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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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      in US Politics

      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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      in US Politics

      ‘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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      in US Politics

      ‘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

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      in US Politics

      What is ‘abundance’ liberalism, and why are people arguing about it?

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      Is progressive public policy in America broken? Do many left-leaning laws actually make life more expensive for struggling people? Is regulatory red tape hindering growth and innovation? Have Democratic-run cities, such as New York and San Francisco, become giant billboards against liberal governance?These arguments wouldn’t sound out of place in a policy paper from a conservative thinktank. Yet their newest champions are two of America’s best-known left-leaning journalists, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson – and they believe the left is overdue for a reckoning of sorts.Klein and Thompson make their case in a new book simply called, with no subtitle, Abundance. The authors put forward a positive pitch for “abundance liberalism”: a vision of the US where policymakers spend less time fighting over how to apportion scarce resources and more time making sure there’s no scarcity to start with.View image in fullscreenAbundance has received a mostly positive reception so far, but also sparked debate, with critics arguing that the book ignores the effect of corporate power, downplays Republicans’ role in the crises that the US faces or overstates the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions. A writer in the left-leaning magazine American Prospect accused the “abundance agenda” of being “neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world”.The book opens with a striking image of a US, in the year 2050, that is close to utopia. Americans’ electrical needs are powered by sustainable energy “so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill”. AI breakthroughs, labor rights and economic reforms mean that most people can do their jobs in a shorter workweek. Vertical farms provide cheap and fresh vegetables, desalinated water from the ocean is used as drinking water, and lab-grown meat has replaced animal slaughter.This near-future America – less the gritty neon smog of Blade Runner than a hi-tech Copenhagen – is entirely achievable, the authors argue. It just requires political vision and a willingness to reconsider certain assumptions.Despite being the richest country in the world, the US has a problem of scarcity, particularly in Democratic-run metropolitan areas, where the costs of housing and other basic needs have spiraled out of control. This is exacerbated by the traditional progressive solution of giving people money or vouchers to help them pay for finite resources such as housing, healthcare and food, the book argues, which increases demand and merely makes those things even more expensive.“The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing,” Klein has said. He and Thompson have described themselves as “supply-side” progressives, borrowing a term usually associated with conservative economic theories.What the US badly needs to do is build, they argue – build more houses, public transportation, power plants and other infrastructure – but that isn’t happening.One obstacle is nimbyism, the tendency of people to support public works and development in the abstract but fight them when they affect their own neighborhoods. Another is “everything bagel” logrolling that complicates what should be narrowly focused legislation by layering it with other social and political objectives, such as diverse hiring requirements or climate crisis goals, in order to appease interest groups or political constituencies.In an example Thompson recently discussed on a podcast, then president Joe Biden signed legislation in 2021 providing $42bn of funding to expand access to broadband internet in rural America. As of this December, according to Politico, the program had “yet to connect a single household”. Critics told Politico that this was partly because of a “suite of federal conditions” that required states “accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces and hire locally”, as well as guarantee affordable broadband plans for people with low incomes.“I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online,” Thompson said. “But by holding those values so closely … we accidentally built just about nothing.” A “confusion of process versus outcomes” meant that “very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards”.Another example is California, which in 1982 began studying the idea of implementing a high-speed rail system across the state. The idea was, and is, extremely popular with voters, and billions of dollars were budgeted for the project. Four decades later, almost none of it has been built. A “vetocracy” of regulatory, legal, environmental and political considerations have caused endless delays and continually narrowed the project’s ambition.“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” Thompson and Klein write, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”The solution to these problems, Abundance argues, is a combination of techno-optimism, ambitious and clearly defined policy goals, and political leadership that is willing at times to say no to progressive pressure groups.Klein and Thompson favorably cite what happened when a bridge collapsed in Pennsylvania in 2023, crippling an essential highway. To fix it would typically take months of planning, consultation and reviews; Governor Josh Shapiro instead declared a state of emergency that allowed the reconstruction of the bridge with union labor but free from many normal processes. The highway reopened in 12 days, instead of the 12 to 24 months that it might have taken.Abundance makes clear that it is a book written for the left, and isn’t really interested in elaborating the ways that Republicans and conservatives have contributed to these problems, though Klein and Thompson acknowledge that they have. Yet within the left the book has proved controversial.“[I]t would be a huge mistake,” Matt Bruenig, a policy analyst, wrote in Jacobin, “to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.”He continued: “Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.”While agreeing with some of Abundance’s aims, the journalists Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, writing in the Washington Monthly, argued that the book’s prescriptions wouldn’t necessarily bring the kind of sweeping changes that Klein and Thompson believe. For example, according to examples they cite, areas of the US that have reformed zoning laws to make it easier to build apartment buildings and multifamily homes have seen only modest reductions in the cost of housing.Thompson and Klein have argued that the abundance agenda is bigger than any individual policy proposal, and more about the Democratic party and other left-leaning institutions rethinking their own ambitions and how they conceive of success and failure.“Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California!” they write. “Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! … What has gone wrong?” More

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      in US Politics

      Michael Lewis and John Lanchester: ‘Trump is a trust-destroying machine’

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      In late 2023, as the US presidential election was heaving into view, the author Michael Lewis called up six writers he admired – five Americans and one Briton – and asked if they’d like to contribute to an urgent new series he was putting together for the Washington Post. At the time, Lewis was hearing talk that if Donald Trump got back into power, his administration would unleash a programme of cuts that would rip the federal government to shreds. Lewis decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. The series, entitled Who Is Government?, would appear in the weeks running up to the election. Its purpose, Lewis explains over a Zoom call from his book-lined study in Berkeley, California, “was to inoculate the federal workforce against really mindless attacks”. It would do this by valorising public service and, as he puts it, “jarring the stereotype people had in their heads about civil servants”.Other writers might shrink away from the notion that they could restrain a US president with a handful of essays, but Lewis has an outsized sway. Author of such mega-bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and Flash Boys, he has a knack for writing about arcane concepts in business, finance and economics in ways that don’t just enlighten the uninitiated but whip along with the pace of an airport thriller. Hollywood loves him: Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short all got turned into hit movies crammed with A-listers. So when Lewis speaks out about the forces shaping our world, even if it concerns something as seemingly unsexy as the federal government, people tend to listen.View image in fullscreenThe British writer John Lanchester, who contributed a standout piece to the series, got a glimpse of Lewis’s appeal when they first met in 2014. It was behind the stage at the London School of Economics. Lanchester had agreed to interview Lewis about Flash Boys, which plumbs the murky world of high-frequency trading. “Not only was the venue sold out,” Lanchester recalls, “but they’d had to add on another room at the theatre for people to watch, and that was sold out too. I remember thinking: ‘There’s a tube strike on, it’s absolutely pissing down, nobody’s going to come.’ But not a bit of it. The place was packed.”Lanchester is no slouch himself when it comes to turning knotty financial matters into page-turners. An acclaimed novelist (The Debt to Pleasure, Capital) who used to review restaurants for the Guardian, in 2010 he published a book about the financial crash – Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay – that gave a sweeping overview of the global economy while mercilessly skewering its absurdities. Now he regularly takes his filleting knife to topics ranging from Brexit to cryptocurrencies for the London Review of Books.View image in fullscreenSince their 2014 meeting, the pair have become good friends, with an odd-couple dynamic that’s entertaining to witness. Lewis is hyper-engaged and talks in a confident New Orleans drawl about the iniquities of Trump and Elon Musk; Lanchester, joining us from his kitchen in London, seems more mild-mannered at first but his easy-going demeanour hides a biting wit. They clearly enjoy each other’s work and company. “I make a point of inviting him for dinner whenever I’m in London,” says Lewis, “and I try to get him over here whenever I can. And of course I looped him into this series …”Who Is Government? isn’t Lewis’s first foray into the workings of the US civil service. In 2017, soon after Trump got in for the first time, Lewis had an insight into just how unprepared the new president was to take over the US government’s various branches. “The Obama administration had spent six months preparing a series of briefings for the transition,” he recalls, “but then Trump won and he just didn’t show up. So I decided to fly to Washington and find out what went on inside the government.” He wrote up his findings in three articles for Vanity Fair, later gathering them into the 2018 bestselling book The Fifth Risk. Among the people he spoke to who’d been neglected by the Trump team were officials tending the US nuclear arsenal.View image in fullscreenAs the 2024 election approached, amid warnings that Trump might do much worse than neglect the civil service if he got back into power, Lewis decided to revisit the government’s inner workings. Joining him for the ride this time was Dave Eggers, who reported on a team of scientists probing for extraterrestrial life from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In turn, Geraldine Brooks profiled online sleuths at the Internal Revenue Service who uncover evidence of cybercrime and child sexual abuse in the darker regions of the net, and W Kamau Bell wrote touchingly about his Black goddaughter’s work as a paralegal at the justice department.For his part, Lewis tracked down a mining engineer at the labour department named Christopher Mark, whose research had helped prevent fatal roof falls in underground mines. He also wrote about Heather Stone, a rare-diseases expert at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who had saved lives by fast-tracking authorisation for an experimental drug to treat potentially lethal balamuthia infections.Lanchester, meanwhile, opted to write not about a person but a number – the consumer price index, a fiendishly complex statistic that acts as the main official measure of inflation. The lack of a human protagonist doesn’t make the piece any less absorbing, and Lanchester has fun uncovering the staggering amount of data on seemingly insignificant matters (such as the average length of the adult bedbug or the average annual income for a nuclear medicine technologist in Albany, New York) that the federal government hoovers up every year.View image in fullscreenThe overall effect of the series, just published as a book –Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service – is to transform civil servants from faceless bureaucrats into selfless superheroes. It’s a cracking read but sadly, contrary to Lewis’s hopes, it did nothing to prevent the flurry of devastating cuts that Trump and Musk, via his “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have inflicted on the government over the past couple of months. Of the 3 million-plus federal workers, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 have already been fired. Many of the subjects of the book are at risk of losing their jobs.“Maybe we’re in early stages in the war, but it’s amazing how little effect the series has had,” Lewis says ruefully. “Not only have I not heard a peep from Doge, but I haven’t had any sense that they were worried about what I might write. Though I did send Elon Musk an email asking if I can move in and watch what he was doing. He didn’t respond.”Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire behaving erratically. From conception to publication, the Washington Post series had the full support of the newspaper’s owner. “Jeff Bezos was very excited to be covering the government in any way you could,” says Lewis. “Every piece, he’d call [then opinion editor] David Shipley, and Shipley would call me, saying: ‘Bezos loves this thing.’ But things have changed.” The day before our conversation, in a move widely interpreted as a knee-bend to Trump, Bezos announced that the newspaper’s opinion section would now be dedicated to supporting “personal liberties and free markets”. Shipley resigned before the announcement.Now Lewis and Lanchester are looking back at a collection of essays conceived in a more hopeful time and wondering what will become of the departments they wrote about – and the country that relies on them. They are not optimistic. Over the course of our 90-minute conversation towards the end of last month, they talked about the motivation behind Trump and Musk’s war on the civil service, its probable effects on the US and the lessons the UK should be taking.You say in the intro to Who Is Government? that “the sort of people who become civil servants tend not to want or seek attention”. Was it hard to find interesting people to write about?ML: It took about a nanosecond. And I think there’s a reason for that: there are just a lot of great subjects [in the federal government], and the minute they face existential risk, they become really interesting. They’re weird and different. They’re not interested in money, for a start. They’ve got some purpose in their lives.Was the entire series written before Trump’s re-election?ML: All except for the last piece [about rare diseases expert Heather Stone], which was conceived before, but I didn’t write it until after. What I’m doing now is getting all the writers to go back to their characters to ask what’s happening to them. Both my characters look like they’re about to be fired. Heather has been told that the whole enterprise of dealing with infectious disease is going to be axed from the FDA. And [mining engineer] Chris Mark texted me the other day to say: “They’ve cut our purchasing authority and they want us to hand in our credit cards.” So if they’re not gone, most of our characters are disabled. It’s like watching a toddler loose inside of a nuclear reactor pushing buttons.You two are watching from afar. Are you watching the end of our democracy? Or are you watching some kind of false jeopardy situation?
      JL: Well, we had an exchange over email about this, and I’ve been thinking about what you said, Michael, that we’ll probably muddle through but we are playing Russian roulette with democracy. That image lodged in my head. And the thing that is deeply shocking and surprising is that nobody seems to give a shit about [the government cuts].The cuts are being made in the name of efficiency but it looks more like an ideological purge. Is that how you see it?ML: I don’t think it’s one person’s will being exerted; it’s a combination of Trump, Musk and Russell Vought, who’s now the director of the office of management and budget. He was the architect of that Project 2025 book and he’s a Christian nationalist-slash-libertarian, whatever that is. Trump is the easiest to grok. He’s a trust-destroying machine. He needs chaos where nobody trusts anybody and then there’s a weird level playing field, and he excels in that environment.My simple view of Musk is that he’s like an addict. He’s addicted to the attention, the drama – he’s stuck his finger in the social media socket and his brain is fried. He’s probably got cheerleaders, his little Silicon Valley crowd, telling him he’s doing a great thing, but most of them don’t know anything about it or the consequences. Vought’s the only one, I think, with a clear vision, but it’s a weird vision – really drastically minimum government. Those are the threads I see of what’s going on, and the backdrop is that they can do anything and the polls don’t move – people here don’t seem to care.But isn’t it only a matter of time before people do start to care… once the effects of the cuts kick in?ML: The pessimistic response is that, when things go wrong, there’ll be a war of narratives. The Trump narrative will inevitably say something like: “These bureaucrats screwed it up,” and it creates even more mistrust in the thing that you actually need to repair. I do think we’re going to muddle through. But I don’t think Trump’s ever going to get blamed in the ways he ought to. And whoever comes and fixes it is never going to get the credit they should.JL: When you look at the historical analogies to this kind of collective delusion, it’s quite hard to think of a way of recovering from losing a sense of an agreed consensus reality. The only historical examples I can think of is, basically, you lose a catastrophic war. You know, the Germans lose and they wake up and they have a reckoning with their past. But that’s historically quite rare and hard to imagine … But maybe that’s too dark. Maybe what happens is specific impacts arise from specific programmes being cut that make people think: “Oh, actually, that’s not such a great idea.”A clip just circulated of Musk talking about the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and he said something like: “Oh yeah, we made a couple little mistakes, like we briefly cut Ebola prevention there for just a second, then we brought it back again.”And then I saw someone who ran the USAid Ebola response during one of the outbreaks saying: “That’s flatly not true [that Musk restored the Ebola response].” Musk talks loudly about fraud and theft in government, but these things aren’t fraud and theft – they’re just programmes they don’t like. In fact I haven’t actually seen anything that you could with a straight face categorise as fraud – have you, Michael?ML: There’s almost no worse place to be trying to engage in fraud or theft than the US government, because there are so many eyes on you. When you take a federal employee out to lunch, they won’t let you pay for their sandwich – they’re so terrified. In fact it’s far easier to engage in fraud and theft in a Wall Street bank or a Silicon Valley startup, and there’s probably much more waste too.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHas either of you met Musk?ML: I have not. I have lots of one degree of separations. Walter Isaacson, who wrote Musk’s biography, is an old friend. I basically watched him do that project – I followed it blow by blow.JL: Isaacson basically lived with Musk for, what, nine months, and there’s not a single commentary on politics at any point in the whole book. In 2022, Musk was still a Democrat. It’s just utterly bizarre. And I think part of the frenzy and vehemence comes from an extraordinary naivety about [government]. He actually doesn’t know anything about it, and he didn’t care about it until about 10 minutes ago.One thing that strikes me about Doge is how adversarial it is without it having to be. You could run a project like this, unleashing a roomful of 20-year-olds on the systems of government, without saying that everyone who works in federal government is a criminal. You could just ask: “How could the systems be made to work better?” Because $7tn [the approximate annual budget of the federal government] is quite a lot of money to spend and it’d be astonishing if there wasn’t some waste in there. But you could do it without making people frightened.And it worries me, because lots of things that happen in the US come back over the Atlantic. It happened with Reagan and Thatcher. It happened with Clinton providing the template for New Labour. So I suspect a version of this is going to come back over here.What lessons should the UK be taking from this? JL: Well, that’s one of them. If we were going to do what they call a zero-based review of government spending, let’s do it without framing them as the enemy, because it’s deeply unhelpful. Also, I wouldn’t be astonished if this attack on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion in companies and organisations] came over. I think we should brace for impact on that one.For your essay, John, why did you decide to write about a number instead of a human being?JL: It’s partly intellectual vanity, but I really like the challenge in writing about structures and systems. We’re hardwired to like stories about people, but a lot of the most important stories in the world don’t have individual people as their central character. We’re very resistant to the idea that we don’t have agency as individuals.Your writing on economics arose from the research you did for your novel Capital, didn’t it?JL: Yeah, that’s right. I’d been following the financial crisis and ended up knowing a lot about it, so I wrote a nonfiction book [Whoops!] in order to quarantine that information, because one of the problems with research from the fiction point of view is that you end up having to use it. It’s very difficult to research a topic and then say: “You know what, that doesn’t really belong in the book.” But finance is difficult to dramatise because of the level of detail involved. It’s kind of anti-erotic in fiction to just explain things.Michael, in the other direction, have you ever come upon a story that didn’t quite work as reportage and you wished you had a novelist’s toolkit to turn it into fiction?ML: No, but I have had moments where I thought: “This story is not mine because I’m just not equipped to write it.” And I wrote one of them – a book about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the two Israeli psychologists [2016’s The Undoing Project]. I had that story land in my lap, with privileged access, and I spent eight years arguing with myself [about whether] I was the person to do it. I was sure that someone else better equipped – a subject-matter specialist – would come along and write the book. Then the people I had interviewed started dying off and I realised that no one was.JL: With quite a lot of these stories, the subject-matter expert is precisely the person who can’t tell the story.ML: That’s right. They don’t have the childlike wonder about it all. They don’t ask the simple questions. because they’re too deep in it … But no, I’ve never been frustrated by my lack of novelistic flair, and I never had a strong desire to write a novel. My literary frustration is all in screenwriting. I’ve had a very successful career as a failed screenwriter. I’ve been paid over and over to do these things, and they never got made.The world of screenwriting is a profound mystery, because you see all the shit they make. What’s the process? You’re turning down these things and making that? I worked on an adaptation of my last novel, The Wall, but then Apple said: “Really sorry, we have a competing project.” The competing project was called Extrapolations and I’ll give you a cash prize if you can get through a single episode. They spent tens and tens of millions on it. And it’s off-the-scale, unbelievably, face-meltingly bad.One problem for writers now is that there’s just such a blizzard of extraordinary news. How do you get a foothold and decide what to write about?JL: Perhaps this is more a matter of temperament than anything else, but I’m feeling that I have to step back a bit until it’s clear what the shape of it is, because my hunch would be some form of horrific implosion and the wheels falling off and chaos ensuing. But I thought that last time that Trump was president.ML: I’m going to Washington for much of April, and I have a character in mind, but I want to test it. It’s kind of a dark, funny book that I want to write, and I’ve got to see if this character can sustain that. Generally, I’m with John in that I like to wait and see. I feel like my role in the war is sniper. Don’t give away your position. You’re going to get one shot at this. Wait until you get the clean shot and take it. But I don’t think we’re far away from having the clean shot.JL: Given that you were on to [the possibility of Trump getting re-elected and gutting the federal government] when we spoke 18 months ago, Michael, are you surprised by how this has played out? Is it basically what you imagined, or is it weirder, more extreme?ML: I’d never have predicted this. I know Trump said that he could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and the supporters would still be with him …JL: I believe that.ML: But I didn’t think he’d do what he’s doing materially to his own base. I mean, two days ago he partially gutted the veterans’ healthcare system. This is the healthcare system in a lot of the rural US. That’s his base. And who would have predicted the alliance with Musk? Not me. I would have thought they’d have a falling out after three days, that there just isn’t enough oxygen in the room for both of them. If you’re looking for the simplest explanation for what’s going on, if Trump was a Russian asset, I don’t know if he’d behave any differently from how he’s behaving. I’m not saying he is, but it isn’t the behaviour of someone who is maximising his political future – it’s someone who’s maximising the damage to society. And why would you do that? He was supposed to get rid of illegal immigrants, stop inflation, cut taxes, whatever. But [gutting the civil service] has become the central feature of his administration. I just didn’t think he cared that much about it.View image in fullscreenWhich is the real Bezos; the one who was supportive of this series celebrating public service or the one who’s now dedicating the Washington Post’s opinion pages to championing free markets?ML: I feel some sympathy towards Bezos. I really like him, personally. He’s fun to talk to. He seems to be basically sane. He’s not obviously megalomaniacal or even that self-absorbed. He’s really interested in the world around him. He makes sense on a lot of subjects. So I think the real Bezos is not a bad guy.But he’s done a bad thing. And it’s curious why. You would think, if you had $200bn, that you’d have some fuck-you money. I mean, how much do you have to have to be able to live by your principles? There’s some curve that bends, and at some point, when you have so much money, you’re back to being as vulnerable as someone who has almost nothing. He’s behaving like someone who has nothing, like he’s just scared of Trump. I think if you were with him and watching every step, you’d be watching an interesting psychological process where he’s persuaded himself that what he’s doing is good. He’s rationalised his behaviour, but his behaviour is really appalling.JL: How fucking craven do you have to be, if you can lose 99% of your net worth and still be worth $2bn and you can’t say “fuck you” to proto-fascists? The thing that is frightening is that people like him, men like him, are looking into the future and basically assuming that the US is going to become a kind of fascist state. Because, I mean, $2bn is enough to say “fuck you”. But if the US is now going to become a Maga [Make America Great Again] theocracy, and we just had the last election we’re ever going to have, then maybe he’s positioning for that. I don’t know that to be true, but that’s my darkest version.Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis, is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Will Trump give up the store?’ Edward Fishman on how US economic warfare works – and doesn’t

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      Edward Fishman’s first book, Chokepoints, is a study of American economic warfare. Densely reported but fast-moving, the book examines recent US sanctions policy regarding Iran, Russia and China, and how the dollar’s dominance of international financial systems has allowed administrations to pursue political aims.Fishman’s own service under Barack Obama, at Treasury, Pentagon and State, stands him in good stead. So does teaching at Columbia and being a Washington thinktank fellow.As Chokepoints comes out, Donald Trump is beginning talks with Russia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Russia is seeking relief from US sanctions, which Trump seems inclined to give, and Ukraine and Europe are increasingly isolated from the US.“The record of the first Trump administration on Russia is not particularly strong,” Fishman said, diplomatically, when asked what the US might expect from a president widely held to be in thrall to Vladimir Putin – and speaking before Trump’s spectacular Oval Office argument with Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and subsequent suspension of US military aid.Fittingly, as the author of a history of modern sanctions, Fishman looked back to look forward – and did not find encouraging signs.View image in fullscreenIn 2018, “under pressure from Congress, Trump imposed sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate in Russia … Deripaska owned Rusal, which is the largest aluminum company in Russia, and produced almost 10% of the world’s aluminum. And overnight, basically, aluminum prices skyrocket, Rusal stock collapses, and there’s significant chaos in metal markets.“And Trump gets all these calls from the Russians, from CEOs, saying, ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ And he just pulls back the sanctions.”Years later, that episode is “concerning” to Fishman, “for a few reasons. One is, I think it signals to Russia that as soon as [Trump’s US faces] even the slightest amount of blowback, he will cave, even absent any concessions. It wasn’t like Putin gave any political concessions [in 2018]. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, we’re gonna free these prisoners overnight, we’re gonna stop this bombardment in Ukraine,’ because there was a low, simmering conflict being fought at the time. Trump just pulled back the sanctions.“And after that is when Russia shifts basically all of its foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro and the yuan, the Chinese currency, and gold. So that was the key moment. Putin realizes [about Trump], ‘This guy, he doesn’t have the stomach to do anything, but also he’s so erratic.’ I think that was when the US lost leverage it needs with Russia, though I think it contributed to Putin underestimating the sanctions he would face in 2022”, from Biden, when he ordered a full invasion.US sanctions have hurt Russia deeply – and therefore should be among Trump’s strongest cards to play. Typically, he has been inconsistent. Usually friendly to Moscow, on Friday, Trump used his social media platform to say that because Russia was “absolutely ‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield” he was “strongly considering large scale” sanctions and tariffs on Russia until a ceasefire could be reached.Fishman pondered the issue: “Do I think that Trump will give up the store? I don’t know … I would say I’m not confident that he’s going to get a just peace in Ukraine. But I’m not yet saying, ‘This guy is failing, we’re about to give up everything to Russia in exchange for nothing,’ though I think it’s possible and it’s certainly what the Russians want. It’s very clear they want to cut a deal with Trump that basically couches sanctions relief as a favor to the US, to say, ‘We should have open trade and investment with you. It’s good for America. It was Biden who put on all these restraints. He was just restraining US-Russia relations for no good reason.’“They want to basically get the US to give up their biggest bargaining chip before full negotiations over Ukraine even start.”Fishman studied at Yale, Cambridge and Stanford after 9/11. He noticed that “Iran’s nuclear program shot to the top of the foreign policy agenda”, even though “it was very obvious that the US was not willing to fight another war in the Middle East. And as a result, a number of people were thinking, ‘OK, what do we do about it?’”Joining the US government, Fishman found himself looking for a good book on sanctions.“I had an interesting mix of roles. Some were in the action, doing sanctions, diplomacy, and in others I was more of an adviser to really senior people. I worked for Secretary of State John Kerry and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey … And what I noticed was in the Situation Room, when the top leaders were discussing US foreign policy, whenever it turned to economic warfare, sanctions, etc, the level of conversation was so low, and I think it was because most people in the room had no idea what sanctions were.“It felt arcane. It felt mysterious. And so a big goal [with Chokepoints] was to demystify this and to create a way for average people just to read a book and say, ‘OK, I get it enough that I can develop my own opinions.’”The book is written to keep the reader moving, short chapters introduced with journalistic flourishes. Character traits are sharply noted, short anecdotes from lives away from work help present diplomats and bureaucrats in sharp relief.The importance of the sanctions policy such characters have shaped over the last 20 years is hard to overstate. The first part of Fishman’s book concerns the Iran nuclear deal, reached under Obama through diplomacy and economic pressure, meant to stop the Islamic Republic getting the bomb, dumped by Trump in 2018. Fishman also considers Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the US-led response – one subject of angry debate in the Oval Office when Zelenskyy visited last week – then switches to how Obama and Trump approached China.Fishman is a proud Obama alum but he is not afraid to apportion criticism.“Trump was significantly less risk-averse than Obama was when it came to sanctions. And I think that hopefully the Obama-Russia section [of Chokepoints] shows that in some ways, that risk aversion did not serve American interests.“The Obama administration also toward the end started to become quite concerned about China building islands in the South China Sea, all kinds of other aggressive acts. I think some Obama people would say this was too late in the administration to do anything about it but I would have been surprised, honestly, if you had seen a kind of frontal assault on Chinese economic aggression, even if Obama had more time.“So I think the benefit of Trump, with respect to China, was that he showed us that we have more leverage than we think we do, that we have more flexibility to actually push back against things that China was doing to hurt American interests, because I think it was well documented that Chinese IP theft was one of the ways that they were damaging American business interests, damaging the US economy, and we really hadn’t done anything about it.“So I do think that what Trump got right on China was that you can punch back without necessarily destroying the relationship … the US-China relationship didn’t really collapse during the Trump administration until the very end, until Covid, because they had signed the phase one trade deal in January 2020.“The thing that strikes me about the first Trump administration, and I think is going to be true about this one, is that Trump … on most issues, he vacillates. And China’s one of them. He goes back and forth from being extremely tough to being like, ‘Xi Jinping is my best friend.’”Trump is inconsistent toward other countries too, particularly those he threatens with tariffs, adversaries and friends alike, as demonstrated this week by 25% tariffs slapped on Mexico and Canada, then partially delayed.“Tariffs are taxes on imports,” Fishman said. “Let’s say we were to impose a tariff on Russian oil of 20%. That would mean that US companies could buy Russian oil, but if they were to do so, they’d have to pay a 20% tax. So a US refinery, down the street from me in New Jersey, could pay a tax to the US government to buy that Russian oil.“A sanction would be basically saying you can’t buy any oil at all. So a tariff is a significantly weaker form of a sanction. Historically, as a result, tariffs have not been used for national security reasons. They’re an economic bargaining chip. Sometimes you use tariffs to protect important domestic industries.“What Trump has done is basically just made tariffs yet another weapon in the US economic arsenal, alongside sanctions and export controls. And I think that’s OK. But it’s important for people to realize that tariffs are a significantly weaker tool than sanctions or export controls, so the idea of using them to address key national security problems is somewhat ludicrous.“Trump recently threatened tariffs on Russia. We import $2bn or $3bn worth of goods from Russia. So what good is that going to do? The tariff threat against the Brics countries – a lot of these things don’t make a lot of sense. I think he has a fixation with tariffs. Let’s see if one of his red lines is crossed, if he actually just relies on tariffs, or if there’s sanctions too.”A “chokepoint” is a point at which trade can be squeezed: physically, in corridors such as the Bosphorus or the Panama canal, electronically, through financial networks from which the US can freeze enemies out.“Geographic chokepoints have never fully lost their relevance,” Fishman said. “With the invention of the airplane, there are ways to ship commodities without access to chokepoints. But a lot of things, like oil, still travel by sea or by pipeline. And so that’s why the Bosphorus today is still a really important chokepoint. The Suez canal is very important, and the Strait of Hormuz.“What’s different about economic warfare today is that throughout almost all of human history, up until 20 years ago, cutting off any of these chokepoints would have required taking a navy vessel and parking it there, and saying, ‘OK, thou shall not pass.’ The difference now is you can have an official in the treasury department sign a document and block a chokepoint from thousands of miles away. That’s why you’ve seen this sort of unchained economic warfare, because it’s not like military force, it’s not like you’re actually putting US troops and US ships in harm’s way.”Trump has implied willingness to use US troops, to seize the Panama canal or Greenland. Fishman sees actual deployments as a possible consequence of Trump fueling a breakdown of economic order.“The thing I worry about, about some of Trump’s rhetoric, not just about Panama but Greenland … is that I think that we are certainly headed toward a breakdown in globalization. I think that in order to regain a sense of economic security, we’re going to see an erosion of economic interdependence.”Economic nationalism is on the rise. Fishman worries that “Trump may be driving us towards deploying these weapons of economic warfare not just against the Chinas and Russias of the world, but against Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Colombia, Brazil – all these different countries he’s threatened tariffs and sanctions against.”His book ends on a pessimistic note. In conversation, he warns: “History shows us that when states can’t acquire markets and resources through open trade and finance, that’s when wars break out. They try to conquer them. If you have that mindset, if you say, ‘We don’t feel like we can access these resources unless we physically plant our flag there,’ then that’s not a world that any of us is going to be happy living in.”

      Chokepoints is out now More

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      in US Politics

      Will Trump put a Fox News host on the US supreme court? Mark Tushnet can’t rule it out

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      Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.“Trump as a person has his idiosyncrasies, I’ll put it that way,” Tushnet said, from Harvard, where he is William Nelson Cromwell professor of law, emeritus. “And … I have thought about potential Trump nominees, and actually, what comes to mind is the equivalent of Pete Hegseth: a Fox News legal commentator.”Justice Jeanine Pirro? It’s a thought. Perhaps future historians will debate “The Box of Wine that Saved Nine”. Perhaps not.“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Tushnet said, of his Fox News theory, if not of Pirro, per se. “I don’t think it’s highly likely, but given the way those things work, and given the idea that you want people who aren’t simply judges, it’s not a lunatic thought, I guess.”The reference to “people who aren’t simply judges” is to arguments laid out in Tushnet’s new book, Who Am I to Judge?, in which he makes his case against the prevalence of judicial theories, particularly originalism, to which conservatives adhere, and calls for a rethink of how justices are selected.Tushnet is a liberal voice. Provocatively, he writes that Amy Coney Barrett, the third Trump justice who in 2022 helped remove the federal right to abortion, at least has a hinterland different from most court picks, as a member of People of Praise, a hardline Catholic sect.“I think her involvement in that group has exposed her to a much wider range of human experience than John Roberts’s background, for example,” Tushnet said, referring to the chief justice who was a Reagan White House aide and a federal judge. “And so if you’re looking for people who have been exposed to human experience across the board, I think she’s a reasonable candidate for that.”View image in fullscreenConey Barrett cemented the 6-3 rightwing majority that has given Trump wins including rejecting attempts to exclude him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection and ruling that presidents have some legal immunity. Now, as Trump appears to imagine himself a king and oversees an authoritarian assault on the federal government, reading Tushnet and talking to him generates a sort of grim humor.Looking ahead, to when Trump’s executive orders might land before the justices, Tushnet suggests “the court will put … speed bumps in the way of the administration. They won’t say: ‘Absolutely you can’t do it,’ except the birthright citizenship order.”That order, signed on Trump’s first day back in power, seeks to end the right to citizenship for all children born on American soil and subject to US jurisdiction, as guaranteed under the 14th amendment since 1868.On 23 January, a federal judge said Trump’s order was so “blatantly unconstitutional” that it “boggled” his mind. Should it reach the supreme court, Tushnet can see the rightwing justices “saying: ‘Look, yeah, if you want to do this, we’re not saying you can, but if you want to do it, you got to get Congress to go along. You can’t just do it on your own.’ So that would be a speed bump.”That said, Tushnet sometimes thinks “about how in the US, there are these traffic-calming measures that are literally speed bumps but sometimes, if you go over too fast, you fly”. Trump, he said, has licensed rightwing justices to take decisions that “may not count as speed bumps if you fly off them”.Tushnet was happy to answer a question he thinks all supreme court nominees should be asked: what’s your favorite book and favorite movie?Tushnet’s favorites are Middlemarch by George Eliot and Heaven, a 2002 film directed by Tom Tykwer from a script co-written by Krzysztof Kieślowski. He wrote his book containing such questions, he said, “because I had this longstanding sense that the [supreme court] nomination process has gotten off the rails, mostly by focusing exclusively on judges as potential nominees, and secondarily by focusing on constitutional theory.“For the past 20 years, the court … has been dominated by people whose background was as judges or appellate advocates, and historically that was quite unusual. There are always some judges but there always had been people with much broader kinds of experience, including a former president, William H Taft [chief justice between 1921 and 1930], and several candidates for the presidency, including Charles Evans Hughes [1916], Earl Warren [a vice-presidential pick in 1948], senators like Hugo Black. And those people had disappeared from consideration for the court, and that seemed to be a bad idea.”Tushnet describes a “political reconstitution of the nomination process provoked in large measure by the Republican reaction to the Warren court”, which sat from 1953 to 1969, the era of great civil rights reforms.“I think their view was the Warren court was not composed of judges, they were politicians, some called them ‘politicians in robes’, and Republicans sort of thought the way to get away from the substantive jurisprudence of the Warren court was to put judges on the court, rather than people with what I call broad experience,” Tushnet said.One justice on the current court was not previously a judge: Elena Kagan, one of the three besieged liberals, was dean of Harvard Law School, then solicitor general under Barack Obama.Tushnet “went into the project thinking that I would find more great justices who had been a politician than I actually did. When I was teaching, I would do this thing about who the justices were who decided Brown v Board of Education”, the 1954 ruling that ended segregation in public schools, “and I think it’s fair to say that not one of them’s primary prior experience was as a judge, and like seven or eight of their prior primary experiences were as a politician. And if Brown v Board is the premier achievement of the supreme court, the fact that it was decided by a court primarily made up of politicians counts in favor of thinking about politicians when appointing to the court.”“Why not do it? For me, the main feature of having been a politician is not that you’ve taken stances aligned with one or another political party at the time, but that you’ve provided reasons in many different ways, you’ve grown up amongst people with a wide range of life experiences that you’ve had to think about, as a politician, in order to get their votes, in order to get your way,” he said.Tushnet’s ideal might be Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice from 1910 to 1916 and chief justice between 1930 and 1941, but also governor of New York, Republican candidate for president and US secretary of state.On the page, Tushnet imagines asking Hughes a question – “What constitutional theories do you use?” – and getting an appealing answer: “I try to interpret the constitution to make it a suitable instrument for governance in today’s United States.”Tushnet says modern judges and justices should say the same, rather than reach for judicial theories. His new book is in part an answer to a demolition of originalism by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley law school: “I distinguish, I think, more clearly than other people have, including Erwin, between what I call academic originalism and judicial originalism.”Either form of originalism concerns working out what the founders meant when they wrote the constitution, then advocating its application to modern-day questions. Tushnet “think[s] a good chunk of academic originalism is not subject to many of the criticisms that Erwin levels. It’s not perfect but it’s an academic enterprise, and people work out difficulties, and there’s controversy within the camp and so on.View image in fullscreen“Judicial originalism is different because it has a couple of components. One is, we now know it’s quite selective. To get originalism into the TikTok decision, for example, you have to do an enormous amount of work. It’s not impossible, but it’s not an originalist opinion, fundamentally. So [justices are] selectively originalist, or, as my phrase is, opportunistically originalist. They use it when the sources that they’re presented with support conclusions they would want to reach anyway, and the adversary process at the supreme court isn’t a very good way of finding out what they say they’re trying to find out. And so as a judicial enterprise, originalism just doesn’t do what it purports to do.”To Tushnet, the late Antonin Scalia, an arch-conservative and originalist, is “the leading candidate to be placed on a list of great justices” of the past 50 years, “because of his influence and his contributions to the court.“But one bad contribution was his widely admired writing style. Now, writing styles change over time. And having read an enormous number of opinions of the 1930s, I know there’s an improvement in readability since the 1930s. But the idea that [opinions] become more readable, accessible and memorable by including Scalia-like zingers, short phrases that are quotable and memorable, seems to be just a mistake. But he’s very influential, and so people try to emulate him … Justice Kagan does it in a gentler way. I guess my inclination would be to say: ‘If you’re going to do it, do it the way Justice Kagan does, rather than the way Justice Scalia did.’”Tushnet agrees that some of Scalia’s pugilistic spirit seems to have passed into Samuel Alito, the arch-conservative author of the Dobbs v Jackson ruling, which removed abortion rights, if while shedding all vestiges of humor.In his book, Tushnet shows how Alito’s Dobbs ruling contained a clear mistake, the sort of thing that is largely down to the role clerks play in drafting opinions, as Tushnet once did for Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American justice.“Times were quite different then,” Tushnet said. “The year I was there, the court decided 150 cases. Now they’re deciding under 50 a year … the year I was there was the year Roe v Wade was decided [1973, establishing the right to abortion, now lost]. It had been resolved fundamentally the year before, so they were just cleaning things up, but we knew these were consequential decisions.”The court will soon have more consequential decisions to make. In the meantime, talk of a constitutional crisis, of a president defying the courts, grows increasingly heated.“My sense is that we’re not at the crisis point yet,” Tushnet said. “Like many administrations before it, the Trump administration is taking aggressive legal positions, which may or may not be vindicated. If they’re not vindicated, they’re muttering about what they’ll do. That’s happened before.“My favorite example is that in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, while a major decision was pending, had his staff prepare two press releases, one saying: ‘Actually the court has upheld our position,’ the other saying: ‘The court mistakenly rejected our position, and we’re going to go ahead with it anyway.’ Now, they didn’t have to issue that press release, because the court went with the administration. But, you know, muttering about resistance is not historically unusual. Resisting would be quite, quite dramatic, but we’re not there yet.”

      Who Am I to Judge? is published by Yale University Press More