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D
ELIVERING EVERYTHING
from speed and security to support for

Can 5G
cutting-edge applications like driver-
less cars, the 5G future promises more.
Yet to contribute to global efforts to mitigate
climate change, the next generation of wireless

Save the
networking will need to deliver less in one key
area: energy consumption.

Planet?
Experts estimate that by next year, information
and communications technology will account for
3.5 percent of annual global carbon emissions,
a larger share than for either the aviation or ship-

Climate Change’s Unlikely Ally ping industry. That figure could jump to 14 percent
by 2040, roughly equivalent to the percentage
Illustrations by Dan Matutina
now attributable to the entire population of the
United States.
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SPONSOR CONTENT

5G could play a significant role in that rise. A world The results have
of many more devices—security cameras, smart been promising.
televisions, connected factory robots—trans-
mitting much more data will require far more
power, what the telecom-sustainability expert KEEPING COOL
Anders Andrae calls a potential “perfect storm”
The ubiquitous base stations that trans-
of increased energy consumption. mit and receive wireless radio signals
currently account for as much as 80
percent of total network energy use;
“5G will allow us to modulate our energy use in almost half of an individual station's

so many places we’ve overlooked, just because power use is for air-conditioning to
cool the equipment. In China, however,
we didn’t have the communications tools to Huawei has developed and deployed
5G stations that generate less heat,
make equipment truly smart.” use sophisticated power-management
–Zach Chang, Carrier-Network Product Manager, Huawei software, and employ open-air cooling
to dramatically reduce electrical con-
sumption— saving an estimated 4,130
kilowatt hours of power per site, per
“5G will be much more powerful than 4G in terms year, which translates to about 1,125
kilograms of carbon emissions.
of processing power and bandwidth and has the
potential to cover the whole Earth’s population,”
says Zach Chang, a carrier-network product man-
ager at Huawei. “All of that will increase energy
consumption. If the efficiency of the entire infra- ON DEMAND
structure doesn’t go up, it won’t make financial Today’s 4G networks use almost the
or environmental sense. It won’t be sustainable.” same amount of energy regardless of
how much data they handle. By con-
But that’s not a fait accompli. Huawei and others trast, 5G will permit reduced power
consumption during periods of lower
are building 5G networks with energy efficiency
network traffic. “I work in an indus-
in mind, aiming to use less power to transmit
trial park,” Chang says. “During the
more data.
day, lots of people go there to work.
They’re checking emails and making
Ultimately, 5G’s most important contribution lots of phone calls. The nearby base
to energy efficiency may come by enabling con- station has to work at peak capacity
nected, sensor-equipped factories, cities, and to process all of that data. But at night,
transportation grids that use advanced analytics those same people leave. So you don’t
and artificial intelligence to optimize and reduce need that peak capacity. With 5G, you
power consumption—cutting costs while put- can lower your power use significantly
ting less CO2 into the atmosphere. “5G will allow without sacrificing performance.”

us to modulate our energy use in so many places

we’ve overlooked, just because we didn’t have
the communications tools to make equipment
truly smart,” Chang says. “Our society as a whole MORE WITH LESS
can become much more energy efficient.” According to Huawei Chairman Liang
Hua, a single kilowatt hour of electricity
is sufficient to download about 300
high-definition movies on 4G networks—
Learn more at: but on 5G, that same kilowatt hour will
www.theatlantic.com/huawei5G power about 5,000 ultra-high-definition
movie downloads.
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OF NO PA RT Y OR C L IQU E

CONTENTS | OCTOBER 2019

VO L . 3 2 4 – N O. 4

Features

48 The Man Who

Couldn’t Take It Anymore
BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
“I had no choice but to leave,”
General James Mattis says of his
decision to resign as President
Trump’s secretary of defense.

56 When the Culture

War Comes for the Kids
BY G E O R G E PAC K E R
Caught between a brutal
meritocracy and a radical new
progressivism, a parent tries to do
right by his children while navigat-
ing New York City’s schools.

COVER STORY

80 Succession
B Y M C K AY C O P P I N S
Who will control the next
generation of the Trump dynasty?

72
When Medicaid
Takes Everything
You Own
BY R AC H E L C O R B E T T
The program that provides health
care to more than 75 million low-
income and disabled Americans
isn’t always free. It’s a loan. And the
government expects to be repaid.

When Tawanda Rhodes’s mother died, the

state of Massachusetts sent her an itemized bill
for $198,660.26, detailing “every Band-Aid,
every can of Ensure” her mother had used. If
she didn’t repay the debt, she was told, the state
could force her to sell her mother’s home.

P h o t o g r a p h by N AT H A N B A JA R T H E AT L A N T I C O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 5
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CONTENTS

Dispatches Departments

CITIES

11 SPORTS
20 In the Fall of
Rome, Good News
8 The Conversation
Why Black Athletes Should for America
Leave White Colleges BY J A M E S FA L LOW S 106 The Big
BY JEMELE HILL The decline of the federal Question
… and tear down the NCAA as we know it government might not be What is the most significant
such a bad thing. sports victory of all time?

POLITICS

27 The Lost
Generation
BY PETER BEINART
Gen X may never produce a
president. That’s bad news
for Americans of all ages.

CRIMINAL TENDENCIES

30 Are Serial Killers

More Common
Than We Think?
BY RENE CHUN
The factors in modern life
that have made it easier to
kill, without consequence,
again and again

On the Cover

SKETCH ANIMAL KINGDOM

16 She Doesn’t 18 Going Deep

Believe All Women BY REBECCA GIGGS
BY A M A N DA F I TZS I M O N S Why whales have dropped
Juanita Broaddrick, who their vocal pitch
alleges that Bill Clinton
raped her in 1978, has
found new life as a
Trump defender.

Illustration by
Ben Fearnley

6 O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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VOL . 324–NO. 4 10 . 19

The Culture File Poetry

36 BOOKS
42 Bluebird
B Y S TA N L E Y P L U M LY
Misunderstanding Susan Sontag
BY MERVE EMRE
Her beauty and celebrity eclipse the real source of
her allure—her commitment to cool control.

Essay

96 “Get a Weapon”
BY SANDRA SIDI
When a veteran military man
gave me that advice before
I left to join U.S. forces in
Baghdad, I thought he meant
that I needed a way to protect
myself from the enemy.

THE OMNIVORE BOOKS BOOKS

32 Broken Spies 40 Boy, 44 The Secret Power

for a Broken Uninterrupted of Menopause
England BY J O R DA N K I S N E R B Y L I Z A M U N DY
BY JA M E S PA R K E R Ben Lerner, portraitist of The end of fertility doesn’t
Mick Herron is the John le talkative men, explores the mark the start of decline.
Carré of the Brexit era. roots of white male rage.

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R E S P O N S E S & R E V E R B E R AT I O N S

on their community—polluting
the environment, failing to
create jobs while demanding tax
breaks, and putting strains
on infrastructure.
Future economic historians
will look back on this period as
one when greed combined with
really bad financial engineer-
ing led to a decline in America’s
economic strength.
Nancy Langwiser-Kear
WELLESLEY, MASS.

The way I was taught long ago

is that when there are no better
uses for a company’s excess
capital and the price of the
company’s stock is “under-
valued,” it’s okay to repurchase
company shares, especially
by a company in the mature
stage of its product life cycle.
Given the rise in stock prices,
it’s disturbing to see so much
stock-buyback activity.
Are opportunities for
reinvesting earnings in the
future development of a
company dwindling?
Rex O’Steen III
GREENVILLE, S.C.

I worked for Equifax for five

years and left before the
data breach. One year, the
company “invested” more than
$500 million, which was roughly
one-fifth of its annual revenue,
in buybacks. When asked after
leaving about the data breach, I
always said that one-tenth of the
• T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N amount invested in buybacks—
about $50 million—would
have gone a long way to secure
The Stock-Buyback Swindle consumer data.
Jean Nickerson
American corporations are spending trillions of dollars to repurchase BRAMPTON, ONTARIO

their own stock, Jerry Useem reported in August. The practice is enriching
CEOs—at the expense of everyone else. I got my M.B.A. in 1972, and
“shareholder value” was the
mantra back then. In no way
I was an institutional investor they use debt to finance share instead of pushing real wages was it an invention of the
in the 1980s and ’90s. Share repurchases, it is even worse. down, and took responsibility 1980s. It’s tempting to blame
repurchases were a fraud American companies would for how their business affects the emphasis on shareholder
then and they are a fraud now. have a bright future if they put the community. It’s unfortunate value on Ronald Reagan or
When companies take cash money into innovation and that many companies would modern corporate profit-driven
away from good investment research and development, not spend a dime to ameliorate culture, but that’s a canard.
opportunities, it is a sin. When invested in their workforce the negative impacts they have The phenomenon is really all

8 O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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about the stock market and To improve management own coffin in the ’90s. Dudley conversation. However, my
short-term results. There isn’t incentives, stop giving away was a skilled carpenter and experience is consistent with
anything intrinsically wrong the equity and make managers carver, so the coffin was really a research that has shown that
with share buybacks, although buy it on the open market, like work of art. My favorite embel- no amount of counseling and
they do illustrate that corpo- the rest of us. Then require lishment: along the bottom accurate information sways
rations don’t have enough that they hold it as long as they rail of the coffin were carved parents who are dead-set
internal investment opportuni- work for the business. This the words HANDMADE BY against immunizations. These
ties and certainly didn’t need a way they’ll have real skin in OCCUPANT. encounters are deeply distress-
huge tax reduction like the one the game, which means they’ll L. W. Bower ing for pediatricians, because
passed in 2017, given that they share as much downside risk ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. prevention is at the heart
cannot figure out how to profit- as upside potential. of our mission, and we value
ably invest the money already Daniel Ferris the trust of parents more than
in their coffers. But that’s a VANCOUVER, WASH. any compensation.
different story of greed from True empowerment of
the one being told. Jerry Useem replies: physicians would include
Christian Y. Wyser-Pratte Adopting Daniel Ferris’s last reinforcement by government,
OSSINING, N.Y. recommendation—require that schools, and child-care facili-
executives hold their shares ties through exclusion policies
I find no fault with the “as long as they work for the of children unvaccinated for
buyback option. The stated business”—would go a long way diseases that are contagious
purpose of buybacks is to raise toward addressing the iniqui- (in the absence of a medical
share value, for all share- ties of stock buybacks. Because contraindication). Insurance
holders. I care not if executives Christian Y. Wyser-Pratte is right: companies could increase
profit along with every other There isn’t anything intrinsically premiums for families that will-
shareholder. (I care a lot if wrong with buybacks per se. ingly choose not to vaccinate,
they profit and the company’s The problem is in their usage, to reflect a higher-risk category.
share value lags or declines, as which rewards inside share- If greater society does not
was the case with Yahoo.) A sellers at the expense of outside value the public-health role of
reduced share count translates shareholders and propagates Measles as vaccines, parents suspect that
into retained earnings. That the lack of long-term investment Metaphor doctors push them for profit.
can find a home in R&D or that Nancy Langwiser-Kear In August, Peter Beinart showed Elise Thomas, M.D.
facilities planning. rightly warns of. Ban buybacks what the disease’s return says YORK, PA.

Jerry Useem states that (a move I’m not proposing), and about America’s ailing culture.
Home Depot employees could managers would likely revert Corrections
have earned an additional to their former habit of using I retired recently after 29 “The Stock-Buyback Swindle”
$18,000 a year had buybacks excess cash to acquire unrelated years of training and prac- (August) stated that Craig
been directed to that end. This businesses. But at a minimum, tice in primary-care pediat- Menear, the chairman and
raises a question: Are those regular investors should have rics. I take exception to the CEO of Home Depot, sold
employees worth that addi- an easier way of knowing who is notion that pediatricians do 113,687 shares of his company’s
tional income? Rising stock profiting and when. That way not spend time reassuring stock the same day as a confer-
prices lift all boats. Individuals they can make an informed deci- patients about vaccine safety ence call with investors. He
need to get theirs in the water. sion about whether executives because reimbursement is sold the shares the next day.
Dick Healy are investing for the long haul— inadequate. My colleagues Due to an editing error,
CHICAGO, ILL. and whether they should too. and I routinely stayed past the “What Happened to Aung San
allotted 15 minutes per patient Suu Kyi?” (September) indi-
A share repurchase is a simple to explain to parents why cated that Wai Wai Nu is a man.
distribution of profits to a DIY Coffins their beautiful baby would In fact, Wai Wai Nu is a woman.
business’s owners, in the form In August, Rene Chun wrote be vulnerable to meningitis, We regret the error.
of an equity purchase. Partners about New Zealand’s newly pneumonia, whooping cough,
in partnerships are bought out popular “coffin clubs.” and severe diarrhea if not
all the time. Is this a scandal? immunized. Parents who To contribute to The
Conversation, please email
No, it’s just how businesses pay This article reminded me of my simply have questions usually letters@theatlantic.com. Include
people who invest in them. friend Dudley, who made his are reassured by thoughtful your full name, city, and state.
EDMON DE HARO

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— Rene Chun, p. 30

D I S P A T C H E S
I D E AS & P R OVO CAT I O N S

OCTOBER 2019

• SPORTS

WHY BLACK
ATHLETES SHOULD
LEAVE WHITE
COLLEGES
… and tear down the
NCAA as we know it
BY JEMELE HILL
P H OTO R E N D E R I N G BY PAT R I C K W H I T E

I N T H E S U M M E R of 2018 Kayvon
Thibodeaux, who was then ranked as
the top high-school football player in
America, visited Florida A&M Univer-
sity, in Tallahassee. When a player of
Thibodeaux’s caliber visits a perennial
football power—say, Alabama—it’s called
Wednesday. But when he visits a histori-
cally black college or university (HBCU)
like Florida A&M, it threatens to crack
the foundation on which the money-
making edifice of college sports rests.

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D I S PAT C H E S

“I really just wanted to learn the history Why should this matter to anyone Top black athletes used to go to black
of FAMU,” Thibodeaux, a defensive end beyond the administrators and alumni colleges. In fact, until the Brown v. Board
who received a scholarship offer from the of the HBCUs themselves? Because of Education decision, in 1954, Jim Crow
school after his freshman year in high black colleges play an important role in and segregation made black colleges
school, told me. “And I wanted to show the creation and propagation of a black pretty much the only destination for black
there were more opportunities out there professional class. Despite constituting athletes. Even into the 1970s and ’80s,
than just big-time Division I schools.” only 3 percent of four-year colleges in the some HBCU alums were achieving Hall
Ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, country, HBCUs have produced 80 per- of Fame–level greatness in basketball
Thibodeaux announced that he was cent of the black judges, 50 percent of (Willis Reed, Grambling State ’64; Earl
going to one of the top football programs the black lawyers, 50 percent of the black “The Pearl” Monroe, Winston-Salem
in the country, the University of Ore- doctors, 40 percent of the black engi- State ’67) and football (Walter Payton,
gon. “Nobody wants to eat McDonald’s neers, 40 percent of the black members Jackson State ’75; Jerry Rice, Mississippi
when you can get filet mignon” is how of Congress, and 13 percent of the black Valley State ’84). But the reason black ath-
Thibodeaux put it. But over the course CEOs in America today. (They have also letes today don’t choose FAMU over Ore-
of the five months between his visit to produced this election cycle’s only black gon, or Hampton over Duke, is obvious:
FAMU and his decision to enroll at Ore- female candidate for the U.S. presidency: Their chances of making it to the pros as
gon, Thibodeaux—who gushed about Kamala Harris is a 1986 graduate of How- a high draft pick, and of winning lucra-
the historically black university on social ard University.) tive endorsement deals, are enhanced
media—galvanized alumni and boosted In a country where the racial wealth by going to the predominantly white
national awareness of the institution. It gap remains enormous—the median schools that sit atop the college-sports
was a moment of hope for HBCUs, and white household has nearly 10 times the world. Even for the majority of players,
it should have been a moment of fear wealth of the median black household, whose prospects of a professional sports
for the predominantly white institutions and the rate of white homeownership career are remote, the lure of playing in
whose collective multibillion-dollar rev- is about 70 percent higher than that of championships—in giant stadiums with
enues have been built largely on the exer- black homeownership—institutions that luxurious training facilities, in front of
tions of (uncompensated) black athletes. nurture a black middle class are crucial. millions of television viewers—is strong.
The NCAA reported $1.1 billion in And when these institutions are healthy, Clemson is only 6 percent black, but it’s
revenue for its 2017 fiscal year. Most they bring economic development to the won two of the past three national foot-
of that money comes from the Divi- black neighborhoods that
sion I men’s-basketball tournament. In surround them.
2016, the NCAA extended its television Moreover, some black
agreement with CBS Sports and Turner students feel safer, both
Broadcasting through 2032—an $8.8 bil- physically and emotion-
The entire endowment
lion deal. About 30 Division I schools ally, on an HBCU cam- of North Carolina 
each bring in at least $100 million in pus—all the more so as A&T is worth barely
athletic revenue every year. Almost all racial tensions have risen as much as Clemson’s
of these schools are majority white—in in recent years. Navigat-
fact, black men make up only 2.4 percent ing a predominantly white football campus.
of the total undergraduate population campus as a black student
of the 65 schools in the so-called Power can feel isolating, even for
Five athletic conferences. Yet black men athletes. Davon Dillard is
make up 55 percent of the football players a basketball player who transferred to ball championships and has a $55 million
in those conferences, and 56 percent of Shaw University after Oklahoma State football complex. North Carolina A&T, a
basketball players. dismissed him for disciplinary reasons. few hours north, is 78 percent black. And
Black athletes have attracted money “Going to a school where most of the while the Aggies have won the HBCU
and attention to the predominantly people are the same color as you, it’s national championship in three of the
white universities that showcase them. almost like you can let your guard down a past four seasons, the program can’t offer
Meanwhile, black colleges are struggling. little bit,” he told me. “You don’t have to what Clemson can in terms of resources
Alabama’s athletic department gener- pretend to be somebody else. You don’t and exposure; A&T’s entire endow-
ated $174 million in the 2016–17 school have to dress this way, or do things this ment is worth barely as much as Clem-
year, whereas the HBCU that generated way. It’s like, ‘I know you. We have the son’s football complex. Presented with
the most money from athletics that year, same kind of struggles. We can relate.’ a choice between Clemson and North
Prairie View A&M, brought in less than It’s almost like you’re back at home in Carolina A&T, most high-school athletes
$18 million. Beyond sports, the average your neighborhood.” Perhaps partly for would choose Clemson—whose starting
HBCU endowment is only one-eighth this reason, black students’ graduation lineup, not incidentally, is majority black.
that of the average predominantly white rates at HBCUs are notably higher than But what if a group of elite athletes col-
school; taken together, all of the HBCU black students’ at other colleges when lectively made the choice to attend HBCUs?
endowments combined make up less controlling for factors such as income and Black athletes overall have never had
than a tenth of Harvard’s. high-school success. as much power and influence as they do

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• SPORTS

now. While NCAA rules prevent them

from making money off their own labor at
the college level, they are essential to the
massive amount of revenue generated
by college football and basketball. This
gives them leverage, if only they could be
moved to use it.
“I have a hard time saying this,”
LeVelle Moton, the head basketball coach
at North Carolina Central, an HBCU that
has won three consecutive Mid-Eastern
Athletic Conference titles, told me. “Black
people, I love us, but everyone else under-
stands that we’re the culture, except for
us.” Audiences and money “are going to
come wherever the product is. We don’t
understand that, and we continue to give
ourselves away for free.”

OM E P E O P L E P O I N T to Septem-
S ber 12, 1970, as the day HBCUs lost
their corner on the nation’s best black
football talent. That’s the day an all-white Kayvon Thibodeaux (left) made news when he visited Florida A&M University, an HBCU—but he
Alabama team got their asses handed ultimately decided to attend the University of Oregon. Davon Dillard (right), a basketball player at Shaw
to them by the University of Southern University, says that being at an HBCU is “almost like you’re back at home in your neighborhood.”
California’s heralded African American
triumvirate of quarterback Jimmy Jones
and running backs Sam “Bam” Cunning-
ham and Clarence Davis. After that, foot- we all know now, maybe they could have rough—prospects who were passed over
ball programs in the Deep South realized figured out a way to say, ‘How can we, or jettisoned by bigger programs. “These
that if they were going to stay competitive, with the window we’ve got left, make are guys who were thought to be not big
they would have to recruit black players. a great product, so when white people enough or not fast enough,” Buddy Pough,
(In other areas of the country, colleges finally get religion, we’ll still be in a the head football coach at South Carolina
had already begun to recruit African good position?’ ” State, told me. “Our niche has been that we
Americans: The Michigan State team that The flight of black athletes to take the guy that nobody seems to want.”
fought Notre Dame to a 10–10 draw in the majority-white colleges has been devas- To attract the best football and basket-
fall of 1966—a contest that many still con- tating to HBCUs. Consider Grambling ball players in the nation, HBCUs have to
sider to be the best college football game State, in Louisiana, home of arguably spend money to improve their facilities—
of all time—had 20 black players.) the most storied football program in but to generate the athletic revenue neces-
In the era before big television con- HBCU history. A 57 percent decrease sary to improve their facilities, the colleges
tracts, HBCUs more or less had a monop- in state funding over a period of several need more of the best players.
oly on black athletes, because there was years had made it difficult for Grambling “We really have to get monetary sup-
little money to be made from them. But to maintain its football facilities. In 2013, port in upgrading facilities,” LeVelle
when college sports became big busi- things got so bad that players—fed up Moton told me. “These kids want to
ness, the major sports schools proved to with the school’s dilapidated facilities know: What does this weight room look
be relentless in recruiting players away and the long bus trips to road games, as like? What does this athletic facility look
LOGAN CYRUS; ICON SPORTSWIRE/GETTY

from HBCUs. William C. Rhoden, the well as the firing of the coach—staged a like? What does this practice facility look
author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves, an boycott that led to them forfeiting a game. like? It’s tough to compete.”
account of how black athletes have his- Though the walkout prompted Grambling Kayvon Thibodeaux said much the
torically commanded big audiences but to spend $30,000 on a new weight room, same. “In this day and age, it’s about
had little true power, places some of the and it has since raised nearly $2 million money,” he told me. “Unless HBCUs
blame for the exodus on the HBCUs for upgrades to its Eddie Robinson Sta- upgrade drastically, I don’t know if things
themselves, which operated as if they dium, the ordeal was embarrassing for will change.”
would have a monopoly on black tal- the university.
ent forever. “The HBCUs probably felt Today, most blue-chip recruits in foot- U T WHAT IF young black athletes
that racism was so deeply entrenched
that white people would never go after
ball or basketball don’t even consider
attending black colleges. This has forced
B were to force that change?
“NCAA athletics generate billions in
black kids en masse,” Rhoden told me HBCUs to become proficient at identi- profit annually, and Black athletes are
recently. “Had HBCUs known then what fying and developing diamonds in the the prized workforce,” reads the mission

T H E AT L A N T I C O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 13
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D I S PAT C H E S • SPORTS

statement of an organization called the financial power. In the early 1990s, five basketball, know one another from Ama-
Power Moves Initiative. “However, Afri- high-school basketball players—two each teur Athletic Union (AAU) tournaments
can Americans are not stakeholders at from Texas and Detroit, and one from and all-star games, as the Fab Five did.
predominantly white universities and Chicago— got to know one another play- If a few of them got together at HBCUs,
corporations that profit from our talent. ing in all-star games and basketball camps. they could redraw the landscape of col-
The system must be disrupted to redirect They enrolled together at the University of lege basketball.
the stream of wealth.” Michigan, and partway through their first “If we created a Fab Five at Alabama
Robert Buck, who attended two black season they were all starting for the team. State,” Buck told me, “that would create a
colleges (Alabama State and FAMU), got Becoming famous as the
the idea to start the Power Moves Initia- Fab Five, they reached the
tive after organizing the 5th Quarter Clas- champion ship game of
sic, a now-defunct annual game between the March Madness tour-
HBCUs held in Mobile, Alabama. He saw nament in 1992 and 1993, A single high-profile
how the black colleges featured in the clas- and four of them went on recruit enrolling
sic were generating millions for Mobile, a to play in the NBA. What at an HBCU would get
city that is 50.4 percent black. It bothered if instead of enrolling at
Buck that other black athletes were gener- Michigan they’d gone to people’s attention.
ating such money for predominantly white Howard, taking the Bison,
schools, and that other black communities rather than the Wolverines,
weren’t receiving the same benefits. to the Final Four?
“It’s almost like we were being used,” A single high-profile recruit enrolling lot of hype around our HBCUs, showing the
Buck told me. at an HBCU would get people’s attention. value that we already possess and redirect-
He is convinced that steering high- (Thibodeaux got people’s attention just ing a whole lot of dollars to black colleges.”
school athletes of color toward HBCUs by considering enrolling.) Three or four of Bringing elite athletic talent back to
can help invigorate African American them could spark a national conversation— black colleges would have potent down-
communities and generate black success. and, in basketball, could generate a stream effects. It would boost HBCU rev-
“I think we have an inferiority complex,” championship run that attracted fans and enues and endowments; stimulate the
he said. “We, as black people, don’t feel money. Now imagine five or 10 or 20—or economy of the black communities in
like something is as large or as good if a a few dozen. That could quickly propel a which many of these schools are embed-
white person isn’t in charge of it … We’re few black schools into the athletic empy- ded; amplify the power of black coaches,
the value. That value doesn’t diminish rean, and change the place of HBCUs who are often excluded from prominent
because you’re doing it with your own.” in American culture. positions at predominantly white institu-
There’s a model for how young black It wouldn’t be that hard. Many of the tions; and bring the benefits of black labor
athletes could leverage their talent and top high-school players, especially in back to black people. In the general cul-
ture, prominent figures such as Beyoncé,
LeBron James, and the recently slain
rapper Nipsey Hussle have argued that
African Americans should be using their
talents not just to enrich themselves but
to help strengthen and empower black
communities. “Gentrify your own hood
before these people do it,” Jay-Z rapped
at the concert that reopened Webster
Hall in New York City in April. “Claim
eminent domain and have your people
move in.”
If promising black student athletes
chose to attend HBCUs in greater num-
bers, they would, at a minimum, bring
some welcome attention and money
to beleaguered black colleges, which
I L LU ST R AT I O N BY WG 6 0 0

invested in black people when there was

no athletic profit to reap. More revolu-
tionarily, perhaps they could disrupt the
reign of an “amateur” sports system that
uses the labor of black folks to make white
folks rich.

Jemele Hill is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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D I S PAT C H E S

U T SIDE OF TRUMP ’S BA SE, the

O
  name Juanita Broaddrick may stir
only muddled memories—wasn’t she
one of the women not named Monica
Lewinsky who accused Bill Clinton of
something? Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey,
• SKETCH Gennifer Flowers—their stories can blur,
but each of these women has a distinct

SHE DOESN’T BELIEVE ALL WOMEN set of allegations, and Broaddrick’s are
the most serious. She says Clinton raped
her in 1978, when he was the attorney
Juanita Broaddrick, who alleges that general of Arkansas and she was a volun-
Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, has found teer for his gubernatorial campaign. She
new life as a Trump defender. did not report the alleged crime to the
police; in fact, Broaddrick’s name wasn’t
BY AMANDA FITZSIMONS made public until two decades later, via
a 1998 court filing in the Paula Jones case.
(Clinton denied the allegations.) Even
though Broaddrick did some press—once
she’d been outed, she wanted the chance
to share her perspective—the story didn’t
stick to the Clinton legacy the way Lewin-
sky’s has. At the time, her claims were
Trump-hologram novelty bills for $30 mostly ignored, and when acknowledged
(proceeds, she explained, would go to they were often disparaged; the fact that
defeating Representative Ilhan Omar). she’d recanted in an affidavit after being
And yet the woman of the hour, the subpoenaed by Jones’s lawyers was a
person with whom just about everyone favorite data point of critics. (Broaddrick

O
wanted to take a selfie, was a 76-year-old says she denied that anything had hap-
grandmother named Juanita with a heart- pened with Clinton because she didn’t
shaped face and a cascade of blond curls want to get involved in a big legal circus
wrangled into a ponytail; on her navy with Jones.)
sheath, she wore a TRUMP 2020 pin no But the worst part of the aftermath had
N THE AF TERNOON bigger than American Airlines wings. already happened by then, Broaddrick told
of July 3, the day before President Don- Before she even reached the check-in me. Clinton had been the leader of the free
ald Trump’s rained-on Independence desk at the pier, she was approached for world for five long years. “Just seeing him
Day celebration (or “show of a lifetime,” a picture by a statuesque woman in her on TV, it was constant. I don’t know who
depending on whose Twitter feed you early 30s wearing a sundress and a MAGA got to be the quickest, my husband or me,
look at), a small but committed group left hat. “I know you from Fox
a wharf in Washington, D.C., for a cruise News,” the woman said.
on the Potomac. Another woman told her,
In 2016, we learned that the Trump “I just love your Twitter—I
coalition was broader than many had have it open on my phone The gulf between
assumed: the hold-your-nose-vote-your- right now.” A man who Broaddrick’s social-media
pocketbook one-percenters; the subur- said he was running for
ban soccer moms who, when it came Congress against Califor-
persona and her actual
down to it, were a little skittish about nia’s Adam Schiff made one is especially wide.
immigration. But the 200-some-odd sure they swapped con-
passengers aboard the Spirit of Washing- tact info—it was clear he
ton were emphatically not those people— wanted her endorsement.
this was a Trump-campaign-rally crowd Throughout the three-hour trip, she switching the channel,” she said. She even
in full flower. Women carried evening was polished and patient and gracious. ended up going to an earlier church service,
clutches with MAGA spelled in rhine- At the same time, she seemed a little because at her usual one the priest had
stones; one guest was literally wrapped in uncomfortable with all the fuss. When we taken to asking congregants to pray for the
the flag, the stars portion knotted at her were back on dry land, I asked how many president. “I had to sit in church, down on
neck, the rest wafting in the waterfront people she thought had wanted to take my knees, and be told that I am to pray for
breeze like Superman’s cape. There were a selfie with her, and she looked embar- Bill Clinton.”
“Bikers for Trump,” “Cowboys for Trump,” rassed. “Oh, no more than 30,” she said, By the early aughts, she’d faded into
a woman peddling 24-karat-gold-plated undoubtedly undercounting her fans. relative obscurity and basically moved

16 O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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on with her life. Then Hillary Clinton ran hate speech (retweeting a picture of the the woman who later greeted me with a
for president, and her pronounced pro- short-haired soccer star Megan Rapinoe bear hug when we met in the lobby of a
woman agenda stirred up decades-old and Representative Alexandria Ocasio- Days Inn near her home. I’d mentioned
resentment. “I kept thinking, Why can’t Cortez captioned “Boy Meets Girl”). She on the phone that I’d forgotten my tooth-
you see this huge elephant in the room?” travels the country speaking to conserva- brush, and, though it was a Sunday morn-
Broaddrick recalled. “Why can’t you see tive groups and signing copies of her self- ing, she’d come over to transport me to
this woman for what she really is?” One day, published memoir, You’d Better Put Some the nearest drugstore. She hadn’t been
Broaddrick decided she had to weigh in. Ice on That (so named for the last thing planning on church that day anyway, she
Though she’d tweeted only three times Broaddrick says Clinton uttered before assured me. Even the story of how she’d
before the 2016 election cycle, she sent leaving the scene of the alleged assault, launched her Twitter activism—her
out a statement that went viral: “I was 35 in which he bit her lip so violently that he grandson had helped; she’d barely known
years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attor- drew blood). how the thing worked—was endearing.
ney General raped me. I am now 73 … it Twitter augments the snarkier side Toothbrush secured, Broaddrick took
never goes away.” Nine months later, the of almost everyone’s personality, but the me on a tour of the place where she’s spent
Trump campaign issued what would be gulf between Broaddrick’s social-media almost her whole life, Fort Smith and
a fateful invitation: Would she sit in the persona and her actual one is especially neighboring Van Buren. Fort Smith has
audience during the candidate’s second wide. In the days after Broaddrick deni- the second-largest population in the state,
debate with Hillary Clinton? grated E. Jean Carroll, the woman who after Little Rock, though it’s by no means a
Since that October evening, Broad- accused Trump of rape in her new book, metropolis. The downtown’s stately, wide
drick has popped up semi-regularly on Fox tweeting that she looked like the Jeopardy boulevards and meticulously preserved
News and become something of a MAGA host Alex Trebek, I called her to request antebellum architecture are its main sell-
thought leader, with 133,000 followers on an interview. To hear Broaddrick’s genial, ing points. The city is so quintessentially
Twitter, where her commentary ranges alto drawl was jarring, as was the con- old South that it served as a location for
from insults (like calling Representative trast between the vitriolic @atensnut The Blue and the Gray, a 1980s miniseries
Schiff “Schiff for Brains”) to borderline (Broaddrick is a huge tennis fan) and about the Civil War starring Stacy Keach.
Most interesting were Broaddrick’s
personal landmarks. She pointed out the
spot where her parents—both white south-
erners, despite what her first name might
suggest—used to own a dry cleaner. The
place where a tomboyish Juanita broke
her arm at 8 years old while visiting a
classmate’s horse farm (now a Walmart—
welcome to Arkansas). The movie theater
where 4-year-old Juanita and her 6-year-
old sister, Patsy, would take the bus to
watch spaghetti Westerns while their par-
ents spent 12-hour days pressing suits—life
was different back then, or her mother
and father were really irresponsible; she’s
undecided. The sprawling 40-acre prop-
erty where she’d lived with her second
husband, a cowboy who lassoed cattle in
their backyard, and then by herself after
the two divorced in 2003. (She downsized
only last year, moving to a two-bedroom
condo in a nearby gated community.) The
law offices of her only child, Kevin, whom
she adopted when he was two days old.
The high school where she attends every
home football game to watch Kevin’s boy,
her 16-year-old grandson, play fullback.
Broaddrick was most animated,
however, when we stopped at a nursing
home she’d run that had won awards for
outstanding patient care and at a facil-
ity for children with severe disabilities
she’d owned and operated before retir-
ing in 2008. In fact, she said, the whole

Illustration by JOHN CUNEO T H E AT L A N T I C O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 17

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D I S PAT C H E S

reason she met Bill Clinton on the day of Goldberg published an op-ed headlined bad”—upended people’s assumptions.
the alleged attack was to ask for his help “I Believe Juanita”; and The Washington “Gruesome” is how Neyfakh described the
in procuring more funds for needy long- Post’s Richard Cohen wrote that he regret- interview when we spoke on the phone.
term-care patients. ted dismissing Broaddrick’s plausible Broaddrick is grateful for her newfound
For most of her life, Broaddrick said, charges for so long. The proximate cause backing from bold-faced liberal names,
she was politically independent: Clinton’s of the reassessment was #MeToo; the but also wary of it, mostly because the
race for governor was the first time she immediate one, at least for Cohen, was an #MeToo movement itself hasn’t exactly
ever showed the slightest interest in poli- interview Broaddrick did last fall for Slow welcomed her. In 2017, Broaddrick was
tics, and she only got involved because a Burn, Leon Neyfakh’s blockbuster podcast approached by Time magazine about
friend in her women’s league talked her about Clinton’s impeachment. Some com- participating in what would turn out to
into it. She voted for George W. Bush twice bination of the episode’s timing (on the be its Person of the Year issue celebrating
but threw in with Barack Obama in 2008, heels of Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony) sexual-harassment whistle-blowers, and
and even gave $3,000 to his campaign, and Broaddrick’s beat-by-beat retelling of though she submitted a blurb in support
she said. At first she wasn’t sold on Trump: her interaction with Clinton—“He grabs of #MeToo, it ended up on the cutting-
“I did not know what to make of this man.” me and that’s when things turned really room floor. (A spokesperson for Time said
Then, in May 2016, she watched an epi-
sode of Hannity in which Trump used the
word rape to describe Broaddrick’s claim—
it was a word she’d avoided. “I almost humans; the wavelengths
fell out of my chair. That’s when I was of their calls were often
firmly in his corner,” she told me. “It was • ANIMAL KINGDOM longer than the bodies of
personal.” She felt vindicated, believed. the whales themselves.)
Around this time, she also started gravi-
tating toward Trump’s policies. She liked
Going Deep In a study last year that
analyzed more than 1 mil-
the border wall and his ideas for stimu- Why whales have dropped lion individual recordings
lating the economy, and she appreciated their vocal pitch of whale calls, scale shifts
that this man seemed to be sacrificing a were found across species,
comfortable life to make America … “bet- BY REBECCA GIGGS and among populations
ter,” she said. that don’t necessarily
When the campaign called, the day interact with one another.
after the infamous Access Hollywood Which is to say, whatever
tape was released, to ask if she could fly has triggered the change

 I
to St. Louis for the debate, she went to S ANY environment hearing. That the sounds doesn’t seem to have a
Kevin for advice. “He told me, ‘Don’t do more secluded from of blue whales seem specific geographic origin.
it, Mom—they’re just using you.’ ” But she our imagination than simple might suggest they The underwater
the seas surrounding are unchanging across clamor caused by mari-
told her son that she didn’t much mind
Antarctica? Icebergs grind generations. But these time traffic and extractive
being used if that meant underlining
above a seabed dotted atonal sounds have begun industries might seem
the hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton: How
with salps, sea squirts, evolving. Since at least a likely culprit. After all,
could she, of all people, express outrage
sponges, and other barely the 1960s, their pitch has such noise is known to
about the tape? “The Republicans use
animate organisms. The downshifted the equiva- interrupt whales’ foraging
the Clinton victims the same way the lib-
sun scarcely rises for half lent of three white keys on and interfere with their
eral media uses the victims—the supposed
the year. Under the ele- a piano. Scientists have vocal interactions. But
victims— of Mr. Trump and [Supreme
mental conditions at these theories as to why—some although some whales
Court Justice Brett] Kavanaugh,” Broad- latitudes, Antarctic blue worrisome, some hopeful, do adapt, in limited ways,
drick said. “It’s truly politics.” She does whales exist in a world all involving humans. to artificial sounds in the
have her limits, though. When she got defined by bioacoustics. The deepening of Ant- ocean—by pausing their
wind that campaign operatives were Blue whales, Earth’s larg- arctic blue whales’ sounds calls to avoid competing
angling to seat her within spitting dis- est animals, call to others is not unique to the sub- with the passage of cargo
tance of Bill Clinton at the debate in of their kind, though species. Groups of pygmy ships, for example—
hopes of provoking a confrontation, she exactly what these cries blue whales found near scientists don’t believe
was horrified. “I would have walked out communicate remains Madagascar, Sri Lanka, that the deepening whale
if that had happened,” she told me. a mystery. Whether to and Australia, as well as calls are a response to
After the election, an unlikely turn of attract a mate, to repel a fin whales, which live in sonic pollution. They have
events: Broaddrick received something rival, or for some other seas around the world, identified lowered pitches
of a collective mea culpa from the left. social purpose, the sounds have also dropped their even across populations
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted that Dem- blue whales make are pitch. (Even before this of whales that live in seas
ocrats were “overdue for a real reckon- less song, more drone—a change, fin whales emit- without major shipping
ing with the allegations against Clinton”; tectonic rumble on the ted sounds so low as to be routes, where mechanical
the New York Times columnist Michelle furthest edge of human nearly imperceptible to noise is negligible.

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• SKETCH

that editors reached out to dozens of peo- before we met, George Conway, the misconduct. (Trump has denied the alle-
ple for possible inclusion and that Broad- relentless Trump critic and husband of gations.) “They need to be investigated,”
drick was one of many who didn’t make White House counselor Kellyanne Con- she likes to say.
it, but Broaddrick views the omission as way, argued in The Washington Post that, Her determination to stand by her man
a personal snub: “#MeToo wants noth- if anything, E. Jean Carroll was at least is especially surprising when it comes
ing to do with me.”) In April 2018, when as credible as Broaddrick, since the lat- to Carroll, because the two women’s sto-
the movement’s founder, Tarana Burke, ter had once recanted. (As an informal ries are eerily parallel: Both women say
was confronted, during a presentation, adviser to Paula Jones, Conway had had they were tricked into being alone with
about whether she believed Broaddrick, a front-row seat for the flip-flop.) the men. Both Carroll and Broaddrick
she hedged—more evidence to Broad- The evolving opinion about Broad- told friends at the time of the incident,
drick that she was being shunned by the drick’s claim hasn’t inspired her to temper and these friends have corroborated
#MeToo universe. her support for Trump. Part and parcel of their accounts. Both allegations surfaced
The veracity of her story continues to that is her unwillingness to trust the word decades after the fact. Both women said
be called into question, even by a hand- of a single one of the more than 15 women they were raped, as opposed to sexually
ful of people on the right. About a week who have accused the president of sexual harassed or groped like the other accus-
ers of Clinton and Trump.
Broaddrick told me she thinks Car-
roll just wanted attention. Carroll also
Another possible expla- have speculated that the whales don’t need to acted strangely during an appearance
nation for the change whale’s anatomy deter- be so loud because on CNN, Broaddrick said. “I’m sure she
in whale calls is the mines that the louder it sound waves travel knows he’s gay, but it was like she was
achievements of global gets, the higher the pitch farther in oceans made putting the make on Anderson Cooper.”
conservation efforts. At of its calls. As popula- acidic by the absorption Ultimately, Broaddrick said, her skepti-
the start of the 20th cen- tions have grown, then, of carbon dioxide. cism comes down to her gut—not just her
tury, an estimated the whales may have Carbon dioxide in the feelings about Carroll but about all the
239,000 Antarctic blue decreased their volume atmosphere, meanwhile, women who have accused the president
whales occupied the because they are more may indirectly influence of sexual improprieties. “When you’ve
Southern Ocean. By the likely to be communicat- whale voices in other been raped, you have a persona about
early 1970s, decades of ing over short distances. ways. Recent monitoring you—it’s almost like you can sense it. I
commercial whaling— In other words, Antarctic of Antarctic blue whales don’t have ESP, but you can almost feel
initially by Norwegian and blue whales may be shows that, during the their feelings if these things really hap-
British whalers, and later lower-toned today than in austral summer, their pened to them.”
by illegal Soviet fleets— previous decades simply pitch rises. Researchers She knows a rape victim when she sees
had decreased the blue- because they no longer have hypothesized that one. It’s hard to believe someone who has
whale population in the need to shout. in warmer months, the been so wounded by having her own rape
region to a mere 360. But Last year’s study of whales must use their
case rejected (not to mention a person
since protection of the whale calls also sug- forte volume to be heard
who has worked with abused children)
subspecies began in 1966, gests a more ominous amid the cracking ice—a
would so blithely dispense with women
that number has begun reason for the drop in natural sound amplified
who make similar claims.
to rebound. Scientists pitch, however: Perhaps by unnatural processes,
Neyfakh has a theory about Broad-
as rising temperatures
drick’s all-in attitude toward Trump:
exacerbate ice-melt. So
“She’s found a willing audience in conser-
the impacts of a warm-
vative media. She believes what she needs
ing planet may modulate
animal sounds even in
to believe.” In other words, he said, “she’s
remote places with barely
a partisan hack, like the rest of us.”
any humans, and where Yes, and maybe she’s also embittered
the most thunderous that the women now coming forward
notes come not from have been taken more seriously than she
ships, but from the clatter was—than she still is, in some quarters.
of breaking ice. For all the heightened awareness of sex-
We may not yet know ual assault, we are, of course, a polarized
what the sounds of nation. It is at once astonishing and pre-
blue whales mean. But dictable that many of us look at an individ-
whether through our ual and see only her tribe—even those of
intent to preserve these us with the most cause to avoid that kind
creatures, or as a result of reductive thinking.
of refashioning their envi-
ronment, our deeds echo Amanda FitzSimons is a Brooklyn-based
in their voices. writer.

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D I S PAT C H E S

ruin—has played an outsize role in tragic

imagination about the United States. If a
civilization could descend from Cicero
and Cato to Caligula and Nero in scarcely
a century, how long could the brave
experiment launched by Madison, Jeffer-
son, and company hope to endure?
The era that began with Rome’s
collapse—“late antiquity,” as scholars
call it—holds a hazier place in America’s
imagination and makes only rare cameo
appearances in speeches or essays about
the national prospect. Before, we have
the familiar characters in togas; some-
time after, knights in armor. But in
between? And specifically: How did the
diverse terrain that had been the Roman
empire in the West respond when cen-
tral authority gave way? When the last
emperor was gone, how did that register
in Hispania and Gaul? How did people
manage without the imperial system
that had built roads and aqueducts, and
brought its laws and language to so much
of the world?
The historians’ view appears to be
that they managed surprisingly well. “It
is only too easy to write about the Late
Antique world as if it were merely a mel-
ancholy tale,” Peter Brown, of Princeton,
wrote in his influential 1971 book, The
World of Late Antiquity. But, he contin-
ued, “we are increasingly aware of the
astounding new beginnings associated
• CITIES
with this period.” These included not
only the breakup of empire into the pre-

IN THE FALL OF ROME, cursors of what became modern coun-

tries but also “much that a sensitive

GOOD NEWS FOR AMERICA

European has come to regard as most
‘modern’ and valuable in his own culture,”
from new artistic and literary forms to
Why the decline of the federal government self-governing civic associations.
In his new book, Escape From Rome,
might not be such a bad thing Walter Scheidel, of Stanford, goes further,
BY JA M E S FA L LOW S arguing that “the Roman empire made
modern development possible by going
away and never coming back.” His case,
in boiled-down form, is that the removal
of centralized control opened the way to
a sustained era of creativity at the duchy-
by-duchy and monastery-by-monastery
T’S TIME TO think about the Roman the legitimate emperor of the Western level, which in turn led to broad cultural
I empire again. But not the part of its
history that usually commands attention
empire, Romulus Augustulus, who thus
became the last of the emperors to rule
advancement and eventual prosperity.
The dawn of the university and private
in the United States: the long, sad path from Italy. business organizations; the idea of per-
of Decline and Fall. It’s what happened The Eastern empire, ruled from sonal rights and freedoms—on these and
later that deserves our curiosity. Constantinople, chugged along for other fronts, what had been Roman terri-
As a reminder, in 476 A.D., a barbar- many more centuries. But the Roman tories moved forward as imperial control
ian general named Odoacer overthrew progression—from republic to empire to disappeared. “From this developmental

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perspective, the death of the Roman feel satisfied with and connected to local cultural signaling—“who you like, who
empire had a much greater impact than institutions and city governments. “When you hate, which side you’re on”—rather
its prior existence,” Scheidel writes. He you talk with people, across the board they than about actual governance. Mean-
quotes Edward Gibbon’s famous judg- are optimistic about their own communi- while, the modern reserves of Ameri-
ment that Rome’s fall was “the greatest, ties, and hopeful about their local futures,” can practical-mindedness are mainly
perhaps, and most awful scene, in the Abrams told me. The AEI team found at the local level, “where people have
history of mankind”—but disagrees with that 80 percent of Americans considered no choice but to solve problems week
the “awful” part. their own town and neighborhood to be by week.”
Might the travails of today’s American an “excellent” or “good” place to live, and Based on my own experience I could
governing system, and the strains on the 70 percent said they trusted people in their give a hundred examples of this atti-
empire-without-the-name it has tried to neighborhood. Does this mainly reflect tude from around the country, virtually
run since World War II, have a similar, self-segregation— people of common none of them drawing national atten-
perversely beneficial effect? Could the background or affinity clustering together? tion and many of them involving people
self-paralysis of American national gov- “That’s been exaggerated,”
ernance somehow usher in a rebirth—our Abrams said. “America is
own Dark Ages, but in a good way? less monolithic, and more
functional at local levels,
The removal of centralized
N A T U R A L L Y M Y H O P E as an
American is that the national gov-
ernment starts working better. And
than people think.”
In Escape From Rome,
Scheidel writes that “a sin-
imperial control opened
what I’ve learned from living through gle condition was essential”
the way to a sustained era
crisis cycles from the 1960s onward, plus for the cultural, economic, of creativity.
studying those of the more distant past, is and scientific creativity
to always allow for the rebound capacity of the post-Roman age:
of this continually changing culture. “competitive fragmenta-
But what if faith in American resil- tion of power.” Today, some of the positive creatively expanding the roles of librar-
ience is now misplaced? What if it really aspects of fragmentation are appearing all ies, community colleges, and other insti-
is different this time? I’ve been asking around us. tutions to meet local needs. Here is just
historians, politicians, businesspeople, one, from Indiana: The factory town of
and civic leaders to imagine 21st-century
America the way historians like Brown
and Scheidel imagine late antiquity. How
F
  I V E Y E A R S A G O , after writing
about a “can do” attitude in local
governments in Maine and South Caro-
Muncie is famed as the site of the Middle-
town sociology studies a century ago. It
was the longtime home of the Ball Broth-
will things look for us, duchy by duchy lina, I got an email from a mayor in the ers glass-jar company, since departed. It
and monastery by monastery, if the Midwest. He said that he thought the is still the home of Ball State University,
national government has broken in a way underreported story of the moment was steadily growing. Like other manufac-
that can’t be fixed? how people frustrated with national- turing cities in the Midwest, Muncie has
Governmental “failure” comes level politics were shifting their enthu- battled the effects of industrial decline.
down to an inability to match a society’s siasm and their careers to the state and Among the consequences was a fund-
resources to its biggest opportunities and local levels, where they could make a ing crisis for the Muncie Community
needs. This is the clearest standard by difference. (That mayor’s name was Pete Schools, which became so severe that
which current U.S. national governance Buttigieg, then in his first term in South two years ago the state took the system
fails. In principle, almost nothing is Bend, Indiana.) When I spoke with him into receivership.
beyond America’s capacities. In practice, at the time, he suggested the situation Last year, Ball State University
almost every big task seems too hard. was like people fleeing the world of became the first-ever public university
Yet for our own era’s counterparts to Veep—bleak humor on top of genuine in the country to assume direct opera-
duchies and monasteries—for state and bleakness—for a non-preposterous ver- tional responsibility for an entire K–12
local governments, and for certain large sion of Parks and Recreation. public-school system. The experiment
private organizations, including universi- At the national level, “policy work is has just begun, and its success can’t be
ties and some companies—the country is increasingly being done by people with assured. But getting this far involved
still mainly functional, in exactly the areas no training in it, and who don’t care innovation and creativity in the political,
where national governance has failed. about it, because they’re drawn into civic, financial, and educational realms
Samuel Abrams, a political scientist national politics purely as culture war- to win support in a diverse community.
at Sarah Lawrence, has been leading a riors,” I was told by Philip Zelikow, of “I was talking with a state senator about
multiyear national survey of “social capi- the University of Virginia, who worked the plan,” Geoffrey S. Mearns, who has
tal” for the American Enterprise Institute. as a national-security official for both been president of Ball State since 2017
Among the findings, released this year, Presidents Bush. “There’s a fiction and is a guiding force behind the plan,
is that by large margins, Americans feel that mass politics is about policy.” The told me this year in Muncie. “After listen-
dissatisfied with the course of national reality, he said, is that national-level ing for 15 minutes, he said, ‘You’re crazy.
events—and by even larger margins, they politics has become an exercise in Don’t do this. Run away.’ After another

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D I S PAT C H E S • CITIES

15 minutes, he said, ‘You’re still crazy. But automobile emissions and improving became “exceptionally open to currents
you have to do it.’ ” fuel efficiency that the Obama adminis- from below.”
This craziness and commitment keeps tration had said automakers must reach. The world changes as we live in it;
a culture alive. A new world is emerging, This year, Ford, BMW, Volks wagen, we’re all part of a pattern that we can
largely beyond our notice. and Honda announced that they would glimpse only dimly. Historians in a thou-
Even when the formal ties of the ignore the shift in federal policy. Instead, sand years will know for sure whether the
Roman empire had broken, informal they would “recognize California’s American empire in this moment was
links connected its various parts. In the authority” to set strict emissions and nearing its own late antiquity. Perhaps by
absence of the Roman state, there was efficiency standards, and would sell cars then Muncie and South Bend will loom
still the Latin language as the original meeting those standards in all 50 states. as large in the historical imagination as
lingua franca; there was still a network the monasteries of Cluny and St. Gall
of roads. Christianity in some form
was a shared religion. Today the links
include trade, travel, family lineage, and
P
  E T E R B R O W N O B S E RV E D that
“a society under pressure is not nec-
essarily a depressed or a rigid society.”
do today. The ancient university towns
of Palo Alto and New Haven may lie in
different countries. In the meantime, we
collaborative research—links that, like The revival that followed the Roman would do well to recognize and, where
the internet, were forged in an era of empire’s collapse, whose full effects possible, nurture the “astounding new
functioning national and global institu- were visible only in retrospect, was beginnings” already under way.
tions but with a better chance to endure. possible because with the weakening
“With the waning of federal government, of central government, Roman society James Fallows is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
you’d see some states really big enough
to act as countries, starting of course
with California,” Anne-Marie Slaughter,
the CEO of the think tank New America, • V E RY S H O R T B O O K E XC E R P T

told me. “You could imagine Texas work-

ing with Mexico, and New England with Space Jammed
Canada—and the upper-Midwest states
as a bloc, and the Pacific Northwest.” She
is becoming a little
E A RT H ’S LOW E R O R B I T
pointed out that states can’t sign formal cluttered, and the results could be catastrophic.
treaties—but then again, the U.S. Senate About 5,450 successful rocket launches have
has not approved a major treaty in years. taken place since Sputnik 1 left Earth on October 4,
Morley Winograd, a former adviser 1957. Approximately 8,950 satellites have been put
to Al Gore and a co-author of the new into orbit. Of those, about 5,000 are still in space,
book Healing American Democracy: Going though only 1,950 of them are operational. While
Local, argues that networked localities Sputnik 1 did the decent thing and disintegrated
have already taken effective control of upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, roughly
crucial policy areas. “If recent trends 3,000 defunct satellites didn’t—they still circle
continue,” he told me, “there’s no rea- the planet, large hunks of space junk. Though they
son why community colleges won’t be rarely crash into one another, one collision, in Feb-
tuition-free across the country, without ruary 2009, between a privately owned American
any federal role. It’s happened in 13 states, communications satellite and a Russian military
and we’re near a tipping point.” After satellite, created more than 2,300 trackable frag-
Donald Trump withdrew the United ments of space debris.
States from the Paris climate accord, Estimates suggest that millions of pieces of
more than 400 U.S. mayors, represent- junk far too small to be tracked are out in space too,
ing most of the U.S. economy, said their mostly the result of spacecraft explosions. Because
communities would still adhere to it. objects can travel at speeds of up to 17,500 miles
“That is where most of the leverage lies an hour, even the tiniest speck of debris hurtling
on sustainability—with mayors and gov- into the side of a spacecraft can cause significant
ernors,” Winograd told me. He gave the harm. Space-shuttle windows have had to be
example of planting trees, which might replaced because of damage caused by mere paint
sound insignificant but, according to flecks flying through space. And the debris keeps
a new study by researchers in Switzer- piling up as satellites have gotten smaller, cheaper,
land, could be a crucial step toward • Adapted from The Conse- and easier to launch. In 2013, only 18 remote-
removing excess carbon dioxide from quential Frontier: Chal- sensing satellites were put into orbit. In 2017, the
the atmosphere. “This could spread city lenging the Privatization number was 177. Between 2018 and 2032, forecasts
by city, state by state, with no federal of Space, by Peter Ward, suggest, 3,979 satellites will be launched. Since
involvement or limitation,” he said. Last published by Melville House doubling the number of objects in orbit could qua-
year, the Trump administration said it in October druple the risk of collisions, debris is sure to pile up
would abandon the targets for cutting faster than ever before.

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Photography by Ty Cole

America Has a Digital Skills SPOTLIGHT ON BIRMINGHAM, AL

Gap. Libraries Can Help Fix It.

As branches across the country invest in new technologies The tools of the digital age—computers, the internet,
and digital services, patrons are increasingly seeing them online training programs—are sometimes branded as a
as go-to hubs for personal and professional development. threat to the public library’s relevance. But that argument
ignores people like Sanders, who value their local branch-

W hen Calvester Sanders was promoted to head of

housekeeping at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham,
Alabama, in 2016, she felt conflicted. On the one hand, she
es precisely because of the access they provide to those
tools and to educators who know how to use them.
Talk to Marijke Visser, an associate director and senior
was excited about the greater responsibility and better policy advocate at the American Library Association,
pay. On the other, the thought of managing her staff’s and you’ll hear story after story of patrons accessing
schedules through the hotel’s computer system made her libraries in ways that could only happen in the 21st cen-
anxious. “I literally didn’t know how to turn it on,” she says. tury: ranchers in rural Nebraska bidding virtually at bull
auctions; farmers in Iowa using a 3-D printer to create
It was Sanders’s manager who pointed her to the free missing tractor pieces; veterans in Kentucky using tele-
introductory computer classes at Birmingham Public conferencing to connect with their doctors. “If they aren’t
Library’s Central Branch. Despite her nerves, Sanders library users, people may have a nostalgic view of libraries
started attending about twice a week. Within a month, from when they were kids,” Visser says. “I think people
she’d learned enough to feel confident on the job. “I don’t have to experience [today’s libraries] to kind of shake
know why I was afraid of coming into the computer world,” that historical view.”
she says. “Now I love it.”
Learn how the Birmingham Public Library is leading
the way: TheAtlantic.com/IOMLibraries
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The Smartphone Generation SPOTLIGHT ON MADISON, WI

Needs Computer Help

Young people may be expert social-media and smartphone collaborating in a digital space, and creating slideshow
users, but many lack the digital skills they need for today’s presentations), which they need to succeed in school,
jobs. How can we set them up for success? the workforce, and life.

O n a recent summer afternoon, six teens burst into

Kenneth Cole’s classroom at the Boys & Girls Club
of Dane County, located on a quiet residential street in
The classes Cole teaches use Grow with Google’s Applied
Digital Skills online curriculum. One day he may lead Club
members in a lesson on building a digital résumé that
Madison, Wisconsin. With smartphones in hand, they text- can be customized quickly and make job-seeking easier
ed and scrolled, chatting with friends both online and in when applying online. Another day they may create a blog.
person. It was Cole’s job to direct the teens to another On this particular day, they drew up a budget for an
type of screen: those of the desktop computers sitting upcoming event using a spreadsheet. For kids who are
in rows that filled the dark, cozy space. often glued to their smartphones, these types of digital
tasks, surprisingly, can be new experiences. Many have
A recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, never learned how to create a spreadsheet. Some have
Cole has been working at the Boys & Girls Club for nearly never worked collaboratively on a document before.
a year. As an instructor for the Club, helping with a new “They love technology,” Cole says, “but not necessarily the
pilot partnership with Grow with Google, he is tasked parts of it that will be most helpful for them.”
with a crucial mission: equipping teens with fundamen-
tal digital skills (think: organizing data in a spreadsheet,
Find out how the Boys & Girls Club is training
digital natives: TheAtlantic.com/IOMYouth
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D I S PAT C H E S

Oval Office in their 40s. But each faltered,

and America replaced Barack Obama, a
young Boomer, with Donald Trump, an
older Boomer. Rather than choose a gen-
erational successor, America elected a
candidate 15 years older than the presi-
dent he replaced, the largest such jump
in American history.
Now Gen Xers have another shot.
Many of the 2020 presidential contend-
ers who sparked early enthusiasm—Cory
Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gilli-
brand, Julián Castro, and Kamala Harris—
were born between the mid-1960s and
1980, the span that defines Generation X.
(Harris, born in 1964, is on its cusp.) But as
of midsummer, with the exception of Har-
ris, they’re all below 5 percent in national
polls. The result is a top tier of candidates
that, in addition to Harris, includes three
who are roughly Trump’s age—Joe Biden,
Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren—
and Pete Buttigieg, a Millennial.
If a Gen Xer doesn’t win in 2020, there
will be another chance in 2024. But by
that time the field may be crowded with
Millennials—born from 1981 to 1996—
whose ranks include Buttigieg, Alexan-
dria Ocasio-Cortez, and rising Repub-
lican stars such as Representatives Dan
Crenshaw and Matt Gaetz. Sandwiched
between two larger and more politically
consequential generations—Boomers and
Millennials—Generation X may never
produce a president at all.
This electoral weakness isn’t coinci-
dental. It reflects an ideological problem.
Rubio, Cruz, Walker, Booker, O’Rourke,
Castro, and Harris all entered adult-
• POLITICS
hood between the Reagan and Clinton
eras, and launched their political careers

THE LOST GENERATION around the turn of the millennium. That

means they likely began forming their
political beliefs at a time when the Repub-
Gen X may never produce a president. lican Party had a strong pro-immigration
That’s bad news for Americans of all ages. wing and leading Democrats embraced
free trade, tough anti-crime policies,
BY PETER BEINART
and charter schools. Then, as they came
closer to running for president, an ideo-
logical earthquake hit.
Since 2016, the Democratic Party has
lurched left. Nativists have taken over
the GOP. Among activists in both par-
OR ALMOST 60 YEAR S, two gener- World War II—took over in 1992, when ties, views that were once mainstream
F
  ations have held the American presi-
dency. The Greatest Generation—born
Bill Clinton was 46. By this precedent,
Generation X was ripe for a president in
are now widely reviled. Gen X politicians
have responded by either downplaying or
in the early 20th century—first won the 2016. Three of the early Republican front- repudiating their prior positions. That’s
White House in 1960, when John F. Ken- runners—Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and un fortunate, because not everything
nedy was 43. Baby Boomers—born after Scott Walker—would have entered the that leading Republicans and Democrats

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D I S PAT C H E S • POLITICS

believed before the parties reinvented The insincerity was obvious, and it support for free trade has left them ideo-
themselves has been proved wrong. didn’t work. In many primaries and cau- logically marooned. Castro now calls
Gen X politicians could help check the cuses, according to data published by for renegotiating NAFTA, and has said
hubris of the present—if only they would FiveThirtyEight, Trump won the lion’s he sympathizes with people who feel
now defend what they once believed. share of voters who called immigration that many trade deals were “entered
their top concern. During his presidency, into with the concern of the big corpo-
C C O R D I N G T O social scientists, Rubio and Cruz have largely supported rations first instead of the American
A events that occur while people are
entering adulthood have a disproportion-
his immigration agenda in the Senate.
That’s unfortunate. Comprehensive
worker.” O’Rourke wants to renegotiate
it too, though not markedly, despite most
ate influence on their political views. That research suggests that while immigration studies showing that NAFTA has had a
doesn’t mean everyone who comes of age imposes some fiscal costs,
around the same time interprets those and disadvantages some
events in the same way. Rather, particular Americans, it benefits the
eras create particular intragenerational American economy as a
arguments. Think about the way Baby whole. But these Gen X
Gen X politicians could
Boomers have spent their political careers Republicans who once help check the hubris
debating the legacy of the Vietnam War. promoted that view have of the present—if only
The fight that has defined Genera- mostly gone silent. they would now defend
tion X is between conservatives who
came of age idolizing Ronald Reagan and EN X DEMOCRATS what they once believed.
liberals who came of age embracing Bill
Clinton’s response to him. As ideological
G have suffered a simi-
lar crisis of confidence.
children of Reagan, who granted legal Consider Beto O’Rourke’s
status to nearly 3 million undocumented and Julián Castro’s shifting stances on modestly positive overall impact on the
immigrants, Cruz, Walker, and Rubio trade. By the time each ran for city council American economy.
expressed sympathy for immigration in their Texas hometowns of El Paso and Kamala Harris’s retreat has been on
before the 2016 election season. Cruz San Antonio in the 2000s, they had wit- truancy. In 2006, as San Francisco’s dis-
argued for doubling the cap on the num- nessed the effects of the North American trict attorney, she launched an initiative
ber of immigrants America could admit Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton to reduce the number of students who
every year; Walker supported a path to had signed into law in 1993. Initially, El chronically missed school without a valid
citizen ship for undocumented immi- Paso saw low-wage manufacturing jobs excuse, a problem that, in the words of
grants; and Rubio helped write a 2013 go south of the border, but over time, as one 2005 study, had “reached epidemic
Senate bill to create a path to citizenship. Texas and Mexico grew more economi- proportions in urban academic settings.”
Then, in 2015, Donald Trump—who, cally intertwined, fortunes rebounded. A The initiative was classically Clintonian,
as a political neophyte, was largely 2016 study by the Federal Reserve Bank an effort to pair the two principles in
unconstrained by traditional Republi- of Dallas found that since NAFTA had which he grounded many of his policies:
can views on immigration—jumped to gone into effect, average income levels opportunity and responsibility. To help
the top of the polls in the Republican in El Paso and other Texas border cities parents keep their kids in school, Har-
presidential race by denigrating Mexi- had come closer to those in the nation as ris created a hotline through which they
can immigrants and demanding a wall a whole. And according to the Bureau of could get referrals to services. Her office
to keep undocumented immigrants out. Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate advertised the hotline on city buses that
Finding themselves on the wrong side in San Antonio, which averaged more than passed through neighborhoods where
of a tectonic shift in the GOP, his Gen X 6 percent in the three years prior to NAFTA truancy rates were high. But she also
competitors jettisoned their earlier taking effect (the Bureau’s data starts in sent a letter to parents warning them that
views. Asked in a 2015 debate why he no 1990), has averaged about 5 percent in the truancy was against the law. Before pros-
longer supported a path to citizenship for 25 years since. ecution, parents of truant children went
undocumented immigrants—a position, Given the data, it’s not surprising that through a lengthy, noncriminal process
the moderator noted, that he had held both O’Rourke and Castro hailed free with school officials. But when that didn’t
“from 2002 until as recently as 2013”— trade before running for president. “Since work, Harris’s office could bring them
Walker responded that he had “listened the signing of NAFTA,” Castro declared to court.
to the American people.” Rubio said that in 2012, “San Antonio has blossomed into At the time, Harris’s tough-on-truancy
although he had helped draft the 2013 a major center of trade.” O’Rourke in 2015 policy fit the Democratic mood. Thirteen
Senate bill that provided a path to citizen- voted to give Obama the authority to years later, it’s become a political liability.
ship, he hadn’t expected it to become law. negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Numerous left-leaning commentators
Cruz claimed that an amendment he’d which, he said, offered the “chance for El have slammed it as part of the criminal-
supported to dramatically increase the Paso to capitalize on its growing status as ization of poverty that in recent decades
number of H-1B visas for foreign workers a leading trade community.” has incarcerated vast numbers of young
had been a ploy to sabotage the passage But as the Democratic Party has men of color. Progressives are right that
of any immigration bill at all. moved left, O’Rourke’s and Castro’s the tough-on-crime policies of the Clinton

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D I S PAT C H E S

era had devastating effects, and that Har- The data have been impressive. While graduation rates have improved too. That
ris wrongly defended some of them. But achievement growth in math ended up finding is consistent with a 2015 study by
her anti-truancy initiative—which she flat, English gains in Newark schools the Center for Research on Education
launched after studying data on the corre- have significantly improved since Booker Outcomes at Stanford showing that stu-
lation between truancy during childhood launched his reforms, according to a dents in urban charter schools perform
and crime later on—was designed to keep study by the Center for Education Policy substantially better than students in other
people out of jail. And the effort appears Research at Harvard. (Although funded urban public schools.
to have kept kids in school: Between the by what is now the Chan Zuckerberg Ini- Nonetheless, as Bernie Sanders’s
2007–08 and 2010–11 school years, the tiative, the study—conducted by research- socialist message has gained influence,
percentage of students in San Francisco ers at Harvard and Dartmouth—was the mood inside the Democratic Party has
public schools deemed chronically truant peer-reviewed.) The study found that the turned against charter schools. Sanders
fell from 4 to 2.5 percent. movement of students from traditional has proposed a halt to government fund-
Progressive critics might argue that public schools to higher-quality charters ing of new charter schools. Even a rela-
Harris could have achieved those results helped drive this progress. According to tive moderate, Pete Buttigieg, has called
without threatening parents with fines or data from the Newark Board of Education, for slowing their expansion, according to
jail. But she didn’t lock up any parents of
truants; very few even paid a fine. In most
instances, judges dismissed cases on the
condition that the parents took actions to words, about 40 percent
get their kid to school. Why did it take a of the time, murderers get
court summons to get some families the away with murder.
• CRIMINAL TENDENCIES
help they needed? It’s called the “black- Some experts
robe effect.” For some people, a judge’s believe that serial killers
demand carries more weight than a school Are Serial Killers More are responsible for a
administrator’s plea, even when they’re Common Than We Think? significant number of
these unsolved murders.
urging the same thing. In the hardest
cases, giving people an opportunity to get The factors in modern life that have made Thomas Hargrove, the
help isn’t enough— demanding that they it easier to kill, without consequence, founder of the Murder
Accountability Project, a
exercise responsibility is necessary too. again and again
Nonetheless, Harris has backpedaled. nonprofit that compiles
Although she declared in her 2009 BY RENE CHUN data on homicide, has
book, Smart on Crime, that “fighting tru- examined how many
ancy might very well be the single most unsolved murders are
important thing we can do to impact the linked by DNA evidence.
future of crime,” the issue is absent from He believes that at least

T
 
HE HELTER- longer prison sentences 2 percent of murders
the criminal-justice section of her cam-
SKELTER 1970s and a reduction in parole are committed by serial
paign website. This spring, she said she
and ’80s are (many serial killers are offenders—translating to
regrets the way other California prosecu-
remembered as the serial convicted murderers about 2,100 unidentified
tors implemented a 2011 statewide anti-
killer’s heyday—think of who, after serving time, serial killers. Michael
truancy law that she’d pushed. In the
Ted Bundy, John Wayne kill again). Better forensic Arntfield, a retired police
current ideological climate, Democrats
Gacy, and David “Son of science is also cred- detective and the author
won’t even defend Clintonian policies
Sam” Berkowitz. Since ited, as are cultural and of 12 books on serial
that they know have worked.
then, data suggest, the technological shifts: less murder, agrees that the
Something similar has happened to number of serial killers— hitchhiking, more heli- FBI’s projections are off
Cory Booker on education. Booker, like defined by the National copter parents, 60 million (he blames patchy data,
Bill Clinton, once advocated for charter Institute of Justice as security cameras. among other things) but
schools, which operate without many of those who commit two or But here’s a curious thinks the number of
the regulations that govern traditional more separate murders, fact. As the number of active serial killers is more
public schools. After becoming mayor of often with a psychologi- serial killings has suppos- like 3,000 or 4,000.
Newark, New Jersey, Booker, according cal motive and a sadistic edly fallen, so too has If such estimates are
to The New Yorker, set out to make the city sexual component—has the rate of murder cases right, why aren’t more
“the charter school capital of the nation.” plunged, falling 85 per- solved—or “cleared,” in killers getting caught?
Aided by an infusion of money from Face- cent in three decades; detective lingo. In 1965, Take Samuel Little. He
book CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others, the FBI now says that the U.S. homicide clear- isn’t a household name,
he made progress toward achieving that serial killers account for ance rate was 91 percent. yet the California inmate’s
goal. From the 2009–10 to 2017–18 school fewer than 1 percent of By 2017, it had dropped confessed death toll,
years, the share of Newark students killings. Several reasons to 61.6 percent, one of across 14 states and four
attending charter schools rose from 12 to are commonly cited for the lowest rates in the decades, appears to be
33 percent. this decline, among them Western world. In other triple Bundy’s. Since 2012,

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• POLITICS

NBC News. And Booker has dramatically were first seeking office—from the Iraq pretending you were wrong when the evi-
muted his support for them; the education War to mass incarceration—have failed. dence has proved you right, just because
section of his campaign website makes no Those failures laid the foundation for the political tides have shifted. It’s the dif-
mention of charter schools. When Los the ideological revolts that have trans- ference between humility and cowardice.
Angeles teachers went on strike earlier formed both parties since 2016, and By defending policies that have
this year, in part to protest the expansion those transformations were overdue. It’s worked but are now ideologically out of
of charter schools, Booker publicly sup- a good thing that Donald Trump is more favor, Gen X politicians could combat
ported them (though he didn’t link his sup- reluctant to attack Iran than George presentism, the recurring tendency—
port with their views on charter schools). W. Bush was to attack Iraq. It’s a good especially among progressives—to con-
thing that Democrats are now contem- descendingly dismiss the ideas of the past.
T I S L AU D A B L E when politicians plating massive infrastructure invest- Young activists disdainful of the
I admit they were wrong to champion
policies that have failed. And many of the
ments to stave off climate change.
But there’s a fundamental difference
Clinton and Obama presidencies are
remaking the Democratic Party. But new
policies that enjoyed widespread sup- between admitting you were wrong when generations tend to overcompensate for
port around the time Gen X politicians the evidence has proved you wrong and the failures of their predecessors. In the
1960s, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
B. Johnson were so eager to distinguish
themselves from the isolationists of the
police have linked him in the trucking industry, lifestyles,” the FBI has 1930s that they forgot that an earlier gen-
to at least 60 homicides, which has drawn scrutiny said. “They’re frequently eration’s skepticism of war—born from
and he claims to have from law-enforcement picked up at truck stops the disillusionment of World War I—had
committed 33 more. officials. As an FBI press or service stations.” Mike lessons to teach despite the necessity
According to Arntfield, release put it in 2016, “If Aamodt, the founder of World War II. Heeding those lessons
killers like Little have there is such a thing as of Radford University’s might have kept America from losing
benefited from the falling an ideal profession for a Serial Killer Information 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam.
clearance rate, which serial killer, it may well Center, says truckers are After the economic woes of the Jimmy
he in turn attributes to be as a long-haul truck well positioned to evade Carter years, Clinton-era New Demo-
a handful of factors: driver.” Truckers appeared detection. “The more crats were so determined to prove that
increased expertise (kill- on the bureau’s radar locations you’re operat- the party was not antibusiness that they
ers have studied other more than a decade ago, ing in,” he added, “the deregulated Wall Street in ways that
murderers’ mistakes and when an investigation more difficult it is for law contributed to the 2008 financial crash.
know how to fool cops, revealed that women enforcement to see a link.” In the 1990s, many New Democrats
for example by planting were being murdered Of course, would- also dismissed labor unions because of
false evidence), con- along the I-40 corridor. be homicidal maniacs their belief in the free market. Today the
strained resources (thanks Since then, the FBI’s lurk in all kinds of jobs. pendulum has swung again, and Demo-
to stagnant salaries, Highway Serial Killings Bundy was a law student.
crats eager for labor’s embrace are join-
detectives in some areas Initiative has investigated Samuel Little was a boxer
ing with teachers’ unions to oppose a
may be less qualified than the murders of more than and an ambulance atten-
charter-school movement that enjoys
their predecessors), grow- 750 victims found near dant. In his book Murder
overwhelming support from African
ing social isolation (which highways, and identi- in Plain English, Arntfield
American and Latino Democrats.
can make potential fied nearly 450 potential breaks down the top
As the in-between generation—old
victims more vulnerable), suspects, a disproportion- serial-killer professions,
enough to have witnessed the Clinton
and greater geographic ate number of them truck and finds that truckers
era as adults but young enough to learn
mobility (which can make drivers. “The victims in are joined by police
dots harder to connect). these cases are primarily and military personnel,
from its failures—Gen X Democrats
One illustration of the women who are liv- forestry workers, hotel
could warn against the hubris of the
last point can be found ing high-risk, transient porters, and warehouse present, as Ted Kennedy warned against
managers, among others. Clinton’s endorsement of welfare reform
In each case, the problem in the 1990s and older foreign-policy
isn’t so much the people thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr and Wal-
who fill the job, but the ter Lippmann warned against Johnson’s
job itself. The key ques- escalations in Vietnam.
tion, Aamodt told me, is What matters most isn’t whether Gen X
whether a given voca- produces a president. It’s whether it helps
tion’s duties hinder or America’s next president—whatever his or
enable killing on the side: her generation—learn from the past rather
“The gas-station attendant than sneer at it.
has no opportunity. The
long-haul trucker has lots Peter Beinart is a contributing writer at
of opportunity.” The Atlantic.

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T H E

C U L T U R E
F I L E
B O O K S , A R T S , A N D E N T E R TA I N M E N T

THE OMNIVORE

Broken Spies
for a
Broken England
Mick Herron is the
John le Carré of the Brexit era.
BY JAMES PARKER
So when somebody writes a book that grips and settles me, that makes a reader
out of me again, I become quite helpless with gratitude. I feel this way about Mick
Herron. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, in England, and educated at Oxford, Her-
ron writes squeakingly well-plotted spy thrillers. More than that, he composes—at
the rate of a pulpist—the kind of efficient, darkly witty, tipped-with-imagery sen-
tences that feel purpose-built to perforate my private daze of illiteracy. More than
that, he’s a world-bringer, the creator of a still-growing fictional universe with its
own gravity, lingo, and surface tension. He whacks his characters and winnows

A
R E Y O U a good reader, reader? his cast with real 21st-century anti-sentimentality, but there always seems to be
Patient, curious, broadly cultured, enough life-energy around to generate more stories. A TV series is in the works,
AG E N C E O PA L E /A L A M Y; S E R G I E S C R I B A N O ;
DAV I D C O R N W E L L / G E T T Y; J O H N M U R R AY

and so on? I’m not—not anymore. and a new novel, Joe Country, was published in June.
Decades of email-checking have At the center of Herron’s mythosphere is a terrible, terrible office: Slough
splintered my concentration; more House. Although … can Slough House be at the center of anything? It’s a termi-
recently and speedily, I’ve rotted out my attention nus, permanently dislodged from—at odds with, even—the flow of existence. A
span with Netflix and end-of-the-republic updates. grimly nondescript building somewhere in the London borough of Finsbury, a
Of the new mind, the pro digious and fluently concrescence of London dilapidation and anonymity, Slough House is where
networking postdigital mind, I am not in posses- you’ll find the “slow horses”—the MI5 operatives deemed too dysfunctional,
sion; I have only the perishing old mind, bleach- addicted, high-risk, or failure-prone for anything but the most grinding busy-
ing in chunks like the Great Barrier Reef. To sit in work. J. K. Coe is there, monastically hoodied, sizzling with PTSD, listening to
a chair, in a pool of educated light, and turn the Keith Jarrett in his earbuds and not talking to anyone. Shirley Dander is there,
pages of a novel … No chance. I twitch, I bounce. always thinking about the wrap of cocaine in her pocket. (“It wasn’t like Shir-
I start reaching for things. Then I get groggy. ley was an habitual user. It was a weekend thing with her, strictly Thursday

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to Tuesday.”) The manager of Slough House, its the Slough House milieu. Reckonings occur, de-
THE OMNIVORE
twice-as-toxic David Brent, its stained and fart- cades delayed. The grandfather of one slow horse
ing Buddha, is Jackson Lamb. Once a formidable is a George Smiley–era spy sinking into dementia;
“joe”—Herron-speak for an agent—at Berlin Station, narratives and counternarratives are coming loose
Lamb is now a chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking in his head. But Herron was on the Underground,
shambles and a creature of coal-black cynicism. going to work, when London was bombed on July 7,
Herron’s slow horses are always being pulled into 2005, and the mood of his spies is un–le Carré: a
plots, called upon to exercise their latent joe skills. jazzy, jangled hyperalertness. Carnage is only a
As rejects, they are the natural enemies of the elite. heartbeat—a switch, a trigger—away. The London
They can smell a false-flag operation a mile off. No where the slow horses live is an invisibly fanatical
fake news for these genuine losers. In Joe Country, city: jihadists, rogue actors, wandering nodes of
a hunt for the missing son of a deceased slow horse annihilation approaching the zero hour.
leads to an encounter with the most infernal eche- Working as fast as Herron does, you can stay
lons of the Establishment. close to life as it’s being lived and close, also, to
Herron has written 13 novels—six in the Slough the hallucination known as current events. “My
House series—but he began his literary career as a feeling about Brexit,” he told The Irish Times ear-
poet. These are the opening lines of Joe Country: lier this year, “is people with vested interests have
manipulated and lied to large sections of the com-
The owl flew screaming from the barn, its wing- munity. There is a part of me that would like to
tips bright with flame. For a moment, silhou- go back and burn down the bastions of privilege
etted against the blank sky, it was a dying angel, that allowed these people to take over in such a
scorched by its own divinity, and then it was Like le Carré, self-serving way.” Well, there are several Brexits,
just a sooty husk, dropping like an anvil into the but one of them, indeed, is the kind of elitist con-
nearby trees.
Herron is spiracy that the slow horses—in their cack-handed,
obsessed explosive way—are constantly uncovering.
Angel/anvil, ascent and gravity in paired syllables. with that area The installation of Boris Johnson in 10 Downing
Let’s hear it for the poet’s ear. The previous Slough of the human Street will have done nothing to appease Herron.
House novel, 2018’s London Rules, kicks off with an Peter Judd, the bicycle-riding, conscience-free
assault-weapon attack on an English village: “The
brain where home secretary in 2016’s Real Tigers, is less a cari-
jeep, which had idled throughout the brief carnage, paranoia cature of Johnson than a police artist’s sketch: “He
spat stones as it accelerated away.” It could be a overlaps with was a bulky man, not fat, but large, and though he
scene from the British poet David Harsent’s apoc- vigilance. had turned fifty the previous year, retained the
alyptic 2005 sequence, Legion: “We cut our engines, schoolboy looks and fluffy-haired manner that
then, and the dust / settled in silence.” It’s the had endeared him to the British public.” Isn’t that
same wiry language, the same sensation of shock Johnson, lasering toward power under his halo of
acting on space. bumble? His fellow Brexiteer Nigel Farage makes
Espionage is a shadow battle; it looks like the an appearance, sort of, in London Rules, as the pop-
psyche. “On a normal day,” muses a spy in Joe ulist Dennis Gimball: “What should have been a
Country, “London was bright and busy, full of open cameo became a career, and the whole thing went
spaces and well-lit squares. But it was also trap on for what felt like decades.” Spoiler alert: Gim-
streets and ghost stations; a spook realm below the ball gets his head knocked off by a falling paint can.
real.” In this realm, people change shape; graves The novelist’s revenge.
open and dead things rise; stories turn inside out. Herron has been praised for the wit and velocity
Like John le Carré—with whom he has been much of the workplace banter at Slough House—the in-
compared—Herron is obsessed with that area of fighting, and the awful, un-PC things that come out
human experience, that area of the human brain, of Jackson Lamb’s mouth: “I’m an ardent feminist,
where paranoia overlaps with an essential, feral as you know. But haven’t you girls got better things
vigilance. “Since leaving the Park he’d had that to worry your little heads about?” A little of this, I
uneasy sense of footsteps in synch with his own. find, goes a long way. Sections of London Rules in
There were tricks you could pull—double back particular seemed to me to be rather clogged with
to check a shop window, pause to fix a shoelace, Veep-like repartee. Joe Country corrects the error.
halt at a bus stop …” No such thing as coincidence. The slow horses are drawn out of fast-talking Lon-
Ordinary, bovine, walking-down-the-street life is don and into wintry Wales, land of snowy ditches
an illusion, a sleep-state. Don’t get caught standing and burning owls. The bastions of privilege are
around: bad tradecraft. casting their long shadow. And in joe country—the
Now and again le Carré’s Cold War—that ’70s place, the mind-set, where the spies live—there
Eastern Bloc dowdiness, all those strange drawl- JOE COUNTRY
are ironies and inversions, but no jokes.
ing characters sipping their tea in a fuggy room in MICK HERRON
Cambridge Circus—reaches with long fingers into Soho Press James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

34 O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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“Weitz, one of the foremost historians “A celebration of menopause as a life stage “This Land Is Our Land is moving, unsettling,
of human rights and genocide, brings a vital to our species’ survival, but one that and, ultimately, inspiring—a profound
lifetime of research to bear in this has now been trivialized as a disease to be meditation for our heedless era.”
sweeping and accessible book.” treated. . . . A wise history of a subject that is —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning
—Kathryn Sikkink, author of Evidence for Hope ‘deeply . . . implicated in the human condition.’” author of The Sixth Extinction:
Cloth $35.00 —Kirkus Reviews An Unnatural History
Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity Cloth $29.95 Cloth $19.95

“This book reshapes the conversation “Caplan argues devastatingly . . . “Readers will be rewarded with Patel’s rich
about upward mobility, shifting our focus that college is, for many of those perspective on religious diversity in America.”
from the opportunities embedded in the who go there, a boondoggle.” —Publishers Weekly
current social structure to the price —Kyle Smith, National Review Paper $17.95
paid by those aiming to climb it.” Paper $18.95
—Sigal Ben-Porath, University of Pennsylvania
Cloth $27.95
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upon meeting Sontag was said to have remarked,

“Oh, you’re the imitation me.”) In private she was
“Miss Librarian,” Sontag’s name for her studious
self. “The camera-ready version of Susan Sontag
would always remain at odds with Miss Librarian,”
Moser continues. “Never, perhaps, had a great
beauty worked less hard at being beautiful. She of-
BOOKS ten expressed her astonishment at encountering
the glamorous woman in the photographs.”
Misunderstanding Sontag: Her Life and Work assumes this same
attitude of astonishment as Moser sets out to
Susan Sontag measure the distance between “the individual”
who was Sontag—brilliant, studious, insensitive,
dishonest, ashamed of her sexuality, a glutton
Her beauty and celebrity eclipse the real source of for emotional pain—and “the representation of
her allure—her commitment to cool control. the individual” that became Sontag, the “Sibyl of
Manhattan.” For Sontag, Moser argues, the gap be-
BY MERVE EMRE tween “a thing and its symbol,” between metaphor
and reality, was “a matter of life and death.”

E R L I F E B E G A N ordinarily enough,

H on the West Side of Manhattan in the

winter of 1933. She was born Susan Lee
Rosenblatt, daughter of Mildred, a vain and cruel

“ 
T
O E X P E R I E NC E A T H I NG as beautiful means: to experi- alcoholic, and Jack, a tubercular fur salesman who
ence it necessarily wrongly,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in died when Sue was 5. She was a precocious and
The Will to Power. It is a line that Susan Sontag quotes toward lonely child. Her friends were her books: Madame
the end of her 1977 essay collection, On Photography, about Curie, Les Misérables, The Sorrows of Young Werther,
how photographs aestheticize misery. It is a line that Sontag’s Martin Eden. Her mother, who was intimidated by
authorized biographer, Benjamin Moser, quotes to describe Sue’s intelligence, dragged her and her sister, Judith,
Sontag’s susceptibility to beautiful, but punishing, lovers. And it is a line that from New York to Miami Beach to Tucson—where
I am quoting to summarize how Moser’s monumental and stylish biography, Mildred met and married an Army pilot named Nat
Sontag: Her Life and Work, fails its subject—a woman whose beauty, and the sex Sontag—and finally to Los Angeles in 1946. “Sue, if
appeal and celebrity that went along with it, Moser insists upon to the point of you read so much you’ll never find a husband,” her
occluding what makes her so deeply interesting. stepfather warned her. But Sue didn’t listen.
The fascination of Sontag lies in her endurance as a cultural icon, the model At 16, Sontag left home for UC Berkeley. There
of how a woman should think and write in public, even though her thinking she discovered Djuna Barnes’s tale of lesbian de-
and writing weren’t very rigorous. What is intriguing about Sontag is less sire and despair, Nightwood, and, while browsing
who she was than how we understand our desire for her, or someone like her, at a bookstore, met the woman who would be her
to occupy a rare position in American literary culture: that of a dark-haired, on-again, off-again lover for the next decade, Har-
dark-eyed, apparently invulnerable woman capable of transforming intellec- riet Sohmers. (“Have you read Nightwood?” was
tual seriousness into an erotic spectacle. What need does such a presence and Sohmers’s excellent pickup line.) Sontag was un-
performance satisfy? nerved by her attraction to women, determined to
Sontag herself was wary of the impulse to anoint. In her 1975 essay “A “force” herself “to have sex with men,” she wrote in
Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?” she argues that conceiving of her diary. When she transferred to the University
a woman’s beauty as antithetical to her other virtues makes beauty morally sus- of Chicago at the end of the academic year, “her
pect: “We not only split off—with the greatest facility—the ‘inside’ (character, kind of beauty found fervent admirers,” Moser
intellect) from the ‘outside’ (looks); but we are actually surprised when some- writes. She began working as a research assistant
one who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.” The power of beauty for a young economics professor named Philip
is self-negating, Sontag warns. It is a “power … always conceived in relation to Rieff, whom she married after one week of diligent
men; it is not the power to do but the power to attract.” We need “some critical note-taking. (“Don’t laugh! he’s not handsome,” she
distance” from beauty if we are to avoid the “crude trap” of treating a woman’s told her mother.) While pregnant with their son, Da-
self-presentation as separable from, and opposed to, her interior self. vid, she began co-writing Rieff ’s first book, Freud:
One imagines that Sontag would have been dismayed to see her biogra- The Mind of the Moralist. Rieff (who did not credit
pher adopting exactly these dichotomies to frame her life and work. “Susan her) got a job at Brandeis University, and in the fall
Sontag was America’s last great literary star,” Moser proclaims in his introduc- of 1952, they moved east. Two years later, she began
tion. “She was incongruous: a beautiful young woman who was intimidatingly graduate school in English at Harvard.
learned.” In public she was “The Dark Lady of American Letters.” (The title Sontag grew to hate marriage and Harvard,
was, in fact, originally given by Norman Podhoretz to Mary McCarthy, who so she left them both, as well as her son, to study

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philosophy at the University of Oxford, which she a downtown party girl, a European duchess, a
BOOKS
also hated. (“There is a type—the male virgin—lots modern dancer, a filmmaker. “There is something
of them in England,” she complained. Also, the Olympian about her sex life,” Moser opines. “How
weather was bad.) When she left “boring Oxford” many American women of her generation had lov-
in 1957, first for France, then for New York, she em- ers, male and female, as numerous, beautiful, and
barked on the most productive period of her life. prominent?” Her affairs left her in childlike states of
New Left publications like The New York Review of bewilderment, shattered and sleepless. Overly pos-
Books and The Partisan Review championed her. In sessive of her son, she “groomed him as a compan-
1963, she published her first novel, The Benefactor, ion,” clutching David closer than a mother should.
and one year later “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” a list of As she entered her 40s, her friends “remarked that
playful, exhilarating observations about camp as she was even more than usually insensitive to oth-
a sensibility, and its “love of the unnatural: of ar- ers, more prone to fabrication.”
tifice and exaggeration.” The essay landed her in Yet Sontag’s lack of awareness and her insecurity
Time magazine, where she was identified as “one of were almost never on public display—not when, at
Manhattan’s brightest young intellectuals,” trans- 42, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, not when
forming her from a mere essayist into “a midcult chemotherapy turned her hair white. She dyed
commodity,” according to Nora Ephron. “Notes all but a front shock black and finished two books
on ‘Camp’ ” was followed, in rapid succession, by during her treatments: On Photography and Illness
Against Interpretation (1966), Death Kit (1967), and as Metaphor (1978), the latter of which railed against
Styles of Radical Will (1969), all published before
Sontag’s lack psychological accounts of cancer as a disease of “re-
her 37th birthday. of awareness pression” without ever mentioning her cancer. Her
But the more Sontag wrote, the more she fret- and her illness prompted her to reevaluate her youthful
ted about writing. Periods of intense productivity insecurity leftism. She broke with the New Left in 1982, at a
were interspersed with periods of “lacerating in- Town Hall event where she denounced commu-
securities,” Moser writes. After expressing dis-
were almost nism, flanked by one of the great loves of her life,
dain for the “exclusiveness, the possessiveness never on the morose Soviet dissident Joseph Brodsky. “She
of marriage,” she spent the 1960s and ’70s in a public display. became a liberal,” Moser writes, and as she entered
series of devastating entanglements with women: her 50s, the pace of her writing slowed. Intermit-
tently estranged from her son, who was installed
as her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she did
not produce another book, aside from a collection
of essays, until AIDS and Its Metaphors, in 1989. She
finished it as she tended to a friend dying of AIDS.
The year the book came out, she met her last
love, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. They spent
the final decade and a half of Sontag’s life living like
divas in their extravagant New York apartments,
Sontag loving and abusing Leibovitz—“You’re so
dumb,” she would yell—while also traveling the
world. During the Bosnian war, Sontag and Lei-
bovitz went to Sarajevo, where the couple became
what Sontag, in her last book, Regarding the Pain of
Others (2003), called “star witnesses” to the ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia. Eager to capture the despair of
waiting for international intervention, she arrived
with a script of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The production, with a set made from United Na-
tions plastic sheeting, “became a cultural event in
the highest sense of the term,” Moser writes in all
earnestness. Sontag returned to Sarajevo often be-
fore her death from cancer, in 2004. Her last words,
to her son, “I want to tell you …,” revealed that she
still had things to say.
GEORGE ROSE/GETTY

Moser packs in an extraordinary amount of

detail. Yet the book feels strangely vacuous, or at
least no more psychologically revealing than ei-
ther Sontag’s diaries or the earlier unauthorized
biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock.
Aptly enough, the problem is one of interpretation.

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Moser’s analysis of Sontag’s life as an unwinnable talking about, or around, intense emotions with-
BOOKS
battle between her public self and her private self out indulging in them. “An aphorism is not an ar-
traffics in the crudest of oppositions: appearance gument; it is too well-bred for that,” Sontag wrote
versus character, mind versus body, intellectual- in her diary—a glimpse of how her style served as
ism versus eroticism, persona versus private self. an exercise in emotional self-regulation, in model-
Erecting these dichotomies is the biography’s ing aesthetic decorum. Her essays aspired to teach
narrative mode, its method of building intrigue her readers how to “feel more sensually” as “the
and suspense. Can you believe, Moser wonders, antidote to feeling too much or too little emotion,”
that a beautiful and intelligent woman could be Nelson writes, offering a more nuanced reading
insecure about her professional success? Can than Moser does of Sontag’s desire “to see more,
you believe that inhuman productivity, fueled by to hear more, to feel more.”
chronic insomnia, a violent disdain for napping, “She was Athena, not Aphrodite,” Moser sug-
and an addiction to speed, might be an attempt to gests, a comparison that is instructive for under-
compensate for social isolation? Can you believe standing Sontag’s place in a long lineage of female
that having sex and falling in love with many peo- archetypes that make our attraction to a figure like
ple, of many persuasions, might trouble the divide her legible. In Greek mythology, Athena was the
between mind and body? “Susan—human—drove favorite daughter of Zeus, the child born from his
people away,” Moser concludes. “But the symbolic forehead. She caused her tyrannical father such
Sontag was tremendously attractive.” pain that he had his head cleaved open. Out she
Moser’s interpretations often fall back on sprang, armor-plated and golden, imperishable,
armchair psychology, pathologizing Sontag’s re- The art she eager to counsel mortal men against foolish-
lationships by making everything symptomatic of championed, ness and vulgarity, to teach them the virtues of
something else. Too many roads lead back to her self- control and courage. Sontag, too, distrusted
mother, who emerges as Sontag and Moser’s shared
and the art immoderation, preferring instead “coolness,”
villain. “Many of the apparently rebarbative aspects she made, “distance,” “disinterestedness and impartiality”
of Sontag’s personality are clarified in light of the valued the when such responses were most necessary—when
alcoholic family system,” Moser writes, describing eternal post- the subject matter was hardest to bear. The art she
how Mildred’s addiction impressed itself on Sontag. championed, and the art she made, valued the
She “would turn lovers into parents,” he suggests,
ponement eternal postponement of emotional involvement,
as if this reading were original. (Sontag admits as of emotional the containment of soft Aphrodite’s passions in a
much in her diaries.) He diagnoses her as having a involvement. brisk, impersonal prose.
Cluster B personality disorder, whose symptoms in- Where Moser perceives a striking, irrecon-
clude “fears of abandonment and feelings of incon- cilable gap between Sontag’s private and public
solable loneliness, which trigger frantic neediness.” selves, Nelson finds a dialectical unity. Sontag’s
The more clinically Moser tries to pin down Sontag’s embrace of a cool aesthetic intelligence is all the
inner life, the more it wriggles away from him. fiercer for her personal experiences of desire and
“She warned against the mystifications of photo- distress; her style is a critical rejection of the “Ro-
graphs and portraits: including those of biog- mantic drama of individuality, emotional intensity,
raphers,” Moser writes in the closing sentence of and powerlessness” that she was living. Nelson
Sontag: Her Life and Work. It’s hard to know how to refers to this as “disciplined self-transcendence,”
read the line. Is Moser asking for our understand- and it is, I suspect, the source of both Sontag’s pro-
ing, given the inherent limitations of biography as ductivity and her appeal—an appeal that far out-
a genre? All biographies are, to an extent, mystifica- strips her physical appearance. There is something
tions. But some methods of reading and writing can mesmerizing about the lifelong performance of
resurrect the dead not as a series of tedious opposi- discipline, something beautiful about the artifice
tions, but as flesh-and-blood individuals animated required to exercise control over one’s turbulent or
by their commitments to their ideas. What this painful inner life. What we are attracted to in Son-
would require is more sensitive probing of human tag is the idea of a woman whose writing can induct
contradictions than Moser has yet mastered. readers into a style of feeling, of attachment, of
vulnerability, while also appearing to refuse those
H E B E S T A N S W E R to the question I feelings, those attachments, that vulnerability, for

T opened with—why do we want and need

a Susan Sontag?—comes from the literary
critic Deborah Nelson’s fantastic 2017 book, Tough
herself—a woman who wears her armor exactly
where it was meant to be worn, on her sleeve.

Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Merve Emre is an associate professor of English
Weil. In Nelson’s view, Sontag’s thoughts on art at the University of Oxford. She is the author,
SONTAG:
and modernity are neither original nor system- HER LIFE AND WORK
most recently, of The Personality Brokers: The
atic. What is enchanting about her writing is her BENJAMIN MOSER Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth
style: an associative and aphoristic approach to Ecco of Personality Testing.

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even gave the name Ben to the narrator of his sec-

ond novel, 10:04, in addition to endowing him with
roughly his own biography. Both earlier books fea-
ture the interior monologues and exterior deal-
ings of Lerner-types. Both are also ironic, formally
experimental, skeptical of their narrators while
deeply enmeshed in their particular way of seeing
the world. And both books are beautifully, exasper-
atingly, transcendently wordy. In Atocha Station,
an extremely stoned Adam—again monologuing—
marvels, before passing out, at “language becom-
ing the experience it described.” In 10:04, Ben is
the kind of guy who admits that he cried on a park
bench by referring to “a mild lacrimal event.”
So it is funny and welcome to open The Topeka
School and find Adam talking so fluently and
intently that he doesn’t notice his girlfriend’s escape.
The scene signals a return of familiar themes in
Lerner’s work—an obsession with language, a par-
ticular genus of American male subjectivity—and
signals that he is confronting these subjects in a
more direct and critical way. The Topeka School
trains the reader’s eye on the dramas and dangers
of being a person—or a nation—enthralled, bom-
barded, and imprisoned by rhetoric.
One of the hallmarks of Lerner’s fiction is the
way that it brings a single consciousness into col-
lision with broad sociopolitical movements. The
backdrop of Atocha Station is the Iraq War, already
souring globalism, America in decline. In 10:04, it
is Occupy Wall Street, Hurricane Sandy, and grow-
ing questions in the Obama years about whether an
American “we,” in a Whitmanesque sense, is still
BOOKS possible. In The Topeka School, Lerner writes from
the vantage of 2019, and from the premise that the
collective is broken and common discourse has
Boy, Uninterrupted been derailed. The implicit bid of the book is that
exploring myopic white male monologuists, sim-
mering with rage in the Midwest in the late 1990s,
Ben Lerner, portraitist of talkative men, might shed light on today’s America.
The main action of The Topeka School takes
explores the roots of white male rage. place during Adam’s final year of high school, in
BY JORDAN KISNER 1997. He is the son of two psychologists, Jonathan
and Jane, who are members of a famous psycho-
analytic institute called the Foundation, some-
thing like a “Mayo Clinic for the mind.” Jane’s
research—which remains vague but concerns

T
romantic relationships—has made her nationally
H E T O P E K A S C H O O L , Ben Lerner’s third novel, begins famous. (Lerner’s mother, Harriet Lerner, a clini-
with a self-aware joke. Adam Gordon, Lerner’s protagonist— cal psychologist, rose to national prominence after
who also narrates Lerner’s acclaimed first novel, Leaving the writing a book about women’s anger that sold mil-
Atocha Station—is sitting in a boat, talking. He’s 17, a speech- lions of copies.) Jonathan is a therapist primarily for
and-debate whiz and an aspiring poet living in Topeka, Kansas. disaffected young white men of privilege, teenag-
It’s the middle of the night and he’s with his girlfriend, Amber, ers who seem to have everything but who suddenly
monologuing passionately about something or other, when he suddenly looks turn angry, sullen, withdrawn, violent. Jonathan
around and realizes that he’s sitting in the boat alone. She has jumped over- calls them the “lost boys.”
board and swum away, and he didn’t even notice. Adam isn’t one of those boys, but he strad-
Men talking—specifically young white male poets from Kansas talking— dles two ways of being. He is part of the hyper-
have been a fixture of Lerner’s novels. Lerner, a white male poet from Kansas, intellectual, Freudian world of his parents, where

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the most successful men think calmly and talk Adam—and who will later “be a key architect of
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calmly, where emotions require verbal “process- the most right-wing governorship Kansas has
ing,” and where any adolescent outbursts are fol- ever known … an important model for the Trump
lowed by “think[ing] along with” his parents about administration.” He is a master of what’s called
the causes. At the same time, he is immersed in the “the spread,” or the act of making arguments and
teenage masculinity of late-’90s Topeka; among jamming in facts at such an unintelligibly fast pace
his peers, the most expressible emotions are rage that an opponent can’t possibly respond to them
or disdain, and the lingua franca is physical vio- all effectively. In his lessons for Adam, we see the
lence or torrents of freestyle rap in an absurd—if beginnings of a national political glossolalia:
earnest—appropriation of a black culture they have
no direct contact with. I want quick swerves into the folksy … After you
At school, Adam falls in with the kids of the go off about a treaty regulating drilling in the
Foundation faculty; the boys among them have Arctic: “Now, in Kansas, we wouldn’t shake on
a tense and violent relationship with the sons that.” I don’t care if they’re not real sayings, just
of blue-collar Topekans. The estrangement of deliver them like they’re tried-and-true. Say “tried
these two groups prefigures the elite-versus-real- and true.” Say “ain’t” if you want. You can go
America animosity that now dominates political agrammatical so long as they know it’s a choice,
and social rhetoric—though what’s striking is how that it’s in quotes. Interrupt your highbrow flu-
similarly angry and anxious about the demands ency with bland sound bites of regional decency …
of masculinity all these young white men seem. Deliver little tautologies like they’re proverbs.
Adam often feels lost and enraged for reasons he
can’t quite explain. His behavior at home grows so Looking back on a scene of himself sparring
explosive that his parents insist he either see a ther-
His rants at with Evanson, the older Adam—now a writer living
apist or learn biofeedback methods for regulating his parents in New York—comments that the younger Adam
his emotions. He opts for the biofeedback. often take the will go on to “attempt this genealogy of his speech,
For the most part, Adam navigates both worlds form of “an its theaters and extremes,” referring to the book we
reasonably well, verbal virtuoso that he is, a state are reading. If the novel is a chronicle of his coming-
debate champion. He can deploy “his Foundation
overwhelm- of-age in language, the suggestion is that it is also
vocabulary” and freestyle rap with fluidity and ing barrage a larger semantic origin story, about faux-populist,
abandon, words “unfold[ing] at a speed he could of ridiculous frenetic Trumpian rhetoric, and the subset of artic-
not consciously control.” Adam is especially gifted but somehow ulate, angry men who helped cultivate it.
at extemporaneous argument, which has become But why are these men so angry? Like Jonathan’s
his way of aggressively dominating others. His
irrefutable “lost boys,” they seem to have plenty of advantages—
rages at his parents often take the form of “an arguments.” so what is the rage about? In the book, a Foundation
overwhelming barrage of ridiculous but somehow analyst offers an explanation:
irrefutable arguments,” and his attitude during
interscholastic tournaments is competitive to the [Men are told] that they are individuals, rug-
point of maliciousness. At the same time, debate ged even, but in fact they are emptied out, iso-
is a route to the flow state he craves: late, mass men without a mass, although they’re
not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys,
He passed, as he often passed, a mysterious Peter Pans, man-children, since America is
threshold. He began to feel less like he was adolescence without end, boys without religion
delivering a speech and more like a speech was on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the
delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation other; they don’t even have a father—President
of his presentation were beginning to dictate its Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the
content, that he no longer had to organize his Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven
arguments so much as let them flow through him. to mass surrender without anything to surrender
to; they don’t even believe in money or in science,
Again and again in The Topeka School, charac- or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has
ters fall into a kind of glossolalia, or “word salad,” fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they
the breakdown of grammar commonly observed are overfed; in a word, they are starving.
in religious rapture or extreme states of psychosis.
Glossolalia is either pure communication, the pres- This diagnosis is compelling but unsatisfying,
ence of the divine in language, or terrible babble, partly because it ignores how directed white male
the impulse to be understood and to understand rage is: It has targets, and those targets bespeak
pushed to the point of implosion. Adam trains something more than godlessness or hunger
for the national speech-and-debate tournament THE TOPEKA SCHOOL
or existential emptiness. They betray anxiety—
with a former champion also from Topeka, Peter BEN LERNER anxiety about power. After Amber jumps out of
Evanson, who is even better at verbal combat than FSG the boat and swims away at the beginning of the

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novel, Adam looks for her frantically, stumbling BOOKS

expressing their alienation in a way that is some-
through a community of lake houses so uncannily how powerful and dangerous. Teenage Adam
identical that he accidentally lets himself into the thinks that the era of white men’s dominance is
wrong home, thinking it’s Amber’s. He’s fright- passing, but the “genealogy” he writes—and the
ened, and when he eventually finds her, he’s furi- world he lives in—as an adult indicates that this
ous. She doesn’t apologize for scaring him. Instead, hasn’t happened.
she recounts a story about how her stepfather used Lerner seems interested in reiterating via the
to talk so endlessly at dinner that she once just details of his own biography the now-evident poli-
slipped under the table and crawled off into the tical reality that these alienated men are powerful
kitchen, where her mother was doing dishes. The and dangerous precisely when they feel they are
two women looked at each other and then stood not. Even in Adam—a relatively sensitive poet, who
together in the doorway, watching him talking with nominally embraces feminism and prides himself
vigor to an empty room. It’s funny, but the humor on being the only boy he knows who studiously per-
vanishes when Amber describes what happened forms oral sex on his girlfriend—we see threatened
when her stepfather turned around: white masculinity deploying whatever language is at
its disposal to reclaim the ascendancy it believes is
He looks at my chair then back at us and now my its birthright. The words may be stolen from Tupac
mom and I start really cracking up. Then he gets or funneled through poetry, “spread” in extempo-
this fucked-up smile that’s pure rage. Like how raneous argument, shouted in a blind rage, or com-
dare you cunts laugh at me. But I give him the pletely nonsensical. Even when babbling (Adam’s
stepdaughter smile back and hold it, hold it. We and Jonathan’s mode during panic attacks or flights
basically have a staring contest and my mom’s of fancy) or intentionally dissembling (Evanson’s
laughter gets all nervous until finally his face debate specialty), the men dominate the spaces they
relaxes and it’s all a big joke. occupy. It seems sort of ridiculous until you remem-
ber the specter haunting this book, an extempora-
O U N G A D A M D O E S N ’ T understand neous wonder whose incoherent babbling serves

Y why she’s telling him this story, but

Lerner makes the connection explicit.
Though Adam is sensitive and well intentioned,
to dissemble, deceive, distract. In America, Lerner
reminds us, you can sound like an idiot all you want,
but if you master the spread, you rule.
he exists on a spectrum of men who use language
not to communicate or connect, but to indulge in Jordan Kisner is a writer in New York City.
ecstatic solipsism, or to effectively erase the per-
son they’re addressing. When they are challenged,
they explode. Throughout the novel, the women
who love them gently try to persuade them to slow BLUEBIRD
down, make sense, and shut up, with little lasting
effect. Adam’s mother, Jane, receives phone calls
The house was strange, even for a summer house,
from male anti-fans, angry about some feminist
element in her books. They empty streams of abuse cold somehow, the wraparound screened porch
and death threats into the phone until she interrupts almost cut off by the trees, though the trees, off
them in an innocent tone to say the connection is
and on, would come alive with bluebirds, birds
bad; could they please speak up? Can they say that
again, but louder? She prods “the Men” until they’re so tame, they would follow on the mountain path
shouting or, unwilling to shout, forced to hang up. It down to the small home lake, chur-wi, tru-ly,
works for the moment, but then more men call. The
chur-wi, tru-ly, over and over, in bird-English.
male vitriol seems inexorable.
In The Topeka School, women are neither
geniuses of language nor abusers of it in the man- Had I ever seen a bluebird so bright a blue?—
ner of men. They are often better, more profound Stanley Plumly (1939–
a blue easily confused with happiness. I didn’t
communicators (with her books, Jane reaches 2019) was the author of
more people than any other character does), but numerous books of poetry even know a bluebird was a thrush. I knew
they exist here as men’s linguistic and emotional and prose, including
and loved you, that was enough. These blues,
foils. The working class, too, seems mostly tan- Against Sunset (2016)
and Posthumous Keats: as you called them, were yours: They seemed
gential: The anger of midwestern, edu cated,
A Personal Biography
middle- class men and their blue-collar counter- (2008). His posthumous
to fly in and out of your hands. The lake was one
parts blurs together, even if it’s expressed in dif- collection, Middle of those mirrorlike lakes. And the house was yours.
ferent vocabularies. Race goes largely unexplored, Distance, will be
other than that all of these Kansan teenagers like published next year.
to rap and make gang signs, believing that they’re — Stanley Plumly

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Little wonder that women writers have felt the

need to weigh in over the centuries. A few took an
upbeat approach. At the age of 41, having just given
birth to her sixth child, the suffragist Elizabeth
Cady Stanton wrote her friend Susan B. Antho-
ny in 1857 to say that their best activist years lay
ahead. “We shall not be in our prime before fifty
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& after that we shall be good for twenty years at
least.” Others were less sanguine. At 54, writing
The Secret Power of her memoir, Simone de Beauvoir gloomily pre-

Menopause pared to say “goodbye to all those things I once

enjoyed”; women, Freud had taught her, become
miserable and sexless as they age. Betty Friedan,
Gloria Steinem, Helen Gurley Brown, Germaine
The end of fertility doesn’t mark the start of decline. Greer—all warily chronicled their maturity, as of
BY LIZA MUNDY course did the writer who invented the concept of
“passage,” Gail Sheehy. Nora Ephron felt bad about
her neck, and her anxiety spawned a best seller.
Even now it’s hard for a woman not to dread the
consequences of moving out of youth. One of the
wryest recent meditations is an episode of Inside
Amy Schumer, in which the eponymous comedian

D
ON’ T TRY TO TELL THIS to a mother sitting in the happens upon three of her comedic icons—Tina
bleachers during a four-hour swim meet; or enduring a Fey, Patricia Arquette, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—
birthday party involving toddlers and craft projects; or picnicking in a meadow. They are celebrating Louis-
resting in an armchair on a peaceful evening, savoring Dreyfus’s “last fuckable day,” as adjudicated by the
the heft of a tiny body and the scent of an infant’s freshly media, Fey explains. Schumer, feigning astonish-
washed hair. Interminable or sweetly languid though ment, asks whether the media do this to men. The
they may feel in the moment, the childbearing years are trio laughs and laughs.
startlingly brief. Fertility, which typically ends in a woman’s mid-40s, occupies
less than half of her adult life. And then, if she’s lucky, she has 30 or 40 years in H R E E N E W B O O K S about post-
which to do something else.
Most people don’t realize how unusual humans are, in the way that non-
reproductive females (how shall I put this?) persist. Females of most other spe-
T menopausal womanhood show that the
conversation is changing. For the first
time, The New York Times noted early this year, a
cies can bear young until they die, and many do, or at best enjoy a brief respite sizable cohort of women is moving into the sixth
from breeding before death. This is true not only of creatures you might expect, and seventh decades of life with a surfeit of ener-
such as rabbits, but also of long-lived mammals such as Asian elephants, and of gy and workplace experience. Women are better
primates such as gorillas and chimps. The odd exceptions—the Japanese aphid, educated than men. Many spend early middle age
for example, enters a “glue bomb” stage after her reproductive phase, ready to constrained by work-life challenges, like athletes
immobilize a colony intruder—only prove the rule. training with ankle weights. Once the weights come
The mystery of why women go on and on and on after their procreative off, they have the muscle to run. Literally: The 2020
function has ceased has occupied some of the great minds of the ages. I am slate of female presidential candidates is Exhibit A.
sorry to report that many of those minds have not been forward-thinking. The landscape looks different due to the #MeToo
“It is a well-known fact … that after women have lost their genital function movement as well. In some ways, it has divided
their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration” and they become women by generation, yet even older women who
“quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing,” Sigmund Freud pronounced. The may regret a return to the idea of feminine fragility
male-dominated medical community of the mid-20th century was similarly are overjoyed to see workplace predators toppled.
dismissive. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal The unseating of men like Charlie Rose and Matt
women are castrates,” opined the gynecologist Robert Wilson, who elabo- Lauer has opened the way for women like Chris-
rated on this theme in his 1966 best seller, Feminine Forever. The influential tiane Amanpour and Gayle King to occupy top
book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to spots, where they exemplify what 60-something
market hormone-replacement therapy. really looks like: pretty freaking great.
Even the architects of the sexual revolution were fixated on fertility as The current conversation is also informed by
a marker of femininity, an attitude that seems doubly unfair coming from evolutionary biology, which evaluates traits based
the people who gave us the pill. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of on their reproductive purpose. Given that meno-
being a woman stops,” wrote the psychiatrist David Reuben in 1969 in Every- pause is nonreproductive by definition, biologists
thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, adding that consider it a “big evolutionary puzzle,” the novelist
the postmenopausal woman comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or Darcey Steinke writes in her memoir, Flash Count
rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.” Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life.

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According to the prevailing view, a human female their birth gender—not that the empathy brings
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possesses all the eggs she will have while still in the much relief.
womb; the number promptly begins diminishing, Steinke also identifies with one of the few other
and by her mid-40s, the remaining ova have deteri- species that enjoy a long postmenopausal life: killer
orated. To an evolutionary biologist, this is interest- whales. In the ocean, nonreproductive females play
ing and weird. To Steinke, it was miserable and hard. an important role. With the wisdom of years, they
Her book is lyrical but a bit depressing, because she guide their pod to the best salmon. Steinke kayaks in
herself was depressed. waters off the coast of Seattle, hoping to commune,
Some women experience few symptoms during and is rewarded with a magnificent breaching. “The
menopause, but Steinke suffered nearly two awful wild matriarchs have given me hope,” she writes.
years of hot flashes, acute episodes that were like “They are neither frail nor apprehensive, but in every
“four-minute surprise anxiety attacks.” She sensed way leaders of their communities.”
mortality stalking her: “For the first time, I feel I
have a time stamp, an expiration date.” She writes HAT MENOPAU SE MAY ENABLE a new
vividly and a little wistfully about sex, mourning
her lost desirability, as she sees it, and the wan-
ing of her own desire. She feels angry; she yells at
T role and stature for women is the central
argument of The Slow Moon Climbs: The
Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause, by
her husband. “Early times of sexual frenzy seem Susan Mattern. A historian at the University of
almost impossible now.” Georgia, she steps away from the personal to con-
Every woman is of course entitled to—can’t sider “humanity’s massive primeval past.” Once
escape—her own response to menopause. But upon a time, scientists assumed that women (and
Steinke’s melancholy reflections sound a bit men) were designed to live to about 50, and that
retrograde, as if she can’t escape those insuffer- menopause was an accident, a by-product of medi-
able doctors, the Wilsons and the Reubens, with cal progress. Yet even in primitive societies, it turns
their pompous pronouncements about the wreck- out, a portion of women lived well past middle age,
age that remains when estrogen, like a tide, drains which suggests that menopause is a feature, not a
away. “Without hormones my femininity is fray- bug, of human evolution.
ing,” she writes. In a transitional state herself, she Mattern has her own audacious theory as to why:
identifies with people who are transitioning out of Menopause is a key to our success as a species. In
humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, tribes needed a
balance of producers and consumers—people who
brought in food, and people who ate it. Most adults
did both. Not so children, who remain dependent
during the long period of brain development. Mem-
bers who could bring in food for more than one per-
son without adding to the population were crucial.
Enter the postmenopausal female. The anthro-
pologist Kristen Hawkes studied a modern forag-
ing tribe, the Hadza, and found that an energetic
group of older women brought “more food into
camp than any other age and sex category.” This
paved the way for the Grandmother Hypothesis:
Not only do older women serve as food producers,
but they are providers of “allocare,” communal
child care. In the Hadza and other tribes, Mattern
writes, women “reach peak foraging productivity
in their 50s and continue to produce a caloric sur-
plus through old age.” She points out that tribes
have been known to kill members who can’t con-
tribute. If grandmothers aren’t murdered, she rea-
sons, that is because they are useful.
Mattern makes the case that menopause prob-
ably emerged in humans when we diverged from
chimpanzees millions of years ago. It gave Homo
sapiens an advantage over other species of hom-
inids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, she
proposes. Limiting childbearing to younger women,
whose offspring could be cared for by older women,
enabled the species to bounce back from an

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epidemic or a crisis: Those fertile women could As the white-collar workplace expanded in the
BOOKS
reproduce quickly, but no woman could do so industrial era, women were shouldered out of it,
forever, sparing the tribe the risk of overpopulation. eroding female social power across the age range.
With the advent of farming, menopause still served Older black women were a mainstay of early civil-
an important purpose. The most prosperous time rights struggles, but the contributions of activists
for a peasant family was postmenopausal, Mat- such as Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod
tern argues, when older children could help and Bethune were sidelined, the credit given to younger
the family no longer had new members to sup- men. And women’s return to the workforce during
port. Nowadays, with fewer children and more World War II gave way to postwar pressure to depart
resources, she brightly adds, “women past meno- it, which delivered mixed results for older women.
pause, who historically used their energy surplus to In the 1960s and ’70s, important strides were made
help their families survive, can now use it in other thanks to female workers such as flight attendants,
ways.” While Steinke experienced menopause as who filed class-action lawsuits protesting rules that
a shutting-down, Mattern sees it as an opening-up. obliged them to retire if they married or reached
age 35. Yet as women’s earning potential grew along
O T H V I E W S A R E T R U E , as the New with their work span and sexual freedom, the more

B York Times columnist Gail Collins shows in

No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older
Women in American History, which spans the colo-
senior among them faced newly corrosive pressures.
It may not be a coincidence that Wilson, Reuben,
and their ilk pushed the perils of “the menopause”
nial era to the present. Her takeaway is that older during this era. The centrality of sexual liberty to
women fare well when circumstances permit them the women’s movement arguably left second-wave
FLASH COUNT DIARY:
to be productive: “If you’re important economically, MENOPAUSE AND
feminists more vulnerable to insecurity about their
you’re important.” Providing allocare is well and THE VINDICATION OF bodies and looks. Susan Mattern proposes that the
good, but “eras in which older women were able to NATURAL LIFE very concept of a menopausal syndrome was the
earn money or increase their family assets were eras DARCEY STEINKE invention of a culture that aimed to psychologi-
FSG
in which they were … popular,” Collins writes drily. cally weaken women in a strong period of life—at
Tracing their shifting status, she observes that a historical moment when female power was rising.
during the colonial period, women continued spin- “Dominant groups,” she observes, “can be very cre-
ning, weaving, and the like into old age. Physically, ative in inventing new ways of oppressing people.”
of course, the stage could be hell—pelvic disorders, Yet I’m struck, reading these accounts, that Stan-
childbirth damage, rotting teeth. Older enslaved ton intuited what remains true today: Women have
women were exiled and horribly neglected. Yet a different life trajectory than men, and the place of
often, the only thing worse than being a woman menopause in it is liberating in a way that’s worth
was being a man: Male mortality was higher, and considering. To describe a passage of life, even a
widowhood could be a blessing—widows, at least painful one, can itself be a form of empowerment.
white ones, could own property (unlike married Men, too, feel loss and insecurity as they age, and
women). Then, as the country became more pop- perhaps could use a map of sorts themselves. Cross-
THE SLOW MOON
ulated, men monopolized the jobs. Women had CLIMBS: THE
ing the midlife point, many struggle to recalibrate
less of an economic purpose, and they lost status. SCIENCE, HISTORY, professional ambition (as Arthur Brooks’s article
Collins highlights the great age of social reform AND MEANING OF in The Atlantic’s July issue revealed) and to build
in the mid-19th century as another period when MENOPAUSE stronger social and intimate ties. Online-dating
SUSAN MATTERN
older women enjoyed prestige, though less be- sites betray men’s own anxiety about physical
Princeton University Press
cause they had economic power than because they decline (“My friends say I look much younger than
wielded moral authority. Notably, they used that 60!”) and suggest that many men are perfectly will-
authority to make the case for, among other things, ing to date women across the age range. The sex
female clout well into later life. A standout among books are right: Men aren’t as picky about women’s
women’s-rights advocates, Elizabeth Cady Stanton bodies as women fear. Men crave sex, but they also
argued that women could occupy different spheres crave conversation, a partner with confidence and
at different life stages, moving from narrow domes- achievements. Even Simone de Beauvoir changed
tic concerns to community-minded platforms. her mind. In The Coming of Age, a book about the
Stanton, Collins writes, “believed that menopause experience of getting older, she wrote that she had
had redirected all her ‘vital forces’ from her repro- crossed a “frontier” and found peace. She had also
ductive organs to her brain.” Vital she and Susan taken a younger lover. “It has been far less sombre,”
B. Anthony certainly were as they barnstormed the she reported, “than I had foreseen.”
country, made speeches on tabletops, played cards NO STOPPING US NOW:
THE ADVENTURES
with soldiers. Their age allowed them to “have Liza Mundy is the author, most recently, of Code
OF OLDER WOMEN IN
adventures.” At the same time, one observer wrote, AMERICAN HISTORY
Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women
“stately Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity GAIL COLLINS Code Breakers of World War II. She is a senior
by a comfortable look of motherliness.” Little, Brown fellow at New America.

46 O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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“[The Years That Matter Most ] should be necessary reading for every
student, professor, administrator, and trustee in this country
interested in what radical revision looks like.”
— KIESE LAYMON, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

“A deeply moral guide

“Gorgeously reported.
to understanding the
Vividly written . . .
situation of children in
Paul Tough jumps
our heartless meritocracy.
skillfully between deeply
The Years That Matter Most
engaging personal
is a great book that should
narratives and the bigger
start a necessary conversation
truths of higher
about the high cost of the
education.”
race to the top.”

—GEORGE PACKER, — IRA GLASS,

host, This American Life
author of The Unwinding:
An Inner History of the New America

Paul Tough, best-selling author of How Children Succeed,

returns with a powerful, mind-changing inquiry
into higher education in the United States.

ON SALE NOW hmhbooks.com

Also available in e-book and audiobook from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK

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Mullen told me recently that service in this administration

comes with a unique set of hazards, and that Mattis was not
unaware of these hazards. “I think back to his ‘Hold the line’
talk, the one that was captured on video,” Mullen said, refer-
ring to an impromptu 2017 encounter between Mattis and U.S.
troops stationed in Jordan that became a YouTube sensation.
In the video, Mattis tells the soldiers, “Our country right now,
it’s got problems we don’t have in the military. You just hold the
line until our country gets back to understanding and respect-
ing each other and showing it.” Mullen said: “He obviously
found himself in a challenging environment.”
Mullen’s concern for Mattis was shared by many other
generals and admirals, active duty and retired, who worried
that sustained exposure to Trump would destroy their friend,
who is perhaps the most revered living marine. Mattis had
maintained his dignity in perilous moments, even as his fel-
low Cabinet officials were relinquishing theirs. At a ritualized
praise session at the White House in June 2017, as the vice pres-
ident and other Cabinet members abased themselves before
the president, Mattis would offer only this generic—but, given
the circumstances, dissident—thought: “It’s an honor to repre-
sent the men and women of the Department of Defense. We
are grateful for the sacrifices our people are making in order
to strengthen our military, so our diplomats always negotiate
from a position of strength.”
To some of his friends, though, Mattis was beginning to place
his reputation at risk. He had, in the fall of 2018, acquiesced to
Trump’s deployment of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and
he was becoming contemptuous of a Pentagon press corps
that was trying to perform its duty in difficult circumstances.
By last December, Mattis was facing the most urgent cri-
sis of his nearly two years in the Cabinet. Trump had just
announced, contrary to his administration’s stated policy,
that he would withdraw all American troops from Syria,
where they were fighting the Islamic State. This sudden (and
ultimately reversed) policy shift posed a dire challenge to
Mattis’s beliefs. He had spent much of his career as a fighter
in the Middle East. He had battled Islamist extremists and
understood the danger they represented. He believed that a
retreat from Syria would threaten the security of American
N DE C E M B E R 19 of last year, Admiral Michael Mullen, the troops elsewhere in the region, and would especially threaten
former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met James Mattis America’s allies in the anti-ISIS coalition. These allies would,
for lunch at the Pentagon. Mattis was a day away from resigning in Mattis’s view, feel justifiably betrayed by Trump’s decision.
as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, but he tends to keep his “I had no idea that he was on the precipice of resigning,”
own counsel, and he did not suggest to Mullen, his friend and Mullen told me. “But I know how strongly he believes in alli-
former commander, that he was thinking of leaving. ances. The practical reasons become moral reasons. Most of
But Mullen did think Mattis appeared unusually afflicted us believe that we’ve moved on as a country from being able
that day. Mattis often seemed burdened in his role. His aides to do it alone. We may have had dreams about this in 1992 or
and friends say he found the president to be of limited cogni- 1993, but we’ve moved on. We have to have friends and sup-
tive ability, and of generally dubious character. Now Mattis porters. And we’re talking about Jim Mattis. He’s not going to
was becoming more and more isolated in the administration, change his view on this. He’s not going to leave friends and
especially since the defenestration of his closest Cabinet ally, allies on the battlefield.”
the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, several months That afternoon, Mattis called John Kelly, the former
earlier. Mattis and Tillerson had together smothered some Marine general who was then nearing the end of his calami-
of Trump’s more extreme and imprudent ideas. But now Mat- tous run as Trump’s chief of staff. “I need an hour with the
tis was operating without cover. Trump was turning on him boss,” Mattis said.
publicly; two months earlier, he had speculated that Mattis The next day, he met Trump in the Oval Office. Mattis
might be a Democrat and said, in reference to NATO, “I think made his case for keeping troops in Syria. Trump rejected
I know more about it than he does.” (Mattis, as a Marine gen- his arguments. Thirty minutes into the conversation, Mattis
eral, once served as the supreme allied commander in charge of told the president, “You’re going to have to get the next sec-
NATO transformation.) retary of defense to lose to ISIS. I’m not going to do it.” He

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handed Trump his resignation letter, a letter that would soon

become one of the most famous documents of the Trump presi-
dency thus far.
Here is where I am compelled to note that I did not learn
any of these details from Mattis himself. Nor did I learn them
from his new book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, which he
wrote with the former Marine officer Bing West. The book is an
instructive and entertaining leadership manual for executives,
managers, and military officers. Mattis is a gifted storyteller,
and his advice will be useful to anyone who runs anything. The
book is not, however, an account of his time in service to the
45th president.
I’ve known Mattis for many years, and we spent several hours
in conversation this summer, at his home in Richland, Washing-
ton, and at the Hoover Institution, on the campus of Stanford
University. In these conversations, we discussed the qualities of MANY GENERALS AND
effective leadership, the workings of command-and-feedback
loops, the fragility of what he calls the American experiment,
A DM I RA L S WOR R I E D T H AT
fishing the Columbia River, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, S US TA I N E D E X P O S U R E
and many other topics. But about Trump he was mainly silent. I
caught glimpses of anger and incredulity, to be sure. But Mattis
TO T RUMP WOULD
is a disciplined man. While discipline is an admirable quality, in DE S T ROY M AT T I S, W HO
my conversations with Mattis I found it exasperating, because I
believe that the American people should hear his answer to this
IS PERHAPS THE MOST
question: Is Donald Trump fit for command? REVERED LIVING MARINE.
He should answer the question well before November 3, 2020.
Mattis is in an unparalleled position to provide a definitive answer.
During moments of high tension with North Korea, he had wor-
ried that being out of reach of the president for more than a few
seconds constituted a great risk. No one, with the possible excep- much opportunity as possible to defend the country. They still
tion of John Kelly, has a better understanding of Donald Trump’s have the responsibility of protecting this great big experiment of
capacities and inclinations, particularly in the realm of national ours. I know the malevolence some people feel for this country,
security, than James Mattis. and we have to give the people who are protecting us some time
I made this argument to him during an interview at his home, to carry out their duties without me adding my criticism to the
a modest townhouse in a modest development in a modest town. cacophony that is right now so poisonous.”
Mattis, who is 69, is single, and has always been so. His house “But duty manifests in other ways,” I argued. “You have a First
serves mainly as a library of the literature of war and diplomacy, Amendment guarantee to speak your mind—”
and as a museum of ceremonial daggers, the residue of a lifetime “Absolutely.”
of official visits to army headquarters across the Middle East. The “And don’t you have a duty to warn the country if it is
decor reminded me of one of his sayings: “Be polite, be profes- endangered by its leader?”
sional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” “I didn’t cook up a convenient tradition here,” he said. “You
I knew that this would be a Gallipoli of an interview, and that don’t endanger the country by attacking the elected commander
Mattis would be playing the role of the Ottoman gunners. But I in chief. I may not like a commander in chief one fricking bit, but
had to try. our system puts the commander in chief there, and to further
“When you go out on book tour,” I said, “people are going weaken him when we’re up against real threats—I mean, we
to want you to say things you don’t want to say.” I mentioned a could be at war on the Korean peninsula, every time they start
scene from the book, one that concerned an ultimately success- launching something.”
ful effort to untangle a traffic jam of armored vehicles in Iraq. I The subject of North Korea represented my best chance to
noted that while this story is an edifying case study in effective wrench a direct answer from Mattis. I had collected some of
leadership, it is not necessarily the sort of story that people want Trump’s more repellent tweets, and read aloud the one that I
from him right now. thought might overwhelm his defenses. It is a tweet almost with-
“Yeah,” he said. out peer in the canon:
“You’re prepared for that? For people wanting you to talk about
Trump?” North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed
He paused. some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence
“Do you know the French concept of devoir de réserve?” he that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled
asked. when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, &
I did not, I said. worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?
“The duty of silence. If you leave an administration, you owe
some silence. When you leave an administration over clear pol- Mattis looked at his hands. Finally he said, “Any Marine gen-
icy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as eral or any other senior servant of the people of the United States

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General James Mattis, photographed in his office at Stanford University, June 10, 2019

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would find that, to use a mild euphemism, counterproductive My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-
and beneath the dignity of the presidency.” eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are
He went on, “Let me put it this way. I’ve written an entire strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion
book built on the principles of respecting your troops, respect- in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an
ing each other, respecting your allies. Isn’t it pretty obvious international order that is most conducive to our security, pros-
how I would feel about something like that?” perity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the
It is. When Call Sign Chaos is refracted through the prism of solidarity of our alliances.
our hallucinatory political moment, it becomes something more Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense
than a primer for middle managers. The book is many things, apart whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other
from a meditation on leadership. It is the autobiography of a war subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.
fighter, and also an extended argument for a forceful, confident,
alliance-centered U.S. foreign policy. Read another way, though, “I had no choice but to leave,” he told me. “That’s why the
it is mainly a 100,000-word subtweet. letter is in the book. I want people to understand why I couldn’t
When I mentioned this notion to Mattis, he looked at me curi- stay. I’ve been informed by four decades of experience, and I
ously. He is not closely acquainted with the language of social just couldn’t connect the dots anymore.”
media. When I explained what a subtweet is, he said, “Well, you Later, during a long walk along the Columbia River, I gave
saw that my resignation letter is in the book.” it another go, asking him to describe in broad terms the nature
It comes near the end. Each chapter contains a lesson about of Trump’s leadership abilities. “I’m happy to talk about leader-
personal leadership, or American leadership, or some combina- ship,” he said. “My model—one of my models—is George Wash-
tion of the two: “Coach and encourage, don’t berate, least of all in ington. Washington’s idea of leadership was that first you listen,
public.” “Public humiliation does not change our friends’ behav- then you learn, then you help, and only then do you lead. It is a
ior or attitudes in a positive way.” “Operations occur at the speed somewhat boring progression, but it’s useful. What you try to do
of trust.” “Nations with allies thrive, and those without wither.” in that learning phase is find common ground.”
And then comes the resignation letter, a repudiation of a man “So on one end of the spectrum is George Washington, and at
who models none of Mattis’s principles: the other end is Donald Trump?”
Mattis smiled. “It’s a beautiful river, isn’t it?” he said. “I used
While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free to swim it all the time when I was a kid. Strong current.”
world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effec-

I
tively without maintaining strong alliances and showing N MID -AUGUST I checked in with Mattis, to see whether
respect to those allies … events over the summer—Trump’s attack on four congress-
women of color; his attack on Representative Elijah
Cummings; his attacks on other minorities; his endorsement-
by-tweet of the North Korean dictator’s “great and beautiful
vision” for his country; the El Paso massacre, conducted by
a white supremacist whose words echoed those often used
by Trump and his supporters when discussing immigration—
might have led him to reconsider his decorous approach to pub-
lic criticism of the president.
About El Paso he said: “You know, on that day we were all His-
panics. That’s the way we have to think about this. If it happens
to any one of us, it happens to all of us.”
But about this treacherous political moment?
“You’ve got to avoid looking at what’s happening in isolation
from everything else,” he said. “We can’t hold what Trump is
doing in isolation. We’ve got to address the things that put him
“   ‘ W I T H M A L I C E T O WA R D there in the first place.” Mattis speaks often about affection:
NONE, WITH CHARITY the affection that commanders feel for their soldiers, and that
soldiers ought to feel for one another—and the affection that
F O R A L L ,’   ” M A T T I S S A I D . Americans should feel for one another and for their country
“L I N C OLN SA I D T H AT but often, these days, don’t. “ ‘With malice toward none, with
charity for all,’ ” he said. “Lincoln said that in the middle of a
IN THE MIDDLE OF war. In the middle of a war! He could see beyond the hatred of
A WA R . I N T H E M I D D L E O F the moment.”
I thought back to what he’d told me earlier in the summer,
A WA R ! H E C O U L D S E E when I had asked him to describe something Trump could say or
B E YO N D T H E H AT R E D O F do that would trigger him to launch a frontal attack on the presi-
dent. He’d demurred, as I had expected. But then he’d issued
T H E M O M E N T.” a caveat: “There is a period in which I owe my silence. It’s not
eternal. It’s not going to be forever.”

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic.

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CAUGHT BETWEEN A BRUTAL MERITOCRACY

AND A RADICAL NEW PROGRESSIVISM, A PARENT
TRIES TO DO RIGHT BY HIS CHILDREN WHILE
NAVIGATING NEW YORK CITY’S SCHOOLS.

BY
GEORGE PACKER

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL SPELLA

56 O CTO B E R 20 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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WHEN
THE
CULTURE
WAR
COMES
FOR THE
KIDS
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1.TO BE A PARENT IS TO BE COMPROMISED.

You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments
can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your
child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—
you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes
revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The orga-
nized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—
find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.
Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d
been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school
with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance stu-
dios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife
and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.
Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The
moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first repre-
sentational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy
and inscrutable smile.
Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund man-
ager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the
area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance
against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by
gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.
Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the
roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said,
“It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on inter-
views with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he
reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor
to worry about.
When the rejection letter arrived, I took it hard as a comment on our son,
until my wife informed me that the woman with the frozen smile had actu-
ally been interviewing us. We were the ones who’d been rejected. We con-
soled ourselves that the school wasn’t right for our family, or we for it. It was
a school for amoral finance people.
At a second private school, my wife watched intently with other parents
behind a one-way mirror as our son engaged in group play with other tod-
dlers, their lives secured or ruined by every share or shove. He was put on
the wait list.
The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthink-
ing devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to
extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion, is not democracy, which often
seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward
talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its
code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from gener-
ation to generation. The pressure of meritocracy made us apply to private
schools when our son was 2—not because we wanted him to attend private
preschool, but because, in New York City, where we live, getting him into a
good public kindergarten later on would be even harder, and if we failed, by
that point most of the private-school slots would be filled. As friends who’d
started months earlier warned us, we were already behind the curve by
the time he drew his picture of the moon. We were maximizing options—
hedging, like the finance guy, like many families we knew—already tracing
the long line that would lead to the horizon of our son’s future.
The mood of meritocracy is anxiety—the low-grade panic when you
show up a few minutes late and all the seats are taken. New York City, with
its dense population, stratified social ladder, and general pushiness, holds
a fun-house mirror up to meritocracy. Only New York would force me to
wake up early one Saturday morning in February, put on my parka and wool
hat, and walk half a mile in the predawn darkness to register our son, then
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just 17 months old, for nursery school. I arrived to find In his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel
myself, at best, the 30th person in a line that led from Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enter-
the locked front door of the school up the sidewalk. prises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while
Registration was still two hours off, and places would producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the pros-
be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the pects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits
front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples
They had spent the night outside. make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals
I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achieve-
feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who ment gap is almost unbridgeable.
made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions
cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.
hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound
together in a mad, heroic project that we could nei-

2.
ther escape nor understand, driven by supreme devo-
tion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school
called Huggs.
New York’s distortions let you see the workings of
meritocracy in vivid extremes. But the system itself—
structured on the belief that, unlike in a collectivized N O T L O N G A F T E R he drew the picture of the moon, our son was
society, individual achievement should be the basis interviewed at another private school, one of the most highly coveted in New
for rewards, and that, unlike in an inherited aristoc- York. It was the end of 2009, early in President Barack Obama’s first term,
racy, those rewards must be earned again by each and the teachers were wearing brightly colored HOPE pendants that they had
new generation—is all-American. True meritocracy crafted with their preschoolers. I suppressed disapproval of the partisan dis-
came closest to realization with the rise of standard- play (what if the face hanging from the teachers’ necks were Sarah Palin’s?)
ized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and reassured myself that the school had artistic and progressive values. It
and the opening of Ivy League universities to the recruited the children of writers and other “creatives.” And our son’s moni-
best and brightest, including women and minorities. tored group play was successful. He was accepted.
A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 chil-
recent decades, the system has hardened into a new dren; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment
class structure in which professionals pass on their bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry,
money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to math theory, taught by passionate scholars. Once in, unless a kid seriously
their children, while less educated families fall fur- messed up, he faced little chance of ever having to leave, until, 15 years on,
ther behind, with little chance of seeing their chil- the school matched its graduates with top universities where it had close
dren move up. relations with admissions offices. Students wouldn’t have to endure the
When parents on the fortunate ledge of this repeated trauma of applying to middle and high schools that New York forces
chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they on public-school children. Our son had a place near the very front of the line,
see a dim world of processed food, shielded from the meritocracy at its
obesity, divorce, addiction, online- most ruthless. There was only one
education scams, stagnant wages, competition, and he had already
outsourcing, rising morbidity rates— prevailed, in monitored group play.
and they pledge to do whatever PLACES AT THE Two years later we transferred
they can to keep their children from him to a public kindergarten.
PRESCHOOL WERE
falling. They’ll stay married, cook We had just had our second child,
organic family meals, read aloud AWARDED ON A a girl. The private school was about
at bedtime every night, take out a FIRST-COME, FIRST- to start raising its fee steeply every
crushing mortgage on a house in a S E R V E D B A S I S . year into the indefinite future. As
highly rated school district, pay for AT THE FRONT OF tuition passed $50,000, the cre-
music teachers and test-prep tutors, THE LINE, PARENTS atives would dwindle and give way
and donate repeatedly to over- WERE LYING IN to the financials. I calculated that
endowed alumni funds. The battle SLEEPING BAGS. the precollege educations of our
to get their children a place near two children would cost more than
THEY HAD SPENT THE
the front of the line begins before $1.5 million after taxes. This was the
conception and continues well into NIGHT OUTSIDE. practical reason to leave.
their kids’ adult lives. At the root of But there was something else—
all this is inequality—and inequality another claim on us. The current
produces a host of morbid symp- phrase for it is social justice. I’d rather
toms, including a frantic scramble use the word democracy, because it
for status among members of a professional class conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens.
whose most prized acquisition is not a Mercedes No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea
plug-in hybrid SUV or a family safari to Maasai Mara than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools”
but an acceptance letter from a university with a established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the
top-10 U.S. News & World Report ranking. knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government,

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while “embracing children of all religious,

social, and ethnic backgrounds.”
The claim of democracy doesn’t negate
meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One
values equality and openness, the other
achievement and security. Neither can
answer every need. To lose sight of either
makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring
meritocracy and democracy into a relation
where they can coexist and even flourish.
My wife and I are products of public
schools. Whatever torments they inflicted
on our younger selves, we believed in them.
We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms
that resembled the city where we lived. We
didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside
our bubble—mostly white, highly and expen-
sively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear
21,000 words a day acquire the unearned con-
fidence of insular advantage and feel, even
unconsciously, that they’re better than other
people’s kids.
Public schools are a public good. Our city’s
are among the most racially and economi-
cally segregated in America. The gaps in pro-
ficiency that separate white and Asian from
black and Latino students in math and English
are immense and growing. Some advocates
argue that creating more integrated schools
would reduce those gaps. Whether or not the
data conclusively prove it, to be half-conscious
in America is to know that schools of concen-
trated poverty are likely to doom the children
who attend them. This knowledge is what
made our decision both political and fraught.
Our “zoned” elementary school, two
blocks from our house, was forever improving
on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough.
Friends had pulled their kids out after sec-
ond or third grade, so when we took the tour
we insisted, against the wishes of the school
guide, on going upstairs from the kindergarten
classrooms and seeing the upper grades, too.
Students were wandering around the rooms
without focus, the air was heavy with listless-
ness, there seemed to be little learning going
on. Each year the school was becoming a few percentage points less poor and That year, when my son turned 5, attending day-
less black as the neighborhood gentrified, but most of the white kids were time tours and evening open houses became a sec-
attending a “gifted and talented” school within the school, where more was ond job. We applied to eight or nine public schools.
expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating We applied to far-flung schools that we’d heard took
at the same time. a few kids from out of district, only to find that there
One day I was at a local playground with our son when I fell into conver- was a baby boom on and the seats had already been
sation with an elderly black woman who had lived in the neighborhood a claimed by zoned families. At one new school that
long time and understood all about our school dilemma, which was becom- had a promising reputation, the orientation talk was
ing the only subject that interested me. She scoffed at our “zoned” school—it clotted with education jargon and the toilets in the
had been badly run for so long that it would need years to become passable. boys’ bathroom with shit, but we would have taken a
I mentioned a second school, half a dozen blocks away, that was probably slot if one had been offered.
available if we applied. Her expression turned to alarm. “Don’t send him Among the schools where we went begging was
there,” she said. “That’s a failure school. That school will always be a failure one a couple of miles from our house that admit-
school.” It was as if an eternal curse had been laid on it, beyond anyone’s ted children from several districts. This school
agency or remedy. The school was mostly poor and black. We assumed it was economically and racially mixed by design,
would fail our children, because we knew it was failing other children. with demographics that came close to matching

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the city’s population: 38 percent white, 29 percent the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in
black, 24 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian. That fact desk, scuffed yellow walls, fluorescent lights with
alone made the school a rarity in New York. Two- toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no
thirds of the students performed at or above grade air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of
level on standardized tests, which made the school anyone who turned to government for a basic service.
one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we The bamboo flooring and state-of-the-art science
later learned that there were large gaps, as much labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a
as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier, special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school
white students and the poorer, Latino and black felt utterly porous to it.
students). And the school appeared to be a happy I had barely encountered an American public
place. Its pedagogical model was progressive— school since leaving high school. That was in the late
“child centered”—based on learning through experi- 1970s, in the Bay Area, the same year that the tax
ence. Classes seemed loose, but real work was going revolt began its long evisceration of California’s stel-
on. Hallways were covered with well-written com- lar education system. Back then, nothing was asked of
positions. Part of the playground was devoted to parents except that they pay their taxes and send their
a vegetable garden. This combination of diversity, children to school, and everyone I knew went to the
achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard- local public schools. Now the local public schools—at
of in New York public schools. This school squared least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t
the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s function without parents. Donations at our school
dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish
We got wait-listed. teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for
The summer before our son was to enter kinder- furniture. Because many of the families were poor,
garten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter our PTA had a hard time meeting its annual fund-
making the case that our family and the school were raising goal of $100,000, and some years the prin-
a perfect match called with the news that our son had cipal had to send out a message warning parents
gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes that science or art was about to be cut. Not many
to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a blocks away, elementary schools zoned for wealthy
half of them. neighborhoods routinely raised $1 million—these
I can see now that a strain of selfishness and van- schools were called “private publics.” Schools in
ity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cos- poorer neighborhoods struggled to bring in $30,000.
seted New York of successful professionals. I had no This enormous gap was just one way inequality pur-
authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, sued us into the public-school system.
among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s We threw ourselves into the adventure of the new
very different groups that our son was about to enter. school. We sent in class snacks when it was our week,
I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a I chaperoned a field trip to study pigeons in a local
token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic park, and my wife cooked chili for an autumn fund-
pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report raiser. The school’s sense of mission extended to a
card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school much larger community, and so there was an appeal
bus to an institution whose name began with P.S. for money when a fire drove a family from a different
A few parents at the private school reacted as school out of its house, and a food drive after Hur-
if we’d given away a winning lottery ticket, or even ricane Sandy ravaged the New York area, and a shoe
harmed our son—such was the brittle nature of meri- drive for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We were ready
tocracy. And to be honest, in the coming years, when to do just about anything to get involved. When my
we heard that sixth graders at the private school were wife came in one day to help out in class, she was
writing papers on The Odyssey, or when we watched enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the
our son and his friends sweat through competitive underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another
public-middle-school admissions, we wondered whether we’d committed class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit,
an unforgivable sin and went back over all our reasons for changing schools and that was it.)
until we felt better. The private school we’d left behind had let par-
Before long our son took to saying, “I’m a public-school person.” When ents know they weren’t needed, except as thrilled
I asked him once what that meant, he said, “It means I’m not snooty.” He audiences at performances. But our son’s kinder-
never looked back. garten teacher—an eccentric man near retirement
age, whose uniform was dreadlocks (he was white),

3.
a leather apron, shorts, and sandals with socks—sent
out frequent and frankly needy SOS emails. When
his class of 28 students was studying the New York
shoreline, he enlisted me to help build a replica of
an antique cargo ship like the one docked off Lower
T H E P U B L I C S C H O O L was housed in the lower floors of an Manhattan—could I pick up a sheet of plywood, four
old brick building, five stories high and a block long, next to an expressway. by eight by 5/8 of an inch, cut in half, along with four
A middle and high school occupied the upper floors. The building had the appropriate hinges and two dozen plumbing pieces, if
usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over they weren’t too expensive? He would reimburse me.

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That first winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted called our son “anti-authoritarian,” and it was true:
many weeks. I took turns with a few other parents ferrying a group of kids He pursued friends who were mildly rebellious, irri-
to and from school. Everyone who needed a ride would gather at the bus tants to the teachers and lunch monitors they didn’t
stop at 7:30 each morning and we’d figure out which parent could drive that like, and he avoided kids who always had their hand
day. Navigating the strike required a flexible schedule and a car, and it put up and displayed obvious signs of parental ambition.
immense pressure on families. A girl in our son’s class who lived in a housing The anxious meritocrat in me hadn’t completely
project a mile from the school suddenly stopped attending. Administrators faded away, and I once tried to get our son to befriend
seemed to devote as much effort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’ a 9-year-old who was reading Animal Farm, but he
union as to making sure every child could get to school. That was an early brushed me off. He would do this his own way.
sign of what would come later, of all that would eventually alienate me, and I The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning
might have been troubled by it if I hadn’t been so taken with my new role as a through doing. Reading instruction didn’t start until
public-school father teaming up with other parents to get us through a crisis. the end of first grade; in math, kids were taught vari-
ous strategies for multiplication and division, but the
times tables were their parents’ problem. Instead

4.
of worksheets and tests, there were field trips to
the shoreline and the Noguchi sculpture museum.
“Project-based learning” had our son working for
weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb
tower during a unit on ancient China.
P A R E N T S H A V E O N E layer of skin too few. They’ve lost an Even as we continued to volunteer, my wife and I
epidermis that could soften bruises and dull panic. In a divided city, in never stopped wondering if we had cheated our son
a stratified society, that missing skin—the intensity of every little worry of a better education. We got antsy with the endless
and breakthrough—is the shortest and maybe the only way to intimacy craft projects, the utter indifference to spelling. But
between people who would otherwise never cross paths. Children become our son learned well only when a subject interested
a great leveler. Parents have in common the one subject that never ceases him. “I want to learn facts, not skills,” he told his first-
to absorb them. grade teacher. The school’s approach—the year-long
In kindergarten our son became friends with a boy in class I’ll call Marcus. second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New
He had mirthful eyes, a faint smile, and an air of imperturbable calm—he York—caught his imagination, while the mix of races
was at ease with everyone, never visibly agitated or angry. His parents were and classes gave him something even more precious:
working-class immigrants from the Caribbean. His father drove a sanita- an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than
tion truck, and his mother was a nanny whose boss had been the one to sug- anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and every-
gest entering Marcus in the school’s lottery—parents with connections and one was his. In this way the school succeeded in its
resources knew about the school, while those without rarely did. Marcus’s highest purpose.
mother was a quietly demanding advocate for her son, and Marcus was And then things began to change.
exactly the kind of kid for whom a good elementary school could mean the
chance of a lifetime. His family and ours were separated by race, class, and

5.
the dozen city blocks that spell the difference between a neighborhood with
tree-lined streets, regular garbage collection, and upscale cupcake shops,
and a neighborhood with aboveground power lines and occasional shootings.
If not for the school, we would never have known Marcus’s family.
The boys’ friendship would endure throughout elementary school and
beyond. Once, when they were still in kindergarten, my wife was walking A R O U N D 2 0 1 4 , a new mood germinated
with them in a neighborhood of townhouses near the school, and Marcus in America—at first in a few places, among limited
suddenly exclaimed, “Can you imagine having a backyard?” We had a back- numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapid-
yard. Our son kept quiet, whether out of embarrassment or an early intuition ity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose
that human connections require certain omissions. Marcus’s father would up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out
drop him off at our house on weekends—often with the gift of a bottle of of disillusionment with the early promise of his
excellent rum from his home island—or I would pick Marcus up at their presidency— out of expectations raised and frus-
apartment building and drive the boys to a batting cage or the Bronx Zoo. trated, especially among people under 30, which
They almost always played at our house, seldom at Marcus’s, which was is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new
much smaller. This arrangement was established from the start without mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short
ever being discussed. If someone had mentioned it, we would have had to years after the teachers at the private preschool had
confront the glaring inequality in the boys’ lives. I felt that the friendship crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds,
flourished in a kind of benign avoidance of this crucial fact. hope was gone.
At school our son fell in with a group of boys who had no interest in join- At the heart of the new progressivism was indig-
ing the lunchtime soccer games. Their freewheeling playground scrums nation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice
often led to good-natured insults, wrestling matches, outraged feelings, an against groups of Americans who had always been
occasional punch, then reconciliation, until the next day. And they were the relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An
image of diversity. Over the years, in addition to our son and Marcus, there incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black
was another black boy, another white boy, a Latino boy, a mixed-race boy, man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by
a boy whose Latino mother was a teacher’s aide at the school, and an Afri- a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to
can boy with white lesbian parents. A teacher at the private school had once kneeling during the national anthem—would light a

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fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In
because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept
older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were
mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radi- so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school
cally egalitarian ideology. year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of edu-
At points where the ideology touched policy, it cation that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the conse-
demanded, and in some cases achieved, important quences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring
reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sen- of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.
tences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the work- The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structur-
place. But its biggest influence came in realms more ally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores. “I
inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we believe in assessment—I took tests my whole life and I’ve used assessments
think and imagine and talk and write, and the public as an educator,” one black parent at our school, who graduated from a pres-
spaces where institutions shape the contours of our tigious New York public high school, told me. “But now I see it all differ-
culture and guard its perimeter. ently. Standardized tests are the gatekeepers to keep people out, and I know
Who was driving the new progressivism? Young exactly who’s at the bottom. It is torturous for black, Latino, and low-income
people, influencers on social media, leaders of cul- children, because they will never catch up, due to institutionalized racism.”
tural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the prin-
more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost cipal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of
believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a sponta-
wrong. An extensive survey of American political opin- neous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with
ion published last year by a nonprofit breathtaking speed, it transcended
called More in Common found that a the realm of politics and became a
large majority of every group, includ- form of moral absolutism, with little
ing black Americans, thought “politi- tolerance for dissent.
cal correctness” was a problem. The We took the school at face value
only exception was a group identified when it said that this decision was
as “progressive activists”—just 8 per- MY WIFE AND ours to make. My wife attended a
cent of the population, and likely to I ARE PRODUCTS OF meeting for parents, billed as an
be white, well educated, and wealthy. PUBLIC SCHOOLS. “education session.” But when she
Other polls found that white progres- asked a question that showed we
WHATEVER TORMENTS
sives were readier to embrace diver- hadn’t made up our minds about
sity and immigration, and to blame THEY INFLICTED the tests, another parent quickly
racism for the problems of minority ON OUR YOUNGER tried to set her straight. The ques-
groups, than black Americans were. S E L V E S , W E B E L I E V E D tion was out of place—no one should
The new progressivism was a limited, IN THEM. want her child to take the tests. The
mainly elite phenomenon. purpose of the meeting wasn’t to
Politics becomes most real not provide neutral information. Opt-
in the media but in your nervous ing out required an action—parents
system, where everything matters had to sign and return a letter—and
more and it’s harder to repress your the administration needed to edu-
true feelings because of guilt or cate new parents about the party
social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, line using other parents who had already accepted it, because school
that I first understood the meaning of the new pro- employees were forbidden to propagandize.
gressivism, and what I disliked about it. We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our
Every spring, starting in third grade, public- school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each
school students in New York State take two stan- student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an
dardized tests geared to the national Common Core external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of
curriculum— one in math, one in English. In the win- class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of
ter of 2015–16, our son’s third-grade year, we began to his education for years to come.
receive a barrage of emails and flyers from the school Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates
about the upcoming tests. They all carried the mes- claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that
sage that the tests were not mandatory. “Inform Your- the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become
self!” an email urged us. “Whether or not your child so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had
will take the tests is YOUR decision.” enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants
During the George W. Bush and Obama presi- had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achieve-
dencies, statewide tests were used to improve low- ment” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could
performing schools by measuring students’ abili- judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black,
ties, with rewards (“race to the top”) and penalties and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times
(“accountability”) doled out accordingly. These stan- tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled
dardized tests could determine the fate of teachers these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s par-
and schools. Some schools began devoting months of ents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus
class time to preparing students for the tests. stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of

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her grandmother, who had been the heart of the fam- grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no effect on him at all. He returned
ily, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing to class and continued working on his report about the mountain gorillas of
red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids Central Africa.
were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of
togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests

6.
seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This
was the price of dismissing meritocracy.
I took a sounding of parents at our bus stop. Only
a few were open to the tests, and they didn’t say this
loudly. One parent was trying to find a way to have
her daughter take the tests off school grounds. Every- T H E B A T T L E G R O U N D of the new progressivism is identity.
one sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular That’s the historical source of exclusion and injustice that demands
with the principal, the staff, and the parent leaders— redress. In the past five years, identity has set off a burst of explora-
the school’s power structure. tion and recrimination and creation in every domain, from television to
A careful silence fell over the whole subject. One cooking. “Identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations
day, while volunteering in our son’s classroom, I about music,” The New York Times Magazine declared in 2017, in the intro-
asked another parent whether her son would take the duction to a special issue consisting of 25 essays on popular songs. “For
tests. She flashed a nervous smile and hushed me—it better or worse, it’s all identity now.”
wasn’t something to discuss at school. One teacher The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate
disapproved of testing so intensely that, when my sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant
wife and I asked what our son would miss during test thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began
days, she answered indignantly, “Curriculum!” Stu- to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality,
dents whose parents declined to opt out would get no disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings,
preparation at all. It struck me that this would punish but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its
kids whom the movement was supposed to protect. very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York,
If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering— including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into
if the entire weight of public opinion at the school consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families
was against the tests—then, I thought, our son that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off
should take them. by the relentless focus on race. Our
The week of the tests, one of son and his friends, whose class-
the administrators approached me room study included slavery and
in the school hallway. “Have you civil rights, hardly ever discussed the
decided?” I told her that our son subject of race with one another. The
would take the tests. school already lived what it taught.
She was the person to whom I’d O N E D A Y I The bathroom crisis hit our
once written a letter about the ideal ASKED ANOTHER school the same year our son took
match between our values and the PARENT WHETHER the standardized tests. A girl in sec-
school’s, the letter that may have HER SON WOULD ond grade had switched to using
helped get our son off the wait list. TAKE THE TESTS. male pronouns, adopted the initial
Back then I hadn’t heard of the opt- SHE HUSHED ME—IT Q as a first name, and begun dress-
out movement—it didn’t exist. Less WASN’T SOMETHING ing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the
than four years later, it was the only boys’ bathroom, which led to prob-
TO DISCUSS
truth. I wondered if she felt that I’d lems with other boys. Q’s mother
betrayed her. AT SCHOOL. spoke to the principal, who, with
Later that afternoon we spent an her staff, looked for an answer.
hour on the phone. She described They could have met the very real
all the harm that could come to needs of students like Q by creat-
our son if he took the tests—the ing a single-stall bathroom—the
immense stress, the potential for one in the second-floor clinic would
demoralization. I replied with our reason for going have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and
ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now
The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-
either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s identified gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the con-
position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement fusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in
by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted conformity with a new idea about identity.
to refuse to go along. The tests had become second- Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kinder-
ary. This was a political argument. garten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had
Our son was among the 15 or so students who took once said BOYS and GIRLS, they now said STUDENTS. Kids would be condi-
the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding tioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first
success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan. cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat
As for our son, he finished the tests feeling neither tri- or stood to pee. All that biology entailed— curiosity, fear, shame, aggression,
umphant nor defeated. The issue that had roiled the pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.

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The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time
end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further
to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe
started arriving home desperate to get to the bath- democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be
room after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.
mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall
door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals.

7.
Our son reported that his classmates, without any col-
lective decision, had simply gone back to the old sys-
tem, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using
the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms.
This return to the familiar was what politicians call
a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heart- I N 2 0 1 6 two obsessions claimed our family—Hamilton and the presi-
breaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge dential campaign. We listened and sang along to the Hamilton soundtrack
the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. every time we got in the car, until the kids had memorized most of its bril-
Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that liant, crowded, irresistible libretto. Our son mastered Lafayette’s highest-
the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was velocity rap, and in our living room he and his sister acted out the climactic
a quiet plea to be left alone. duel between Hamilton and Burr. The musical didn’t just teach them this lat-
When parents found out about the elimination of est version of the revolution and the early republic. It filled their world with
boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse the imagined past, and while the music was playing, history became more
at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared real than the present. Our daughter, who was about to start kindergarten
that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman at our son’s school, wholly identified with the character of Hamilton—she
threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The fought his battles, made his arguments, and denounced his enemies. Every
parents in the other camp argued that gender labels— time he died she wept.
and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying Hamilton and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The first
and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious effects, bely-
called for the elimination of urinals. It was a minor ing its most ominous portents. Donald Trump could sneer at Mexicans and
drama of a major cultural upheaval. The principal, rail against Muslims and kick dirt on everything decent and good, but the
who seemed to care more about the testing opt-out American promise still breathed whenever the Puerto Rican Hamilton and
movement than the bathroom issue, explained her the black Jefferson got into a rap battle over the national bank. When our
financial constraints and urged the formation of a daughter saw pictures of the actual Founding Fathers, she was shocked and
parent-teacher committee to resolve the matter. After a little disappointed that they were white. The only president our kids had
six months of stalemate, the Department of Education known was black. Their experience gave them no context for Trump’s vicious
intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral. brand of identity politics, which was inflaming the other kinds. We wanted
them to believe that America was better than Trump, and Hamilton kept that
belief in the air despite the accumulating gravity of facts. Our son, who started
I N P O L I T I C S , I D E N T I T Y is an fourth grade that fall, had dark premonitions about the election, but when the
appeal to authority—the moral authority of the Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, he sang Jefferson’s gloating line
oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and about Hamilton’s sex scandal: “Never gonna be president now!”
makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with The morning after the election, the kids cried. They cried for people
the universal principles of equality, dignity, and free- close to us, Muslims and immigrants who might be in danger, and perhaps
dom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often they also cried for the lost illusion that their parents could make things right.
a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape Our son lay on the couch and sobbed inconsolably until we made him go
and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it to the bus stop.
sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited The next time we were in the car, we automatically put on Hamilton.
one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by When “Dear Theodosia” came on, and Burr and Hamilton sang to their new-
the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, born children, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you,
which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an we’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away,” it was too much for
essence that defines individuals regardless of agency me and my wife. We could no longer feel the romance of the young republic.
or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna It was a long time before we listened to Hamilton again.
Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces A few weeks after the election, our daughter asked if Trump could break
that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need our family apart. She must have gotten the idea from overhearing a conversa-
black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” tion about threats to undocumented immigrants. We told her that we were
At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to- lucky—we had rights as citizens that he couldn’t take away. I decided to sit
the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, down with the kids and read the Bill of Rights together. Not all of it made
with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and dis- sense, but they got the basic idea—the president wasn’t King George III,
plays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental the Constitution was stronger than Trump, certain principles had not been
constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship abolished—and they seemed reassured.
and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent— Since then it has become harder to retain faith in these truths.
these are qualities of an illiberal politics. Our daughter said that she hated being a child, because she felt help-
I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side less to do anything. The day after the inauguration, my wife took her to the
of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, Women’s March in Midtown Manhattan. She made a sign that said WE HAVE

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Misperception: Security Threat

Fact:
Huawei connects more
than 3 billion people
every day and hasn’t had a
major security incident
over its 30-year history.

^²čàÊìä²ȇ
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POWER TOO, and at the march she sang the one pro- lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of free-
test song she knew, “We Shall Overcome.” For days dom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was
afterward she marched around the house shouting, trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power
“Show me what democracy looks like!” accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including
Our son was less given to joining a cause and the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had
shaking his fist. Being older, he also understood the been betrayed. He got his civics from Hamilton.
difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casualty of poli-
him, because he knew that children really could tical polarization, as the left and the right each accuse the other of using the
do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate subject for indoctrination—and with it the public’s basic knowledge about
change throughout elementary school—first grade American government. In the past few years, civics has been making a come-
was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and back in certain states. As our son entered fifth grade, in the first year of the
in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned Trump presidency, no subject would have been more truly empowering.
that every wild animal he loved Every year, instead of taking
was facing extinction. “What are tests, students at the school pre-
humans good for besides destroying sented a “museum” of their subject
the planet?” he asked. Our daughter of study, a combination of writing
wasn’t immune to the heavy mood— “IF YOU FAIL and craftwork on a particular topic.
she came home from school one SEVENTH GRADE Parents came in, wandered through
day and expressed a wish not to the classrooms, read, admired, and
YOU FAIL MIDDLE
be white so that she wouldn’t have asked questions of students, who
slavery on her conscience. It did not SCHOOL, IF YOU stood beside their projects. These
seem like a moral victory for our F A I L M I D D L E S C H O O L days, called “shares,” were my very
children to grow up hating their spe- Y O U F A I L H I G H S C H O O L , best experiences at the school. Some
cies and themselves. IF YOU FAIL of the work was astoundingly good,
We decided to cut down on the HIGH SCHOOL YOU all of it showed thought and effort,
political talk around them. It wasn’t FAIL COLLEGE, and the coming-together of parents
that we wanted to hide the truth or IF YOU FAIL COLLEGE and kids felt like the realization of
give false comfort—they wouldn’t everything the school aspired to be.
YOU FAIL LIFE.”
have let us even if we’d tried. We The fifth-grade share, our son’s
just wanted them to have their child- last, was different. That year’s cur-
hood without bearing the entire riculum included the Holocaust,
weight of the world, including the Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.
new president we had allowed into The focus was on “upstanders”—
office. We owed our children a thousand apologies. individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their
The future looked awful, and somehow we expected voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activ-
them to fix it. Did they really have to face this while ism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented
they were still in elementary school? dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ
I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack
I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them. spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was
There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t
weapon—except to say that identity alone should nei- been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries,
ther uphold nor invalidate an idea, or we’ve lost the answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard,
Enlightenment to pure tribalism. Adults who draft clay, and slogans.
young children into their cause might think they’re
empowering them and shaping them into virtuous

8.
people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents
post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the
adults are making themselves feel more righteous,
indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiat-
ing their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anx-
ious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, S T U D E N T S I N N E W Y O R K C I T Y public schools have to
because they lack the intellectual apparatus and apply to middle school. They rank schools in their district, six or eight or a
political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children dozen of them, in order of preference, and the middle schools rank the stu-
what to think. The point is to teach them how to think dents based on academic work and behavior. Then a Nobel Prize–winning
so they can grow up to find their own answers. algorithm matches each student with a school, and that’s almost always
I wished that our son’s school would teach him civ- where the student has to go. The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak;
ics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.” An education
China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, expert near us made a decent living by offering counseling sessions to panic-
and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of stricken families. The whole process seemed designed to raise the anxiety of
Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught 10-year-olds to the breaking point.
about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that “If you fail a math test you fail seventh grade,” our daughter said one
conflicting values and practical compromises are the night at dinner, looking years ahead. “If you fail seventh grade you fail

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This content was created by Atlantic Re:think, the branded content studio at The Atlantic, and made
SPONSOR CONTENT possible by AdoptUSKids. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorial staff.

The Allred parents say that

adopting teenagers showed

What Adopting
them that the desire to be loved
doesn’t have an age limit.

A Teen
Taught Me
Teenagers in foster care
deserve families as much
as younger children do.
And bringing a teen into
your home can yield
surprising, joyful lessons—
just ask these parents.

WE ASKED FAMILIES across America

to tell us what teen adoption taught
them. Parents and the teenagers
they adopted hand-wrote letters to
each other, detailing the fears and
anxieties they started with, and the
unexpected bonds and connections
they have today.

Mike and Jennifer Allred, who adopted

Andrew, Amberlynn, and Misty when
they were 20, 10, and 7, had adoption
The Allred family
experiences with every age group. currently includes six
You can read the letter they wrote to teenagers from all
backgrounds and walks
their children here. of life, and Mike and
Jennifer wouldn’t have
it any other way.

To read more stories and watch original videos about the lessons and joys of
adopting older children, go to: TheAtlantic.com/WhatAdoptingATeenTaughtMe
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middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high accounted for the racial makeup at our son’s new
school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.” school. In the new system, students would still rank
We were back to the perversions of meritocracy. But the country’s politics their choices, but the algorithm would be adjusted to
had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. produce middle schools that reflect the demography
Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school of our district, giving disadvantaged students a prior-
hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is ity for 52 percent of the seats. In this way, the district’s
showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to middle schools would be racially and economically
make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” integrated. De Blasio’s initiative was given the slo-
The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Chris- gan “Equity and Excellence for All.” It tried to satisfy
tian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off democracy and meritocracy in a single phrase.
his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher I went back and forth and back again, and finally
in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with decided to support the new plan. My view was gratu-
an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, itous, since the change came a year too late to affect
unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet our son. I would have been sorely tested if chance had
troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50. put him in the first experimental class. Under the new
The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates system, a girl at his former bus stop got matched with
of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive con- her 12th choice, and her parents decided to send her
test and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much to a charter school. No doubt many other families
as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes, realms that are will leave the public-school system. But I had seen
equally inhospitable to the delicate, complex organism of a child’s mind. If our son flourish by going to an elementary school
there’s a relation between the systems, I came
to think, it’s this: Wokeness prettifies the suc-
cess race, making contestants feel better about
the heartless world into which they’re pushing
their children. Constantly checking your privi-
lege is one way of not having to give it up.
On the day acceptance letters arrived at
our school, some students wept. One of them
was Marcus, who had been matched with a
middle school that he didn’t want to attend.
His mother went in to talk to an administrator
about an appeal. The administrator asked her
why Marcus didn’t instead go to the middle
school that shared a building with our school,
that followed the same progressive approach
as ours, and that was one of the worst-rated
in the state. Marcus’s mother left in fury and
despair. She had no desire for him to go to the
middle school upstairs.
Our son got into one of the “good” mid-
dle schools. Last September he came home
from the first day of school and told us that
something was wrong. His classmates didn’t
look like the kids in his elementary school.
We found a pie chart that broke his new
school down by race, and it left him stunned.
Two-thirds of the students were white or
Asian; barely a quarter were black or Latino.
Competitive admissions had created a segre-
gated school.
His will be the last such class. Two years
ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a new ini-
tiative to integrate New York City’s schools.
Our district, where there are enough white
families for integration to be meaningful, was
chosen as a test case. Last year a commit-
tee of teachers, parents, and activists in the
district announced a proposal: Remove the
meritocratic hurdle that stands in the way of
equality. The proposal would get rid of com-
petitive admissions for middle school—grades,
tests, attendance, behavior—which largely

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that looked like the city. I had also seen meritocracy a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large
separate out and demoralize children based on their historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set
work in fourth grade. “If you fail middle school,” our aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking
daughter said, “you fail life.” It was too soon for chil- for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn’t enough to intimi-
dren’s fates to be decided by an institution that was date dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up,
supposed to serve the public good. one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he
I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like
doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian the opt-out “education session” my wife had attended: The deal was done.
excess of the new progressivism. It called for the cre- There was only one truth.
ation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics
jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let
to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-
teaching civics that faced the complex truths of Ameri- bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million.
can democracy, “the curriculum will highlight the vast One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Per-
historical contributions of non-white groups & seek to fectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written
dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the
& World History.” name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.
“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the The legacy of racism, together with a false meritocracy in America
plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even men- today that keeps children trapped where they are, is the root cause of the
tioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: inequalities in the city’s schools. But calling out racism and getting rid of
“Provide support for [district] educa- objective standards won’t create real equality or close the achievement gap,
tors in adopting best practices for aca- and might have the perverse effect of making it worse by driving out families
demically, racially & socioeconomically of all races who cling to an idea of education based on real merit. If integra-
mixed classrooms.” How to make sure tion is a necessary condition for equality, it isn’t sufficient. Equality is too
that children of greatly different abilities important to be left to an ideology that rejects universal values.
would succeed, in schools that had long

9.
been academically tracked? How to do
it without giving up on rigor altogether—
without losing the fastest learners?
We had faced this problem with our
daughter, who was reading far ahead of
her grade in kindergarten and begged her I N M I D D L E S C H O O L our son immediately made friends with the
teacher for math problems to solve. When same kind of kids who had been his friends in elementary school—outsiders—
the school declined to accommodate including Latino boys from the district’s poorest neighborhood. One day he
her, and our applications to other pub- told us about the “N-word passes” that were being exchanged among other
lic schools were unsuccessful, we trans- boys he knew—a system in which a black kid, bartering for some item, would
ferred her to a new, STEM-focused private allow a white kid to use the word. We couldn’t believe such a thing existed, but
school rather than risk years of boredom. it did. When one white boy kept using his pass all day long, our son grabbed
We regretted leaving the public-school the imaginary piece of paper and ripped it to shreds. He and his friends heard
system, and we were still wary of the com- the official language of moral instruction so often that it became a source of
petitive excesses of meritocracy, but we irony and teasing: “Hey, dude, you really need to check your privilege.” When
weren’t willing to abandon it altogether. his teacher assigned students to write about how they felt about their identity,
The Department of Education didn’t letting the class know that whiteness was a source of guilt for her, our son told
seem to be thinking about meritocracy her that he couldn’t do it. The assignment was too personal, and it didn’t leave
at all. Its entire focus was on achieving enough space for him to describe all that made him who he was.
diversity, and on rooting out the racism “Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one
that stood in the way of that. day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” He was respond-
Late in the summer of 2018, a pub- ing as kids do when adults keep telling them what to think. He had what my
lic meeting was called in our district to wife called unpoliticized empathy.
discuss the integration plan. It was the Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of
height of vacation season, but several the world you’re going to leave them. I can’t say I’m sanguine. Some days
hundred parents, including me, showed the image fills me with dread. That pragmatic genius for which Americans
up. Many had just heard about the new used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our
plan, which buried the results of an inter- young—how did it desert us? Now we’re stewing in anxiety and anger, fever-
nal poll showing that a majority of parents ish with bad ideas, too absorbed in our own failures to spare our children. But
wanted to keep the old system. We were one day the fever will break, and by then they’ll be grown, and they will have
presented with a slideshow that included to discover for themselves how to live together in a country that gives every
a photo of white adults snarling at black child an equal chance.
schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—
as if only vicious racism could motivate George Packer is an Atlantic staff writer. His most recent books are
parents to oppose eliminating an admis- Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
sions system that met superior work with and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

T H E AT L A N T I C O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 71
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72 O CTO B E R 20 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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Tawanda Rhodes believed she would inherit her parents’ home. Then she
received a letter from her state’s Medicaid program.
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died believing that he had secured a legacy for his

family, which, in just a few generations, had lifted
itself out of slavery, segregation, and poverty to own
a piece of the American dream.
When I visited Dorchester this spring, Tawanda,
62, was waiting for me on the front porch of the three-
story, vinyl-sided house. She now lives there alone,
and on borrowed time.
The trouble began when her mother started show-
ing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. For a while, one of
THE Tawanda’s brothers cared for Edna, but he was sick
himself and died in 2004. A guardian of the state
FOLDED
admitted Edna into a nursing home and signed her
AMERICAN up for the state’s Medicaid program, MassHealth.
FLAG Tawanda was relieved that her mother was being cared
for while she was busy arranging her brother’s funeral.
from her father’s military funeral is displayed on the mantel in But when she arrived in Boston from Brooklyn, where
Tawanda Rhodes’s living room. Joseph Victorian, a descendant of she and her husband had settled, she heard rumors
Creole slaves, had enlisted in the Army 10 days after learning that about MassHealth “robbing people of their homes”
the United States was going to war with Korea. as reimbursement for their medical bills.
After he was wounded in combat, Joseph was stationed at a She soon learned that the rumors held some truth.
military base in Massachusetts. There he met and fell in love with Medicaid, the government program that provides
Edna Smith-Rhodes, a young woman who had recently moved health care to more than 75 million low-income and
to Boston from North Carolina. The couple started a family and disabled Americans, isn’t necessarily free. It’s the only
eventually settled in the brick towers of the Columbia Point hous- major welfare program that can function like a loan.
ing project. Joseph took a welding job at a shipyard and pressed Medicaid recipients over the age of 55 are expected to
laundry on the side; later, Edna would put her southern cooking repay the government for many medical expenses—
skills to use in a school cafeteria. In 1979, Joseph and Edna bought and states will seize houses and other assets after
a house in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood for $24,000. those recipients die in order to satisfy the debt.
Just a few years after they moved in, Joseph died of blood- Sure enough, just weeks after Edna entered
circulation problems. But by leaving that house to his wife and the nursing home, Tawanda received a notice that
children, its mortgage satisfied by his life-insurance payout, he MassHealth had put a lien on the house. Tawanda
called the agency and said she wanted to take her
mother off Medicaid; she knew Edna had alternatives
as a longtime employee of Boston Public Schools. A
representative for MassHealth told her not to worry:
If she took her mother out of the nursing home, the
agency would remove the lien and her mother could
continue to receive Medicaid benefits.
Tawanda and her husband, Oliver, decided to
move to Boston. They took Edna out of the nursing
facility and brought her home to care for her full time.
“The place was pretty dilapidated, but I knew it was
ours, so my husband and I started bringing it back to
life,” Tawanda said.
Oliver and Tawanda had lived a modest but com-
fortable life in Brooklyn. He worked maintenance
for Time Warner; she was a bartender. To renovate
the old house, they cashed in all of their savings
bonds, about $100,000 worth. They tore up the shag
carpeting, refinished the floors, painted the walls,
remounted the cabinets. They replaced the 1970s
appliances—brown dishwasher, blue toilet, and
mustard- colored refrigerator—with modern ones.
They paid off Edna’s second mortgage, and her third.
Then, in 2007, Oliver started showing signs of dementia,
and shortly thereafter, he too was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Now Tawanda spent her days caring for both her mother and
her husband, shuttling them back and forth to doctor’s appoint-
ments, giving baths, clipping toenails, changing diapers. She
cooked them special dinners “as they started not being able to
chew this or swallow that.” After putting them to bed at night,
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on her behalf.” For Edna’s five

years on MassHealth, she
owed $198,660.26.
“You must be kidding me,”
Tawanda recalled telling the
MassHealth caseworker on the
phone. As proof, the agency
sent her a 28-page itemized
bill for “every Band-Aid, every
can of Ensure” her mother had
used. The state gave Tawanda
six months to pay the debt in
full, after which she would
begin accruing interest at a rate
of 12 percent. If she couldn’t
afford it, the state could force
her to sell the Dorchester
house and take its share of
the proceeds to settle the debt.
Tawanda’s hair started fall-
ing out soon after. She and Oli-
ver, who was in the final stages
of Alzheimer’s, had no savings
and no jobs. “I said to myself,
I don’t care what they do to me.
I can take care of myself,” she
told me. “But I couldn’t have
my dying husband thrown out
into the street.”
She wrote to nearly every
elected official in the state. “No
one would help me,” she said.
Now instead of reading
a late-night romance novel,
she stayed up research ing
Medicaid regulations. She
discovered that MassHealth
allows some exceptions. It will
not seize a home occupied by
a spouse or a dependent child
of the late Medicaid recipient
until they die or move. It also
offers waivers for financial
hardship and an “adult child
caregiver” exemption for
those who lived with a parent
for at least two years and “pro-
vided care that allowed the
applicant to remain at home.”
Above: Tawanda holds a photograph of her father and mother,
who purchased their home in Boston’s Dorchester That was her, Tawanda
neighborhood in 1979. Opposite page: The flag Rhodes’s thought. She and Oliver had
father earned for his service in the Korean War. a combined monthly income
of just $1,400, well below the
threshold to claim financial
hardship, and she had taken
if she wasn’t too tired, she’d mix herself an apple martini and care of her mother at home for more than five years. But Tawanda
read in the kitchen, often her only hour of relaxation in the day. told me the state rejected her requests for both exceptions. To
This went on until the end of 2009, when Edna died, at home, qualify for the caregiver exemption, an adult child must live in the
in Oliver’s arms. Afterward, Tawanda received a letter from the house for two years before a parent enters a long-term-care facil-
Massachusetts Office of Health and Human Services, which ity. Tawanda doesn’t know why she didn’t qualify for the financial-
oversees MassHealth, notifying her that the state was seeking hardship waiver. “Somebody makes that decision somewhere
“reimbursement from [Edna’s] estate for Medicaid payments made and that’s it,” says Joanna Allison, the executive director of the

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Volunteer Lawyers Project, who helped

Tawanda find a pro bono lawyer. It didn’t
matter that Tawanda had taken her mother
out of a nursing home to provide care that
saved the Medicaid system hundreds of
thousands of dollars, Allison told me.
MassHealth representatives declined
to be interviewed for this story and do
not comment on individual cases for
privacy reasons. A spokesperson said in
a statement, “MassHealth’s application
and member notification materials pro-
vide notices related to estate recovery to
ensure applicants are informed of this
requirement upfront.”
Tawanda reminded her caseworker
of the lien release the agency had sent
her years ago. But “what they didn’t tell
me then was that they had the right to
reinstate” the claim on the property after
her mother’s death. This was estate recov-
ery now, the caseworker told her, and
there was nothing she could do about it.

BILL CLINTON SIGNED the

Medicaid Estate Recovery Program into
law as part of his deficit-reduction act in
1993. Previously, states had the right to
seek repayment for Medicaid debts; the
new law made it mandatory. The policy
arrived at a time when political rhetoric
about individual responsibility domi-
nated the national discourse. The idea
that welfare created a “spider’s web of
dependency,” as Ronald Reagan once
put it, played into fears that taxpayers
were shouldering the burden for rampant
abuse of the system. Politicians such as
then–House Speaker Newt Gingrich
tried to justify deep cuts to Medicaid
and Medicare by promoting the idea that
the programs were exploited by con art-
ists and layabouts—people who “want to
be 70 pounds overweight, drink a quart
of hard liquor a day, pay no attention to
exercise, and then tell you it’s your obli-
gation to make me healthy,” Gingrich
said at the time. “You cannot have totally
irresponsible humans enjoying the ben-
efits of responsibility.”
Estate recovery was billed as a sensible reform: States would rejected the suit in 2002.) Michigan became the last state to enact
recoup costs for the largest category of Medicaid spending—long- recoveries, in 2007, after the federal government threatened to
term care, such as nursing homes—from the people most likely to cut its Medicaid funding if it didn’t. Other states opted to collect
incur them (those 55 and older) in order to replenish the program’s only high-value assets, or offered exemptions for family farms or
coffers and help others in need. (If there was no money to be had estates worth less than a few thousand dollars.
in an estate, then the debt simply went unpaid.) The goal was not The majority of states, however, took a harder line. Some
to deter people from going on Medicaid, but to mitigate the cost of started allowing pre-death liens, tacking interest onto past-due
an already expensive program that the Baby Boomer generation debts, or limiting the number of hardship waivers granted. The
was projected to bankrupt. law gave states the option to expand their recovery efforts to
Some states initially resisted implementing estate recovery. include other medical expenses, and many did, collecting for
West Virginia legislators called it “abhorrent” in a federal lawsuit every doctor’s visit, pharmaceutical drug, and surgery that Med-
seeking to have it declared unconstitutional. (An appeals court icaid covered.

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As projected, aging Boomers drop in the bucket given the amount of misery they cause people,”
were straining the system. States’ says Patricia McGinnis, the executive director of the California
spending on Medicaid services Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, which co-sponsored suc-
soared from $137 billion in 1994 cessful 2016 legislation to limit the assets Medicaid can recover
to $577 billion in 2017, when the in California. “It’s a terrible program, it’s a punitive program, and
oldest Boomers reached their it doesn’t do anything to reimburse the billions of dollars spent,”
70s. Much of the cost comes she told me. “The purpose of recovery was to support Medicaid
from long-term care: Medicaid and bring money back, but how? By collecting anything from the
pays for about 50 percent of the poorest of the poor? It’s ridiculous.” By contrast, she says, “you
nation’s 1.4 million nursing-home could have a $100,000 heart operation on Medicare and there’s
residents, coverage that’s often no recovery.” One lawyer in Tennessee recalled a case in which
denied by private insurers and a woman went to her late mother’s Medicaid auction to buy back
even by Medicare, the low-cost quilts that had been passed down for generations.
federal insurance available to Treva Bollman, an accountant in Elwood, Kansas, had been
anyone age 65 or over, regardless receiving Medicaid benefits for four years, and was just one year
of income. Medicaid also bears shy of qualifying for Medicare, when she died from cancer. A few
the brunt of costs for patients with months later, her husband, Walter, received a letter from Kansas’s
illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and Medicaid Estate Recovery Unit. “I don’t know what this means,”
Parkinson’s disease, whose needs he told his stepdaughter Janie at the time. “It says I owe the state
often fall under “custodial” rather of Kansas a half million dollars or they’re going to take my home.”
than “medical” care, and who Walter lives on a two-acre plot passed down from his great-
therefore are largely denied cov- grandparents. After their town was devastated by a flood in 1993,
erage by Medicare as well. “It’s he and Treva built a double-wide trailer on that ancestral land. Wal-
Medicaid, a low-income program, ter, who worked most of his life cutting scrap metal despite a child-
that has by default turned into our hood accident that left him with only one arm, has never been on
long-term-care system, and that Medicaid. But under Kansas law, the state can collect his house and
After the is absolutely unsustainable,” Matt land, worth an estimated $40,000, to put toward his wife’s debt.
death of her Salo, the executive director of the The state will let Walter live the rest of his life there, but that
mother, Edna,
Tawanda
National Association of Medicaid does little to comfort him. “It’s for you kids,” he told Janie.
received a Directors, told me. “If you spend your whole life working for something, you take
letter from Defenders of estate recovery pride in being able to pass something on to your children,” Janie
MassHealth’s
estate-
see it both as a way to control the told me. “They took that sense of pride away from him.”
recovery high costs of long-term care and
unit. For as a necessary check on those who O N E O F T H E R E A S O N S estate recovery works at all is that
Edna’s five
years on
could pay for such care but would few people know about it. Although states disclose the policy in
Medicaid, rather the government foot the bill. their Medicaid-enrollment forms, it’s often buried in fine print
she owed (Nursing homes cost $89,000 a that can easily be overlooked, especially when applicants are
$198,660.26.
If Tawanda
year, on average, for a semiprivate anxiously seeking urgent medical care. MassHealth, for example,
couldn’t room.) Medicaid, Salo told me, is places its notice about three-
cover the already struggling to meet the quarters of the way down page
debt, the
state could
needs of the poorest Americans. 20 of its 34-page application:
compel her Should it also cover long-term “To the extent permitted by
to sell the care for “someone who’s going to law, and unless exceptions
Dorchester
home so
pass hundreds and hundreds of apply, for any eligible person
MassHealth thousands of dollars of assets on ESTATE age 55 or older, or any eligible
could take to their family?” RECOVERY person for whom MassHealth
its share.
But the overwhelming majority PUNISHES helps pay for care in a nursing
of estates are not worth hundreds home, MassHealth will seek
WORKING- AND
of thousands of dollars. In 2005, money from the eligible per-
the Public Policy Institute of the MIDDLE-CLASS son’s estate after death.”
AARP published a study of the first decade of mandatory estate AMERICANS WHO, “It’s all technically accurate,
recovery. Massachusetts, it found, recovered an average of $16,442 DESPITE but it’s hard for a nonlawyer
per estate in 2003, in total offsetting a little more than 1 percent of THE ODDS, to know that that means We’re
its long-term-care costs that year. That made its efforts among the HAVE MANAGED going to send you a bill,” says
most effective in the nation. In Kentucky, by contrast, the average TO SCRAPE Gregory Wilcox, an elder-law
amount collected from an estate was $93; the state recovered just TOGETHER attorney in California who’s
0.25 percent of its long-term-care costs. The total amount states received “lots of calls from
A LITTLE
recouped jumped from $72 million in 1996 to $347 million seven people who are dismayed,
years later—but even so, estate recoveries accounted for less than SOMETHING shocked,” first by the loss of
1 percent of Medicaid’s total nursing-home costs in 2003. TO PASS their loved one and then by
Opponents of estate recovery say that the harm of destabilizing ON TO THEIR the secondary blow of losing
low-income families does not justify the meager returns. “It’s a CHILDREN. their inheritance.

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One of the few times estate recovery has made headlines York inherit summer houses, art collections, and trusts—their
was earlier this decade, during the rollout of the Obama admin- riches maximized by an ever-eroding estate tax—it compounds
istration’s Medicaid expansion. As more Americans considered the sense of shame my mother feels in failing to leave her chil-
Medicaid as a health-insurance option, more came across the dren with even a modest leg up, and in knowing that, had she
fine print. At least three states passed legislation to scale back been better informed, she might have prevented it all.
their recovery policies after public outcry. As I learned from reading the lawyers’ ads, it’s possible to protect
I initially learned about estate recovery because it’s going to your assets by putting them into an irrevo-
happen to my own family. My mother enrolled in Medicaid at cable trust or transferring a deed to a family
age 55 after being rejected by other insurers for having once had member before you reach retirement age.
the preexisting condition of cancer. Last year, she called me cry- “These are not loopholes,” says Michael
ing because she’d heard that the state will take our house in rural Amoruso, the president of the National
Iowa when she dies. Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. “Con-
At first I didn’t believe her. She had bought the house on con- gress and the states allow people to plan.”
tract for $35,000 in 1995 and had long since made the last pay- But the people who consult estate
ment. It was among the most rewarding decisions of her life, but planners are typically those who have
also one of the riskiest. My parents’ divorce had plunged our family wealth to plan for in the first place. “I can’t
into poverty as my mother struggled to raise two children without think of a single person who has come to
child support, on two low-wage jobs, as a teacher’s aide in an elem- me to avoid estate recovery,” Gregory
entary school and, on weekends, as a clerk at a health-food store. Wilcox says, “because they’re usually not
When the house we were renting was sold to another family, aware of it.” Instead, those who do find
we found ourselves on the brink of homelessness, at the mercy out about it are those who “come to me
of a new landlord willing to rent to a single mother for cheap. So for estate planning. I tell them, ‘I’ve got
when she found a little yellow house on a patch of eastern-Iowa good news for you: I can help you avoid
farmland for $400 a month, she hung a tapestry to cover the hole probate, and if you avoid that you can also
in the kitchen ceiling, and we moved in. A few years later the land- avoid Medicaid estate recovery.’ They’re
lord fell behind on his property taxes, and my mother offered to not even aware of the need to do that.”
buy the place. She began reinforcing the weather-beaten porch, Perversely, then, the program pun-
reshingling the roof, and painting the plywood floors. She planted ishes neither the affluent nor those with
sunflowers and a vegetable garden, showing us that even after los- nothing to lose, but working- and middle-
ing everything, it was still possible to build things that last. class Americans who, despite the odds,
That someone could now take that house from us seemed an have managed to scrape together a little
impossibly cruel twist. After I hung up the phone, I went online something to pass on to their children.
to look for evidence that she was mistaken. What I found instead
was page after page of attorney ads warning potential Medicaid HOMEOWNERSHIP IS ONE OF
recipients to hire them immediately in order to save their home the greatest catalysts of class mobility in
before it was too late. America. Home equity provides a lifeline
For us, it was already too late. If my mother stays on Medic- during emergencies and helps ensure
aid, the state will almost certainly take our house when she dies; that your children won’t slip down the
if she transfers it to my or my economic ladder. A typical homeowner’s
brother’s name, her Medicaid net worth is $231,400—nearly 45 times
benefits will be suspended. that of the average renter’s net worth
Unable to afford other insur- of $5,200, according to a 2016 Federal
ance options, and unable to go Reserve survey.
without insurance as a cancer Homeowners also benefit from consid-
survivor, she has no choice THE MORTGAGE- erable financial perks, such as mortgage-
but to remain on the govern- INTEREST interest deductions and capital-gains exemptions inscribed into
ment program. DEDUCTION our tax codes. “Wealthy people aren’t on Medicaid, but they’re
Unlike Tawanda Rhodes, getting all kinds of other benefits,” says Brian McCabe, a sociolo-
COST THE
my brother and I don’t live in gist at Georgetown and the author of No Place Like Home: Wealth,
the house, nor do our futures FEDERAL Community, and the Politics of Homeownership. The mortgage-
depend on inheriting it. But GOVERNMENT interest deduction alone—a set of housing subsidies that pri-
in a country that protects the $66 BILLION marily benefits Americans in the top 20 percent of the income
passage of intergenerational IN 2017. distribution—cost the federal government $66 billion in 2017. By
wealth for its most privileged LETTING EVERY comparison, letting every family of a Medicaid recipient keep
sons and daughters, there’s a FAMILY OF their property would cost just $500 million, according to 2011
special indignity to having to A MEDICAID data gathered by the Office of the Inspector General, the most
fight for a trailer, or $93, or a recent available.
RECIPIENT
shack at the edge of an Iowa But the benefits of homeownership aren’t merely financial.
cornfield that’s of virtually no KEEP THEIR For many people, owning property is a crucial source of secu-
value to the government but PROPERTY rity and status, often marking one’s arrival in the middle class.
has meant everything to us. WOULD COST “It’s the stability of being in a place, of knowing no one’s going to
As my wealthier peers in New $500 MILLION. take your house away from you,” McCabe says. “You’ve made

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it, earned your independence through hard work.” This is espe- no way I would even qualify for a loan to get another home,” she
cially true among those for whom that dream has always been far said. She looked into public housing, but there are 10,000 people
out of reach, such as low-income and nonwhite Americans. In a on the wait list and it’s currently closed.
2018 study in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, McCabe Musgrave paid an attorney $5,000 from her savings to plead
found that Latinos and African Americans were twice as likely as a hardship case to the state in the hopes of negotiating down her
white Americans to consider social status an important reason to mother’s bill. She was denied, without explanation. “No, we’re
not able to reduce the bill,” she said was
the state’s response. “Go live on the street,
live in a box under the bridge. We don’t
care; we want our money.”

LAST Y E A R , for the first time in her

life, Tawanda Rhodes didn’t vote. When
Election Day came she pulled up in front
of the polling station and sat there for a
minute, then drove off. “It did not make
me feel good,” she said. “But I felt like,
Vote for what? No one cares about me.”
Today she hears Democratic presi-
dential candidates talking about a public
option and Medicare for All, and she won-
ders if that would render a low-income
program such as Medicaid redundant,
and estate recovery a thing of the past.
But change probably won’t come soon
enough for Tawanda. Last year her attor-
ney told her that her best option was to
accept a deal from MassHealth that would
keep its claim on the house but allow her
to remain there as a tenant until her death.
(Oliver died in 2018.) But the contract stip-
ulated that if she fell behind on any of her
bills or taxes, or didn’t keep up on repairs,
she’d have to vacate. “They were setting
me up for failure,” she said.
Tawanda refused to sign. She no lon-
ger trusted MassHealth, and she objected
to the deal on principle. “From slavery
years we never got our 40 acres and a
Tawanda has refused to sell her house to pay her mother’s Medicaid debt.
“From slavery years we never got our 40 acres and a mule; we never mule; we never got reparations,” she said.
got reparations,” she said. “My parents made their 40 acres and a mule “My parents made their 40 acres and a
with blood, sweat, and tears, and now they want that too?”
mule with blood, sweat, and tears, and
now they want that too?”
Money was so tight that paying a bill
a little late was almost inevitable. A few
buy a home. “When you’ve historically been excluded from this months ago, the ceiling in an upstairs bedroom cracked and water
thing that is centrally American, the ability to achieve it is that poured in. She patched the hole as best she could, but the house
much more meaningful,” he says. needs a new roof, and she says no bank will lend her the money
If homeownership is one of the greatest means of upward for the project because of the Medicaid debt. “They got my hands
mobility, then estate recovery, a program that strips property locked where I can’t get any equity out of the home, so they figure,
from the people who stand to benefit from it the most, is an ‘It’s gonna fall, the roof is gonna blow one day, and she’s gonna
insidious obstacle, perpetuating cycles of poverty and pushing have to get the hell out of there.’ ”
displaced families back into the welfare system. Tawanda doesn’t know which will come down on her first,
Lisa Musgrave, a 56-year-old secretary in Nashville, told me MassHealth or the roof. Any day now, the state could file suit to
she’ll be homeless when the state forecloses on the house she’s force her to sell the house, but she’s decided to stay put. “After
been living in for the past eight years to collect on her late moth- my husband died I picked up the sword again,” she said. “I will
er’s $171,000 Medicaid debt. “If I could afford to pack up and fight them to the death. I will never, ever give up this fight, and
move down the road to another house, that would be fine,” she I will never sign a paper saying that they own my house.”
said. “But I don’t make $80,000 a year,” which is about what it
costs to live comfortably in Nashville, where the median price Rachel Corbett is the author of You Must Change Your Life:
of a home is $320,000. Musgrave, who works for the state’s The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, which won
handgun-permit office, makes $31,000 before taxes. “There’s the 2016 Marfield Prize. She lives in Brooklyn.

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IA
L LR U
T S/ T
PRHA
OTTIOOGNR BAYP H
RYY ACNR M
EDE LI G
TAR
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Inside the battle to control the next generation of the Trump dynasty

By McKay Coppins

T H E AT L A N T I C O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 81
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 RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws

his petition for residency is denied. Indignant, he

takes his new family and his new money back to

I.
New York City, where he is free to pursue that
shape-shifting mirage—is it starting to resemble
respectability?—without the weight of a past. By
the time the Spanish flu takes him at age 49, he’s
amassed a modest fortune—the modern equivalent
of half a million dollars—and a small portfolio of
outer-borough properties. It isn’t Rockefeller money,
but it’s enough, just barely, to launch a dynasty.
To keep the family afloat, Friedrich’s widow, Eliza-
beth, assigns each of her children a job in their fledg-
ling real-estate business. But it’s Fred, the middle
child, who has a knack for building, both houses and They stood shoulder to shoulder—Don Jr., Ivanka, Jared, and Eric—watching
empires, and he takes charge shortly after high school. the conquest unfold on TV. Ohio was theirs. Then North Carolina and Flor-
Fred runs the enterprise in a clock-racing, ida, too. The vaunted midwestern “blue wall” was crumbling on live TV, as
corner- cutting scramble, selling each new house to ashen-faced pundits muttered about the electoral map. The scene was sur-
cover construction costs for the last. He backslaps real, and delicious.
his way through Brooklyn’s political machine, cozies While Don and Eric fielded congratulatory text messages, some in the
up to mobsters. One house in Woodhaven leads to room noticed Ivanka cut through the thick scrum of campaign aides and
two in Queens Village, then several more in Hollis. attach herself to her father’s side. “Did you hear that, Dad?” she asked when-
When the federal government starts offering loans ever the TV delivered good news, expertly guarding his attention just as she
to Depression-plagued developers, Fred is first in had since she was a young girl.
line—and soon he has an army of shovel-wielding Around midnight, the family realized they would need a victory speech.
workers digging 450 foundations out of the East No one had bothered to write one, because Trump wasn’t supposed to win—
Flatbush swampland. at least not electorally. He was supposed to go down in a spectacular blaze
As rows of mass-produced “Trump Homes” of made-for-TV martyrdom that all of them could capitalize on. Ivanka had
spread across Brooklyn and Queens, the papers call a book coming out. Don and Eric were working on a line of patriotically
Fred the Henry Ford of home building. Later, when themed budget hotels. And preliminary talks were under way to launch a
the scandals start to come out—the charges of profi- Trump-branded TV network that would turn disgruntled voters into viewers.
teering, and fraud, and banning black tenants—the Now they needed a new plan.
papers find other things to call him. Infamy attends One by one, they retreated from the buzzing hive on the 14th floor of
each new triumph. By the 1950s, he has built thou- Trump Tower and rode the elevator up to their father’s penthouse. Steve
sands of houses and apartments, and become the Bannon and Stephen Miller—sleep-deprived and pulsing with adrenaline—
kind of landlord Woody Guthrie writes songs about. began punching out a draft for the president-elect to read. But Ivanka took
When the time comes to plan his own succession, one glance over Miller’s shoulder and concluded that it wouldn’t do. (Some-
Fred turns first to his eldest son and namesake. But one who read it later summed up the tone as “We won; fuck you.”) The next
Fred Jr. has no feel for the business—he’s soft and act of the Trump story was beginning tonight. This was a task for family.
free-spirited, and wants to fly airplanes. Donald is Gathered around the dining-room table with a coterie of aides and allies,
the one with a taste for combat, and to him the great Trump’s three oldest children took turns dictating while the speechwriter
unconquered frontier lies across the East River. Don- typed. The final product—a laundry list of thank yous interspersed with patri-
ald sees more than money in Manhattan. He sees otic platitudes—was notable only for its un-Trumpian restraint. With his fam-
fame, status, entrée into elite society—things the ily lined up behind him onstage, Trump intoned, “I pledge to every citizen of
Trumps have never had. our land that I will be president for all Americans.”
The market on the island is crowded and hos- The speech was bland and forgettable, but hall-of-fame oratory wasn’t
tile, but Fred and Donald work closely to plot their the goal. The remarks were a placeholder, a chance for the family to work
invasion. Together, they cook books, fleece inves- out their next moves. “They’re undeniably adaptable,” Kellyanne Conway,
tors, and fool one regulator after another. Some of a senior adviser to the president, told me of Trump’s children. “When the
the scion’s schemes pay off. Others prove disastrous. family business was real estate, they learned contracts and building approv-
But his signal achievement is forging the Donald als and architecture. Then it was television, and they learned that industry.
Trump persona itself—that high-flying playboy, that Now, a decade later, they’ve turned around and learned politics.”
self-made man, that larger-than-life titan the tab- But this latest reinvention has set off a power struggle within the first
loids can’t resist. It’s a creation of both father and family, one that has played out largely away from public view. The presi-
son, and it will do more for the family business than dent and his children—who declined to be interviewed for this story—have
any casino or skyscraper. labored to project an image of unity. But over the past several months, I
Today a photo of Fred sits in the Oval Office, look- spoke with dozens of people close to the Trumps, including friends, for-
ing out on an empire much vaster and more power- mer employees, White House officials, and campaign aides. The succes-
ful than even he could have imagined. And while sion battle they described is marked by old grievances, petty rivalries—and
the president writes his chapter in history, the next deceptively high stakes.
generation waits in the wings, jockeying for position, In his brief time on the political stage, Donald Trump has comman-
feuding over status, knowing only one of them can deered the national conservative movement, remade the Republican Party
be the heir. in his image, and used his office to confer untold value on the Trump brand.

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Between their business holdings and their politi- For Trump—a distant and domineering father who has long pitted his
cal influence, the Trumps could remain a fixture of offspring against one another—the unsettling reality is that the choice of who
American life for generations. The question now will succeed him may be out of his control.
dividing the president’s children is not just which
one of them will get to take up the mantle when he’s
gone—but how the family will attempt to shape the

II.
country in the years ahead.

F O R A N AT I O N F O U N D E D I N R E V O L T
against monarchy, the United States excels at pre-
serving its own royalty. Once a name and fortune are
made, the machinery of American power churns into
gear. Wealth is passed down through trusts. Impor-
tant jobs flow to unaccomplished heirs. Famous fam-
ilies get mythologized in the media, celebrated in
the culture. The result is a ruling class dominated by
dynasties—from the Rockefellers to the Roosevelts,
the Mellons to the Murdochs. The Trump children grew up surrounded by the trappings of dynasty. Their
Members of these clans tend to justify their privi- home was an eponymous skyscraper—all glass and gold and capital letters—
lege by claiming to uphold a tradition of patriotism that doubled as a symbol of their family’s power. Famous surnames can have
and public service passed down by their forebears—a an enveloping effect on those who carry them, flattening every outside aspi-
refrain that has echoed especially throughout Ameri- ration until the family is all that matters. To young Don, Ivanka, and Eric, the
ca’s most durable political dynasty. whole world felt as if it could fit within Trump Tower.
The Trumps like to invoke the Kennedys in their From afar, their lives looked like a Richie Rich–style fantasy. They had an
own mythmaking. The president has called Melania entire floor of the triplex penthouse to themselves, with rooms full of toys
“our own Jackie O.” Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, and big-screen TVs, and nannies and bodyguards attending to their whims.
whose father reportedly sees himself as a “Jewish Joe Michael Jackson, their neighbor, stopped by to play video games. Limousines
Kennedy,” had a framed photo of JFK in his Manhat- shepherded them around the city.
tan office. And close Ivanka watchers have noted that But within the family their father cultivated a Darwinian dynamic. On ski
her Instagram feed—filled with idyllic photos of fam- trips, when they raced down the mountain, Trump would jab at his children
ily life against the backdrop of the White House—has with a pole to get ahead of them. His favorite fatherly maxim was “Don’t trust
a certain Camelotian quality. anyone”—and he liked to test his children by asking whether they trusted him.
But if Camelot was always a romantic facade, the If they said yes, they were reprimanded. Sibling rivalry flourished. “We were
Trumps have dropped the ennobling pretense. Like a sort of bred to be competitive,” Ivanka said in 2004. “Dad encourages it.”
fun-house-mirror version (Tiffany and Barron, born later to different mothers,
of the Kennedys, they reel seem to have been spared from this contest.)
across the national stage For Trump’s three oldest kids, the defining
swapping the language of drama of their childhoods came in 1990, when
duty and sacrifice for that of he left their mother for Marla Maples, moving out
grievance and quid pro quo. of the penthouse amid a tabloid feeding frenzy.
Ask not what your country ȉȉɔ
ɷ
ʦʰȉΦʦ
Eric, then 6, was too young to fully grasp what
can do for you, they seem to was happening, but his siblings understood, and
say; ask what your country

ʹ ɫ
ʰȉʰ
Jˑȉɷɦȉউʦ
they reacted in different ways. Don, who was 12,
can do for the Trumps. ʁɫɔ˘
ɷʦ
˒
lashed out at his father—“How can you say you
In considering which of love us?” he reportedly spat during an argument—
his children should carry on
ʁ
ɫʁʦɫ˘
ȉɫɔ
ɷ
and refused to talk to him for a year. Eight-year-
his legacy, Trump is now ˒ɔʰ
ʦɷ
˒ɦɷʦ
old Ivanka was afraid of what she might lose in the
caught between compet- divorce. “Does it mean I’m not going to be Ivanka
ing visions for the future of
ʰȉɷ
ʹʦʰ
ɫʰ
ˑʁʰʦे Trump anymore?” she asked, tearfully.
the family— one defined by In the years that followed, Don seemed to
a desire for elite approval, define himself in opposition to his father. Trump
the other by an instinct for loved golf, so Don stayed off the links. Trump was
stoking populist rage. a teetotaler, so Don drank heavily. In his college
But Stephen Hess, a fraternity, he developed a reputation for blacking
scholar who studies American political dynasties, out. “He was drinking himself into a really dark place,” said one former fra-
says succession can be unpredictable in presidential ternity brother, who recalled Don breaking down in tears at a party as he
families. Unlike in business, where a patriarch can talked about his father. “He hated what his dad did to his mom. For a while,
simply install his chosen heir as CEO, politicians he didn’t even want people to know his last name.” (A spokesperson for Don
often see their best-laid plans upended by voters: said: “This is fiction.”)
Think of the Bushes anointing brainy, well-behaved Ivanka, meanwhile, worked to stay close with her father. She stopped by
Jeb, only to have George W. surprise everyone by his office every day after the divorce, and when she was at boarding school
beating him to the White House. she called home often—seeking his advice, and asking questions about the

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family business. Later, Ivanka

would recall with pride how her
dad interrupted important meet-
ings to talk to her: “He’d always
take my call.”

sj
å©j*
≰≵, ≱≩≰≴, IVANKA

strode across a dais in the atrium
of Trump Tower and beamed out
at the crowd. “Welcome, every-
body,” she said, a glint of amuse-
ment in her voice. “Today, I have
the honor of introducing a man
who needs no introduction.”
That Donald Trump had cho-
sen Ivanka to feature so promi-
nently at his campaign kickoff
seemed natural. He’d been groom-
ing her for years to take over the
family empire. She was the golden
child—beautiful, telegenic, and in
possession of that most important
family trait: a compulsive image-
consciousness.
According to an aide who
helped launch Trump’s presiden-
tial bid, Ivanka was the one child
for whom he voiced concern while
he was deciding whether to run. “I
know they’re gonna go after me
for the women,” Trump told the
aide. “The problem is, they’re
gonna go after Ivanka, too, for
the ex-boyfriends.” His daugh-
ter’s romantic history included a
succession of problematic exes—
from Lance Armstrong to James
“Bingo” Gubelmann, a D-list film
producer who would later be
arrested on cocaine charges with Donald Trump with his three oldest children and his then-wife, Ivana, in 1988
Maroon 5’s bassist.
Ivanka had a brand to protect, something Trump Navigating the campaign this way required finesse. Ivanka kept her dis-
understood. She’d been tending to her image since tance from the uncouth rallies in places like Reno, Nevada, and Toledo, Ohio.
she was a teenager— carefully evolving the Ivanka While Trump riled up the country with Muslim-ban proposals and Mexican-
persona from party-girl socialite to lean-in lifestyle rapist panics, she perched herself on a higher plane, where she just wanted
guru. She had her own fashion line and a flagship bou- to talk about the issues that really mattered to her, like affordable child care
tique in SoHo. Alongside Jared—another real-estate and the gender pay gap. Campaign staffers grumbled that Ivanka’s policy
scion—she had wedged herself into Upper East Side preferences were more closely aligned with Aspen weekenders than Rust
society, earning invites to exclusive charity functions Belt voters. “People started to realize this wasn’t about Trump’s vision,” one
and a cameo on Gossip Girl. former aide told me. “It was about Ivanka’s ability to feel comfortable in her
NORMAN PARKINSON/ICONIC IMAGES

Ivanka may not have thought her father could win New York circle.”
the presidency, but she chose to treat the campaign as But few were willing to challenge her. Rumors swirled that a state-level
a brand-enhancement vehicle. She posed for glossy staffer had been fired after displeasing Ivanka. True or not—a spokesperson
magazines, and sat for soft-focus interviews on Good for Ivanka declined to comment—the story reinforced an impression that
Morning America. After speaking at the Republican the candidate’s favorite child was untouchable. “It all felt very Tudor,” said
National Convention, she served her Twitter follow- the former aide. “Aside from whispers in the bathroom, nobody would dare
ers a link to the pink sheath dress she’d worn onstage say anything bad about Ivanka. It was the kind of thing that would get you
and encouraged them to “shop Ivanka’s look.” The tarred and feathered.”
dress sold out within 24 hours, a sign of the broader While Ivanka soaked up the spotlight, Don was consigned to the margins
strategy’s success: In the first half of 2016, Fast Com- of the campaign. The two had long been a study in contrasts. Where she whis-
pany reported, net sales at her clothing line were up pered, he shouted; where she was careful, he was reckless. Unlike Ivanka—who
nearly $12 million. couldn’t wait to follow her dad into real estate—Don had taken a more leisurely

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path to the family business after college, bartending and bumming around Don had long ago come to understand that Ivanka
Colorado for a year and a half while his father seethed. was his father’s favorite. “Daddy’s little girl!” he liked
With his slicked-back hair and pin-striped suits, Don had carried a cer- to joke. But making peace with her husband’s status in
tain fratty energy into adulthood that periodically got him into trouble. (In the family was harder. Ever since Ivanka had married
2002, Page Six reported that he got a beer stein to the head at a New York Jared, Don had been made to watch as this effete, soft-
comedy club after some patrons thought he was “reacting too enthusiasti- spoken interloper cozied up to his dad. “The brothers
cally to [Chris Rock’s] ethnic humor.”) He spent weekdays working at the thought Jared was a yes-man,” said a former Trump
Trump Organization, where he developed a millionaire’s belief in low taxes, adviser. “Don, especially, looked at him as very suspect.”
and weekends in the wilderness with his hunting buddies, where he gained But Ivanka and Jared’s real power was rooted in
an appreciation for gun rights. As a result, Don came to conservatism years Trump’s aspirations for the family. The couple stood
before the rest of his family. as avatars for the elite respectability he’d spent his life
Yet when Don offered to help his father’s campaign, many of the tasks he futilely chasing. They belonged to a world that had
received had a whiff of condescension. Trump had always been embarrassed long excluded him, dined in penthouses where he’d
by his son’s hunting, especially after photos emerged in 2012 of Don posing been derided as a nouveau riche rube. Cultivated and
with the severed tail of an elephant he’d slain in Zimbabwe. But now that the urbane, they embodied the high-class, patrician ideal
candidate was wooing rural Republicans, he was happy to let Don put on that he so desperately wanted the Trump name to evoke.
goofy orange vest and shoot at stuff for the cameras. “You can finally do some- Don—the screwup, the blowhard, the hunter—
thing for me,” Trump told Don, according to a former aide. didn’t stand a chance.

TENSIONS BETWEEN DON AND

Jared sharpened in the spring of 2016, as
it became clear that Trump was going to
fire his campaign manager. With Corey
Lewandowski on the way out, Don and
Jared each began vying for larger roles in
the campaign, according to two Repub-
lican operatives who worked for Trump.
People close to the candidate knew
he would never entrust his campaign
to his son—Don’s chances of taking the
reins were “less than zero,” a former
adviser told me. But Don seemed like
the last one to realize it. He hustled to
prove that he was up to the task, swap-
ping texts and emails with anyone who
said they could help his dad’s candi-
dacy. It was during this period that Don
set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer
who claimed to have dirt on Hillary
Clinton. “The Trump Tower meeting
was Don’s move to take over the cam-
paign,” a former aide told me. “He was
trying to show his father he was compe-
tent.” (The spokesperson for Don said:
“More fiction.”)
The full extent of the mess Don was
making wouldn’t be clear for another
year. But even in the moment, the meet-
ing was a bust. The Russians rambled
about adoption policy, Jared emailed his
assistant looking for an excuse to leave,
LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY

and no useful intel was produced. Don

had wasted everybody’s time.
Jared and Ivanka took a savvier
approach to consolidating power, cul-
tivating the new campaign chairman,
Paul Manafort, as an ally. By the fall,
Jared was traveling virtually full-time
with Trump on his private plane, while
Don was sent to stump in far-flung
states no one else had time for. “I just
Trump with Ivanka in 1991 wake up in the morning and go to

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whatever city they tell me to,” Don complained dur- advertising the $10,800 bracelet she’d worn on air. When Trump met with
ing one trip, according to a travel companion. “Jared’s the prime minister of Japan, Ivanka—who was pursuing a licensing deal with
the smart one. He has it all figured out.” a Japanese apparel conglomerate—sat in on the meeting. As ProPublica would
But Don discovered that he had a knack for cam- later reveal, she also helped ensure that a portion of her father’s inauguration
paigning. Bounding into county fairs and hunting budget was spent at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
expos in boots and blue jeans, he dazzled crowds Eric and Don—tasked with running the Trump Organization while their
with his knowledge of duck blinds and fly-fishing— father was away—looked for their own angles. They doubled the membership
sounding more like a Trump voter than a Trump. He fee at Mar-a-Lago, which was already being described as the “winter White
thrived in the shouty, testosterone-soaked realm of House,” and pushed forward on the development of their down-market hotel
#MAGA Twitter, where his chain, American Idea. Working with a pair of
provocations routinely went Mississippi businessmen they’d met on the cam-
viral. Don’s habit of amplify- paign trail, the Trumps planned a series of red-
ing memes from the right- state budget hotels stuffed with star-spangled
wing fever swamps generated tchotchkes and decorative Americana, such as
controversy. (One infamous vintage Coca-Cola machines in the lobbies.
tweet compared Syrian refu- Trump reportedly began Eric in particular welcomed the challenge of
gees to poisonous Skittles; running the family business. He’d always been the
another featured the alt-right
telling allies, “Jared one most interested in construction and architec-
mascot Pepe the Frog.) But hasn’t been so good for ture, and many in the company assumed that he
it also helped turn him into a would take over day-to-day operations when his
kind of Breitbartian folk hero.
me,” and lamenting that father retired. Now that he had a chance to prove
“He’s one of the bros,” Mike Ivanka could have married himself, Eric planned to exploit every opportu-
Cernovich, a popular far-right nity. “The stars have aligned,” he proclaimed.
social-media personality, told
Tom Brady. “Our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”
me. “He has a classically mas- Jared, meanwhile, was busy attending to
culine personality, and you his own brand. When the December 20, 2016,
don’t feel like he’s a snob. He issue of Forbes hit newsstands, the cover fea-
really likes the meme culture— tured Trump’s favored son-in-law—his arms
it’s not fake for him.” folded, his lapels peaked, his hair a perfect coif—
Don may have lost the inside game to Jared and grinning triumphantly above a headline that seemed tailored to torment Don
Ivanka, but he was building a grassroots base of his and Eric: “THIS GUY GOT TRUMP ELECTED.” Inside, readers were introduced
own. When fans began calling on him to run for to a heretofore unfamiliar version of Jared: the visionary strategist who had
mayor of New York City—and Don responded with run the Trump campaign like a “stealth Silicon Valley startup.”
a bit too much enthusiasm—his father quickly shut it The brazen credit-grabbing rankled people who’d worked on the cam-
down. “Don’s not going to run for mayor,” he said in paign. “He never sacrificed or risked a thing,” a former staffer complained.
an interview with Sean Hannity. But Trump couldn’t “Then, after the win, he came in to grab the spoils and anoint himself grand
put an end to his son’s political career that easily. By pooh-bah. It was gross.” Don and Eric were similarly vexed, according to
the end of the election, Don’s budding #MAGA star- people close to the family.
dom was undeniable—and he had no intention of Jared had wasted little time in wielding his influence. Just days after
walking away. “Going back to doing deals is boring,” the election, he’d persuaded Trump to fire Chris Christie as the head of
he reportedly told a gathering of gun enthusiasts. the transition team. Christie had been the federal prosecutor responsible
“The politics bug bit me.” for putting Jared’s father behind bars a decade earlier, and the dismissal
was widely interpreted as an act of vengeance. But the shake-up also gave
Jared a strategic advantage, allowing him to exert control over hiring for the
new administration.

III.
Don was not happy with this arrangement. More than once, according to
aides familiar with the process, he would recommend someone for a job only
to have Jared intervene and insist that personnel decisions be run through him.
Worse, Jared seemed intent on staffing the Trump White House like it was a
charter jet to Davos. He recruited Gary Cohn, a Goldman Sachs executive and
registered Democrat, to serve as the president’s chief economic adviser. He
lobbied for Steven Mnuchin, a hedge-funder cum Hollywood producer, to be
named Treasury secretary. Don managed to usher a handful of loyalists into
his father’s administration—but Jared and Ivanka ended up with many more.
People close to Trump speculated about what Jared was hoping to
get out of all this. Some thought he was simply seizing the chance to fill
With the election over and the presidency in hand, his Rolodex with world leaders and Wall Street titans. Others would
the Trumps got to work doing what they did with any later point to a sweetheart deal his family cut with a Qatari invest-
new asset: figuring out how to sell it. Their initial cash ment firm as evidence that Jared’s involvement in foreign policy had a
grabs were clumsy and relatively small-scale. When profit motive. (A spokesman for Jared denied this.)
the soon-to-be first family was profiled by 60 Min- Whatever the reason, the couple’s headlong dive into politics proved dif-
utes, Ivanka’s jewelry line blasted out a “Style Alert” ficult to reconcile with Ivanka’s brand. As the inauguration approached, she

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found herself under siege on the Upper East Side. A brother’s attorney general. Eleanor Roosevelt traveled the country on
horde of New York artists—including some whose behalf of her wheelchair-bound husband to survey New Deal programs,
work she personally collected—gathered outside a and Edith Wilson is said to have effectively run the White House after
downtown building where she kept an apartment to Woodrow suffered a stroke.
protest her role in Trump’s “fascist” agenda. Activ- Still, modern presidents do not, as a rule, hire their children to work in
ists launched a viral Instagram campaign juxtaposing the West Wing. So when, in March 2017, Trump made Ivanka an assistant
her glamour shots with appeals from frightened con- to the president, and Jared a senior adviser, the appointments attracted
stituents: “Dear Ivanka, I’ve been raped and I need more than a few critics. Some compared Trump to a third-world autocrat
to have an abortion”; “Dear Ivanka, I’m afraid of the stacking his regime with relatives. But Ivanka was certain the naysayers
swastikas spray painted on my park.” would thank her in the end.
This struck Ivanka as profoundly unfair. She— Her confidence was not unreasonable. People close to the Trump family
the author of a forthcoming book on women in had long marveled at how Ivanka handled her father. The playful Aw, Dad eye
the workplace and frequent participant in female- rolls, the giggles at his jokes, the strategically deployed fawning followed by
empowerment luncheons— subtly asked-for favors—these little performances,
was a misogynist? She—a honed over a lifetime, had taken on an almost
convert to orthodox Judaism mythical quality among Trump’s friends and
and supporter of numerous employees, who say no one’s better at getting what
respected Jewish charities— they want from him.
was an anti-Semite? What The presidential agenda Ivanka envisioned
did these people expect was one her former Manhattan neighbors would
her to do, disown her father? “He wasn’t angry at Don,” approve of. With her help, Trump would enact
But as much as the a former White House a paid-family-leave program and reform the
attacks bothered Ivanka, criminal-justice system. He would update the
they also made something ʁΪɔȉɫ
ȉɫɫे
আJʰ
˒ȉʦ
nation’s infrastructure, and preserve LGBTQ
clear: The White House ʁ
ɫɔɦ

˒ȉʦ
ʦɔ
ɷ
rights. Republican, Democrat, these were just
wasn’t going to boost her labels. Once fair-minded people saw what her
lifestyle business—if any- ʰʁ
ɔʦ
ʦʁɷউʦ
ɔɔʁ˘ेই father had accomplished—what the Trumps had
thing, the coming years accomplished—the family’s legacy would be secure.
would politicize it beyond The first test of Ivanka’s persuasive powers
repair. To take advantage came when White House officials began drafting
of this moment, she would an executive order focused on expanding pro-
need to think bigger. For- tections for religious conservatives. Ivanka, who
tunately for Ivanka, A-list knew the order would be seen as anti-LGBTQ,
celebrities and thought leaders were now flocking to enlisted Tim Cook—the gay Apple CEO, whose respect her father craved—
her. Leonardo DiCaprio, Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie to lobby Trump against signing it, according to a former White House aide.
Slaughter—all of them wanted a spot on her calendar. She also privately reminded her father that Vice President Mike Pence
She didn’t need to sell handbags or luxury condos to had faced nasty political blowback when he’d stumbled into a religious-
command the attention of America’s elite. Her proxim- freedom culture war as governor of Indiana.
ity to the Oval Office was enough. Ivanka’s crusade culminated one night in the president’s private study,
The week before Trump entered the White House, where Trump was discussing the issue with a small group of advisers. A for-
Ivanka announced that she was taking a leave of mer aide who was present at the meeting recalled Pence launching into an
absence from the Trump Organization and her fash- impassioned defense of the executive order, only to have Trump cut him
ion line. The seat of the family empire wasn’t in Man- off. “Mike, isn’t this the shit that got you in trouble in Indiana?” he snapped.
hattan anymore. It was in Washington—and that’s Pence quickly retreated as blood rushed to his face. It was clear to all in the
where she and Jared would be. room that Ivanka—standing quietly in the corner—had won. When Trump
did eventually sign the order, it had been dramatically watered down.
But as time went on, Trump began to tire of Ivanka and Jared’s inces-
sant lobbying. Every time he turned around, they were nagging him about

IV.
something new—refugees one day, education the next. It never stopped. Their
efforts to change his mind about the Paris climate accord exasperated the
president, who took to mocking their arguments when they weren’t around.
“They’re New York liberals,” he would say, according to a former White
House aide. “Of course that’s what they think.”
When the president withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June 2017,
the illusion of Ivanka the Trump whisperer collapsed. “Look, It’s Time
to Collectively and Officially Give Up on Ivanka Trump,” Vogue declared.
“Ivanka Trump is never going to come through,” a New York Times op-ed
announced. Vanity Fair published a savage story about her and Jared’s
The American presidency has always been shaped, early adventures in elite Washington, where they were widely regarded
for better or worse, by unelected family members. as dilettantes. “What is off-putting about them,” one politico told the
Hillary Clinton was the architect of her husband’s magazine, “is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance. They think
health-care plan. Bobby Kennedy served as his they are special.”

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The 2019 World Media Awards celebrate the most effective multi-platform, cross-border,
content-driven advertising. To see more details of the winning campaigns, go to
www.world-media-group.com/awards/2019-winners/

WORLD media award DEEP STATE PAN-EUROPEAN

grand prix MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Entered by: FOX Networks Group

WORLD media award BRING THE E-TRON TO THE DIGITAL AIRWAVES

automotive Entered by: PHD Germany

WORLD media award THE POWER OF ENTREPRENEURIAL THINKING

brand & media owner partnership Entered by: Bloomberg Media Group

WORLD media award THE COST OF SILENCE

corporate influencer Entered by: The Economist Group

WORLD media award THE ECONOMIST GROUP GLOBAL

financial services TREASURY LEADERS PROGRAMME
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WORLD media award FORMULA 1: UNLEASHING THE GREATEST

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Ivanka seemed consumed by her coverage. Omarosa Manigault Newman, Eric and longed instead for the political arena. But
who worked in the White House for the first year of the administration, he rarely called his dad at the White House—“I feel
recalled Ivanka derailing a senior staff meeting to complain about a Sat- ridiculous bothering him,” he told a reporter—and
urday Night Live sketch that portrayed her as the face of a perfume named his dad called him even less. In fact, no one in the
“Complicit.” “Ivanka was thin-skinned,” Newman wrote in her memoir, “and first family took Don’s political ideas seriously, least
could not seem to take a joke.” of all Jared and Ivanka. “You never heard them say,
Ivanka’s favorite-child status had long been tied to the good press she ‘We’ve got to get Don Jr.’s opinion on this,’ ” a former
generated for her dad. “For Trump, everything comes back to optics,” Cliff White House official told me.
Sims, a former White House aide, told me. “She is the archetype of what he In private, Don complained that the West Wing
wants—the most beautiful face, the most buttoned-up message, everything had been overrun by Democrats, and griped that even
just exactly the way it should be.” But as Ivanka became a less attractive the true believers were too passive. Having immersed
surrogate, Trump’s patience with her and her husband waned. A news story himself in the online meme wars, Don seemed to
about Jared using a private email server to conduct government business believe the White House’s woes could be solved with
prompted a presidential meltdown in the Oval Office. “How could he be so the kind of aggressive lib-owning that came so natu-
stupid?” Trump fumed, according to a White House official who was present. rally to him. Instead, his father had put his faith in a
“That’s what Hillary did!” timid preppy. When photos were released of Jared in
Trump reportedly began telling allies, “Jared hasn’t been so good for Iraq in the spring of 2017, sporting a flak jacket over
me,” and lamenting—in jest, perhaps, though no one could say for sure—that his oxford shirt and blazer, Don spent the afternoon
Ivanka could have married Tom Brady instead. More than once, the presi- trading gleeful text messages with friends about the
dent wished aloud that the couple would move back to New York. Martha’s Vineyard–meets–Mosul getup.
Ivanka reacted to her sudden loss of influence by affecting an airy, just- But beneath all Don’s carping was a more per-
a-daughter pose. “I try to stay out of politics,” she said in an interview with sonal grievance: While Jared and Ivanka moved
Fox News—a puzzling claim for a White House official. To those who knew freely through the West Wing, he was stuck on the
her, it was clear she was disoriented. For the first time since she was a girl, outside, his face pressed up against the glass.
her privileged place in the family seemed uncertain.
So when, in July of 2017, Don’s ill-conceived Trump Tower meeting with EVERYBODY WHO WORKS F O R T R U M P
the Russians became public—putting Jared in jeopardy—the couple did what learns sooner or later that imitating him will only
they had to do. Jared released an 11-page statement effectively blaming the draw his contempt. The tragedy of Don Jr. is that
radioactive meeting on his brother-in-law while absolving himself. In a gra- he seems never to have learned this lesson. As his
tuitous bit of knife-twisting, he recounted emailing an assistant, “Can u pls mother has recalled, Trump resisted when she
call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.” wanted to name their first son after him: “You can’t
The statement infuriated Don, according to family friends—not just for do that!” he protested. “What if he’s a loser?” That
the way it threw him under the bus, but for the way it belittled him. But Jar- Don went on to confirm his father’s fear largely by
ed’s maneuver worked on the audience that mattered most. trying to mimic him—in temperament, style, speech,
Watching cable-news coverage of the fiasco from the West Wing, Trump and career—points to the unique difficulties of being
shook his head wearily. “He wasn’t angry at Don,” a former White House the president’s namesake.
official recalled. “It was more like he was resigned to his son’s idiocy.” In March 2018, Page Six reported that Don’s wife,
“He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” Trump said with a sigh. Vanessa, was filing for divorce after 12 years of mar-
riage. The echoes from his childhood were hard to
ignore. The couple had five kids—including a daugh-
ter who was about the same age he’d been when his

V.
parents split up—and the tabloids were circling.
Hoping to spare their children from the media cir-
cus Don had experienced, he and Vanessa commit-
ted to keep their no-contest proceedings quiet. He
told his publicist he didn’t care what reporters wrote
about him, but requested that they respect his kids’
privacy and keep in mind that some of them were old
enough to read.
Trump had been ambivalent about Don’s wife.
(Some traced his doubts back to her teenage romance
with a member of the Latin Kings gang; others pointed
Saturday Night Live has a running bit in which Trump’s two eldest sons appear to an oft-retold story about Vanessa meeting Don’s
in tandem, with Don portrayed as the smart, responsible big brother and dad at a fashion show and later joking that he was
Eric as a kind of bumbling man-child. In an episode last year, Don answered “retarded.”) But the president was even less enthusi-
questions about the Russia investigation while Eric ate Play-Doh. Real-life astic when his son started dating Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Don seems to delight in these sketches, and has even publicly volunteered The Fox News host had lobbied to become White
to come on the show to play himself. But within the Trump family, associates House press secretary early in the administration,
say, the brothers’ roles are exactly reversed. but Trump had shown little interest, according to
Sequestered in Trump Tower, Don spent the first year of his father’s presi- two former aides. “Even he can tell the difference
dency as a kind of armchair pundit, watching the news on TV and firing off between the attractive women on Fox who have a
tweets. He showed little interest in running the Trump Organization with little bit of substance, and those who will be derided

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T he D e fi n i t iv e P ort ra i t o f a
Leg e nda ry W r i t er

“A significant life like Sontag’s demands a significant biography.

That demand has now been incisively, extravagantly met.”
—Michael Cunningham

“An astonishing page-turner, the last word on Susan Sontag.”

—Sigrid Nunez

Ava i l a b l e i n h a r d c ov e r , e b o o k , a n d au d i o b o o k
 RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws

as airheads,” one aide said. Now she was gallivanting across the gossip pages 6,000,” says Tommy Hicks Jr., a co-chair of the Repub-
with his son, and posing for photos on the South Lawn. lican National Committee and a friend of Don’s.
The family was friendly to Guilfoyle in person, but there were signs of But the stump was where Don really shined. Taking
disapproval. One source told me that after her attendance at a White House the stage to wild applause from riled-up MAGA-heads,
Fourth of July party sparked a round of fawning press coverage—upstaging he riffed and ranted and cracked jokes about gender
Jared and Ivanka—Don was contacted by an official informing him that he identity. To watch Don in these settings was to see a
would need to clear his guests the next time he visited. And as Thanksgiv- man morphing into his father—the vocal inflection,
ing approached, the president made it known that the puckered half-smirk,
Guilfoyle wasn’t welcome to join the family at Mar- the staccato “Who knows?”
a-Lago, two Trump associates told me. (Spokes- punctuating key sentences.
people for the White House and Don denied this.) It was as though he had
Some suspected that the president was simply studied his dad’s deliv-
fed up with the distraction the relationship posed. ery, practicing each tic in
But according to one longtime Trump adviser, To watch Don on the the mirror.
there may have been another reason for his dis- stump was to see a man By November 2018, Don
pleasure. Over the years, Trump had frequently had appeared at more than
made suggestive comments about Guilfoyle’s morphing into his father— 70 campaign events across
attractiveness, the adviser told me, and more than ʰ
ˑʁȉɫ
ɔɷζʰɔʁɷू
ʰ
17 states—and powerful
once inquired about whom she was dating. Republicans were abuzz. “I
But while Trump may have been less than ʹɦ
ȉɫ␨ʦɔɦू
ʰ
could very easily see him
thrilled about the relationship, among rank-and- staccato “Who knows?” entering politics,” Senator
file right-wingers “Donberly”—as the couple nick- Kevin Cramer told me. “I
named themselves—was a hit. Appearing side by think his future is bright,”
side at Republican rallies, they bantered about said House Minority Leader
each other’s pet names—she was “Pooh Bear,” he Kevin McCarthy. News-
was “Junior Mint”—and railed against Democrats. max’s CEO, Chris Ruddy,
They went on hunting trips and posted selfies with told me he’d personally
rifles on social media. Fans on Twitter began referring to Guilfoyle as the encouraged Don to run for office; Sean Hannity called
“future first lady,” and she made little effort to tamp down the speculation. him “a born natural leader.” Senator Rand Paul went
When an interviewer on Breitbart News’s radio show made a comment so far as to say that Don was one of the best Republican
about Don’s political potential, Guilfoyle didn’t hesitate: “I think he’s the campaigners in the country. “If you can’t get the presi-
No. 1 up-and-coming political figure, for sure, on the right.” dent,” Paul told me, “he’s a close second.”
Notably, many of these Republicans seemed less
enthusiastic about his sister. Cramer, for example,
spent 15 minutes in a phone interview gushing to me
about Don’s “accessibility” and “irreverence” and

VI.
gift for “connecting” with voters. But when I asked
him about Ivanka, he paused. “She’s a little bit harder
to get,” he replied, politely. “Her faith prevents her
from traveling on the Sabbath.” Charlie Kirk was
similarly careful when we spoke. While all of Trump’s
adult children were helpful to the cause, he told me,
“I can honestly say that outside of his father, Don is
the No. 1 most requested speaker, and he brings the
most energy to the conservative base.”
None of this newfound excitement about Don
seemed to rub off on the president, however. People
As the 2018 midterm elections approached, Don decided to get serious about close to Trump told me he remained enchanted by
politics. He hired the Republican strategist Andrew Surabian to help shape the idea of Ivanka as the inheritor of his political
his press coverage, and began fielding requests to join candidates on the legacy. During trips to Mar-a-Lago, he was often
campaign trail. heard rhapsodizing about her potential to be the
Crisscrossing the country with Guilfoyle in the year that followed, Don first female president. Don’s political prospects, if
emerged as a veritable right-wing phenom. At the University of Georgia, more they came up at all, were treated as an afterthought.
than 2,000 young Republicans lined up to hear him speak. At the Conservative If there was any doubt about which child Trump
Political Action Conference in Maryland, he was swarmed by fans clamoring favored, his Twitter feed told the story: In the first
for selfies and autographs. Charlie Kirk, the founder of the student organiza- two years of his presidency, he tweeted about Ivanka
tion Turning Point USA, recalled a summit in West Palm Beach that featured 16 times, while Don received just four mentions—all
conservative A-listers such as Tucker Carlson, Greg Gutfeld, and Jordan Peter- of them about the Trump Tower scandal.
son. Don drew a bigger crowd than any of them. Trump floated Ivanka for various prestigious jobs,
To the surprise of many in elite GOP circles, he also excelled at schmooz- including United Nations ambassador and head of
ing wealthy donors, raising millions of dollars for conservatives in closed- the World Bank. When Washington snickered, she
door fundraisers. “He’s as good in a room of six people as he is in a room of settled for a more amorphous role that let her travel

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the world to speak on pet issues. She appeared onstage with Angela Merkel to someone familiar with the conversation. (Spokes-
in Berlin, and addressed a conference on women’s empowerment in Tokyo. people for Don and Ivanka disputed this account and
On a trip to Africa, she wore flowy dresses as she laughed and danced (and denied that there is a rift between them.)
posed for photos) with Ethiopian women. She even began to claw her way
out of Upper East Side exile, thanks to her high-profile advocacy for the WHILE HIS SIBLINGS åsZ*È*$ <s
s^J¢J^

Republican tax bill—which slashed rates for the rich, and the corpora- position, Eric spent most of his days at Trump Tower.
tions they owned. “As people got richer, [Ivanka and Jared] started getting Don was still technically on the company’s payroll,
TIME LIFE PICTURES/DMI/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY

Trump and Don Jr. with Fred Trump (ɥʧLjȶǫȓȶȅ) in the Plaza Hotel in 1988

welcomed back in by their old friends,” says Emily Jane Fox, a Vanity Fair but between hunting trips and campaign stops, his
reporter who wrote a book about the Trumps. presence in the office was irregular at best.
But as Don’s visibility grew, the cold war between him and Ivanka inten- Running the Trump Organization during the
sified. Now that each had their own teams of allies and advisers, they had Trump presidency had turned out to be more diffi-
grown paranoid that the other’s henchmen were planting damaging stories cult than Eric had imagined. After an initial burst
about them in the press. A few days before the midterms, McClatchy pub- of postelection activity, many of the family’s most
lished a story under the headline “Trump Kids on the Campaign Trail: Don Jr. ambitious plans collapsed. They were forced to
Wows, Ivanka Disappoints.” Ivanka’s camp was enraged, and suspected that scrap their American Idea hotel chain after eth-
Don was behind the story. Later, Don confronted Ivanka over rumors that ics concerns were raised. International building
her team was undermining him in off-the-record conversations with report- projects were delayed amid outcry from watchdog
ers. “Tell your people to stop trashing me to the media,” he said, according groups. Valuable retail space in Trump Tower sat

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empty month after month, and socially conscious Trump watches these segments from the West Wing and offers a running
condo owners called for the Trump name to be commentary to whoever is around, according to a former aide. His attitude
scraped off their buildings. toward each of his adult children on any given day is shaped by how they are
Meanwhile, at Mar-a-Lago, patrons whispered playing on cable news. Ivanka tends to draw rave reviews, while Don’s are
that “the boys” were draining the club of its class with more mixed, with the president muttering things like “Why did he say that?”
cost-cutting measures after numerous charities can- and “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Recently, though, his perspective
celed functions there. When a rumor went forth that on his two oldest children seems to have shifted.
Eric had ordered lower-quality steaks to be served In June, Ivanka accompanied her father to Osaka, Japan, for the G20
at the restaurant, members erupted in outrage: His summit. After the meetings, the French government posted a video clip
father never would have allowed this. that showed the president’s daughter standing amid a gaggle of side-eyeing
Eric blamed the Trump Organization’s setbacks world leaders as she tried awkwardly to force her way into the conversa-
on partisan politics. “We live in a climate where tion. The clip went viral, spawning a hashtag—#UnwantedIvanka—and
everything will be used against us,” he told The Wash- a wave of parody Photoshops inserting her into great moments in his-
ington Post. But within the president’s orbit, there was tory: mugging for the camera at the March on Washington, grinning next
a growing sense that his sons were driving the com- to Winston Churchill at Yalta. News outlets around the world covered
pany into the ground. the snub. Pundits called it a damning indictment of Trump’s nepotism,
Trump, who’d pledged to recuse himself from busi- while foreign-policy experts argued that Ivanka’s lack of credibility could
ness decisions, relied on golf buddies to update him on harm U.S. diplomacy. A quote from an anonymous Indian diplomat recir-
the company during his weekend trips to Florida. Their culated in the media: “We regard Ivanka Trump the way we do half-wit
reviews seemed to confirm his worst fears. Before Saudi princes.”
launching his campaign, he’d fretted that his kids The episode laid bare the depth of Ivanka’s miscalculation. She had
weren’t ready to take over the business. Now, with Don thought when her father took office that the surest path to power and status
MIA and Eric flailing, he became preoccupied with was to plant herself in the West Wing and mingle with the global elite. But
what would be left of his company when he returned after two and a half years of trying to burnish her credentials as a geopolitical
to it. According to a former White House aide, Trump player, Ivanka had become an international punch line. There was, it turned
talked about the issue so often that administration offi- out, no market for a genteel brand of Trumpism.
cials worried he would get himself in trouble trying to Don, meanwhile, threw himself into his father’s reelection campaign,
run the Trump Organization from the Oval Office. while quietly plotting his own future. According to Republicans familiar
But as the 2020 campaign season entered its early with the discussions, he considered running for office somewhere in the
stages, even Eric turned his attention toward politics. Mountain West, where his love of guns and hunting could help woo voters.
His wife, Lara—a conservative activist from North A privately commissioned poll in Montana—passed around enthusiastically
Carolina—was an outspoken surrogate for Trump. among Don’s inner circle—showed that 75 percent of the state’s Republicans
Eric had been holding back, worried that his father viewed him favorably. In April, it was announced that Guilfoyle would join
would disapprove; after all, someone needed to mind the Trump campaign as a senior adviser.
the shop. But the president encouraged Eric to join While Don mulled his options, some allies talked him up as a potential
his siblings in the fray. There would be plenty of ways chairman of the Republican National Committee. Others suggested he
to cash in later. This was the family business now. launch a right-wing political outfit that would allow him to hold rallies and
bestow endorsements. The word kingmaker started getting tossed around.
Even the president began to appreciate his son’s political value. During
a family gathering at the White House, Trump was overheard questioning

VII.
Don about whether he’d been using the company plane while shirking his
day job. A Republican senator in the room intervened to say that without
Don’s work on the campaign trail, the party might not have kept its Senate
majority. Trump seemed pleased: “I believe it.”
On a steamy June evening, Trump officially launched his bid for reelection
with a raucous rally in Orlando. This time, Ivanka and Jared sat in the audi-
ence, while Don—the president’s most skilled warm-up act—strutted across
the stage to fervid applause. Bellowing into the microphone until his voice
went ragged, he crowed about “crushing the bastards of ISIS” and made fun
of Joe Biden for “groping” women. As he neared the end of his speech, Don
lifted his arms in the air as if conducting an orchestra, and the arena erupted
Watching Trump’s children appear on Fox News, one in chants of “Four more years!”
gets the sense that they’re still auditioning for their In that moment, there was little question what the future of the
father’s affection. Ivanka speaks in dulcet tones about Trump family would look like. After a century and a half of striving,
how proud, so proud, she is of her dad. Don bashes they had money, and fame, and unparalleled power. But respectability
the “fake-news media” with performative force. Eric, would remain as distant a mirage as it was when Friedrich was chasing
the least camera-ready of the three, clings to talking it across the Yukon. While no one knew when Donald Trump would exit
points, lavishing praise on Trump whenever he gets the White House, it was clear what he would leave behind when he did:
stuck. (In an interview earlier this year, Eric repeated an angry, paranoid scrap of the country eager to buy what he was hawking—
variations of “He’s the greatest guy in the world” and an heir who knew how to keep the con alive.
in such reverential tones that even Sean Hannity
seemed uncomfortable with the obsequiousness.) McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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E S S AY

“GET A W E A P ON”

When a veteran military man gave me that advice

before I left to join U.S. forces in Baghdad,
I thought he meant that I needed a way to protect
myself from the enemy.

By SANDRA SIDI
Illustration by Ben Fearnley

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T H E AT L A N T I C O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 97
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“D
UCK AND COVER!” through the rows of sandbags, then past on democracy-building in Iraq. “Iraq’s
a mechanized voice the statue of Saddam Hussein, its half- had a real ass-kicking this month,” she
screamed. The ground head lying in the sand. Behind me, thick announced. “Qahtaniya bombing toll
shook and the window plumes of smoke rose into the sky. over 500 now.”
rattled. I rolled from my I showed my badge at the palace Theresa, an MP, mused that we hadn’t
bed to the floor of my trailer and felt for entrance, coded into my office. I walked figured out how to bring democracy to
the armor I’d forgotten in my office. I lay past flashing TV sets and translators in the Middle East, but we had managed
there and sweated and swore. The voice headphones typing at their keyboards. to bring Southern fried chicken and grits.
from the loudspeaker urged me to get When I arrived at my desk, I put my head Theresa was tiny, with more positive
away from the windows. I was inside a down. It was 6:30 a.m. energy than a sunflower. She did security
tin can. checks on the perimeter and was Com-
I crawled to the door. My hand was on SOME HOUR S LATER, my brown bal- mand Sergeant Major Holcomb’s assis-
the knob when I realized I was naked. The let flats tapped softly on the marble floor. tant driver.
next impact knocked the air conditioner to It was 2007, and the U.S. military and Two soldiers stood up, craning to get a
the floor. I grabbed a light-blue cotton robe State Department were working out of glance at us. One pointed.
and bolted. Saddam’s Republican Palace, in Baghdad. “What do the men gain from it being
I raced along a row of sandbags, one I walked next to a woman I’ll call Morgan, like this?” That was Silvana (a pseudo-
hand holding the robe closed. The who was new and whom I’d met only the nym), an economic analyst with sev-
duck-and-cover bunkers were 100 feet night before. At 23, she was two years eral master’s degrees. She’d just filed a
away. Another series of explosions, and older than I was. She wore her long brown sexual-harassment complaint against her
I hit the rocks. I was lying there, panting, hair down, though she wouldn’t for long. supervisor. The food in front of her was
when I saw a bright-yellow bunker tucked The men were excited about her. She car- untouched, as it often was.
behind a row of sandbags and palm trees. ried a Bible, and I remember thinking this “Before I came here,” said Ann
I was up, running, full out. My robe fell would help her. (another pseudonym), the National
open and flew out behind me. Men watched as we passed beneath an Guardsman with goat-farm fantasies, “I
Another hit. I was 20 feet away. Ten. ornate ceiling of red-and-green marble used to like them—men, I mean.”
Five. I crashed into the duck-and-cover, and rows of glittering chandeliers. The Morgan, the newbie, said she’d hoped
yanking my robe closed. table of women was at the back of the that she might meet a guy in Iraq, but not
More than a dozen men squatted palace dining facility—DFAC to all of so much anymore.
there and looked at me. Soldiers in mili- us. We couldn’t see one another socially “The odds are good,” Nicole replied,
tary fatigues, some without shirts; con- much, with our crazy work schedules, but repeating one of her mantras, “but the
tractors in cargo shorts and polos; other we walked together whenever possible, goods are odd.”
men in nothing but boxers. The curly hair and gathered for meals, six or seven of
on their chests rose and fell with their us, our trays loaded with barbecue and W E C A M E F O R love of country, for
labored breathing. I should have slept biscuits and salads drenched in ranch patriot ism, for money. We came to
in clothes, but my air conditioner was dressing. We were all happy to see Mor- escape debt or marriages. We came
broken. The rounds hit like deep drums, gan. Grateful for another young woman because of television—Alias and Buffy the
but we were safe, packed together in 50 to talk to, and perversely relieved by the Vampire Slayer. We came for adventure,
square feet of concrete. addition of another female to absorb the for service. We came because someone
I leaned against the wall and tried to male attention. had suggested we wouldn’t dare.
stop my legs from shaking. Two more One of us was State Department, I grew up in the Washington, D.C., area,
men in boxers joined us. A bearded, sun- another a civilian analyst, and others and, like many of my high-school class-
burned soldier stared at my feet. A half- military police, or MPs. There was a mates, I was shaken by the 9/11 attack on
dressed contractor took furtive looks at cropped-haired, soft-voiced woman the Pentagon. Inspired to help my country,
my neck. A marine offered me the one in the National Guard who dreamed I chose political science as my major in col-
chair inside the bunker. “You always say of starting a goat farm. Beside her was lege and studied three languages, includ-
thank you when we buzz you through,” a Naval Academy graduate with shin ing Arabic. Just before graduating, I was
he said, smiling kindly. These men went splints and swollen ankles from carry- offered a job by the CIA’s Middle East desk,
outside the wire every day, in all that dan- ing 80 pounds on 10-mile marches. She though I’d have to wait a year or more to
ger, that heat. They were heroes. They could barely pull her boots on. None of us get security clearance and would have
were lonely. had the security clearance to know what little control over my assignment. I was
The bearded soldier’s eyes met mine she did. I was a civilian, ferried over by thrilled to have been selected by the CIA,
and held. He looked away. I pulled my third-party contractors to provide ana- but I was also impatient and impulsive,
robe tighter. lytical support for Rear Admiral Gregory and hadn’t given much thought to exactly
Finally, the attack ceased, and the Smith, the new head of public affairs for what kind of work I wanted to do, or where.
sirens quieted. Back in my trailer, I dressed the Multi-National Force in Iraq. This So when a government contractor pitched
and slipped my embassy ID around my was my first job out of college. me by phone—Three weeks and you’ll be in
neck. I ran my fingers through my hair Nicole joined us at the table. Ex- Baghdad—I said yes.
and braided it as I left the Riverside Trailer Army, she was now a doctoral student Before I deployed, I stood in a line
Compound, where I lived, and threaded and civilian analyst collecting research with other contractors and soldiers at

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Fort Benning, in Georgia, waiting for They openly made bets about who was the gorgeous geometric patterns of the
our physicals. The contractor in front of going to get pregnant, who was going to ceiling until images emerged. My moth-
me wore a shirt with fake blood splat- get an STD. We overheard conversations er’s favorite blue dress. The sun striking
tered up the side—a makeshift kidney we wished we hadn’t—like after my first the Potomac River, where we used to
wound—and the words I’M OKAY at the briefing of the admiral, when one analyst swim. My own eyes and breasts and legs
top. We started talking about his home in my office observed to another, “I think and feet, misshapen and rearranged like
in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is where she’ll do well,” and the other answered, in a cubist painting.
my mother lives. We spoke of boats and “Just another woman trying to use her
streetlights and dolphins. He had gray body to get ahead.” Or the four contrac- I WA S LU C K Y. Rear Admiral Smith
hair and friendly lines around his eyes. tors who didn’t see me reading in a chair made it known from his first day in
He asked where I was headed. behind them as they watched a female theater that he’d personally punish any
“Baghdad,” I said. “The embassy.” translator for the State Department: sex offenders. This made a difference,
“How old are you?” he asked. “Fuck, look at that.” I think. A colonel from Psychological
“Twenty-two,” I lied. My birthday was “Is she seeing anyone?” Operations once propositioned me on
five months away. “Not since they sent that old bird home.” behalf of his son—Honey, with him you’ll
He frowned. “Have they issued you a “Well, that ass has got to be fucked.” be breathing twice as hard. In the office,
firearm?” I shook my head. He nodded “Do you know where she lives?” though, I was fairly safe. The only sex-
and looked out at the line of men behind “Riverside 242.” ual slurs came from a fellow analyst who
us. The creases in his forehead were like had a habit of calling me “Twat.” But I’d
rails of a train track. He turned back to W E WO R K E D 14-, 16-, 18-hour days. lived such a sheltered life that I didn’t
me and leaned close. “A tall blonde? Get We put in as many hours as the men—we know what the word meant, so I wasn’t
a weapon,” he said. They called his name. made sure of this. Women who’d been bothered by it.
He looked up at the nurse and then back My job was to inform the admiral of
to me. “Get a weapon,” he repeated, and the most “strategic” events that occurred
walked away. in Baghdad on a given day—incidents that
I’d thought he meant for insurgents. would affect our operations, the stability
I counted how many of the Iraqi government, or our highest-
F ROM T H E MOM E N T I stepped out- women were in a room priority alliances. Each evening, I chose
side my trailer, when I stood in line at the six events to highlight.
dining hall, when I ran to the duck-and-
the second I entered: Not long after my arrival, a translator,
cover, when I sat at my desk, the male 63 men, two women; Nazir (a pseudonym), reached out to pro-
soldiers watched. For some, I was the vide guidance. I’d passed the exams that
first woman without a hijab they’d seen
44 men, one woman. Me. tested regional knowledge and the ability
in months. Men with enormous hands, to respond to hypothetical foreign-policy
with shoulders the width of door frames, and security challenges, but I was the only
with pistols strapped to their thighs— analyst without a master’s degree. Nazir
they watched. there longer offered advice: Be sure to helped me keep track of the latest faction
I read before I went to Iraq that engage with them, we were told. Don’t get to boycott the prime minister and which
women made up one in 10 American too close, we were warned. Say Yes, sir. Do new militia was splintering off from the
soldiers in the country, but I had no idea not ever say Yes, sir. last new militia. He’d find impor tant
where all those women were. The ratio Some of us were married, had kids events for me before they were reported
seemed closer to one in 20, even 30. I back home. One of us was quietly going anywhere in English, allowing me to give
counted how many women were in a through a divorce. Theresa had deployed the admiral the most up-to-the-minute
room the second I entered. Twenty-nine to Iraq with her mother, also a soldier, information. He was funny and took me
men, three women. Sixty-three men, two while Ann had come with her husband, to social gatherings with Iraqi nation-
women. Forty-four men, one woman: me. who, like her, was a staff sergeant. When als that, as a non–Middle Easterner, I
I wore my hair in a tight braid. I didn’t we sat together in the DFAC, talking, wouldn’t have had access to. Those first
wear shorts. I wore shoes that hid my toes. he’d sit a few tables behind, drinking weeks, I don’t know what I would have
I put on sweaters in 117-degree heat. Even coffee, her lookout. They lived together done without him.
so, my body was everywhere. in a married trailer and held hands while On a mortar-free day roughly a month
My eyes met the other women’s when lying on the floor during shellings. into my deployment, I sat outside the pal-
we passed in the hall, when I threw my Some of us were looking to date. Others ace. The air was like the inside of a hair
trash away at the DFAC, when I was couldn’t be bothered with men. A num- dryer. A squad of soldiers jogged around
buzzed through the guard stations. How ber of us were virgins. the T-walls, the 12-foot slabs of reinforced
are you? Are you okay? Are we safe? During my breaks, I’d lie on a gold concrete lining the embassy compound.
couch in the main palace entryway, which After they went by, I saw Nazir and waved.
T H E M E N G O S S I PE D about us; we’d was usually empty because the side “Do you want to smoke?” he asked.
meet them in a professional capacity and entrances were safer. I’d run my fingers I didn’t smoke but appreciated the
find that they already knew our home- over the gilt of Saddam’s chairs and along invitation. “Sure, Nazir. Thanks.” We
towns, our alma maters, our marital status. the smooth marble railings. I’d stare at walked to a picnic table, passing a

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ENDLESS roped-off section of dirt with a sign

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He lit a cigarette for me, which I held
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and stayed out of their way as much as with frightening accuracy, he refused to “Good for her,” Theresa said. “Who
possible. Some of us loved Baghdad, no allow me to accompany him to the broad- could work for that creep?”
one more than Nicole, the doctoral stu- cast room, because the hallway had floor- “I hope he gets AIDS,” the Naval Acad-
dent. She swore as well as the men and to-ceiling windows. emy graduate said, massaging her shins.
had jaw-length red hair so thick, it looked Three months into my deployment, We discussed how to respond to Ira-
like a crash helmet. She barely seemed to Silvana vanished. She just stopped nian encroachment in Basra. “That’s
notice the lack of women. easy,” Nicole cracked. She moved a chunk
We desperately missed our families. of red hair from one side of her face to the
I’d think of my 10-year-old brother, who other. “Tell them to watch it, or we’ll fuck
was still into Pokémon cards. (Secretly, I up Iran the same way we fucked up Iraq.”
was too.) We dreamed of home. For me,
We had fun, too. Genius! We laughed.
it was the leafy college campus filled We slid down the marble I wish I could say that we were more
with women I’d left only weeks before. curious about what was going on in Sil-
For Morgan, her twin brother, who was
railings of the palace. vana’s office, but we didn’t have any way
preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. We flew over blue pools to speak about our vulnerability in an
Theresa dreamed of her two little boys; environment that placed a premium on
she feared they wouldn’t know her when
surrounded by sand female toughness and resourcefulness.
she returned home. and could hardly breathe I didn’t tell the others, not even Morgan,
how the same day Silvana disappeared,
T H E R E W E R E W O M E N who, like
at their beauty. Nazir had put his hand on my neck and
Silvana, reported their male bosses for whispered, “Have you thought about
sexual harassment. But I worked for a my question?” It’s not that we didn’t
man as decent as he was powerful. A man care about Silvana—we did—but we also
who listened to me in the briefings, who coming to work, no word to any of us. I wanted to be in Baghdad. We wanted it
sought out my opinion in a room full of emailed her, called her cell. We asked badly. We feared the noise coming from
majors and colonels. And when the secu- around, but no one knew. her corner would show as lie the truth
rity situation deteriorated, and the mor- “Bet she broke her contract,” Morgan we most valued: I belong here. Women
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WE HAD F UN, TOO. We slid down the but the door didn’t open; he must have
marble railings of the palace when no one released the button too soon. Through
was looking. Hanging out in Saddam’s the glass, I heard him clear his throat.
golden chairs, we ate tangy, Army-issued There was a pause, some shuffling, and a
granola bars, which actually weren’t bad. sound like something falling off a desk. A
We used Morgan’s State Department muffled curse. I fought a smile.
status—she had the longest leash of any of After I’d finally made it through, I
The Stylemaster us—to get our names on a helicopter trans- turned toward him and smiled, because
This classic fur felt fedora distinguishes port and flew over blue pools surrounded he was awkward, because he looked like
a gentleman as well today as it did on by sand and could hardly breathe at their my brother, because there was thick glass
beauty. We got drunk at Italian-embassy between us, or because I was so tired of
the streets of Melbourne or Sydney in
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shop via davidmorgan.com or study. I can’t say my faith was thriving in she’d slept with most
Baghdad, but I never missed a meeting.
request our catalog Oh, the joy and freedom of being a woman of the men in her squad.
#KB-354-PIN among women, of letting my guard down. “I guess I don’t really
It was additional relief to be around Mor-
gan, because she was fearless. She would know how not to,”
run the perimeter, where most of us were she said. “They keep
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too afraid to go by ourselves. She would
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dozens of drooling men—in Saddam’s
800-324-4934 davidmorgan.com pool. She formed a soccer team with
11812 N Creek Pkwy N, Ste 103•Bothell, WA 98011 Italian-army guys. “They don’t care that
I’m the only girl,” Morgan said, “and they not smiling. For a moment he simply
never go easy on me, either.” looked at me, then nodded, like I was his
It wasn’t long, however, before posters superior. In his eyes there was gratitude
were plastered around the embassy with and respect.
a photo of Morgan’s five teammates and
a description—in English and Italian—of “I K N OW A L L the spots,” Nazir whis-
all the things a certain unidentified female pered, leaning over my desk, his hand
soccer player would do to them, one-on- on my shoulder. A male co-worker—the
one or all together. “There was no one else same one who’d said I was trying to use
they could have been describing but me,” my body to get ahead—fed a folder into
Morgan said grimly. the shredder, looking at me with disgust.
To be close to any man, no matter He was convinced I’d pursued Nazir.
how platonic the association, was to have I’d wake to the siren; I’d wake to the
your reputation questioned. The five call to prayer. I’d wake to throwing myself
guys ran around the base and tore down on the floor as mortar rounds crashed
every poster. down around me. “You know I’m a very
determined man,” Nazir said. I read
T H E R E WA S A young marine who reports about sectarian protests and
worked at one of the palace’s side entry Sunni marginalization. “I think I’ve been
points, and whenever he manned the very patient,” Nazir said. I read reports
booth it took me three times as long to be about kidnappings and IEDs. “You’re so
screened. I didn’t know if he didn’t under- selfish,” Nazir said.
stand how to work the buzzer or just liked “Please stop,” I told Nazir, but never
A universal message of truth and love, to be in my company, but I didn’t mind. anything more. I had almost no knowl-
now more timely than ever. He looked like my little brother: stiff edge then of what constituted sexual
blond hair, smooth face, crooked nose. harassment, never mind that it was illegal.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI Every Tuesday and Thursday, we’d peer I was also keenly aware of the impor-
by Paramahansa Yogananda
at each other through two-inch-thick, tance of Nazir’s work. He’d often catch
Quality Paperback, 80 photos $12.50
bulletproof yellow glass. videos on Arab channels of U.S. military
I remember one of these interactions convoys being blown up by IEDs, videos
in particular. I held up my badge. He fum- that everyone knew fueled the influx
bled with the buzzer and then it sounded, of foreign fighters. Thanks to Nazir’s

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detection, they could swiftly be taken off into my deployment, Morgan got a cook I asked the marines at the door if they
the air, saving American lives. to make a cake for my 22nd birthday. knew where she was, and they told me to
I’d call the faraway soldier I loved and General Petraeus called to tell me I had check the front gardens, which sounded
tell him nothing about the harassment. I written diffuse instead of defuse in the strange, because no one would be so reck-
wanted so badly to tell him, but he was in Battlefield Update Assessment. He joked less as to go there in the middle of the day.
combat, and I worried that any additional about it; he was kind. It snowed in Bagh- Yet when I arrived, I saw her brown bun
stress would compromise his safety. My dad for the first time in living memory, and peeking out from inside the dry fountain.
silence was a way of protecting him from we ran outside to see thin white flakes fall- I trotted over to her, about to make
the knowledge that he could do nothing ing on sand, and I thought it was possible a fuss about being out there in daylight
to protect me. that this was where I was supposed to be. and rush us both inside, but I quickly
I’d begun ad hoc humanitarian visits realized that if we sat inside the foun-
M O S T T I M E S I S AW N A Z I R , he to Iraqi families around Baghdad, and tain, we were protected from shrapnel
asked for sex. But in the briefings with the admiral volunteered to join me. While on four sides. Only a direct hit would kill
the admiral, a translator wasn’t neces- many flag officers considered this an un- us, which seemed like good enough odds.
sary, and there I grew strong. I was cre- necessary security risk, he rarely missed The fountain was strangely magnifi-
ative, adaptive; I was correct. The admi- a trip. “I can’t wait for the runs out to the cent. Giant stone fish leaped from non-
ral requested my work regularly. I was families on Thursday,” the admiral said existent water. I climbed in beside the fish,
assigned to write a high-profile section of after the briefing one day. “My wife made but Theresa didn’t look at me. I sat next
the Battlefield Update Assessment, which a quilt for Sabine and the kids.” to her and nudged her with my shoulder.
was sent to General Petraeus, the Penta- Thinking of this moment now, I feel She sort of smiled.
gon, and the White House every morning. sad, because I almost told him about “Where you been?” I asked.
A paper I wrote was recommended by the Nazir then, and I could have. He surely “I was at karaoke night,” she said quietly.
Defense Intelligence Agency as required would have helped, but I was too shy, too I laughed. “For four days?”
reading for all incoming personnel. One embarrassed to say words like proposition “But there was no one to walk home
day, I asked the co-worker who called me and sex and help me. with.” Her voice was hoarse as she told
“Twat” what the word meant. His face me she’d seen and spoken with him, the
flushing, he haltingly explained, and S E V E N M O N T H S I N T O my deploy- guard, many times before, though never
never called me that again. Four months ment, I hadn’t seen Theresa for four days. alone. She said “Good evening,” as she

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always did when she entered her trailer She looked toward the other end of I’D BEEN IN IRAQ eight months when
compound. “He held out his hand and the cafeteria, where her squad sat eating. the Sadr City cease-fire began to fall
smiled, like for me to shake it,” Theresa One of the soldiers caught her eye and apart, in March 2008. Rockets rained into
said, and that’s when the guard yanked waved amiably. She turned back to me. the embassy compound. The mortars and
her toward him and forcibly kissed her. “I “You know, sometimes I feel like a piece sniper fire were so accurate that we took
twisted away from him. I just kept trying of dirt, blowing in whichever direction to wearing our flak vests inside buildings.
to twist away, looking to see if anyone was anyone chooses.” At night in my trailer, the aluminum
around. Anybody.” And there was Theresa’s rage and ceiling above my bed shone like a bullet. I
I took her hand. It was so small. guilt when the guard who assaulted her imagined the roof peeling back like wrap-
The guard grabbed Theresa by the hair, assaulted another female soldier only ping paper, my body sprayed on the walls.
and she kept saying, “I have to go. I need weeks later. I slept a few hours a night, less. Everyone
to go.” Theresa told me her thoughts ran looked terrible, unshaven, white-faced.
on a loop as he dragged her. I’m going to be N O T L O N G A F T E R Theresa and I I walked slowly down the hallway, drag-
raped. Is this cheating on my husband? Why talked in the fountain, she and Ann ging my hand along the red mosaic of
is this happening to me? When he released completed their deployments. Morgan, the wall. My shirt was untucked. My hair
his grip to undo her jacket, she ran. “The Nicole, and I watched them preparing to hung around my shoulders, long and oily.
whole time, running, I thought he was go- depart in armored buses called Rhinos. When rockets took out several trailers
ing to shoot me in the back,” Theresa said. Standing together, saluting stiffly, they and a prominent financial analyst in the
We watched a brown bird land on the looked beautiful, and we were proud of embassy was killed, we were required
opposite side of the fountain. “Even my to remain inside the palace at all times.
mother’s been assaulted, you know.” She I briefed on the same bombings in the
sat quietly for a moment before adding, same markets day in, day out, and then
“Several times.” tried to find a place in the palace to put my
“Theresa, can I do something? Help The number of cot, though the siren rarely shut up long
you report—” enough for us to sleep for more than 20
“I did. I just—” She shook her head.
sexual assaults in the minutes at a time. In the open areas, men
“I didn’t react how I thought I would. I military has risen, were everywhere, dozens of hungry eyes.
thought I’d be …” with 20,500 in 2018. I’d set up my cot in the DFAC or a hallway
Theresa was furious with herself that and lie there watching every boot that
she hadn’t fought back. Despite her train- passed, looking and not looking at every
ing, she’d frozen in fear. And she was face. I lived in fear that Nazir would dis-
upset that she’d lied in her report. She’d cover me while I slept.
provided the location and unit of the sol- them. I started to cry, thinking I’d never I’d heard that the theater in the base-
dier who tried to assault her but claimed see them again. Nicole turned to comfort ment was safe and that the siren was
not to have seen his face because she’d me. “Go back to the palace. Walk those muted. So one evening I waited until the
forgotten her glasses. Theresa knew halls as a lion,” she said. basement hallway was clear, pulled my
exactly who he was. She lied because he In Morgan’s trailer a few weeks later, hoodie over my head, and walked quickly
was armed and lived only a few trailers we struggled to open a bottle of wine with- inside. In the pitch-black room, I could see
away from hers—how might he retaliate out a corkscrew so that we could break the nothing, but instantly I heard a chorus of
if she named him? She hoped the other rule against drinking. “I don’t have cups,” snoring. Did I breathe like a woman?
soldiers in his unit would identify him, Morgan said, when the cork finally yielded I made my way forward, my shins
because there had been only one guard to a combination of a knife and a screw- bumping into soft bodies and metal
on post at the time. They didn’t. driver. “We’ll just have to take it straight frames. I almost forgot myself and said
from the bottle,” Nicole said. “Excuse me.” I set up my cot in the dark
T H E R E W E R E other stories. Stories of We lay in Morgan’s bed, and she started and lay down. I was so tired. I heard the
supervisors using their trailer keys to en- talking about her brother, a helicopter man beside me snoring, slow and gentle.
ter female subordinates’ rooms, stories pilot, but she wasn’t saying her words I rolled over and my hand fell off the cot
of gang rape. There was the American right. “You’re drunk,” we teased, and onto his. The frame of his cot was warm
translator, a civilian who worked down then she started saying she couldn’t feel from his body. I drew back quickly and
the hall from me, who whispered, “I came her limbs and her tongue was swollen and stuffed my hands into my hoodie, but
here a confident person.” And the enlisted she couldn’t breathe, and we were calling sometime during the night I reached out
soldier, the only female in her squad, who an ambulance. and touched the warm metal again.
sat across from me one afternoon in the Morgan was medevaced to London, This went on for weeks. Every night
DFAC, having just come in from outside where it was discovered that she’d suffered I looked for somewhere, anywhere, I
the wire. Her sunburned face was peel- a flare-up of a rare autoimmune syndrome. could sleep alone or at least with another
ing as she said, lightly, that she’d slept A week later, when we spoke on the phone, woman. Eventually I wandered into one
with most of the men in her squad. When she said, “I’m so worried about you all. I’ll of Saddam’s conference rooms. It had two
I smiled awkwardly and asked if she had be back soon.” My voice was stern, mean massive floor-to-ceiling windows. One
wanted to, she said, “I guess I don’t really even, when I replied, “Morgan, don’t ever mortar and anyone in the room would be
know how not to. They keep me alive.” come back here,” and hung up. vapor. The men would be mad to choose this

104 O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
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place, I thought. I dragged my cot in there Back at the palace, I sat in my of- then there has been a substantial drop in
and slept for the first long stretch in days. fice, still in full gear and helmet. I didn’t incidents: from approximately 34,200 in
remember walking there. Commander 2006 to 14,900 in 2016, based on a con-
A FEW DAYS into the ban on going out- Scott Rye was speaking to me. What’s fidential survey. Yet recent data suggest
side, I decided to violate orders and go to wrong? Why are you wearing your helmet? that the number has risen, with 20,500
the post-office trailer to send my family a I’d been knocked briefly unconscious victims of sexual assault in 2018. It’s
letter. We’d been discouraged from men- by the blast, and I’d be diagnosed with hard to know exactly what to make of
tioning via email or phone how dire the a concussion. He helped me up and half- this, but one finding is particularly sur-
situation in the embassy compound really carried me to the palace infirmary. prising: Despite the #MeToo movement,
was, but I was desperate to communicate “I’m sorry I’m like this,” I mumbled. service members were somewhat less
with my parents. Or maybe I just got lazy. The infirmary was full, so we waited in likely to report an assault in 2018 than
It’s tiring, trying to stay alive all the time. the hall. I was leaning on him and then they were in 2016, based on comparing
I put on full gear and helmet and waited lying in his lap, which embarrassed me, figures in the confidential survey with
for lunchtime, when mortars were fewer. and I apologized again. Commander Rye reported incidents.
Running, I could make the trip in less was a reserved, professional man. We Sometimes I wonder if it’s the nature
than five minutes. had rarely spoken, but that afternoon he of warfare itself that is to blame for the
I stood by the door for a moment, and wiped the layer of dust and sand from my persistence of sexual abuse in the military.
when I heard nothing, I pushed outside, face, patted my head, tried to soothe me. We ask men to do violence in service to the
jogging toward the post office. And then “I can’t sleep here,” I mumbled. Men, state, to be paragons of hypermasculinity.
the sirens blared. “Incoming!” men everywhere. Can we simultaneously ask them to
The next thing I knew, I was facedown “Sure you can.” change the way they perform masculinity
in the gravel at the foot of the post-office I must have trusted him. I did sleep. toward women? Can we ask them to make
stairs. I’m so stupid. How could I have done safe spaces for women in war?
this to my family? Don’t let me die. Don’t let IT WASN’ T an easy decision, but I gave But Rear Admiral Smith treated
me die. my two weeks’ notice several days after women with respect, treated us simply as
The earth isn’t hard like we think it the mortar attack that picked me up and colleagues united in a common mission.
is. It snaps like a rubber band. The first dropped me near the post-office stairs. It is Commander Rye did too. The men of the
mortar landed. The second one lifted me miraculous that nothing worse happened Italian Personal Security Detail did too. As
off the ground. I crawled to the nearest to me other than being very scared. Ann, do thousands of soldiers performing their
T-wall, a few feet away. I didn’t hear the with her bodyguard husband, made it to duty honorably under great stress.
third impact at all; I only felt air heavy as the end relatively unscathed and started In a photograph of me taken during
water roll over me. her goat farm. Morgan recovered in Lon- this time, my face is nearly transparent
“Are you hit?” don and returned to Baghdad after I left. from lack of sunlight, deep blues and
I opened my eyes. The marine with Once she returned home, Theresa became purples framing my eyes. When I look at
the crooked nose from the other side of pregnant with her third child and retired that photograph, I remember a 21-year-
the yellow glass—he must have seen me from the military, which she’d always miss. old woman learning how to make strate-
leave the palace. His mouth moved again. The Naval Academy graduate recovered gic battlefield assessments about where
The roar was so loud. from her shin splints and became a lieu- to sleep, what to wear, how to engage with
“Are you hit?” tenant commander. And Nicole, with her male co-workers without risking sexual
“No,” I whispered. He picked me up by wild red hair, who liked to announce her assault. I lasted about a year in Iraq. I
my vest with one hand. I swayed to the left, arrival in the dining hall with a coffee cup don’t know whether I could have lasted
and he caught me in his arms. Another slammed on the table and the words Iraq’s longer. Maybe I could have withstood the
crash near the pool. He spun me so that I had a real ass-kicking this month, Nicole pressures of IEDs and mortars and stray
faced the palace and shoved me hard. Go! who loved Baghdad—she was blown up fire over the Tigris and a workload more
Then he ran toward the mortar rounds in in a municipal building in Sadr City. The appropriate for three analysts if not for
search of more casualties. Toward them. bomb had been placed for the Iraqi politi- the less explicable, less tangible pressure
I thought how brave that man was. How cians she was meeting. In one of the last of the ratio: too many men paying too
were we supposed to report one of these emails she sent, she wrote, “I love this job!” much attention.
guys? Maybe the soldier who harassed or
even molested you didn’t save your life, I N 2 0 0 8 , the Pentagon ramped up Sandra Sidi teaches at Texas State
but what about someone else’s? Do you efforts to prevent sexual assault and University and is working on a novel about
report a man who is mission-critical? make offenders more accountable. Since Israeli soldiers.

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THE BIG QUESTION

Q:
What is the most
significant sports pic Games in Berlin. A Glenn Huberman,
victory of all time? black American’s victory
humiliated Adolf Hitler
Miami, Fla.
The Major League debut
and produced a dark reac- of Jackie Robinson, on
Tommy Tomlinson, sports the “Rumble in the Jun- tion from American society. April 15, 1947, with the
journalist and author, The gle,” in 1974. The American Owens was not invited to the Brooklyn Dodgers. He broke
Elephant in the Room hockey team was amateur, White House to meet Presi- baseball’s color barrier, and
The 1926 Rose Bowl: the Russian one much less so, dent Franklin D. Roose- after tolerating racist taunts
Alabama 20, Washington 19. and Ali, with his opposition velt for recognition of his throughout his career, he
There was a time when the to the Vietnam War and bra- accomplishments, nor was was enshrined in the Hall of
South wasn’t good at college zen declaration that black is he allowed to go through Fame in 1962.
football. This upset win gave beautiful, represented a new the main entrance of the
the region a post–Civil War spirit in the culture emerging Waldorf-Astoria to attend a Frank D. Rugienius,
identity. Southern schools in the ’60s. gathering in his honor. Philadelphia, Pa.
grew to have the best teams, The New York Jets’ Joe
the biggest stadiums, the J. A. Adande, director Namath guaranteed an
deepest rivalries. Credit (or of sports journalism, upset victory over the Bal-
blame, if you prefer) that one Northwestern University, timore Colts in Super
game 93 years ago. and panelist, ESPN’s Bowl III, in 1969; the Jets
Around the Horn delivered. This game set the
There was a moment at the stage for the National Foot-
end of Texas Western’s ball League to become the
victory over Kentucky in dominant sports organiza-
the 1966 NCAA men’s- tion in the United States.
basketball championship
game when it wasn’t just a Adriana Delia Collins,
sporting event; it was a chap- San Francisco, Calif.
ter in the civil-rights move- Passing Title IX in 1972,
ment. For the first time, a which prohibited sex dis-
basketball team with an all- Michael Clemmons, crimination in any education
black starting lineup won the Philadelphia, Pa. program, including sports,
title over an all-white team. In Tommie Smith and John that receives federal aid.
Roberto González a picture captured by the pho- Carlos coming in first
Echevarría, author, The tographer Rich Clarkson, the and third in the 200- David Drexler,
Pride of Havana: A History faces of the Kentucky players meter race at the 1968 Wilmington, Del.
of Cuban Baseball and coaches show a recogni- Olympics. It enabled their The upset victory of the South
Two come to mind: the U.S. tion of an irreversible change. iconic Black Power protest, Africa Springboks over the
ice-hockey victory over derailed their lives, created New Zealand All Blacks in
the Soviet team in 1980 READER RESPONSES a national controversy, and the 1995 Rugby World Cup
(the “Miracle on Ice”), and Michael Mims, Clanton, Ala. inspired more people than final. It provided the glue
Muhammad Ali’s knock- Jesse Owens’s four gold any other 20 seconds in that held a newly united
out of George Foreman at medals at the 1936 Olym- sports history. country together.

106 O CTO B E R 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C Illustrations by GRAHAM ROUMIEU

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