Evelyn Reynolds

Two senators, JD Vance of Ohio and Tim Scott of South Carolina, have shot to the front of the US media’s beloved “veepstakes”, the reporting, betting and outright speculation about who Donald Trump will pick as his running mate against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the presidential election in November.But one report from Capitol Hill quoted a source as saying that Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican senator who ran against Trump in 2016, was still an “ace in the hole” for one adviser particularly close to Trump, “if Scott gets taken out on the runway”.That might have been a pointed choice of words, given reports that Trump’s plane clipped another at a Florida airport last Sunday.Vance, meanwhile, might have stolen a march on Scott by flying to New York to attend Trump’s hush-money trial on Monday.Emerging from court in Manhattan, Vance slammed the case against Trump, which frames payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels around the 2016 campaign as a form of election subversion, and concerns 34 of the 88 criminal charges Trump must face as he attempts to return to power.Vance was not the first Trump-supporting Republican to show up in New York but he did grab headlines by doing so.The next day, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, grabbed more when he and three VP hopefuls – North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Florida congressman Byron Donalds and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy – followed Vance to the court. All four attacked prosecutors and the judge in virulent terms Trump cannot employ, given a gag order.One reporter said Trump may have been editing surrogates’ remarks in court.Other observers commented on Burgum, Donalds and Ramaswamy’s decision to wear blue suits and red ties, thereby following Trump’s favourite dress code and earning, from the conservative professor Jack Pitney, a Tarantino-esque nickname: “Reservoir Lapdogs”.View image in fullscreenVance wore the uniform for court on Tuesday. Scott has worn it on the campaign trail, where he challenged Trump for the Republican nomination but dropped out early, telling the ex-president: “I just love you.”According to a detailed report by the Daily Beast, Scott has now acquired a “powerful ally” when it comes to securing the VP slot: Kellyanne Conway, the longtime Republican strategist who managed Trump’s winning campaign in 2016 and was a senior White House aide.Citing three sources, the Beast said Conway was “game” to push Scott with Trump, causing Scott to “place his hopes in Conway’s hands”. The two were recently seen dining in Washington, the Beast said, and were working on a fundraising event.Citing “multiple Trumpworld sources”, the Beast said Conway had “privately encouraged Trump to partner with Scott, believing the two-term senator” – the only Black Senate Republican – “is the best of the options in front of the former president”.The Beast also pointed to a New York Times column from February, in which Conway said Trump should pick a running mate of colour – but included Rubio in that bracket.Rubio and Trump both live in Florida, raising questions about whether they are allowed, under the constitution, to run on the same ticket.But the Beast quoted another anonymous Trump source as saying: “Here’s the thing about Kellyanne: people dismiss her for a variety of reasons; she’s not particularly smart and doesn’t really come up with a lot of good ideas, she’s always chasing money and that’s what guides her decision making.“But she does have Trump figured out like no one else. If anyone can convince him to make a mistake – and later assign blame to someone else – it’s Kellyanne.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConway said: “President Trump seeks the counsel of many men and women on the VP pick, but he and he alone will decide.”Scott did not comment. Nor did the Trump campaign.On Tuesday, according to NBC News, Trump commented on another possible VP pick once seen as a strong contender but deemed to have slipped in the running.“What a week!” Trump reportedly told an audience including Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, at a Manhattan fundraiser also attended by Scott, Rubio and Burgum.“The dog, the dog!” Trump said.Last month, the Guardian first reported Noem’s decision to include in a memoir her story of using a shotgun to kill both Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer she deemed “untrainable”, and an unnamed male goat.Noem has defended the story, which she said took place 20 years ago, as evidence of her willingness to do unpleasant things in life as well as politics. She has also endorsed her apparent threat, also in her book, to kill Joe Biden’s dog, which has a history of biting.But enduring shock and revulsion – and controversy over Noem’s claim to have met and “stared down” the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a story revealed to be untrue – are widely seen to have killed her chances of being Trump’s VP.“I’m really curious about the dog,” Trump reportedly said in New York, before “riffing on Cricket’s story” in a “bemused” rather than critical manner.Of Noem, Trump said: “She’s been there for us for a long time. She’s loyal, she’s great.” More

Against the backdrop of demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza on college campuses, the White House and Congress have announced a string of policies and commitments aimed at addressing what Joe Biden warned was a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States.Antisemitism was on the rise in the US before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. But the ensuing war has exacerbated the problem, with the law enforcement officials recording a spike in threats against Jewish Americans.Several of the proposals coming out of Washington DC have converged around college campuses, where hundreds of students have been arrested as part of pro-Palestinian demonstrations against Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and caused catastrophic levels of hunger.Many Jewish students have said that rhetoric common to the protests – for example, their denunciations of Zionism and calls for a Palestinian uprising – too often veers into antisemitism and poses a threat to their safety. A number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, as well as the president, have echoed their fears, condemning documented instances of antisemitism on campus.But critics say some of the actions and polices under consideration threaten free speech and are part of a broader effort to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.“The view that these encampments, these student protests, are per se antisemitic, which I think some people have, is leading to very aggressive repression,” said Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago law school and an expert in the first amendment. “I also think it is incorrect, particularly when the student movement is being populated and led in many ways by Jewish students.”​The wave of student activism​ against the war in Gaza has renewed a charged debate over what constitutes antisemitism.Many supporters of Israel say the situation on college campuses validates the view, articulated in 2022 by the Anti-Defamation League’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. But the Jewish and non-Jewish students involved with campus protests say their critiques of Israel, and its rightwing government’s prosecution of the war, are legitimate political speech that should not be conflated with antisemitism.In remarks at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the Capitol last week, Biden vowed to leverage the full force of the US government to fight hate and bigotry against Jews and outlined specific policy steps his administration was taking to confront antisemitic discrimination in schools and universities.The debate is also playing out on Capitol Hill, where the Senate is considering a bill that would codify into federal law a definition of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization based in Stockholm.The IHRA defines antisemitism as “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”. But it also includes several modern examples of antisemitism that alarm free speech advocates, among them “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”, claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel that are not expected of other countries.Supporters say the bill, known as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, is critical.“We really believe it’s the single most important thing that Congress could do right now to help bring under control the rampant antisemitism we’ve seen on campus,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, which is lobbying in support of the legislation.But opponents are urging the Senate to block the bill, recently approved by the House in a resounding 320-91 vote,“In a democratic society, we’re allowed to engage in political advocacy and political protests that criticize any government in the world,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire). “Taking some ideas off the table for one country is classic viewpoint discrimination that the courts just won’t tolerate.”Fire has opposed iterations of this bill since it was introduced in 2016, citing concerns that the definition is “vague, overbroad, and includes criticism of Israeli government policy”.If enacted, the Department of Education would be required to use the definition when conducting federal investigations into alleged incidents of discrimination against Jewish students. Colleges or universities found to have violated the law could be stripped of federal funding.Fingerhut said free speech concerns were a “red herring”, arguing that the legislation was designed to give the Department of Education and academic institutions a “clear” standard for punishing acts of antisemitism.But the bill has drawn condemnation from pro-Palestinian advocacy groups who view it as an attempt to quash their ascendent movement.The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) condemned the legislation as a “one-sided, and dishonest proposal about campus antisemitism that ignore[s] anti-Palestinian racism and conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism”.Since the Israel-Hamas conflict began seven months ago, the law enforcement officials have also warned of a rise in threats against Muslim and Arab Americans, and advocates are monitoring an uptick in Islamophobia on college campuses.One of the effort’s most notable opponents is a lawyer and scholar who authored the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. Kenneth Stern, who is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and is Jewish, has said the definition was created with the purpose of collecting better data on antisemitism across borders, not to be turned into a campus hate-speech code.“In my experience, people who care about campus antisemitism, and want to do something about it, sometimes advocate things that feel good … but actually do great harm,” he testified in 2017 against a previous iteration of the bill.That version stalled, but two years later, proponents won a significant victory when Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order instructing federal agencies to use the IHRA definition when investigating civil rights complaints.In recent months, alarm over rising antisemitism – which Jewish groups say is not unique to college campuses – appears to have broadened support for the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Still, the vote split House Democrats, including some Jewish members of the caucus, who disagreed over whether it was the right legislative fix.The representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat who sponsored the House bill, said it was a necessary response to the “tidal wave” of antisemitism, while Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and constitutional scholar, voted for the bill but called it “essentially symbolic”.“At this moment of anguish and confusion over the dangerous surge of antisemitism, authoritarianism and racism all over the country and the world, it seems unlikely that this meaningless ‘gotcha’ legislation can help much – but neither can it hurt much,” Raskin said.But the representative Jerry Nadler of New York, who describes himself as “an observant Jew, a proud Zionist, a strong supporter of Israel”, voted against the bill. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Nadler explained that he supported the sentiment behind the bill, but feared the it could “sweep in perfectly valid criticism of the state of Israel that, alone, does not necessarily constitute unlawful harassment or antisemitism”.“I want my Jewish community to feel safe on campus, but I do not need it shielded from controversial views simply because those views are unpopular,” he wrote.The legislation has also drawn opposition from some conservatives over concerns that it could be used to persecute Christians who express the belief that Jews killed Jesus, an assertion widely regarded as antisemitic that historians and Christian leaders, including Pope Benedict, have rejected.Civil liberties advocates are also raising concerns about an anti-terrorism bill approved overwhelmingly by the House last month in the wake of Iran’s unprecedented missile assault on Israel. Proponents say the measure is a necessary guardrail to prevent US-based organizations from providing financial support to Israel’s enemies. But critics have called it an “Orwellian bill aimed at silencing nonprofits that support Palestinian human rights”.Last week, Biden announced a series of actions that build on what the White House has called “the most comprehensive and ambitious US government effort to counter antisemitism in American history”.It included new guidance by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, sent to every school and college, that outlines examples of antisemitic discrimination and other forms of hate that could lead to a federal civil rights investigation. Since the 7 October attack, the Department of Education has launched more than 100 investigations into colleges and public school districts over allegations of “discrimination involving shared ancestry”, which include incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia.The initiative also includes additional steps the Department of Homeland Security would take to help campuses improve safety.Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, House Republicans have vowed to use their majority to intensify scrutiny of antisemitism on college campuses, part of their election-year strategy to use the unrest as a political cudgel against Biden and the Democrats, who are deeply divided over the Israel-Gaza war.Wielding their oversight powers, several House Republican chairs have announced plans to investigate universities where pro-Palestinian student protests have flourished. On Wednesday, a House subcommittee held a hearing, titled Antisemitism on College Campuses, in which Jewish college students testified that their university administrations had failed to stop antisemitic threats and harassment. And during a congressional panel last week, Republicans challenged the leaders of some of the nation’s largest public school systems to do more to counter antisemitism in their schools.It follows a tense hearing on antisemitism with administration officials from some of the nation’s most prestigious universities that precipitated the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. A congressional appearance last month by Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, escalated the antiwar protests at her school that then spread to campuses across the country.“There are a lot of shades of McCarthyism as the House keeps calling people in to shame and name them, to spread moral panic,” said Lakier of the University of Chicago law school.Facing enormous pressure from Congress and the Department of Education, as well as from students, faculty, donors and alumni, universities and colleges, Lakier argued, are collectively showing less tolerance for the pro-Palestinian student protests than they did for Vietnam war-era campus activism.On dozens of university campuses, state and local police officers, sometimes in riot gear, have dispersed pro-Palestinian protesters, often at the request of university officials. As many as 2,400 people have been arrested during pro-Palestinian campus protests in recent weeks, while many students have been suspended or expelled.“From a first amendment perspective, one hopes you learn from the past,” Lakier said, “but to be repeating it is distressing.” More

There is something important about Trump’s criminal trial in New York that’s not being openly talked about. I don’t mean we’re not getting the facts about what’s happening in Manhattan superior court. But something very big is being left out.The trial has introduced us to a world of moral and ethical loathsomeness in which people use and abuse one another routinely. It’s Trump world.Consider Stormy Daniels. Adult film stars are entitled to do as they wish to make money. But when they extort people who are running for public office – demanding huge payments in order to stay quiet about an affair – they’re contributing to a society in which every interaction has a potential price.Last week we heard Daniels’s story, even more detailed and lascivious than expected. But perhaps the most troubling aspect of her behavior is that the moment the former president ran for office, she saw a chance to extort money from him. She then “shopped” her account of their sexual liaison before finally accepting $130,000 to be silenced in the 2016 election’s final, critical days.Or consider Michael Cohen. Powerful people often need “fixers” – assistants that carry out their wishes and protect them from legal or political trouble. But when those fixers arrange payments to keep stories out of the media, they’re treading on morally thin ice.Cohen didn’t just fix. He boasted of burying Trump’s secrets and spreading Trump’s lies. In his work for Trump, he repeatedly acted illegally and found ways to cover up his actions. After he paid Daniels to keep silent and Trump was elected president, Cohen concocted with Trump a means of being reimbursed that involved falsifying records that disguised the repayment as ordinary legal expenses, according to his testimony.And then there’s David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer. Tabloids are part of a long tradition of US journalism. But when tabloid publishers buy stories to bury them on behalf of powerful people, thereby establishing a kind of bankable account of chits that can be cashed in with the powerful, it violates public morality because it corrupts our democracy.Two weeks ago, Pecker testified about “catching and killing” stories – buying the exclusive rights to stories, or “catching them”, for the specific goal of ensuring the information never becomes public. That’s the “killing” part. According to people who have worked for him, Pecker mastered this technique – ethics be damned.Which brings us to Trump himself. I don’t care that he had extramarital affairs. But when a presidential candidate tells his fixer to buy off someone – “just take care of it” – so the public doesn’t get information about a candidate before an election that they might find relevant to evaluating him, it undermines democracy.This cast of characters – and there are many, many others like them in Trump world – are loathsome not only because they may have violated the law, but because they have contributed to a harsh society in which everyone is potentially bought or sold.It’s a sell-or-tell society, a catch-and-kill society, a just-take-care-of-it society. A society where money and power are the only considerations. Where honor and integrity count for nothing.I am not naive about how the world works. I’ve spent years in Washington, many of them around powerful people. I have seen the seamy side of US politics and business.But the people who inhabit Trump world live in a more extreme place, where there are no norms, no standards of decency, no common good. There are only opportunities to make money and the dangers of being ripped off. It’s a place where there are no relationships, only transactions.I sometimes worry that the daily dismal drone of Trump world – the continuous lies and vindictiveness that issue from Trump and his campaign, the dismissive and derogatory ways he deals with and talks about others, the people who testify at his criminal trial about what they have done for him and what he has done for or to them – has a subtly corrosive effect on our own world.I think it is important to remind ourselves that most of the people we know are not like this. That honor and integrity do count. That standards of decency guide most behavior. That relationships matter.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

A “deal” allegedly offered by Donald Trump to big-oil executives as he sought $1bn in campaign donations could save the industry $110bn in tax breaks if he returns to the White House, an analysis suggests.The fundraising dinner held last month at Mar-a-Lago with more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, reportedly involved Trump asking for large campaign contributions and promising, if elected, to remove barriers to drilling, scrap a pause on gas exports, and reverse new rules aimed at cutting car pollution.Congressional Democrats have launched an investigation into the “ethical, campaign finance and legal issues” raised by what one Democratic senator called an “offer of a blatant quid pro quo”, while a prominent watchdog group is exploring whether the meeting warrants legal action.But the analysis shared with the Guardian shows that the biggest motivation for oil and gas companies to back Trump appears to be in the tax system, with about $110bn in tax breaks for the industry at stake should Joe Biden be re-elected in November’s election.Biden wants to eliminate the tax breaks, which include long-standing incentives to help drill for oil and gas, with a recent White House budget proposal targeting $35bn in domestic subsidies and $75bn in overseas fossil fuel income.“Big oil executivess are sweating in their seats at the thought of losing $110bn in special tax loopholes under Biden in 2025,” said Lukas Ross, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Action, which conducted the analysis.Ross said the tax breaks are worth nearly 11,000% more than the amount Trump allegedly asked the executives for in donations. “If Trump promises to protect polluter handouts during tax negotiations, then his $1bn shakedown is a cheap insurance policy for the industry,” he said.View image in fullscreenSome of the tax breaks have been around for decades, and are a global issue, but the US oil and gas industry benefited disproportionately from tax cuts passed by Trump when he was president in 2017.Next year, regardless of who is president, a raft of individual tax cuts included in that bill will expire, prompting a round of Washington deal-making over which industries, if any, will help fund an extension.Lobbying records show that Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, Cheniere and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have all met lawmakers this year to discuss this tax situation, likely encouraging them to ignore Biden’s plan to target the fossil fuel industry’s own carve-outs.Chevron and ConocoPhillips, the analysis shows, lobbied on a deduction for intangible drilling costs, the largest federal subsidy for US oil and gas companies, which is worth $10bn, according to federal figures.View image in fullscreenOther lobbying centered on more generalized tax breaks that the oil and gas industry has taken advantage of. ExxonMobil lobbied for a little-known bill that would restore a bonus depreciation deduction to its full value, which, according to Moody’s, would allow big oil to avoid Biden’s newly established corporate minimum tax.“Unlike previous administrations, I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to big oil,” Biden said following his inauguration in 2021. But Congress and the president will have to agree to any new tax arrangements next year, and the fossil-fuel industry continues to have staunch support from Republicans and some Democrats.The API insisted its industry gets no favorable treatment in the tax system. “America’s energy industry proudly invests in communities, pays local, state and federal taxes and receives no special tax treatment from the federal government,” an API spokesperson said.“This nonsense report is another attempt to distract from the importance of all energy sources – including oil and natural gas – to meet America’s growing energy needs.”Who was at Mar-a-Lago?The high stakes for the fossil-fuel industry, as well as for the climate crisis, have placed scrutiny upon those who attended Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Although representatives of large oil companies were present, the majority of known attendees were executives of smaller firms focused on specific subsections of the fossil-fuel industry, such as fracking or gas exporting.Those companies are not often held to account in international forums such as the UN climate talks or the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which means they are less likely to make buzzy climate pledges. They may also be more threatened by regulations on individual parts of the US fossil fuel economy, such as auto-emissions standards aiming to quell gas-car usage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The oil majors … see their future in plastic [production]. That doesn’t apply to the smaller companies who don’t work across the industry,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity. “They’ve got nothing to shift to.”Among other reported attendees were the head of the company Venture Global, which rivals Qatar as one of the world’s leading liquefied natural gas exporters. This year, the company came under fire after it was revealed to have been using millions of gallons of water to construct a Louisiana LNG terminal while a nearby community faced extreme shortages. The firm was also accused late last year of reneging on its contracts by Shell and BP.Another attendee: Nick Dell’Osso, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, which after years of court fights had to pay $5.3m to Pennsylvania landowners who say they were cheated out of gas royalties. The company’s earlier CEO, John McClendon, was indicted in 2016 on charges of conspiring to rig bids on oil and gas leases in Oklahoma.Billionaire oil tycoon Harold Hamm, who founded fossil fuel exploration company Continental Resources, was also present. He helped raise money for Trump’s 2016 presidential run and was under consideration to be Trump’s energy secretary, and was reportedly one of the seven top donors who had special seats at Trump’s inauguration. Though he eschewed the former president after his 2020 loss, he donated to his primary campaign in August.View image in fullscreenAsked about the meeting, API spokesperson Andrea Woods said the organization “meets with policymakers and candidates from across the political spectrum on topics important to our industry”. She said the premise of Democrats’ investigation into the meeting is “patently false and an attempt to distract from a needed debate about America’s future – one that requires more energy, including more oil and natural gas”.Amid the scrutiny of last month’s Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump is continuing to court oil-tied funders. On Tuesday evening, he held a Manhattan fundraising dinner that cost a minimum of $100,000 to attend.Among the event’s hosts, advocacy group Climate Power noted, was John Catsimatidis, the chief executive of the much-scrutinized gas refiner United Refining Company and owner of two grocery chains, a radio station and holding company Red Apple Group.Between 2017 and 2023, United Refining Company’s small refinery in western Pennsylvania was the most dangerous refinery in the country, with federal data showing it reported 10 times the average number of injuries for a refinery – 63% higher than the next-most dangerous facility.The company also reportedly sought to dodge environmental regulations using a process championed by Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.Catsimatidis has also been criticized for neglecting vacant gas-station properties and for blaming gas prices on “open” borders, corporate taxes and worker benefits. The Pennsylvania town home to United Refining pays some of the highest gas prices in the state, despite the presence of the refinery, raising suspicions among some residents about the company’s practices.Trump this week also held a fundraiser hosted by the US senator JD Vance, who is one of the largest recipients of big-oil funding in Congress, and another with Joe Craft, a major Trump donor who owns massive coal producer Alliance Resource Partners. In 2016, Craft reportedly gifted Pruitt courtside basketball tickets after the agency crafted pro-coal regulations. More

I’ll leave it to future historians to puzzle out the reasons why, but in the second decade of the 21st century, in the unlikely setting of the most thoroughly capitalist country in world history, large numbers of Americans, mostly young, displayed a new interest in socialist ideas, values and policy proposals, and in turn in the often neglected history of socialism and communism in the United States.Having written three books early in my scholarly career dealing with one or another aspect of the tangled history of American communism, the last appearing in 1990, I figured I’d said all I had to say on the subject, and turned to other topics. Enough time had passed by the time of the 2010s socialist revival that the several score ageing communists and ex-communists whom I’d interviewed for my early books were now long dead.But in 2020 an editor at a New York publishing house, noticing the upswing in interest among young Americans in leftwing (although non-communist) politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, contacted me wondering if there might be a readership emerging for a new narrative history of the Communist party USA, from its founding in 1919 to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.We decided there was, and the result, out this month, is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.A lot of what I had written in earlier books on the subject still seemed valid to me. But some things needed to change. For one thing, no one writing on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s had any real idea of the extent to which the party was involved in Soviet espionage activities in the 1930s and 1940s. More generally, what struck me as I returned to the topic was the mystery of why so many often highly intelligent and in many ways admirable people, as communists were when considered individually, could have remained so loyal for so long to a fundamentally flawed movement that never had a chance of success in the US.Most of the interviewees I met while researching my earlier books, starting when I was a graduate student in the 1970s, were in their 60s and 70s by the time I sat down with them, armed with my primitive cassette tape recorder. I came to think of them as the “YCL generation”: teenagers or young adults who had joined the Young Communist League in the early days of the Great Depression, graduating to the adult movement in the course of the decade, some of them fighting in Spain, others organizing unions of steel workers in Ohio and agricultural workers in California, some writing for and editing publications like the Daily Worker in New York and the People’s World in San Francisco.Not a few of them wound up spending time in federal prison in the 1950s for violating the Smith Act, a law that made it a felony to conspire to advocate the overthrow of the government. Most had left the movement before the 1960s, disillusioned by Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in Moscow in 1956, in which the then Soviet leader indicted his recently deceased predecessor, Joseph Stalin, as a bloodthirsty tyrant.By the time I met them, after the passage of another two decades, these American ex-communists, and the few who remained in the party, generally as dissidents, had had a long time to think over the errors they’d made, and the crimes they’d apologized for, in younger days.And because they were, as a rule, so thoughtful, introspective, self-critical, and eager to share their insights with a then twentysomething-year-old researcher – hoping in doing so, I imagine, to persuade a younger generation via my books not to repeat their mistakes – I forgave them a lot. I like to think I didn’t apologize for their blindness to Stalin’s crimes, or for their willing support of a movement that, had it actually come to power in the US, might well have been responsible for similar crimes.But I don’t think I fully understood, or at least fully conveyed, how the elderly men and women from whom I learned so much might not have seemed so appealing to me if I’d encountered their younger selves decades earlier, when they were still true believers. And this, despite the fact that some of them told me as much: “I was a little Stalin,” Dorothy Healey said of her early years as a Los Angeles communist party leader. “I’m not talking about anybody else.”The central contradiction of American communism – one that defined it from its founding in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution to its essential demise with the end of the Soviet Union 70-odd years later – was, as I write in Reds, that it “attracted egalitarian idealists, and it bred authoritarian zealots”. Some clung longer to their idealism and resisted the authoritarian temptation better than others, but only at the price of concealing their true feelings.Mary Heaton Vorse, a free-spirited feminist and socialist from Greenwich Village, was a labor journalist who seemed to be on the scene of every major moment that American labor challenged the power of capital, from the 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the 1937 auto workers’ strike in Flint, Michigan. She noted in her diary in the early 1920s that the people she met in the newly-established Communist party all seemed to have “closed minds, so certain, so dull. They bore me, bore me, bore me,” underlining the last words for emphasis.A few years later, however, she joined the party herself, and remained a member into the 1930s. But she retained the habit of confiding to her diary her dislike for many of her comrades. “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be,” she wrote in 1931. “But I am a communist who hates communists and communism.”Writing the history of American communism requires an appreciation of such contradictions. Somewhere along the line, I showed a draft of an early chapter of Reds to a friend and fellow historian familiar with my earlier works. Getting back to me a few days later, he said he liked it well enough, and saw how it grew out of my first books on the topic. But, he added: “You seem less patient with the communists than you used to be.”That was a shrewd observation. Now that I’m in my 70s, roughly the age of those I interviewed back when I first began studying the history of American communism, now that I’ve had ample time to reflect on some of my own youthful political follies in the 1960s, I probably am (in retrospect) less inclined to be patient with my interviewees in their younger days. Understanding, yes. Patient, not so much. As the great British historian EP Thompson, himself a former communist, wrote in his 1963 masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class, understanding the “obsolete”, “utopian” and “deluded” English working-class radicals of the early 19th century required rescuing them from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.Condescension, historically, can take the form of a patronizing dismissal of those who came long before us for failing to live up to the high standards of moral intelligence and practical knowledge we like to imagine we possess. But it can also take the form of cutting our ancestors perhaps too much slack.In the case of American communism, the appeal of the Soviet “experiment” in the 1930s and 1940s in a world racked by the Great Depression and menaced by domestic and foreign fascism is perfectly comprehensible. At the same time, it shouldn’t have taken a speech by Khrushchev to reveal Stalin’s all-too-evident crimes against humanity in his three decades of misrule over the Soviet Union; lots of people, including many on the American and international left, had figured that one out for themselves long before.In the end, studying the history of communism should be neither an exercise in filiopietism, the excessive veneration of ancestors, nor of demonology, the classification of malevolent spirits. I hope that in Reds I have avoided both (readers, please advise), and thus have been fair to my old and now departed friends, those veterans of the communist movement, whose memories and insights I taped so many years back.American communists in the 20th century included in their ranks people of talent, vision, and genuine idealism. Their tragedy lay in their willingness to subvert their own best instincts in their devotion to a flawed and irrelevant historical model, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state. And in doing so, they helped set back for generations the opportunities for the emergence of a genuinely American left. May the new generation emerging on the left avoid their mistakes.
Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College. His most recent book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism More

Vincent Namatjira’s portrait of Gina Rinehart has found no favour with the subject, with the mining tycoon asking the National Gallery of Australia to remove the painting from an exhibition. But Australia’s richest womanis not the first person to take a painting of their likeness to task.Here we take a look at seven notable examples.Winston Churchill by Graham SutherlandDespite being one of the most highly regarded artists of his time, Graham Sutherland produced a portrait of Winston Churchill that was so detested it was secretly burnt by his wife.The painting was commissioned by the Houses of Parliament to mark the former prime minister’s 80th birthday in November 1954. In it, Churchill was seated and wore a dark suit, displaying his famous bulldog demeanour.The wartime leader is said to have found his likeness “like a down-and-out who has been picked out of the gutter”. The painting was taken to his home, Chartwell in Kent, where destroyed it in a bonfire.Germaine Greer by Jeffrey SmartPrim, seated and with her hands clasped around a handbag, a likeness of the author and feminist Germaine Greer was so unlike her, the sitter reportedly complained of the 1984 portrait painted by Jeffrey Smart.The sitter and artist were friends but Greer reportedly refused to pose after seeing initial pencil studies of her face, forcing Smart to use a body double. While Greer may have hated the painting, it sold for $1,227,273 in 2022.Bernard Breslauer by Lucian Freud A double chin was to blame for the destruction of the portrait of the millionaire antiquarian book dealer Bernard Breslauer by Lucian Freud. The art academic Catherine Lampert made the discovery in 2008 after visiting Breslauer’s New York apartment, where she reportedly learned that he had not been flattered by Freud’s depiction of his baldness and bulging chin.Freud was told of the painting’s fate when he was 85, some 50 years after the portrait was completed. Had it survived, the portrait could have fetched a seven-figure sum at auction. Malcolm Fraser by Bryan WestwoodThe prime minister’s first official portrait was instantly rejected when it was revealed in 1983, with Malcolm Fraser reportedly “loathing it at first sight”.Bryan Westwood, who went on to twice win the Archibald prize, captured the prime minister standing with folded arms against a dark background.Westwood’s agent, Robin Gibson, told the Canberra Times that the late former PM saw the painting as “too casual and domestic”. The painting was originally consigned to a National Gallery storage unit but was eventually moved to Old Parliament House. Lyndon B Johnson by Peter HurdThe president is said to have called his likeness, standing and clutching a history book with the Capitol at dusk in the background, “the ugliest thing [he] ever saw”.In turn, its painter, Peter Hurd, was not shy about calling LBJ’s behaviour “very damn rude”.Theodore Roosevelt by Théobald ChartranAfter the 1902 portrait was unveiled, Theodore Roosevelt felt the Frenchman had made him look more like “a mewing cat” than the powerful leader he preferred to imagine.He reportedly hid the painting in a wardrobe before having it destroyed. A second – and more successful – official portrait was commissioned, this time by John Singer Sargent.Ronald Reagan by Aaron ShiklerThe 1989 official portrait of Ronald and Nancy Reagan was a second attempt after Aaron Shikler’s first version was rejected because it reportedly lacked a “twinkle in his eye”.Two years later, the official portrait was replaced by a third, by Everett Raymond Kinstler.Other notable unlikenessesGough Whitlam refused to sit for his prime ministerial portrait after his dismissal. His Archibald-winning likeness by Clifton Pugh was instead chosen as his official portrait. Lucian Freud’s painting of Queen Elizabeth was both admired and derided when it was unveiled in 2001. While some said the likeness was more like that of a corgi than the Queen, the sitter tactfully told Freud: “Very nice of you to do this. I’ve very much enjoyed watching you mix your colours.”  More

The US supreme court on Wednesday ordered Louisiana to hold congressional elections in 2024 using a House map with a second mostly Black district, despite a lower-court ruling that called the map an illegal racial gerrymander.The order allows the use of a map that has majority Black populations in two of the state’s six congressional districts, potentially boosting Democrats’ chances of gaining control of the closely divided House of Representatives in the 2024 elections.The justices acted on emergency appeals filed by the state’s top Republican elected officials and Black voters who said they needed the high court’s intervention to avoid confusion as the elections approach. About a third of Louisiana is Black.Like much of the south, voting is racially polarized in Alabama so any majority-Black district is likely to favor Democrats. Republicans narrowly control the US House and are fighting for an advantage in every seat.It is the latest development in a long and twisted legal saga over Louisiana’s congressional districts.Louisiana lawmakers were forced to add a second majority-Black district last year after a federal judge said the map they drew violated the Voting Rights Act. The state approved a map, but then non-white voters challenged it in court, saying lawmakers relied too much on race when drawing it. Lower federal courts agreed the map should be struck down, and the state said it should not be required to use the map for this year’s elections.The supreme court’s order on Wednesday halts that argument and means the map with a second majority-Black district will be used for this year’s election. What happens after that is unclear.The supreme court has previously put court decisions handed down near elections on hold, invoking the need to give enough time to voters and elections officials to ensure orderly balloting. “When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote two years ago in a similar case from Alabama. The court has never set a firm deadline for how close is too close.The court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all said they would not have granted the request to intervene. Only Jackson explained her reasoning.“There is little risk of voter confusion from a new map being imposed this far out from the November election,” she wrote in a brief dissent. “We have often denied stays of redistricting orders issued as close or closer to an election.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson was objecting to what has come to be known as the Purcell principle – a novel idea adopted by the supreme court that they should not intervene in an election dispute when election day is near. The liberal justices and other critics have accused the court of using the principle to benefit Republicans.Louisiana has had two congressional maps blocked by federal courts in the past two years in a swirl of lawsuits that included a previous intervention by the supreme court. More

An interior department staffer on Wednesday became the first Jewish political appointee to publicly resign in protest of US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the interior department, accused Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict.Call had worked for the presidential campaigns of both Biden and Kamala Harris, and was a longtime activist and advocate for Israel in Washington and elsewhere before joining the government.She is at least the fifth mid- or senior-level administration staffer to make public their resignation in protest of the Biden administration’s military and diplomatic support of the now seven-month Israeli war against Hamas.She is the second political appointee to do so, after an education department official of Palestinian heritage resigned in January.Her resignation letter described her excitement at joining an administration that she believed shared much of her vision for the country. “However, I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration,” she wrote.In an interview with the Associated Press, Call pointed to comments by Biden, including at a White House Hanukkah event where he said “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe” and at an event at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial last week in which he said the 7 October Hamas-led attacks that triggered the war were driven by an “ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people”.“He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said, noting that ancestors of hers were killed by “state-sponsored violence”.The Hamas-led attacks on 7 October killed about 1,200 people in Israel. Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians.The Biden administration has pointed to its repeated calls to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for more precise targeting of Hamas so as to spare more civilians. It recently paused a shipment of bombs to Israel, saying it wanted to prevent Israeli forces from dropping them on the crowded southern Gaza city of Rafah.“I think the president has to know that there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous,” Call said of the war overall and US support for it. “Not just for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews, for Americans, for his election prospects.” More