Books and Literature

Subterms

    Latest story

    50 Shares42 Views

    Vivek Ramaswamy Is Confused

    by

    The theatrically combative presidential candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy seems to be premised on two messages. One is his disdain for identity politics, which he argues creates a citizenry obsessed with victimhood and a corporate sector in thrall to trendy left-wing obsessions, leaving America trapped in a “cold cultural civil war,” as he put it last month in the first Republican debate. The other is his devotion to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy relentlessly defended in the debate, promising to support the former president, if Trump wins the Republican nomination, or to pardon him, if Ramaswamy wins the White House. He called Trump “the best president of the twenty-first century.”Both these stances, however, are complicated or contradicted by Ramaswamy’s literary trilogy: “Woke, Inc.” (2021), “Nation of Victims” (2022) and “Capitalist Punishment” (2023). In these works, Ramaswamy is more thoughtful, but also more confused, than his smiling, trolly, rapid-fire campaign persona. He can’t seem to decide if woke capitalism is a public-relations ploy or a mortal threat to the republic. And even as he lionizes Trump among his conservative heroes, he writes that Trump’s calls for American greatness degenerated into “just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole.” (Swallowing much of something whole is a typical Ramaswamy hedge, one of several categorical assertions in these books that find room for a little wiggle.)In “Woke, Inc.,” published some seven months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Ramaswamy assails the rise of so-called stakeholder capitalism, the notion that companies should not solely serve the interests of shareholders but should also serve the interests of workers, the environment or society writ vague. The traditional principle of maximizing shareholder value is not just about encouraging corporate greed, he argues, but about keeping capitalists in their lane, making sure that their business judgments do not lapse into moral ones. Yet that is precisely what happens, Ramaswamy complains, when chief executives and investors conspire with activists to push for, say, racial equity audits or socially responsible investing.Here, Ramaswamy struggles to make up his mind. Stakeholder capitalism is a “farce,” he writes, an example of “corporate opportunism” and “self-interest masquerading as morality,” a “do-good smoke screen” through which businesses distract the public from their perfidy. “The social causes simply serve as a form of reputational laundering for those same companies’ profit-seeking,” Ramaswamy maintains, with businesses “performatively one-upping each other to show that they’re the good guys.”But if the whole thing is just a lucrative P.R. scam, then it is hard to see how it is also “the greatest long-run threat of all to American democracy itself,” as Ramaswamy warns readers. On one page, businesses are pushing radical agendas and imposing their elite progressive values on our democratic process; on another, they are just “feigning wokeness” to win favor with consumers, “pretending to care about justice in order to make money.” So, is stakeholder capitalism a punch in the mouth to our nation’s principles or just lip service to justice? In Ramaswamy’s writing, the answer is never quite clear.Even when he is certain that something nefarious is underway, Ramaswamy doesn’t seem quite sure who the bad guys are. He warns that Facebook and Google “have effectively assumed the role of the state itself,” censoring public discourse under the guise of fighting hate speech and misinformation. “The rise of Wokenomics consummates Silicon Valley’s coup over our democracy,” he writes ominously. Yet just a few pages later, readers learn that it is Congress that has “co-opted Silicon Valley” to restrict speech for its own purposes. So, is the tech industry the puppet or the master? Consistency seems irrelevant to Ramaswamy’s scattershot populism. In “Woke, Inc.” there are enough culprits to satisfy everyone.Ramaswamy can be hazy about his own basic tenets. “I don’t believe in ‘systemic racism,’” he declares in the third chapter of “Woke, Inc.” Yet in chapter 14, he acknowledges its reality. “My problem with woke complaints about ‘systemic racism’ isn’t that it doesn’t exist,” he writes. “It’s that too often it’s used as a vague, judgmental catchall phrase for all of America’s woes.” An author’s views can evolve over time, of course, and a politician’s are almost required to do so. It is less common to see them contradicted across the pages of the same book.I don’t know if Ramaswamy has an underlying philosophy or just an underlying shtick, but if one of these books captures it, it is probably “Nation of Victims.” In this book, Ramaswamy laments that Americans have lost their scrappy, underdog attitude and defaulted to a mentality of group identity and collective grievance — an outlook that becomes self-fulfilling. “If we divide the world into black and white, virtuous victims and evil oppressors with no shades of gray, we will create the nation that we see,” he writes.This is not a novel argument, and Ramaswamy highlights the post-Civil War Lost Cause narrative as an early example of the country’s enduring cultural resentments. “Modern America’s victim complex began as a tale of conservative white victimhood after the Civil War,” he writes, only to mutate into “an ongoing story of liberal white victimhood.”Ramaswamy concedes that “the Constitution brought justice to black Americans with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” but since then virtually every possible identity group has been battling for a perch on what he derides as the “victimhood podium.” The result, he concludes, is a nation that has lost confidence in itself — a culture in decline, a less productive economy, a society that produces activists rather than engineers, a country so weakened that it “would almost certainly lose” a naval war with China over Taiwan.This could be the core of Ramaswamy’s political message: He marries anti-woke messages to pro-growth ones and links culture wars at home to shooting wars abroad. If Ramaswamy makes any contribution to the long-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party, it will be in broadening the case against identity politics from the realm of book bans and bathrooms to that of economics and national security.In “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy privileges the misdeeds of the progressive left, which he says is so taken by its own fantasies and slogans that it “replaces the voices of black people themselves” who, he suggests, may want more police presence in their communities rather than less. But his critique encompasses the right as well. “The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives,” he writes, “is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen.” Aside from policy differences with Trump over tariffs and spending, Ramaswamy blasts the former president as a “sore loser,” even likening him to Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor of Georgia who refused to concede her 2018 defeat — and to be clear, in conservative politics, that’s a serious burn. Ramaswamy also writes that the events of Jan. 6 shook his faith in the United States: “Rome fell to invading barbarians, but us Americans have become our own barbarians, sacking ourselves.”These books are not the sanitized autobiographies one usually gets from self-congratulatory business executives or aspirants to high office. Ramaswamy offers some family background to animate his political and cultural awakenings — he was drawn to the expansiveness of capitalism, he reports, in contrast to the rigidity of caste he witnessed in his parents’ India, and his youthful conservatism was in part an “emotive choice” to counter the liberal convictions of his father — but these volumes are far more about principled arguments than personal stories, and he includes an eclectic mix of policy wonkery and moral maxims.Ramaswamy proposes mandatory national service for American high schoolers — he cites Pete Buttigieg’s similar call during his 2020 presidential campaign — and calls for “a hefty inheritance tax with no gaping loopholes” to prevent America’s meritocratic winners from morphing into aristocratic ones. He emphasizes the need for stronger job retraining programs for displaced blue-collar workers, the deregulation of housing markets and the easing of professional licensing requirements. He urges companies to prioritize “diversity of thought” among their employees rather than a diversity “crudely measured by appearance or accent.” And he longs for a “Manhattan Project” (an obligatory reference for policy mavens) for the national semiconductor industry to raise America’s economic and military competitiveness.Particularly striking are Ramaswamy’s thoughts on how to move the country beyond the identity conflicts that, in his view, erode our sense of nationhood. “The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim,” he writes. Our true selves do not equal our superficial identities, Ramaswamy insists, and we become better people when we see ourselves and others as individuals with the power to direct their own lives. “When you free yourself from the illusion that you’re a mere victim, you simultaneously free yourself from seeing others as mere oppressors,” he writes. This plea for collective forgiveness is a welcome break from the hyper-pugilism of Ramaswamy’s campaign appearances, even if his harsh exchanges on the Republican debate stage suggest that his conciliatory side has not yet taken hold.“Capitalist Punishment,” the latest and slimmest of his books, is something of an outlier in the Ramaswamy canon. It is narrowly cast, focusing on his criticism of investment funds that adopt E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) principles to guide their strategies. Here, Ramaswamy’s transgressors are the investment firms BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. “The Big Three are becoming a threat to democracy,” he contends, because they impose social-activist values onto the industries in which they hold significant positions, including the oil and banking sectors, and because pension fund managers adopt E.S.G. investing even if individual pensioners may be ignorant of (or hostile to) such principles. “When elites force their values onto everyone else,” he writes, ordinary people lose trust in important institutions. “And that, in turn, makes society fall apart.”As in his other works, some tensions emerge in “Capitalist Punishment.” When Ramaswamy complains that E.S.G. investing is radically transforming corporate America but also revels in the fact that E.S.G. funds are “underperforming” and “dropping like flies,” it’s hard to tell if E.S.G. investing is pervasive or in decline. Yet, near the end of the book, readers gain some clarity on Ramaswamy’s own interests and motives.He calls for antitrust lawsuits against the big three and suggests that Black Rock break itself into two smaller firms. Ever helpful, he also offers an alternative for investors — an investment firm called Strive, co-founded in 2022 by Ramaswamy himself. And here the book reads almost like a fund prospectus:Strive’s mandate to underlying companies is simple: focus on excellence over politics; provide excellent products and services to your customers; and maximize value for your shareholders by doing that rather than advancing any particular social or political agenda.Though he retains a multimillion-dollar stake in the company, Ramaswamy resigned from the board and relinquished his day-to-day responsibilities at Strive earlier this year because he was running for president. Even so, depending on the standards to which one holds politicians, Ramaswamy’s self-serving approach in “Capitalist Punishment” may be disheartening or pedestrian. At the very least, encountering it does persuade me, as Ramaswamy argues in these books, that there are plenty of business people out there “pretending to care about justice in order to make money.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    More stories

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Does Therapy Culture Help or Hurt Us?

      by

      More from our inbox:Trump Pardoning Himself? An ‘Appalling Idea’Trump’s WeightImproving Access to E-BooksGraphicaArtis/Getty ImagesTo the Editor: Re “Hey, America, Grow Up!” by David Brooks (column, Aug. 11), about how an emphasis on trauma makes adults immature:As a psychiatrist, I feel that Mr. Brooks makes several valid points regarding trauma but fails ultimately to thread the needle.A good psychiatrist or therapist identifies the real trauma in a patient’s past — typically from events in childhood at the hands of parents or other family members — while simultaneously discouraging the kind of victim mind-set that displaces past pain onto present-day scapegoats.The goal is to illuminate the real trauma, which requires re-evaluating what is often an idealized remembrance of one’s upbringing, so that the patient can stop projecting malice onto anyone and instead regain a sense of agency. As the saying goes, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.If we fail as a culture to acknowledge the well-established long-term consequences, both physical and psychological, of legitimate trauma, we will wind up creating more people who identify as victims, not fewer.Christopher BaileyKirkland, Wash.To the Editor:One thing David Brooks’s good column leaves untouched is how much resistance to the hyperinflation of “trauma” there has been among psychotherapists themselves.In 1967, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, wrote that the concept had become so “carelessly used” that its “blurring” could lead to “abandonment and loss of a valuable concept.” In 1978, psychiatrist Henry Krystal, an Auschwitz survivor and founder of contemporary trauma theory, said flatly that the use of the term “has become so loose that it has become virtually useless.”Of course, “trauma culture” has a life of its own, independent of psychiatric or psychological knowledge. And no small number of therapists have fully cashed in from Trauma, Inc., which is, indeed, big business.But my sense is that, even in the culture at large, “trauma” hype may have run its course. What follows may be greater “maturity,” as Mr. Brooks and many others would hope, or it may be just the next form of mishegoss.Henry GreenspanAnn Arbor, Mich.The writer is an emeritus psychologist at the University of Michigan.To the Editor:Wouldn’t it be nice if David Brooks’s ideas about how people should “throw off some of the tenets of the therapeutic culture” and “weave their stable selves through the commitments to and attachments with others” in order to build a culture of maturity were realistic?But try telling that to people who have grown up in poverty, who have never had adequate health insurance or medical care, who grew up in families rife with violence and abuse, who live in communities with chronic gun violence, and who have to drop out of high school to give birth to a baby.What can you weave in there? And who can you attach to when your life and the lives of those around you are a mess, and you live in a world that you have little hope of escaping?Debra KuppersmithDobbs Ferry, N.Y.The writer is a psychoanalyst.To the Editor:David Brooks made some excellent observations about our country’s growing narcissism. But he missed a key prescription for change: helping Americans develop a sense of purpose.This starts with treating challenges as temporary setbacks and harnessing our talents and efforts in the service of something bigger than ourselves. We need to lose the “me” and find the “we.”Studies show that people who feel a sense of purpose in their lives — through family, friends, work or community — are overall more resilient and report a greater sense of well-being. This message feels especially urgent for adolescent girls in America who are experiencing record levels of isolation, depression and suicidal thoughts.Until Americans commit to a purpose-driven mind-set, we will continue to wallow in our current obsession with victimization and search out cheap ways to validate our self-worth.Suzanne ChazinChappaqua, N.Y.Trump Pardoning Himself? An ‘Appalling Idea’Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor: It has become commonplace to suggest that one difference between a state and a federal conviction of Donald Trump is that Mr. Trump could not pardon himself from a state conviction if he is elected president, implying that he could pardon his own federal offenses. It’s long past time to stop giving this appalling discussion of self-pardons any air.A president pardoning himself for his own crimes is the very definition of unchecked power. Revolutionaries called it tyranny, which in this context is a better word. The idea that our executive has so much power that the rule of law does not apply to him because he could forgive himself betrays what the Revolutionary War was about.The Constitution separated the powers of the government into three branches. It empowers Congress with the legislative power and the courts with the judicial power. The idea that a president could make himself immune from both other branches — in the furtherance of a crime — is inexcusable.Mr. Trump has floated this idea before and some allies are resurrecting it again. It’s born in the brevity of the Constitution’s pardon power. But it flouts both the rule of law and the separation of powers essential to the Constitution. We should be outraged.Andrew J. KennedyMonroeville, Pa.The writer is a lawyer.Trump’s WeightTo the Editor: Re “Trump Is Booked at Jail in Atlanta in Election Case” (front page, Aug. 25):Donald Trump weighs only 215 pounds? Forget the mug shot T-shirts; his campaign should be selling whatever brand of scale he’s using.Alan RutkowskiVictoria, British ColumbiaImproving Access to E-BooksAnn Johansson for The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “What Does It Mean to Own a Book?” (Business, Aug. 13):I would like to thank David Streitfeld for his piece shining a light on the innovative and visionary work done by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive. In the discussion about the complexity of providing digital access, the work of our nation’s libraries and nonprofits like the Digital Public Library of America that support them should not be overlooked.Public libraries across the country offered access to over a billion digital e-books and half a billion digital audiobooks in fiscal year 2021. They circulated 460 million digital items and spent nearly $600 million to provide that access. And these numbers continue to grow.Mr. Streitfeld rightly points out that many titles are increasingly expensive for libraries to acquire, especially those from the “big five” publishers, which only offer licenses that are limited to a certain number of loans or length of time. However, the Digital Public Library of America works with hundreds of midsize and independent publishers to offer more reasonable terms including, for example, a perpetual one-user-at-a-time license that functions much like library ownership of a print book.Right now, legislators in several states are working with librarians to draft legislation that would enshrine the rights of libraries to acquire digital content on reasonable terms.Libraries need our support to ensure that as the transition into a digital world continues, access to knowledge becomes more and not less accessible.John S. BrackenChicagoThe writer is the executive director of the nonprofit Digital Public Library of America. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      What Alex Jones, Woody Allen and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Share

      by

      Skyhorse Publishing has built a reputation for taking on authors that other houses avoid. And its founder has helped Kennedy mount a bid for president.Skyhorse Publishing is not a large company, but it has an outsize reputation for taking on authors that others avoid. Its list includes figures on the left, the right and those outside the mainstream altogether, like Alex Jones, the conspiracy broadcaster whose recent book examines “the global elite’s international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet.”What has garnered significantly less attention is the way in which the publisher’s founder, Tony Lyons, has supported the political ambitions of one of his authors: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign for president has been rife with misinformation, including false theories about coronavirus vaccines. Mr. Lyons is a chairman of a super PAC supporting Mr. Kennedy. Under his direction, Skyhorse has donated $150,000 to the group.Mr. Lyons casts his support for Mr. Kennedy as an extension of his mission as publisher: to defend against what he considers censorship. “Bobby Kennedy says this line now and then,” Mr. Lyons said. “Name a time in history where the people advocating for censorship were the good guys.”At a moment when the country is deeply polarized, Mr. Lyons stands out among publishers for being more willing — and, because of the structure of the private company he controls, more able — to take risks. Skyhorse’s titles range from anodyne cooking and gardening books to works that court controversy or promote theories that have been debunked.Its best-selling book ever was Mr. Kennedy’s “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which was released in 2021 and makes baseless claims against Dr. Fauci, accusing him of having “truly a dark agenda.” Mr. Lyons said it has sold more than 1.1 million copies across all formats.“He is unique in the way he questions and challenges industry norms,” David Steinberger, a longtime publishing executive, said of Lyons. “Nothing Tony does surprises me.”Mr. Lyons has also supported the political ambitions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Skyhorse author whose books, like his political campaign, can be sources of misinformation.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn recent years, publishing decisions that might not have seemed controversial in the past have incited a backlash. After Simon & Schuster signed a two-book deal with former Vice President Mike Pence in 2021, more than 200 employees, joined by thousands of writers and other publishing professionals, signed a petition demanding the deal be canceled. Simon & Schuster published the first book in the deal, a memoir, anyway.In instances where other publishers decided to drop a book, Skyhorse has sometimes stepped in. Hachette canceled the publication of a memoir in 2020 by Woody Allen, called “Apropos of Nothing,” in the face of allegations that Allen molested his adopted daughter when she was a child. Allen has denied the allegations and was not charged after two investigations. Skyhorse picked up the memoir and published it weeks later. The book became a New York Times best seller.Mr. Lyons takes pride in publishing across the political spectrum, and beyond.Last year, as several publishers rushed out their own version of the Jan. 6 report, Skyhorse put out two versions: one with a foreword by Elizabeth Holtzman, a Democrat and former United States representative from New York, and another with a foreword by Darren Beattie, who was a speechwriter for former President Donald J. Trump.This year, Skyhorse published “The War on Ivermectin,” by Dr. Pierre Kory, which argues the anti-parasitic drug could have ended the Covid-19 pandemic. (Clinical trials have found that ivermectin is not effective against Covid-19.)Mr. Lyons said he believes the pharmaceutical industry has too much power over scientific research and federal regulators, and so he approaches established science with suspicion. This wariness, even in the face of widespread agreement and convincing evidence, informs his approach to publishing.“Time after time, people have generally agreed about things that turned out to be demonstrably untrue,” Mr. Lyons said, citing as an example the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a claim that served a basis for justifying the U.S. invasion, and which turned out to be false. “That’s a much bigger danger than the danger of people being wrong.”But there is at least one line Mr. Lyons said he would not cross. Though Skyhorse publishes Alex Jones, he said it would not publish a book by him about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which Mr. Jones has falsely argued was a government hoax.Christopher Finan, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, said he supports Mr. Lyons’s publishing program, and the coalition welcomed Mr. Lyons onto its board this summer.Mr. Lyons’s philosophy reflects the coalition’s, Mr. Finan said: “Nobody has a monopoly on the truth.”The publisher puts out novels, thrillers, cookbooks and other workaday titles alongside books that other publishers have preferred to keep at arm’s length. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSkyhorse, which published about 450 titles last year, also puts out novels and thrillers, along with books about sports and graphic design. Much of its business is supported by an undramatic collection of older books — reliable sellers that include a pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, a series of cookbooks called “Fix-It and Forget-It” and a book titled “Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills,” which offers instructions on activities like weaving a rag rug and raising chickens.Mark Gorton, an investor and entrepreneur, is a chairman, along with Mr. Lyons, of American Values 2024, the PAC supporting Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Gorton said his own political evolution away from the mainstream began about 16 years ago while he was reading a book about former President Lyndon B. Johnson. As he made his way through the book, he thought, “Oh my God, Lyndon Johnson is behind the J.F.K. assassination.” From there, he began researching what he described as “various deep state crimes,” and by the time he met Mr. Lyons many years later, he estimated he had 30 Skyhorse books on his shelves.Now, Mr. Gorton said, he acknowledges that his worldview — which includes believing “that 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government” — is “almost on a different plane from most people.” (There is no evidence that the U.S. government orchestrated the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, nor that it was involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.)“When people are like, ‘Are you left or right?’” Mr. Gorton said, “It’s like, I’m up when everyone else is down. It’s not even the same scale.”Mr. Lyons said he first met Mr. Kennedy about 12 years ago at a speech Mr. Kennedy was giving about thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in some vaccines, which Mr. Kennedy has falsely linked to brain disorders and autism. Numerous studies have failed to support a connection between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. The preservative was removed from most childhood vaccines in 2001, yet autism diagnoses have continued to rise.The two men connected over the issue. Mr. Lyons said a member of his family had had a seizure after a vaccine, which he believes led to brain damage and an autism diagnosis.“It has definitely influenced me,” he said. “If you see something with your own eyes, then you see newspaper after newspaper that says it never happens and that anybody who thinks that it happens is crazy, then that does change you in some way.”In 2014, Mr. Lyons published a book edited by Mr. Kennedy on the subject, called “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak.”Industry executives said that while Mr. Lyons’s role as a chairman of the American Values 2024 super PAC was unusual, it did not appear to be unethical. He is also not the country’s only politically engaged publisher. Rupert Murdoch is deeply involved in Republican politics and is a major shareholder of News Corp, which is the parent company of HarperCollins.Mr. Lyons takes pride in publishing across the political spectrum. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMark Gottlieb, a literary agent with Trident Media Group who has sold many titles to Skyhorse over the years, said that Skyhorse fills a critical niche in the industry.“Skyhorse is a safety net for publishing for voices that would otherwise get canceled,” Mr. Gottlieb said. He has sold to Skyhorse illustrated books, thrillers, memoirs and some nonfiction books that might not have easily found a home elsewhere, such as “Gender Madness,” a book by Oli London, a TikTok personality who writes about struggling with gender identity and why, after living as a trans woman, he decided to begin identifying as a man again.“They don’t publish any one political view,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “They’ll show the complete spectrum.”Mr. Lyons said that spectrum includes many Skyhorse titles with which he personally disagrees. Among them, Mr. Lyons said, was “Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect,” which he described as a book that “‘debunks’ many of the arguments in other Skyhorse titles.”Mr. Lyons wrote in a text message that he found the book to be “interesting and helpful,” but, he added, “not quite right for me — since I’m proud and excited to live in and explore and learn from the rabbit hole, a place of countercultural ideas, fascinating characters, mind-boggling uncertainty and the possibility of progress.”Alexandra Alter More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis Financial Disclosure Puts Him in the Millionaires Club

      by

      The Florida governor, who has spent almost his entire career in public service, made more than $1 million from his best-selling memoir.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who often speaks of his blue-collar roots, is now a millionaire, thanks to a $1.25 million book deal that he signed with HarperCollins in anticipation of his run for president.Mr. DeSantis saw his net worth skyrocket to $1.17 million by the end of 2022, up from roughly $319,000 in 2021, according to a financial disclosure filed on Friday with the Florida Commission on Ethics. The governor’s memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” was published in late February as a prelude to the presidential campaign he announced in May. It became a New York Times nonfiction best seller, with more than 94,000 copies sold in its first week. (Literary reviews were less kind.)Before declaring that he would run for president, Mr. DeSantis took a series of trips around the country to meet local Republicans and promote his book. “And so my book, I think it’s out there, just so you know, No. 1 book in America for nonfiction,” a smiling Mr. DeSantis said at one such stop in Iowa this spring. “There’s a lot of people that aren’t happy about that, I can tell you.”Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, had seen his personal wealth hold relatively steady in the years since he was first elected governor in 2018. At the end of that year, he reported his net worth at around $284,000.As governor, Mr. DeSantis received an annual salary of $141,400.20 last year. Besides his salary and the book deal, he reported receiving no other income in 2022, according to his state financial disclosure. His assets included a USAA bank account with slightly more than $1 million, as well as a federal Thrift Savings Plan and a state retirement account. Mr. DeSantis, a Navy veteran, has spent almost all of his career in government service. His only liability is listed as nearly $19,000 in student loan debt.Mr. DeSantis’s straightforward finances offer a contrast to the sprawling commercial empire of his main rival for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump, who is well ahead of Mr. DeSantis in national polls. Mr. Trump, whose father was a successful real estate developer, grew up wealthy.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis highlights his far humbler roots.“I was a blue-collar kid growing up. My parents were working class,” he told a crowd in North Carolina this month, adding that he had worked low-wage jobs to put himself through school.“And I only did that because I believe in America,” Mr. DeSantis continued. “You work hard and you make the most of your God-given ability, you’re going to have the chance to do big things. And I wonder how many people believe that nowadays.” More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Burhan Sönmez on the Tensions Between Politics and Art in Turkey

      by

      Burhan Sönmez, who is president of PEN international, discusses the tension between politics and art and the role of literature in authoritarian societies.The momentous Turkish presidential election, whose second round will take place on Sunday, has more than just geopolitical consequences; it is a watershed for culture as well. Since 2016, after a failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government here has cracked down on artists, writers, filmmakers and academics, who have experienced censorship, job losses and a climate of fear.For the novelist Burhan Sönmez, who is part of the country’s ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are only the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between Turkish power and Turkish art.Born outside Ankara in 1965, where his first language was Kurdish, he worked as a human rights lawyer but went into exile in Britain after a police assault. He has written five novels, including the prizewinning “Istanbul Istanbul,” “Labyrinth” and “Stone and Shadow,” newly out in English by Other Press. His novels delve into imprisonment and memory, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jorge Luis Borges.
      Sönmez now lives in Istanbul and Cambridge, and in 2021 he was named president of PEN International, where he has been an outspoken defender of freedom of expression in Turkey and elsewhere.I spoke to Sönmez over video a few days after the first round of the Turkish general election, in which Erdogan finished a half-point shy of an absolute majority. This interview has been edited and condensed.Istanbul has always been a city of arrivals. When did you first come here?During the military-coup era, the 1980s. I was born and grew up in a small village in central Turkey. It’s in the middle of the countryside, like a desert village, without electricity. I moved to Istanbul to study law, and the next phase of my life began after I went to exile in Britain. So now I can combine those different spaces — small village, big Istanbul and then Europe. They all come together and sometimes they separate.Frequently, there’s an indeterminacy of setting in your novels, not only of geography but of time. You rarely use the obvious tells of technology or current affairs that some authors use to ground a reader in time.Particularly in my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I didn’t state a specific year, or period, when the events take place. When people read it, everyone feels that this is the story of their generation.For better and for worse!Yes. But, you know, only a naïve writer would feel proud of that. You would say, “OK, I am reflecting the feelings of different generations in a single novel.” In fact, it comes from the society itself in Turkey. Every generation has gone through the same suffering, the same problems, same oppression, same pain. So it is not a literary talent, actually, to bring all those times into a single story.In “Istanbul, Istanbul,” the narrators are prisoners, held without charge in underground cells, who tell one another stories. What their stories sketch in aggregate is a kind of dream-state Istanbul, where freedom is always abbreviated but with which freethinkers and artists remain hopelessly in love.This really started in the 1850s, when the first liberal intellectuals were oppressed by the Ottoman sultan and went into European exile. When we look at this history over time, 150 or 170 years, we see that, with every decade, governments used the same methods of oppression against writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals.But the tradition of oppression also created a tradition of resistance. And now look: After 20 years of the rule of Erdogan, still nearly half of society is against him strongly. We haven’t finished. This is partly our history of resistance.Turkey, like America, has a strong political fault line between the cities and the countryside. But your novels have crisscrossed from Istanbul to rural Anatolia and back.Especially in my last novel, “Stone and Shadow,” I wrote about this, comparing the eastern, middle and also the western part of Turkey over the last 100 years.What’s the difference between life in a small village in rural Turkey and in Istanbul? You could say it’s the difference between living in a small hut with a gas lamp and living on a street with flashing neon lights. Two different worlds, two different eras.But you should understand: Istanbul is now also part of rural Turkey. There has been a huge migration from the countryside. When I went to study in Istanbul, the population was about five million. Now it’s 17 million. It’s not easy for a big city to create a new citizen, a new cultural spirit.On that subject, one of the most disturbing themes of this election has been the demonization around refugees. I wonder how it sounds to you, as a former refugee yourself.The sad thing for Turkey now, we’ve seen a new rise of nationalism — in the color of racism, actually — against immigrants. There’s open racism against Syrians and Afghan people in Turkey. And every side, every political platform, has different ways of legitimizing this.Right-wingers say, “These people are underdeveloped Arabs. This is a backward race.” From secular progressive people, you hear, “Oh, they’re right-wing Islamist militants. They are here to support Erdogan, and to invade our country, to turn it into an Islamic republic.” In every case, racism or hatred of immigrants is on the top of the agenda.Nationalism now dominates almost every political movement.Yet there’s a rare lightness and freedom to your characterization of these political themes. “Labyrinth,” the story of a musician who loses his memory after jumping into the Bosporus, barely hints at the upheavals of the Erdogan years, when the amnesiac sees a torn poster of the president and confuses him for a sultan.We know the difference between art and journalism. Journalism speaks directly. Speaking this different language of art, we feel that we are no longer in the field of society, of politics. A political matter or a historical fact is just a color in my novel. That is real power. When I write a novel, I feel that I unite the past and the future. Because the past is a story and the future is a dream.Has there been a self-censorship of artists and writers in Turkey over the last few years?Well, first, every year more than 500 new Turkish novels are being published. When I was at the university, the number of new novels published in Turkish was about 15 or 20. That’s an enormous difference.With the young generation, I see that they are brave. Despite all this oppression, this danger of going to prison or being unemployed, young people are writing fearlessly. They are writing about Kurdish issues, about women’s issues, about L.G.B.T. issues, about political crimes in Turkey.Hundreds of writers are like this: writing openly, and at some point a bit dangerously, for themselves. This is something of which we should be proud.As president of PEN International, you have a particularly close view of the state of free expression. Have things gotten any better in Turkey since the crackdowns of 2016-2017, when thousands of academics and journalists were arrested or purged?No, no, it’s not better. In Turkey, we never got to distinguish between bad and good. It was always: bad or worse.In Turkey, PEN International has been supporting writers in prison. For myself, being a lawyer, I have the opportunity to go to prisons. Anytime I go to Turkey, I use this advantage. I go and I see Selahattin Demirtas, or Osman Kavala, so many people. It is sad to see great people are still in prison.But also it is great to see that we have solidarity. At the end of my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I used an epigraph by a Persian Sufi from the Middle Ages. He says, “Hell is not the place where we suffer, it’s the place where no one hears us suffering.” I know that if I am arrested, I will never be left alone.I probably shouldn’t ask you what you expect when Turks vote in the presidential runoff next Sunday. …No, you should ask. I think we’ll win. I’m too optimistic in life, and very naïve. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,’ by Kerry Howley

      by

      In “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” Kerry Howley explores how the erosion of privacy has fueled conspiracy theories and the national security state.BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS: A Journey Through the Deep State, by Kerry HowleyThe people in Kerry Howley’s new book include fabulists, truth tellers, combatants, whistle-blowers. Like many of us, they have left traces of themselves in the digital ether by making a phone call, texting a friend, looking up something online. Certain conveniences have become so frictionless that we reflexively entrust devices with mundane yet intimate secrets: group-chat gossip, numbers of steps taken, dumb selfies.“It is our fate to live in the age of the indelible,” Howley writes in “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” her account of the national security state and the people entangled in it. “It’s best to just take another photograph. Keep building up the database. Throw it into the cloud, whatever that is.”Howley is a writer for New York magazine and the author of “Thrown” (2014), a book about mixed martial arts fighters (real) that was narrated by a philosophy student named Kit (not real). As far as I can tell, “Bottoms Up” seems to be narrated by Howley — though who she “really is” and, by extension, who any of us “really are” is something that this book encourages us not to take for granted.The book is riveting and darkly funny and, in all senses of the word, unclassifiable. Howley writes about privacy and its absence; about hiding and leaking and secrets and betrayal. But she also writes about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened and codified into data that can be turned into portraits of static, permanent beings — creatures who would be unrecognizable to ourselves.“With endless information comes the ability to take information from its context, to tell stories perfectly matched to the intentions of the teller, freed from the complex texture of reality,” Howley writes. Countering that slide toward bland propaganda, “Bottoms Up” returns information to its context, capturing as much as possible the texture of reality, showing us how bewildering it often is.She reintroduces us to figures like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and John Walker Lindh. We revisit the case of John Kiriakou, the ex-C.I.A. officer who disclosed on television that the American government had waterboarded (that is, tortured) a detainee. Kiriakou would become the first C.I.A. officer convicted of a leak. He later took a job at the Russian propaganda outfit Sputnik Radio.Kerry Howley, the author of “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs.” Jordan GeigerBut at the center of this book is Reality Winner (“her real name, let’s move past it now”), who was 9 years old on 9/11. What happened to Winner is the point on which a number of the book’s themes converge. She joined the Air Force at 18, becoming a linguist who spoke Dari and Pashto. She later worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. In 2017 she was arrested for mailing five printed pages of classified information to The Intercept that detailed Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections.Howley got to know Winner and her family, depicting a young woman who “took ideas in their fullness, ignorant of their social context, and therefore radically open to argument.” Winner worked as a translator for the drone program while teaching yoga and worrying about global warming. “She was not on a team,” Howley writes. The book suggests it was this — the fact that nothing Winner did was easily amenable to the narrative of a particular side — that eventually did her in.Winner sent the classified information to The Intercept because she visited the site for news; she knew that some of its journalists were skeptical about the allegation of Russian meddling, and she wanted to show them evidence of the meddling. Howley explains, step-by-step, how The Intercept bungled the handling of those five pages, neglecting to consult its own first-rate digital security experts, eventually showing the document — creases and watermarks intact, betraying the source — to the N.S.A. for verification. “It would prove extremely unfortunate for Reality that the audience who might be most interested in and moved by her case was largely captured by a publication embarrassed by it,” Howley notes.It would also prove extremely unfortunate for Reality that the American government used her work for the American government against her. “It had taught her obscure languages,” Howley writes, “knowledge of which it now implied was dangerous.” A note Winner had made about wanting to “burn the White House down” was taken as proof of malevolent intent, omitting the “ha, ha” that followed it. (Winner later wondered if she would have fared better with an “lol jk.”) She was sentenced to 63 months — “the longest sentence ever handed down for an Espionage Act conviction.” The government assembled the fragments from Winner’s life and projected a story into the absences, essentially creating what Howley elsewhere calls a “fantasy built on solid ground.”This warped kind of world-building bears more than a passing resemblance to what conspiracy theorists do. So it’s fitting that the title “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs” comes from a 2014 viral video of a Christian woman at a conference who presents a (remarkably polished and assured) case that Monster Energy drinks are a vehicle for Satan. From there it’s just a short crawl to QAnon’s elaborate nightmares about Satan-worshiping pedophiles.The arc of Howley’s extraordinary book feels both startling and inevitable; of course a journey through the deep state would send her down the rabbit hole. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a congresswoman from Georgia, said in 2017. How’s that for the banality of evil? As Howley puts it, “True believers speak of Satanism with the bored fluency of someone selling condos.”But it’s not as if QAnon has had to make up its nonsense out of whole cloth. Its propagation also relies on the not uncommon impulse to worry for one’s children. It was only toward the end of the book that I noticed how children were a recurrent presence — Howley’s, her friend’s, those of a camera assistant in Baghdad killed by an American strike.Howley learned she was pregnant while reporting the book. “I despaired many times, in the writing, about my ability to protect the thing I was growing,” she says. She was immersed in a world “that had forgotten what it was like to construct a self in the dark.” We become ourselves by shedding our past selves — but now those discarded selves are recorded somewhere, potentially living longer than we do. In her acknowledgments, Howley ends with a note to her children that could serve as a blessing for us all: “May you be only as remembered as you wish.”BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS: A Journey Through the Deep State | By Kerry Howley | 233 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28 More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      The Vice President Question: The Stakes Are High

      by

      More from our inbox:Mike Pence, It’s Time ‘to Do the Right Thing’What Chris Rock Gets to BeStains Left on a Rare TextFamily Values? We Need to Talk About School Shootings. Illustration by Zisiga Mukulu/The New York Times; photograph by Leigh Vogel/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Voters Should Pick the Vice President,” by Greg Craig (Opinion guest essay, March 5):Mr. Craig’s article raises a larger question. The vice-presidential nominees of the two major parties are too often chosen largely or entirely because of their perceived ability to help elect their presidential running mate, rather than an apparent ability to act as president if needed.Considering the stakes, the main or sole criterion in selecting a vice-presidential nominee should be that person’s capacity to immediately and competently step into the president’s shoes, if required.Just in the last century, Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan all labored under the specters of age, infirmity or both. This clearly demonstrates the national interest in vice-presidential nominees having the qualifications, experience, health and ability to competently represent the country as a whole.If a vice-presidential nominee is also a plausible national candidate in her or his own right, all the better, and having a nominee of such stature should benefit his or her party and the ticket.Over the last 50 years, some vice presidents, such as Spiro Agnew (crook), Dan Quayle (lightweight) and Dick Cheney (unelectable) were unqualified, and Mike Pence seems marginal. Lyndon B. Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore and Joe Biden were clearly qualified, reflecting positively on those who chose them.The question for whoever chooses vice-presidential nominees should always be “Can this person competently lead the country?” — not “Will this person help our party get elected?”Anders I. OuromVancouver, British ColumbiaTo the Editor:I’m very grateful for “Voters Should Pick the Vice President.” Greg Craig has raised perhaps the most significant and worrying issue, however delicate, of the Biden candidacy.Given the entirely realistic concerns over President Biden’s age and chances of dying in office in a second term (and I write as an 87-year-old in decent health), the choice of a running mate shouldn’t be a reflexive decision.It should be one requiring a great deal of thought, consultation and polling about who could handle the most demanding of offices in these difficult and perilous times — and whom a wide spectrum of Democratic voters see as the most convincing possibility as their next president.Barbara QuartNew YorkTo the Editor:As our octogenarian president ponders another presidential run, he needs to consider replacing his 2020 running mate. It’s a delicate subject, sure to arouse fierce opposition within the Democratic Party (however it’s accomplished).Forget loyalty, tradition or popularity. In 2024, the top priority for selecting the second-highest elected official in the country should be proven foreign policy experience.President Biden has an age problem that he can’t control. It will be a major campaign issue that will only place greater emphasis on who would be next in line for the presidency.Continued support for Ukraine (including maintaining the broad coalition of European and NATO nations forged by President Biden) and other brewing major-power standoffs demand a vice president with longstanding, first-rate diplomatic skills.Replace Kamala Harris with Susan Rice, the longtime diplomat and policy adviser. It’s time to dispel conventional wisdom and go bold.Carl R. RameyGainesville, Fla.Mike Pence, It’s Time ‘to Do the Right Thing’ Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Asks Judge to Block Pence’s Testimony to Grand Jury” (news article, nytimes.com, March 4):There is no doubt that former Vice President Mike Pence did the right thing (and his constitutional duty) by certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden.Now is the time for Mr. Pence to do the right thing by honoring the Justice Department’s subpoena to testify about his knowledge of the events before and after Jan. 6. Mr. Pence says he will fight the subpoena, citing specious legal arguments. But why?Mr. Pence, you know what former President Donald Trump did and did not do. Tell us. It is your duty as a citizen, and it is the right thing to do.William D. ZabelNew YorkThe writer is a lawyer, the chairman of Immigrant Justice Corps and the chairman emeritus of Human Rights First.To the Editor:Re “Pence Says That History Will Judge Trump” (news article, March 13):The shortcoming of former Vice President Mike Pence’s pronouncement that “history will hold Donald Trump accountable” for the former president’s lead in fomenting the violent Capitol insurrection is obvious.History’s verdict takes a long while, and it is rarely unanimous and subject to revisionism.Mr. Trump and his minions must pay the price now, and Mr. Pence should render an unequivocal verdict to that end, instead of punting into history.Justice delayed is justice denied, especially in this case.Lawrence FreemanAlameda, Calif.What Chris Rock Gets to Be Illustration by Shoshana Schultz/The New York Times; photograph by Kirill Bichutsky, via Netflix, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Chris Rock Looks Very Small Right Now,” by Roxane Gay (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, March 11):Chris Rock’s recent Netflix special certainly deserves critique, but Ms. Gay’s article gets one thing very wrong. As the target of another man’s violence, Mr. Rock is not responsible for entertaining us with his response to that attack, nor redeeming himself with the right joke.He gets to just be angry.Catherine HodesFlorence, Mass.Stains Left on a Rare TextTo glove, or not to glove? For rare book librarians, there’s no question. The best option is (almost) always clean, dry hands.Chris Ratcliffe/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:“For Rare Book Librarians, It’s Gloves Off. Seriously” (Arts, March 11) notes that stains left on a rare book tell us something about who has used it in the past.I was once privileged to see the original Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest extant Passover Haggadahs. It dates to the 14th century.I was deeply moved to see this ancient text. But what I remember best were the wine stains on some of the pages. Clearly, long before this book had become a priceless object listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, someone had used it at a Seder and had, as still happens in the 21st century, spilled their wine on it.Deborah E. LipstadtWashingtonThe writer is the professor of Holocaust history, currently on leave from Emory University.Family Values? We Need to Talk About School Shootings. Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “The Party of Family Values Should Truly Value Families,” by Patrick T. Brown (Opinion guest essay, March 9):The idea of a political “parents’ party” may be a good one, but the total absence of any discussion regarding school shootings is glaring. Republicans won’t be much of a parents’ party if they can’t figure out how to deal with an issue that parents and their children think about every day.Jeff WelchLivingston, Mont. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Ron DeSantis ‘The Courage to Be Free’: Review

      by

      In his new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” the Florida governor and potential Republican presidential candidate offers a template for governing based on an expansive vision of executive power.THE COURAGE TO BE FREE: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, by Ron DeSantisAs governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been casting himself as a Trump-like pugilist. But the overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.Not that he admits any of this, peppering “The Courage to Be Free” with frequent eruptions about “the legacy media” and “runaway wokeness.” But all the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core. A former military prosecutor, DeSantis is undeniably diligent and disciplined. “The Courage to Be Free” resounds with evidence of his “hard work” (a favorite mantra), showing him poring over Florida’s laws and constitution in order to understand “the various pressure points in the system” and “how to leverage my authority to advance our agenda through that system.” Even the title, with its awkward feint at boldness while clinging to the safety of cliché, suggests the anxiety of an ambitious politician who really, really wants to run for president in 2024 and knows he needs the grievance vote, but is also trying his best to tiptoe around the Trump dragon.“The Courage to Be Free” resounds with evidence of DeSantis’s “hard work” (a favorite mantra).What a difference a dozen years make. Back in 2011, a year before DeSantis first ran for Congress, he published “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” — an obvious dig at Barack Obama, whom DeSantis lambasted for his “thin résumé” and “egotism” and “immense self-regard.” It was a curious book, full of high-toned musings about “the Framers’ wisdom” and “the Madisonian-designed political apparatus.”His new book will leave some supporters, who have encouraged DeSantis to “humanize himself” for a national audience, sorely disappointed. In his acknowledgments, he thanks “a hardworking team of literary professionals who were critical to telling the Florida story,” but presumably those professionals could only do so much with the material they were given. For the most part, “The Courage to Be Free” is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.DeSantis’s attempts at soaring rhetoric are mostly too leaden to get off the ground. “During times of turmoil,” he intones, “people want leaders who are willing to speak the truth, stand for what is right and demonstrate the courage necessary to lead.” Of his childhood baseball team making the Little League World Series, he says: “What I came to understand about the experience was less about baseball than it was about life. It was proof that hard work can pay off, and that achieving big goals was possible.” You have to imagine that DeSantis, a double-barreled Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law School), put a bit more verve into his admissions essays. At around 250 pages, this isn’t a particularly long book, but it’s padded with such banalities.Much of it is given over to laying out what he calls “Florida’s blueprint for America’s revival,” or, as he puts it in his generic summary: “Be willing to lead, have the courage of your convictions, deliver for your constituents and reap the political rewards.” What this has meant in practice looks an awful lot like thought policing: outlawing classroom discussion of sexual orientation through the third grade; rejecting math textbooks that run afoul of Florida’s opaque review process; forbidding teachers and companies to discuss race and gender in a way that might make anyone feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.” Florida also has a ban on abortion after 15 weeks — which DeSantis has indicated he would be willing to tighten to six weeks — with no exceptions for rape and incest.In this regard, all the bland platitudes do serve a purpose. DeSantis’s blunt-force wielding of executive power might sound like a good time for hard-core social conservatives, but if part of the point of this book is to float a trial balloon for a presidential run, you can see the gears turning as he tries to make his message palatable for the national stage. Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in “The Courage to Be Free” is chilling — unfree and scary.Much of what DeSantis is describing in “The Courage to Be Free” is chilling — unfree and scary.Of course, DeSantis insists that he’s simply doing his bit to fight “political factionalism” and “indoctrination.” He removed Tampa’s democratically elected prosecutor from office in large part for pledging not to prosecute abortion providers — explaining in the book that he, DeSantis, was just using the powers vested in him by Florida’s state constitution to suspend a “Soros-backed attorney” for “a clear case of incompetence and neglect of duty.” (Last month, a federal judge ruled that DeSantis was in violation of state law.) DeSantis boasts about big-footing companies and local municipalities when he prohibited vaccine mandates and lifted lockdowns. In April 2020, when the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship expressed annoyance at the possibility of dealing with some “jackass mayor,” DeSantis told him not to worry: “I will overrule any mayor that gives you guys a hard time.”It’s unclear what happened to the DeSantis of a decade ago, a boilerplate libertarian and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus who was mainly preoccupied with fiscal austerity and privatizing Medicare and Social Security. His 2011 book contained numerous tributes to “limited government.” Now, he says, in his typically windy way, anything he does that looks suspiciously intrusive is in fact a cleansing measure, purging public life of excess politicization: “For years, the default conservative posture has been to limit government and then get out of the way. There is, no doubt, much to recommend to this posture — when the institutions in society are healthy. But we have seen institution after institution become thoroughly politicized.”Fewer than 20 pages later, DeSantis proposes making about 50,000 federal employees — currently apolitical civil servants — into “at-will employees who serve at the pleasure of the president.” By any measure, this would amount to politicization on steroids.But despite all the dutiful servings of red meat, DeSantis looks so far to be the favored son of the donor class — which is probably the main audience for this book. The message to them seems to be twofold. First, don’t normalize “the woke impulse”: When Disney’s chief executive criticized Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law (officially titled “Parental Rights in Education”), DeSantis cracked down accordingly. Second, Republican donors can take assurance from “the Sunshine State’s favorable economic climate” that, when it comes to what truly matters to them, it will be business as usual.Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as “woke” nonsense cooked up by the “corporate media.”Reading books, even bad ones, can be a goad to thinking, but what DeSantis seems to be doing in “The Courage to Be Free” is to insist that Americans should just stop worrying and let him do all the thinking for them. Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as “woke” nonsense cooked up by the “corporate media.” (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and News Corp, which owns the publisher of this book, doubtless don’t count.) “I could withstand seven years of indoctrination in the Ivy League,” DeSantis says, only half in jest.The bullying sense of superiority is unmistakable, even when he tries to gussy it up in a mantle of freedom. DeSantis is not taking any chances: He may have been able to “withstand” the “indoctrination” of being exposed to ideas he didn’t like, but he doesn’t seem to believe the same could be said for anyone else.THE COURAGE TO BE FREE: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival | By Ron DeSantis | 256 pp. | Broadside Books | $35 More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Is Poetry Dead? Listen to the Poets.

      by

      More from our inbox:‘All Polls Are Not Created Equal’The Myth of the American Dream Brea Souders for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month,” by Matthew Walther (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 29):Just because poetry is not a popular art form in North America doesn’t mean it’s dead. If Mr. Walther would look closer, he’d see it thriving in local scenes.Poetry is free to change into something Mr. Walther doesn’t recognize as good, but it is not free to die. A poem is a process set in motion by a compulsion to sing in the teeth of death.As the world changes, poets change forms and Mr. Walther has a right to feel shortchanged, but his neglect for everything fabulous that’s happened since T.S. Eliot “finished poetry off” is puzzling.For instance, he ignores the influence of Whitman and Surrealism on the Beats and the impact of French poets like Apollinaire on the quotidian rhythms of New York poets in the postwar American boom, bypassing it all to insist that everyone after Eliot was cursed to rewrite “The Waste Land.” No vision so negative can win.In fact, as a teacher and a poet whose work has been published in this newspaper, I’ve found that our art form’s thrilling and nearly secret history of struggle and triumph is one that most laypeople want to learn about. And I would guess that many young poets, M.F.A.’s or not, are captured by the thrill of becoming part of the story.America today is poetry-curious, and it would be wonderful to see more articles in The Times talking about poetry culture with love and humor.Julien PoirierBerkeley, Calif.To the Editor:Matthew Walther’s lament that poetry is dead because poets are no longer in touch with mysterious forces of the natural world raises once again questions that never fail to excite me: What is a poem? Is there a “right” poem and a “wrong” poem? Not really. Is there an aesthetically “good” poem and a “not so good” poem? Yes, but how different readers arrive at their assessments is as variable as the wind.Mr. Walther implies that we are separate from “nature” and that perhaps poetry could be revived if we returned to a pre-technological sensibility. But what is “nature,” exactly, and where is “nature”? Outside the city, in mountains or sea?What if “nature” is inside every one of us? Aren’t we as much “nature” as the bird and the tree? Our “nature” as a source of poetry is inexhaustible.Barbara BlatnerNew YorkThe writer is a playwright, poet and composer.To the Editor:As one of the judges of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Awards in poetry, I can assure Matthew Walther that his concerns about the demise of the form are premature.Having read several hundred volumes of poetry written in 2022, I can also reassure him that the vast majority of poems include no references to “an empty plastic bottle” or “an iPhone with a cracked screen.”Rather, they are wondrous and inventive, blazing and desperate, vibrant with the same joys and agonies and mystic awe that have kept poetry alive since the origins of human language. Fortunately, neither “The Waste Land” nor any critic can kill these voices or silence their rhythms.Jacob M. AppelNew YorkThe writer is vice president and treasurer at the National Book Critics Circle.To the Editor:Poetry is dead? No way. I’m a trauma surgeon. I know what’s dead when I see it.A year or two ago, I stood with my team in the emergency room awaiting the arrival of a severely injured patient. Our chaplain was there, as usual, and we chatted about an essay that I’d read on the Poetry Foundation website about chaplaincy and poetry. She’d already heard about it from another hospital chaplain.Our nurse leader chimed in. “I love that site,” he said. “I get their poem of the day.”Then the injured person showed up. We stopped chatting and went to work, inspired by our unexpected connection in poetry, which is definitely not dead.Elizabeth DreesenChapel Hill, N.C.‘All Polls Are Not Created Equal’Skewed red-wave surveys fed home-team boosterism among right-wing news outlets and benefited from cheerleading by former President Donald J. Trump.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Skewed Polling Washed Away ‘Red Tsunami’” (front page, Dec. 31):I agree that partisan polls erroneously created the expectation of a red wave/tsunami for the midterm elections. But that’s only half the story. Why did poll aggregators and election analysts embrace these knowingly partisan polls? Yes, costs for independent, nonpartisan polls have skyrocketed.In response to this challenge, organizations like the Marist Poll and others systematically revised methods to address the mounting difficulties of reaching voters and rising costs without sacrificing accuracy.The Marist Poll’s final round of surveys included a national poll and battleground state polls in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. There wasn’t a trace of a red wave/tsunami to be found in any of the poll results.What can be learned about poll coverage from this election cycle? Consider the source of the information. That may be the cornerstone of journalism, but it doesn’t drive poll coverage. Partisan-based polls should be treated as if you were hit over the head with a frying pan.In addition, more is not necessarily better. Relying upon the influx of partisan polls will likely only send you in the wrong direction. Making statistical adjustments for a polling organization’s partisanship, as some forecasters do, is not an elixir.Independent, nonpartisan, transparent polls conducted by an organization with a time-tested record must rule the day, particularly in our current partisan charged environment. All polls are not created equal, and it is a mistake to treat them as such.Lee M. MiringoffPoughkeepsie, N.Y.The writer is director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.The Myth of the American Dream Masha FoyaTo the Editor:Re “What Lies at the Heart of the American Dream” (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 8):Costica Bradatan misses a wider reality about the so-called American dream. He speaks of the “fear of failure” that, he believes, is at its core. But for that fear to be operative there needs to be the opportunity to fail.So, to better understand the American dream, I suggest that Mr. Bradatan travel to cities and towns and rural communities throughout this country. Perhaps then he’ll understand that this dream is only a myth. For countless people, trapped in low-wage work and cycles of poverty, it’s just too dangerous to even think of dreaming. They can’t worry about failing when there’s no opportunity to even fail.Indeed, if we look beyond the surface, the rhetoric surrounding this American myth is just a convenient way to maintain the status quo. It rests on the false foundation that everyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps — and risk failure. That if you’re poor and struggling, it’s a failure to take personal responsibility.In the end, the American dream ignores the structural, systemic issues that keep this dream beyond so many people’s reach. The dream is just some rhetorical phrase often used to ignore the deep chasm of inequality here in America.Arnold S. CohenNew YorkThe writer is an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and former president of the Partnership for the Homeless. More