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      A capitalist cheerleader wrote the US’s hottest new self-help book. Surprised? | Adam H Johnson and David Sirota

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      As economic misery in the US persists, the country’s self-help industry has become a multibillion-dollar bonanza. If one reads enough of that industry’s happiness catechism – including its latest bestseller, Build the Life You Want – one realizes that all of the advice revolves around a core set of directives: focus on the self rather than the collective, redeploy hours to different priorities, spend less time at work, build deeper personal relationships – and, by implication, buy more self-help books.But if “time is money”, then in America’s survival-of-the-richest form of capitalism, time-intensive remedies are mostly for the affluent – that is, those with a big enough savings account to de-risk career changes; those with enough income to afford gym memberships, hobbies and excursions; those with enough paid leave and cash to enjoy the best vacations; those with enough resources to employ personal aides to do paperwork, chores and cleaning; those with enough workplace leverage to secure more hours off for introspection, friend time and outdoor adventures.Erasure of privilege disparity and presumption of wealth has turned most self-help products into a series of Stuart Smalley affirmations for the already and nearly comfortable. But while such class bias pervades the happiness industry, it is particularly egregious coming from the author of the aforementioned Build the Life You Want: Arthur Brooks, hardly a disinterested bystander in this epoch of economic anxiety and its attendant unhappiness.As the former $2.7m-a-year head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – one of the country’s most prominent conservative thinktanks – Brooks spent a decade sowing the despair he now insists he is here to cure.Brooks’ career turn from let-them-eat-cake ideologue to I-feel-your-pain happiness prophet may seem bizarre. But he is walking the well-trodden – and lucrative – path from arsonist to firefighter. It is a trail previously blazed by financial crisis-era deregulators now platformed as credible economic experts, and by Iraq war proponents reimagined as leaders of a pro-democracy resistance.In Brooks’ case, he led an organization that repeatedly worked to help its billionaire and corporate donors prevent working-class Americans from securing the better standard of living, universal benefits and leisure time that undergird the countries consistently reporting the world’s highest levels of happiness.Citing a colleague’s book deriding Americans as “takers”, Brooks insisted the central crisis facing the nation is not a notoriously thin social safety net – but politicians who “offer one government benefit after another to our citizens”, complaining that this “has made a majority of Americans into net beneficiaries of the welfare state”.He declared war on “labor unions and state employees demanding that others pay for their early retirements, lifetime benefits, and lavish state pensions”. Under his leadership, the AEI railed against “entitlement” programs, tried to privatize and gut social security, opposed Medicaid expansion, opposed free college, opposed rent control and fought against free healthcare.Now, Brooks’ pivot to happiness guru is disseminating that political agenda via the soft agitprop of self-discovery and self-improvement. Along the way, Brooks is being boosted by (among others) the Atlantic, NPR and Oprah Winfrey (who is listed as co-author of the book, although in reality she only writes a handful of introductory paragraphs to each chapter) – together the most coveted media seals of approval for liberal readers whose purported ideals Brooks spent his career grinding into political dust, but who are now enriching him with $30 book purchases.On its face, Build the Life You Want offers a mix of reasonable – if banal – life advice, parables, reasonably clear distillations of complex philosophical and linguistic concepts, and synthesized academic research. The book engages in pop metaphysics that limits its ambition for the more science- and liberal-minded from the get-go, letting us know that achieving “happiness” – as some final stage of contentment – is impossible. But, Brooks insists, “we can be happier” in relative terms.“Unlike other books you may have read,” he tells us, “this one is not going to exhort you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This isn’t a book about willpower ​​– it’s about knowledge, and how to use it.”Which is all to say, this book is absolutely about how to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and follow concrete steps to self-contentment, but doing so with some reputable sociology and psychology studies as your guide rather than the quasi-fascist bromides about being an alpha dog one typically hears from the likes of Jordan Peterson. But the general motivational tone and reactionary political premises are the same.The book kicks off in earnest with a scrappy, can-do story of self-determination on the part of Brooks’ Spanish mother-in-law, “Albina”, who is used as a template for self-fulfillment.In the introduction, titled Albina’s Secret, we are told that, after years of living with an abusive husband and a fraught domestic life, “One day, when Albina was forty-five, something changed for her. For reasons that were not clear to her friends and family, her outlook on life seemed to shift. It’s not that she was suddenly less lonely, or that she mysteriously came into money, but for some reason, she stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her life. The most obvious change she made was to enroll in college to become a teacher.”Brooks asserts that the primary change that propelled Albina toward midlife happiness was her shift from worrying about “the outside world” to looking inward.“She switched,” Brooks tells us, from “wishing others were different, to working on the one person she could control: herself.”Personal responsibility is a hallmark of the self-help genre, and Brooks’ breezy title has this convention in spades. In his telling, changing “the outside world” as a pathway to peace and happiness is a fool’s errand. Like virtually all self-help books, we are told the road to self-satisfaction is found within – not with our circumstances, but how we respond to our circumstances.This is a convention of the capitalist self-help genre for one obvious reason: it requires nothing in the “outside world” to change. And once one gets into the messiness of “changing the outside world”, one ventures into political theory. This is uncomfortable and can’t be put into an earth-toned 700-page book that rich Atlantic subscribers will want to buy.Albina’s solution, Brooks tells us, wasn’t to find her local underground socialist party or union headquarters and join a political movement to combat the Franco regime, or to try to materially improve the lot of other women sharing her gender-based suffering – it was to ignore “the outside world” and instead focus on a career shift and a switch in attitude.Like a lot of self-help advice, this works on a micro scale. Surely, it’s too great an ask to demand a middle-aged mother in an economically precarious situation join the fight against the Franco regime. But Brooks is constitutionally uninterested in the forces of patriarchy and capitalism that co-authored the misery – not because they’re irrelevant to his self-help brand of anti-politics, but because of it.Self-help makes grand claims about human progress, it offers advice to the masses on how they can improve their lot – it is inherently political by its nature. But Brooks does not tell us that we can be empowered by making demands of the powerful, or joining a union or a political movement, but – how else – by buying his book.This is Brooks’ big trick: his happiness recommendations presume a society that can and will never change from the one he helped craft in Washington.In today’s AEI-sculpted America, millions are deprived of the building blocks of happiness such as guaranteed healthcare, free higher education, paid family leave, workplace empowerment, retirement security and a host of other social democratic pillars that sustain the world’s happiest societies. Unwilling to allow for the possibility that such conditions can or should change in the United States, Brooks nonetheless presents happiness as an achievable self-centric project inside the dystopia he helped create.Build the Life You Want follows Brooks’ first foray into the happiness industry – a book called From Strength to Strength that is about “finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life”.That monograph argues that because of the way humans’ brains change, one’s professional decline begins much earlier than we expect. The book suggests that workers in midlife should therefore move into work roles that require less cognitive innovation (fluid intelligence) and more teaching of acquired wisdom (crystallized intelligence).It is an important finding that might prompt a broader discussion of policies that could account for this inevitability – retraining programs, funding for midlife career education, universal portable benefits that allow for job switches and earlier retirement ages. But ever the conservative ideologue, Brooks eschews all that, instead channeling the old conservative trope that failing to change professional trajectory – or being demoralized by the work treadmill – is just a mental flaw in one’s personal outlook.“Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things,” he writes, in a call for a mass change of attitude.What prevents necessary career shifts that might lead to happiness, Brooks asserts, is “self-objectification, workaholism, and most of all success addiction that chain us to our declining fluid intelligence curve.”“What do I want to do with my time this week to cultivate the relationships that will result in that end scenario?” Brooks says he asks himself in order to imagine an existence of stronger personal bonds. “I might make the decision to leave work on time, leave my work at the office, get home for dinner, and watch a movie after dinner with my family.”In this dreamscape, most Americans get to choose when they work, and under what conditions. Nowhere in Brooks’ world of lanyards does he consider that Americans working ever-longer hours and ever-more jobs may have less to do with career ambition than with simply trying to earn enough to pay the ever-increasing bills – bills that fund the ballooning profits of the kind of donors who can pay Brooks’ upwards of $125,000 speaking fee or write six-figure checks to outfits like the AEI.This same ideology carries into Build the Life You Want, where Brooks repeatedly hints at a deeper theme of overwork and soul-sucking labor, but avoids the obvious indicators and instead moves on to sell his brand of self-analysis – with little consideration of systemic problems.Recapping researchers documenting how humans are usually good at categorizing their own positive associations, Brooks notes that “activities that were most negative and least positive were commuting and spending time with one’s boss”.He caps this off with a joke: “Obviously, then, it’s definitely best not to commute with your boss.” It’s clear that people’s least favorite activities are related to working dreary, miserable jobs.Does this prompt Brooks to apologize for leading the fight against proposals for government-sponsored healthcare that could end the employer-based system and free Americans to search for more fulfilling jobs without fear of losing access to medical services?No, it’s the subject of a wisecrack and he moves on.This isn’t to say the book is uninterested in “careers” – it very much is. It just doesn’t care much for jobs, or the masses who occupy work for work’s sake, to stave off starvation and homelessness – what novelist Ursula K Le Guin called kleggich, or “drudgery”, work that the vast majority of people do day in and day out for survival.The target demographic for Brooks is the aggressively middle and upper class, so what matters is how “happy” the job makes them rather than whether the worker has carpal tunnel syndrome or is subject to sexual harassment, precarity and a host of problems that affect anyone who can’t afford the luxury of lifehacking their happiness as Brooks prescribes.In its characteristically fawning profile of Brooks as “part social scientist, part self-help coach, part motivational speaker, and part spiritual guru”, Politico recently cast his journey as a departure from politics and ideology.“Brooks has undergone one of the more unusual professional transformations that Washington has witnessed in recent decades,” the Beltway news outlet wrote. “His most recent transformation also represents a type of retreat – away from a conservative movement that once held him up as a model of its future.”Brooks himself leans into this assertion, arguing that “I’m not a player in the conservative movement” and adding that his career in the conservative movement “is just not relevant – this stuff isn’t relevant anymore”.But Brooks’ professional trek is less a “transformation” – and less shocking – if one considers that his happiness books are ideological manifestos shrouded in the veil of social science. His new literature is the kind of academia-flavored politics that has long been the central product – and sleight of hand – of the almost $70m thinktank that Brooks ran for a decade. (The AEI still lists Brooks as one of its scholars.)From its origin, the AEI has depicted itself as a staid, nonpartisan, quasi-academic institution, even though it has always been a lobbying front for rightwing forces – a one-stop shop where corporate America can advance its ideological and political interests under the auspices of academic research and policy-shaping.Though not mentioned in the AEI’s official history, President Harry Truman shut down the organization in 1949 because it was illegally operating as a lobbying front for the railroad industry. It falsely called itself an “educational association” while sharing a physical address with a rail lobby. Though the AEI’s donors remain anonymous to this day (a practice frowned upon in the non-profit world for obvious reasons), the donors that have been revealed through reporting include fossil fuel extractors, labor abusers, opioid pushers, dictators, weapons makers and big tech giants – all of which have an interest in shaping US political discourse, under the guise of seemingly nonpartisan empiricism.The bulk of Build the Life You Want is harmless enough, synthesizing sociological and psychological theories and studies from the past 50 years or so, from personality sorting questionnaires to scientifically suspect, but persistently popular, reliance on brain activity research. But Brooks then weaponizes that research and scholarship to create ideological storylines.The book stresses the importance of “earned success”, which is Brooks’ personal conservative spin on “learned helplessness” – a concept popularized in the 1970s by Martin Seligman, the so-called “father of positive psychology”.“Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy,” Brooks writes. “The best way to enjoy earned success is to find ways to get better at your job, whether that leads to promotions and higher pay or not.”Hard work for its own sake will make us happier is a storyline that couldn’t have been better articulated by AEI scholars, who insinuate that Americans’ big problem is their alleged lack of work ethic, not the rapaciousness of the thinktank’s donors.Paraphrasing – or rather, misreading – Viktor Frankl, the author of the 1946 Holocaust memoir and social psychology text Man’s Search for Meaning, Brooks writes that “the common strategy of trying to eliminate suffering from life to get happier is futile and mistaken; we must instead look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth.”Later, building off Frankl’s works, Brooks repeats a major theme of the book: circumstances aren’t what matter, our response to them is.“You can’t choose your feelings,” Brooks tells us. “But you can choose your reaction to your feelings. What [Frankl] was saying is … If someone you love gets sick, you will be afraid, but you can choose how you express this fear, and how it affects your life.”But if a loved one is sick, the most significant way one can choose how it “affects your life” is if said loved one has quality, inexpensive healthcare – something Brooks spent more than 10 years working to make sure the poor can’t have. What would the average person rather have in the face of an earth-shattering family illness: a squishy life guideline to managing emotions or quality healthcare?Obviously the latter, but for Brooks, only the former is on offer.This “tough it out” ethos is consistent with Brooks’ decades of advocating the evisceration of programs designed to help the poor survive – all to extend “happiness” and prosperity to the masses.“It is a simple fact that the United States is becoming an entitlement state,” he wrote in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed that depicted social security, welfare programs and disability benefits as “impoverishing the lives of the growing millions dependent on unearned resources”.“The good news is that we have a golden opportunity to rein in entitlements,” he said, invoking Washington-speak for reducing social security benefits, which the AEI has proposed. “By reforming entitlements and the tax system instead of extracting more money with higher tax rates, the economy could be reoriented away from unearned transfers to earned wages. This would make the economy fairer and sounder. And in the process it could build a happier country for ourselves and our children.”If it seems deeply cynical to use pop psychology and pop morality of “earning” money and creating “happiness” to argue for lowering taxes for the rich and cutting social programs for the poor, that’s because it is.Brooks now insists he is no longer manufacturing such political opinion, but his old austerity activism shines through in his happiness literature.The most explicit example is in his book From Strength to Strength. As part of a passage headlined “The benefits of weakness, pain, and loss”, Brooks cites Frankl to suggest that a world of hardship may actually be desirable, because people “could find the meaning of their lives, and personal growth, in all kinds of suffering”.Perhaps this explains why Brooks’ new iteration as a happiness guru includes no mea culpa for his past career explicitly advocating for the austerity that sows so much desperation. If suffering is a catalyst for personal growth, then why should he offer contrition?The mystery, then, isn’t why he is so unapologetic and still on this trajectory (answer: it is lucrative). The most vexing question is: why are so many liberals falling for this act?This is a man who is deeply uninterested in – and, indeed, actively hostile to – creating the conditions that allow anyone who isn’t in his class status the capacity to be safe and secure, much less happy, and he is now one of the country’s most prominent gurus for finding “happiness”.For the better part of a decade, Brooks hired and curated the careers of documented racists like Charles Murray, climate denialists like Mark Perry and ”replacement theory” advocates such as JD Vance. Now he’s doing a calm, professorial routine about how we all need to take a practical, science-driven path to being happier?This should be a scandal, but Brooks frames it in the right Atlantic-ese, so most just nod along.For a book about a life well lived, Build the Life You Want is remarkably short on objective discussions of ethics or virtue. All moral content exists entirely inside the head of the reader or the authors’ examples of happy people (what makes you feel inspired, what our subject found fulfilling), with zero discussion about what is objectively virtuous or what can be done as a community rather than as an individual – fitting for a career funded by ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers and heirs to the Walmart fortune.Ultimately, this is where all of these class-flattening, middlebrow self-help discussions of happiness fall apart: they treat “happiness” as the center of the moral universe rather than virtue, which is to say, the politics of maximizing others’ happiness over one’s own in a systematic way, rather than as one-off instances of bourgeois charity.But, of course, serial killers are “happy” murdering, Charles Koch is “happy” extracting profit from low-wage workers, and Saudi dictators are “happy” hosting cocaine-fueled yacht parties and buying soccer teams. So what? Being happy is not inherently good or bad. What matters is building systems of justice, welfare and safety that allow the maximum number of people to be secure and healthy.If granting the average working person rights to a universal basic standard of living ends up creating more happiness, then all the better.But without such foundational rights – rights Brooks has spent his career opposing – what is “happiness” if not an abstract privilege of those who can afford it?
      Adam H Johnson is the co-host of the podcast Citations Needed and a writer for the Substack newsletter The Column
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
      A version of this article first appeared in the Lever More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Our political situation is such a fragile thing’: Robert De Niro on fatherhood, family – and Trump

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      For a very long time, the actor Robert De Niro was reticent in interviews. He was solitary or shy or inarticulate – biographers couldn’t decide which. Then Donald Trump was made president, and public De Niro – the De Niro we read in magazines, who appeared at Hollywood events – became openly, angrily, exasperatedly chatty, at least on politics. Trump was a New Yorker, like De Niro, but not a good New Yorker, it turns out. He was a “fool”, a “bozo”, a “national disaster”. How could he have become president? Why weren’t more Americans embarrassed, or terrified? “Fuck Trump!” he shouted while appearing at an awards ceremony in 2018. It was an offhand remark that earned him an ovation. During an interview later that year he added, “I feel that more people should speak out against him, not be genteel about it.”This is the De Niro I meet on Zoom, one afternoon a few months ago. Outspoken De Niro. Politically frustrated De Niro. He is bethroned in a hotel suite in Cannes, grey-haired and lined of face, present as an irked but not unpleasant grandpa. (He recently turned 80.) It is shortly before the actors’ strike and long before Trump’s appearance at a New York courthouse on charges of fraud. “I’m going to go into this,” De Niro says. “The political situation we’re in in my country, it is crazy and absurd – we lost control. I see the phenomenon of Trump, the phenomenon of people not standing up to him, people who ought to know better… They’re causing great concern in the country and a lot of anxiety. I feel like since he’s come on the scene – even after being president – it’s like when an abusive parent rules a household, only it’s not just one household it’s the whole country. We’re like, ‘What’s this guy going to do next? What’s he going to aggravate us about?’” The actor shrugs. “Is he just doing this to aggravate people? To make people unhappy? Maybe he is.”De Niro and I are meant to be discussing his latest picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, which recalls a dark period in 1920s Oklahoma during which members of the Osage Nation were murdered for their oil rights, and in which De Niro plays William Hale, a benign-seeming ranch-owner who is in fact at the root of much of the period’s evil. (The film is based on David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller of the same name.) But Trump keeps getting in the way. At a press conference earlier in the day, De Niro had suggested that Hale’s kind of immorality – his entitlement and greed, his racism, his disregard for anyone outside his own bloodline, all of it wrapped up in a kindly aspect – is easy to spot in contemporary politics, in what was a not-so-veiled swing at Trump and a broader swipe at members of the Republican party, accessories to the chaos.When I mention his allusions to Trump, De Niro says, “Of course. He allowed more of it to come out” – the racism, the disregard. “One of the main tasks of being a leader, the responsibility, is to lead. Even when the masses are turning in a certain the direction, you have to show them the right way. And that comes down to personal integrity, what you know is right and what you know to be wrong, what you stand for.” Trump is “doing whatever he can to be the boss,” he goes on. “He just wants to be in charge. He has no moral centre.”In Killers of the Flower Moon, Hale is similarly unprincipled, bigoted, and vengeful. Many if not all of his actions are propelled by avarice. Asked what appealed to him about playing the character, De Niro replies, “I don’t know if he appealed to me. He’s… I don’t know.” Then he adds, “The older I get, people do things that I just don’t understand. I have no pretence to know.”“What sort of things?” I ask.He gives a brief answer that he boils down to: “The state of the country.”A few years ago, a suspect package was mailed to one of several New York restaurants De Niro owns. Similar packages were delivered to other outspoken Trump critics, including Joe Biden, then a former vice president. The event proved De Niro’s concern that things were not OK. “It was sent by somebody crazy,” he recalls now. “But I don’t want to make it simple. All you can do is keep an eye on them. Suppress or repress it. Because it’s always going to be there. People have their reasons.”Killers of the Flower Moon is De Niro’s 10th collaboration with the director Martin Scorsese. (Their first, Mean Streets, was released 50 years ago.) Of De Niro, Scorsese said recently, “Bob doesn’t talk a lot.” (In a typically halted style, De Niro has said of the director, “There’s a connection, but it’s hard for me to define.”) I ask now why Trump has made De Niro, a man so diffident even his close friend and collaborator has described him as taciturn, suddenly so forthcoming.“It upsets me so much that somebody like him could get so far in our political system,” he says. “Many New Yorkers were on to what a fool he is, a joke. But when the country started buying it? I mean, he didn’t win by much. He didn’t win the popular vote. She won. But look what happened. What’s scary is it’s such a fragile thing, to swing like that. And the odd thing about Trump is that if he had any brains he could have become president again. But he doesn’t care. He did stupid things. He’s not somebody who should ever be allowed close to leadership in this country again.” (Remarkably, or perhaps not, Trump is currently polling highly as a 2024 presidential candidate.)I ask, “The fragility he created, do you think it’s still there?”“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t you?”I nod.“I mean, I wish the media would not give him much attention, would ignore him. But it’s like watching a train wreck. You’re fascinated by it. What will eventually happen is he will die away. He’ll become not even an afterthought. It’s like the pandemic. We had it. Now people are forgetting. And it was only three years ago.”De Niro was born in New York during the Democratic presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. His father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr, studied under the German émigrés Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, briefly waited tables with the playwright Tennessee Williams, and worked as a night watchman at the Guggenheim Museum alongside Jackson Pollock, who De Niro Sr considered both peer and friend. De Niro’s mother, the artist Virginia Admiral, briefly counted the writer Anaïs Nin as a mentor, and transcribed several volumes of her diaries. (For a time, both Admiral and De Niro Sr wrote erotica for Nin, who paid a dollar a page.) De Niro’s early life was bohemian. An only child, he grew up quietly in the company of adults and books, loved but not coddled. His parents, who called him Bobby, separated when he was two – they divorced a decade later – and he lived with his mother, who stopped painting despite a promising career and began a successful typing business.Still, it is De Niro Sr who has loomed large over De Niro’s life. At auditions early in his career, De Niro would mention his father’s name in case the casting director had heard of him. He would later hang his paintings on the walls of his business ventures, including his restaurants, to generate interest in his father’s career. When I ask if legacy is something De Niro considers, he replies, “Yeah, I think about legacy,” but goes on to discuss his father’s work rather than his own. “I think about his legacy,” he says. “I’ve tried to keep it going. To me he was a great artist, he was a genuine artist. And it’s not like I want to revive whatever he did. I just want my kids, my grandkids, to know who he was, what he stood for.”De Niro Sr died in 1993, on his 71st birthday; Admiral died in 2000, aged 85. De Niro has described his father as witty and affectionate but prone to loneliness and severe self-criticism. (De Niro Sr was gay, though not publicly, and his sexuality was never discussed between father and son.) That the senior artist’s star never exploded led slowly to bitterness, and he fell into poverty. De Niro has talked before of how he considers it his responsibility to maintain awareness of his father’s work – to “see him get his due”.I ask De Niro now what he thinks his father thought of his fame.“I think he was proud of me,” he says. “At the same time, a little jealous, or envious, and so on. But he always… He was proud of me. And what I remember is I was proud of him when I was a kid – he was an artist. But that’s normal. People in families have certain feelings. It doesn’t mean they don’t love the family member, that they’re not loyal to them.”I ask about their relationship.“We had an OK relationship,” he says. “ He was not with me, we didn’t live together. But I would see him, spend time. I would always go to his shows, take the kids to his openings.” Sometimes father and son would run into each other in the street and talk, or De Niro would visit his father while he worked. “We had what I suppose people would call an understanding,” De Niro has said. “We were close in some ways but not in others.” The painter regularly requested his son sit for a portrait, but the son demurred. (“I wouldn’t sit still,” he has said.) A couple of years ago, De Niro, while showing a journalist around his father’s SoHo studio, which De Niro has preserved faithfully, said, “I wish I had listened more to my father so I could speak more carefully about his work.”I ask now, “Why is this important to you?”“It just is,” he says. “It’s family. Tradition.”“It’s for your children,” I say.“It’s for the family, yes.”Not long before De Niro and I meet, it is announced that he has had another child – his seventh, and his first with his current girlfriend, the actor Tiffany Chen. When I offer congratulations he nods plainly. And when I ask how things are going, he says, “It’s going OK,” shrugs, and screws up his features into a kind of parent-face that suggests he might be muddling through.We both laugh.De Niro has said of child-rearing, “It’s always good and mysterious and you don’t know what the hell is going to happen.” I ask if he agrees with that statement now.“You never know,” he says.“That’s still true?” I ask.“Of course it’s true!” he says. “It’s true for everybody.”“It’s still mysterious?” I ask.“You never know what’s going to happen,” he says. “They surprise you.”I ask if things get easier.“It doesn’t get easier,” he says, becoming pleasantly private. “It is what it is. It’s OK. I mean, I don’t do the heavy lifting. I’m there, I support my girlfriend. But she does the work. And we have help, which is so important.”I ask if he enjoys fatherhood.“Of course I do.”“What about it do you enjoy?” I ask.“All of it! With a baby it’s different to with my 11-year-old. My adult children. My grandchildren. It’s all different.”“In what way?” I ask.“Well, I don’t talk to the adult children the way I talk to my baby,” he says, in a way I think suggests exasperation, “or the way I speak to my 11-year-old, though she’s pretty smart. But… I don’t know if you have kids.”“I have two,” I say, adding, “I think that’s enough for me.”Smiling, De Niro says, “Well, that’s understandable.”Talk turns to his upcoming plans. When I ask De Niro his intentions for the next couple of years, he mentions a Netflix series I was unaware he had scheduled, what might be another piece of make-work for which the actor has been regularly, often unfairly criticised. (A student of the acting coach Stella Adler, a two-time Oscar winner, the force behind Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter, one of our greatest actors, he is also responsible for Dirty Grandpa.) But soon another, more plain ambition is revealed. “And to stay alive,” he says.“You think about that?” I ask.“Of course I think about it, at my age,” he says. “You think about it at your age, why wouldn’t I think about it at my age?”He looks briefly off camera to his publicist, then goes on, “It’s not going to stop me, but you think about it.”“What do you think about?” I ask.“I’m aware of it,” he says. “You think more about time. Every summer, every new season, everything, you say, ‘Well, I’m going to use these few months of the summer to be with my kids, my family.’ I can’t wait until the next – I don’t know what’s going to happen. So each thing becomes more important. Everything I do, time-wise, is important. Whatever I’m thinking about doing in two years, I’d better think about doing it now.”I ask, “Do you enjoy being older?”“I don’t mind,” he says. “I have no control over it. What am I going to do? I might as well give in and go with it.”And with that his publicist rises, and De Niro gives in and goes with it.Killers of The Flower Moon is in cinemas nationwide from 20 October. This interview was completed before the SAG-AFTRA strike commenced More

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      in US Politics

      Democracy Awakening review: Heather Cox Richardson’s necessary US history

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      In a media landscape so polluted by politicians addicted to cheap thrills (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Orange Monster) and the pundits addicted to them (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Steve Bannon), the success of Heather Cox Richardson is much more than a blast of fresh air. It’s a bona fide miracle.The Boston College history professor started writing her newsletter, Letters from an American, almost four years ago. Today her daily dose of common sense about the day’s news, wrapped in an elegant package of American history, has a remarkable 1.2 million subscribers, making her the most popular writer on Substack. Not since Edward P Morgan captivated the liberal elite with his nightly 15-minute broadcasts in the 1960s has one pundit been so important to so many progressive Americans at once.In the age of social media, Richardson’s success is counterintuitive. When she was profiled by Ben Smith in the New York Times a couple of years ago, Smith confessed he was so addicted to Twitter he rarely found the time to open her “rich summaries” of the news. When he told Bill Moyers, one of Richardson’s earliest promoters, the same thing, the great commentator explained: “You live in a world of thunderstorms, and she watches the waves come in.”Richardson’s latest book shares all the intelligence of her newsletter. It doesn’t have the news value of her internet contributions but it is an excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history – and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.Like other recent books, including The Destructionists by Dana Milbank, Richardson’s new volume reminds us that far from being an outlier, Donald Trump was inevitable after 70 years of Republican pandering to big business, racism and Christian nationalism.So many direct lines can be drawn from the dawn of modern conservatism to the insanity of the Freedom Caucus today. It was William F Buckley Jr, the most famous conservative pundit of his era, who in 1951 attacked universities for teaching “secularism and collectivism” and promoted the canard that liberals were basically communists. Among Buckley’s mortal enemies, Richardson writes, were everyone “who believed that the government should regulate business, protect social welfare, promote infrastructure and protect civil rights” – and who “believed in fact-based argument”.In place of the liberal consensus that emerged with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Buckley and his henchmen wanted a new “orthodoxy of religion and the ideology of free markets”. A few years later, the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Four years after that, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy included promises to slow down the desegregation the supreme court had ordered 14 years before.In one of the most notorious dog whistles of all time, Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign by declaring his love for states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi – made infamous by the murders of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964.Since the 1950s, Richardson writes, conservatives have fought to destroy “the active government of the liberal consensus, and since the 1980s, Republican politicians [have] hacked away at it” but still “left much of the government intact”. With Trump’s election in 2016, the nation had finally “put into office a president who would use his power to destroy it”. Republicans fought for 50 years for an “end to business regulation and social services and the taxes they required”. Trump went even further by “making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism”.Richardson is refreshingly direct about the importance of the fascist example to Trump and his Maga movement. When he used the White House to host the Republican convention in 2020, the first lady, Melania Trump, wore a “dress that evoked a Nazi uniform”. And, Richardson writes, the big lie was a “key propaganda tool” for the Nazis, which Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf, the book Trump may have kept on his night table at Trump Tower (or maybe it was a collection of Hitler’s speeches).Richardson even uses the psychological profile of Hitler by the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency during the second world war, to remind us of similarities to Trump. The OSS said Hitler’s “primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy … never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong”.But Richardson’s book isn’t just a recitation of the evil of Republicans. It is also a celebration of progressive successes. She reminds us that before Vietnam ruined his presidency, Lyndon Johnson compiled an incredible record. In one session, Congress passed an astonishing 84 laws. Johnson’s “Great Society” included the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided federal aid for public schools; launched Head Start for the early education of low-income children; the social security amendments that created Medicare; increased welfare payments; rent subsidies; the Water Quality Act of 1965; and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.These laws had a measurable impact. “Forty million Americans were poor in 1960”; by 1969, that had dropped to 24 million.Addressing graduates of the University of Michigan in 1964, Johnson used words that are apt today:“For better or worse, your generation has been appointed by history to … lead America toward a new age … You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation.”Johnson rejected the “timid souls” who believed “we are condemned to a soulless wealth. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
      Democracy Awakening is published in the US by Viking More

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      Fascism in America: a long history that predates Trump

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      Pro-Nazi propaganda, courtesy of the US post office? This unlikely scheme was hatched by George Sylvester Viereck, a German-born American who between 1937 and 1941 sought to marshal US sentiment against intervention in Europe. Those who heeded him included prominent members of Congress, such as Burton Wheeler of Montana and Rush Holt Sr of West Virginia, anti-interventionist Democratic senators known for speeches that prompted accusations of antisemitism. Viereck’s contacts on Capitol Hill allowed him to place anti-interventionist speeches in the appendix to the congressional record. Thanks to friends in high places, he could order inexpensive reprints and have German-American groups mail them out on government postage.If this sounds out of place in the land of the free, it shouldn’t – according to an illuminating new anthology, Fascism in America: Past and Present, edited by Gavriel D Rosenfeld and Janet Ward. In 12 chapters plus an introduction and epilogue, the co-editors and their contributors make the case that fascism has existed on US soil for well past a century and remains disturbingly present today.“We don’t sufficiently teach civics or democratic awareness [in high schools], how fascism and far-right extremist movements have a long history in the US,” Rosenfeld said. “We think we’re an exception, that America fought ‘the good war’ to defeat fascism and Nazism. We patted ourselves on the back for many decades as ‘the greatest generation’ – a useful myth for American public life that blinded us to darker undercurrents in our society.”Ward mentions history from even further back, “eugenics-based scientific standards” that “informed opinions and policies on what it meant to be included not just as fully American, but as fully human” in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, subsequently influencing Nazi laws regarding race.Rosenfeld is president of the Center for Jewish History in New York and a professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut. From the UK, Ward is a history professor at the University of Oklahoma; she is a past president of the German Studies Association and was an American Council on Education fellow at Yale. Both are scholars of Germany, including the second world war and the Holocaust. (Rosenfeld authored a chapter in the anthology, on alternate histories of the war, from The Plot Against America to Watchmen.) Both editors became alarmed by developments during the Trump administration that suggested parallels with the rise of Nazism and hinted at a reawakening of homegrown fascist sentiments lying dormant for decades.“We redirected attention on our own backyard and applied the same kind of lens to a place that had not been subject to the same kind of scrutiny, the vulnerabilities in our own kind of democratic institutions,” Rosenfeld said. “We reached out to scholars in related fields – American studies, Black studies – to see what we could learn from the American experience … We were equally concerned about the present-day democratic backsliding.”Ward said: “More than one country has turned toward populism and the extreme right. It began to worry a lot of us, not just academics but cultural commentators.” The resulting volume is “very much part of a new awareness of the way in which traditional academics circulate to a broader public”.Collaborators include the New York University history professor Linda Gordon, who incorporated findings from a forthcoming project and The Second Coming of the KKK, her 2017 book about the years after the first world war. Ousmane K Power-Greene, an African American scholar at Clark University in Massachusetts, examined Black antifascist activism from the 1960s to the 1980s, by activists such as Angela Davis and H Rap Brown.Trump comes up repeatedly. Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, compares “Anarchy and the State of Nature in Donald Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany”. Marla Stone of Occidental College researched Trump-era detention facilities for migrant children. Her chapter title: “Concentration Camps in Trump’s America?”“It’s not just that we wanted to determine for ourselves, is Trump a fascist or not, is Trumpism fascist or not, is Maga-ism fascist or not,” Rosenfeld said, noting that such questions are frequently posed by scholars, journalists and readers. “We try to trace the evolving debate, the historical shift over time – of course, after the Charlottesville Unite the Right march in 2017 … [Trump’s] defending the Proud Boys at the 2020 debate, obviously after January 6 … it’s been a moving target.”Yet, Rosenfeld said, “ever since January 6, more people are inclined to believe that even if Trump is not a dogmatic fascist, so many of his followers are willing to use violence to overturn the rule of law, the constitution, to make it very concerning for people. At a certain point, you want to be safe rather than sorry, err on the side of caution, to believe we’re in a potential fascist moment.”The book suggests fascism in America might date back as far as the late 19th century, amid Jim Crow laws in the south and nativist fears over immigration from Europe. In the early 20th century, the US enacted infamously high immigration quotas, while domestic white supremacist groups thrived: the Ku Klux Klan during its 1920s resurgence, followed by Depression-era proto-fascist militant groups such as the Silver Legion, under William Dudley Pelley. While the interwar years witnessed clandestine German-backed attempts to mobilize Americans against intervention, the book makes it clear fascism needed no foreign encouragement.“Ultimately, this is an American story,” Ward said. “You can’t – you shouldn’t – look at fascism solely as an outside influence into the US … it needs to be looked at from within, as well as something coming in from without.”She noted that she received her doctorate from the University of Virginia, the campus on which the Charlottesville riots occurred six years ago.“The August 2017 events of Charlottesville pinpointed it for a lot of people,” Ward said. “The open demonstration of violence, the coming together of racism, antisemitism and white supremacy all at once through that ugly moment.”As to whether America is on the precipice of another such ugly moment, the co-editors are hoping democracy holds firm, just as it did in the second world war.“I’m going to be an optimist,” Ward said, “with education, with informed voices like the contributors to our book, with discourse and engagement [to prevent] a doomsday scenario with the new presidential election coming up.”Rosenfeld agreed, but could not help recalling a sobering lesson.“We know now that Franklin Roosevelt was still dealing with a nearly 20% unemployment rate on the eve of world war two,” he said. “Only billions and billions of dollars in military spending got us out of debt. All the isolationists got on board against the Nazis and Japan. Rightwingers were forced into silence.“It’s clear in retrospect,” he added, “that world war two did make the US a great power on the world stage. It also spared us the kind of fascism that Vichy France and Germany experienced, that many other countries experienced. We were spared the same thing – but it was a close call. We shouldn’t be complacent.”
      Fascism in America is published in the US by Cambridge University Press More

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      ‘Lachlan Murdoch is a Hamlet figure’: Michael Wolff unpicks the real-life succession drama

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      Immediately before Michael Wolff published The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, the emperor himself, driver of its expansion and its bitter divisions, stepped aside. Last week, Rupert Murdoch announced he was anointing his eldest son, Lachlan, as his successor, which per Wolff’s narrative will have been a bitter blow to everyone, including Lachlan.Wolff’s latest book joins an oeuvre that is remarkable for its access: in 2008, he wrote a biography of Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, for which the mogul gave him 50 hours of interviews. Never mind that it’s the longest Murdoch has ever spoken to a journalist, it’s probably the longest he’s ever spoken to a friend. “We really got along. He’s inexhaustible on the subject of the media, and I, too, am inexhaustible on that subject. We had a very good time,” says Wolff. So long as they were doing business or gossip, that is. “He’s very hard to talk to personally; he can’t reflect on his own past and his own experience. He can talk about his family; he was weirdly transparent about his children. But about himself, what he might be feeling, no.”Ten years later, Wolff, who is now 70, produced what will probably be his defining work, the trilogy about Donald Trump’s White House: Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide. The books distilled qualities evident since Wolff’s first piece in the New York Times Magazine ran in 1974: an exquisite eye for detail and mischief, expert pacing and a peculiar ability to get people to talk to him, even if they know – as by now they must – that he’s going to stitch them up like kippers. “I’m always surprised,” he says. “I have no real explanation except that people like to talk about themselves. I think of myself as a writer, not a journalist, and what does that mean? It means I’m not there to challenge anybody, I’m there to see what the experience is, and to try to put that on paper. I try to fade into the background.”Anyway, back to Lachlan, who takes over the company “theoretically”, Wolff tells me, over video call from an austere-looking room in Manhattan. He’s “a Hamlet figure. Does he want this job? I think many people who have worked with him and his siblings would say, in an ideal world, probably not.”Could Murdoch have stepped aside because of Wolff’s warts-and-all exposé? Does that sound like the kind of thing he would do? “From my point of view, I would say it’s not a coincidence,” Wolff says, picking his words judiciously, like a seasoned, picky traveller at a hotel buffet. “Obviously I speak to people inside the empire on a constant basis, and the feeling is that the book was a bus headed right at them. It’s a fairly vivid description of the problems of a 92-year-old running a public company, and he runs two significant public companies.” These are, of course, the Fox Corporation and News Corp, which, in fact, represent the rump of Murdoch’s empire, after the $71bn (£58bn) sale of 21st Century Fox – the film and television arms of the corporation – to Disney in 2019. But nevertheless that rump continues to change the shape of politics in the US and elsewhere. “The book created the environment where he was going to have to do more explaining than he wanted to do.”Just how many warts are there in Wolff’s book, though? The story it describes is, at root, quite sad: Murdoch wanted a rolling news channel and created Fox News in 1996, putting it under the control of the late Roger Ailes, for a number of reasons of which managing, controlling, manipulating and tamping down Murdoch’s warring sons were not the least. Murdoch was never even that into TV news, apparently, preferring print, but what he’d made ultimately delivered a new politics, culminating in Trump, whom Murdoch loathed.But Disney bought all the important bits of the business, leaving Murdoch with the thing he hated: Fox News (give or take what’s still a considerable newspaper empire; Wolff is not that interested in print, at least for the purposes of this book). So now Murdoch can’t get rid of Fox, because it’s all he has, and he can’t even change it, because it’s just making too much money.You’d call it Mephistophelean, except Murdoch didn’t sell his soul, he sold something he actually cared about – his news credentials. My sympathy for him would be greater if the devil only had plans for the Murdochs, but these new politics affect us all. If I had one criticism of Wolff’s overarching analysis, it’s that if you consider the UK for five seconds, it falls apart: Murdoch was never riding the tiger of Fox News here, he was tending the Sun and, for many years, the News of the World, his babies, and he still managed the slow-motion transformation of our politics, to a toxic sink where immigrants are to blame for everything and a blond sociopath could sweep into power on buffoonery. But I guess we just have to get used to our new place in the world, where nobody considers us for five seconds. And if I’m complaining, imagine what Australians have to say about their media’s virtual omission from the Murdoch story – they’ve been dealing with this family for a century.“There’s another theory inside the company,” Wolff says, about the abdication: “This is a Murdoch ruse. He doesn’t want to testify in the Smartmatic case.” Fox Corporation is being sued for $2.7bn for spreading the conspiracy theory that voting machines were rigged in the 2020 election; a similar case brought by Dominion resulted in an astronomical payout by Fox. Wolff reveals in the book that Murdoch thought the suit would cost $50m. By the time the firm walked away this April, it had cost $787.5m.Obviously it’s hard to even consider the Murdochs now but through the lens of Succession. Which one’s meant to be Kendall again, and did he win? “The superstructure of Succession takes a lot from the Murdoch story,” Wolff says. “But the Murdochs really don’t figure into any of the characters in an exact way. In no way. They aren’t those people. Murdoch, in the flesh, is incredibly conflict averse. Never engages. Very courtly. Very polite. In person, not in the least bit bullying or demanding or even functionally a know-it-all.” (According to The Fall, James Murdoch is “a prick”. I liked the brevity.)Wolff doesn’t fawn in front of big money and even expresses sympathy for the Murdoch heirs, who each got $2bn from the Disney deal. “When you have $2bn, that money owns you. You have to go to work for it. It essentially creates a full-time job which you very well may not want but you would be stuck with.” But he does surrender to its logic. “Theoretically,” Wolff says, “Rupert Murdoch didn’t have to go along with this. He could have said, ‘No, I’m closing Fox down. Or I’m going to let James run it.’ But temperamentally, after 70 years in this business, I think that it was beyond expectations for him to give up this incredibly powerful profit machine. Fox News has made more money than any other news business ever. And I’m sure he goes to bed at night thinking, ‘That’s something I’ve accomplished.’”Between that and Wolff’s fascination with the players at Fox News, first Ailes – with whom he had an affectionate lunching friendship – then Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, as well as sundry female anchors with fun-sounding drink and nymphomania problems, he emerges with an engaging but vexingly neutral narrative. “I’m not particularly interested in politics,” he says. “I think that the real issues are about people’s personal motivations. I think even if that’s in a political setting, which Fox is clearly, in fact what’s pushing these characters forward is not politics, it’s something else, it’s something a lot more basic.”So, ratings, yes? “What’s the overarching motivation of people on television? It’s to stay on television. People who have been on television can’t live with not being on television. Their lives diminish. They become incredibly bitter and angry.” Yes, but do I really care whether or not Carlson is patting his jowls every night and staring down screen mortality? Or is it more important that he actively created the environment for overturning Roe v Wade, because that’s the bit of his life that intersects others’?When you’re talking to Wolff, you have to turn down the bit of your brain that raises objections like that, just as he turns down that bit of his own brain.He was telling me about Ailes, the architect of Fox, always vehemently opposed by both James and Lachlan Murdoch (the only thing they could ever agree on), who was brought down by sexual harassment accusations in 2016 and died the next year. Ailes created the behemoth by recognising that some viewers didn’t want progress; they wanted to stay in 1965. “He made a business of the left-behinds. That’s interesting, from a business standpoint, because the left-behinds previously had no commercial use. He figured out how these people could be monetised, and that changed everything.” Once they’d been monetised, they were a calculable entity, looking for a political home.Ailes had another interesting mantra: it’s not enough to make conservatives happy; you have to make liberals angry. Which, again, feels like an important insight, but Wolff’s response to “alt-right” provocation feels … well, you decide: “I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed every moment I ever spent with Roger. You know, he had these political views that were reprehensible. He would get on these rants and you knew that if you let him go all the way down, at the end of the day the Jews would be killed. You would have to veer him off if you didn’t want to hear that. I remember, once, he was on a rant, and I interrupted him to ask about his son. His son was born when he was 60. I myself at that age was considering having another child. So we had this lovely conversation which precluded having to talk about some ugly politics.”Did more baby Wolffs result from this conversation? “No, my wife persuaded me to have a baby when I was 60, but he helped. Not only has it not been a disaster, then I had another after that.” (This family is with his second wife, the 43-year-old journalist Victoria Floethe. He has three children with his first wife, the lawyer Alison Anthoine.) And what is the consequence, the hangover, from checking your moral compass at the cloakroom while you dodge antisemitic necropolitics over linguine?Wolff’s adventures in Trumpland landed him in hot water from all quarters: the president tried and failed to block publication; numerous sources complained about Wolff’s reporting of off-the-record conversations, or the conversation simply not unfolding the way they remembered it; and then there were people lodging my kind of objection, which is essentially, “Come on, this isn’t a game.” But now the dust has settled, Trump is “no longer upset. I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with him and Melania. He calls me from time to time. And it’s as though we are – actually, I don’t know what we are. We’re friends? That can’t possibly be. But we have some relationship.”He quotes a lot of people as thinking Trump is a moron, but does he think Trump is a moron? “I certainly think he’s unlike anyone that I or, I would go so far as to say, any of us have had any experience with. Sometimes he can certainly sound like a moron. He can sound as if he knows literally nothing about anything. But on the other hand, obviously he does know something. He has keen instincts. Obviously on some level he’s a genius. So I guess you can be a moron and a genius.”How would Wolff write himself; what’s his motivation? “It’s partly that I’m a storyteller. But I would also say that I’ve spent my time trying to get rich. On quite a number of occasions I’ve set out to get rich beyond my wildest dreams and never succeeded. It makes me interested in people who have. Most journalists have accepted the fact that riches are not for them. But I never accepted that.”I then ask how he’d feel if Trump gained a second term in 2024, and he says he’d feel like he had to get back to work. Any anxieties about the future of democracy at all? “I feel that American democracy is pretty damn strong, that it can probably withstand Donald Trump. It can withstand Fox News. America survives, it grows, it prospers. Could that end? I guess it could. Would we know it ends when it ends, or would we only know that in hindsight?”“I’m a fundamentally optimistic person, who keeps having children,” he says. Maddening. A lot of fun. Still maddening.The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire by Michael Wolff is published by The Bridge Street Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. More

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      ‘You want to think America is better’: can the supreme court be saved?

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      When Dawn Porter studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, she would pass the US supreme court every day. “You walk by the marble columns, the frontage which has inspirational words, and you believe that,” she recalls. “You think because of this court Black people integrated schools, because of this court women have the right to choose, because of this court, because of this court, because of this court.”Its profound role in American life is chronicled in Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, Porter’s four-part documentary series that traces the people, decisions and confirmation battles that have helped the court’s relationship with politics turn from a respectful dance into a toxic marriage.Porter, 57, an Emmy award winner who maintains her bar licence, remembers first year common law classes when she studied the court’s landmark decisions. “Like most lawyers I have a great admiration for not only what the court can do but its role in shaping American opinion as well as American society,” she says via Zoom from New York, a poster for her film John Lewis: Good Trouble behind her.“If there’s a criticism of the court in this series, it comes from a place of longing, a place of saying we can’t afford for this court to lose the respect of the American people. There’s going to be decisions over time that people disagree with. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is how cases are getting to the court, how they’re ignoring precedent and the procedures by which the decisions are getting made. That’s where I would love people to focus.”Deadlocked offers a visual montage of the court winding back in time: women and people of colour gradually disappear in favour of an all-white, all-male bench. They include Chief Justice Earl Warren, who heralded an era of progressive legal decisions such as Brown v Board of Education, a unanimous 1954 ruling that desegregated public schools.Porter says of the paradox: “One of the things we were thinking is, isn’t it ironic that this all-male, all-white court is responsible for Brown v Board and for Roe v Wade [which enshrined the right to abortion] and you have the right to an attorney, which is Gideon v Wainwright, and you have the right to have your rights read to you. Yet when we have the most diverse court we’ve ever had, we’re seeing a rollback of some of these civil rights.”In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first Black man to serve on the court. A group of southern senators, almost all Democrats, sought to exploit riots in the major cities and fears about crime to try to derail his nomination. Marshall endured five days of questioning spanning three weeks and was finally confirmed by the Senate in a 69-11 vote.There have only been two African American justices since: conservative Clarence Thomas and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first woman to sit on the court was Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative appointed by the Republican president Ronald Reagan.“It takes a century of supreme court jurisprudence before we get a woman on the court. There’s an irony there that we have the current composition of the court and yet we have probably one of the most least hospitable courts to individual rights.”The court’s relationship with public opinion has been complex, leading at some times, following at others. In 2015, it ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The 5-4 decision removed same-sex marriage bans in 14 states – an acknowledgment of shifting attitudes and the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.Porter observes: “The court doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t even have PR or a media representative. The supreme court can’t change public opinion but what the court can do is either set an aspirational goal or it can reflect where the country is. For the gay marriage decision, that’s where the country was. The country was supportive of same-sex marriage and the court ratifies that public opinion and makes it law.”Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans have also consistently supported reproductive rights. In Roe v Wade in 1973, the court voted 7-2 that the constitution protects individual privacy, including the right to abortion. Porter observes: “It’s not that controversial a decision by that time. More than half the states had reproductive rights access so it was only going to affect some of the states.”At the time, Christian evangelicals were not opposed to abortion rights. “Evangelicals historically were pro-choice. This is where politics comes in and is on this collision course with the judiciary. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell realised, oh, wait, abortion is a wedge issue and there are all these Catholic voters. So they come together.“What the evangelicals want is tax exemption for religious schools. The Catholics don’t want abortion and together they’re a powerful voting bloc. They not only say we’re going to try and get the supreme court to change but we’re going to elect a president who is going to help us.”These religious groups duly turned against the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Sunday school teacher, in favour of the divorced former Hollywood actor Reagan. Porter continues: “What you see is kind of politics at work. How can we get power? How can we get what we want? How can we form alliances?“That alliance is very powerful because Reagan ends up having so many appointments to the court and you see the rightward shift of the court. These kinds of monumental changes don’t happen quickly but building blocks are constructed in these earlier years, like in the 80s, and they’ve continued to this day.”The court’s role as a political actor was never more stark than in 2000, when its ruling in Bush v Gore terminated the recount process in Florida in the presidential election, effectively handing the White House to George W Bush. Porter notes: “It’s 5-4 to step in and stop the voting to determine who would be the next president of the United States. Sandra Day O’Connor later said she regretted voting with the majority.“Also, interestingly, Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all working with the Republicans on the side of soon-to-be President Bush. Is that illegal? No. Is it impermissible? No. Is it unethical? No. Is it interesting? Yes!” Porter says with a laugh.But the ever-growing politicisation of the court became turbocharged – perhaps irreversibly – by the death of the conservative justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Mitch McConnell, then Republican majority leader in the Senate, committed a professional foul by refusing to act on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace him, insisting that the seat remain vacant in an election year.Step forward Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president who released a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees based on advice from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. It was an unprecedented political masterstroke that comforted religious conservatives troubled by his unholy antics and past support for abortion rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcConnell is seen in Deadlocked asserting that “the single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump … was the supreme court”. This clip is from an address he made in 2019 to the Federalist Society, which has played a critical role in tilting the court to the right.The group was founded in 1982 under the mentorship of Justice Antonin Scalia to challenge what conservatives perceived as liberal dominance of courts and law schools. Among its most prominent members was Leonard Leo, who oversaw the rise in its influence at the expense of the more liberal American Bar Association.Porter says: “Leonard Leo is one of the most fascinating and yet not widely known political actors in our contemporary history. The Federalist Society realises: we can have influence in grooming judges and who’s getting appointed to the lower courts. Leonard Leo takes that on steroids and eventually becomes the person who former president Trump looks to create his list of potential supreme court nominees.“In recent years Leo has secured a multibillion-dollar war chest in order to continue to groom and populate the lower courts with very conservative ideologues. Amy Coney Barrett is a product of that. Kavanaugh is a product of that. All the greatest hits are with Federalist Society influence.”Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, has called it “the scheme”: a decades-long plot by rightwing donor interests to capture the supreme court and use it to accomplish goals that they cannot achieve through elected officials. The Federalist Society is a receptacle for “dark money” – millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.Porter adds: “The problem with private entities like the Federalist Society having so much influence and power is that there’s no insight into the source of their funds. We certainly do know that it’s not a coincidence that some of the interests of some of the most conservative folks seem to be being served by these appointments.”Last year the rightwing forces achieved their greatest victory with a decision that once seemed unthinkable: the overturning of Roe v Wade after nearly half a century. Most Republican-led states moved to restrict abortion with 14 banning the procedure in most cases at any point in pregnancy. About 25 million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before the ruling.Porter had wanted to believe the court she admired as a student was a bulwark in defence of individual liberties. “Every pundit, every organisation, said Roe is going to be overturned and yet it was still hard to believe that 50 years later, when so many people rely on that decision, that it actually could be overturned.“I will say it really did personally impact my feeling about the court. Reading the decision, there’s ignoring of history. It’s not a well-written opinion, it’s not coherent, and that’s really hard. We all need to believe in things and we all need to believe that these are the smartest people and that they’re able to put aside their personal beliefs and that didn’t seem to be the case.“It was more than disappointing. It’s somewhat comforting that we have such a strong reaction to it but I see the cases of the women who have been so harmed by this decision. There are people have been forced to carry pregnancies to term that were not viable, people who just stay pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant. You want to think America is better than that.”As the final episode of Deadlocked acknowledges, the court faces a crisis of legitimacy. A series of extremist rulings out of whack with public opinion have come at the same time as ethics scandals involving the rightwing justices Thomas and Samuel Alito. The share of Americans with a favourable opinion of the court has declined to its lowest point in public opinion surveys since 1987: 44% favourable versus 54% unfavourable, according to the Pew Research Center.Porter adds: “Every single person we spoke to for this series regardless of their political background – and we have Scalia’s former clerk, who wrote the decision broadening access to guns; we have Ted Olson, who argued Bush v Gore for President Bush; we have Don Ayer, who was a Reagan justice department official – is concerned about the reputation of the court and what the future holds if the court continues to chart its own path and not realise the delicate balance of our tripartite system of government.“What if the court sides with a Trump who refuses to accept the results of the election next year? That’s what we’re talking about and a lot of the people who did the insurrection are still out there; we didn’t arrest them all. We’re in uncharted waters. It’s not a game and I don’t think anyone wants to actually put this to the test of: will our democracy survive?”
      Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court premieres on Showtime on 22 September with a UK date to be announced More

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      in US Politics

      Key takeaways from Michael Wolff’s book on Murdoch, Fox and US politics

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      Michael Wolff’s new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, was eagerly awaited even before the Guardian published the first news of its contents on Tuesday.Since then, other outlets have reported more revelations familiar in tone and sometimes in cast list from the gadfly author’s blockbusting trilogy of Trump tell-alls: Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide.In response, Fox News pointed to a famous impersonation of Wolff by comedian Fred Armisen when it said: “The fact that the last book by this author was spoofed in a Saturday Night Live skit is really all we need to know.”Nonetheless, what have we learned about Rupert Murdoch, Fox and US politics from The Fall so far? Here are some key points:Murdoch did not expect Dominion to prove so costlyDominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6bn, over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud in 2020. According to Wolff, in winter 2022, an irate Rupert Murdoch told friends of his then-wife, Jerry Hall, “This lawsuit could cost us fifty million dollars.” When the suit was settled, in April, it cost Fox a whopping $787.5m.Murdoch thought Ron DeSantis would beat TrumpMurdoch reportedly predicted the Florida governor would beat Trump for the Republican nomination next year, siphoning off evangelical voters because “it was going to come out about the abortions Trump had paid for”. But it seems Murdoch’s radar was off again: a few months out from the first vote in Iowa, notwithstanding 91 criminal charges, Trump holds gigantic polling leads over DeSantis, whose campaign has long been seen to be flatlining.Murdoch wishes Trump dead …Murdoch, Wolff says, directs considerable anger Trump’s way, at one point treating friends to “a rat-a-tat-tat of jaw-clenching ‘fucks’” that showed a “revulsion … as passionate … as [that of] any helpless liberal”. More even than that, Wolff reports that Murdoch, 92, has often wished out loud that Trump, 77, was dead. “Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme,” Wolff writes, reporting the mogul saying: “‘We would all be better off …?’ ‘This would all be solved if …’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?’”… but Lachlan just wipes his bottom on himRupert Murdoch’s son, Lachlan Murdoch, is in pole position to take over the empire. According to Wolff, the younger man is no Trump fan either. As reported by the Daily Beast, Wolff writes: “In the run-up to the 2016 election, the bathrooms at the Mandeville house featured toilet paper with Trump’s face, reported visitors with relief and satisfaction. [Lachlan] told people that his wife and children cried when Trump was elected.”Rupert has choice words for some Fox News starsThe Daily Beast also reported on the older Murdoch’s apparent contempt for some of his stars. Considering how, Wolff says, Sean Hannity pushed for Fox to stay loyal to Trump, the author writes: “When Murdoch was brought reports of Hannity’s on- and off-air defence of Fox’s post-election coverage, he perhaps seemed to justify his anchor: ‘He’s retarded, like most Americans.’”Hannity may have been on thin iceAlso reported by the Daily Beast: Wolff says Murdoch considered firing Hannity as a way to mollify Dominion in its defamation suit, with Lachlan Murdoch reportedly suggesting that a romantic relationship Hannity had with another host could be used as precedent, given the downfalls of media personalities including Jeff Zucker of CNN.DeSantis may have kicked Tucker Carlson’s dogAccording to the Daily Beast, and to a lengthy excerpt published by New York magazine, Wolff writes that in spring of this year, Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, visited another leading Fox host, Tucker Carlson, and his wife, Susie Carlson, for a lunch designed to introduce Murdoch’s favored Republican to his most powerful primetime star. What Wolff says follows is worth quoting in full:
      The Carlsons are dog people with four spaniels, the progeny of other spaniels they have had before, who sleep in their bed. DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: She did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a ‘fascist’. Forget Ron DeSantis.
      Carlson saw a presidential run as a way to escapeCarlson has said he “knows” his removal from Fox after the Dominion settlement was a condition of that deal. Dominion and Fox have said it wasn’t. On Wednesday, New York magazine published Wolff’s reporting that Trump openly considered making Carlson his vice-presidential pick. But Wolff also fleshes out rumours Carlson considered a run for president himself – reported by the Guardian – and says the host seriously pondered the move “as a further part of his inevitable martyrdom – as well as a convenient way to get out of his contract”. This, Wolff says, left Rupert Murdoch “bothered” – and “pissed at Lachlan for not reining Carlson in”.Wolff is no stranger to gossip …… often of a salacious hue. Roger Ailes, the former Fox News chief, features prominently throughout The Fall, a font of off-colour quotes and pungent opinions, including that Trump, whom he helped make president, is a “dumb motherfucker”. Ailes died in disgrace in 2017, after a sexual harassment scandal. According to a New York Times review, Wolff describes the Fox-host-turned-Trump-surrogate Kimberly Guilfoyle “settl[ing] into a private plane on the way to Ailes’s funeral”, adding: “What was also clear, if you wanted it to be, was that she was wearing no underwear.”Jerry Hall called Murdoch a homophobeSticking with the salacious, the Daily Beast noted a focus on “Murdoch’s attitude towards homosexuality”. Hall, the site said, is quoted as responding to a discussion of someone’s sexuality by asking: “Rupert, why are you such a homophobe?” Repeating the charge, the former model reportedly told friends: “He’s such an old man.” More

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      in US Politics

      Rupert Murdoch often wishes Donald Trump dead, Michael Wolff book says

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      Rupert Murdoch loathes Donald Trump so much that the billionaire has not just soured on him as a presidential candidate but often wishes for his death, the author Michael Wolff writes in his eagerly awaited new book on the media mogul, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.According to Wolff, Murdoch, 92, has become “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of the 77-year-old former US president, often voicing thoughts including “This would all be solved if … ” and “How could he still be alive, how could he?”The Fall was announced last month and will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Wolff has written three tell-all books about Trump – Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide – and one about Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. In his second Murdoch book, he says he may be “the journalist not in his employ who knows [Murdoch] best”.Wolff also describes his source material as “conversations specifically for this book, and other conversations that have taken place over many years … scenes and events that I have personally witnessed or that I have recreated with the help of participants in them”.After Trump entered US politics in 2015, winning the White House the following year, he, along with an increasingly extreme Republican party, Fox News and other properties in Murdoch’s rightwing media empire formed a symbiotic relationship.But Murdoch has long been reported to have soured on Trump – a process which, according to Wolff, saw Murdoch personally endorse the Fox News call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020 that fueled Trump’s campaign of lies about voter fraud, culminating in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.By the beginning of this year, Wolff writes, what Murdoch “adamantly didn’t want … was Trump.“Of all Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one. His relatively calm demeanor from the early Trump presidency where, with a sigh, he could dismiss him merely as a ‘fucking idiot’ had now become a churning stew of rage and recrimination.“Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: “We would all be better off …? “This would all be solved if …” “How could he still be alive, how could he?” “Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?”Trump has regularly claimed to be exceptionally fit for his age, claims backed by doctors when he was in the White House. He also claims to be more mentally fit for office than Biden, his 80-year-old successor, claims many observers increasingly doubt.After Trump left office, Wolff writes, Murdoch “like much of the Republican establishment … had convinced himself that Trump was, finally, vulnerable. That his hold on the base and on Republican politicians had weakened enough that now was the time to kill him off, finally.”But now, as another election year approaches, Trump is in rude political health.Notwithstanding 91 criminal charges – for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments – and assorted civil cases, Trump leads the Republican primary by vast margins in national and key state polling, the overwhelming favourite to win the nomination to face Biden in another White House battle. More