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      Kamala’s Way review: Harris as symbol of hope – and hard politics

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      The president of the United States spent weeks recruiting then inciting a mob to invade Congress and prevent the certification of his opponent’s victory. The intruders killed one police officer and injured more than a dozen, pummeling them with everything from flagstaffs to fire extinguishers.Democratic House members talked openly about feeling threatened in the presence of newly-elected white supremacist, QAnon-friendly colleagues across the aisle, as evidence grew that several such gun-toting Republicans may have directly collaborated with the lovely people who tried to destroy their workspace.All this after the president issued waves of pardons for war criminals and stock manipulators – and, perhaps, just before a new wave of pardons for himself, his family and everyone he incited to destroy the Capitol.After being assaulted for four long years with so much evidence of American venality, now more than ever we need to remind ourselves that a new and hopeful era will begin just three days from now – thanks to the extraordinary hard work of a majority of decent, voting Americans.Yes, 74 million inexplicably voted to re-elect the most corrupt and incompetent president in American history. But surely this is the more important fact: 81 million chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, thereby giving us the first woman, the first African American and the first Indian American ever to serve as vice-president.She’s prepared, she’s focused, she’s smart, she’s effective, she does her homework. And that’s the coin of the realmThe good news from the author of this new biography of Harris is that even a former editorial writer who endorsed Harris’ opponent when she ran for California attorney general now recognizes she is supremely qualified to be Biden’s governing partner.“Kamala Harris comes to play … every single day,” said her Senate colleague Ron Wyden, from Oregon. “She’s prepared, she’s focused, she’s smart, she’s effective, she does her homework. And that’s really the coin of the realm of the Senate: who’s doing their homework and who’s just throwing press releases out for a 10-second sizzle.”In this case, heritage is almost as important as talent. The daughter of a Jamaican-born economist and Indian-born cancer researcher, Harris embodies the American immigrant dream – and everything Donald Trump and his disgusting minions have spent four years seeking to destroy.Dan Morain is a former state political reporter for the Los Angeles Times and former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee but he doesn’t have any scoops in Kamala’s Way. He has done a workmanlike job of assessing her passions and her accomplishments. But often his best details are lifted directly from her own autobiography, including this description of her life as an undergraduate at Howard University, America’s premier black college in Washington DC:
      “You could stand in the middle of the Yard and see, on your right, young dancers practicing their steps or musicians playing instruments. Look to your left and there were briefcase-toting students strolling out of the business school, and medical students in their white coats … That was the beauty of Howard. Every signal told students that we could be anything – that we were young, gifted and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success.”
      One thing Harris doesn’t describe in her autobiography is the jump start her career got from a romance with Willie Brown, the grand old man of California politics, a long-time speaker of the state assembly who became mayor of San Francisco. Harris was just 30 when she was outed as Brown’s girlfriend at his 60th birthday party. The legendary San Francisco columnist, Herb Caen, reported that Clint Eastwood spilled champagne “on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris”.The political education she received from Brown undoubtedly contributed to her rapid rise, from San Francisco district attorney to California attorney general to United States senator. But even as she enjoyed the usual perks of a California politician, crossing paths with everyone from Elton John to George Lucas and Sharon Stone, Harris was always impressing colleagues with her seriousness – from early advocacy for marriage equality to determination to get $20bn out of the nation’s largest banks as punishment for their abuses of the foreclosure process after the collapse of the housing bubble.She was also an enthusiastic enforcer of a California law that takes guns out of the hands of convicted felons.By the time she ran her first campaign for DA, eight years after her romance with Brown was over, she didn’t hesitate to call him her “albatross”. In a clever bit of political jiujitsu, she told SF Weekly: “I refuse to design my campaign around criticizing Willie Brown for the sake of appearing to be independent when I have no doubt that I am independent of him – and that he would probably right now express some fright about the fact that he cannot control me. His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years.”From the beginning she was a superb networker, becoming one of Barack Obama’s earliest supporters when he ran for president, befriending Joe Biden’s son Beau when both were state attorneys general. In the Senate, she was appropriately abrasive when she interrogated Trump’s cabinet nominees. But she was also careful to be much more respectful of Senate staffers than many other senators.All her life, Harris has made a habit of exceeding expectations. This book suggests she will do that again as vice-president – and that one day she might also excel as America’s first woman, first Indian and second Black president. More

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      Saving Justice review: how Trump's Eye of Sauron burned everything – including James Comey

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      With the storming of the Capitol, the fired FBI director’s earnest attempt to help America recover has been overtaken by eventsComey: Trump should not be prosecuted after leaving officeA centuries-old norm has been broken. The inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not mark the peaceful transition of power. On Wednesday, American carnage arrived. Five people including a police officer are dead. Related: After Trump review: a provocative case for reform by Biden and beyond Continue reading… More

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      Sisters in Hate review: tough but vital read on the rise of racist America

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      It’s not Proust, Nietzsche or even Toni Morrison when it comes to difficult reading, but some are sure to find Seyward Darby’s book even more arduous to wade through.It’s not that it is inscrutable. Indeed, as engaging as it is adroit, Sisters in Hate offers an excellent explanation for the ascent of Donald Trump amid a triumphal resurgence of white supremacy, sexism and xenophobia. A journalist, Darby focuses on Trump’s success through the experience of three individual and distinct women. Apart from gender and reactionary politics, there’s only the year of their birth, 1979, to link them. Each took a divergent path to arrive at what she saw as a battle to save white identity, deemed by all three to be America’s “true identity”.Oregon native Corinna Olsen, a former porn star and bodybuilder, has mostly survived as an undertaker, specializing in embalming. She is Darby’s sole repentant sister. Admirably, all along her erratic odyssey she sought to shield her young daughters from a hatred of difference she was first reluctant to admit but gradually came to accept. Her search to fit in, leading to an embrace of white nationalism, was sparked by the death of her skinhead-adherent brother. Today, swastika tattoos obscured, she’s a Muslim convert, teaching martial arts to black girls as wistful as she once was.The savviest white nationalists are aware of the blind spot that observers often have when it comes to womenAyla Stewart hails from Las Vegas. Between looking after six children as a Mormon “tradwife”, she has become a minor celebrity in her malevolent milieu with blogged and broadcast racist rants. How did she evolve thus, from being a vegan feminist who worshiped a pagan goddess and supported liberal Democrats like Dennis Kucinich? Only by slow degrees. Eventually, suspecting a plot to discredit her, Stewart stopped confiding in Darby. But she was plenty happy to tell her story at first, and it is riveting.The third sister in hate, Lana Lokteff, was born to Russian immigrants in the Pacific north-west but is now a resident of quaint and gracious Charleston, South Carolina. Like her Swedish husband Henrik Palmgren, the pale and slender blonde is perfectly Aryan-looking. Together the neo-Nazi pair operate Red Ice TV. Produced abroad since being banned on YouTube, it is widely considered the CNN of the alt-right. Espousing apocalyptic antisemitic conspiracy theories, the pair have generated notoriety as well as wealth.The particular appeal of women as spokespersons for a movement so blatantly misogynistic, Darby tells us, is what makes female recruits such valued members. It’s akin to the prominent placement of black people behind the podium at Trump rallies or front-and-center among the ranks of the Proud Boys. Both offer plausible deniability of bigotry.“Today,” Darby writes, “the savviest white nationalists are aware of the blind spot that observers often have when it comes to women, discounting their contributions to abhorrent causes because they prefer to think of them as humanity’s better angels.“One of this book’s subjects,” she continues, “put it this way: ‘A soft woman saying hard things can create repercussions throughout society.’” In same the vein, Lokteff noted at a conference: “Since we aren’t physically intimidating, we can get away with saying big things. And let me tell you, the women in this movement can be lionesses and shield maidens and Valkyries.”Startling as this is, it is not much different from Sarah Palin’s memorable characterization of gun-toting Alaskan soccer moms as “pit bulls in lipstick”. How perverse is the desire of some women to show fidelity and worth by matching the contempt for others held by men? What does this growing ruthlessness mean?In 2016, some 6 to 9 million citizens who had supported Barack Obama, voted for Trump. Nearly 50% of white women did. This November, in even greater numbers, one-time Obama voters sought to re-elect Trump. As hard as it is to imagine, he gained still more adherents among women.All three “sisters” who spoke to Darby do not like being thought of as racist haters. Yet their disdain, their race- and class-based derision, born of envy, ignorance and fear, is real enough. Lyndon Johnson posited that if someone can make the worst white feel they are superior to the best black, their subject’s pocket can be easily picked. Of late, more than 600 billionaires have gained double the wealth held by 331 million Americans. One might imagine that the time was ripe for the masses to join ranks.The total indifference displayed towards the humanity and contributions of people of color and more is what makes Sisters in Hate so painful to read. Considering the genocide and theft to which Native Americans were subjected, African enslavement or the Holocaust, one might regard each tragic episode as holding the promise of a happy ending. These struggles were a testament of our common resolve. We can all say, “We shall overcome!”But can America’s resurgent white nationalism and antisemitism be surmounted? The prospect is pessimistic, Darby concedes, writing of the how the dismantling of hegemony and patriarchy feel like discrimination to many entitled whites.“Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well,” wrote Derrick Bell. “Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us.”Perhaps America’s happy ending will come from heeding the lessons of history. In the turbulent 1960s, willing to be brutalized, black and white demonstrators protested successfully for change. This year, in the wake of enduring police violence, diverse masked protesters marched anew worldwide.In the same spirit, risking all, more voted than ever before. But, overwhelmingly, those who made the difference on election day were women of color. Our sisters in hope? More

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      From A Very Stable Genius to After Trump: 2020 in US politics books

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      A long time ago, in 1883, a future president (Woodrow Wilson, a subject of this year’s reckonings) studied political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a classroom in which was inscribed the slogan “History is Past Politics, Politics is Present History”, attributed to Sir John Seeley, a Cambridge professor.That was before the era of the made-for-campaign book.Politics books in this election year fell into three broad categories. The ordinary, ranging from “meeting-and-tells” to campaign biographies that outlived their relevance. The interesting, those which made tentative starts at history or contained some important revelations. And the significant, those few whose value should live past this year because they actually changed the narrative – or are simply good or important reads.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books also fell in descending categories numerically. Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post read 150 books on Donald Trump and the Trump era for his own book, What Were We Thinking. Virtually all readers, however, will be content with simply a “non-zero” number, to quote a Trump campaign lawyer.First, the ephemera and the expected offerings of any election year. Scandals in and out of government; tales of the extended Trump family; attempts at self-justification; books, some entertaining, by correspondents; how-to guides to politics meant to be read and applied before November.The permutations and penumbras of the 2016 campaign continued to produce new books: Peter Strozk’s Compromised is the story of the origin of the investigation into the Trump campaign from one FBI agent’s perspective, strong stuff and persuasive though omitting facts inconvenient to him. Rick Gates’ Wicked Game contains some new inside scoop, but the real stuff presumably went to the Mueller investigation of which Strzok was briefly a part. Donald Trump Jr’s Liberal Privilege had a double mission: to encourage votes for the father in 2020 and perhaps for the son in 2024. American Crisis, New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s early book on the coronavirus outbreak, highlighted his programmatic vision rather than soaring prose, a choice appropriate for the year but quickly forgotten as the pandemic rages on.Second come those books that made one sit up a bit to pay attention: a new insight, important facts revealed; “worth a detour”, in the language of the Michelin guides. Psychologist and presidential niece Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough explained the pain of the Trump family over two generations and how that pain has influenced our national life for ill. David Frum was among the first to predict Trump’s authoritarian dangers. This year, Trumpocalpyse, well-written and insightful as always, focused on the attacks on the rule of law and “white ethnic chauvinism” as hallmarks of Trumpism, whether its supporters are poor or elite. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer-winning Post reporters, chronicled Trump more deeply and successfully than most in A Very Stable Genius. Trump’s anger at the book showed they hit their target.Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie takes Republican history back a few decades in a punchy mea culpa whose themes will be important in the debate over the future of the GOP. Among the Democrats, a rare good work by a politician, Stacey Abrams’ Our Time Is Now, as well as her triumph in political organizing in Georgia, marks her as an important force.For quality in financial journalism and the importance of its topic, not least to current and future investigations of Trump and the Trump Organization, Dark Towers by David Enrich on Deutsche Bank offers as full an analysis of the bank and its relation to Trump as is likely to be public absent a further court case in New York.Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor with the Mueller investigation, wrote Where Law Ends, a strongly-written account in which he regrets his boss not having pursued further, notably in not issuing a subpoena to Trump and then in not making a formal determination as to whether the president would be charged with obstruction of justice. Weissmann’s frustration is understandable, but readers may judge for themselves how fair or not he is to the pressures and formal restrictions on Mueller himself.There is a subcategory here, of books on foreign and security policy. HR McMaster’s Battlegrounds attempts to explain his working theories (“strategic empathy”) modified for current realities and arguing against American retrenchment and isolation. In The Room Where It Happened, former national security adviser John Bolton told of Trump begging for China’s assistance and wrote that Trump was not “fit for office” – the tale would have been better told to the House impeachment committee. David Rohde’s In Deep demolished the theory of the “deep state”. Barry Gewen delivered a new biography of Henry Kissinger’s life and work. Traitor, by David Rothkopf, sought to chronicle the Trump administration while seeking to reverse its effects and giving a history of American traitors.Finally, the significant – those few books that contributed importantly to the year’s narrative, or that deserve a reading next year.There was another Bob Woodward book, Rage – with tapes. The big news was that Trump was aware of the dangers of Covid-19 yet chose not to publicize them and that Dan Coats, then director of national intelligence, thought Putin had something on Trump. Woodward got the stories others chased. Michael Schmidt’s Donald Trump v the United States is another serious book, with a strong argument of how deeply the attacks on the rule of law by the Trump administration, notably by Trump himself, threaten democracy. Schmidt’s recounting of efforts to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey are sobering, and his revelations on how the Mueller investigation was narrowed to focus on criminality rather than Russian influence in 2016 form a useful corrective to Weissmann.Politics meets history in a few volumes, notably Thomas Frank’s plea against populism, The People, No, contrasting Trump unfavorably with FDR. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser teamed for a masterpiece biography of former secretary of state James Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington, that reminds us what (and whom) the Republican party used to call leadership. It’s a serious book that recalls Baker, Gerald Ford’s campaign manager in 1976, did not challenge the election result because Ford lost the popular vote. It also shows the truth in Seeley’s aphorism about the relation of politics and history, with many insights into one of the best recent practitioners of politics, fondly remembered for his statesmanship at the end of the cold war.Molly Ball’s well-researched and enjoyable biography of Nancy Pelosi makes sense of the most powerful woman in American history. Thomas Rid’s Active Measures, on disinformation and political warfare – Clausewitz for the cyber era – finds fresh urgency in light of recent revelations about major cyberattacks on the US government.Two books merit a final mention. As the Trump administration comes to a close, Ruth Ben-Ghiat analysed Trump’s actions and personality from the comparative perspective of fascist leaders since Mussolini and chillingly noted not only the actions that pointed to authoritarianism, but how deep the danger of going down that path.Strongmen is a vital book and a warning. Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.” Dehumanizing rhetoric and actions against immigrants (and even members of Congress) and appointments of people whose motivation was loyalty rather than law has real cost to a political system whose fragility at points is evident. It takes both individual action and courageous will to preserve democracy.On a happier note, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith in After Trump offer a legal, sometimes quite technical roadmap to reform of many norms of government that have been eroded. Some are obvious, others will prove controversial, but let this urgent discussion begin with Congress and the Biden administration.Of which, this year also saw the publication of A Promised Land, the first volume of memoirs from Barack Obama, whom the new president served as vice-president. Well-written despite being policy heavy, at times deeply moving, at others not as detailed as many readers might wish (despite its length), Obama is reflective both about the nature of power and about himself. More, his book serves once again to remind the world of the contrast between him and his successor. He is rightly proud to have written it – and to have written it by hand, to encourage his own deep thoughts about his presidency and the country he was honored, and sometimes troubled, to lead.To learn more about the president to come, Evan Osnos’ Joe Biden: American Dreamer is an excellent place to start: his political skills, life tragedies and conviviality are here in equal measure. Osnos ends with a Biden speech about dispelling America’s “season of darkness” – a fervent hope for the new year ahead. More

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      What next? Three books for America after Trump

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      On 3 November, a majority of the US electorate voted to eject the president from the White House. Yet Donald Trump still refuses to accept the verdict. Populism’s pretense of devotion to “the will of the people” lies in shambles. Conservatives have demonstrated their readiness to jettison democracy for the sake of clinging to power or appeasing an unhinged man-child.Ominously, Gen Michael Flynn has demanded martial law and suspending the constitution. Elsewhere, one Michigan Republican called for voiding the vote in Wayne county, thereby disenfranchising Detroit. At the same time, the president and his allies remain committed to burnishing the legacy of long-dead Confederate generals, even if means killing a pay increase for US troops.As Thomas Ricks reminds us in First Principles, the paradox of equality melded to racism dates back to the founding. The most famous pronouncement in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal”, was written by a slave-owner, Thomas Jefferson.A Pulitzer-winning author and military historian, Ricks also observes that one of our two parties has felt perpetually compelled to offer a “home to white supremacists, up to the present day”. First the Democrats, now the Republicans.Case in point: the fight over DC statehood. Back in June, the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton argued that the majority-minority District of Columbia (population 684,000) did not deserve to be a state because it lacked the “well-rounded working class” of Wyoming (population: 577,000).Elsewhere, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, recently tweeted that it was “essential” to “keep Ethiopia on the path to democracy”. The US has seen this movie before, back when the cold war turned hot and the rice paddies of south-east Asia became killing fields.While freedom was supposedly on the march overseas, the home front was markedly different. Black churches were bombed. Martin Luther King was jailed, stabbed, assassinated. John Lewis was beaten in Selma. Others were sent to an early grave.Jon Meacham is a native of Tennessee, a biographer of George HW Bush and now a speechwriter for Joe Biden. In His Truth is Marching On, his new book about the young Lewis, Meacham says “the hypocrisy of an America fighting for liberty abroad while tolerating white supremacy at home” characterised the Vietnam era.And yet as Edmund Fawcett, a self-described “leftwing liberal” and former writer at the Economist, notes in his new book, Conservatism, “although liberal democracy is a child of the left, its growth and health have relied on support from the right.” Half a century ago, Senate Republicans defeated a southern Democratic-led filibuster and enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Those days are gone.He also posits that “when, as now, the right is divided, the haves sleep less easily that government is in safe hands.” Said differently, monied America is not simply about tax cuts. It can even come with a conscience, a reality that troubles both the president and the woke left. Philadelphia’s upscale suburbs made the difference for Biden in Pennsylvania, and possibly the US.Fawcett is keenly aware of the rise of the hard right, of Trumpism in America, of Marine Le Pen in France, UKIP in Great Britain and the AfD in Germany. “The arrival of a new century,” he writes, “scrambled assumptions and shook the conservative center.” These tremors continue. Brexit tethered to a pandemic is expensive – and lethal.Amid America’s winter of political discontent, Ricks, Meacham and Fawcett are well worth reading. Each conveys a message that deserves our attention as we strive to exit, or at least better understand, the morass.The way of CincinnatusSpurred by the seismic shock of the 2016 election, First Principles focuses on America’s first four presidents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, their education and outlooks. In Ricks’ view, ancient Greece and Rome influenced these men more than contemporary religion.“Christianity simply did not loom as large in colonial America as it would a century later,” Ricks writes, “or indeed does now.” The Declaration of Independence summons the Creator and Nature’s God but Jesus does not appear. The constitution refers to religion but is silent as to a deity.Between Greece and Rome, Ricks contends the latter held sway over the early presidents, with the exception of Jefferson. In the run-up to and aftermath of the revolutionary war, Rome came to exemplify republicanism, civic virtue and stoicism, as well as a cautionary tale of decline and tyranny. It came as little surprise that Washington would lead the new nation. More remarkable was the fact that he did not seize power and instead stepped down voluntarily. Cincinnatus, the citizen-soldier, was the paragon, Caesar the anathema.Even so, it is Jefferson, Greece and the epicurean notion of happiness that mark our Fourth of July celebrations. America’s Declaration of Independence hinged on a country dedicated to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, instead of John Locke’s formulation of government existing explicitly to protect property. Importantly, for Jefferson happiness was about more than just the right to party. Rather, it spoke to a general tranquility and the possibility of a common purpose.His subtle shift in wording was seismic: the landless could no longer be so easily marginalized or subordinated. A single phrase would help incubate the seeds of Jacksonian democracy. “America works best when it gives people the freedom to tap their own energies and exploit their talents,” Ricks concludes.‘The way of Jesus’Under the subtitle John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Meacham covers the first 28 years of the civil rights leader’s life, from his birth in 1940 to the murders of Dr King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. It is practically a hagiography, portraying Lewis as saint and hero – and yet imperfect.As a boy, Lewis preached to the chickens on the family farm. Later he attended American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee. He was ordained as a minister but instead of settling into a pulpit, he took up the cross and threw his body and soul into the civil rights movement.In Meacham’s telling, Lewis “rejected the tragedy of life and history” and “embraced the possibilities of realizing a joyful ideal”. The late congressman “seemed to walk with Jesus himself”, making the cause of the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed his own.Meacham’s religious tenor is organic. He is a believing Christian who discounts a wholly secular public square. Instead, he observes that “one way to a nation where equality before the law and before God is more universal, is the way of King and of Lewis. Which is also the way of Jesus.”Unlike Ricks, Meacham sees the constitution as a distinctly Calvinist document. It is “theological and assumes our sinfulness and that we will do the wrong thing far more often than the right thing”. He adds: “We have done everything since then to prove them right.”Fittingly, Meacham gives Lewis the final say in the book’s “afterword”, in which the congressman plays off the text of the Gospel of John, proclaiming that America’s “moral compass comes from God, is of God, and is seen through God”.More hauntingly, Lewis writes: “And God so loved the world that he gave us countless men and women who lost their homes and their jobs for the right to vote” and the “children of freedom who their lives in a bombing in Birmingham and three young men who were killed in Mississippi”.In other words, Christ’s Passion can be relived and reimagined; suffering can bring redemption in this world. Those who bled and died were more than just historic figures.The way of Weimar?If anyone needs further reminder of the American right’s apparent discomfort with universal suffrage, Fawcett offers a telling examination of extreme libertarianism and populism. He recalls the work of Jason Brennan, a Georgetown business school professor who complains of “ignorant majorities” and their capacity to “thwart” economic growth.Unmentioned is Palantir’s Peter Thiel and his infamous 2009 take: that women and minorities have mucked things up. Thiel has since partnered with the Trump administration, and holds a passel of government contracts.Back then, he wrote: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”Fawcett also calls our attention to the tension between populism and participatory democracy. His characterizations are borne out by the last gasps of Trump’s presidency. He asserts that “populists are ill at ease with multi-party competition” and “indifferent or hostile to countervailing powers within the state or society”.Here, Fawcett is dead on. Trump’s campaign cries of “lock her up”, branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and bashing the “deep state” are cut from the same cloth.The final paragraphs of Conservatism pose these questions regarding the center-right: “Do they side with the hard right and leave liberal democracy to the mercies of uncontrolled markets and national populism? Or do they look for allies with whom to rebuild a shaken center?”If the response of Republican congressional leadership to Trump is a case study, the answer is discouraging. The other day, Mitch McConnell stood sobbing in the Senate over a colleague’s pending departure but had nothing to say about the president’s destructive behavior. Weimar is not an abstract. In the end, guardrails don’t always withstand the stress. More

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      Eleanor review: sensitive and superb biography of a true American giant

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      As the 2020 US presidential election winds toward a tortuous and dysfunctional certification, it is tempting to imagine that intrigue and machinations belong only to this particular heated moment in American life and history. That would be wrong.There is always intrigue in American politics, though nothing approaching the current state of near-sedition. We would be also be wrong if we dated the role of iconic first ladies only as far back as Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, or even Jackie Kennedy. Before there was Jackie or Hillary or Michelle, there was Eleanor. Niece to one president, wife to another; activist, global citizen; mother of the Democratic party in the mid-20th century, when the mother of the party was still a thing.You will find all these identities in David Michaelis’s elegant new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, but the beauty of this robust volume is that there are so many more Eleanors to meet. Awkward girl; yearning and unappreciated wife; shy but committed romantic; resolute partner; distant mother. Michaelis, a veteran biographer, shows us all these many faces, rendering a complex and sensitive portrait of a woman who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, reimagining herself many times with both courage and resilience.Born into the strictures of upper-class white womanhood, Eleanor was conversant with and adjacent to political power from an early age. Born to a beautiful, critical mother and an affectionate, drug- and alcohol-addicted father, she might well have been identified in the 21st century as an adult child of an alcoholic, with all the needy and compliant behavior implied. Her mother, Anna, consumed with keeping up appearances, was no better than any other woman of her class; indeed, her constant mockery of the young Eleanor certainly compounded the child’s insecurity and desire to truly belong. Michaelis writes with great sensitivity, utilizing Eleanor’s own recollections and other research materials to set the backdrop for recurring themes in his young subject’s life, including her mother’s “ritualized humiliation … as often as not in front of company”, including her mocking nickname of “Granny”.With both parents and a brother dead by the time she was 10, Eleanor found herself introduced to tragedy – as well as to something steadfast within herself: “No matter what happened to one in this world, one had to adjust to it.” And adjust she did, to her grandmother’s strictures, her mother-in-law’s disdain, the ambitions of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This biography gives equal weight to Eleanor’s personal and political longings, her frustrations with her husband and her fury at his indiscretions; and her own loves, requited and otherwise.At the same time, however, Michaelis reveals, again and again, that Eleanor found her truest self through duty, hard work and sometimes punishing overachievement. She felt most loved in partnership and was misled by the illusion of it. Longing to be the center of one person’s love, she settled instead for the larger, public love of a generation as she wrote, traveled and agitated to change the world. What is especially refreshing about this biography are the ways in which Michaelis refuses to hide the fact that Eleanor’s struggles for justice had limits, drawn not only by her grudging acceptance of a political spouse’s role, but also through the limitations of her race and class.Impressively, the author does not sugarcoat or diminish the casual racism and xenophobia of the age, highlighting FDR’s use of the N-word and comfort with segregation, as well as the well-documented anti-Asian racism undergirding the internment of Japanese citizens during the second world war. Indeed, Michaelis’s framing of these deficiencies in American political life helps us to trace their provenance in our own era and allows us to see what Eleanor was up against in her bravest as well as her most timid moments.Her commitment to global citizenship and human rights served to mirror white activists in that period as well as this one: they find the courage to fight for human rights and dignity in the far corners of the globe yet choke at the exact moment when their courage could be most effective. She found herself in full command of the symbolic gesture – making it possible for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution but refusing to attend the concert herself, at a moment when such a symbolic gesture might have made a greater difference.These sections will not surprise many African or Japanese Americans. Such readers will likely have personal experience with the failures of white Americans who talk a good game about democracy and equal justice under law, but who can’t deliver when the chips are down. Indeed, Michaelis does such an excellent job of outlining Eleanor’s grueling work to bring to fruition the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the country’s domestic deficiencies during and after FDR’s presidency are drawn in sharp relief. More

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      Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump

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      This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More

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      in US Politics

      Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

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      “I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
      The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
      However, the very fact that we need to ask this question helps answer it – for lying, paranoia and conspiracy are also defining features of the totalitarian societies that American society is being so hotly compared to. As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project. Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of pervasive lying, what Arendt called “lying as a way of life” and “lying on principle”, systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality. Orwell similarly insisted that lying is “integral to totalitarianism”: indeed, for Orwell, totalitarianism probably “demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth”. And as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, both the Nazis and the Soviets created markedly paranoid societies, in which the capillary action of conspiratorial fictions did as much work as ideological infrastructure. More