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    ‘100-year timeframe’: how Project 2025 is guiding Trump’s attack on government

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    David A Graham doesn’t say he read Project 2025 so you don’t have to, but it might be inferred.The Atlantic staff writer’s new book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, is a swift but thorough overview of the vast far-right plan for a second Trump administration that achieved notoriety last year. Over just 138 pages, a passing dream next to the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page doorstop, Graham considers the origins of Project 2025, its aims and effects so far.There’s a reason Project 2025 came out so long.“They’re looking at a 100-year timeframe,” Graham said. “They’re looking at things from the New Deal and saying, ‘This is where the government went wrong, and we need to fix these things. We need to change them permanently and reframe what the government does and what its relationship with every American is.’”The New Deal is the name given to the vast expansion of the federal government under Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression and laying the foundation of the modern US state.Project 2025 was published in 2023. As the 2024 election loomed, Democrats raised alarms about its hardline policy recommendations on issues including climate, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive healthcare and more. Incendiary rhetoric raised awareness too. Kevin Roberts, Heritage president and author of the Project 2025 foreword, said he and his allies were “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”, then peppered his own book with images of fire and destruction. In praise of Roberts, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, said it was time to “load the muskets”.To Graham, such bellicose rhetoric was “terrifying” but also, in retrospect, a clear signpost to things to come. “To say that publicly before the election is really a strange public relations choice. It’s such a chilling thing to say. But you know, it told us what they wanted.”Amid controversy, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and its authors. But then he won the election. At the outset of his second term, he duly unleashed slashing cuts to federal staffing and budgets and a barrage of executive orders advancing policies directly linked to Project 2025 or firmly in its spirit.Graham is an award-winning reporter, used to working fast. He started writing The Project “at the very end of November”, weeks after Trump defeated Kamala Harris, “and turned the book in in mid-January”.He wrote the book, he said, because “we the press, we the American public, had talked a lot about Project 2025 during the election, and it felt like it had kind of gone away – but it remained really relevant. And I felt like there was a lot in it that I didn’t understand, and a lot that had been missed.”During the 2024 election, experts did indeed advise that such policy plans for possible administrations have existed for decades but have rarely been enacted. The sheer size of Project 2025 might also have lulled some into a false sense of security. Like many reporters, Graham “had dabbled in parts of it”. Unlike many, he found “it was a different experience to read the whole thing altogether.“I think it is both more radical in some ways than it came across – like, when you’re just reading atomized policies, you don’t get what a social program it is – [but] one of the other things that I think is interesting is how there are ideas that I think are either [only] fairly objectionable or might have widespread appeal, right next to ones that are totally out in right field. You’ll be in the same paragraph or in the same chapter.“And the third thing I think is interesting is the way there are disagreements within the text, either between the authors or between the authors and Donald Trump. Those cleavages within the right I think are worth paying attention to now.”Trump opponents looking for cleavages will not find them in the influential office of management and budget, now directed by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist, advocate of “traumatizing” political enemies, and Project 2025 co-author. The original director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, fell victim to political necessity in 2024, forced out of the Heritage Foundation as Trump came under pressure – but remains a true believer, recently declaring Trump’s actions in office to be beyond his “wildest dreams”.But there is also Elon Musk. The world’s richest man has led Trump’s so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge, in attacking federal agencies and departments with startling speed and recklessness.“This is one of the places I have been most surprised,” Graham said, “because I think the methods that they lay out [in Project 2025] are really important. I thought that an important part of this was going to be how deeply people like Russ Vought had thought about, ‘OK, how can we work within the bounds of the law to achieve these things? How can we rework the bureaucracy?’ And in fact, Musk came in and just blasted right through it and made it a lot easier for them, and a lot faster. I certainly didn’t expect that. It’s not contemplated in the book or in the original document.”Nor are Trump’s beloved tariffs much loved by Project 2025 and its free-trade-loving authors.Graham said: “There are these big differences within Project 2025. The most obvious place is the chapters on tariffs … they [also] disagree with Trump on Ukraine. They’re much more hawkish on Ukraine, and anti-Russia. You have this sort of standard, ‘We stand up for Israel, We oppose Iran,’ sort of thing, but foreign policy is barely mentioned. It’s all about China. And Trump talks the talk on China, but then many of the things he’s doing, like tariffs, which are discussed in Project 2025 but not as a major priority, are alienating the rest of the world, which makes it very hard to take on China.“But then, even something as small as how to handle childcare, you have different people having different views [within Project 2025]. One of the things that jumps out at me is they did a really good job of figuring out how to meld these longstanding social and religious conservative priorities on to Maga. They find places where they can work with Trump.Trump is very interested in talking about trans rights and Democrats, and men are very interested in fighting back much more broadly on gender norms, LGBTQ+ rights, and so … Project 2025 becomes sort of like a tip of the spear to get Trump’s attention. They care about “wokeness”, and DEI, maybe for different reasons than he does, but they’ll attack that, and it gets him onboard.On another key issue of Trump’s second term, Graham sees the White House and the ideologues of Project 2025 much more closely aligned.Project 2025 is “very focused on illegal immigration, but also on legal immigration. Overall, the point is to have fewer people who are born overseas in the US, by whatever means necessary. And so they talk about mass deportation, and they talk about detention centers, but they also talk about reducing the number of visas that people get and trying to … find people who have lied on their citizenship applications, to revoke citizenship, denaturalization.“There are things where you see maybe not a direct correlation but the same spirit. So we see in Project 2025 an argument that we need to crack down on student visas from quote, unquote, unfriendly countries, and use student visas as a sort of tool of political warfare.”Trump may not be implementing Project 2025 word for word but its authors have much to delight them. Conversely, Graham’s book is sprinkled with lines that prompt grim laughter.Consider the case of James Sherk, a Trump adviser on civil service and labor issues in the first term who drafted “Schedule F”, a proposal to reclassify about 50,000 civil service jobs as political, thereby allowing a president to fire such people at will. Under Joe Biden, Schedule F was shelved. Ahead of Trump’s second term, Project 2025 advocated putting it swiftly to use.Last year, Sherk spoke to ProPublica. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap your ability to implement your agenda.”Under Trump, more than 260,000 government workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early.

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      How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

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      View image in fullscreenSo far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.Fetal personhood is the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people. If taken to its logical conclusion in US law, this belief would not only totally outlaw abortion, but also risk pitting the rights of fetuses against the rights of the women carrying them in all kinds of circumstances. In the first year after the US supreme court overturned Roe, at least 200 people were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies. Most of these cases involved charges of child endangerment, abuse or neglect – language that treats fetuses as children.A Guggenheim fellow who has published seven books on reproduction and abortion, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the throughline in the anti-abortion movement’s centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced that the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight. “The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: ‘Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,’” she said in an interview.View image in fullscreenPersonhood, which was released Tuesday, argues that the anti-abortion movement did not have to be so punitive. While anti-abortion activists have never agreed on how to best implement fetal personhood, they over time started to take more cues from Republican politicians, whose own veneration of “law and order” grew alongside its antagonism toward a social safety net. Those developments ultimately paved the way for the more extreme anti-abortion activists to grab more power within the movement.After Roe legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized in support of an amendment to the US constitution that would recognize embryos and fetuses as people. (The effort never gained the political traction it needed to become a serious possibility.) Around the same time, some activists broke with mainstream anti-abortion groups to push for policies that would offer more support for pregnant women, rather than just ban abortion.Yet the voices advocating for better daycare and housing for mothers faded away as the anti-abortion movement tightened its alliance with the Republican party. Anti-abortion activists understood that, by portraying fetuses as defenseless victims of the ultimate crime, they could energize conservative voters – and open their pockets.“The Republican party, from the Reagan era onward, has really equated a kind of justice and equality with punishing wrongdoers,” Ziegler said. “It’s a natural fit for the anti-abortion movement: the more its fortunes relied on Republican politicians, the more it framed things the same way.”State-level bans on abortion still do not technically punish abortion patients. (Instead, it’s abortion providers, long positioned by the movement as coercing or confusing women into the procedure, and sometimes the people who help them, who are at risk of criminal consequences.) But, over the last few years, self-described “abortion abolitionists” have slowly migrated out of the fringes of the anti-abortion movement and moved towards its center. Unlike mainstream “pro-lifers”, “abolitionists” believe that, if a fetus is a person and abortion is the murder of that person, women should be punished accordingly: as murderers.Neither “pro-lifers” nor “abolitionists” are particularly popular. After Roe’s collapse enabled states to make their own abortion laws, several states – including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Missouri – passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, while a 2024 survey from the 19th News and SurveyMonkey found that 41% of Americans think “a fetus has rights starting at conception that should be protected by the government.”Even people who support fetal personhood can have tangled, even contradictory views on the matter. Only 9% of people think that the government should restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, even though IVF as it is currently practiced frequently involves the destruction or abandonment of embryos.None of the bills that allow abortion patients to be charged with homicide are likely to pass this year, but Ziegler doesn’t think “abolitionists” are going anywhere, for two reasons. First, the anti-abortion movement maintains a strong grip in southern Republican-dominated state legislatures, where many of these bills have emerged. Second, Ziegler believes that the anti-abortion movement is embracing “a conviction that it matters less what voters think and more what judges think”.“If you don’t worry about what you’re doing being unpopular, and you believe that ideological consistency, or even logical consistency, is paramount, you would be more inclined to go with an abolitionist argument, and you might worry less about that having political fallout in a politically uncompetitive state,” Ziegler said. “You don’t need to convince most Americans you’re right. You only need to convince five justices on the supreme court.”With abortion bans proving deeply unpopular in the US, circumventing popular will has become a necessity for an increasingly hardline movement. And by relying on the courts rather than voters, the anti-abortion movement can afford to ignore voters’ misgivings.The movement has abandoned its earlier goal of amending the US constitution to recognize fetal personhood; instead, the anti-abortion movement is now seeking to convince courts that the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of due process and equal protection, already recognizes embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception. It is, according to Ziegler, yet another sign of the movement’s drift away from democratic norms.View image in fullscreenThis interest in the 14th amendment is also something of an about-face for the anti-abortion movement, which is predominantly white and has had a convoluted relationship with race for more than a century. At the time that the amendment passed, as part of a post-civil war effort to recognize Black people’s rights, anti-abortion leaders “didn’t want to talk about race because they weren’t sure that people of color were persons with rights”, Ziegler said. Over time, the anti-abortion movement began using the language of civil rights and affirmative action – but primarily to argue that fetuses are the greatest victim of discrimination.“I think that’s one of the reasons fetal personhood language has been resonant for so long,” Ziegler said of the movement’s co-option of civil rights rhetoric. “It gives people a way to talk about equality and a way to elevate somebody as a victim of discrimination in a way that makes sense to a largely white group of conservatives.”As Roe recedes further into the rearview mirror, Ziegler expects the movement to become even more committed to some of the most unpopular implications of fetal personhood, such as restrictions on IVF. Although Republican politicians have shied away from limiting access to the treatment, the anti-abortion movement has grown more strident on the topic. Some of its leaders even condemned Donald Trump for his recent executive order supporting IVF.“I think the anti-abortion movement is going to be still full steam ahead,” Ziegler said. “There’s an increasing sentiment in the movement that this is not about pleasing Republicans. This is not about pleasing voters. This is about the importance of this, ideologically, to the people involved.” More

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      in US Politics

      Go-to author on White House reverses take on Biden and slams former president

      by

      “Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail,” Chris Whipple wrote in The Fight of His Life, his 2023 book on the 46th president, who was then warming up his re-election bid at the age of 80.In that book, Whipple quoted Bruce Reed, a senior aide, describing a long-distance flight. When others appeared exhausted, Biden was raring to go, Reed said. Biden showed “unbelievable stamina”.Speaking to the Guardian in January 2023, Whipple said Biden’s “inner circle” was “bullish about Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to govern. I never heard any of them express any concern and maybe you would expect that from the inner circle. Many of them will tell you that he has extraordinary endurance, energy.”Put it this way: much has happened since.Obviously, there was that whole 2024 election thing. You know – the one when Biden dropped out after a disastrous debate exposed his decline for all to see. There was also the day in February, before the campaign kicked off, when the special counsel Robert Hur declined to charge Biden with mishandling classified documents, because he found him too addled and sympathetic a prospective defendant.Hur wrote: “He did not remember when he was vice-president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice-president?’) and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘In 2009, am I still vice-president?’) … He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”Whipple, a former CBS producer, has emerged as a go-to author on the White House and those who work there. In The Gatekeepers, he examined the lives of chiefs of staff. Then came The Fight of His Life. With hindsight, Whipple seems to have missed key evidence of Biden’s decline.But Whipple is back with a vengeance. Uncharted, his third book, hits Biden and his aides like a bludgeon. Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew, fares little better: Whipple depicts a candidate who never should have been there, a sentiment repeatedly expressed by senior Democrats.Whipple had access. People talked. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, is a key source – and demonstrates startling cognitive dissonance about Biden’s mental and physical decline. Klain says Biden should have stayed in the race – but also gives an absolutely withering account of debate prep at Camp David.At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, Klain describes Biden as “startled”. Whipple writes: “He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” He fell asleep.“‘We sat around the table,’” says Klain in the book. “‘And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.’” Klain, Whipple writes, “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US”.Come the debate against Trump, Biden gave perhaps the worst performance of all time. He shuffled, he stared, he made verbal stumbles and gaffes. He handed Trump the win.Klain also tags Biden for skipping a post-debate meeting with progressives in favor of a family photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz.“‘You need to cancel that,’” Klain says he told Biden. “‘You need to stay in Washington. You need to have an aggressive plan to fight and to rally the troops.’” Biden rebuffed him and instead held a Zoom call with the progressives. It went badly.“‘All you guys want to talk about is Gaza … What would you have me do?’” Biden said. “‘I was a progressive before some of you guys were even in Congress.’”How do you remind people you’re old without saying you’re old?Whipple also pays attention to Trump. Susie Wiles, now Trump’s chief of staff, and Karl Rove, a veteran of the George W Bush White House, speak on the record. So does Paul Manafort, a campaign manager in 2016, later jailed and pardoned.“Democrats wanted to know why Harris had lost to Trump and his MAGA movement,” Whipple writes. “Susie Wiles wanted to know why Harris and her team had run such a flawed campaign.”Wiles did not view a Trump victory as inevitable. Whipple asks Wiles: “‘Did that mean Harris couldn’t have won?’”Trump’s campaign chair didn’t mince words.“‘We’ll never know,’” she replies, “‘because it didn’t seem like she even tried.’“‘Voters want authenticity … and they didn’t get that from her.’”Leon Panetta, chief of staff to Bill Clinton, echoed Wiles.“‘I thought they were thinking they could tiptoe into the presidency without getting anybody pissed off at them,’” he tells Whipple. “‘Baloney. You’ve got to make the American people understand that you’re tough enough to be president of the United States.’”Rove does take a jab at Trump and Chris LaCivita, the ex-Marine who became a senior adviser. Rove introduced LaCivita to Trump, via the late megadonor Sheldon Adelson, but didn’t think LaCivita would take the gig. “‘I’m surprised because I know what he thinks of Trump,’” Rove tells Whipple. “‘He thinks Trump’s an idiot.’”LaCivita condemned January 6, after which he “liked” a tweet that urged Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment and remove him from power. LaCivita deleted the post – but did not join the second Trump administration.Back in 2023, in The Fight of His Life, Whipple wrote: “Presidents do not give up power lightly.” Andy Card, chief of staff to George W Bush, weighed in: “‘If anybody tells you they’re leaving the White House voluntarily, they’re probably lying. This applies to presidents, of any age, who are driven by vast reserves of ego and ambition.’”Biden did go – but not voluntarily. In Uncharted, in merciless detail, Whipple shows he should have gone much sooner.

      Uncharted is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      in US Politics

      The America I loved is gone

      by

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      Ta-Nehisi Coates on why stories matter in the age of Trump – podcast

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      “This is a cultural president. Make no mistake about it.”For Ta-Nehisi Coates, the award-winning writer and journalist, the US president, Donald Trump, and his allies clearly understand the power of story-telling in politics. Coates has recently written a new book, The Message, and he tells Michael Safi that the stories told in TV, films, literature and beyond are not a distraction from politics today but are actively shaping it.The pair discuss whether the political centre-left in the US has become uncomfortable competing in the cultural realm and is in many ways the more conservative movement, adopting the role of steward of the status quo. They also examine the role of white supremacy in the narratives emerging against progressive, identity politics.Coates describes a visit to the Middle East and the significant gulf he sees between how the Israel-Palestine conflict is portrayed in US media and what he witnessed on the ground. The writer also reflects from an African-American perspective on the stories being told about Israel and outlines the reaction to his book so far.Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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      Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’

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      Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me. “I’m intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.”The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad?Audition deliberately sets itself apart from the recent spate of popular novels – such as Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch or Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor – that explore the viscerality and intensity of early motherhood. Kitamura wanted to write something that was “temperature wise, on the opposite pole”, a novel more concerned with maternal separation, the unavoidable and necessary estrangement that occurs as children grow up and away from their parents. Her fiction has always been interested in the moments when you look at a person you know well and they appear to you as a stranger, and it occurred to her that this happens often between parents and their children. Her own children, aged 12 and eight, are “very surprising creatures”, she says, and she marvels at how rapidly their relationship, and her experience of motherhood, changes as they change. When she speaks to friends whose grown-up children have moved back home, they tell her it’s “like living with a stranger”. “You do not recognise large swathes of their personality and their way of being in the world,” she says. “Talking with people, it doesn’t seem like it’s a reconstitution of the old family unit. It feels like a reorganisation of the family.”In Kitamura’s books, the female protagonists are so reserved that they are often accused of being cold or arrogant, but she herself is disarmingly warm and unassuming. “Is it OK if I get a cookie too?” she asks when we first meet, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. She is dressed elegantly, in a slouchy suit and big sunglasses, and she laughs a lot, generally at herself. At one point, she tells me that when a family friend said she was excited to read her book, Kitamura’s daughter challenged her. “She doesn’t have a book coming out,” her daughter insisted, “I’ve never seen her write!” “And that,” Kitamura says, “feels like a very accurate description of my life.”“There’s something very interesting about being a parent, because suddenly there is another person in the world who is telling you who you are to them. And that is, in a lot of ways, the most important identity that you have, but it is somehow othered. I know very much that the person my children think I am is not the person I always feel myself to be – that crack in being, or experience, is something I wanted to explore.” The actor in Audition struggles to piece together the different parts of herself, her overlapping roles, on stage and in real life, as an artist, a wife and possibly a mother. Kitamura can relate. “Sometimes I feel like a teacher or a writer or a friend or a daughter or a wife or a mother, and there’s something that does feel a bit incommensurate about those parts,” she says.She is married to the British novelist Hari Kunzru. Kunzru writes faster than her, she tells me, and he is better at sitting down to work after the children are in bed, or writing in 45-minute snatches during the day. Ah, I say, is that because of your role in the family: are you the one carrying the household’s mental load? But it isn’t. “My friend said something like, ‘Who does all the playdates and who books the appointments with the dentists?’ – and Hari does all that,” she says, laughing. He also does all the cooking.View image in fullscreenDo they ever get jealous of one another, I ask, now openly stirring. No, she replies, because they write such different books: his are big and multistranded, hers are more compacted. Then she leans forward and says: “What does happen is one of us will have an idea and we’ll say to the other, ‘That’s something you should write’.” Her manner is confessional, as though this weren’t the opposite of what jealous people would do. They are each other’s first editors and always undertake a final read of one another’s work before submission. On a day-to-day basis, Kitamura says, she appreciates her husband as the unloader of dishwasher and purchaser of laundry detergent, and then she’ll read his new book and think: “This is smart! You’ve had all this going on in your head as well!”In light of her family dynamic, it’s interesting that her female characters in novels such as Intimacies and A Separation are often married to writers but themselves work as interpreters, translators or actors – mediums for other people’s messages. Kitamura says she is uncomfortable with the idea of being a writer and sees her own role as closer to interpreting, to channelling other people’s voices. The women she writes about are often passive in their professional and personal lives, which she believes is true to life. “Who of us has that much agency? I mean, what kind of a fantasy world are we living in? We have the illusion of agency,” she says. “I’m interested in passivity in part because it’s the condition most of us live in. But I’m also interested in passivity because it is itself a kind of action.” She’s fascinated by the point at which passivity becomes complicity. Her characters often find themselves in ethically unsustainable positions: working for institutions they disapprove of, for instance, or accepting an inheritance although it isn’t rightfully theirs.View image in fullscreenWe meet in late February, and it seems everyone I’ve passed today in New York has been discussing politics. Kitamura has not been sleeping well. She never sleeps well during a Trump presidency, she half jokes. She teaches on New York University’s graduate creative writing programme and says that the day after the 2024 election her students asked her what the point was of fiction: did they not have an obligation to resist Trump more directly? She had struggled with that question herself in 2016, but the second Trump administration has been so extreme that she can now see with greater clarity the urgent importance of writing, art and education. This is, she says, “in part because they are being targeted so fiercely, but also because [Trump and his allies] are trying to take away everything I love and care about. It’s never been clearer to me that writing actually does matter. It’s not a frivolous or useless task.”In an immediate way, she continues, writers are well placed to respond to Trump’s attacks on language, the obfuscation and doublespeak, the moral panic over pronouns or the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.Before Kitamura wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a ballerina. She was raised in California, where her parents had moved from Japan for her father’s job as a professor of engineering at the University of California. Throughout school, she left class at noon to dance, and she planned to go professional. But she got injured and says that was “the nail in the coffin” because it was becoming clear that she wasn’t quite good enough to make it. Having never thought she’d go to college, she won a place at Princeton University, where she studied English. Kitamura sees similarities between dance and writing. Both require discipline: “It’s doing the same thing over and over again, reworking and reworking.” It strikes me too that if ballerinas excel at masking the pain and physical effort required for their art, Kitamura’s writing shows similar restraint and contrast, between the streamlined, exacting prose and its roiling undercurrents.In 1999, after Princeton, Kitamura moved to the UK to study for a PhD in literature at the London Consortium. She worked part time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (where she met Kunzru) in the early 00s, and found London’s art and cultural scene vibrant and exciting. “People were taking incredible risks with their work, and that was interesting to see,” she recalls. In 2009, she published her first novel, The Longshot, about a mixed martial arts fighter preparing for his comeback match. She has retained a keen interest in performance, “both the pressures and incredible freedom of it”. In Audition, the actor believes that “a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience” and Kitamura believes the same to be true of books. She wanted Audition to be open to multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations, so that a reader could form their own conclusions. She’s curious about what it may say about a reader that they settle for one reading over another, concluding ultimately that the “son”, Xavier, is a con artist, perhaps, or that the actor is a “bad” mother.Audition forms a loose trilogy with her two preceding books, A Separation and Intimacies, novels that similarly have a keen eye for the sinister, for the subtle and yet threatening shifts in power between people, for the moments when closeness becomes dangerous or suffocating. “We have such a tendency to think of intimacy as something desirable, something we seek out with other people,” she says, “but it can also be an imposition.” In Audition, the narrator is almost pathologically attuned to the power renegotiations in the family. The person who is most desired holds the upper hand, the actor observes. Money also shapes how the characters relate to one another, sometimes in unexpected ways: at points, characters try to buy power, but their generosity only weakens them, exposing the extent of their need.Kitamura says she is both fascinated and horrified by the occasions when she has exerted power over her children. “Those moments make me very uncomfortable. It’s really simple things, like when you send them to their room or you lose your temper, or when they are little, you pick them up against their will. It’s really a brutal exertion of power over another person, but it’s also just parenting,” she says, revealing her ability to identify the disquieting elements in everyday interactions. At the same time, she observes, parenthood can make you feel powerless. She often feels powerless to protect her children from the world.She has already started on her next novel, which she says will be very different from her previous books. She checks herself: “Well, it’s not a maximalist … it’s a difference that will be significant to me and nobody else.” She is itching to write, but there’s the book tour, her teaching and, of course, family life. Like any working parent, the fact that she has so little time to herself, so little solitude, could make her unhappy, but she’s come to accept that “work comes from the mess of life”, creativity doesn’t come from a vacuum. “I have to write from the middle of my life, that’s all I can do,” she says. “I’m not going to wait for a decade to pass until I have more time.” More

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      Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration

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      For many librarians, the stakes of the job are high – they’re facing burnout, book bans, legislation pushed by rightwing groups, and providing essential resources in an effort to fill gaps in the US’s social safety net.Now, as Donald Trump’s administration rolls out their agenda, many librarians are describing his policies as “catastrophic” to accessing information and the libraries themselves – institutions considered fundamental to democracy.Rebecca Hass, the programming and outreach manager at the Anne Arundel county public library in Maryland, has seen the effects of Trump’s second term ripple in.“The impact [is] on many different community partners and customers that are represented in some of the executive orders,” said Hass. “We get everyone at the library. When people lose their jobs, they come to the library. When they’re not sure what’s going on, they come to the library.”Hass said the library received some pushback about LGBTQ+ programming, including protesters showing up to its trans Pride event. But the library is undeterred in efforts to meet community needs and supply resources, creating new resource pages on immigration and LGBTQ+ communities, and updating others. They have expanded partnerships, including with social workers in the library. Usage of the community pantry has increased.Much of this is work the library has always done, Hass said, adding: “But now it’s taken on urgency and additional responsibilities.”Emily Drabinski, an associate professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the City University of New York, said that what is happening to librarians now mirrors what is happening to other workers.“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” she said.Some librarians described the impact of institutions capitulating to censorship on their work. A librarian in the deep south, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect their safety, described tensions rising on their library board, and how the library is taking pre-emptive measures to make it challenging to find titles considered “controversial”.“I see all that being as a measure of: ‘If we fly under the radar, we’ll be safe,’” they said. “But it’s sad because who gets left behind – for staff members of color, [or] who are visibly queer, who are disabled, we don’t get to turn off that part of ourselves.”Meanwhile, Imani, an academic librarian in Texas who declined to give their full name for privacy concerns, is an active public library user, said “DEI removal” happened in her workplace in 2023. Now, they’re seeing increased scrutiny on how funds are spent, especially in regard to large databases.“It’s really important that people know that this isn’t new at all,” she said, adding that she knew a school librarian who retired several years ago due to fears of criminalization. “At this point, many librarians have done every single thing they can to save things.”Also, Imani noted, librarians are doing their work with “very little money, very little support [and] higher, higher demand”.Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” recently gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the American Library Association noted greatly affects the important services they offer, including high-speed internet access, summer reading programs, veterans’ telehealth spaces and more, with the most intense losses in rural communities.While the majority of public library funding comes from city and county taxes, according to EveryLibrary, the IMLS provides grants that support these critical services in every state.Marisa Kabas, the independent journalist who writes the The Handbasket, obtained a copy of a letter sent by IMLS’s acting director, Keith Sonderling, announcing that state library grantee funding would be terminated immediately. (Sonderling previously declared his intention to “restore focus on patriotism” to the IMLS, which many groups noted as an attack on freedom of expression.)The IMLS submitted a budget request of $280m for 2025.“That’s nothing in terms of the federal budget, yet it’s going to affect every single library in the country,” said Jessamyn West, who works in a rural, public library in Vermont in addition to working with the Flickr Foundation. “It’s going to make them scramble, it’s going to make them worry, and it’s going to make them have to make really difficult choices for the services that they give to their patrons.”In many cases, the money is already spent because of contracts libraries had with governments, West added.“We’re all pretty furious,” West said.Librarians are speaking out about what communities could lose, including internet access and workforce development in Kentucky, the Talking Book and Braille Center in New Jersey, digital hotspots in North Carolina, and much more outlined in reporting from Book Riot. As librarians grappled with losses that would directly affect their work, the IMLS Instagram account issued posts appearing to mock grantees.“It’s catastrophic,” Drabinski said, adding that IMLS funds significant library infrastructure, including ebook platforms and interlibrary loan systems. “Without those funds, many of those systems will grind to a halt. All of our work is about to become harder at the same time that the need for our resources and services will explode.”Drabinski continued: “What we want is for people to be able to read, and for people to have enough. The problems that we face as American workers are similar to yours, and we share a fight.” More

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      ‘A case study in groupthink’: were liberals wrong about the pandemic?

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      Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years?A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement.View image in fullscreen“Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,” Lee said. “It became so moralized, like: ‘We’re not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we’re doing’.”She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said.Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed, Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest.It’s a controversial argument. Covid-19 killed more than a million Americans, according to US government estimates. The early days of the pandemic left hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, and scientists scrambling to understand the new disease and how to contain it.Still, Macedo and Lee say, it is unclear why shutdowns and closures went on so long, particularly in Democratic states. The book argues that in the US the pandemic became more politically polarized over time, after, initially, “only modest policy differences between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states”.After April 2020, however, red and blue America diverged. Donald Trump contributed to that polarization by downplaying the severity of the virus. Significant policy differences also emerged. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, moved to re-open physical schools quickly, which progressives characterized as irresponsible.Yet in the end there was “no meaningful difference” in Covid mortality rates between Democratic and Republican states in the pre-vaccine period, according to CDC data cited in the book, despite Republican states’ more lenient policies. Macedo and Lee also favorably compare Sweden, which controversially avoided mass lockdowns but ultimately had a lower mortality rate than many other European countries.The shutdowns had foreseeable and quantifiable costs, they say, many of which we are still paying. Learning loss and school absenteeism soared. Inflation went through the roof thanks in part to lockdown spending and stimulus payments. Small businesses defaulted; other medical treatments like cancer screenings and mental health care suffered; and rates of loneliness and crime increased. The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe.Covid policies escalated into culture wars, amplifying tensions around other social issues. Teachers’ unions, which are often bastions of Democratic support, painted school re-openings as “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” and “a recipe for … structural racism”, the book notes, despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning.These measures also had a literal price. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” Macedo and Lee write, “the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined” – or about what the US spent on war production in 1943.View image in fullscreenYet of the $5tn that the US Congress authorized in 2020 and 2021 for Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the spending was on economic relief to people and businesses affected by shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen by fraud, according to the AP.The pandemic was an emergency with no modern precedent, of course, and hindsight is easy. But In Covid’s Wake tries to take into account what information was known at the time – including earlier pandemic preparedness studies. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken.“We take a look at the state of the evidence as it was in early 2020,” Lee said. “It was clear at the time that the evidence was quite unsettled around all of this, and if policymakers had been more honest with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better.”The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that “[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic”. Similarly, a WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were “not recommended in any circumstances”.“And yet we did all of that in short order,” Macedo said, “and without people referring back to these plans.”He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a left-leaning “laptop class” that could easily work from home touting anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values.At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries. Stay-at-home measures were partly intended to protect “essential workers”, but policymakers living in crisis-stricken major metropolitan areas such as New York or Washington DC did not reckon with why social distancing and other measures might be less important in rural parts of the country where Covid rates were lower.Lockdowns were intended to slow Covid’s spread, yet previous pandemic recommendations had suggested they only be used very early in an outbreak and even then do not buy much time, Macedo said.View image in fullscreenPolicymakers and experts often embraced stringent measures for reasons that are more political than medical, Macedo and Lee argue; in a pandemic, authorities are keen to assure anxious publics that they are “in charge” and “doing something”.In strange contrast, policymakers and journalists in the US and elsewhere seemed to take China as a model, the book argues, despite the fact that China is an authoritarian state and had concealed the scale of the outbreak during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Its regime had obvious incentives to mislead foreign observers, and used draconian quarantine measures such as physically welding people into their homes.When the WHO organized a joint China field mission with the Chinese government, in February 2020, non-Chinese researchers found it difficult to converse with their Chinese counterparts away from government handlers. Yet the WHO’s report was “effusive in its praise” of China’s approach, the book notes.“My view is that there was just a great deal of wishful thinking on the part of technocrats of all kinds,” Lee said. “They wanted there to be an answer – that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so they’re kind of grasping at straws. The Chinese example gave them hope.” She noted that Covid policymakers might have been better served if there had been people assigned to act as devil’s advocates in internal deliberations.Lee and Macedo are not natural scientists or public health professionals, they emphasize, and their book is about failures in public deliberation over Covid-19, rather than a prescription for managing pandemics.But they do wade into the debate about Covid-19’s origin, arguing that the “lab leak” hypothesis – that Covid-19 accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously leaping from animals to humans – was unfairly dismissed.The Wuhan Institute studied coronaviruses similar to the one responsible for Covid-19, had a documented history of safety breaches, was located near the outbreak, and is known to have experimented on viruses using controversial “gain-of-function” methods funded by the US, which involve mutating pathogens to see what they might look like in a more advanced or dangerous form.Perhaps because Trump had fanned racial paranoia by calling Covid-19 the “China virus” and rightwing influencers were spreading the notion that it had been deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world by China, many scientists, public health experts and journalists reacted by framing the idea of a lab leak – even an accidental one – as an offensive conspiracy theory. Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say, as well as the fact that a US non-profit funded by the National Institutes of Health allegedly funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.Since then, though, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have cautiously endorsed the lab leak theory, and the discourse around Covid has softened somewhat. The economist Emily Oster sparked immense backlash by arguing against school closures in 2020. Now publications such as New York Magazine and the New York Times have acknowledged the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, for example, and there is growing consensus that school closures hurt many children.The reception to In Covid’s Wake has been more positive than Macedo and Lee expected – perhaps a sign that some of their arguments have penetrated the mainstream, if not that we’ve gotten better as a society at talking about difficult things. “The reception of the book has been much less controversial [and] contentious than we expected,” Macedo said.Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers of the New York Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper’s flagship podcast, recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book has criticized it for underplaying the danger of the disease.Macedo and Lee said that a few of their colleagues have expressed concern that their critique could fuel political attacks on science – a worry that crossed their minds too. “Our response is that the best way to refute criticisms that science and universities have been politicized is to be open to criticism and willing to engage in self-criticism,” Macedo said.“We need to make sure these institutions are in the best possible working order to face the challenges ahead. And we think that’s by being honest, not by covering over mistakes or being unwilling to face up to hard questions.” More

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      ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ Joe McCarthy and the road to Trump

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      On 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question, the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives.“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said, as millions watched on TV, as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy’s sights.“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”As Clay Risen writes in his new history, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America: “McCarthy, it seemed, did not.”The public listened. McCarthy was abandoned by those in power. McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm, President Dwight D Eisenhower joked. The senator died three years later, aged just 48, firmly in disgrace.Risen published his book last week, to glowing reviews, smack in the middle of another dramatic Washington moment, full of drama, replete with disgrace, in which many have compared McCarthy and Donald Trump, a Republican president pursuing his own purges and persecutions.Government workers are in Trump’s sights. So are protesting students and anyone or anything he deems representative of progressive values – of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump’s political enemies are best defined as anyone he thinks wronged him in his first term, his defeat in 2020, his four criminal cases and in the election last year.“McCarthy was not a lone wolf,” Risen said, “but he was willing to go and say things. No one knew what he was going to say. There was something Trumpian in that regard.”Asking historians to discuss their subjects in light of modern figures and events is a journalistic cliche. But it seems fair when talking to Risen. He has addressed the question, writing for his employer, the New York Times, about the Trumpist “New Right” in a piece illustrated with a picture of McCarthy in a red Maga cap.Given McCarthy was finally brought down by a simple appeal to decency, could that possibly happen, one day, to Trump?View image in fullscreen“I think that’s been the question since 2015,” Risen said. “I remember when he went crossways with [the Arizona senator] John McCain, and everyone said, ‘Well, that’s the end, because you say something like that about a war hero … ’ But remember, Trump said right around the same time, ‘Look, I go walk out into Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and my supporters will still be with me.’ And it’s funny: so many things he’s been wrong about, or incoherent about, but in that he was right.”Reading Red Scare, it seems inconceivable such hysteria could have lasted so long, stoked by postwar paranoia about agents of the emerging Russian enemy, reaching sulfurous heights in years shot through with nuclear panic. It seems inconceivable ordinary Americans could have allowed it. To Risen, it’s not inconceivable at all.“The way I always explain it is, ‘Look, America is a big place, and most Americans don’t pay any attention to politics. They have no idea. Most of their interpretation at least of national politics is strictly economic.’”The 1950s were boom years. Now, since Trump’s return to the White House, the economy is shaky but the president has not shouldered the blame.“There are ancillary things,” Risen said. “Immigration as an economic issue. Occasionally a cultural element comes in. Abortion is obviously part of that. But most people, when they think about ‘What does the federal government mean to me?’, they think in economic terms.”As the red scare raged, most Americans simply did not care. Now, Risen said, many persist in thinking: “Well, shouldn’t we have a businessman running the country?”“So that raises the question: now the economy’s tanking, or the markets are tanking, and we may find ourselves in recession, do those people move away from Trump? Or do people go with it?”At long last, sir, have you no currency?Could happen.Risen is 48. He worked at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the New Republic, then at the Times he edited opinion and politics before switching to writing obituaries. Somehow he has written nine books, five on American whiskey and four histories: of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr; of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; of Teddy Roosevelt at war; and now Red Scare.“Postwar American politics and political culture is sort of my lodestone. The red scare seemed a natural fit.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRisen spoke from the Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan. Further uptown, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, protesters rallied for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student with a green card and an American wife, arrested for his role in anti-Israel protests. Spirited to Louisiana, Khalil was charged with no crime. Instead, he was held under an obscure law – from 1952, the heart of the red scare – that allows for the deportation of anyone deemed a threat to US foreign policy.Many fear Khalil is a test case for purges to come.Risen said: “The way they have gone after him, even the tools they’re using, are one and the same with the way they tried to get Harry Bridges, who was an Australian-born labor leader of the west coast longshoremen” in the early 1950s. “Personally, I think Bridges is a hero … He was detained without cause at the start of the Korean war because he was considered a threat to national security. His case went to the supreme court, he won, and he lived a long time.“Obviously there are some differences but it’s hard not to see the same stories playing out now. The Department of Education recently announced a tip line where if you’re a parent and you think some teacher or some librarian is, I don’t want to use the verb, ‘DEI’ … Essentially, it’s: ‘If you just have a complaint about a teacher, in this vein, let us know.’“The same thing existed during during the red scare. The FBI had the Responsibilities Program, where they would take input from grassroots organizations, veterans groups, concerned parents groups, and then they would share information with PTAs, with local school boards. You know: ‘This teacher has a background that’s kind of suspect,’ ‘Here’s a list of books that you want to remove from your library.’ It’s just the same playbook. It’s terrifying to see it play out. And in fact, in some ways, I think it’s much scarier now.”View image in fullscreenAfter the red scare, Republicans marched ever further to the right. There was Richard Nixon, who cut his teeth questioning suspected communists as a congressman in the 50s, scenes retold in Risen’s book. There was Ronald Reagan, who testified before the House un-American activities committee and flirted with extremists. There was Pat Buchanan, who challenged the establishment from the far right, and there was Newt Gingrich, who polarized and radicalized Congress.But, Risen said, “despite everything, there were safeguards” that had ultimately withstood the red scare.“We had a center-right establishment of the Republican party that tolerated but ultimately moved on from the red scare. We had a fairly established media that was credulous and made a lot of mistakes but ultimately was not taken in by the red scare and was willing to call some of the worst red scarers to account. One of the things that came out of the red scare was a stronger awareness of the importance of defending civil liberties. The ACLU and the American Bar Association did not cover themselves in glory during the red scare. But ever since then, groups like that have been much more present and aggressive in terms of defending civil liberties, and so we see that today.“Hopefully it’s enough. I think a lot remains to be seen whether what we’re going through now will be worse than the red scare, but I’m not at all hopeful.”In that fateful hearing in 1954, Joe McCarthy’s own counsel sat at his side. It was Roy Cohn, a ruthless New York lawyer who later became mentor to a young Trump. Risen sees plenty of other parallels between McCarthy and Trump.View image in fullscreen“I spent a lot of time looking at the encomiums to McCarthy when he died, and letters his friends were sharing, and so much of it was the sentiment that McCarthy was the ultimate victim, because McCarthy was the guy who was willing to say the truth, and he was destroyed for it.”Trump also presents himself as both victim and avenger, promising revenge and retribution.“There was around [McCarthy] this idea that it wasn’t enough just to replace the leaders. It wasn’t enough just to control spending. Reform was not enough. The fundamental core of the New Deal” – Franklin Roosevelt’s vast modernization of the US state, from the 1930s – “needed to be thrown in the garbage, and anybody ever connected to any of that needed to be banished.”In the 1950s, that effort failed. In the 2020s, Trump and his mega-donor and aide Elon Musk are trying again – it seems with more success.Risen said: “When you look at not so much Trump but at some of the more systematic thinkers around him, like JD Vance and his circle, like Kevin Roberts, Stephen Miller, I think some of these guys do have a sense of history.”“I don’t think Elon Musk does, necessarily, but he is saying those same things about ‘We need to go in and dismantle, essentially, the New Deal architecture.’ And it’s not just because it’s expensive, it’s because it’s [seen as] un-American and a rot on society. In the 1940s and 50s, the name for this was ‘communism’. In that sense, communism was a red herring. It wasn’t really about communism. It was about progressivism. It was about the New Deal. It’s about this culture in America that was more tolerant, pluralistic, in favor of labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights. That was the target.”During the red scare, in what came to be called “the lavender scare”, gay men were ensnared and ruthlessly ruined.Risen said: “Today, it’s DEI or woke or whatever. But it’s the same thing. It’s not that they’re getting rid of DEI programs, whatever that might mean. They’re mainly getting rid of fundamental civil rights protections or offices that protect civil rights, that are nothing about what they charge.“That is the real game, at heart. It’s what was going on in the red scare.”

      Red Scare is published in the US by Scribner More