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      Michael Lewis: ‘We were incentivised to have a bad pandemic response’

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      An event as large and devastating as the Covid pandemic was always going to attract a rush of authors seeking to uncover the story behind the decade’s biggest story. Leading the pack – not for the first time – is Michael Lewis, the man with an unerring knack for finding narrative gold in the most well-mined territories.He did it with notable success in the financial crisis of 2008, by smartly identifying the people who made money from the banking collapse, those who bet against the collateralised debt obligation bubble. That was The Big Short, a bestseller that was turned, like a previous book, Moneyball, into a successful Oscar-nominated Hollywood film.And one can imagine that the film rights will be quickly snapped up for The Premonition, Lewis’s pacy exploration of America’s response to the pandemic. There are many approaches that could be taken with such a far-reaching crisis but Lewis has opted for a similar counterintuitive approach to the one he took in The Big Short. Instead of following those whose lack of foresight has had such damaging effect on life and prosperity in America, he has focused on a group of health officials whose warnings were ignored.“The working title for most of the time I was working on it was The Ones Who Knew,” he tells me on a Zoom call from his office in Berkeley, California. He decided against that title because he was worried that it would place his subjects in a harsh spotlight, by suggesting – incorrectly – that they were negligent with their knowledge. He opted for The Premonition because, he explains, “to control a virus you have to see around corners”. What he means by that is that if you wait for sufficient evidence to establish that a pandemic is under way, it’s already too late to stop it.In the pandemic prevention business, you need to see the future before it arrives and, as it turns out, there were a number of people who had anticipated precisely where things were heading. One of them was the deputy public health officer for the state of California. A woman with the wonderful name of Charity Dean, she is such a remarkable character that it would have been a tragedy had she not found her way, at some point of her life, into a Michael Lewis book.Each December, Dean would write her new year resolutions on the back of a photograph of her grandmother. On 20 December 2019, she wrote down two things. “1) Stay sober. 2) It has started.” She had a kind of sixth sense that the viral pandemic she had long been expecting had begun. By coincidence, and rather oddly, at about the same time, Lewis put forward the idea, in a conversation with the Observer, that the only thing that could wake America up to Donald Trump’s governmental negligence was a pandemic.He now plays down his clairvoyance, explaining that he gave that example simply because it was a situation that would affect everybody. “Rich white people would be scared too,” he says. In the event, many Americans followed Trump’s lead in denying the danger of Covid-19 and the virus has remained a highly divisive and contested subject. “If it had killed twice as many people and killed kids,” says Lewis, “you wouldn’t be seeing these revolts in Oklahoma. You’d be seeing the New Deal.”As it is, the virus has killed nearly 570,000 Americans, one of the highest death rates in the world, though not quite as high as the UK’s in relative terms. The irony, as Lewis notes, is that in a pre-pandemic assessment of those nations best prepared to deal with a global contagion, the US was ranked top and the UK second.The way Lewis tells it, the US practically invented pandemic planning, after George W Bush read a book in the summer of 2005 about the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic. Written by John Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History so affected the then president that he asked a unit of the homeland security department to develop a new pandemic strategy. At the time, the only documented plans were to speed up vaccine production and stockpile antiviral drugs.Lewis details the recruitment of a group of medical mavericks, led by a couple of southern doctors, one a poet-administrator named Richard Hatchett and the other Carter Mecher, a sublimely focused problem-solver with highly evolved people skills (Tom Hanks would have to play him in a movie). They were charged with breaking away from received thinking and looking at radical ways of dealing with a pandemic.Three years earlier, a 13-year-old girl called Laura had entered a school science fair in Albuquerque with a project she’d been working on: a computer model to predict the spread of a virus. She was helped by her scientist father, Bob Glass. The senior Glass soon became obsessed by the project, long after his daughter moved on to other interests, and he tried without success to engage the attention of the academic science world with his findings. No one was interested. But eventually Hatchett and Mecher were and they used his model, first developed with his daughter, to come up with a comprehensive plan for limiting the spread of a virus: closing down schools and colleges, social distancing, mask wearing.“It’s a novella,” Lewis says of the Bob and Laura Glass story. “It could be written as fiction. I went and saw Bob Glass in Albuquerque. He reminded me of me. He’s much smarter than I am but his feelings about his daughter’s science projects are exactly the feelings I have about my daughters’ softball careers.”Drawing on Glass’s work, Hatchett, Mecher and several others were brought into the White House in the Bush years and some stayed on during the Obama administration. But when it really mattered, they found themselves outside the decision-making process, unable to get through to those in power. The book follows the pioneering strides made in federal pandemic planning and then the gradual and then abrupt dismantling of their work.For all Hatchett’s and Mecher’s painstaking efforts, perhaps the real hero or heroine of the book is Dean. As deputy public health officer of California, her warnings were ignored by her boss and the state governor’s administration. When she protested, she was frozen out of meetings and silenced. But rather than buckle, she fought back, finding any way she could to get the message out, until finally the state administration, reeling from the virus, was compelled to backtrack and adopt Dean’s plan, although without publicly recognising her input.We see her first as the public health officer for Santa Barbara, where she gained a fierce reputation for battling a tuberculosis outbreak. In a scene that must surely feature in any prospective film, Dean is forced to conduct a postmortem in a mortuary car park with a pair of garden shears because the local coroner is too scared to extract a lung that might be infected with TB.“Men like that always underestimate me,” she tells Lewis. “They think my spirit animal is a bunny. And it’s a fucking dragon.”Any author would kill for that kind of dialogue. As is often the case with Lewis’s books, I wonder how he manages to find people who speak in such gloriously vivid language. Is it a factor of America culture, steeped as it is in cinematic ways of talking, or is he just lucky?“There are two secrets,” he says. “One is I’m picking characters. They’re not randomly selected. But if you ask Charity Dean how much time I spent with her, she will say, ‘He spent more time with me than any human being in my life has ever spent’. She would say I know her better than either of her ex-husbands. I’m also culling. But having said that, all three major characters in the book were really unfiltered. They weren’t thinking, how’s this going to sound?”If Dean and Mecher are the good guys, there are no shortage of baddies. Chief among these, perhaps surprisingly, is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC. It’s an American federal institution with an international reputation. As Lewis himself admits, he’d always thought of the CDC as “one of the places in the government that America can be proud of”. This, he adds, is because he didn’t know what they were doing.In the book, they are mostly not doing very much and a lot of their energy seems to go into preventing others from doing anything either. Back in the 1970s, the then head of the CDC, David Sencer, called for nationwide vaccination after a swine flu outbreak. Two hundred million doses of vaccine were ordered and 45m administered, only for the outbreak not to materialise. Sencer was blamed for overreacting and sacked. Henceforth, the CDC tended to err on the side of cautious inaction. “I think the CDC had virtues but it was not battlefield command. It had become a place where the generals had no experience fighting a war,” says Lewis.He is impressed by what the Biden administration has achieved in a short time. “I feel like there’s an intelligent entity all of a sudden,” he says. Nor is he in any doubt how ill-suited Trump was to being the man in charge during a pandemic. Yet, although he charts Trump’s incompetence, he doesn’t really target the former president as the arch-villain of the piece, partly because it’s a handy simplification that Lewis wants to avoid. “There is a national institutional desire to sort of bury what just happened and say, ‘Oh it was all Donald Trump’. And I don’t think anyone who’s close to the thing believes that,” he says.The official within the Trump administration whom he does identify as a major culprit is the former national security adviser John Bolton, who now does the media rounds as a voluble Trump critic. The day after he was appointed to the position in April 2018, Bolton sacked Tom Bossert, a veteran of the Bush administration. Bossert was the homeland security adviser who oversaw the biological threat team that was even then still influenced by the Hatchet and Mecher pandemic plan.“From that moment on,” Lewis writes, “the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation states.” So ingrained was this perspective within the administration that when he finally began to acknowledge the danger that Covid presented to America, Trump could only speak of it in nationalistic or xenophobic terms, continually referring to the “China virus”. Yet Lewis believes there was an opportunity for Trump to have been seen as the saviour of the day.Bossert told Lewis that had he survived he thinks he would have been able to persuade Trump to give him a chance of implementing the pandemic plan, on the basis that if it didn’t work, he could fire and blame him and, if it did work, he could take all the credit.“Trump would have loved that,” says Lewis. “All it would have taken is a couple of months with the United States doing well in relation to other people. That could have got Trump re-elected. The fact that Bolton cut that tie – that probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives. It prevented all the knowledge that had been accumulated from ever getting into the response. There’s an alternative history there. Maybe John Bolton is the reason Donald Trump didn’t get elected.”For many observers, not only did the Trump administration fail the United States, it also vacated its long-established position as world leader. Had the US set the kind of example seen in Japan and South Korea, it’s not hard to imagine that the UK and the EU would have been more inclined to follow suit.Lewis says it’s another element of the story that reminds him of the financial crisis. “With The Big Short, I remember wandering Europe and thinking, no one will ever listen to us again on the subject of finance and banking. We were the world’s leader on this. We had a moral authority and we lost it. We’ve just embarrassed ourselves all over again. The fact that Britain has done worse than the US doesn’t excuse the American response and there’s a tendency to use that excuse here [in America].”If The Premonition is an avowedly character-driven book, it also seeks to cast a critical light on the workings of America’s mammoth industrial-medical complex. One point that repeatedly emerges is that lacking any kind of national coordination, it is fundamentally ill-prepared to deal with national crises. That said, the UK does have a national health service, but it didn’t stop us from being among the nations with the highest per capita death rate from Covid. “The existence of an actual national system is not a sufficient solution,” acknowledges Lewis, “but it’s necessary. There’s no way you can run a coordinated response without a system.”On a more profound level, the book also examines the backward priorities in health, how we are geared up to treat illness rather than to stop it from occurring. The paradox of medical science is that the better you are at avoiding a problem, the less likely that anyone will notice your efforts. And if they do, it will probably be to complain of a needless overreaction.“There is no incentive to prevent things,” he says. “If you look at what our two societies have in common, we’ve given ourselves over to markets in a way that’s pretty extreme. Which is to say, we strongly encourage things that pay and we give correspondingly less attention to things that don’t pay. Prevention does not pay. Disease pays. It pays when Covid is all over society and corporations get to make a lot of money testing for it. It doesn’t pay just to shut it down up front. And if there’s food for thought, it’s that we were essentially incentivised to have a bad pandemic response.”The lesson of the book is that there are people who spend their lives readying those in power for bad outcomes. Rather than being treated as tiresome Cassandras, simply because bad outcomes more often than not don’t occur, they ought to be involved at the centre of decision-making, not just for strategic purposes but economic ones. Most of the damage done to the economies of the US and UK was due to the fact that neither country acted early enough. Each saw themselves as the so well prepared that they had no need to worry about it. And so they didn’t.Or, as Lewis, ever the sports fan, neatly puts it: “Our players aren’t our problem. But we are what our record says we are.” The Premonition is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      in US Politics

      The Premonition by Michael Lewis review – a pandemic story

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      It is hard to think of a writer who has had more success than Michael Lewis at turning forbiddingly complex situations into propulsive nonfiction narratives. His first book, the semi-autobiographical Liar’s Poker, drew on his own experience as a bond salesman in the 1980s to tell a vivid story about the predatory culture of Wall Street. He has since repeated the trick, though with fewer autobiographical elements, with an impressive range of subjects, from statistical analysis in baseball (Moneyball) to the credit default swap market and the 2008 financial crisis (The Big Short). His success derives from an ability to take incredibly wonkish-sounding premises and turn them into the kinds of stories that get made into films starring, respectively, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale.His new book, The Premonition, is the story of a group of medics and scientists who attempt to get the US government to take pandemic response seriously. In a New York Timesinterview in January 2021, Lewis described the book, which he was then still working on, as “a superhero story where the superheroes seem to lose the war”. It’s a little grandiose, but it’s an accurate enough elevator pitch. Lewis’s main subjects are a group of extraordinarily dedicated, resourceful and conscientious people who understand how drastically underprepared America is for a viral pandemic. They know what needs to be done to redress the situation, but are up against the fragmented dysfunction of the federal government and the malicious indifference of the Trump White House.Lewis is unashamedly and, at times, cornily earnest about what he refers to at one point as this “rogue group of patriots working behind the scenes to save the country”. One such rogue is Charity Dean, a deputy director of California’s Department of Public Health, who becomes, in the days of Covid’s first emergence, a kind of underdog heroine in the fight to get the federal authorities to take the threat seriously. Then there are Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who shaped pandemic planning in the George W Bush administration, and later, with Dean and others, worked from outside the nucleus of power to try to mitigate the unfolding catastrophe.If this is a superhero story, it’s one that lacks a supervillain. Though you might expect a book by Lewis about the US government’s grotesque mishandling of the pandemic to be a late entry into the Big Trump Book canon, the 45th president is a mercifully peripheral presence in its pages. As with his last book, The Fifth Risk, Lewis’s approach here is to find a small number of unheralded individuals working within vast systems, and use them to portray the workings (or, in this case, not-workings) of those systems. The malevolent force in The Premonition is institutional malaise. Lewis’s underlying argument here, though, is hardly compatible with the conservative “big government doesn’t work” boilerplate, which posits centralisation as the root of all societal evil. Rather, he portrays a system that is both incredibly vast and insufficiently centralised. “There’s no one driving the bus,” as Joe DeRisi, one of Lewis’s main subjects, puts it. DeRisi, a biochemist who developed an extremely useful technology for rapid viral testing, spends much of the book banging his head against institutional brick walls in an attempt to get his innovation adopted as part of a wider campaign against Covid.If this is a superhero story, it’s one that lacks a super­villain – instead the malevolent force is institu­tional malaiseAnd so although the book’s action takes place within the context of the Trump administration’s drastic mishandling of the crisis, Lewis is more interested in the political conditions that exist before the pandemic. Fiasco though Trump’s leadership was, there is no attempt to lay the entire blame for the crisis at the feet of his administration. To put it in medical terms, Lewis diagnoses Trump as a comorbidity.It is the CDC – the US government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – that emerges as the main antagonist. As the country’s public health agency, the CDC is, as its name suggests, technically responsible for preventing the spread of disease. But the book presents a damning portrayal of an organisation in which no one is willing to risk getting fired by making a wrong move, and in which an institutional abundance of caution amounts to a form of recklessness. The fact that the director of the organisation is appointed by, and can be fired by, the president also means it’s a role that tends to go to yes-men. As Lewis writes of Trump’s differing relationships with CDC director Robert Redfield, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: “If Donald Trump had gotten up and said, ‘Fauci, you’re fired,’ nothing would have happened, which is likely why he never did it […] To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.”Although Lewis does justice to the complexity of the scientific and institutional problems he’s examining, he rarely gets bogged down in their density. He is at least as interested in characterisation as he is in, say, explaining the science of stuff like viral genetic sequencing. The wager here is that the investment in the former pays off by getting the reader through a fair amount of the latter. And so he devotes a large proportion of what is a relatively short book to establishing his characters’ back stories. We first encounter Charity Dean, for instance, dealing more or less single-handedly with a TB outbreak in her Santa Barbara jurisdiction, trying to get a useless coroner’s office to perform an autopsy on a TB-riddled corpse. (By the time I got to her standing in the parking lot of a morgue, rolling up her sleeves and opening the corpse’s ribs with a pair of garden shears as a bunch of terrified men in Hazmat suits look on, I had narrowed down my casting preference to either Kristen Bell or Reece Witherspoon.)When Lewis gets to the pandemic itself, surprisingly late in the book, he’s faced with a contradictory problem, with respect to the imperatives of narrative journalism: a major historical crisis is unfolding, but it’s happening mostly in the form of Zoom calls. (This, of course, is also the contradictory problem of our time: the moment itself is dramatic, but the individual’s experience of it is profoundly static.) A representative scene has Dean and DeResi on a Zoom call with Priscilla Chan, philanthropist and wife of Mark Zuckerberg:
      “The meeting with the Biohub was meant to start at one thirty in the afternoon on April 29th. Shortly after one thirty, Charity unmuted herself and turned on her video and tried to stall by making small talk with Priscilla Chan about their children. At length Priscilla said, ‘Um, maybe we should just get started?’ Joe DeRisi was in his own box. He had one of those faces that would always look younger than it was, Charity thought.”
      I was mostly willing to park my epistemological doubts about the position Lewis adopts as a kind of omniscient third-person narrator, but I did find myself questioning whether, with this kind of scene, he’s encountering the formal limits of the kind of pacy, thriller-ish style he favours. At times, in fact, the book can seem less like a work of narrative journalism than an exceptionally vivid script treatment. Of Dean, for instance, he writes: “She’d crash meetings that her boss didn’t want her to attend and announce her arrival by dropping this huge binder on the table: Boom!”I found this sort of approach strangely unsuited to the story the book tells, largely because it never quite translates into a story at all. And yet, in the end, without his ever having to spell it out, Lewis’s message comes across very powerfully: the US government, in its institutional dysfunction, is in danger of abandoning its citizens to a private sector that is even less equipped to deal with large-scale disasters such as Covid. The Premonition ends on a profoundly depressing note, with Dean abandoning the civil service to found a healthcare startup. “She’d entered the private sector,” writes Lewis, “with the bizarre ambition to use it to create an institution that might be used by the public sector.” When she tells people in the business world that she wants to save the country from another Covid-like catastrophe, she says, she gets blank looks. But when she tells them she wants to do “private government operations”, like a kind of healthcare Blackwater, their eyes light up. “Oh wow,” they say, “you could take over the world.” More

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      in US Politics

      Antitrust: Hawley and Klobuchar on the big tech battles to come

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      Antitrust is hot. In February, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2021. Weeks later, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley proposed the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act. Both bills are pending before the Senate judiciary committee.Hawley and Klobuchar have both published books. Hawley offers The Tyranny of Big Tech, and Klobuchar Antitrust. There is plenty of overlap but the substantive and stylistic differences are glaring.Hawley takes pride in owning the libs. Klobuchar criticizes the Trump administration’s lack of antitrust enforcement. His book is barbed. Hers methodical.On 6 January, Hawley gave a clench-fisted salute to pro-Trump militants and voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. On the page, he doubles down.Two weeks after the Capitol attack, Klobuchar told the presidential inauguration: “This is the day our democracy picks itself up, brushes off the dust and does what America always does.” She remains angry with Hawley and “Flyin’” Ted Cruz for the insurrection and its aftermath.Playing to type, Hawley has also provided the sole vote against a bill to crack down on anti-Asian hate crime and opposed renaming military bases named for Confederate generals. Roy Blunt, Missouri’s senior senator and the No 4 member of GOP Senate leadership, parted ways with Hawley on both. In the civil war, Missouri was a border state. A century and a half later, it looks like Hawley has picked the losing side.In his book, he upbraids corporate America, “woke capitalism”, Amazon, Google and Facebook. He demands that Google “be forced to give up YouTube and its control of the digital advertising market”.He would also have Facebook “lose” Instagram and WhatsApp, and accuses Amazon of destroying Parler, the conservative alternative to Twitter funded by Rebekah Mercer, a Hawley donor along with her father, Robert Mercer and other Trump acolytes.Hawley’s embrace of antipathy toward big business – even that in which he invests – is not exactly new.In 2008 he published a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, subtitled Preacher of Righteousness and approving of the 26th president’s relentless support for the little guy.Almost a decade later, as Missouri attorney general, Hawley launched an antitrust investigation of Google. Shortly after that, as a Senate candidate, he told Bloomberg News: “We need to have a conversation in Missouri, and as a country, about the concentration of economic power.”But Hawley is buffeted by contradictions. He has for example feted Robert Bork as a conservative martyr, even as Bork’s legal writings have served as intellectual jet fuel for those developments in the marketplace Hawley professes to abhor.The Tyranny of Big Tech makes no mention of the professor who wrote an influential anti-antitrust book, The Antitrust Paradox, in 1978, nine years before he was blocked from the supreme court.Klobuchar, by contrast, gives Bork plenty of face time.“For Bork,” she writes, “the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is not a relevant consideration for antitrust law.”Bork had issues with civil rights too. In 1963, when Jim Crow was still in full force, he branded what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “legislation by which the morals of the majority are self-righteously imposed upon a minority”.In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Hawley also blasts corporate abuse of personal data and data mining – all while he looks to Peter Thiel of Palantir for donor dollars.Left unstated is that Palantir was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Cambridge Analytica was owned by the Mercer family and Thiel was an early funder and board member of Facebook. The circle is complete.Hawley’s book can be viewed as plutocrat-populism in print. Tucker Carlson’s praise is blurbed on the jacket. Inside, Hawley defends Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from purported predations by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Both Murdoch and Zuckerberg are billionaires many times over.Hawley is on stronger ground when he revisits the nexus between the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Google. Eric Schmidt, then head of the company, was Obama’s chief corporate ally. On election night 2016, Schmidt, wore a Clinton staff badge, having spent months advising her campaign.In her book, Klobuchar furnishes an overview of the evolution of US anti-monopoly law and a call for rebalancing the relationship between capital and labor. She condemns corporate consolidation and wealth concentration, and views lax antitrust enforcement as antithetical to democracy.In a footnote, she commends Hawley for addressing the “turf wars” between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and their negative impact on antitrust enforcement. Unlike Hawley, however, Klobuchar vehemently disapproves of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision and characterizes it as opening “the floodgates to dark money in our politics”.In 2016, Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, wrote an op-ed titled: “Josh Hawley for [Missouri] Attorney General”. In his maiden Senate race, Hawley’s campaign received $10,000 from the Citizens United Political Victory Fund.Unfortunately, Klobuchar goes the extra mile and calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn that decision. Her would-be cure is worse than the disease – an attack on free speech itself.The proposed amendment would expressly confer upon “Congress and the states” broad power to curtail campaign fundraising and spending. It also provides that “nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the states the power to abridge the freedom of the press”.Not so curiously, it is silent about “abridging the freedom of speech”, an existing constitutional protection. Media barons rejoice – all others start sweating.In 2020, Klobuchar came up way short in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now, she chairs the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, where Hawley is a member.Both senators were law review editors: she at the University of Chicago, he at Yale. If Hawley has written a sort of campaign manifesto for the Republican presidential primary in 2024, Klobuchar’s book reads at times like an application for supreme court justice. It contains hundreds of pages of footnotes and pays repeated tribute to the late justice Louis Brandeis.Klobuchar also heaps praise on Stephen Breyer, a member of the court appointed by Bill Clinton and a former Harvard Law professor who in 1982 authored Regulation and Its Reform, a counter to Bork and the “Chicago School”.Klobuchar extends an array of “thank yous”. There is one for Jake Sullivan, her former counsel, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser; another for Matt Stoller, a former staffer to Bernie Sanders on the Senate budget committee and a sometime Guardian contributor; and another for Paul Krugman of the New York Times. All three come with definite viewpoints and are strategically placed.Increased antitrust enforcement by the DoJ, the FTC and the states appears to be more likely than wholesale legislative change. A government antitrust case against Google proceeds. Furthermore, Biden has already appointed two critics of big tech to key slots at the White House and the FTC. Who will lead DoJ’s antitrust division is an open question. Finding a suitable non-conflicted pick appears difficult.Klobuchar and Hawley will be heard from. Their books matter. More

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      in World Politics

      The Media’s Love of Pseudoscience

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      One inevitable consequence of the rise of the consumer society and the ever more sophisticated technology it requires to survive and expand is the progressive replacement of every aspect of natural human culture by consumable simulacra. When the process involves linking the increasing variety of simulacra together into the semblance of a coherent whole that can be treated as a system, the result is hyperreality. The scientist Alfred Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory.” Hyperreality exists as a kind of map that so completely covers the territory that it finds a way of replacing all its original features.

      Like the map, everything hyperreality contains is artificial, made to facilitate our understanding but also to deceive us into believing we may rationally account for all the details. But in contrast with maps, hyperreality carries the illusion of having more than two dimensions. The illusion owes its impact in part to the sophisticated methods of fabrication, but even more so to the fact that we collectively want to believe in the coherence of the three dimensions.

      Will Big Pharma Continue to Own the World’s Health?

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      What we fail to notice, however, is that in contrast with Einsteinian space-time — which scientists recognize as the fundamental structure of the universe — hyperreality lacks the fourth dimension, time. Reality is always becoming itself. Hyperreality has already become what it is. It exists as a static prop, like a Hollywood movie set. Its various elements sit alongside each other to prop up the world we are invited to believe in.

      Much of the belief depends on the production of canned ideas that become a convenient substitute for perception. In our technology-orientated world, pseudoscience plays a key role. While scientists struggle with the structural uncertainty of quantum mechanics or their frustrating quest to understand dark matter and dark energy, humanity relies on its media to consume pseudo-science and build its faith in hyperreality.

      Pseudoscience enters our lives every day through the innumerable studies our various media present as “news.” By the time any body of research takes the form of a media-friendly story, it will undergo a hyperreal transformation. One glaring example is a piece of manipulated research that has in recent weeks made the rounds of the right-wing media in the US. On April 26, it even featured in the discourse of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Newsmax covered it in an article with the title: “White Liberals More Likely to Have Mental Health Problems, Study Shows.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      White liberal:

      A mythical being invented by the media in the US to found the hyperreal idea that US society is composed of a pair of diametrically opposed camps distinguished on the basis of two artificially defined value systems, apparently designed with the specific purpose of preventing the majority of citizens from becoming aware of the wide range of serious political issues that any complex democracy will be permanently faced with

      Contextual Note

      In a remarkable performance on Monday focused on the burning question of the enforced wearing of masks, Carlson managed to demonstrate how devoted he is to pseudo-scientific distortion as he claimed that “a Pew survey from last month found that 64% of white Americans who classify themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ have been diagnosed with an actual mental health condition.” Not only was the Pew survey published in March 2020, making it at best old news, but the figure he cited was significantly higher than what reported by other right-wing news outlets. And there was no diagnosis but self-reporting: “34 percent of liberals reported having mental health problems,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But the problem isn’t in the details. It is much broader, affecting the entire culture. It stems from three combined sources of hyperreal distortion.

      The first is the survey itself. Because it produces statistics that can be displayed in a graph, people attribute to it the status of science. An enterprising PhD candidate with a personal political agenda and a Twitter account, hoping for a career in either statistics or politics (or both), can then step up and make it look even more scientific by “breaking down” the statistics, correlating them with other statistics and using terms proper to specialized language such as “aggregate indexes” and “dispositively.” The young man in question, Zach Goldberg, has defined for himself the mission of reporting on the status of whiteness and wokeness in the US.

      The second source of distortion is the propensity of the media to use both the primary source (the Pew survey) and the secondary source (Goldberg’s tweets) to announce some deep truth about society itself. With the aim of attracting readers and viewers, the media jump at the opportunity to reveal a deep, disturbing truth. Most articles about climate change, health, diet, economic trends, the cosmos and UFOs fall into this pattern. They all begin with something rooted in reality and based in either scientific fact, social observation or polling. But they quickly transform that basis into the illusion of a new and troubling feature of our everyday hyperreality.

      The third source of distortion is the need in the US to reduce everything to an oppositional binary choice. Even as the idea of gender diversity has now displaced the obvious and very real binary division between male and female, most Americans believe there are two subsets of humanity called “liberal” and “conservative.” Even the analysis of subtle social scientists such as George Lakoff feeds into this requirement of hyperreal belief in US society. Americans are conditioned to believe that they themselves are, or at least should be, in their essence, either a liberal or conservative. This is an amazing ideological accomplishment.

      The surveys themselves sometimes undermine the dominant binary thesis by highlighting the inconsistencies within the categories. But the hyperreal binary distinction remains as the ultimate buttress of a political system that requires the belief in oppositional thinking. It underpins an electoral system designed to create the conviction that the two parties authorized to govern represent the dual essence of the American electorate.

      Historical Note

      The binary meme has been both complicated and reinforced by the reemergence in recent years of Americans’ awareness of the racial divide. This awareness, to some extent, lay dormant following the legal gains and cultural shifts associated with the 1960s civil rights movement. In an article published by Tablet magazine last August, during protests over the murder of George Floyd, Zach Goldberg documented the rise of this new sensitivity to the abiding racial question in the US as reflected in the news. He traced statistics from the media over the past 50 years to demonstrate the rise of the phenomenon he identifies with the “wokeness” that has infected the minds of white liberals.

      To make his point, Goldberg presents two dubious assertions as if they were truisms. He begins by citing “the absence of legal discrimination in the post-affirmative-action era.” This is technically true but culturally false. One prominent feature of hyperreality consists of using the formality of the explicit to hide the implicit. In this case, the inert text of the law obfuscates the informal, organic reality of culture. 

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      Goldberg then claims that, thanks to their media, white liberals are guilty of “concept creep” when they claim that racial injustice is real. He cites “the immense absolute improvements in the quality of life of the average Black person over the past half century” as if it was a documented fact. The key word here is “absolute.” Although he offers no details, Goldberg is almost certainly thinking of the statistics — his unique source of absolute truth — that demonstrate some measurable progress in material wealth within the black community.

      Goldberg’s hopes to find and punish the culprits who have led white liberals to adopt a belief system predicated on the defense of blacks. He affirms that “publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that ‘color’ is the defining attribute of other human beings.” He wants us to “de-emphasize these categories and unite in pursuit of common interests.”

      This abstract advice has some merit, but it is at odds with social reality. Zach Goldberg, Tucker Carlson and many others on the right have been contributing with their own “concept creep” to instill a belief in what is truly a hyperreal category, their designated enemy: the white liberal.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Madam Speaker review: how Nancy Pelosi outwitted Bush and Trump

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      John Boehner, a Republican predecessor, concedes that Nancy Pelosi may be the most powerful House speaker in history. Pelosi provided George W Bush with the votes he needed to prevent a depression, as Republicans balked. She helped make Obamacare the law of the land.Pelosi repeatedly humbled Donald Trump. Already this year, she has outlasted his acolytes’ invasion of the Capitol and helped jam Joe Biden’s Covid relief through Congress. Hers is an “iron fist” wrapped in a “Gucci glove”, in the words of Susan Page and John Bresnahan of Politico.This latest Pelosi biography traces her trajectory from Baltimore to DC. Geographically circuitous, Pelosi’s ascent was neither plodding nor meteoric.Page delivers a worthwhile and documented read, a running interview with her subject together with quotes from friends and foes. Andy Card, chief of staff to Bush, and Newt Gingrich, a disgraced House speaker, both pay grudging tribute to the congresswoman from San Francisco.In the same spirit, Steve Bannon, Trump’s pardoned White House counselor, is caught calling Pelosi an “assassin”. He meant it as a compliment.Page is Washington bureau chief for USA Today. She has covered seven presidencies and moderated last fall’s vice-presidential debate. She also wrote Matriarch, a biography of Barbara Bush.Trump made the personal political and vice versa. Pelosi had a long memory and kept grudgesMadam Speaker makes clear that the speakership was not a job Pelosi spent a lifetime craving but it is definitely a role she wanted and, more importantly, mastered. She understood that no one relinquishes power for the asking. Rather, it must be taken.Pelosi took on the boys club and won. Ask Steny Hoyer, the No2 House Democrat. Her tire tracks cover his back. As fate would have it, their younger selves worked together in the same office for the same boss.Catholicism and the New Deal were foundational and formational. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, Pelosi’s father, served in Congress and as mayor of Baltimore, a position later held by her brother. Pelosi is a liberal, albeit one with an eye toward the practical. Utopia can wait. AOC is not her cup of tea.As a novice congressional candidate, Pelosi was not built for the stump. She chaired the California Democratic party and the finance committee of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Her specialty was the inside game. No matter. In a spring of 1987 special election, Pelosi reached out to Bay area Republicans. They provided her margin of victory.Once in Congress, Pelosi became the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee and climbed to join the party leadership. Fundraising skills and attention to detail helped.Pelosi also made common cause with unusual suspects. Page records her friendship with the late John Murtha, a gruff ex-marine and congressman from western Pennsylvania – God and Guns country.Murtha furnished Pelosi with ammo and cover in opposing the Iraq war. He also managed her quest for the speakership. After Murtha lost to Hoyer in an intra-party contest in 2006, the Pennsylvanian announced his retirement.Among Murtha’s notes found by Page was one that read: “More liberal than I but she has ability to get things done and she’s given a tremendous service to our Congress and country.” Another one: “Able to come to a practical solution.”Page’s book chronicles Pelosi’s capacity to judge talent. She took an early shine to a young Adam Schiff, another east coast transplant, but held a dimmer view of Jerrold Nadler, a long-in-the-tooth congressman from Manhattan’s Upper West Side and chair of the judiciary committee.A former federal prosecutor, Schiff wrested his California seat from James Rogan, a Republican. Nadler could not control his own committee. After a raucous hearing in September 2019, the die was set. Schiff, not Nadler, would be riding herd in Trump’s first impeachment. Seniority and tradition took a back seat to competence.Context mattered as well. Pelosi’s relationship with Bush was fraught, yet she squashed Democratic moves to impeach him over Iraq – a move Trump actually advocated. She had witnessed Bill Clinton’s impeachment and concluded that harsh political judgments were generally best left to the electorate. Impeachment was not politics as usual. Or another tool in the kit.Trump was different. Practically speaking, draining the swamp translated into trampling norms and the law. Bill Barr, his second attorney general, had an expansive view of executive power and a disdain for truth and Democrats. His presence emboldened Trump.For more than two years, Pelosi resisted impeachment efforts by firebrands in her party. She acceded when Trump’s Ukraine gambit became public. He had frozen military aid to Russia’s embattled neighbor, seeking to prod the country into investigating Joe and Hunter Biden.Trump made the personal political and vice versa. Pelosi had a long memory and kept grudges. But this was different. After Biden’s election victory, Pelosi called Trump a “psychopathic nut”. A mother of five and grandmother to nine, she knew something about unruly children.Pelosi is not clairvoyant. She predicted a Hillary Clinton win in 2016 and Democratic triumphs down-ballot four years later. Instead, Clinton watches the Biden presidency from the sidelines, the Senate is split 50-50 and Pelosi’s margin in the House is down to a handful of votes.To her credit, Pelosi quickly internalized that Trump was a would-be authoritarian whose respect for electoral outcomes was purely situational: heads I win, tails I still win. Populism was only for the part of the populace that embraced him.Hours after the Capitol insurrection, at 3.42am on 7 January 2021, the rioters were spent, the challenges done, the election certified.“To those who strove to deter us from our responsibility,” Pelosi declared: “You have failed.”Biden sits behind the Resolute desk. Pelosi wields her gavel. More

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      in World Politics

      German Nationalism, From Revolution to Illiberalism

      by

      It is often noted that 19th-century nationalism owed much to the rise of academic history. As historians have observed, studies in national development provided materials for later and cruder claims of fascist cultural supremacy. For instance, Leopold von Ranke and Georg Hegel represented different versions of such narratives. The former traced a conceptual movement in large patterns of events; its ideological consequences were various, but one aspect was the justification of the Prussian state. The latter urged rigorous attention to historical evidence but suggested that in such detail a pattern of providence could be found.

      Remembering Germany’s Dark Colonial History

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      Ranke’s method, adopted by a generation of historians, was that of a conservative liberal of the Restoration period, envisaging a balance of European power. By mid-century, however, new historians had taken a Prussian-centered national narrative to a new level of conviction, combining elements of Hegel’s statist teleology with Ranke’s evidence-based method. In the German revolution of 1848, the rhetoric of liberty and nationhood was confused, and the goals of a constitutional monarchy and a united Germany seemed united under one banner.

      Yet within a short time, the revolution failed, and a conservative mood descended. Subsequently, the liberal spirit of nationalism was replaced by a Bismarckian argument for nationalist militarism and expansionism. Academic writing was touched by this sequence of events.

      A Historical Method

      Prior to 1848, academic historians were already sketching accounts of providential German unification and expansion. The writers of the Prussian School of History were former students of Ranke and Hegel. They wrote at first in a liberal register. Johannes Gustav Droysen began his career as a classicist, coining the term “Hellenism.” His 1833 life of Alexander the Great launched his academic career. A popular volume, its account of the Macedonian marshaling of Greek culture into a powerful empire was read as a pattern for Prussia’s future role.

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      Droysen’s historical work became overtly political with his 1842-43 “Lectures on the Wars of Liberation,” a record of Prussian popular resistance against foreign invaders. A member of the Frankfurt parliament during the 1848 revolution, he witnessed the failure of its liberal and nationalist aspirations. The crisis came when members voted to fight for the regions of Schleswig-Holstein against the claims of Denmark. It was clear, on Prussia’s withdrawal of support, that the parliament was impotent without the northern state’s backing, and by 1849 Frederick William IV was secure enough to reject liberal proposals.

      Since 1840, Droysen had taught at Keil University in the disputed region. His account, “The Policy of Denmark towards the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein,” lent support to nationalist calls for the defense of Germany’s territory. In a similar spirit, in 1851 he published a life of Count Yorck von Wartenburg, the general whose decision to change sides was a turning point in the war with Napoleon. The historical stage was set for a renewal of this national self-assertion. Otto von Bismarck, the prime minister of Prussia and the founder and first chancellor of the German Empire, no doubt saw the usefulness of such narratives when formulating his foreign policy in the early 1860s.

      Droysen took pains with his lecture series on the historical method, hoping to provide a philosophical basis for the discipline. The lectures were published only in 1937, but in 1858, he circulated a precis, the “Grundriss der Historik,” translated as “Outline of the Principles of History,” which describes history as theodicy, forming an organic pattern of growth. The method was Rankean, but drew explicitly on Hegel in its emphasis on the direction and progression of history. Going beyond Ranke’s hints at the runic import of recorded facts, Droysen pointed directly to signs of development, specifically toward a Prussian state.

      This commitment was clear in his major work, “The History of Prussian Politics,” which he began having taken a chair at Jena in 1851. Through the period of the Prussian wars on Austria and France until his death in 1884, Droysen completed 14 volumes that traced the growth of the Prussian monarchy to the year 1756.     

      From French Revolution to German Empire

      Heinrich von Sybel made his name with a history of the first crusade written with Rankean documentary rigor. Yet he already had a political aim, undercutting romantic medievalism in his commitment to a liberal future. In 1848, he too attended the Frankfurt parliament, and similarly transferred his nationalist faith toward Prussian statism over time. Despite this allegiance to the “polar star” of the north, he took a chair at Munich on Ranke’s recommendation, leading Prince Maximilian’s new Bavarian Historical Commission and founding the Historische Zeitschrift (Historical Journal).

      His debt to Ranke did not preclude a shift in tone. A celebrated 1856 address on historiography demurred at the excessive pursuit of objectivity. His major work of these years, the “History of the French Revolution,” was a Burkean warning against the destructive effects of Jacobinism. Using archives in Paris, Sybel mounted a scholarly assault on France’s role in recent European history. He effectively downgraded the revolution to a by-product of historical providence centering on Prussia. The French historiographer Antoine Guillard described it as “an attack not only on the Revolution but on the mind and history of France.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      In this view, the French Revolution indeed signaled the end of the old order, but it was merely one of three such events, the others being the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the destruction of Poland. This wider break with feudalism and the rise of a modernity that would be encapsulated in a unified Germany under Prussia. French pride at the assertion of popular sovereignty and human rights was undercut and German nationhood celebrated.

      Taking a chair in Bonn in 1861, the historian was now also a politician, sitting in the 1860s and 1870s in the Prussian Diet and the Constituent Reichstag of the North German Confederation. Bismarck saw Sybel’s value and made him director of Prussian archives in 1875, where he worked on his last major work, “The Founding of the German Empire by William I.” This overtly politicized work of history gave a Bismarckian slant to events leading up to 1871. Some, noting William I’s ambivalence about his chancellor’s maneuverings, joked the phrase “by” should have read “despite.”

      The work lacked life and bore the weight of a propagandistic tome; later its political slant worked to its author’s disadvantage as the focus on Bismarck over William I offended the new kaiser, and Sybel was banished from the state archives in 1890. He died five years later, having completed his last volume. Sybel, though wary of democracy as a step toward Bonapartism and a believer in Prussia’s power, was also a believer in a Burkean pluralism, whereby power was best distributed among social groups under the protection of the state. Toward the end of the 19th century, a more virulent language of racial homogeneity and expansionism came to the fore.

      Racial Theory

      The boldest publicist of the Prussian School, whose messages most clearly herald the racialized nationalism of the 20th century, was Heinrich von Treitschke. Born in Saxony with Czech roots, Treitschke began his career as a Privatdozent in Leipzig, but his conviction in Berlin’s destiny to rule was out of place there, and he returned to take university posts in Prussia. His earliest publications included patriotic poems, while his 1859 dissertation on “the science of society” made a strong case for the state as necessary and primeval, without need for a contract with its citizens. Prussia provided a nucleus for a German state forming according to historical destiny.

      Treitschke’s path exemplified the historians’ trajectory away from liberalism. As his writing gained influence, his distance from Ranke was clear. When sending a copy of his polemical essays to his father in 1865 he noted: “That bloodless objectivity which does not say on which side is the narrator’s heart is the exact opposite of the true historical sense. Judgment is free, even to the author.” His essays, often biographical studies or political arguments, grew more fervently nationalistic. The smaller German states should submit to annexation; colonial growth was a natural expression of a vital new power.

      This set a tone for German expansionism from the 1860s onward. Treitschke too was politically active, sitting in the Reichstag in 1871 as a member of the new National Liberal party and welcoming the culture war against Catholics isolated in the new Kleindeutschland. In 1874, he was invited to take the chair in history in Berlin; Ranke was ushered from his post to make room for Treitschke, whom he deemed disapprovingly a publicist, not a historian. Yet student fraternities preferred their new teacher, the court made him official historiographer of Prussia in 1886, and his academic standing was reinforced by his editorship of Historische Zeitschrift after Sybel’s death in 1895.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Treitschke’s “History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century” was a colorful and lively work; keyed into the public mood, it impressed foreign readers including the British historian G.P. Gooch, who compared it to Macaulay’s “History of England” in style and vigor, “both vibrate with their authors’ personality.” Gooch wrote in 1913, not seeing the full legacy of the Prussian School. As Treitschke gained influence in polemical attacks on socialists and Jews, his arguments converged with forms of social Darwinism and a racialized politics. In 1879, a long review essay in the Preussische Jahrbucher, the right-wing journal he edited from 1866 to 1889, concluded with an anti-Semitic polemic. He claimed that fundamental differences between Jews and Christians in Germany could not be resolved, and that the Jews had “assumed too large a space in our life.”

      These passages were later republished in the pamphlet, “A Word About Our Jews,” which reached a wider audience and sparked the Berlin Anti-Semitism Conflict, a two-year spate of protest and violence against the Jewish population. Treitschke’s anti-Semitic pronouncements coincided with those of Adolf Stöcker, then a court preacher to William I, who created the Christian Social Workers’ Party in 1878 to draw laborers away from socialism. Between them, Treitschke and Stöcker gave a new clerical, political and academic respectability to anti-Semitism from the 1880s onward.

      Such theories were not far removed from the biological variants of similar ideas, for example in Ernst Haeckel’s monism of the same period, with which it seems aligned as much with a social Darwinist as an Idealist or Christian idea of providence. It was Treitschke who coined the phrase “The Jews are our misfortune,” repeated ad nauseam in the Nazi period, and most recently adapted as “Israel is our misfortune” by the far-right party Die Rechte (The Right) in the European Parliament elections of 2019. The tradition of German nationalism had come a long way from the liberal rhetoric of freedom during the revolutionary period.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Mike Pence’s publisher refuses to cancel memoir after staff protest

      by

      Simon & Schuster has said it will not pull out of a seven-figure book deal with Mike Pence after some of its employees called for the contract to be scrapped, stating that “we come to work each day to publish, not cancel”.An open letter circulated by staff at S&S said that the publisher had “chosen complicity in perpetuating white supremacy by publishing Pence”, in a two-book deal struck earlier this month and reported to be worth $3-4m (£2.1-2.8m). The letter, which did not reveal how many members of staff had signed, said that the former vice-president had “made a career out of discriminating against marginalised groups and denying resources to BIPOC and LGBTQA+ communities”, and demanded his book deal be cancelled.“By choosing to publish Mike Pence, Simon & Schuster is generating wealth for a central figure of a presidency that unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence,” says the letter. “This is not a difference of opinions; this is legitimising bigotry.”Though in January S&S pulled out of publishing Republican senator Josh Hawley’s book over his part in the Capitol riot, S&S president Jonathan Karp told staff on Tuesday that the publisher would not cancel Pence’s deal.“As a publisher in this polarised era, we have experienced outrage from both sides of the political divide and from different constituencies and groups. But we come to work each day to publish, not cancel, which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives,” wrote Karp. “We will, therefore, proceed in our publishing agreement with vice-president Mike Pence.”The employees also called for the publishing house to refrain from signing any more book deals with former members of the Trump administration, and demanded S&S stop distributing books for Post Hill Press. An independent publisher which focuses on “conservative politics” and Christian titles, Post Hill hit the headlines last week when it announced it would be publishing a book by by one of the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor, officer Jonathan Mattingly. While S&S subsequently announced it would not distribute Mattingly’s book, staff at S&S pointed to Post Hill titles which S&S still distributes, including embattled Republican congressman Matt Gaetz’s Firebrand.“We impart to you the sad and unfortunate truth that we are actively making history right now,” says the open letter. “People will look back on this one day, and see that through our complicity, we chose to be on what is clearly the wrong side of justice.”Karp said the decision not to distribute Mattingly’s book was “immediate, unprecedented, and responsive to the concerns we heard from you and our authors”. But he added that S&S has “contractual obligations and must continue to respect the terms of our agreements with our client publishers”.Post Hill confirmed last week that it would go ahead with publishing Mattingly’s book without S&S, and declined to comment further.Karp described the publisher’s role as “to find those authors and works that can shed light on our world — from first-time novelists to journalists, thought leaders, scientists, memoirists, personalities, and, yes, those who walk the halls of power”.“Regardless of where those authors sit on the ideological spectrum, or if they hold views that run counter to the belief systems held by some of us, we apply a rigorous standard to assure that in acquiring books, we will be bringing into the world works that provide new information or perspectives on events to which we otherwise might not have access,” he wrote.“When we allow our judgment to dwell on the books we dislike,” he added, “we distract ourselves from our primary purpose as a publisher – to champion the books we believe in and love.”Pence’s currently untitled autobiography is set to be released in 2023. More

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      in US Politics

      Empire of Pain review: the Sacklers, opioids and the sickening of America

      by

      By 2016, opioids had torn a piece out of Appalachia and the rust belt. The deep drop in life expectancy among white Americans without four-year degrees would no longer be ignored. OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s highly addictive painkiller, helped elect Donald Trump.In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe methodically and meticulously chronicles this tale of woe and crisis, indifference and corruption. His Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty lays bare the price exacted by the family’s drive for wealth and social mountaineering.The Sackler name came to dot the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, Tate Modern and the Louvre. They rose – others paid dearly.Keefe is a veteran writer at the New Yorker. His 2019 bestseller, Say Nothing, chillingly examined the convergence of youth, zealotry and destruction in Northern Ireland. He even solved the mystery behind a disappearance.Like Say Nothing, Empire of Pain is drenched in misery, this time the byproduct of OxyContin, the go-to drug for Purdue. Since 1999, opioid-related deaths have risen more than fivefold. By the numbers, opioids have killed more than 450,000 in the US in two decades.Keefe’s book builds upon The Family that Built an Empire of Pain, a 2017 long read. Empire of Pain is filled with firsthand interviews and takeaways from confidential and original documents. It is a chilling and mesmerizing read, “substantially built on the family’s own words”. Which is what makes it so damning.The Sacklers did not cooperate. Indeed, they sought to derail publication. Keefe raises the possibility he was placed under surveillance, an attempt to intimidate him and his family. Nonetheless, the Sacklers’ indifference and smugness rise off the pages like steam from a sewer.In one 1996 email, Richard Sackler, Purdue’s chairman and president, demands the company become as feared as a “tiger with claws, teeth and balls”. Asked repeatedly at deposition years later if Purdue played any role in the opioid crisis, he steadfastly answers: “I don’t believe so.”A cousin, Kathe Sackler, actually boasts that OxyContin was a “very good medicine” and a “safe medicine”. She also claims credit for coming up with the “idea”. But she doesn’t end there.Confronted with the question, “Do you recognize that hundreds of thousands of Americans have become addicted to OxyContin?”, she can only muster: “I don’t know the answer to that.”The drumbeat surrounding the monster birthed by Purdue is as old as the century itself. Barry Meier, then of the New York Times, published Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic, in 2003.Yet faced with pushback from Purdue and the Sacklers, the powers that be swept the crisis under the rug. Even the Times came down with a case a temporary case of cold feet.In 2007, under George W Bush, the US justice department only delivered a relative slap on the wrist. The Sacklers, major Republican donors, had unleashed a full-scale counter-attack starring Rudy Giuliani, Mary Jo White, formerly in charge of the southern district of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a bevy of high-priced legal talent.Strings were seemingly pulled, career prosecutors’ findings and recommendations discounted and binned. Purdue agreed to pay $600m to resolve a felony charge of misleading and defrauding physicians and consumers. Three executives entered guilty pleas and agreed to $34.5m in penalties. None of the individuals criminally charged were Sacklers.In the words of a former DoJ lawyer, this was “a political outcome that Purdue bought”. The company named its in-house law library after one of the designated-offenders and paid millions in post-employment compensation: a reward for taking a bullet for the team.Paul McNulty, then deputy attorney general, helped handcuff justice. John Brownlee, the federal prosecutor for the western district of Virginia, clashed with McNulty over the disposition of the case. Word spread that Brownlee’s job tenure was shaky. He resigned in April 2008. For the record, James Comey, McNulty’s predecessor as deputy AG, resisted Purdue’s entreaties.Among hundreds of interviews, Keefe spoke to Brownlee and Rick Mountcastle, the line prosecutor and career lawyer who handled the case. Still at DoJ, Mountcastle raises the possibility Purdue had an inside man at the Food and Drug Administration who enabled OxyContin in exchange for the prospect of future employment.Based on a 1995 email, Mountcastle began to suspect that Curtis Wright, then an FDA examiner, had turned a blind eye to the dangers posed by OxyContin. Purdue would later tap Wright to be an executive director. In 2003, Wright testified that he still believed addiction to OxyContin was “rare”.“I think there was a secret deal cut,” Mountcastle tells Keefe. “I can never prove it, so that’s just my personal opinion. But if you look at the whole circumstances, nothing else explains it.”Regardless, the FDA helped pave the way for an opioid epidemic. Dr David Kessler, FDA commissioner when OxyContin received the agency’s approval, acknowledged “certainly one of the worst medical mistakes”.Donald Trump spoke of the toll of the opioid crisis but in 2020, as election day loomed, his Department of Justice announced a “global resolution” of the government’s investigation into Purdue and the Sacklers. By then, the company was in bankruptcy and the target of a barrage of civil lawsuits.The Sacklers agreed to pay a $225m civil penalty, little more than the 2% they had taken from Purdue. But no one would be prosecuted. Asked why the government had not brought criminal charges against the Sacklers, Jeffrey Rosen, Bill Barr’s deputy attorney general, declined to say.The government, Keefe writes, was “so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody even bothered to question them”. More