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      John Lewis review: superb first biography of a civil rights hero

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      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community chronicles one man’s quest for a more perfect union. An adventure of recent times, it is made exceptional by the way the narrative intersects with current events. It is the perfect book, at the right time.Raymond Arsenault also offers the first full-length biography of the Georgia congressman and stalwart freedom-fighter. The book illuminates Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests, his service in Congress and his time as an American elder statesman.Exemplary of Malcom X’s observation, “of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Arsenault’s life of Lewis also brings to mind William Faulkner’s take on American life: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”John Robert Lewis was born into a poor family of sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping amounted to slavery in all but name. White people owned the land and equipment. At the company store, seed and other supplies, from cornmeal to calico, were available on credit. The prices set for all this, and for the cotton harvest, were calculated to keep Black people in debt.Recalling his childhood, Lewis was not referring to material wealth when he wrote: “The world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one … It was a small world … filled with family and friends.”His school books made him aware of the unfairness of Jim Crow: “I knew names written in the front of our raggedy secondhand textbooks were white children’s names, and that these books had been new when they belonged to them.”His parents and nine siblings’ initial indifference to learning proved frustrating. They viewed his emergent strength, which would help him withstand a career punctuated by arrests and beatings, as a means to help increase a meager income. First sent into the cotton fields at six, Lewis was frequently compelled to miss class through high school.His political mission grew out of a religious calling. His was a gospel of justice and liberation. As a child he practiced preaching to a congregation of the chickens. In time, like Martin Luther King Jr, he was ordained a Baptist minister.Inspired by Gandhi and Bayard Rustin as well as by King, Lewis also embraced non-violence in emulation of Jesus. He took to heart Christ’s call to turn the other cheek: love your enemy and love one another. He called his modeling of Christ’s confrontation with injustice “getting into good trouble”.Education offered opportunities. In college, Lewis met and befriended likeminded young people. Helping form and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he attracted others eager to take action, as Freedom Riders or whatever else gaining equal treatment might take.Lewis’s willingness to suffer attack while defending his beliefs gave him credibility like no other. The most remembered blow produced a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama. That barbaric 1965 assault against peaceful protesters came from authorities headed by George Wallace, the governor who said: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” A move to maintain white supremacy, the atrocity became known as “Bloody Sunday”.Time after time, Lewis found unity among colleagues elusive. In 1963, at the March on Washington, four higher-ups insisted on softening his speech. Even so, his radicalized passion shone through.Collaborating with Jack and Robert Kennedy, their self-satisfied delusion masquerading as optimism, was also problematic. Time and again, political expedience tempered the president and the attorney general in their commitment to civil rights. Sixty years on, among lessons Lewis attempted teaching was the inevitability of backlash following progress. If Barack Obama represented propulsion forward, the improbable installment of Donald Trump was like a race backward. Angering some, this was why, looking past Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Lewis endorsed for president the less exciting but more electable Joe Biden.Lewis’s ability to forgive indicates something of his greatness. Of George Wallace’s plea for forgiveness, in 1986, he said: “It was almost like someone confessing to a priest.”Rather like a priest, Lewis was admired across the House chamber. His moral compass was the “conscience of Congress”. Near the end of his life, in 2020, employing all his measured and collaborative demeanor, he exerted this standing in an attempt to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted by a rightwing supreme court. Exhibiting what seemed to be endless resolve, he nearly succeeded.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI met Lewis in 1993, in Miami, at the conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The event’s theme, “cultural diversity”, got more dubious by the day. Only Black people attended excellent Black history workshops. Only rich white people toured Palm Beach houses.There were subsidized airfares, conference fees and accommodation for people of color. But I asked the Trust’s new president, Richard Moe, if it wouldn’t be good for the Trust to acquire Villa Lewaro, a house at Irvington, New York, once the residence of Madam CJ Walker, a Black business pioneer. Moe answered: “I intend to take the Trust out of the business of acquiring the houses of the rich.”I hoped Lewis’s keynote address would deem preservation a civil right. It didn’t. Instead, Lewis lamented how high costs made preserving landmarks in poor Black neighborhoods an unaffordable luxury. Moe heartily concurred. I stood to protest.Moe cut me off: “Mr Adams, you are making a statement, not asking a question. You are out of order!”“No,” Lewis said. “The young man did ask a question! He asked: ‘Why in places like Harlem, with abatements and grants, taxpayers subsidize destruction, instead of preserving Black heritage?’ I never thought of it that way. And he’s right.”In that moment, John Lewis became my hero. As a preservationist, I share his mission to obtain that Beloved Community. It is a place where inclusion is a right and where welcome is a given.
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press
      Michael Henry Adams is an architectural-cultural historian and historic preservation activist More

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      ‘He’d been through the fire’: John Lewis, civil rights giant, remembered

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      When he was a Ku Klux Klansman in South Carolina, Elwin Wilson helped carry out a vicious assault that left John Lewis with bruised ribs, cuts to his face and a deep gash on the back of his head. Half a century later, Wilson sought and received Lewis’s forgiveness. Then both men appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show.Wilson looked overwhelmed, panicked by the bright lights of the studio, where nearly 180 of Lewis’s fellow civil rights activists had gathered. But then Lewis smiled, leaned over, gently held Wilson’s hand and insisted: “He’s my brother.” There was not a dry eye in the house.Raymond Arsenault, author of the first full-length biography of Lewis, the late congressman from Georgia, describes this act of compassion and reconciliation as a quintessential moment.“For him, it was all about forgiveness,” Arsenault says. “That’s the central theme of his life. He believed that you couldn’t let your enemies pull you down into the ditch with them, that you had to love your enemies as much as you loved your friends and your loved ones.”It was the secret weapon, the way to catch enemies off-guard. Bernard Lafayette, a Freedom Rider and close friend of Lewis, a key source for Arsenault, calls it moral jujitsu.Arsenault adds: “They’re expecting you to react like a normal human being. When you don’t, when you don’t hate them, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. The case of Mr Wilson was classic. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime, for sure.”Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, has written books about the Freedom Riders – civil rights activists who rode buses across the south in 1961 to challenge segregation in transportation – and two African American cultural giants: contralto Marian Anderson and tennis player Arthur Ashe.He first met Lewis in 2000, in Lewis’s congressional office in Washington DC, a mini museum of books, photos and civil rights memorabilia.“The first day I met him, I called him ‘Congressman Lewis’ and he said: ‘Get that out of here. I’m John. Everybody calls me John.’ It wasn’t an affectation. He meant it. He seemed to value human beings in such an equalitarian way.”Lewis asked for Arsenault’s help tracking down Freedom Riders for a 40th anniversary reunion. It was the start of a friendship that would last until Lewis’s death, at 80 from pancreatic cancer, in 2020.“From the very start I saw that he was an absolutely extraordinary human being,” Arsenault says. “I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite like him – absolutely without ego, selfless. People have called him saintly and that’s probably fairly accurate.”Arsenault was approached to write a biography by the historian David Blight, who with Henry Louis Gates Jr and Jacqueline Goldsby sits on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Black Lives series. The resulting book, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, examines a rare journey from protest leader to career politician, buffeted by the winds of Black nationalism, debates over the acceptability of violence and perennial tensions between purity and pragmatism.Arsenault says Lewis “was certainly more complicated than I thought he would be when I started. He tried to keep his balance, but it was not easy because a lot of people wanted him to be what is sometimes called in the movement a ‘race man’ and he wasn’t a race man, even though he was proud of being African American and very connected to where he came from. He was always more of a human rights person than a civil rights person.“If he had to choose between racial loyalty or solidarity and his deeper values about the Beloved Community [Martin Luther King Jr’s vision of a just and compassionate society], he always chose the Beloved Community and it got him in hot water. He, for example, was criticised for attacking Clarence Thomas during the [1991 supreme court nomination] hearings and of course he proved to be absolutely right on that one.“There were other cases where if there was a good white candidate running and a Black man who wasn’t so good, he’d choose the white candidate and he didn’t apologise for it. He took a lot of heat for that. Now he’s such a beloved figure sometimes people forget that he marched to his own drummer.”Lewis’s philosophy represented a confluence of Black Christianity and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Arsenault says. “He had this broader vision. There’s not a progressive cause that you can mention that he wasn’t involved with in some way or another.“He was a major environmentalist. There was a lot of homophobia in the Black community in those years but not even a hint [in Lewis]. He was also a philosemite: he associated Jews as being people of the Old Testament and he was so attracted to them as natural allies. Never even a moment of antisemitism or anything like that. He was totally ahead of his time in so many ways.”‘A man of action’Lewis was born in 1940, outside Troy in Pike county, Alabama, one of 10 children. He grew up on his family’s farm, without electricity or indoor plumbing, and attended segregated public schools in the era of Jim Crow. As a boy, he wanted to be a minister.Arsenault says: “I have a picture of him in the book when he was 11; they actually ran something in the newspaper about this boy preacher. He had something of a speech impediment but preached to the chickens on the farm. They were like his children or his congregation, his flock, and he loved to tell those stories.“But he was always bookish, different from his big brothers and sisters. He loved school. He loved to read. In fact his first protesting was to try to get a library card at the all-white library.”Denied a library card, Lewis became an avid reader anyway. He was a teenager when he first heard King preach, on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking support to become the first Black student at the segregated Troy State University.“He was a good student and a conscientious student but he realised that he was a man of action, as he liked to say. He loved words but was always putting his body on the line. It’s a miracle he survived, frankly, more than 40 beatings, more than 40 arrests and jailings, far more than any other major figure. You could add all the others up and they wouldn’t equal the times that John was behind bars.”Lewis began organising sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests. He helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming its chair in 1963. That year, he was among the “Big Six” organisers of the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, where at the last minute he agreed to tone down his speech. Still, Lewis made his point, with what Arsenault calls “far and away the most radical speech given that day”.In 1965, after extensive training in non-violent protest, Lewis, still only 25, and the Rev Hosea Williams led hundreds of demonstrators on a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. In Selma, police blocked their way off the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers wielded truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback. Walking with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat, Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten, suffering a fractured skull. Televised images of such state violence forced a reckoning with southern racial oppression.Lewis returned to and crossed the bridge every year and never tired of talking about it, Arsenault says: “He wasn’t one to talk about himself so much, but he was a good storyteller and Bloody Sunday was a huge deal for him. He said later he thought he was going to die, that this was it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He passed through an incredible rite of passage as a non-violent activist and nothing could ever be as bad again. He’d been through the fire and so it made him tougher and more resilient. It’s origins of the legend. He was well considered as a Freedom Rider, certainly, and already had a reputation but that solidified it and extended it in a way that made him a folk hero within the movement.”Lewis turned to politics. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta city council. Five years later he won a seat in Congress. He would serve 17 terms. After Democrats won the House in 2006, Lewis became senior deputy whip, widely revered as the “conscience of the Congress”. Once a young SNCC firebrand, sceptical of politics, he became a national institution and a party man – up to a point.“That tension was always there,” Arsenault reflects. “He tried to be as practical and pragmatic as he needed to be but that wasn’t his bent.“He was much more in it for the long haul in terms of an almost utopian attitude about the Beloved Community. He probably enjoyed it more when he was a protest leader, when he was kind of a rebel. Maybe it’s not right to say he didn’t feel comfortable in Washington, but his heart was back in Atlanta and in Pike county. As his chief of staff once said, wherever he went in the world, he took Pike county with him.”The fire never dimmed. Even in his 70s, Lewis led a sit-in protest in the House chamber, demanding tougher gun controls. As a congressman, he was arrested five times.“He was absolutely determined and, as he once said: ‘I’m not a showboat, I’m a tugboat.’ He loved that line. Nothing fancy. Just a person who did the hard work and was always willing to put his body on the line,” Arsenault says.‘If he hated anyone, it was probably Trump’Lewis endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but switched to Barack Obama, who became the first Black president. Obama honoured Lewis with the presidential medal of freedom and in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, they marched hand in hand in Selma. Lewis backed Clinton again in 2016 but was thwarted by Donald Trump.Arsenault says: “He was thrilled by the idea of an Obama presidency and thought the world was heading in the right direction. He worked hard for Hillary in 2016 and thought for sure she was going to win, so it was just a devastating thing, as it was for a lot of us. He tried not to hate anyone and never would vocalise it but, if he hated anyone, it was probably Trump. He had contempt for him. He thought he was an awful man.“That was something I had to deal with in writing the book, because you like to think it’s going to be an ascending arc of hopefulness and things are going to get better over time, but in John Lewis’s life, the last three years were probably the worst in many respects because he thought that American democracy itself was on the line.”When Lewis died, Washington united in mourning – with a notable exception. Trump said: “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK. That’s his right. And, again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have.”Arsenault says: “They were almost like antithetical figures. Lewis was the anti-Trump in every conceivable way, but when he died in July 2020 he probably thought Trump was going to win re-election. Within the limits of his physical strength, which wasn’t great at that point, he did what he could, but the pancreatic cancer was so devastating from December 2019 until he died.“It was tough to deal with that part of the story but, in some ways, maybe it’s not all that surprising for someone whose whole life was beating the odds and going against the grain. He had suffered plenty of disappointments before that. It just made him more determined, tougher, and he was absolutely defiant of Trump.”Lewis enjoyed positive relationships with Republicans. “He was such a saintly person that whenever there were votes about the most admired person in Congress, it was always John Lewis. Even Republicans who didn’t agree with his politics but realised he was something special as a human being, as a man.“He had always been able to work across the aisle, probably better than most Democratic congressmen. He didn’t demonise the Republicans. It was Trumpism, this new form of politics, in some ways a throwback to the southern demagoguery of the early 20th century, this politics of persecution and thinly veiled racism. He passed without much sense that we were any closer to the Beloved Community.”Lewis did live to see the flowering of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He was inspired, a day before he went into hospital, to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza, near the White House.“For him it was the most incredible outpouring of non-violent spirit in the streets that he’d ever seen, that anybody had ever seen,” Arsenault says. “That was enormously gratifying for him. He thought that in some sense his message had gotten through and people were acting on these ideals of Dr King and Gandhi.“That was hugely important to him and to reinforcing his values and his beliefs and his hopes. I don’t think he was despondent at all because of that. If that had not happened, who knows? But he’d weathered the storms before and that’s what helped him to weather this storm, because it was it was so important to him.”Lewis enjoyed fishing, African American quilts, sweet potato pie, listening to music and, as deathless videos testify, dancing with joy. Above all, Arsenault hopes readers of his book will be moved by Lewis’s fidelity to the promise of non-violence.“When you think about what’s happening in Gaza and the Middle East and Ukraine right now, it’s horrible violence – and more than ever we need these lessons of the power of non-violence. [Lewis] was the epitome of it. You can’t help but come away with an admiration for what he was able to do in his lifetime, how far he travelled. He had no advantages in any way.“The idea that he was able to have this life and career and the American people and the world would be exposed to a man like this – in some ways he is like Nelson Mandela. He didn’t spend nearly 30 years in prison, but I think of them as similar in many ways. I hope people will be inspired to think about making the kind of sacrifices that he made. He gave everybody the benefit of the doubt.”
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      ‘This person should not be president’: Kamala Harris takes hits in book on Biden

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      Considering Kamala Harris’s fitness to take over from Joe Biden should the need arise, a top aide to the former California senator’s 2020 campaign said: “This person should not be president of the United States.”The withering assessment, given after Harris was picked for vice-president in 2020, is reported in The Truce: Progressives, Centrists and the Future of the Democratic Party, by the reporters Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen. The book will be published in the US on 24 January 2024. The Guardian obtained a copy.Harris ran for president in 2020, but withdrew a month before the first vote. Her campaign, Walker and Luppen quote the unnamed aide as saying, was “rotten from the start.“A lot of us, at least folks that I was friends with on the campaign, all realised that: ‘Yeah, this person should not be president of the United States.”Another unnamed aide, identified as a “senior staffer”, is quoted as saying Harris’s backstory, as the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who became the first woman and woman of colour to be vice-president, is “a lot of the reason people support her.“But you’ve got to back that up with: ‘What are you going to do?’”In fact, Harris made a strong start to the Democratic primary in 2019, landing memorable blows on Biden in the first debate when she brought up the veteran senator and former vice-president’s historic opposition to “busing”, a way of compelling racial integration in public schools.“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” Harris said, onstage in Miami, “and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.”But Harris failed to capitalise with policy proposals or further profitable attacks and though Biden forgave her, overruling reported opposition among aides and from his wife to pick Harris as his running mate, reports of tension and Harris’s frustrations as vice-president have been a feature of their time in power.The White House has repeatedly denied such reports concerning Biden and Harris’s working relationship and alleged dysfunction in Harris’s office.Biden and Harris are set to form the Democratic ticket again this year.Polling, however, shows widespread concern that at 81, Biden is too old to properly prosecute a potentially historic campaign, with Donald Trump seemingly set to be the Republican nominee once more.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolling also shows low approval numbers for Harris. Republicans, particularly Trump’s closest challenger, Nikki Haley, have made the prospect of her taking power a central campaign theme.Walker and Luppen report speculation that Harris could line up a 2028 bid on a ticket with Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary who won the Iowa caucuses in 2020.A former Buttigieg staffer is quoted as saying Harris has established “a personal relationship with Pete in a way that she doesn’t with other people”.But alleged people problems, familiar from reports about Harris’s campaign and her time as vice-president, also surface in Walker and Luppen’s book.“The problems Harris and her team had experienced on her campaign had persisted during her time as vice-president,” the authors write.“Harris saw heavy staff turnover, with aides describing a toxic climate riven with factionalism and mismanagement. One source who worked for the vice-president declined to go on record or even discuss matters anonymously, due to the heated atmosphere around the office.“They refused to characterise the experience of working for Harris, apart from offering a three-word assessment. It was, they said: ‘Game of Thrones’.” More

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      The Rebels review: AOC, Bernie, Warren and the fight against Trump

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      In 2017, mere months after Donald Trump settled into the White House, Joshua Green of Bloomberg News delivered Devil’s Bargain, a mordantly amusing but deadly serious take on the 45th president and his relationship with Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who became Trump’s chief strategist. With wit, insight and access, Green informed, entertained and horrified. More than six years later, both Trump and Bannon face criminal trials. Then again, the band may soon be back together – in the West Wing.Green is acutely aware of the economic and social cleavages that roil the US and divide Democrats ranged against the Republicans’ rightward turn. With his new book, The Rebels, he shifts his gaze to three notables of the Democratic left: two senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York. Once again, Green’s work is smart, sharp and smoothly written.Warren and Sanders failed in bids to become president. In 2020, his second such primary campaign, Sanders won early contests but saw his ambitions crash in South Carolina. That heavily African American primary electorate wasn’t all that keen on Brooklyn-bred progressivism, as Sanders offered.As for Warren, she failed to win a single contest and finished third in her home state, behind Sanders and Joe Biden. What worked for her in debates, congressional hearings and the faculty lounge did not resonate with voters. A highly contentious claim to be Native American raised damning questions too.Still, Warren’s critiques of the mortgage meltdown and resulting displacements provided intellectual heft for the populist left. Furthermore, unlike Biden she was intellectually brilliant and not beholden to Delaware and its credit card giants. Warren was a harsh critic of Wall Street too. The two billionaires in the 2020 race, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, regularly felt her sting. Ditto Tim Geithner, first treasury secretary to Barack Obama and another key character in Green’s book.Warren made an impact. Green writes: “Knowing [Trump’s] commitment to economic populism was merely rhetorical, Bannon fretted that Warren would lure away blue-collar voters with a program he described as ‘populist Democratic nationalism’.”In the House, Ocasio-Cortez, who at 34 is decades younger than Warren, Biden and Sanders, is the one member of the “Squad” of progressives who possesses the tools and dexterity to play politics nationally. She is emotionally grounded.At one 2019 hearing, the congresswoman widely known as AOC filleted Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s ties to Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct data-harvesting and research firm owned by Bannon and the rightwing Mercer family. She also put the wood to Exxon over its early but non-disclosed knowledge about global heating and its effects.All three of Green’s subjects convey seriousness. Humor, less so. Nonetheless, the book offers a valuable recapitulation of the crack-up of the New Deal coalition, the impact of Ronald Reagan’s victories and the continued reverberations of the Great Recession of 2008.The Democrats hold the White House and the Senate but their future is unclear. Non-college graduates, regardless of race, find less to love in the historic home of working America. Green seizes on the havoc wrought by economic liberalization, financialism and expanded trade with China – factors that have driven a wedge between the Democrats and what was once their base.Convincingly, Green argues that neo-liberalism is in retrograde and that Biden is more a transitional figure than a harbinger of what comes next. Even so, Biden tacked left – instead of pivoting toward the center – as he faced Trump in 2020.In 2021, on inauguration day, Biden issued the Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. His White House intoned: “Advancing equity is not a one-year project – it is a generational commitment that will require sustained leadership and partnership with all communities.”Good luck with that. The controversial fall of Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard, who came under sustained conservative fire over the Israel-Hamas war, student protest and allegations of plagiarism in her work, is just one recent illustration of how tough such terrain will remain.Green traces many Democratic dilemmas to 1980, when Reagan handily defeated an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Afterwards, Democratic mandarins concluded that the old-time religion of lunch-bucket liberalism needed to make room for market-based economics. Reagan’s embrace of tax cuts and reduced government resonated with the public. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came to stand as heirs of that strategic decision. But it was about more than “it’s the economy, stupid”, as Clinton would learn on the job.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton told Robert Rubin, his treasury secretary, a former head of Goldman Sachs.James Carville, the guru of Clinton’s first victory, later said that were he to be born again, he wanted to be reincarnated as the most powerful thing in the world: the bond market.Green homes in on the close relationships that existed between the Obama administration and Wall Street. In 2008, for all the then Illinois senator’s talk of hope and change, he was the financial sector’s choice for president over John McCain. Green quotes Geithner’s pitch to Obama for the treasury slot, and describes how Geithner beat out Larry Summers, Rubin’s successor, to secure the job.Green also examines how in saving the financial system despite its players’ unadulterated greed and stupidity, Geithner helped incubate resentments that haunt the US today.“In a crisis, you have to choose,” Geithner said. “Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson?”In 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, voters did the latter. Ten months from now, they may do so again.
      The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      ‘Floored’ union leader called AOC new Springsteen after shock primary win, book says

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      Donald Trump memorably compared the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eva Perón, the Argentinian first lady known as Evita. But a new book reveals that when the young Latino leftwinger burst on to the US political scene in 2018, one US labour leader made perhaps a more telling comparison – to Bruce Springsteen.“I was floored,” Michael Podhorzer, then political director of the AFL-CIO, told the author Joshua Green. “The best comparison I can make is to the famous Jon Landau line: ‘I’ve seen rock’n’roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.’”Landau is a journalist who became Springsteen’s manager and producer. He passed his famous judgment in May 1974, after seeing Springsteen play at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then 25, Springsteen went on to sell records by the million and win Grammys by the sackful, becoming widely known as the Boss but maintaining his image as a blue-collar hero, true to his New Jersey roots.In Democratic politics, Ocasio-Cortez – widely known as AOC – has built her own star power while maintaining working-class credentials.In 2018, she was a 28-year-old bartender when she scored a historic upset primary win over Joe Crowley, then 56 and a member of Democratic US House leadership, in a New York City district covering parts of Queens and the Bronx.In a campaign ad, Ocasio-Cortez depicted herself as an ordinary New Yorker, hustling to work on the subway.She described Crowley, in contrast, as “a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air”.Green, previously the author of Devil’s Bargain, on Trump’s rise to power, reports Podhorzer’s response in his new book, The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics.A look at three stars of the modern Democratic left, the book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Podhorzer, Green says, is a union official “who spends his waking hours trying to get voters to care about working people”. Among working people who might appreciate his comparison of Ocasio-Cortez to Springsteen is none other than Crowley, now senior policy director for Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.At a party event on election night in 2018, as he digested the sudden end of his 20-year congressional career, Crowley picked up a guitar and took the stage with a band.“This is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he said, launching a cover of Springsteen’s Born to Run.In his epilogue, Green considers a common question: was Ocasio-Cortez born to run for president?Noting how AOC, Warren and Sanders have pushed Democrats left, as evidenced by Joe Biden’s record in office, he writes that Ocasio-Cortez “still gets covered mainly through the lens of ‘the Squad’” – a group of mostly female representatives of color who have achieved prominence on Capitol Hill.“But among the rising generation of Democratic staffers and strategists who will soon run the party, she’s come to be seen as a significant figure in her own right.”Speaking anonymously, a Warren adviser adds: “You can see [AOC] pointing a path toward the future in a way that none of the other Squad members are doing. She’s the one really marking the future of the left in the post-Biden era.” More

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      Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion by David Keen review – Trumpism’s lifeblood

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      Imagine a white, working-class American, most likely a man, from Louisiana or Alabama, perhaps, standing in a long line that represents his life’s journey. The man has been sold the American “bootstrap myth”, which states that his great country is a place where anyone can rise from the humblest of origins to become a billionaire or a president, and at the end of the line he expects to find a little part of that dividend for himself. But things aren’t panning out as he had hoped. For a start, the line stretches to the horizon, and even as he stands in it, he suffers: his pay packet is shrinking, the industry he works in is moving overseas, and the cost of everything from food to gas to healthcare is through the roof. Worse still, he can see people cutting into the line ahead, beneficiaries of “affirmative action” – black people, women, immigrants. He doesn’t think he’s racist or misogynist, but that’s what they call him when he objects. He is doubly shamed: privately, by his failure to live up to the myth; publicly, by liberal society.This is the so-called deep story of the American right. We don’t have to accept the man’s worldview, just believe that this might be how he perceives it.Now a new figure enters the scenario, an orange-haired tycoon: we’ll call him Donald. Donald seems instinctively to understand the man’s shame. In fact, he’s a shame expert. He has a long history of transgression, and people have been trying to shame him for much of his life. But Donald has found a way around it: he has become shame-less. He demonstrates his shamelessness almost daily by producing a stream of shameful remarks – about Mexicans, say, or Muslims, or the sitting president, who happens to be black. Although people shout “Shame!” at him, each condemnation inflates Donald a little more in the eyes of his tribe, including the man in the line, who holds him up as a sort of shame messiah. By refusing his own shame, Donald absolves them, too.This, more or less, is the analysis of Trumpism offered by David Keen in his fascinating, occasionally frustrating book. We are living through a sort of shame golden age, Keen observes, with the words “shame” and “shameless” in greater vogue than at any time since the mid-19th century. We have developed a “habit of instant condemnation”, which is “choking off curiosity and narrowing the space for understanding of others”. It is also having a terrible effect on our politics.It’s not hard to see where our shame culture originates. Every keyboard jockey now holds the power of a witch-finder general, while the phones in our pockets vibrate with the merry-go-round of digital finger-pointing, body-shaming and moral high-handedness that constitutes much of social media. Of course, shame isn’t always a negative thing – what would #MeToo or #BLM be without it? But too often the effect of shaming is to drive the shamed into an angrier, more shameless place. Oddly, despite the huge seam of public shaming that Twitter/X, Instagram and Facebook provide daily, Keen doesn’t spend any time on them. Instead, he draws on his expertise as professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics to embark on a series of case studies, including the Holocaust, the civil war in Sierra Leone, the Brexit vote and Trump’s election.His analysis of the violence in Sierra Leone is compelling, his chapter on the Nazis less so, but it is Trumpism that lies at the heart of the book, and his arguments here are highly plausible. Might a shame analysis even explain the great paradox of modern politics, in which one individual can be mobbed for the slightest indiscretion, while another can brag, as Trump once did, that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote? Does the shame/shameless diptych explain not only Trump, but the whole crew of latter-day demagogues, from Johnson to Modi, Meloni to Bolsanaro, and now Javier Milei in Argentina?I think it could, but I’m not wholly convinced, absent a deeper dive into the driving mechanism of modern shame: technology.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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      A house divided: 2023 in US politics books, before Trump v Biden part II

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      The US is a house divided. The presidential election is set to be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But as 2023 draws to a close it leaves a legacy in print, in books about the US political scene that help explain the crises that engulf us.February brought The Lincoln Miracle, Edward Achorn’s in-depth examination of the 16th president’s quest for the Republican nomination in 1860. Beautifully written, Achorn’s book reminds us that outcomes are not preordained and that elections bring consequences. Achorn also shows that the battle between red and blue America is now more than 160 years old.The party of Lincoln, however, is no more. Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, had two books on Trump behind him before Tired of Winning. Well-paced, meticulously sourced and amply footnoted, Karl’s latest shines another light on how the Republican party has been recast by a man now under multiple felony indictments.Steve Bannon, Trump’s brain and muse, a leading voice of the far right, talked on the record. He stressed that as long as Trump lives, the party belongs to him. Confronted by a grandee who suggested Trump play less of a role in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Bannon unloaded: “Have you lost your fucking mind?” If Trump defeats Biden, Bannon may well return to the West Wing.Loyalty to Trump has emerged as a cardinal tenet of Republican life. In Enough, Cassidy Hutchinson, the White House aide who became the lead January 6 witness, offers a persuasive, dispiriting tale of political degradation. Hutchinson “isn’t crazy”, a Trump White House veteran confided before her first public appearance in front of the January 6 committee. But she is a “time bomb”. True on both counts.McKay Coppins’s Romney: A Reckoning is a must-read for anyone interested in how the Republican party became a Trumpian mess. Picking up where he left off in The Wilderness, his earlier look at the GOP, Coppins, a veteran Romney-watcher now at the Atlantic, offers an engaging read, the product of 30 interviews with the 2012 presidential nominee, access to aides and friends and also the senator’s emails and diaries. Coppins offers a scorching critique, capturing Romney strafing Trump and Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence.Adam Kinzinger represented a Republican Illinois district in the US House for six terms. He voted to impeach Trump for the January 6 insurrection, and with Liz Cheney was one of two Republicans on the investigating committee. Like Cheney, from Wyoming, Kinzinger earned the ire of Trump and the GOP base. Both are no longer in Congress. Renegade, Kinzinger’s memoir, written with Michael D’Antonio, biographer of Pence, is a steady, well-crafted read.In the year of the Republican shadow primary, before voting begins next month, presidential aspirants past and present gave their spin too. Mike Pompeo, ex-congressman, CIA director and secretary of state, wrote Never Give an Inch. Tart and tight, filled with barbs, bile and little regret, it was an unexpectedly interesting read. Pompeo did give an inch to reality, though, accepting there was no point mounting a run.On the other side of the aisle, with The Last Politician, Franklin Foer provides a well-sourced look at Biden. A staff writer at the Atlantic and former New Republic editor, Foer captures successes and cock-ups. The 46th president is caught wondering why John F Kennedy was not so tightly handled by his aides – or “babied”. Less than a year from election day, Biden trails Trump at the polls.Chris Whipple’s The Fight of His Life is a flattering portrait of Biden. Ron Klain, his first chief of staff, hails “the most successful first year of any president ever”, adding: “We passed more legislation than any president in his first year.” Many remain unimpressed. Inflation scars remain visible. The retribution impeachment looms. Hunter Biden is under felony indictment.With Filthy Rich Politicians, Matt Lewis skewers both sides of the aisle. A senior columnist at the Daily Beast, Lewis performs a valued public service, shining a searing light on the gap between the elites of both parties and the citizenry in whose name they claim to govern. The book is breezy and readable. The Bidens and Clintons, the Trumps and Kushners, right and left – all are savaged.Michael Waldman ran the speechwriting shop in Bill Clinton’s White House and now heads the Brennan Center at NYU. The Supermajority, his book about the conservative bloc that dominates the supreme court, is written with great verve. He takes the Citizens United decision to task for allowing unlimited political spending. He also argues that the court has become a serious threat to American democracy.Religion in politics garnered its share of attention this year, particularly evangelical Protestants. Sunday attendance is down but the movement retains political clout. In Losing Our Religion, the Rev Russell Moore, conservative but a Trump critic, laments the growing interchangeability between cross and flag, and the paganization of Christianity. “The step before replacing Jesus with Thor is to turn Jesus into Thor,” he writes. Like the caesars of old, Trump is deified by his minions.In The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, Tim Alberta poignantly and painfully captures the metamorphosis of US evangelism. A writer at the Atlantic and the son of a Presbyterian minister, Alberta lays bare his hurt over how Christianity has grown ever more synonymous with those who fervently wave the stars and stripes. He takes us back to summer 2019. The Rev Richard Alberta died suddenly. At his funeral, a church elder delivered to Alberta a one-page screed expressing his disapproval of the author for not embracing Trump. Alberta also delivers a deep-dive on the disgraced Jerry Falwell Jr and Liberty University.The media and the Murdochs remained in the spotlight too. In Network of Lies, Brian Stelter, the former CNN host, captured the Murdochs’ struggle to make money, keep their audience happy and avoid liability. It wasn’t easy: Fox News coverage of the 2020 election led to a $787.5m settlement of a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems. Other litigations remain.Stelter had competition. In The Fall, Michael Wolff gave the Murdochs and Fox the treatment he gave Trump, memorably with Fire and Fury and two sequels. Wolff says he may be “the journalist not in his employ who knows [Murdoch] best”. Quotation marks abound – whether the author was an actual witness is another matter. But The Fall is full of digestible dish.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionElsewhere in the media, Marty Baron led the Washington Post as executive editor for eight years, retiring in 2021. Newsrooms he led won 17 Pulitzer prizes, 10 at the Post. Baron has stories to tell. The actor Liev Schreiber even played him in Spotlight, winner of the best picture Oscar in 2016. Collision of Power, Baron’s first book, carried a tantalizing subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post”.“Trump and his team would go after the Post and everyone else in the media who didn’t bend to his wishes,” Baron writes. From the beginning, as Baron saw close up, Trump “had the makings of an autocrat”.In finance, with Going Infinite, Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Big Short and other bestsellers, wrote about Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto and the scandal that saw the one-time billionaire convicted on seven counts of fraud. To politicians, as well as to profilers, Bankman-Fried had allure. Exactly why he continues to puzzle. Money doesn’t explain everything, but it does shed light on plenty.Foreign policy impinged on domestic politics too, of course. Last spring, Israel marked its 75th anniversary, roiled by internal divisions. On 7 October, Hamas mounted a barbaric binge of rape, murder, plunder and hostage-taking. Israel’s response continues.In May, Isabel Kershner of the New York Times painted a masterly and poignant portrait with The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for Its Inner Soul. Attempting to make sense of a “national unraveling”, she spoke with members of competing and clashing tribes. Wisely, she offered no sense of immediate resolution. None is on the horizon.Back home, Trump stands ready to plunge a knife into US democracy. A year ago, he called for terminating the constitution. More recently, he said he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second term. He is the “most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office”, Liz Cheney writes in Oath and Honor, her own memoir.The former congresswoman, a member of the Republican establishment, adds: “This is the story of when American democracy began to unravel. It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize.”The book is well-timed. Iowa and New Hampshire vote next month.“We cannot survive a president willing to terminate our constitution,” Cheney adds. Promoting her book, she warned that the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship”. In 11 months, we will find out how fast. More

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      A Republic of Scoundrels: America’s original white men behaving badly

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      On 15 February 1798, a fight erupted on the floor of Congress. The previous month, Matthew Lyon of Vermont spat in the face of a fellow congressman, Roger Griswold of Connecticut. Now they came to blows. Griswold wielded a hickory walking stick. Lyon used fireplace tongs. The melee devolved into a wrestling match. Griswold won, but it was just the start of Lyon’s downfall. Defending his seat that fall, he fell foul of a law against sedition by campaigning against an undeclared war with France and was sentenced to four months in jail.Improbably, Lyon had the last laugh. While incarcerated, he won re-election. When an electoral college tie sent the 1800 presidential election into the House, Lyon was among those who voted for the winner, Thomas Jefferson.“The Spitting Lyon” is one of 14 controversial members of the founding generation profiled in a new book, A Republic of Scoundrels: the Schemers, Intriguers & Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation, edited by David Head of the University of Central Florida and Timothy C Hemmis of Texas A&M University – Central Texas.“One of the things the whole project does is cast a look at the founding generation – not just the founding fathers,” Hemmis says. “The founding fathers were American saints, so to speak. This is kind of a more complicated picture of that founding generation. These men did not hold up the ideals … we’ve been taught about or told about.”Two names are infamous: Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr.Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton dramatized Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Head and Hemmis explore a less familiar development.“What the musical does not do,” Hemmis says, “is talk about Burr’s activities after he shot Hamilton. He goes out west and is starting to recruit these frontiersmen as audiences for entirely different plans and schemes, like carving out an empire in the west on a separate basis from the US, or going to invade Spanish Mexico.”Captured in Alabama in 1807, brought to trial for treason, Burr won acquittal and survived subsequent hearings. Arnold actually committed treason, defecting to the British in the revolutionary war. Yet the chapter on Arnold adds nuance, James Kirby Martin of the University of Houston noting how Arnold felt under-appreciated as a patriot and plagued by rivals despite his considerable achievements on the battlefield.Other subjects may be less familiar, including James Wilkinson, a high-ranking general who spied for Spain.“[Wilkinson] was just an amazing general in the US army – and a paid agent of a foreign power,” Head says. “No one discovered this definitively until after he died. There were rumors and suspicions, but he managed to hide it.”Each protagonist receives a chapter by a separate author. Shira Lurie of Saint Mary’s University notes in her chapter on Lyon that he really was called a scoundrel by Griswold before the Connecticut congressman assaulted him. Some subjects appear in other chapters: Wilkinson gets star treatment in the chapter by Samuel Watson, of the United States Military Academy at West Point, then plays a supporting role in Hemmis’s chapter on Burr. Improbably, the spy for Spain did the US government a favor by alerting it to Burr’s alleged plot. As to why Wilkinson did so, the explanations are predictably murky.“Was he blowing the whistle on treason or telling on Burr to save himself?” Head asks. “Who was doing what to whom? One of the options was to say one guy was less good than the other, but the reality is, they were both bad.”Defining the term “scoundrel”, the book cites Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definition, including a “low petty villain”.“It’s not exactly helpful,” Head says, “but it gives you an idea of someone known for deceit, known for cunning, preying on people’s vulnerabilities … It’s the kind of thing people duel over, impugning their reputation for honor.”Hemmis says: “It’s also the idea that there’s a lot of unethical commercial interests and schemes going on that don’t fit nicely into the American narrative.”If we are to fully understand the founding generation and the early American republic, the authors argue, we need to understand such scoundrels and their impact. As they explain, the new nation was no longer under a monarchy and the Articles of Confederation weakened the central government at the expense of the states. Powerful rivals controlled the borders: England, Spain and Indigenous American peoples. In such an atmosphere, Americans could pursue self-interest.Consider William Blount, who swindled revolutionary war veterans out of land earned through service. Blount enlisted his brother in the scheme and wound up with millions of acres on the western frontier. He became one of the first senators from Tennessee – and the first senator to be impeached.As Head and Hemmis illustrate, self-interest could lead men to ally with another country, encourage secession from the US, or both. There was Burr’s bid for a breakaway section in the west and there was Wilkinson’s work with the Spanish, during which he criticized superiors such as the only general who outranked him, Anthony Wayne, and George Washington himself. Wilkinson’s chapter does note that the intelligence he passed on was essentially open-source material and that when it counted, he supported American interests over those of Spain.The editors remind readers of the many differences between that era and ours. Spain loomed uncomfortably close, sharing a boundary for 40 years. The biggest sectional rivalry was not north v south but east v west, with the frontier in Kentucky. Foreign agents interfered in American politics. William Bowles, a would-be British agent, became a trusted voice among some Indigenous peoples in Florida and tried to set up an independent state, Muskogee. Don Diego de Gardoqui, a Spanish diplomat, supported the patriot cause with arms from Spain but later worked for his government in an unsuccessful attempt to weaken American power.Do these scoundrels offer lessons to learn today, amid the rise of Donald Trump and deepening social divides? Discussing Lyon, the congressman who brawled on the House floor then was re-elected from prison, Head recalls an exchange with a friend.“He texted me back: ‘Are we still a republic of scoundrels?’ I said, ‘Yes, but remember, it’s a republic.’ It’s an important point. Whatever it is, the country is still a republic. It’s an important thing to think about in modern times … It’s still unusual, precious, [something] to be proud of.“Our constitution works. The political system works. We’ve been through a civil war, slavery, violence … In the 1790s, we didn’t know whether it could work.”Lurie, author of the chapter on Lyon, has her own reflections for today, focused on his rivals’ inability to oust him.“The attempt to weaken one’s distasteful political opponents through ridicule, mockery and expressions of outrage did not work then, and it does not work now,” she writes. “Too often, such tactics just enhance these individuals’ popularity. Instead of looking down on them and their supporters, we might do better to seriously and humbly contemplate the nature of their appeal. And so, confront the real America, scoundrels and all.”
      A Republic of Scoundrels is published in the US by Pegasus Books More