.
1257
1258Peep Show, if you aren’t familiar and haven’t already surmised, is about pain. Not grand pain, or the pain felt by great heroes or villains, but the ordinary kind: the slow, stubborn persistence of middling luck and compromise. The mundane frustration of making the same mistakes you’ve never learned from.
1259
1260Professional criticism of bleak comedy has a habit of finding something redemptive in this kind of mire: Perhaps failed love affirms friendship, or failed dreams provide a view of what’s important. But there is no such thing to be found in Peep Show. Mark and Jeremy aren’t friends and flatmates because that’s really what’s important in this life. They are friends and flatmates because their attempts to escape one another have failed. Nobody else will have them. They may love each other, each in their own dried-up, desiccated way, but they’re desperate.
1261
1262 Peep Show
1263That desperation is fueled by Mark and Jeremy's paranoia, and while not all of us are so excessively doomed by it, their casual insecurity and the potential for stupid pain that follows it is an undercurrent of human life, one not captured in quite this way before. For a time, when I was younger and before I found Peep Show, I wondered if I’d never seen this particular kind of fear depicted in popular culture because it wasn't terribly common. As Mark thinks in season one, episode one: "Maybe he doesn’t mind. Maybe nobody minds things as much as me."
1264
1265I was wrong. Of course. The narcissism that says my vague, foreboding teenage dread is unique in human history is, if anything, a very common feature of teenage life. I am not the only one who minds things. I am not the only one who sometimes overreacts to my uncertainty regarding the intentions of others.
1266
1267WE CANNOT SPEAK IN ONE ANOTHER'S HEARTS, BUT OUR HEARTS CAN APPREHEND EACH OTHER THROUGH THE MUTUAL RECOGNITION OF SOME ARTIST'S TRUTH
1268
1269But still — can you really know that? Perhaps you and I shared the same small, juvenile anxieties, but maybe it's fashionable aloofness and duplicity all around. I've been to university to study the problem of other minds. How can we know them? But how can we know them really? The consensus is: We're fucked.
1270
1271Except, sometimes, with art. In the history of our societies, art has been, in its best moments, a transom for relation between isolated selves. We are, each of us, anchored to our own thoughts and our own bodies. But when we look at the same painting, or read the same novel, we are sometimes able to find one another in a parallel apprehension of beauty. We cannot speak in one another’s hearts, but our hearts can apprehend each other through the mutual recognition of some artist’s truth.
1272
1273Peep Show was the longest-running sitcom in British history. It became a cult phenomenon when it arrived in the United States. Many people, it seems, have heard the inner thoughts of two pallid men, not special in their suffering, but constantly just a bit humiliated, unable to feel certain that they know the first thing about anybody, and recognized themselves in it. Then recognized it in each other.
1274
1275That is high art.
1276
1277It is also very funny.
1278
1279The State of California believes the following things to be true: first, that reading to children will make them smarter. Second, that parents ordinarily disinclined for reasons of time or temperament from this activity may be won over by means of thirty-second radio spots. These are strange beliefs, but they are not uncommon.
1280Too Small to Fail, a nonprofit nominally led by Hillary Clinton, believes the same. Among the organization’s many laudable efforts to improve early childhood health and education is a less laudable (but no less costly) attempt to use advertisements to convince poor parents to read to their children. This, the group claims, will bolster kids’ intelligence, and thereby their tests scores, and thereby their futures. Chicago has a similar program. Their slogan: “Take time to be a dad.”
1281These efforts will fail. Not because PSAs and chipper radio spots won’t conjure quality reading time in the schedules of parents rushing from a 5 p.m. quitting time to the start of a 6 p.m. second shift (although they won’t, of course), but because reading to children, even young children, will not necessarily make them smarter.
1282It isn’t that reading to children doesn’t have its benefits. Improved socialization and greater empathy skills are among the upsides of childhood reading. If you are a parent with the luxury of time, reading to your kids will help produce better people. It just won’t produce smarter ones.
1283Chicago and Clinton and California didn’t invent these misconceptions. There is a wealth of data purportedly showing that reading to young children will increase their intelligence and test scores. The trouble is these studies do not actually demonstrate a link between the act of reading and an increase in childhood intelligence; rather, they demonstrate a link between the kinds of children whose parents read to them and the kinds of children (largely the same children) who wind up doing well on tests.
1284There’s another correlation that goes unmentioned: the parents who read to their children tend to be wealthier and smarter than the parents who don’t (PDF). And so the tail wags the dog; similarly, we notice how many athletes were encouraged to play sports as children, but fail to note how tall and strong their parents are and what nice sports equipment they’ve got locked in the garage.
1285If we restrict ourselves instead to studies that properly adjust for parental characteristics—that is, how smart, well-educated, and test-capable they were—the impact of reading to children disappears. It may be a distressing thought for would-be parents, that beyond what you impart through environment and genetics, there is very little you can do to make your children acquire any behavioral traits at all (PDF). This is not to say that genetics or environment are small things to provide, but that once you’ve got a decent home, a stable income, and undamaged zygotes, the task at hand is pressing go and trying not to commit monstrous abuse.
1286But reading campaigns are not the only way to spend outrageous sums of money on programs and receive little demonstrable impact on educational achievement in return. The prevailing consensus of contemporary not-quite-neoliberalism (patron saint: Rahm Emmanuel) have it that our best bet is an either/or effort: sending the most clever of our disadvantaged students to charter schools while trying to attract “better teachers” for those left behind in public schools with selective salary bumps.
1287These schemes have one up on reading campaigns: they do boost test scores. That the tests are written and held up as holy metrics by the same people advancing these solutions may have something to do with that, but even if we imagine that all quantitative calculus is pure, the monetary cost of these efforts is negligible. In 2004, Teach for America commissioned a study to estimate the effectiveness of their teachers (who are largely recruited from elite universities and therefore reflect the talent presumably sought by increased teacher compensating strategies) against non-TFA public educators by comparing average student test scores from both groups (PDF). The TFA teachers won, by a 3.4 percent margin. And if we, as a nation, wanted to go national with this nearly-4-percent triumph? It’d only cost us the price of expanding TFA’s annual budget (which currently stands at $70 million) to staff every classroom in the country, and just the tiniest bit of complete union busting.
1288Photo by ayoub.reem
1289Photo by ayoub.reem
1290
1291Or we could go the charter school route. For that price tag–probably somewhere in the billions of dollars for complete national implementation–we could have their average 1.3 percent test score bump (PDF). For maybe a few hundred billion more, we could put a KIPP school in every neighborhood. They are the best charter school system in the country and they score, on average, 6 percent higher on tests than public schools. It’ll only cost more than Medicare.
1292But there is another option still. It is more effective than any of the others, and it’s likely cheaper too. It is the lowest-hanging fruit in education policy reform, and it is called “giving money to people.” It is not strategic investment, or money as a secondary motivator of performance. It’s just money, given as cash to the families of poor children.
1293Here’s a story about Norway. On August 21, 1969,massive oil reserves were discovered under Norway’s sovereign waters in the North Sea. Previously poor regions became suddenly wealthy as the petroleum boom–later bolstered by a natural gas discovery–poured new income into the region.But the wealth wasn’t spread evenly—not every Norwegian in the north could get in on the action. Suddenly there were the makings of a great natural experiment (PDF). Researchers wanted to see what the impact of sudden cash infusions–a significant environmental change–had on previously poor students, as compared with their still-impoverished peers. The influx of money bested almost every other popular solution to the education gap: students in suddenly-well-off families saw an average of 3 percent increase in absolute IQ and a 6 percent increase in college attendance. The results were as good as the best American charter schools at a fraction of the cost and logistical hassle.
1294Another set of circumstances conspired to demonstrate the same principle in the United States. During the course of along longitudinal study, the calculation of the Earned Income Tax Credit–an essentially unconditional cash transfer to poor parents–changed several times, allowing researchers to plot the causal achievement impact of cash transfers on a curve of multiple benefit levels (PDF). These results were even more significant: for a mere $3,000 given annually to the parents of poor children, the data suggests a 7 percent increase in expected student test scores. That’s a relatively low number, too: $8,000 annually wouldn’t double the impact, but it would get us well clear of 10 percent, and still cost less than comparable alternatives. Other studies back up the same thesis, though they don’t quite have the same fun stories.
1295Granted, this plan has an unnerving simplicity. “Give more money to people”—not to specific institutions, teachers, schools, or outreach efforts, but just “people” who have low incomes and children—reeks of liberal parody. It isn’t much more sophisticated than the “throw money at the problem” reaction that’s so often deployed in a country that remains ineradicably possessed by the notion that we are short on cash.
1296But this is not soft socialism of the usual hand-waving variety; it does not rely on the complexities of differing economic axioms. It is only that keeping the lights on, keeping food on the table, and keeping parents from having to take a third job are all things that can demonstrably increase student performance. It is only that the price tag, while in the several billions of dollars, would likely be cheaper, and certainty no more expensive, than the less efficacious alternatives, even before considering the likely returns in tax revenue and GDP that would come from pushing tens of thousands of students over the threshold to probable college attendance. (Also worth considering: the cost of cutting checks, versus the cost of assembling and staffing a KIPP school for every American neighborhood, if such a thing were even logistically feasible).
1297Household income determines home environment. Poverty is associated with increased levels of parental stress, depression, and poor health—and these are all things that may make it harder to “take time to be a dad.”
1298Politically speaking, cash infusions for education could either be sold as a form of empathetic relief (assisting the poor because it is the right thing to do in a nation so bountiful) or as a relatively cheap form of investment (“creating economic growth” by granting something akin to tax relief to those likely to immediately capitalize on it). Either rhetoric leads to the same policy. Yet even writing the proposal strains credulity: a new program handing money directly to poor parents? There are a thousand political reasons it won’t happen. The fact that “championing early childhood reading campaigns” makes for better campaign copy is only one of them.
1299Apparently those who support income redistribution through aggressive top marginal taxation are still willing to accept union busting and poor parent shaming before considering direct infusions of cash. No matter how lofty their rhetoric, there is an intuitive desire within mainstream American liberalism to believe that the trouble in education is not so obvious as poor people not having enough money to do well—but rather, that poor parents are to blame for not being enough like middle class ones.
1300And from there they have the strange idea: I bet we can make them more like us with a radio ad.
1301
1302When Governor Mike Pence of Indiana signed SB101 into law last week, he likely didn't mean to demonstrate that Adam Smith was wrong. It's a shame. In some strange part of my socialism, I have always wished that human beings really were little profit-maximizing rationalists at heart. It's a wish for a kinder world, really, a world money was green, and where the Right wouldn't be so eager to sanctify in law the proposition that a dollar has nothing on our right to signal tribal loyalty in the most boorish way possible. There are a thousand ways to quietly avoid doing business with gays if you don't want to, all perfectly legal in all 50 states. What Indiana bigots have gained is only the satisfaction of being odious in public.
1303
1304“One of the most fascinating things about the 1960s,” an historian I know once told me, “is how very seriously people took teenagers. Forgetting, of course, that they were teenagers.” Maybe the 60s were when the American press first acknowledged the existence of people under thirty (and begun to consider, with some apprehension, that these people might one day control the destiny of the Republic), but the phenomenon hardly stopped then. Some of the fascination is gone, but over the last half-century, there’ve been few more reliable tropes in American journalism than the periodic attempt to decode the political intentions of young people.
1305The most recent cycle of breathlessness got started back on July 10th, when Reason Magazine’s polling outfit released a survey suggesting, under a particularly selective reading of the numbers, that today’s inscrutable young cohort — the Millennials — are shaping up to be the most libertarian generation yet. A few weeks of medium-sized murmuring followed: Reason ran with the story, a few other fringe outfits followed suit. TIME got excited. Vox’s Dylan Matthews suggested that the survey results made a better case for calling youth politics “incoherent,” and several other think-pieces agreed. The matter seemed settled.
1306But then, on August 7th, The New York Times Magazine released “Has The ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?”, an instant classic of the generation gap genre, wherein the Paper of Boomers eases into its analysis of Millennial politics by way of a Generation X rock and roll analogy. The heavy-hitters came calling. Paul Krugman issued a response; Jonathan Chait opined in New York; David Frum weighed in from The Atlantic. Now nearly ten weeks out, the coverage is still going in Talking Points Memo and The Washington Post. A dire warning regarding our rapidly diminishing reserves of unused Rand Paul stock photos is expected from the AP any day now.
1307Gaza, ISIS, Ferguson. Ebola and Ukraine. Robin Williams, Joan Rivers, the midterm elections. If we’ve learned anything this summer, it is that there is no news cycle so dense or so grim that it can distract the American media from its obsession with divining the political intentions of young people.
1308The consensus seems to be that the kids will be alright. There are of course self-servers within the libertarian community (as well as a few leftists evidently in search of a good haunted-house-style risk-free scare) still selling a youth-fueled groundswell for liberty, but among more sober respondents, incredulity hasn’t even remained inside partisan lines. Chait and Frum treated the “libertarian moment” with equal condescension. Drawing a sentence at random from each of their responses (That young voters actually favor ‘bigger government’ in the abstract is a sea change in generational opinion, not to mention conclusive evidence against their alleged libertarianism” and Young voters are not libertarian, nor even trending libertarian. Neither, for that matter, are older voters. The “libertarian moment” is not an event in American culture, for example), I am reasonably confident that nobody who is not bizarrely familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Chait and Frum’s respective writing styles could even confidently say which was which.
1309Libertarian apologists will no doubt argue that the across-the-board mainstream dismissal of their moment is a bipartisan consensus with emphasis on the bi (that is, the revolution is a threat to their cushy two-party status quo), but any honest look at the available numbers says the consensus is right: Millennials are not libertarians. They do not share more than a few, mostly incidental, goals with Reason Magazine. They will not defect from the left in large numbers to elect Rand Paul President.
1310
1311There he is again, looking a little more concerned this time.
1312But these conclusions concern ultimate electoral outcomes. That it is unlikely that any voters, young or old, will pull the level for the Libertarian candidate in 2016, or that shifting sentiment will force the major parties to permanently adopt more libertarian positions does not, by extension, imply that there isn’t something going on in the miasma of Millennial political consciousness, or that libertarianism has had no impact on my generation’s politics. The “Libertarian Moment” is not a serious threat, but consider Krugman as he really gets going:
1313When it comes to substance, libertarians are living in a fantasy world. Often that’s quite literally true: Paul Ryan thinks that we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel. More to the point, however, the libertarian vision of the society we actually have bears little resemblance to reality.
1314This goes beyond taking a dim view of a libertarian’s electoral chances. It is an absolute dismissal, and one that is typical of the intellectual left. That isn’t to say I don’t agree with the characterization. I’ve engaged in it myself: portraying Paulites and Randians less as political players than as status seekers, overgrown teenagers who embrace the sanctimonious middle-class warrior poet vibe first and the curiously bias-confirming political content second. And yes, some libertarians seem eager to confirm this cliché (at one point in Draper’s Times story, Reason Editor Nick Gillespie predicates a sentence with the words “The whole point of America – and this is an admixture of Saul Bellow and Heidegger and Jim Morrison lyrics…”). But the roots of the particularly Millennial libertarian instinct deserve slightly more serious consideration than Krugman, Chait, and company allow them.
1315The Professional Libertarians–like Welch, Gillespie, Rand, and Ryan–may be living in a self-serving fantasy world. But my peers — the ones who care about politics but don’t work in it, the ones who discover themselves unexpectedly nodding along to a Rand Paul filibuster–aren’t doing so out of a conscious desire to get on the A-list for the Galt’s Gulch Gala. I don’t think they’re doing it consciously at all.
1316
1317Nick Gillespie, alchemist of Bellow, Heidegger, and Morrison
1318As it happens, I do think this generational phenomenon has a generational cause. Consider the political environment in which Millennials, especially the majority left-wing set of Millennials, came of age. For the better part of our adolescence, the American government was controlled by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, personifications of the pre-Tea Party Republican Party’s toxic mix of domestic Evangelical moralizing and reckless foreign adventurism. We came of age in a political climate dominated by a senseless, costly, and violent use of the military abroad, and a culture war at home. The issues we found our voices arguing about weren’t socialized medicine, or structural racism, or even the value of limited, humanitarian intervention. They were the Iraq War and Guantanamo; abortion, gay marriage and medical marijuana; whether or not the CIA ought to be torturing people in black-site interrogation rooms.
1319Liberals, in the minority, were playing their typical out-of-power role: protesting state abuses with all the rebellious verve of anarchists. The Times casts libertarians as people “who long have relished their role as acerbic sideline critics of American political theater.” It sounds like a pretty accurate description of a leftist in the Bush Years, too. Perhaps it’s a role the left only relishes when evicted from The White House, but being born when we were, it was the only role Millennial liberals knew growing up.
1320It is no coincidence that these Bush Era disputes are the issues on which Millennials ostensibly reveal their secret libertarian sympathies; it is even less surprising that given the opportunity these incidental overlaps created, real libertarians have emphasized these policy areas in their marketing pitch to young people. But that isn’t the whole story. If an alliance of convenience, a shared dislike for the particular policies of then-ascendant neo-conservativism, was the only cause of Millennial libertarianism, then it ought to have evaporated so soon as the political ground shifted. Once the nominal left–now in control of the state and ready to implement its agenda–found itself back at odds with the Nick Gillespies of the world (who remain opposed to forceful implementation of any agenda whatsoever) that should have been it.
1321Yet Millennial sympathy (if not actual support) for libertarianism lingers, to a degree inconceivable toward more traditional Republicans. Spend some time listening to Millennials talk politics: it isn’t uncommon to find one sharing some new Rand Paul quotation, admitting, almost uncomfortably, that they agree with it even as they swear their ongoing loyalty to the left. “I think Paul is actually right on this one,” they’ll say about some protestation of the police state, “Even if he’s crazy about a lot of stuff.” You never hear them talk that way about Rick Santorum.
1322Even when Leftists and Libertarians agree – say, in the case of abortion – they don’t reach their conclusions for the same reasons. A libertarian (at least not the bizarrely Evangelical variety) supports abortion rights because they’re appalled by the idea of state interference in medical practice. They are ideologically opposed to the regulation of any private decisions, whether those be the medical choices of a woman or the wage practices of a business. A Leftist, meanwhile, predicates the permissibility of state intrusion in terms of compelling interest. Of course a socialist doesn’t believe the government has no role in regulating acceptable medical practice: even neoliberals register support for socialized medicine far beyond The Affordable Care Act. Rather, left-wing support of abortion is a manifestation of left-wing ideological axioms: that reproductive freedom specifically is vital to redressing gender inequality; that empathy for the impoverished requires family (and therefore financial) planning, and that both these things, if they are to be meaningful, must be enforced with the power of the state. They are entirely opposite starting points that happen to reach the same practical conclusion.
1323It is the same with marriage equality: the state has no business regulating private contracts, says the libertarian. “Traditional marriage” laws are needless, punitive discrimination against a marginalized group, says the liberal. On marijuana too: the Left sees it as a drug the state has good reason to allow, Libertarians just don’t like the state “allowing” certain drugs. That’s why libertarians end up supporting heroin legalization and liberals typically don’t.
1324Of course, these are just the de jure differences between libertarians and the left, the kind a political scientist might identify when attempting to make various planks of co-selecting ideology conform to a central logic. But as nobody ever tires of pointing out, most citizens are not rational. They’re certainly not political scientists or even possessed of a particularly cohesive understanding of their own beliefs. The incoherence of Millennial politics implies this truism: in the face of patently contradictory policy preferences, the simple explanation is that most people, even holders of especially strong opinions, do not rationally examine the consistency of their worldview.
1325But even if we aren’t typically self-aware, there is still a process by which we come to believe what we do. I tend to think we develop our worldviews first by accident and then by rote. We believe something, or think we ought to. We find ourselves in need of a reason to justify that belief. Deployed enough times, the lines of reasoning we’ve stumbled upon become habitual; the quick trains of thought that served us in the past are applied interminably to the present.
1326Eventually we find them bubbling up to our considerations like the outcome of common sense. By the time we’re old enough to engage in any kind of critical reflection on our biases (and who of us, really, has bothered even now?), the whole holistic nexus of our politics is already in place: obvious, true, and what we’ve always believed in.
1327
1328A stock photo of a generation.
1329In the New York Times story, author Robert Draper notes one common defense of the libertarian worldview: “Virtually every other libertarian leader I met,” he writes, “told me that their philosophy was unique for its ‘consistency.’” Another word might be “simplicity.” This need not be derisive–I only mean that liberals have always had the harder project, on the one hand unwilling to reject the usefulness of state power, but on the other opting to write its own, new guide to its moral use rather than rely on inherited, conservative values. Libertarians by contrast have a clear moral vision, one which happens to answer–as a matter of consistency–most questions with the answer “let people do as they will.”
1330The practical consequence of this simplicity is that libertarian arguments for policy positions tend to be more easily learned, to include fewer statistics and caveats, to derive their weight from the force of moral principle rather than some dull assessment of what we can achieve, and how we might do it, and why.
1331What kind of argument is more appealing to teenagers? To anyone trying to win a political argument over the Internet or beer or Thanksgiving dinner? In the Bush Years, libertarians and leftists happened to share some policy goals. In theory–and to some extent, in practice–we supported those goals for different reasons. But the arguments both factions ended up using were the simple ones. The libertarian ones. For older leftists, perhaps this was a conscious decision–but for Millennials, it was how we learned our liberalism.
1332Habit is the strongest force in political life: if you spend your teenage years and twenties saying over and over how the state shouldn’t get to make medical decisions, or how marijuana smoking, at worst, is a victimless “crime,” the logic which underlies these arguments will grow on you. Even after the political ground shifts, and the convenient alliances vanish, the unconscious logic remains. When you hear it deployed by Rand Paul in defense of some position you consciously reject–say, that government enforcement of civil rights laws is federal overreach–your learned intuition will still tell you that there’s something to his point. Dissonance ensues, thus the uncomfortable murmurs, thus the poll results that show a generation with moral schizophrenia.
1333So what does this mean? Millennial politics, like everyone’s politics, are largely incoherent. The presence of a contradiction won’t force a reckoning. The brain is a rationalizing machine, but it is not a rational one and for most people dissonance doesn’t inexorably resolve toward one or the other strict consistency. Most Millennials will carry on relying on the discrete logics they’ve learned for every issue, the priority of one or the other artfully exploited by whomever’s got the better messaging team that year. But there won’t be a “Libertarian Moment.”
1334The youngest Millennials will be able to vote in just four years. By then, though, we’ll have moved on to the next generation of youngsters, and begin again the quest to figure out just what these kids are thinking.
1335
1336
1337In college, a friend of mine married a man I didn’t much like, and shortly thereafter, that man was murdered. Because I didn’t much like him and because his widow was no longer a close friend, the event did not evoke much special feeling in me. There was an abstract sense that death, especially young and especially violent, is a tragedy, of course, and that none of his character flaws as I perceived them were deserving of an execution. However, because I did not feel acutely wounded and because I did not want to contrive some kinder image after death, I did not attend the funeral. I did not sit quietly mourning in my room. I did not visit with the widow and cry. I did not offer my reflections in public or in private. I did not partake in grief because I had no grief to offer.
1338
1339These were all internal acts and the most important thing I did not do was relate them externally. I did not say I didn’t like the guy, I said nothing. I didn’t say why I wasn’t at the funeral, or why I wasn’t crying—I only didn’t do these things. I did not protest that people “expected me to care,” because they didn’t. I was far from the minds of the pallbearers and nothing in their pain required me to speak well or ill of the departed. A simpler way of putting it: the only expectation was that I not be an asshole. Even this was implicit—the mourning were not thinking about me.
1340
1341It takes a peculiar kind of narcissism to imagine that mere proximity to an event compels a response—as if you cannot sometimes be silent and the world would not be complete without your verdict. Blame social media’s endless appetite for commentary if you like, but that’s only the megaphone for broadcasting the bad habit. The impulse comes first and it had an especially egregious airing on the day of Joan Rivers’ death.
1342
1343It took less than an hour. I know because I happened to be procrastinating when the news broke, in those odd few minutes between the first rumors and final confirmation from the Associated Press, when the Internet holds still and waits to see whether its got a tragedy or a hoax. (We had a case of each that day: Joan Rivers was really dead. Betty White was not.)
1344
1345So I remember precisely when the news broke, and I remember that it was less than an hour before the straight signal boosts and quickly cobbled tributes were interrupted by a stream of commenters unable to resist the impulse to register their dissent. The extremity of sentiment varied, but the essence was the same: Joan Rivers was a bad person; I don’t know why I’m expected to care; I’m neutral or even (with some of them) happy that she’s died.
1346
1347It isn’t that they were wrong. Setting aside that she was nowhere even near the running for "worst person ever" (or even of the recently deceased), Joan Rivers was deeply flawed. Her sins were entirely verbal, but she had too much clout to make them harmless. I won’t recite the litany right now. Suffice it to say, she said enough to transgress every sacred pillar of the Left, not always in a tone we can rightfully consider “kidding,” and there is a credible case to be made that she was at times a racist, transphobic homophobe and a fairly bad feminist to boot.
1348
1349I don’t write in order to valorize the woman. But it bothers me that it only took an hour. What is accomplished by a snarky celebration of her passing before the body is even in the ground? When her family, and more immediately her fans, are not even yet sufficiently past shock to begin mourning? Do we imagine they want to hear about how terrible she was right now, or that hearing it, they might say, “You’re right. Forget the funeral. I’m glad she’s dead, too?”
1350
1351How soon is too soon to begin speaking ill of the dead? A number of her detractors have pointed out to me that Rivers, beyond her general sins against social justice, was especially insensitive to that line. "She would make terrible cracks about people as soon as the doctors called a time of death," they say. "Why do we owe her any better?" Maybe. But it seems strange to argue that Rivers was reprehensible in the same instant that you just barely clear the moral bar you say she set too low.
1352
1353Of course, the more common pushback isn’t about bars, precisely; rather, I have been told that the day of Rivers' death—as she is being celebrated for the final time—is not just permissible but the best time to remind the teary-eyed of her transgressions. "We shouldn’t lie about people, even if they’re gone," they say. "She didn’t have to act the way she did, and it would be dishonest of us to pretend we loved her unconditionally."
1354
1355Yet nobody is asking these people to lie. Nobody is waiting behind the screen, clicking refresh every minute, to see what they have to say about Joan Rivers. Nobody is expecting them to care, and nobody—certainly not me—is expecting them to feel anything at all that they don’t feel. Staying silent for a single day does not constitute a failure to speak out. It does no injury to the world. Perhaps rushing to post against the tide of popular opinion is some small part of bravery, but the better part of decency is restraint.
1356
1357I don’t know how soon is too soon. I don’t expect a week, or even a weekend. But is a day too much? Even an hour?
1358
1359Joan Rivers’ legacy should be complicated. She should not be remembered as a saint, but all of future time exists for this critique. Every day since Thursday has been one more measure of distance between the narcissism of contradicting the bereaved and the thoughtful, reflective consideration that should be offered when the dust has cleared. We come to bury Rivers, not to praise her. We respectfully request the silence of the crowd during the internment and eulogy. When we’ve gone and if you must, feel free to begin dancing on the grave. 
1360
1361
1362No Angels in Ferguson: Michael Brown and The Grey Lady
1363Occasions of great moral clarity in American life offer a myriad of possibilities: conversations that wouldn’t ordinarily occur, chances for political change not typically probable, voices heard that would otherwise remain silent. In the aftermath of an event like the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, these opportunities form a silver lining around what otherwise would be a wholly nihilistic tragedy.
1364But such occasions offer another possibility: the chance, as always, that The New York Times will try too hard to be “fair to both sides” and wind up embarrassing itself. In the usual course of events, stories have ten sides as often as they’ve got two, and all of us–in this brave new digital world–take some comfort in the fact that The New York Times is still reporting the facts on the ground that form the baseline of our discourse. But in cases like Ferguson–one of those rare stories which, at least in moral terms, has only one side — the reach toward objectivity ends up feeling more like a desperate grope.
1365That’s how you end up with pieces like John Eligon’s Times essay this Sunday, which characterizes the 18-year-old, murdered Brown as “no angel.” (Eligon has since told the Times’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, that he regrets the choice of words.) “He dabbled in drugs,” Eligon wrote of Brown. “He had taken to rapping in recent months.”
1366Taking special pains to complicate Brown’s character has been a common theme in the aftermath of the 18-year-old’s murder, especially amongst those committed to appearing “reasonable” by way of omnidirectional capitulation. The police are out of control, sure, but he wasn’t an innocent kid. He attacked the officer. He was threatening and possibly intoxicated. This isn’t surprising: it’s a common motif in the fallout of racialized shootings, an old dog whistle for reminding white readers that the victim wasn’t like their teenage children, to say without quite saying so explicitly that the victim was big, was black, was wearing baggy clothes, that he was the kind of “kid” who makes you cross the street at night. You know how they are. Do you really think he just minding his own business?
1367A cardinal rule of this trope is that it can never be phrased in explicitly racial terms. Indeed, part of its infuriating menace is that many of its users would earnestly protest that they don’t (consciously) believe in broad-brush racial stereotypes. It’s always about this particular case, this particular kid. It’s just about what Brown did, or Powell did, what Garner said or what Trayvon Martin was wearing. I’m just saying we don’t know everything. I’m just saying I get what the cop must have been thinking. Interesting how, when it comes to black victims, every incident is an over reaction, every case has mitigating circumstances that mean the shooter was acting rationally all along.
1368Typically, this line of rhetoric will meet pushback over the facts, and the conversation will then devolve into a cycle of cherry-picked points of objectivity and cross-examination. Well, what did the toxscreen say? What do the eyewitnesses say happened? How credible is the cop’s story? The questions one asks, and the answers they get, that any given interlocutor prefers– that is, which answers among the often-contradictory accounts they prefer to believe – are pre-determined by one’s politics, and stay that way. No minds are changed: the argument was never about the facts anyway.
1369In the aftermath of Mike Brown’s death, these arguments have been as predictable as ever, but the particulars of the fallout have given birth to another popular resistance to the “no angel” (read: thug) defense of Wilson’s actions. No matter the facts of the original case, the argument goes, police behavior since Brown’s shooting has become a scandal in itself, and one worthy of independent protest. This is a fair point, but inadequate. Under an especially cynical reading, the conclusion of this line of logic can be read as, “If you’re going to shoot black teens, at least try to be polite about it afterward.” But that isn’t the point.
1370There’s a third way to look at the assassination of Michael Brown’s character. Imagine that everything the skeptics think about Brown is true, and that the facts, as they happened conform to the fever dream typified by The Independent Journal Review, (This is a widely-read but never-cited right-wing “magazine,” and its articles are essentially glorified Facebook status updates from the conservative id.) Here’s their take, via “The Gateway Pundit”:
1371So [Wilson] goes in reverse back to [Brown and his friend]. Tries to get out of his car. They slam his door shut violently. I think he said Michael did. And, then he opened the car again. He tried to get out. He stands up.
1372And then Michael just bum-rushes him and shoves him back into his car. Punches him in the face and them Darren grabs for his gun. Michael grabbed for the gun. At one point he got the gun entirely turned against his hip. And he shoves it away. And the gun goes off.
1373Well, then Michael takes off and gets to be about 35 feet away. And, Darren’s first protocol is to pursue. So, he stands up and yells, “Freeze!” Michael and his friend turn around. And Michael taunts him… And then all the sudden he just started bumrushing him. He just started coming at him full speed. And, so he just started shooting.
1374That’s a pure distillation of the “thug” premise: that Michael Brown was a good-for-nothing hooligan who got high, choked out and robbed a convenience store clerk, and then tried, inexplicably, to murder a cop. Let’s say that’s what happened. Let’s say this particular shooting was completely justified.
1375Who cares?
1376The far more profound revelation is that nearly no one — especially the non-white Americans who endure mistreatment by police every day — assumed that that was what happened. Nobody figured the events that led to an unarmed black 18-year-old left dead in the street was anything but a cop acting with reckless malice — a cop at once made over-confident by official power and scared to death of a color and body and age he’s been told is criminal by definition.
1377Regardless of what happened between Wilson and Brown, the people who took the streets knew that Brown was only one of four unarmed black men killed in the prior month alone. That in St. Louis, blacks were eighteen times more likely to face marijuana possession arrests than whites. That from 2002 to 2011, New York police conducted 3.8 million stop-and-frisks, 90 percent of them on black and hispanic residents.
1378If the fever-dream being presented by Wilson’s supporters turned out to be true — if Michael Brown turned out to be a maniac who had it coming — is there a single activist who would say, Oh well, we were resting our entire case about the state of racialized policing in America on this single shooting. You say he was a gangbanger? I guess we’ll all go home then.
1379It isn’t quite clear why this shooting, one so many, was what that set off weeks of protests and clashes with police so voluble that they could capture the nearly undivided attention of the public. It was a spark, no doubt. But a flashpoint isn’t a lynch pin. Maybe they’ll manage to convict Michael Brown of his own murder. Maybe they won’t. But the impulse to do so isn’t just another dimension to the present racism: it’s irrelevant to the real case.
1380
1381Something you don’t hear too often in the middle of an improv set: “Okay, and for the next scene, my opening line will be ‘I really didn’t rape that girl’.”
1382
1383That’s the moment when Sex Signals, one of the country’s fastest growing sexual assault prevention programs, stops being so funny. Employees of the company behind the show, Catharsis Productions, call it the “rape bomb.”
1384
1385The first half is funnier.
1386
1387A girl sits at a table. She says she’s had a really bad day. “I just want to be left alone.” But a guy notices her and wants to talk. He gets nervous, doesn't know what to say. So he asks the audience for a pickup line. “The one we get most often,” say Brea Hayes, a program specialist and theatrical director with Catharsis, “is ‘How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice.’"
1388
1389They begin a conversation, breaking off for one or the other to face the audience and share their character’s feelings. The girl: “That was weird, but this guy is cute, I want to get to know him, should I be really flirty or should I be like a hard-ass?"
1390
1391The guy: “She seems to really like me, should I show her my sensitive side or my tough guy side?”
1392
1393“They try on these different stereotypes,” says Brea. “The takeaway is that when we put these faces on, nothing is ever going to work out.”
1394
1395And sometimes it really goes wrong: They try out various scenarios, which are progressively more ridiculous until it’s obvious something’s not right. The audience has been holding up their “Stop” cards—big red road signs handed out before the show that they’ve been told to deploy when the action crosses a line. Finally, the guy says, “I have an idea for another improv. My opening line will be, 'I really didn't rape that girl.'”
1396
1397“Up until this point, it's been crazy, funny,” says Brea. “The audience is laughing. They’re at a sexual assault prevention show, but they’ve almost forgotten. And then we drop the bomb.”
1398
1399The girl, a college student, invites the boy over to study. Or, in the military version of the show, to play video games. Either way: they have some beers. Eat a pizza. She kisses him first. There’s some tickling and wrestling … and they end up having sex.
1400
1401Great, except that she said “stop,” whispered “stop,” and he kept going.
1402
1403"Who's at fault? Almost all the time the audience says both. So we ask them, 'Why do you want to hold the girl accountable for this?'"
1404“That’s sex without consent. That’s rape,” Hayes says.
1405
1406Is that what the audience thinks? Who’s at fault? “Almost all the time they say both. And then so we ask them, well, why? Why do you want to hold the girl accountable for this?” Hayes says.
1407
1408“The audience gives us their reasons and from there we have a facilitated conversation.
1409
1410We break down the reasons that they want to hold the girl responsible. All these victim-blaming things: She was drinking, she didn't do more to stop him, she was sending mixed messages. We talk about the difference between reducing your risk from a situation versus being able to prevent that actual situation from happening. We then start talking about why it's important to hold the guy accountable for what he did.”
1411
1412When we talk about sexual assault in this country, we tend to tell a sad story. One in four women are assaulted in their lifetime; almost all are harassed. Assaults of men, even, are far higher than we previously believed. The picture becomes especially bleak when we consider the institutions traditionally charged with transforming children into young adults: Stories of university ineptitude in handling assault cases have grown so dire as to provoke Department of Justice intervention at dozens of schools; for years, the military has been plagued with headlines detailing a pervasive culture of abuse, intimidation, and silence. We tend to tell a frustrating story, too: Despite decades of effort to curb assaults, it’s difficult to escape the impression that even if things are not getting worse, they’re hardly getting better—we’re left to taking “raised awareness” as a consolation prize, while the horror stories continue to flow in.
1413
1414But as grim as things can seem today, they were even darker in 1998, when Christian Murphy and Dr. Gail Stern—the founders of Catharsis Productions—met during a play festival where each was performing a one-person show about social justice.
1415
1416They were impressed by one another’s work.
1417
1418“One of the things that blew me away about Gail,” Murphy remembers, “was that at that time she was a rape crisis counselor during the day and a stand-up comedian at night. So she had this amazing ability to lure mainstream audiences into talking about feminist issues: sexism, sexual violence, at a time when people weren’t used to talking about those things. I’d overhear frat guys going, ‘Shit, I think I’m a feminist, you know?’ It was really cool.”
1419
1420For Stern, it was simpler: Murphy was doing a show that seriously interrogated his privilege has a heterosexual white man—long before it was fashionable.
1421
1422RELATED STORY
1423
1424
1425How Not to Talk About the Culture of Sexual Assault
1426
1427Both were looking for a new project. Murphy, recently returned from a stint in Los Angeles, was trying to rediscover his place in Chicago theater. Stern, after working for years as a rape crisis counselor, was feeling an exhaustion common to that field—burnt out by the burden of victim’s advocacy, and wondering if there was another, more proactive way she could help.
1428
1429They discovered a niche. “We both felt there was a dearth of decent or engaging sexual violence programs on college campuses,” Murphy explains.
1430
1431It wasn’t only that such programs were comparatively rare then; many that did exist were unable to win over unreceptive audiences. Others were even counter-productive, reinforcing dangerous cultural tropes like victim-blaming, or conflating risk reduction strategies (“don’t walk alone at night, girls”) with real assault prevention and moral accountability.
1432
1433“We thought if we can make something more engaging, a show that balanced the tension between something artistically fulfilling but also reflective of the research and the lived experience of survivors, and use humor to make the material more accessible, to bring the audience in, then we could really have a dialogue that galvanized both men and women to work on these issues,” Murphy says.
1434
1435In 1999, the two began collaborating in earnest., In 2000, after several months of work, the show that would become Sex Signals—then going by “The Sensitive Swashbuckler and Other Dating Myths”—premiered as a late night comedy billing at Chicago’s Stage Left Theater. Despite audiences of drunks expecting lighter fare, the show immediately struck a nerve: Based on audience reaction and the evaluations they collected afterward, Stern and Murphy knew they were on to something.
1436
1437“A lot of people said, you know, at first I was a little thrown by the whole conversation about sexual assault, but I really loved the humor and I loved the way that you gave us an opportunity to have a sort of candid, frank, honest, safe conversation about it,” Stern recalls.
1438
1439Encouraged, the pair continued refining the show. They brought in representatives from rape victims advocates and academia for feedback, striving to maintain the vital balance between engaging entertainment, and rigorous, effective education. They got their first college gig: a presentation at The University of Chicago. More followed, as did a collegiate programming agency, interested in representing the show. That first school year (from fall 2000 to spring 2001), Sex Signals was performed eight times on college campuses. The following school year, it shot up to fifty. For 2014 to 2015, that number is expected to top 2,500.
1440
1441Clearly something is working.
1442
1443Over the years, Catharsis has developed a host of complimentary programs in response to the latest research and challenges, with titles like Got Your Back, The Hook-Up, and others. Meanwhile, they continue—as they have for 15 years—to update and improve the script for Sex Signals, which still comprises nearly three-quarters of their presentations.
1444
1445Many of the improvements address and combat the host of challenges familiar to any effort to combat sexual assault: victim blaming, a media culture that can encourage sexual assault, fear of retaliation for reporting, and inadequate infrastructure to address reports.
1446
1447Catharsis also faces another challenge arising from the particular nature of direct engagement programs. Many Americans may be more comfortable talking about rape and assault in the abstract, but there’s a tendency to recoil when the problem comes too close to home, when “a face is put to the word ‘rape’ with a capital ‘R’”, as Dr. Stern explains. Often, that resistance takes the form of communities closing ranks when accusations are made toward one of their own (see: Steubenville, Ohio) but even before an assault takes place, Stern and Murphy point out, audiences can become reflexively uncomfortable at the suggestion that assault is something they could commit, or even be victim to. That’s why so many programs which focus on consent and communication tend to fail: They alienate their audience before the message gets through.
1448
1449“[When you focus on those issues],” Murphy says, “You end up with men and women out there in the audience going, ‘Okay, but I am not raping, so why am I here?’
1450
1451"I say to a military audience, 'I want you to be a hero. This is about courage.'"
1452“It’s not an effective teaching frame,” Dr. Stern explains, “If I tell you, ‘Hey, I’m assuming you’re all going to be rapists, so let’s talk about consent;’—well, first, most men don’t commit rape, and the ones that do don’t give a crap about consent. So that’s alienating and ineffective… [Conversely,] when you start talking about sexual violence with women, they immediately assume you’re saying they’re going to be victims. And what they hear is that you’re saying they’re going to be weak or stupid. And people don’t want to feel preemptively accused of anything. So they shut down. And they don’t listen. And you can’t get through.”
1453
1454The strategy to overcome that challenge underlies the entire prevention philosophy of Catharsis. Instead of placing audience members in the assumed roles of victim or perpetrator, they use and teach the theory of bystander intervention—framing the audience, the potential rapists and victims, as outsiders with the power to prevent assault.
1455
1456“If I say, especially to a military audience, ‘I want you to be a hero. You signed up because you wanted to do something, to actively step up,’ it makes the message resonate. You say, ‘This is about courage. This is about don’t leave you battle buddy behind,’” Stern says.
1457
1458Most importantly, bystander intervention gives you something to do, as opposed to a don’t do. “We’re asking them to take a leadership role,” Murphy says.
1459
1460The increase in demand for programs like Sex Signals suggests that bystander intervention programs produce better results.
1461
1462But even a successful program isn’t enough on its own, as every Catharsis employee I spoke to was quick to point out. Rather, a show like Sex Signals is only one step in creating a broader culture of prevention. “[The culture we’re fighting] definitely doesn’t get better by a one-stop pop in, 90 minutes, ‘Hey guys, rape is wrong, don’t hurt people, see you next year,’” one employee told me.
1463
1464To create and help sustain that culture, Catharsis offers an expanded suite of programs beyond Sex Signals: a range of alternative, complimentary, and follow-up presentations, tailored for different audiences and different levels of progress. The idea is to foster the capacity for communities to shift their own cultures and begin improving themselves through a self-reinforcing cycle that does the day-to-day work.
1465
1466One might ask if, in a world so saturated by messages that enable sexual assault, a self-policing climate in environments like college campuses and military bases, where there is a constant population turnover, can sound a little bit like wishful thinking. But Murphy compares his goals with the largely successful efforts by the U.S. Government to curb drunk driving:
1467
1468“Back in the 80’s, most people didn't think drunk driving was that big of a deal,” he explains. “People didn’t want to feel accused, a lot of the response was: ‘What is this about? I don’t know why we’re making such a big deal out of drunk driving.’”
1469
1470But after years of excruciatingly slow progress, “there really has been a cultural shift,” he says, “Does it mean that drunk driving has stopped? Of course not. But I think now people are much more plugged in to the notion that if they see a buddy wasted at a bar pick up their keys, they’re probably going to do something to stop them. A moral obligation was placed on bystanders to say something.”
1471
1472In the case of drunk driving, the effort worked: Since the 1980s, there’s been a marked decline in DUI fatalities; dropping below 10,000 for the first time in 2011. As Catharsis work has expanded (they’re expected to give just under 3,000 performances in 2014, up from 1,460 last year), the demand has reinforced the company’s hope that their work is helping to create a similar trend in sexual assault prevention.
1473
1474
1475The Misguided Definition of Rape as 'Force'
1476
1477At Catharsis’s flagship military client—the Great Lakes Naval Base, where the company has been active for two years—anonymous reports of rape have dropped between 50 and 70 percent since the program started. More detailed surveys, usually designed to detect sexual assault instances where people’s willingness to report and conflicting definitions of “rape” can complicate surface statistics, confirm those statistics. In fact, the program has been so successful that the military has begun referring to the program as the “Great Lakes Model,” one they hope to emulate on other bases, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Navy Rear Admiral John Kirby, who said the work at Great Lakes Naval Base was on the leading edge of “implanting comprehensive, evidence-based methods of sexual assault training and prevention.”
1478
1479“They’re really a model not just for the Navy but for the whole military,” he told reporters recently.
1480
1481But, Murphy and Stern are quick to point out, these statistics—while encouraging—are complicated and sometimes even counter-intuitive. Sexual assault reports can dramatically increase after a prevention program begins working, before they begin to subside.
1482
1483“That’s really important to remember,” Murphy says, “In most situations, if you’re really doing the right thing, you’ll see that your reports go up before they go down.”
1484
1485“A lot of it is old cases, people who are finally coming forward, who now feel more comfortable making those reports because they feel they’re going to be supported,” Dr. Stern says.
1486
1487This is a sign of a culture beginning to change. It’s a slow process, but the pair shows no signs of slowing down.
1488
1489“I hope to go on doing prevention work for a long, long time,” Stern says, “because whenever we get feedback, and we get someone who says, ‘I never saw it that way before,’ or we'll get emails, anonymous, from people who have seen the show on bases who say, ‘I just saw Sex Signals and I now recognize that that thing was bad, and I intervened last night, and here's how I did it.’”
1490
1491When we talk about sexual assault, we tend to tell a sad story. But it’s one, despite the dark and still-serious headlines, that’s beginning to get better.
1492
1493“There’s a lot of despair that comes with this kind of crime when it’s perpetrated,” Murphy says, “But we’re constantly looking at the hope in our culture. Even if it’s slow. Because that way, I think, we’re able to inspire people’s better selves.”
1494
1495There’s nothing that gets American journalists quite so giddy as an authoritarian mouthpiece failing to get a joke—as when, in September 2012, Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency reported on a Gallup poll that found an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans preferred President Ahmadinejad to President Obama. It wasn't a real Gallup poll, of course: It was an Onion article, as every English-language news site in the world gleefully pointed out. A month later, it was The People's Daily turn, as the official newspaper of China's Communist Party reported that a certain American newspaper had named North Korea’s Kim Jong Un the “Sexiest Man Alive.” Again, the internet erupted with laughter. 
1496
1497But like any good tale of hubris, some those same American websites—along with countless, hapless Facebook users—proved equally gullible in the coming months. The Washington Post fell for a report that Sarah Palin was joining Al Jazeera America, Breitbart believed that Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy, and Drudge Report splashed an article claiming that a New York pizzeria owner, angry over the proposed ban on large sodas, had refused to serve Mayor Michael Bloomberg a second slice. The culprit this time wasn't The Onion, though. It was The Daily Currant, a site that calls itself “The Global Satirical Newspaper of Record.” 
1498
1499Our domestic media, at least, had an excuse. While it takes a particularly keen immunity to irony to fall for an Onion article these days, The Daily Currant is a fake-news site of a different stripe: one entirely devoid of jokes. Whether this humorlessness is intentional or not—the site's founder contends his critics don't have a sense of subtlety—the site's business model as an ad-driven clickbait-generator relies on it. When Currant stories go viral, it's not because their satire contains essential truths, but rather because their satire is taken as truth—and usually that "truth" is engineered to outrage a particular frequency of the political spectrum. As Slate's Josh Voorhees wrote after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg story, "It's a classic Currant con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story is true." 
1500
1501To choose a recent example: “Obama Pledges $700 Billion Bailout of VA” isn’t a headline whose humor you might miss on the first pass but find sly in retrospect. It’s just an unfunny lie, and any American who doesn't keep a close eye on the size of federal budgets—the VA's was $139 billion last year—could be forgiven for believing it. Not every fake-news site needs to signal its intentions as quickly and openly as The Onion does, but The Daily Currant's headlines don’t engage in subtlety so much as fail entirely to signal humorous intention. That would be acceptable, perhaps even clever, if the stories themselves skillfully exploited the reader's initial credulity, the copy growing increasingly ludicrous until the reader realizes the joke. Instead, jokes sometimes materialize in the final lines, but they’re half-baked at best. The VA story ends with Obama dismissing calls for officials to resign. "Why," Obama asks, "would holding people accountable for their actions be necessary?” That neither funny nor satirical. But it rings true to partisans who genuinely believe that Obama thinks that way—the same people who, in a flash of outrage, are most likely to share the story on social media.
1502
1503The Currant's string of successes in duping media outlets last year drove a brief flurry of head-scratching and hand-wringing. Gawker’s Max Read called the site "semi-believable political wish-fulfillment articles distinguished by a commitment to a complete absence of what most people would recognize as 'jokes.'" Politico's Dylan Byers put it bluntly in his headline, "The Daily Currant Isn't Funny," writing, "If their stories are plausible, it's because they aren't funny enough. No one—almost no one—mistakes The Onion for a real news organization. That's not just because it has greater brand recognition. It's because their stories make readers laugh." And in The New Republic, Luke O'Neil argued that such stories "could do actual damage to political discourse and the media in general... Juicing an already true-enough premise with more unbelievability simply adds to the informational noise pollution—without even the expected payoff of a laugh." 
1504
1505All legitimate gripes, but perhaps that's overthinking it for a site that's the product of under-thinking. The Daily Currant is trying to maximize clicks and shares, and has found a niche between The Onion and real news: all the believability of the latter, but all the libel protections of the former. There's a Catch-22 to this approach, though. As more people have become aware of The Daily Currant—in December, Mediaite whined, "Just Stop It, Everyone: Internet Falls for Daily Currant Fake Story Once Again"—suckers have become increasingly rare. The site is a victim of its own success. 
1506
1507No matter. The formula is easily replicable, as other web entrepreneurs and hucksters have discovered. This poor imitation of The Onion has itself spawned a legion of poor imitations, websites so devoid of infotainment value and so cynical in their click-baiting that they make the likes of Viral Nova and Upworthy look staid.
1508
1509Daniel Barkeley, The Daily Currant’s founder and editor-in-chief (and, as of last year, one of its two total employees) presents himself as a purveyor of comedic art. In an interview with Slate's David Weigel, he cited Britain's Ricky Gervais and Armando Iannucci as influences, saying, "That’s the kind of comedy I like—it’s made to look real. It’s funnier that way, and we think it’s more intelligent that way. So I guess a byproduct of that is that you end up with parodies that people think are true."
1510
1511A few months later, after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg pizza-slice story, Barkeley wrote in an email to Politico, "Our headlines themselves aren’t necessarily meant to be funny. (Some are, most aren't). Rather, the humor is supposed to lie in the plot and actions of the characters. Additionally, satire is meant to have a deeper message." He singled out an Onion headline, "'Fuck You,' Obama Says In Hilarious Correspondents' Dinner Speech," as one that "clearly" does not have a deeper message. 
1512
1513The lecture didn’t stop there.
1514
1515"Our style of satire is as old as literature itself," Barkeley continued, "but hasn’t recently been applied to news articles, which is why many in the media appear to be confused by it. But even in the narrow genre of written news satire, this tradition has a long history with Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain both notorious for publishing such articles."
1516
1517Benjamin Franklin. Mark Twain. The Daily Currant. If you can't see it, well, maybe you aren’t sophisticated enough for such a subtle brand of commentary.
1518
1519Barkeley might be an un-clever hack or a clever troll. Or maybe, as Esquire's Charles Pierce generously puts it, "the Currant exists to punk the mainstream media." But at least Barkeley aspires—or pretends to aspire—to greatness, even if he falls desperately short of it. The same can't be said for his many competitors, who see a potentially lucrative con predicated on exploiting the worst habits of social media driven news content. 
1520
1521Their names sound plausible, for the most part: The News Nerd, News-Hound, Huzlers, Demyx, Empire Sports News, Mediamass, National Report and so on. Like The Daily Currant, none suggests humor—except perhaps The Lightly Braised Turnip. Like the Currant, they all identify themselves, with varying degrees of prominence, as being in the business of fake news. There are variations, though. Before its website went down recently, Huzlers published real news alongside outright fabrications, which had the obvious effect of making all its stories seem real. Global Associated News doesn't produce fake stories; it enables users to do so with its "fake celebrity news engine."
1522
1523But they all have one thing in common: ads. Banners, pop-ups, and sidebars—these sites are saturated with the worst kind of aggressive Internet advertising. On News Nerd, for instance, the article text only begins after no less than four Google ads. That’s perhaps the best hint that this not well-intentioned comedy, but a brazen traffic grab. 
1524
1525“These sites don’t worry about saturating their pages with a ton of ads because they don’t really care about anybody staying on the page very long after ending up there," Joseph Finkelstein, an SEO expert with Los Angeles-based design firm Desired Reaction, told me. "The articles themselves are just filler stuffed with high trending, low competition keywords associated with current news stories. The way they make money is all in the headlines— they’re designed to be inflammatory but just believable enough to entice partisans to click on them—or better yet, share them—without looking too hard. Each page is so loaded up with revenue-generating advertisements that as long as they can get people to click over for a minute, they’re making money.” 
1526
1527That’s the con. News Nerd and its ilk cram user-unfriendly ads into every available space because the sites don't rely on visitors ever deliberately returning. Instead, they publish intentionally deceptive content that's just believable enough to get shared and go viral. An appreciable sense of humor would, in fact, be bad for business—unless they can do it as well as The Onion, which no one has proven able to. As long as news traffic is driven by social-media sharing, bad satire news sites will remain profitable.
1528
1529But to blame News Nerd for your credulous reading of a News Nerd story is like blaming P.T. Barnum for your belief that George Washington had a 160-year-old nurse. So long as we keep buying the snake oil, somebody’s going to be craven enough to produce it. We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves.
1530
1531Upworthy and Viralnova, at least, are honest about what they're selling: gaudy, sentimental, life-affirming stories. But the Currant class promises humor and almost universally fails to deliver it—because the actual goal is SEO clickbait. Given that, you might wonder why they even bother identifying themselves, usually in disclaimers at the bottom of the page, as satirical news sites.The answer is simple: to avoid a lawsuit. 
1532
1533In the U.S., satirical writing—even if it makes reference to real people, and even if those references are defaming—is protected speech. But according to Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay, there are established standards for determining whether or not content is comedic and not criminally libelous—standards that can get tricky when your business is predicated on deceiving your readers. “The question a court would ask is whether the average reader would think the article was factual or satirical,” he says. While it’s unclear if somebody would win a libel suit against a purely fake news site—nobody has tried suing one yet—the risk is theoretically significant enough that these sites have decided not to chance it. As long as the disclaimer is there, they assume they’re protected.
1534
1535At least, that appears to be their reasoning. The creators of these sites, when they can be identified at all, aren’t talking. With the exception of National Report, these sites don’t have mastheads. When they allow contact at all, it’s through blind submission forms—not always in English—or generic email addresses. Most also use third-party services to mask the identity of the domain owner. Despite attempting to reach out to dozens of sites, I got only two replies. One was from Empire Sports News's Aaron Smith, who said he was “possibly” willing to talk, but went silent at the first mention of ad revenue. Barkeley, of The Daily Currant, responded to my request for an interview with a brief email that read, “You’re more than welcome to do a takedown piece on our website. But you’ll have to do it without help. Good luck.” He ignored my follow-ups. 
1536
1537But the biggest mystery isn’t the identity of the conmen—it’s how much they're hauling in. Barkeley told Slate that his humor provides him with a “tight but livable” income. A number of publically available valuation services, which are by no means precise, estimate that The Daily Currant brings in anywhere from mid-five figures to $130,000 dollars a year on ad revenue alone. Finkelstein, the SEO expert, says even those numbers may be low, as they doesn't include revenue derived from short-term revenue bumps when a story goes viral. “I would estimate their yearly revenue from display advertising at about $100,000–$150,000 a year,” he said, noting that even with his expertise and access to estimation tools, it's not an exact science. “It isn’t perfect, but it is close. But at most, over the few years they’ve existed, The Daily Currant may have made as much as $500,000 in revenue—split between two people who are hardly doing any work.”
1538
1539The Daily Currant is likely the king of this particular con. But others may be catching up. The same public revenue calculators place Mediamass’s annual ad revenue alone at just under $40,000; Huzzlers' is rapidly approaching $45,000. Not bad takes, especially when you consider that some of these sites don’t even bother to write their own unfunny canards: They just steal them from other sites.
1540
1541The Adobo Chronicles, for example, is a seemingly well-intentioned, relatively ad-free satirical site. Its sole writer, Rene Astudillo, told me he donates the majority of his limited ad revenue to charity. In March, he ran a story claiming the American Psychiatric Association had classified “selfitis”—the taking of selfie photos—as a medical disorder. A solid joke: It was shared more than 10,000 times on Facebook. Less than a week later, Demyx took the article verbatim, cut the overtly comedic final paragraph, and threw it up on their ad-saturated page. They got 18,200 shares.
1542
1543At first glance, stopping sites like Demyx seems simple enough: Just don't click on their stories. Without the ad impressions, the sites won't make any money. But that’s easier said than done: Fake-news sites are myriad, and many are fly-by-night operations. If we learn to recognize one, two more will take its place. But even disavowing all unknown news outlets wouldn’t eradicate the scourge. At times, these stories appear on legitimate sites through no fault of an editor. The bogus Krugman bankruptcy story made it to Breitbart via Boston.com, where it appeared in the finance section due to an automated process. 
1544
1545So the best we can do, having landed on a story titled “Marijuana Cures Hepatitis C, Research Shows,” is read it long enough to realize that it's not true—rather than sharing it first, without a thought. We’ll still be providing an ad impression, but at least we’ll have quarantined the infection.
1546
1547Even that remedy may be asking too much of mankind. A March study by the Media Insight Project found that, as the Washington Post reported, "roughly six in 10 people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week." A month earlier, Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile tweeted that his traffic-analytics company had "found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading." 
1548
1549For those who have fallen for these stories, the consequent humiliation can inoculate them against making the mistake a second time. But you can’t vaccinate suckers as fast as they’re born. Unless Google and Facebook change their algorithms—or humans suddenly become less gullible, and less prone to confirmation bias—these sites will likely persist, metastasizing across the internet like a profoundly unfunny cancer. 
1550
1551House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi indicated that Democrats would attempt to pass a proposed federal minimum wage hike using an obscure House parliamentary procedure.
1552
1553Called a “discharge petition,” the tactic brings a bill — in this case, a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over two years — directly to the floor of the House, bypassing the Republican-controlled committees that have so far blocked such a vote. The reason is simple: The GOP disapproves of the minimum wage, but with most Americans in favor of raising it, House Republicans would rather not cast that vote ahead of the midterm elections.
1554
1555But in case they are forced to cast public votes against the measure, Republicans have also attempted to lessen the political damage by discrediting the proposed wage hike. They cite a recent CBO report that estimates raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would cost 500,000 jobs — too high a price, conservatives say, even in exchange for the 16 million workers who would earn higher income under such a mandate.
1556
1557
1558Millennials are one of the primary targets of this GOP dissuasion campaign. It makes sense: My generation makes up about 18% of the electorate. We’re more politically independent than older voters. Growing and potentially persuadable, we might make the difference in key elections this fall; with only 6 in 10 of us able to find any work (including part time), and a disproportionate share working minimum-wage jobs, the issue promises to be one of the few that might move otherwise recalcitrant young voters to the polls.
1559
1560Republican’s generationally targeted case against a minimum-wage hike is fairly simple, and fairly similar to their general one: More money paid means fewer jobs offered. A higher minimum wage doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t earning any wage at all, and anyway, why are these kids so darn entitled?
1561
1562Like many morality play arguments against economic progress, the case has a kind of intuitive appeal. But the reality is more nuanced. Millennials would benefit enormously from a hike to a $10.10 wage, but more important, it represents only the small first step we must take to create the country we want to inherit.
1563
1564
1565Why?
1566
1567First, there’s a strong case to be made that the hike to $10.10 wouldn’t cost jobs. What it would do is give a significant boost to a generation crippled by student loan debt and at times unable to make ends meet even when working more than 60 hours a week at current wages. But even that would be little more than a fighting chance. When we hear about the “destructive” and “radical” push to raise the minimum wage, no millennial should forget that $10.10 an hour is still a compromise.
1568
1569The truth is that if the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity after 1968, it would be more than $20 an hour today. People wonder why today’s young people can’t seem to get ahead like their parents and grandparents did. That’s why: Even a “substantial” hike to entry level wages would still put us far behind the average purchasing power of our predecessors at this phase in life.
1570
1571PHOTO ESSAY: 5 Senate women to watch in 2014
1572
1573It’s not that the money isn’t available. Our GDP will recover. The stock market is doing fine. But it’s more difficult than ever for workers, especially those starting out, to get a fair share of the wealth their labor generates for businesses. Our businesses aren’t so frail that they couldn’t allocate higher pay for their employees; despite similar cries from the start of the minimum wage through every subsequent increase, a mandate on a minimum income for workers has never crippled the American economy. And who knows? Maybe employers will even get better value from employees who aren’t coming off an eight-hour shift at their other jobs.
1574
1575Economic justice impacts every American. But it is especially vital to those of us who are just starting out. We are the ones who must decide what kind of country we’ll inherit when its current leaders are gone. So we’ve got to aggressively support politicians who seek to raise the minimum wage, and punish those who don’t. If we refuse to flex our political muscle now, it won’t be a future worth the 100-hour workweeks we’re inheriting.
1576
1577On July 9, 2012, just two weeks after a divided Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of President Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA), Texas Governor Rick Perry decided to make a stand for liberty. 
1578
1579The governor was disappointed with the ACA decision. If it had been up to him, the whole thing would've been ruled unconstitutional. But his options for resistance were limited. Perry could do nothing to stop the creation of state health insurance exchanges; if he refused, the federal government would simply create one for his state. He couldn't hold off the individual mandate either – like citizens of the other 49 states, Texans would be assessed a fee, newly rationalized as a tax, if they failed to procure health insurance and didn't qualify for an exemption under the law. He couldn't even protect businesses from the crushing (albeit easily, if cynically, circumventable) obligation to provide basic insurance for full-time employees.
1580
1581In these ways, it seemed, the people of the Lone Star State would never again be free. But in this dark hour, Governor Perry saw a sliver of light that, along with other Republican governors, would allow for one of the worst, underreported tragedies of the last decade to occur.
1582
1583He saw his opening and took it. A vital provision of the original health care reform law mandated that states accept federal funding to expand Medicaid eligibility for any adult with an income under 133% (now 138%) of the federal poverty line. The requirement was there to make sure that the poorest Americans, some 17 million who could not afford insurance even with new subsidies, would still be covered in some form. But, according to the Supreme Court, the federal government couldn't require states to accept the cash or implement the expansion. If a Governor felt like denying health care coverage to the poorest among their constituents on principle, that was their call. Rick Perry decided to make it.
1584
1585"I oppose both the expansion of Medicaid ... and the creation of a so-called 'state' health exchange," he told Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius in a letter, because the programs represented "brazen intrusions into the sovereignty of [Texas]." 
1586
1587"I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab," he said, going on to call the Affordable Care Act "Orwellian."
1588
1589And so, in the name of the Founders, Rick Perry denied health insurance to an estimated 1.3 million Texans who would have qualified under the proposed expansion.
1590
1591He wasn't alone. As of last month, only 25 states and the District of Columbia have voluntarily expanded their Medicaid programs. The unlucky impoverished of the remaining 25, under the resolute leadership of men like Florida's convicted Medicare fraudster-come-Governor Rick Scott, have become part of a growing "Medicare eligibility gap": an estimated five Americans who remain uninsured despite a federal government willing and able to foot the bill. No doubt they feel especially free right now.
1592
1593Image credit: The Advisory Board Company
1594
1595With attention focused on the enrollment rate for healthcare.gov, the state-by-state implementation of a poverty eligibility adjustment impacting less than 10% of Americans hasn't gotten a ton of coverage. It's a slightly wonky issue, and, with its calculations and contingencies, doesn't lend itself to easy explanation. And so the (exclusively Republican) governors refusing to comply have gotten away with little political consequence. When they haven't benefited from lack of interest in the issue, they've fought: Right now, the Louisiana GOP is suing MoveOn.org over the progressive site' refusal to take down a billboard calling attention to the 242,000 Louisianans saved from federal tyranny by Governor Jindal.
1596
1597We need a new strategy for calling attention to this issue, and for driving web traffic to our cause. If clicks are caring, then by the much-bemoaned state of journalism, those clicks must be bated. So let's try something more appropriate to the age of the sensational. According to a Harvard study, as many as 17,000 Americans will die as a direct result of not becoming eligible for Medicaid in their state. That's on top of the 45,000 annual dead from a general lack of insurance.
1598
1599Or, in other words, the Medicare eligibility gap will murder at least five times as many people as 9/11.
1600
1601Is it fair to compare the denial of health insurance to a nation-shaking terrorist attack? In the important ways, yes. Twenty-twenty hindsight and bin Laden-determined-to-strike foresight aside, nobody exactly allowed 9/11 to happen. There was plenty of finger-pointing after the fact, but at no point did somebody put a bill on President Bush's desk and tell him if he didn't sign it, there was going to be a body count. And if the Patriot Act taught us anything, it's that President Bush — love him or hate him — wouldn't have declined to sign such a bill, had it existed, in the name of "liberty".
1602
1603So imagine the public backlash if it had turned out there were studies years in advance of Sept. 11 detailing exactly what would happen on that day. Imagine if they included estimated casualty counts and demographic predictions of who the dead would be. Imagine if the attacks happened despite the fact that elected leaders could have prevented them by simply accepting federal money. Now imagine that happened five times.
1604
16059/11 may have been a consequence of negligence, but the governors refusing to sign on to the Medicaid expansion are guilty of criminally negligent homicide. When the dead start piling up, nobody will even go on TV and swear to avenge them with bombs.
1606
1607Republicans claim that their refusal comes from a place of fiscal responsibility. Don't believe them. Under the plan, the federal government — which is more than able to afford the relatively modest program — would foot 100% of the bill through 2020. After that, they'd foot 90%. In states refusing the expansion, overall medical spending will actually increase. There's no rational basis for refusal, only an all-too-familiar willingness to defy the president out of blinding spite.
1608
1609These Republican governors (with some surprising and admirable exceptions like Arizona's Jan Brewer) are sitting idly by and allowing Americans to die, which leads us to an even better way to calculate the human cost of the Medicare eligibility gap, one that might be especially appealing to our friends in the GOP.
1610
1611You think 9/11 fives times over is bad? The predicted 17,000 American dead also equals a sum total of 4,250 Benghazis. And these citizens didn't even sign up to go to a war zone.
1612
1613No doubt Darrell Issa will be on the case soon, and refuse to ever, ever let it go, just as soon as he's finished embarrassing himself with the IRS.
1614
1615Last month, as the East Coast was pounded by winter storms and the West Coast by drought, "Meet the Press" decided it was time once again for a climate-change debate. The NBC show predictably invited "two people on opposite sides of the issue," as host David Gregory put it his introduction to the segment. One was Marsha Blackburn, the Republican congresswoman and vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who, if not qualified to speak authoritatively about climate change, at least influences climate policy (albeit to the detriment of the environment). But her sparring partner that morning wasn’t someone of officially commensurable stature—not a Democratic member of Congress, a prominent climate scientist, a green-NGO head, or even Al Gore. Rather, the man invited onto our most venerated political talk show to defend the scientific consensus was a part-time actor with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering: Bill Nye, the Science Guy.
1616
1617In today’s YouTube-ready debate contests, that’s considered a win. "Bill Nye Scolds GOP Congresswoman," Time reported. “Bill Nye Schools Marsha Blackburn,” The Raw Story declared. Mother Jones began its analysis with, "Bill Nye is getting good at this." Even the conservative Washington Times could only muster that Nye and Blackburn "don’t see eye to eye." The media response was similar to just weeks earlier, when Nye took on “young-Earth creationist” Ken Ham in a debate, at Kentucky’s Creation Museum, over the origins of life. So one-sided was that victory that the biggest criticism of Nye was whether he should have participated at all, thereby granting undue credence to creationists and helping to fund the museum's planned Noah's Ark theme park. 
1618
1619Despite his superficially flimsy qualifications, Nye, who did not respond to interview requests, has emerged these last few months as perhaps the left’s most celebrated public advocate for scientific rationalism—more successful, so far, than the legions of more accomplished experts to come before him. As the Washington Post's Scott Clement put it, the Nye-Blackburn "meeting puts in stark relief how much the scientific community has failed to communicate their message on global climate change. Perhaps Nye—who has perfected communicating complex subjects to children—will have more success." 
1620
1621The "Meet the Press" and Creation Museum appearances are part of a broader cultural renaissance for the former host of "Bill Nye, the Science Guy," a popular PBS Kids show for much of the 1990s, and the fawning doesn’t end with the press. Policymakers sing his praises as liberally as liberal pundits, with one White House official even telling Mother Jones that President Barack Obama himself “lights up when he sees Bill.” A recent photo provided proof of it:
1622
1623That this selfie is being shared with Neil deGrasse Tyson, a bona fide astrophysicist, says a lot about Nye's skyrocketing credibility. It's also a bit bizarre. How did a man who has been out of the public eye for over a decade—aside from the occasional TV cameo—become the political left's foremost spokesman on climate change? And more important, is this genial, bow-tied eccentric really the most qualified and effective person for the job?
1624
1625William Sanford Nye was born in Washington, D.C., in 1955 to two World War II veterans (his mother was a code breaker). After graduating high school in 1973, he attended Cornell University, where one of his professors was the late, legendary astronomer Carl Sagan. After graduating in 1977 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, he moved to Seattle and took a job with Boeing. By day, he was the model of a dignified 9-to-5 engineer, developing a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor still used today. But by night, after winning a Steve Martin look-alike contest in 1978, he began performing stand-up comedy. In 1986, he signed on as an actor and writer for a local comedy show, "Almost Live!," broadcast on Seattle's NBC affiliate. It was there that he got his moniker.
1626
1627Within a few years, in 1993, the newly christened Science Guy was host of his eponymous show, and it didn't go off the air until half a decade and a hundred episodes later. Before long, "Bill Nye, the Science Guy" was consigned to the mausoleum of Millennial nostalgia, a cultural icon recalled in the kinds of conversations that also touched on Super Soakers and "Legends of the Hidden Temple." But although Nye was no longer performing in prime time, singing about air pressure to the tune of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," he never left the world of science education. In the years since his show ended in 1998, he has quietly entered the realm of public policy, setting himself up for the resurgence he enjoys today.
1628
1629In 2005, Nye became vice president of the Planetary Society, one of the country’s largest interstellar-science NGOs. Founded by Carl Sagan in 1980, the society engages in public outreach to promote space exploration, as well as funding research and other efforts that will “seed” further extra stellar exploration. After serving five years, Nye became executive director of the society in 2010. In 2012, he spearheaded the “Save Our Science” campaign, an effort to have Congress to increase federal appropriations for planetary science to $1.5 billion annually (thanks in part to these efforts, the appropriation is now close at $1.345 billion). As an Obama administration official told Mother Jones, for a while now Nye has been “instrumental in helping advance some of the President’s key initiatives to make sure we can out-educate, out-innovate, and out-compete the world.” He just hasn't been doing it on TV, until recently.
1630
1631But if Nye's years of quiet advocacy offer some justification for his Sunday-morning bookings, they don’t quite make sense of his sudden, broad embrace by the left. That’s because Nye's renewed celebrity isn’t predicated exclusively on his resume, which is still a mystery to most, or on any superlative prowess as a debater. It doesn't even have to do with shifts in the media landscape. Rather, it's the result of something much more emotional than all of that.
1632
1633The most cynical explanation for the Nye Moment is that it's just the latest symptom of a culture long guilty of conflating celebrity with authority—or worse, that it’s all just generational nostalgia, fueled by the supposed navel-gazing of Millennials who have finally emerged from political puberty. But the cause is more complicated, more deeply rooted in how the left engages in debates over scientific reality.
1634
1635In the early aughts, fighting battles with the righteous assurance of scientific consensus made happy warriors of leftists. It was fun to poke holes in creationist talking points; while frightening, there was a motivating urgency that came with yielding the newest evidence for man-made global warming. While it was apparent, even then, how stubborn science skeptics could be, it hadn’t sunk in yet how resistant to rational persuasion they would prove to be. The endurance of people like Ken Ham to Marsha Blackburn—forever repeating the same pseudo-rational “objections" with unjustified confidence and unbothered smiles—boggles even the most cynical liberal. Decades of proof, the prognosis worsening by the year, and what does the rational world have to show for it? Nothing.
1636
1637This has given way to a profound sense of frustration and exasperation. A decade ago, the climate-change debate was about what would happen if we didn’t act. Now, it’s how much we can prevent even if we acted now, which everybody knows we won’t: Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists may agree that humans are causing the planet to warm, but too many Republicans on Capitol Hill do not. It seems that nothing short of the worst actually occurring will get through to the skeptics, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the likes of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh saw Los Angeles underwater and still managed to declare it “hysteria.” 
1638
1639Bill Nye calls his new life as a political pundit a “patriotism.” It's a war he probably won't win. If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can't convince the diehard climate-change deniers, the Science Guy probably doesn’t stand a chance. But his performance so far hasn't disappointed, and that's exactly the point: It's a performance. That may be exactly what the rational side, exhausted from years of outrage and alarm, needs today. If the deniers cannot be reasoned with like adults, then at least let's be entertained by the dismantling of their arguments and exposure of their ignorance—if only to make us laugh, and thereby preserve our sanity. And given that reasoning, who better to debate these intransigent skeptics than an impossibly patient ex-comedian who not only made science fun for children, but made their parents laugh, too?
1640
1641
1642That satisfaction has come with consequences. Outrage across media digital, traditional and social has led to calls for Pence's resignation. Businesses have begun looking for real estate in more tolerant climes. Consumers and conventioneers across the country are vowing boycotts of Indiana goods. Even NASCAR has declared its discontent.
1643
1644It's good to see the Left still has some fight in it. For all the sense that we are feckless Occupiers, it is good to know that we can still deliver a cocktail of social, political and economic punishment that would put the old Baptist book burners to shame.
1645
1646
1647USA TODAY
1648Anti-gay bias legal in Indiana before new law: Column
1649
1650Presently I find myself excited to turn this newfound strength on states like Texas, where at a savings of zero dollars, Republican state governments have refused to expand Medicaid and thereby sentenced some 17,000 of its poorest citizensto risk a preventable death. We've got half the country to choose from. Where will we start?
1651
1652Or perhaps we could start with Wisconsin, or one of the 24 other states that have passed Right to Work laws in excess of the Taft-Hartley Act, subjecting workers to lower wages, lesser benefits and diminished negotiating power, all in the name of Freedomâ„¢. Freedom, that is, from things like workplace safety and vacation days. Businesses have been an integral part of hitting Indiana where it hurts. As soon as you tell them that Right to Work states see decreases in worker productivity with no comparable improvement in business conditions, I'm sure they'll be eager to join the cause.
1653
1654The average American worker hasn't seen a raise in 40 years. Since productivity and wages went their separate ways in the late '70s, our middle class has vanished while the newfound poor generate even more wealth for "job creators." Why stop at repealing bad laws? Let's boycott any state unwilling to raise the minimum wage. With everyone one from Rahm Emanuel to Miley Cyrus and George Takei on board, how could we lose?
1655
1656
1657Rather, I think the trouble has more to do with empathy. Early in the marriage-equality wars, activists spent a lot of time talking about how when somebody discovered a friend or relative was gay, they became far more likely to support gay rights. These days it is difficult for anybody in a position to direct the Left's energies — whether they work in business, or government or media — to avoid having gay colleagues. Human faces for the struggle are all around us. But how many middle-class opinion makers socialize with the impoverished? How many editors and legislators and Silicon Valley heroes have dinner with the lovely couple on food stamps down the street?
1658
1659It isn't that the Left doesn't care for economic justice. But empathy of the kind that underlies liberal politics is one of the most difficult undertakings in moral life; doubly so when that empathy is cognitive, not personal. We feel viscerally compelled to stand and fight with those we know in daily life. We feel less urgency when the suffering are little more than an abstract, undifferentiated mass. That chasm has consequences. We're seeing them right now.
1660
1661most teenage malcontents, I spent a lot of time hanging around garbage Los Angeles rock closets and garbage bars that weren’t too strict about IDing, talking garbage politics, and listening to garbage music on garbage nights and smoking garbage pot in parking lots with other Valley kids whose older sisters’ boyfriends had cannabis club cards, too. I don’t know where the real punks were. Long gone by 2005, probably, and sure as hell not hanging around Second Street with some eighth-grade poser in a Joy Division T-shirt.
1662
1663The kids in the dance clubs were our chosen enemies. The difference came down to two kinds of dancing for people who didn’t know how to dance. Ours involved moshing, throwing our elbows, and kicking our legs out in what must have looked like a looked a highly choreographed routine. It was fake fighting, and it was the most sincere thing I had going for me.
1664
1665I don’t go in much for mosh pits anymore, but the idea of routinized violence stuck with me: I traded bullshit dancing for bullshit Facebook arguments. I am an addict, more in the style of Candy Crush obsessives than heroin junkies; I’m never looking for a fix—just getting one, mindlessly, in any spare moment over anything at all.
1666
1667I argue to procrastinate. I argue before I get out of bed. I argue on my own wall and on the walls of others; I belong to several Facebook groups dedicated to arguing (although these, as a rule, generate arguments far less satisfying than the organic kind—such is the nature of self-selecting clubs). I argue on my laptop between episodes of Law and Order: SVU, and I argue on my phone at bars and parties.
1668
1669That last behavior earns the ire of a set of scolds who operate under the bizarre misapprehension that before smartphones, in-person conversation was a universally rapt affair. These people are everywhere, at bars and parties, on cigarette breaks, and some years ago the frequency with which my face went down into the glow of artificial light was cited among the top reasons a woman was leaving me. She said it revealed how uninteresting I found her. Well, if it means anything, know that I’m looking down on my phone to yell on Facebook because I like it.
1670
1671Let me give you just a partial list of questions over which I’ve helped fill threads with over six dozen comments, burning out the energy of whoever wanted to talk in the first place. Here’s some from just the last week:
1672
1673Whether moral truths imply moral facts
1674Whether or not Arrested Development was actually a good show
1675Whether there’s a proper way to say “Nevada”
1676Whether working in firearm design is a moral act
1677Whether Rahm Emanuel should remain mayor of Chicago
1678Whether writers’ retreats are scams
1679In addition, there was the proper definition of a tabloid, the ethics of aggregation, the dramaturgical promise of this year’s House of Cards, how much light can remain when the sun has technically “set,” how involved Iran is in Syria, and how insulting it is to see William Shatner ads for PriceLine on Hulu when you’re trying to watch Star Trek because Leonard Nimoy just died.
1680
1681I argue to procrastinate. I argue before I get out of bed. I argue on my own wall and on the walls of others.
1682I’m told I belong to a conflict avoidant generation, but it’s never hard to fill out my dance card for these things. Even those who would never raise an objection, much less their voice, in the course of in-person conversation have difficulty resisting a comment thread gone hostile. Most don’t have the endurance to hang in for the whole thing—they’ll argue for half an hour then move on—but this does not speak to their willingness so much as their athleticism. I didn’t start out with enough steam for a day-long online brawl. It took time the develop the chops for such a marathon, and if I only fought with those in similar shape, I’d spend most of my time just looking for a worthy match. But amateurs make good enablers, too.
1683
1684“Enablers” is wrong. I’m not speaking of the kind of vice that makes one’s life unmanageable. These aren’t cigarettes; I don’t need to quit. I argue on the Internet for the same reason I used to frequent mosh pits: There is a pleasure in harmless conflict for its own sake.
1685
1686Presently, nobody seems to believe me when I say my motives are so simple. I suspect this is because Internet arguments belong to the class of activities we’re meant to be ashamed of. It’s meant to be a guilty pleasure. The consensus lumps it in with over-liking, with late-night texting one-night stands, with following the Instagrams of old lovers, and with all those things too many of us do but only admit to with some dutiful self-reproach. I’m not proud, but at least I’m self aware, right?
1687
1688We do this because we believe that these activities give away a certain kind of insecurity. They are obsessions, the behaviors of people who can’t move on, who can’t find self-respect, and who are trying much too hard. For a nation obsessed with self-starting, there is no motive less desirable than pretension, than fixating on a world that doesn’t fixate on us. The over-liker and the late-night texter have given up their power. The Facebook arguer is giving up her cool. At best, we are taken to be trying too hard to sound smarter than we are; at worst, we are taken to be contrarians, moved by the secret insecurity of assholes, projecting our abiding fear that we know nothing and nobody likes us. Who gets into a fight without anything to prove? What’s worse these days than seeming like you’re trying to prove something?
1689
1690It’s easy enough to ignore the scolds. But these last few years have seen the rise of something far more threatening.
1691
1692I’m speaking of an aggression usually often referred to as trolling but better known as harassment, a practice that has made the Web increasingly unsafe for advocates of certain politics. I like nothing more than a good burner, but they’re difficult to instigate when for somebody like Anita Sarkeesian—one of the prime victims of the Gamergate campaign— the word “argument” is a polite term for “death threat.” The frequency of these attacks has taken over Web culture during the past few years, and if I’m to defend an Internet for fighting, I should say something about those who have used that Internet to make people fear for their lives.
1693
1694For a flame war to be fun, it must exist with fun in mind, and the game hinges on it remaining a game. The views may be sincere, and the anger may be real, but all of this must exist within the fiction of its context and within the mutually understood assumption that this is an exercise, not a war. Here’s a Facebook fight I’m tired of having: whether or not an acceptable response to a political argument is shut up get raped and die. (It’s not.)
1695
1696I’m told I belong to a conflict avoidant generation, but it’s never hard to fill out my dance card for these things.
1697A Facebook fight about Israel isn’t the same as a death threat, and I refuse to have anything to do with these monsters.
1698
1699I’m inclined to think of the mosh pit. We had a way of dealing with it there. Let the naysayers stand on the sidelines, and let anyone who wanted to get too rough try it: The crowd had no reservations about lifting them into the air and throwing them outside the circle.
1700
1701
1702
1703I spend a lot of time rationalizing my own habits. I feel compelled to justify even trivial behaviors to the uninterested, or against those who charge others of abusing my hobbies, or really anyone who suggests that how I spend my time makes me anything less than exactly the sort of person anyone should like. I watch NFL football. I spend more time in ponderous discussions of whether the sport is too violent than I do watching actual games.
1704
1705We run into trouble when we try too hard. That’s where the trap is. The need to give reasons, to give good reasons, to persuade others that an activity that has nothing to do with them at all becomes the very way we validate their skepticism. If it’s fine, then why are you so defensive about it? Some pleasures don’t need reasons. As far as Internet arguing goes, the reason-givers are the assholes: Those are the future trolls who can’t help telling you that they don’t argue—they debate. Well. I don’t debate. I argue. And I don’t have a good reason for that; the lack of one is a reason in itself. Activity without apparent purpose is a rare pleasure these days. I like arguing on the Internet because so long as everybody plays fair, there are no consequences. It’s either that or Tetris.
1706
1707Sometime between the mosh pits and the Facebook fights, I spent a lot of time hanging around 12-step meetings. The real die-hards there, the lucky few of the 1 percent for whom such programs work long term, never stopped being addicts. It was only that their addiction wasn’t harmful anymore. Instead of drugs, they had meetings: meetings they could go to every single day, meetings with rituals and validation and retreat from the world, everything an addict looks for but without the nasty side effects of real drugs.
1708
1709A decade or two in, most of them were in little danger of going back to the bottle. They didn’t need a meeting every day; they no longer had the reason this keeps me from using to come back to the group every night. They did it because they felt compelled to and it provided an outlet for an impulse unacceptable in ordinary life in a space designed for that sort of bloodletting. They did it because it felt good.
1710
1711We don’t need reasons. Some things can be done for their own sake. The nay-sayers miss the point when they say that it’s all meaningless; the trolls miss it when they attach too much importance to high meaning. The question is safety, not purpose. A mosh pit is better than a real fight because real fights break bones. The Internet is all right for fighting, because so long as everybody understands the game, nobody goes home broken.
1712
1713Maybe that’s wrong. But you can find me on Facebook. I’m happy to fight about it.
1714
1715 you might not have realized it was about polyamory. It was easy to miss. In several thousand words, the term appeared only one time. And no one could be blamed if the phrase that author Alex Morris chose in its stead caused even more confusion: “The New Monogamy.” Huh?
1716
1717But despite the understandable confusion, Morris’ article was, at least in part, about polyamory. Novel terminology aside, it was the same old story about nontraditional relationships.
1718
1719While well researched and amply quoted, Morris’ article engaged in an old, ugly trend of mischaracterizing polyamory as some kind of newly emerging phenomenon, discovered by Morris while investigating a “new sexual revolution.”
1720
1721It isn’t that Morris’ profile was explicitly hostile, or even all that wary of non-monogamous arrangements. Rather, the well-intentioned reporting falls victim to an old laundry list of misapprehensions. Polyamory, according to Morris and countless other writers who have taken on the topic, is about frivolity and sex. That’s why it fits in an article that also deals with teenage promiscuity statistics and typical head-scratching over the vagaries of “hookup culture.”
1722
1723I understand: Sex sells. Youth sells. Transgression sells. Package all three together and you’ve got a hot story.
1724
1725But misleading stories about polyamory do a disservice, both to the immense diversity of polyamorous practice in this country and to readers who might be genuinely interested in exploring that diversity.
1726
1727So, if I may temporarily take the dangerous step of speaking for my community, here are some common misunderstandings that have come out of these stories, and some clarifications for future stories:
1728
1729Polyamory isn’t a trend among young people. It never was. Among the non-monogamous, there is everything from the youngish hipsters Morris profiles to long-standing domestic families with mortgages and children. Some are even on Social Security. The only common thread is deviation from strict, traditional fidelity.
1730
1731Polyamory doesn’t entail a particular relationship structure. I’ve seen everything from the so-called open relationship to groups of three or more partners -- but for whom any outside entanglement would be a form of infidelity. And everything in between. The point is that those in every relationship get to figure out what works best for them.
1732
1733Polyamory is not about sex. Sex is an obvious and typically unavoidable component, but reducing the idea to a sexual practice leads inexorably to the assumption that practitioners are just promiscuous, commitment-phobic or simply not yet with the “right” partner. It’s what makes it all so easy to condescend to and to dismiss.
1734
1735But polyamory, at bottom, is about love, and about the idea that love is not a zero-sum game in which one partner’s gain is another’s inevitable loss. If sex comes into that, then it comes into it, but sex as an expression of love isn’t anything unique to us.
1736
1737Finally: Polyamory is not a revolution. We are not rebels. We are not trying to delegitimize monogamy.
1738
1739Sorry if all of that is less exciting. But hey, who knows? Maybe once the real stories are out there, this whole polyamory thing won’t seem to be “new” or revolutionary after all.
1740
1741Reading the news in recent days, it's difficult to escape the impression there has been a miracle. Obamacare worked. Despite a troubled launch, disappointing early numbers and cynicism from across the political spectrum, the Affordable Care Act came through. A total of 8 million Americans have enrolled, even more than the number set by outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as a benchmark for success..
1742
1743As with all miracles, it has provoked its share of skeptics now rooting around behind the curtain, looking for the real Wizard of Oz. Were the books cooked, as Rush Limbaugh has suggested?
1744
1745Reason, not magic
1746
1747Not likely. Despite what you've heard, this wasn't some kind of third-act triumph, shocking to friends and foes of President Obama alike.
1748
1749What really happened? Despite the near-constant use of the words "goal" or "magic number" to describe the 7 million enrollee target, that number didn't originate as an aspiration for Obamacare proponents. It didn't even emerge as an indicator of whether the program was working. Rather, the figure came out of a 2013 Congressional Budget Office report. It was an educated guess about the future. A non-partisan federal office looked at the law, looked at market conditions, crunched the numbers and estimated that 7 million people would sign up by this April 1.
1750
1751In other words: Some experts predicted what would happen, and then it happened.
1752
1753But the magic number narrative persists, and it's difficult to escape the conclusion that this is more to do with convenience than reality. "Administration exceeds incredible goal" sells more newspapers than "World proceeds about like we figured." Likewise for Democrats: Obama pointing Babe Ruth-like at the stands then hitting a grand slam is better political propaganda than a law working just about as experts predicted. Even the right wins: The more incredible the achievement seems, the easier it is to stoke suspicions.
1754
1755To be sure, if enrollment had fallen short, that would have been bad news for the administration. But that the program managed to accomplish what analysts predicted is essentially neutral news. The only thing it proves is that the CBO still works.
1756
1757Common reality
1758
1759And that's a good thing, for all of us. An enormous amount of ink is spilled bemoaning the intensifying polarization of our politics. It has become so extreme, we like to say, that Republicans and Democrats don't merely disagree, they seem to inhabit alternative realities. We ought to take heart from the confirmation that the non-partisan agencies we rely on to produce reasonable analysis to inform our political debates actually work.
1760
1761It would be far more frightening if they didn't, because then it'd be hard not to conclude that somebody was cooking the books, or worse, that we no longer had a way to predict the consequences of our actions.
1762
1763The borough of Linesville emerges from a crook in the road. Leaving Meadsville and heading due west on highway 6, and proceeding through the pale green farmland of northwest Pennsylvania, the road bends left and a town appears, suddenly and severely there.
1764
1765It is a small town. A main street with a slew of local businesses, a gas station, two diners (one closed and being renovated under the stewardship of the local church); a district office for the local assemblyman: his issues are vaccine shots and guns. Linesville is old and overwhelmingly white, one of the whitest places in the country; the last Democrat to carry the county was Lyndon Johnson, and this, I’m told, had more to do with beagles than with politics. They are the sort of folks typically unconcerned with the larger country, except for a sense that God is rapidly withdrawing from it.
1766
1767Not to say that they are universally hostile to out-of-towners. In summer, the population swells with seasonal workers, come to service tourists from nearby Cleveland and Pittsburg who have arrived for the county’s two warm-weather attractions: lake Conneaut with its attendant hotel, and the more peculiar Linesville Spillway, where oversized carp – drawn by the promise of plentiful thrown bread -- emerge by the thousands and in such density that the townspeople refer to it as “the place where ducks walk on fish”. By late August, the summer hands and families leave, and the year-round population – just north of a thousand souls – retire almost exclusively to the daily tasks that keep them clothed, fed, and sheltered until the tourists come again.
1768
1769I pass through in early September. It is already too cold for any activity on the waterways, and so the sight of an unfamiliar car with out-of-state plates is alarming enough for the locals to take notice; doubly so when their visitor is so easily pegged as more than a mere outsider: judging from my dress and mannerisms, I am obviously urban, possibly Jewish, and probably liberal; not enough to elicit outright hostility (these are kind people, after all, open-armed like all country people seem in the popular imagination), but more than enough for open curiosity. While pouring my coffee, a hen-like waitress of indeterminate age asks what brought me to Linesville this morning.
1770
1771“I slept in Meadsville last night,” I tell her and, after considering how easily I want to confirm their suspicions about me, add “I’m driving from New York back to Chicago.”
1772
1773“Well, you’re halfway home,” she smiles, and its true: The Maclaine Building, sitting in the northwest corner of the town at an intersection boasting Linesvilles’ only stop light, has a sign of particular interest to travelers: One arrow, pointing east, reads “500 MILES TO NEW YORK”; another, pointing west, says “500 MILES TO CHICAGO”.
1774
1775The true midpoint is about a mile west of there, but close enough and still well within the city limits. But it’s not just this geographical accident that’s brought me here, and when the waitress returns I clarify. “Half my family is buried here,” I say, “including my maternal grandparents. I’ve never been, and by the way: do you know how to get to the cemetery from here?”
1776
1777The memories I have of my grandparents do not take place in Linesville, or anywhere in Pennsylvania; until their deaths some four years prior, I don’t believe they’d set foot in the Keystone State since long before my birth. But in their own ways, they both came from the small town on the Ohio border – my grandmother (Helen Dennison), raised in nearby Erie but heir to the hotel her parents owned on lake Conneaut; my grandfather (Willard “Pete” Peterson), raised in town and born – back when it was a home – in the boarded-up diner now turned over to the church. He worked summers in the Dennison hotel, and at 18 married the boss’ daughter.
1778
1779When Pete joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, he was assigned to California and later the Pacific; when he went, Helen went with him, and while their lives took them to homes in several states, they only set foot in the Keystone state for a transient few years, my mother and her elder brother born in hotels and other towns for lack of a hospital in Linesville. But they wanted to return in death, and so were buried by my mother and my uncles in the graveyard with so many of my relatives.
1780
1781One imagines all the trucks that must be on the highway now, packed with other corpses, crisscrossing on their final preprandial journeys.
1782
1783Like Linesville itself, the eponymous cemetery appears suddenly. North from the main street, a row of postwar homes comes to an abrupt end. Then a downward slope of grass and dirt, littered with gravestones, covering bodies. I park and walk to the gravel path that leads into the graveyard; it is clear and lack of any cityscape exposes the scene to an annihilating sky, still and windless. I am not alone. A tent has been erected a hundred yards into the field and a few mourners idle under it, waiting for a body.
1784
1785My family plot is farther down.
1786
1787The weather – chilly but still clear, with visibility out to the horizon – is nothing like the climes I associate with Pete or Helen. By my own birth in the early 90s, they had settled in right outside Seattle on Mercer Island, and with visits there largely restricted to the holidays, I had never seen the place anything but tree-obscured and damp. When I thought of them I thought of their house, packed with relatives, over-carpeted, and always much too warm.
1788
1789It snowed one year. It was the first time I had seen powder on the ground.
1790
1791My memory of my grandfather is of him in his chair, a black recliner in the living room off-limits to everyone but him (although I manage to sneak in sometimes), turning to me as I enter the room and shouting “What’cha say, Em?”. I never knew how to respond. He was kind to me, and didn’t scare me in the way my other grandfather – blind and wild-haired – had until his death when I was seven. Years later I would find out that Pete savaged both my uncles as children, and once struck my grandmother (precipitating her departure, and eventual return only on the condition that it never happen again). He was kind to me.
1792
1793I thought of my grandmother, who was quiet. Whose voice I can’t remember very well.
1794
1795I thought of the last few years of their lives, when they sold the house and moved in to separate nursing homes. It was faster than expected. After Helen’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, and Pete’s with Parkinson’s, they had managed to stay home for awhile, functioning as a kind of symbiotic organism, with Helen, able-bodied but forgetful, carrying out instructions from the clear-headed but chain-confined Pete. But all of a sudden, they were both much too far gone. Within a year, Helen was relocated to a hospice, the kind filled with moaning and sickly smelling air, and when we visited her, she didn’t speak, or even wake, most times. Pete went to a private house where the mostly-cogent elderly were cared for by the family there.
1796
1797Once, he lost his temper. I don’t remember why, but I had never seen him mad before. I suppose he had begun to slip and didn’t know or care I was around. So he bellowed, and in my uncles eyes I saw the momentary conviction that their father, who by this point could not wipe his own ass unassisted, would somehow rise up from the chair, tall and strong as he had been the day he came home from the War, and make them sorry for thinking they could cross him.
1798
1799He doesn’t get up, of course. Later that day, he gives me a Christmas present. I go back to California. He dies.
1800
1801The pilgrimage to the dead and to the place of ancestry are intertwined in American myth, and walking down the gravel to the spot where my grandparents are buried, I feel the peculiar identification that comes finding one’s self in the reality of a tradition before relegated to the domain of other people. It is you, not someone else, who has lost love for the first time. It is you, not someone else, who is famous. It is you, not someone else, who has cancer, who is married, who is walking down the pathway to a grave.
1802
1803It takes me a minute to find the headstone. It has only been there for a few years, and the marble is still glossy, but grass and leaves have obscured part of the nameplate. I clean it off, largely so I can tell my mother that I did.
1804
1805I stand there for awhile. I smoke a cigarette and look around to see if anyone is looking, in case smoking near the dead isn’t allowed. I think of an old girlfriend who lived across the street from a cemetery in Chicago who said when lightning struck she looked across her window to the graves to make sure no one was moving. I’m distracted.
1806
1807The connection, the catharsis of a clichéd carried out fails to come. I try a “Watch’ya say, Pete?”, but it comes out insincere.
1808
1809I realize I don’t feel anything, not because I didn’t love my grandparents, or because I didn’t miss them, but because there was nobody to talk to here. In movies and television, we see the ritual of survivors standing over graves, checking in to half a conversation, and yet I couldn’t summon up the dissonance to even pantomime the scene. I was in a town I’d never been to, a town that bored me, and my only connection to it was scattered bodies buried in the Earth.
1810
1811
1812We have a host of rituals toward the dead, but very few in honor of the living. Even those we do have one eye cocked toward passing on. Any religious consecration is in some sense preparation for the inevitable, but even secular ceremonies are done with legacy in mind: the highest honors let you know the first line of your obituary.
1813
1814I have written obituaries, written them compulsively for myself and my parents and my friends. I have made notes of moments planned for poignant recollection down the road, and I have described the heights of relationships not yet complete. The trouble is how often I have to change them when the subjects keep on living.
1815
1816Why?
1817
1818In some sense, it is willfully obtuse to say the dead cannot appreciate our presence. In some sense, of course, these rituals are for the living; and my compulsion for obituary writing is a particular clear case in point. Yet too often even these are hyperbolic, a departed uncle “the most intelligent man” the orphaned niece has ever met; the world “unlikely to see” another grandmother, in truth so ordinary. This is a testament to our goodness, perhaps: being kind does not make a man extraordinary.
1819
1820What I know is that standing in a strange town did nothing for the living or the dead. I was more interested in the current residents than in the departed, but even this was a passing novelty. Even this was a distraction, delaying my return to Chicago, where I might spend time with the living before they too became an empty site of pilgrimage.
1821
1822Linesville was a myth; but if there was some hope in it, was in the realization of my error. If there is hope in the emptiness of death, it was a recommitment to the urgency of life.
1823
1824So the cliché goes, my grandparents life is in my memories of them – memories of Christmastime and the Pacific Northwest, not in some strange town. Their lives are in the memories of others, my parents, their other children. Eventually we too shall die, and nobody will visit the grave in Linesville, except as a landmark they pass over in pilgrimage to their own bodies. Helen and Pete won’t mind.
1825
1826I walk back toward the road where my car is parked. On the way, I pass the funeral party again. The service hasn’t started yet, but more cars have come, and more people stand beside them, waiting for the body to arrive. I stop and watch them for a moment. They seem listless, shifting from leg to leg and looking out across the tombstones, looking down the road for the headlights of a hearse. They seem bored. Waiting for the whole thing to be over so they can pack up, leave town, and return to the business of the living.
1827
1828
1829“I CAN’T TELL YOU if I’ll start back up,” President Dwight Eisenhower once said of cigarette smoking, “But I’ll tell you this: I sure as hell ain’t quitting again.” 
1830On Sunday, the body of Philip Seymour Hoffman was discovered in his Manhattan apartment with a needle in his arm. It appears that despite a stint in rehab last spring, Hoffman, like so many other lifelong addicts, relapsed. He wasn’t quitting again. Now he’s dead.
1831Embarrassment seems to be the major theme. Shame. It’s a shame he had to go this way; it’s a regrettable loss. How could he leave his kids without a father? How could he be so stupid or so selfish?
1832But if we’re going to talk about embarrassment, we should remember that nobody would be more ashamed than Hoffman to see his own body, cold on a bathroom floor.
1833This isn’t an obituary. Perhaps it doesn’t go without saying that Hoffman was unparalleled among his peers, or that we have lost who knows how many roles he still had in him, but by now it has certainly been said. I don’t come to bury Hoffman, or to praise him: for that, I suggest Derek Thompson’s beautifully rendered essay in The Atlantic.
1834Rather, I want to talk about the reaction; about the conversation that’s begun this week and which will no doubt continue in the weeks to come; about this old story that we tell whenever someone dies this way.
1835How could he? I don’t know. I don’t know why Philip Seymour Hoffman was an addict. I don’t know what demons might be to blame, but as a one-time junkie, I do know that the demons hardly matter. We imagine addiction as a voluntary act, romantic or tragic, depending on our mood. When we try to imagine the scene, we conjure up pictures of the wrong room and the wrong stress; tumultuous men brought low by vulnerability in the face of fear and loneliness.
1836Maybe that’s what happened here, but I doubt it. Most times, the confluence of circumstances don’t tend toward the dramatic. It’s just something to try. Many of us, especially in youth, experiment with the world’s wide array of narcotics.  It’s just that some of us don’t stop.
1837It isn’t willpower, or shortsightedness. It might be easier if it were. It isn’t existential dread, or reckless abandon, or even some devilish seduction. Usually it’s just mundane. Usually it’s just that heroin is the best you’ll ever feel, and nobody feels that way once and says, “Okay, that was fun. Now I’m never doing it again.” You use. Then it becomes part of who you are.
1838It’s why a majority of addicts relapse within the first six months of treatment; it’s why first-year Twelve Step dropout rates top 95 percent. Sure, meetings help. So does therapy. But these things cannot shake the memory, not really.
1839That’s why, despite being off heroin for nearly seven years, I still have a moment that comes every time the season turns when some part of me wants nothing more than to get high. Call it stupidity or selfishness or demons — really, it just is, in a way our language is ill equipped to explicate. There aren’t words for the stubborn fits of that desire. Compulsion doesn’t quite capture it. Addict does, but only in an obvious, unsatisfying way. 
1840Fairly or not, it bothers me when people try. The last few days, I’ve seen an outpouring of sentiment on social media, and between the expressions of disbelief and endless clips from Boogie Nights and Capote, I’ve seen those who have not known addiction in their own lives attempt to make sense of what happened and offer their take on what we should “learn” from this. 
1841I don’t mean the usual suspects. The knee-jerk sanctimony — from “this isn’t a tragedy, he brought it on himself” to “how could he do this to his children” and “how could someone so successful throw it all away?” — are almost easier to deal with. Those old tropes are too tired and obtuse to take too seriously. Rather, in the last few days, I’ve found myself resentfully fixated on the far more well-intentioned outcry of friends and fans who have not known addiction in their own life, saying things like “Remember, guys, it’s never worth it.” 
1842“Don’t forget: heroin is bad for you! If you take it and die, people will be sad!” As if that was the lesson here. As if the thing that stands between an addict and sobriety is the intellectual revelation of the consequences, as if heroin users are operating under the misapprehension that it’s good for them. As if there weren’t junkies with needles in their arms as they read the news about Hoffman. As if, suddenly confronted by the inexorability of overdose, they all put those needles down in shame.
1843What do these friends imagine? That somebody was about to do heroin for the first time, but a quick check of their Facebook feed prevented it?
1844I don’t fault anyone for his or her feelings. But when we treat overcoming addiction like it was just a matter of making the consequences resonate enough — of remembering it isn’t worth it — we contribute to the very culture that kills men like Philip Seymour Hoffman. If getting clean were just a matter of dispassionate pros and cons, then we’d be justified in shaming somebody who just can’t do the math right. 
1845But it isn’t like that. We’re fond of saying “addiction is a disease,” but “addiction is a fundamental trait of personality” might be a more accurate refrain. It’s immutable like that. You can’t fix it with a pill or an epiphany. Think of it as a nasty temper: you can learn to control the rage, but sometimes you can’t help seeing red.
1846If there is a “teaching moment” here, that’s it. First-time addicts rarely die; relapse is what kills. Hoffman had been to rehab. He knew the habit wasn’t worth it. The inevitable consequences had long resonated, I’m sure. But the culture that says that such remembering, taken one day at a time, is the key to recovery is the culture that drives so many — even those who have sought help in the past — to die in the shadows. It’s just too embarrassing to admit you did it anyway. Again.
1847There are limits to empathy. Every addict lives in fear of reaching them.
1848In an old episode of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin — no stranger to addiction — writes a scene in which Leo McGarry, the recovering alcoholic turned White House Chief of Staff, explains why he didn’t tell anyone the second time he took up drinking. “I went to rehab. My friends embraced me when I got out,” he says. “You relapse — it’s not like that. Get away from me, that’s what it’s like.” There are only so many times you can be forgiven for the same thing. 
1849We love redemption stories. We love watching characters brought low by affliction fight their way to glory. We love watching their struggle and their doubts; hey, we’ll even indulge a few second-act screw-ups.  But there’s a limit to the repetition we’ll allow. How many do-overs is too many do-overs? When do we get frustrated and bored? Is it five? Ten? Twelve? When does that moment come when even those who know better write off a former friend as a screw-up, consigned to a bed of their own making?
1850It’s a vicious irony, but the terror of that moment doesn’t stop people from relapsing. Addicts live with that fear, reminders or not. All the head shaking does is make addicts fear admitting that they’re back to square one, from seeking help this time around.
1851It’s a paralytic mixture of embarrassment and fear. The pressure cripples you. It’s crippled me. I spent the autumn of 2012 snorting painkillers, convinced that somehow this was the only thing preventing a full relapse. I never told anyone till now. You just don’t want to see the way that mouth forms around the word “Again?” And I’m only an ordinary, private addict — how much worse must it be for someone like Hoffman, who knows full well that another stint in rehab would curry a whole world asking why he doesn’t know better by now?
1852Maybe one day treatment will be easy. Maybe Suboxone, a painkiller with some promise as a withdrawal treatment, will gain widespread acceptance, or some more radical vaccine will hit the US market, and overcoming heroin will be as simple as beating back strep. But until then, it’s little different from cancer, and you wouldn’t tell friends locked in the grip of stage-four death to remember that “it isn’t worth it.” Remission doesn’t work like that. 
1853
1854
1855From coffee shops to college campuses, this country still has plenty of publications dedicated to radical politics. But only one is breathing new life into a far-left movement mostly vanished since FDR dropped dead. It isn’t The Socialist Worker. It’s not The Militant, either. And it isn't Monthly Review, Political Affairs, World Socialist Website, or Worker’s Vanguard. Rather, the vanguard of revolution—the paper most dedicated to the overthrowing capitalism in the United States today—is none other than The Onion. 
1856
1857Since their move to Chicago two years ago, "America’s Finest News Source" has taken on a decidedly darker—and more subversive—bent. Nothing in The Onion suggests explicit support for a communist solution, of course, but looking back on the humor magazine’s punchiest political barbs of late, one can’t help noticing that many of the jokes—what you’re meant to “get”—are just less obtuse, much funnier versions of capitalist critiques in The German Ideology and other Karl Marx classics.
1858
1859The joke behind “Man Briefly Forgets Hotel Staff are Not Human” would provoke chuckles from even the most crass conservative, but the truth it gets at—that capitalist commodification not just of goods, but of humans' subjective agency in the form of labor, is tantamount to the dehumanization of the working class—is straight out of young Marx’s Manuscripts of 1844. “They’re all so lifelike,” hotel client Peter Adler says in the piece, no doubt contemplating the palpably unnatural material relations of capitalism, “I keep forgetting to just walk right by and act like they’re not even there.”
1860
1861If only we could all stop forgetting, The Onion seems to cry, then the revolution would be nigh.
1862
1863It doesn’t stop with the obvious, communist-tinged class warfare gags. More often than not, The Onion delves into deep cuts from the Marx-Engels oeuvre. “Laid Off Man Finally Achieves Perfect Work-Life Balance” has traces of entfremdung, the contention that capitalism alienates the proletariat from their species-consciousness by making them participants without control in the economic relations of their culture. The "newly unemployed" coder can finally eat better, sleep longer, and spend more time with his family! "I'm even cooking more," he says. "Everything just feels right." We laugh because we know that only complete overthrow of the master class and a restoration of “natural” labor relations will give us the balance we seek so fruitlessly in dating sites and cable.
1864
1865“Majority of Office Supplies Used to Apply for Different Job”, “Interns Treated to Informative 30-Minute Q&A With Totally Miserably Employees”, “Area CEO Likes To Think of Family As Small, Close-Knit Business”—all clear indictments of false consciousness, arising inexorably from bourgeois dogma as it perverts our very understanding of fulfillment, family, and success. Society is sick with capital; attempts to work within the system only lead to comic cycles of futility. 
1866
1867But perhaps the most salient example of The Onion’s Marx-inspired skewering is last months’  “All-Knowing Invisible Hand Of Free Market Once Again Guides Millions In Profits To Nation’s Bead Stores.” The joke is far from subtle. But it wouldn’t be so obviously if you didn’t intuitively buy into the theory of commodity fetishization, and know that the natural use of capital as a convenient common denominator for the exchange of material goods has been supplanted by a system wherein commodities are little more than frivolous intermediates for the conversion of capital into itself. The beads themselves don’t matter! That we assuage this clear perversion of material distribution with mythologies about the “Invisible Hand” and its accompanying capitalist morality play is even more thoroughly Marxist: Stories like these are just post-hoc rationalizations; like all non-materialist philosophy, they seek to rationalize the dominant economic order, not explain it in a real way.
1868
1869If the idea that this represents some latent Marxism in our culture seems far-fetched, just try imagining a New York Times editorial making the same point: “Seven Figure Profits for Plastic Bead Industry Make the Efficiency and Virtue of Consumer Capitalism Suspect.” Except you can’t imagine that. It’s valid point, but much too radical. It sounds like an Onion headline.
1870
1871So does “Continued Existence of Cows Disproves Central Tenets of Capitalism.” Except that isn’t from The Onion—it’s a 37-page paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, exploring why, in India, "livestock investments may persist, even with negative returns." But it quotes, atop its very first page, an Onion piece from which it cribbed its title, "Continued Existence Of Edible Arrangements Disproves Central Tenets Of Capitalism":
1872
1873In theory, the market should have done away with Edible Arrangements long ago," said American Economic Association president Orley Ashenfelter, who added that one of the crucial assumptions of capitalism is the idea that businesses producing undesired goods or services will fail. "That's how it's supposed to work. Yet somehow, despite offering no product of any worth whatsoever, this company not only makes payroll every week, but also generates strong profits. 
1874
1875See? The real Marxists are catching on. 
1876
1877Of course, you don’t need to have actually read Theories of Surplus Value to “get” the Onion’s jokes. Fans of Preface to The Critique of Political Economy aren’t enjoying some punch line beyond more casual readers’ reach. Rather, the very universal accessibility of The Onion reflects just how deeply ingrained Marxist critiques of capitalism are in our culture. At a time when our moderate president is called a "socialistic dictator" by a sitting congressman, it’s telling that one of our most universally beloved sources of comedy is so sympathetic to a far more radical ideology.
1878
1879What it tells us is that we’ve accepted Marx’s basic view of capital so thoroughly that we treat it like obvious, intuitive truth—the kind necessary for any kind of broadly appealing humor. The idea that “The Invisible Hand” is a truly stupid way to find moral virtue in our excess consumption of plastic beads is pure Marxism. We’re just not allowed to call it that. 
1880
1881Given this disconnect, it’s unsurprising that withering critiques of American capitalism have found their most popular outlet in the nation's leading satirical newspaper. From King Lear’s Fool to Samuel Clemens, humor is often the cover by which the radical reaches the mainstream. I don't believe The Onion’s writing staff is consciously promoting Marxism, but that only emphasizes the point: Cognitive dissonance or not, Das Kapital has so thoroughly permeated our understanding of capitalism that we’re seldom even aware that we are citing it. It’s become a kind of cultural white noise—always present, but rarely acknowledged. 
1882
1883Among mainstream U.S. publications only The Onion, under the guise of satire, can get away with openly channeling this contradiction. No doubt the intent is more opportunistic than deliberately subversive, but the point remains: With Americans continuing to struggle in the long wake of the Great Recession, and a populist wave taking aim at the country’s ever-widening economic inequality, the timing has never been better for dark humor about the failures of late capitalism. And so The Onion resonates. As the saying goes: It’s funny because it’s true.
1884
1885I’m calm. I’ve had time to reflect. The victims have been mourned, and nobody could accuse me of jumping to conclusions. The moment has cooled. The election is over. I’ve even waited an extra two months to make extra-double sure I wasn’t politicizing the tragedy. I’ve let many moments pass in silence. Those were the terms you laid out, and I’ve been happy to oblige.
1886
1887But now I think I’m ready to talk about Aurora.
1888
1889I’m ready to ask why a man with a documented history of mental illness was able to purchase assault weapons. I’m ready to ask if somebody else having a gun in that theater would’ve made a difference against Holmes’ body armor. I’m ready to discuss the possibility that we have, among many others, a gun problem in this country.
1890
1891Too soon? Maybe you’re right. It’s only been a few months. Maybe more reflection is in order.
1892
1893In that case, can we talk about the attempt on Gabby Giffords’ life? The six people killed that day, including a nine-year-old girl? It’s been nearly two years, and I think we’ve all had time to think. Could we start discussing whether political rhetoric had anything to do with that day? We don’t even have to say it did yet. I just think we’re ready to raise the possibility, aren’t we?
1894
1895Well, maybe not. Congresswoman Giffords is still in recovery, after all. We wouldn’t want to be insensitive to any victims. That’s OK, though. I’ve been reflecting on a lot of things these last few years. It’s just that I’m trying to take you at your word. You said it was wrong to jump too quickly to conclusions. It was wrong to blame guns for the gun violence in this country when emotions were still running high. Granted, you came to these conclusions while telling me that the wake of a tragedy was no time for conclusions (or even conversation), but I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.
1896
1897But maybe it’s too soon to talk about Aurora. Maybe it’s too soon to talk about Tucson. Fair enough.
1898
1899So what about Huntsville? It’s been three years, hasn’t it? Or Fort Hood? Can we talk about Binghamton, Santa Carla, or Alger? I’ve been reflecting on those so long I’ve hardly had time to start reflecting on Oak Creek, Minneapolis or Milwaukee.
1900
1901Can we talk about the 82 victims of gun violence every day in this country whose deaths don’t make national news? Those weren’t sensational, right? They can be discussed with sobriety, can’t they?
1902
1903How about Columbine? It’s been over a decade. Surely we’re calm enough to question whether Harris and Klebold constituted a well-regulated militia.
1904
1905I think it’s been long enough. I think we can start our conversation, don’t you—after all this time? So let’s start talking. Today. There’s a lot to say and I’d like to get started.
1906
1907For example, I’ll point out how many violent crimes are committed with guns. You’ll show me how gun ownership rates don’t correlate to the murder rates of industrialized countries. I’ll counter that it does correlate to mass murders with multiple victims.
1908
1909You’ll say things would be different if only more victims were armed themselves. I’ll point out that we’re the most heavily armed country on Earth, yet that doesn’t make us anywhere near the safest.
1910You’ll say we haven’t got a gun problem, we’ve got a media problem, we’ve got a problem with mental health. I’ll concede the point. But after that, I’ll remind you that taking action on one front doesn’t exclude taking action on the others.
1911
1912You’ll say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” I’ll be annoyed. But since our heads are cool now, I’ll get over it. We’ll keep talking.
1913
1914I’ll question whether your legitimate desire to own a device designed only to project pieces of metal through the air at lethal velocities is worth risking the life of a parent or a child. You’ll ask the same about knives. I’ll ask if knives were designed just to kill, even if the targets were meant to be animals and burglars. The conversation might feel like its venturing into the absurd at this point, but we’ll come around eventually. We’ll recognize, at the very least, that a gun puts enormous power into the hands of an individual, and that with such great power comes - as the cliché goes - great responsibility.
1915
1916You’ll cite the second amendment. I’ll cite Article V.
1917
1918By the end of our chat, we might even reach some reasonable middle ground. Background checks at gun shows, maybe. A limit on magazine capacity. A more robust mental health industry in this country, even. An acknowledgement that while we may disagree on the legitimacy of private gun ownership, our Founding Fathers couldn’t possibly have imagined a world with assault rifles, urban gangs, and streetlights.
1919
1920We’ll talk, and as long as we can start today, I promise not to cite the death of twenty innocent children in my argument. I’ll promise not to “exploit” the recent tragedy if you promise to let me talk about all the others you’ve asked me to take time and reflect on before starting the conversation.
1921
1922Deal?
1923
1924So it was for Beethoven, so it was for rock and roll. So it was for James Dean, and Ulysses and MTV.
1925
1926So it hasn’t been for Girls.
1927
1928Despite being the first true Millennial foray into mainstream TV culture, Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series seems to have won over the establishment without much of a fight. Girls has been praised in the Los Angeles Times, on Buzzfeed and in the New York Review of Books. The show even pocketed two Golden Globes on its first season out — an Establishment endorsement that seemed to take even Dunham by surprise. {Old Generation} loves Girls.
1929
1930{New Generation} — not so much.
1931
1932While it certainly has many fans among the under-30 crowd, many of Girls‘ harshest critics have been Dunham’s fellow Millennials. In the hippest corners of the Zeitgeist, in blogs and tumblrs and tweets, Girls has been attacked since the get-go: It’s been called racist, sexist, reductive and clichéd. It’s been accused of pandering, of feeding into a tired caricature of our generation, of celebrating nothing more than the privilege of its characters and fortunately-sired creators and actors. Even those willing to admit they’ve enjoyed the occasional episode do so with reservations, praising some element while always remembering to disclaim that some other part is “problematic.” Millennials love calling shit “problematic,” especially Girls.
1933
1934This certainly isn’t the routine we’ve come to expect. What happened to the culture wars of generations past? What happened to the rebellion? Shouldn’t we be pushing Dunham forward as our voice-incarnate over the Boomers’ and X-er’s howls of protestation? How did it come to be that they were the ones pulling her up, while we tweeted snide comments with one hand and tugged on the poor girl’s ankles with the other? Why do so many of the hippest Millennials hate Girls so much?
1935
1936If you ask them (or just take the time to read their scathing Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter comments), the fashionable complaints about Dunham fall into two broad, albeit apparently schizophrenic categories: First, they say, Girls is unrepresentative of the diversity and nuance of the Millennial generation. Second, it hits way too close to home.
1937
1938Where to begin?
1939
1940The first charge is familiar enough and has been the one picked up on by the few and far between adult critics of the show. To sum it up:
1941
1942The Millennial generation is the first for whom racial tolerance comes naturally. It is the first whose right wing endorses gay marriage and while its Left sheds light on the full spectrum of queer sexuality. Through the Internet, it has done more than any other generation to summon a great diversity of voices from every class and demographic, to protest the last vestiges of privilege, and to eschew the power structures of ages past. In short, The Millennials are hip to every kind of human.
1943Girls, by contrast, is about upper middle class young white women living in Brooklyn and chaffing at having to grow up and make it on their own. Since the days are long gone when the very existence of a show created by, written by, directed by, and starring a woman would’ve been enough to pass revolutionary muster, we might as well call this thing “Straight, Cissexual, Well-Off White Girls” and put another point on the board for the patriarchy since it sure as hell doesn’t represent us, am I right?
1944
1945Well, wrong. Even if you take the romantic characterization of us Millennials’ boundless tolerance at face value (and there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t), this critique misses the point of our generation’s supposed triumphs in cultural liberation. After all, the whole idea behind hearing the voices of the traditionally oppressed, of opening up the floodgates of idiosyncratic racial, gender, and sexual identity, of giving everyone on the internet a platform for their expression, wasn’t, I’m pretty sure, just for the sake of having a bunch of new and different perspectives per se. We didn’t invent new categories of human just to get the numbers up, did we? To prove how accepting we are? At least for the earnestly idealistic among us, the whole crux of the argument seemed to be that the sorts of people we’ve opened up to have always existed — the problem was that they weren’t allowed to speak. They weren’t allowed to be true to who they were. They weren’t allowed to tell their stories.
1946
1947I mean, that was the point, wasn’t it? That everybody is allowed, as humans, to be faithful to their own experience and to be judged solely on their aesthetic merits?
1948
1949If so, then let’s remember the obvious: Lena Dunham isn’t a cocaine-addled 40-something suit sitting in midtown Manhattan plotting ways to crassly exploit young women he doesn’t understand in order to get over a neurotic complex stemming from his suspiciously feminine name. Rather, Lena Dunham is a straight, cissexual white girl living in Brooklyn and trying to be a writer — and that’s the story she’s telling on Girls. Sure, it might not be your story. It might not even be a story you care about or want to hear. But if there’s anything we can agree on, it’s that Girls is true to its creator, and that’s what this whole Internet revolution was about, right?
1950
1951Imagine for a moment if Dunham’s work wasn’t about people like her. Imagine, for example, if Girls was about impoverished black transsexuals in Detroit trying to find success as slam poets on Tumblr. Now that would be racist, wouldn’t it? That would be exploitation. Can you imagine how Millennials would respond to Lena Dunham bowing to their earlier criticism and starting to write about people and cultures she doesn’t actually understand or belong to? Hell — you don’t even have to imagine. Just look at how its responded to her writing a single, relatively privileged heterosexual black character so far. Of course, the speed with which Sandy was introduced and dismissed in the second season tempts one to believe that Dunham deliberately used the character to subtly mock the absurdity of this criticism. That he was a Republican only adds to irony.
1952
1953In the end, the absurdity of criticizing a television show for focusing exclusively on a particular time, place, or culture falls into particularly stark relief when one considers the kinds of shows culturally savvy Millennials do admit to loving. Between Mad Men and Downton Abbey, 30 Rock and Boardwalk Empire, there doesn’t seem — in general — to be a problem with such a narrow scope. The only way to make sense of this is by saying that while these other shows are made by older generations and sample a broad range of output, Girls represents the current total of Millennial television triumph, and that as a result, it takes on some added responsibility. No single program bears the burden of reflecting Gen X, but Girls is all we Millennials have , so far.
1954
1955Which brings us to the second objection. Despite being called racist, sexist, and unrepresentative, Girls’ Millennial critics contend, it also errs by hitting way too close to home. Strange as it seems, this isn’t actually all that contradictory.
1956
1957You see, chances are that if you’re a happening young person complaining away on your social media about how unrepresentative Girls is, you consider yourself something of an artist (or at the very least culturally wired). In virtue of the fact that you have the luxury of pursuing your art and possess the access to HBO and social media required to make these complaints in the first place, you’re probably not so different from Hannah Horvath. As a result, while you may feel that the show isn’t representative of every aspect of our culture, it is, in fact, pretty representative of you. Maybe you aren’t white, or female, or straight or even have parents that could continue to support you if they wanted to , but the fundamentals are there: the anxieties, the frustration, and the endless miasma of urban complaint are familiar. You know what it’s like to try and create something, and you know how hard that can be. You know it all well enough that Girls makes you pretty uncomfortable. You ask: Is my life really this much of a mess when seen objectively? More importantly: Wait, if this is my life, and I’m an artist, why didn’t I write Girls? I could write this so much better, couldn’t I?
1958
1959And there’s the rub.
1960
1961As mundane and disappointing as it may be, the actual culprit behind Millennial distaste for Girls seems largely to be old-fashioned envy. It’s bad enough that Hannah is so much like us, but to add insult to injury, it’s even worse how Lena Dunham isn’t. She isn’t struggling. Sure, she had a low-budget web series (Delusional Downtown Divas) once, and sure, she earned her indie movie cred with Tiny Furniture a few years ago — but no longer. These days, Lena Dunham isn’t just better funded and more widely viewed, she’s the toast of the New York media cognoscenti with a $3.7 million book contract to boot. She’s not toiling in obscurity. She’s 26 years old and famous for telling our story, and she didn’t even have to fight the establishment in the usual way for acceptance — they just gave it to her with their fawning reviews and cemented it with two Golden Globes.
1962
1963Of course, envy isn’t a uniquely Millennial problem and while it provides an obvious motive for the present criticism, it doesn’t really explain why the reception of Girls has been such a reversal from times past. After all, every generation has had its strivers and success stories. Every generation has had its share of bitterness. Every generation saw some of its members achieve stardom while others toiled away, angry that they didn’t get there first. What sets the Millennials apart isn’t the existence of these things; rather, it is how uniquely aware of them we are. The irony of the internet revolution has been that by giving everybody a voice, everybody has seen just how many voices there are. More than any other generation, we know how many other people are working, we see just how scarce attention is. Unlike the Boomers or the Xers, we don’t become aware of other artists only when they achieve success or if they happen to be working the same town. Rather, we see all of it — every poet and photographer, every web series and short story — in blogs and posts, in reposts and re-blogs, in tweets and links and so many Tumblr pages that’s it’s impossible to digest each one. Rather, we just feel the visceral weight of output, and while sometimes this is something to be celebrated, in our more honest moments we concede how overwhelming it can be. How could any particular one of us possibly stand out from this sea?
1964
1965As a result, we’ve developed a special capacity for criticism, a unique ability to dismiss. We’ve learned to rationalize our own chances of success through a schizophrenic mix of unqualified praise for every effort of our peers and a willingness to tarnish them at any sign of failure. As precarious as it seems, the system works so long as nobody breaks too far out of orbit, so long as everyone gets their equal share of Facebook praise. So long as everyone is still aspiring, everyone can assuage their inner doubts. But with Lena Dunham, Millennials find themselves unable to rationalize so easily: she did break free, she has entered the mainstream, she did do better than the rest (so far). In the perverse logic of Millennial arts culture, to praise her too much would be to admit our own failings. Therefore, the only choice, for many of us, has been to tear her down. As long as she isn’t actually all that great, the thinking goes, there’s still room for other greatness.
1966
1967It’s a vicious cycle. Luckily, if there is some consolation, its in remembering that it is in virtue of being the first of our success stories that Dunham has weathered these attacks. By being first, she most certainly won’t be last. As time goes on and as Millennials begin to fill the roles held now by older generations, more of us will make the big time. More of us will win accolades and Golden Globes. Yes, there will be many who never make it, but after a time the anxiety will lessen, and the vitriol of frustrated resentment won’t, at the very least, all be directed at one very talented girl who happened to get there first.
1968
1969And hey — if you still think Girls is a mess of white privilege and doesn’t speak for you, then go ahead: write your own show. Just be ready for some seriously angry internet twenty-somethings if it works.