THE DEMS’ SHIFTING ABORTION MESSAGE WHY AMERICANS AREN’T RETIRING

GRACE SEGERS HEATHER SOUVAINE HORN

November 2024

AMERICA IS
SO READY
FOR
KAMALA
HARRIS
HOW SHE ROSE TO
THE OCCASION
KALI HOLLOWAY

PLUS:
HOW A CAMPAIGN AD
GETS MADE
COLIN JONES

TRUMP’S
DEPORTATION PLANS
MELISSA GIRA GRANT
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 Table of Contents November 2024
Features

10 America Is So Ready for 30 The Greatest

Kamala Harris Treasure in Politics
This is no ordinary campaign, but it is exactly the Campaigns spend billions on ads that change
campaign we needed at this extraordinary historic outcomes by a few points, if at all. An inside view
juncture: one that is powered by the millions of people of where the money goes—and how it drives
who were just waiting for this moment—and by the our political parties.
candidate who so impressively rose to the occasion. Colin Jones
Kali Holloway

38 The Immigration
18 The Incomprehensible Lawyer Who Helped
Scale of Trump’s Too Many People
Deportation Plans In Tucson, a legendary attorney was suspended
In many ways, a mass deportation machine already for two years from representing clients in
exists in the United States. But Donald Trump immigration court. Was the punishment warranted?
has vowed that, if he returns to office, he’ll begin an Sasha Abramsky
operation that could involve a force larger than
the U.S. Army—and he promises that it will be a
“bloody story.”
Melissa Gira Grant
COVER SOURCE PHOTO: MARCO BELLO/REUTERS/REDUX; THIS PAGE: REBECCA NOBLE/AFP/GETTY

10 America Is So Ready for Kamala Harris

1
Cover Illustration by Roberto Parada
State of the Nation

4 Democrats Are Finally Talking The New Republic

About Abortion
But they’re still being very careful about how they do it. Chairman and Editor in Chief Win McCormack
Grace Segers Editor Michael Tomasky

7 Who’s Afraid of AI? Magazine

Editorial Director Emily Cooke
The political threat of artificial intelligence isn’t just exaggerated— Literary Editor Laura Marsh
it’s a distraction from more pressing issues. Managing Editor Lorraine Cademartori
Senior Editor Alex Shephard
Benjamin Charles Germain Lee Design Director Andy Omel
Photo Director Stephanie Heimann
Production Manager Joan Yang
5 Never Forget Poetry Editor Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Contributing Copy Editor Howery Pack
8 Who Said It?
newrepublic.com
Digital Director Mindy Kay Bricker
Books & the Arts Executive Editor Ryan Kearney
Deputy Editors Heather Souvaine Horn

46 The Threat to American Retirement Jason Linkins

Tori Otten
Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani
The wealthy don’t want to retire. The middle class can barely afford to. Art Director Robert A. Di Ieso Jr.
We need a better vision for old age.
Staff Writers Kate Aronoff
Heather Souvaine Horn Matt Ford
Melissa Gira Grant

The End of Empathy

Timothy Noah
51 Greg Sargent
Grace Segers
How useful are attempts to understand grievances of the far right? Associate Writers Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Edith Olmsted
Jacob Bacharach Hafiz Rashid

56 Originalism’s Sins Copy Editor

Lead Developer
Kirsten Denker
Tom Fletcher
Front-End Developer Clark Chen
The Founders didn’t believe the Constitution had a fixed meaning.
Product Manager Carla Nudel
So why does today’s Supreme Court? Reporter-Researchers Kate Mabus
Andrew Lanham Indigo Olivier
Sam Russek
Interns Gage Denmon
60 No Place Like Washington Contributing Editors
Robert McCoy
Rumaan Alam
Dinaw Mengestu’s novels of grief and dislocation in the D.C. suburbs Emily Atkin
Nina Burleigh
Lily Meyer Alexander Chee
Ana Marie Cox
Michelle Dean
63 Before Your Eyes Siddhartha Deb
Abdul El-Sayed
Ted Genoways
Disclaimer has something to hide from the audience. Jeet Heer
Phillip Maciak Patrick Iber
Kathryn Joyce
Suki Kim
66 Twilight Zone Simon Lazarus
Pablo Manríquez
Nick Martin
Guy Maddin’s Rumours plunges world leaders into a surreal G-7. Bob Moser
Osita Nwanevu
Adam Nayman Alex Pareene
Jacob Silverman
Jordan Michael Smith
Poetry
Interim Publisher Bryan Groves
Chief Financial Officer David Myer
55 Flute Sales Director Anthony Bolinsky
Bruce Bond Marketing Director Kym Blanchard
Director of Engagement Dan Pritchett
62 Black Hole Engagement Associate
Executive Assistant/
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How Kamala Harris became an inspiring figure
Win McCormack

2 November 2024
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STATE OF THE NATION

Democrats Are Finally

Talking About Abortion
But they’re still being very careful about how they do it.
By Grace Segers denied care in an emergency room because It was a reminder of why abortion rights
the health care providers are afraid they activists were so excited when Harris became
Illustration by Hanna Barczyk
might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in the Democratic nominee for president in
a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want August. Her campaign marks a shift in the
IN HER FIRST, and perhaps only, debate that. Her husband didn’t want that,” Har- party’s rhetoric on abortion access. Gone
with former President Donald Trump in ris said, responding to Trump’s claim that are the days of candidates who insisted that
September, Kamala Harris spoke about Americans wanted the issue of abortion abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,”
abortion in terms not typically used by a access to be returned to the states. “A 12- or while barely daring to mention the actual
Democratic presidential candidate. “Preg- 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced word “abortion.”
nant women who want to carry a pregnancy to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t But the 2022 decision by the Supreme Court
to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being want that.” overturning Roe v. Wade brought abortion

4 November 2024
 to the forefront of Democrats’ campaign Harris’s campaign is betting that sharing
messaging and was critical to Democratic the stories of women who experienced mis-
victories in several state and congressional carriages or other health emergencies at
races. Practically overnight, abortion surged a later point in their pregnancy may help
in importance as an issue for voters. shift the perception of people who seek NEVER
Harris’s campaign has centered the real, abortions as irresponsible—and can appeal FORGET
often shocking consequences of the repeal to voters, particularly moderate women,
of Roe. Kaitlyn Joshua, a Louisiana woman who have only recently begun voting for A brief look back at the chaos of
Donald Trump’s White House at this
who has become a key campaign surrogate Democrats. Having the women themselves
time five years ago.
for Harris, spoke on stage at the Democratic be the messengers also puts a human face
National Convention in August, relating how to these stories, as well as helping certain TRAGEDY
she was turned away from two emergency voters understand that this scenario could On November 13, Chad Wolf was
rooms during her first-trimester miscar- happen to them, or their loved ones. Not appointed acting secretary of the
riage in 2022. She was flanked by Amanda all abortion advocates are thrilled about Department of Homeland Security—
Zurawski, who unsuccessfully sued the state this approach. the fifth head of DHS during Trump’s
of Texas after she was denied an abortion “When we get into conversations about presidency. Wolf previ-
ously had been involved
during a nonviable and life-threatening why and under what circumstances [abor-
in crafting the “zero toler-
pregnancy, and Hadley Duvall, a Kentucky tions take place], we are undercutting why
ance” policy that resulted
woman who was raped and impregnated by we should trust women,” said Alexis Mc-
in thousands of migrant
her stepfather when she was 12 years old. Gill Johnson, the president of the Planned children being separated
Duvall, who miscarried the pregnancy, has Parenthood Federation of America and the from their parents at the
also appeared in a campaign ad for Harris. Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “When border. (He denied this,
Harris is the most prominent Democratic we’re asking why they needed access to abor- although there is a wealth of evidence
politician to focus on these stories, but she tion, then we’re implicitly saying … ‘I need connecting him to the program.)
is hardly alone. For more than two years, a little bit more information before I don’t Wolf’s own tenure was notable for its
Democrats across the country have focused pass judgment on you.’” attempted suspension of daca and
for the deployment of DHS forces
on the tangible consequences of the repeal Abortion rights advocates have sought
to Portland, Oregon, to “secure” the
of Roe, and warned of what a Trump presi- to frame the battle over abortion access as
federal courthouse there during
dency and Republican-controlled Congress a conflict between freedom and extremism. anti–police brutality protests in 2020.
could entail for abortion access. They be- Republicans, meanwhile, have countered by Wolf’s appointment (along with the
lieve that this messaging, and the impact arguing that Democrats are the real extrem- daca suspension) was later ruled un-
of the repeal of Roe, could help them win ists: They would not only allow abortion up constitutional. He resigned in
the White House. until the moment of birth but even allow January 2021 and went to work for …
“I’ve had conversations with a lot of mothers to, as Donald Trump claimed at the Heritage Foundation.
women—some that have not been engaged the September debate, “execute” newborns.
FARCE
in the political conversation, and women These Republican talking points may be
While wildfires engulfed millions of
who have, but that may have voted for the hyperbolic, but they reflect a desire to flip acres of California, Trump tweeted
Republican candidate in the past—and this is the narrative in a way that mirrors a regular on November 3 that Governor Gavin
an issue that completely changes things for polling result: that abortion after a certain Newsom had “done a terrible job of
them,” said former Representative Debbie point in pregnancy is unpopular with most forest management” and threatened
Mucarsel-Powell, who is running in Florida Americans. Harris herself has not answered to withhold federal aid to fight the
against incumbent GOP Senator Rick Scott. questions about whether she would support fires—despite the fact that the federal
“They need to understand … that if this is expanding abortion access beyond the limits government itself oversees more than
an important issue for them, that they have of Roe, which only legalized the procedure half of the 33 million acres of forest in
the Golden State.
to vote for the candidate that will protect a through fetal viability at around 24 weeks.
woman’s right to choose at the federal level.” According to Pew Research Center, 63 per- FASCIST
These more extreme stories are increas- cent of Americans believe abortion should be Appearing before the House Intelli-
ingly common, but most abortion stories legal in all or most cases. Gallup has found gence Committee on November 20,
are less sensational. that 60 percent of Americans believe that U.S. Ambassador to the European
The typical abortion recipient is not a overturning Roe was a bad thing. However, Union Gordon Sondland testified
married woman suffering a miscarriage in 55 percent also believe it should be illegal in that he pressured the Ukrainian gov-
a wanted pregnancy, or a young girl who had the second trimester, and 70 percent think ernment to investigate former vice
president (and declared Democratic
been sexually abused—she is more likely a it should be illegal in the third. Neverthe-
presidential candidate) Joe Biden at
twentysomething, low-income, nonwhite less, a poll by PerryUndem, a consulting
the “express direction” of President
single mother with at least one child at home. firm that does regular surveys on abortion, Trump, lending credence to a whistle-
This woman might already face significant found nearly 80 percent also believe that
JOHN MOORE/GETTY

blower claim that the White House

stigma because of her race, her income, and laws on abortion can’t account for every was soliciting foreign interference in
her status as a single mother, which would situation where one might be needed. Much the 2020 election.
then be exacerbated by societal beliefs about of Harris’s messaging appears to be focused
people who seek abortions. on those voters.

State of the Nation 5

 In September, a pro-Harris super PAC talking about this to not focus exclusively typical story,” said Undem. Whereas now,
STATE OF THE NATION

launched three ads targeting suburban on these terrible, but unbelievably rare, cir- she continued, the example of a woman
and exurban white women in Pennsylva- cumstances that face people who don’t have needing to travel across state lines is “pretty
nia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, featuring access to care.” relatable as well to people.”
health professionals concerned about the Connecting abortion access to maternal McGill Johnson also warned against the
effects of abortion bans. health and motherhood “makes it easier presumption that an upper-class suburban
“When my pregnancy was in crisis, and for people to talk about the story,” said woman would not have experience with an
the child I wanted and loved had a devastat- Monica Simpson of SisterSong, an Atlanta- unwanted pregnancy. “All of these stories res-
ing diagnosis, we chose to have an abortion,” based reproductive rights organization, “as onate precisely because we all know, either
Anna, an ob-gyn, says in one ad, which was opposed to the ways that we’ve been con- through experience, or through friendships,
produced by the group American Bridge. ditioned to think that people who have an through relationships, through our sister-
“Women are nearly dying because of these abortion because they want one and they ship, the variety of circumstances that people
Trump abortion bans. As an ob-gyn, I can’t need one [have] done something wrong.” want or need to have an abortion,” she said.
tell you how dangerous this is. And as a A story about someone who wanted, but And Harris has spoken about more av-
mother who’s had a miscarriage, I can’t think was unable to obtain, an abortion is “just erage abortion experiences. She was quick
about living in a world like that.” as tragic” as someone who wanted to to respond when ProPublica in September
“When it comes to voters who are on the give birth but experienced a miscarriage, revealed that a woman named Amber Ni-
fence, what we’ve seen time and time again Simpson continued. cole Thurman had died after being unable
to access abortion care in Georgia in 2022.

Harris’s campaign has centered the She had experienced complications from
medication abortion, but the hospital she
real, often shocking consequences of visited afterward was unwilling to perform a
procedure to clear the remaining fetal tissue
the repeal of Roe. from her uterus and later conducted a hys-
terectomy after acceding to the procedure.
Thurman was 28 years old, Black, and a single
mother already raising a son—representative
is that this is an issue that reaches across This approach to messaging could show of the average abortion patient. Thurman,
parties, especially with this group of women voters who may be less concerned with how according to her best friend, did not believe
voters,” said Eva Kemp, vice president of cam- an abortion ban affects low-income and that it was the best time in her life to give
paigns at American Bridge. “When we present nonwhite Americans that these policies birth to twins.
them with storytellers who look, sound, and could have an impact on their lives as well. Thurman’s death quickly became a ral-
feel like their relatives, their neighbors, their “I think that’s also a completely fair point, lying cry for Democrats and abortion rights
friends—it’s even more compelling.” to say, ‘Even if you think that it’s OK to stig- advocates; the organization Reproductive
Democrats may be elevating the stories of matize these people, if you think that these Freedom for All launched an ad highlighting
women with atypical abortion experiences criminal laws aren’t coming for you, too, Thurman’s experience, which targeted young
because they are so shocking and increas- you’re wrong,’” said Ziegler. “I think seeing and low-propensity voters in Georgia—those
ingly frequent, said Mary Ziegler, a professor or showing [people in] positions of privilege who might see themselves in Thurman’s
at the University of California, Davis, who that they have more in common with people story. Harris’s willingness to discuss Thur-
has written several books on the history of they may have been ignoring than they think man’s experience indicates an openness to
abortion politics in the United States. Law- is politically valuable. It’s just a question of highlighting the experiences of all abortion
suits such as the one brought by Zurawski whether it inadvertently reinforces some patients; at a rally in Georgia in September,
against Texas and a similar case against other kind of stigma.” Harris led attendees in speaking Thurman’s
Idaho for its restrictive abortion ban have The fall of Roe has led to a greater openness full name as a way to remember her.
ensured national attention. For Democrats about abortion in all its forms. Tresa Undem, a In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in late
to ignore these stories would be “political partner and co-founder of PerryUndem, September, Harris said that “Amber’s story
malpractice,” Ziegler said. said that a story about a woman wanting highlights the fact that among everything
Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat who an abortion may be more palatable to voters that is wrong with these bans and what has
once served as the vice president of Planned in 2024 than it would have been even in happened in terms of the overturning of Roe
Parenthood in Minnesota, said that these 2020. During the debate with Trump, Harris v. Wade, it’s a health care crisis.”
stories also provided distinct examples of gave the example of women suffering mis- Thurman’s mother, Shanette Williams,
the impact of restrictive abortion laws. carriages or who were victims of rape being also spoke during the interview with Win-
“There’s so much clarity about the impact unable to obtain abortion care—but she also frey. Her daughter shared characteristics
of somebody taking that decision away from talked about a woman who would have to with many abortion patients—and people
you. A person who decides to terminate their travel to another state to get an abortion, who will be affected by abortion bans—but
pregnancy in 10 or 12 weeks and isn’t able to calling that hypothetical “unconscionable.” her individual story has universal weight.
because of these Trump abortion bans—the “Maybe three or four years ago, I might “I want y’all to know Amber was not a
impact on their life is really severe, but it’s have said the story about unwanted preg- statistic,” Williams said.
less visible,” said Smith. Still, she continued, nancy, or the story about rape or incest Grace Segers is a staff writer at The New
“It’s incumbent upon those of us that are might have been way more impactful than a Republic.

6 November 2024
Who’s Afraid of AI? registration quickly and en masse. Those
who want to optimize polling and campaign-
ing are pitched AI analytics products that
mimic business enterprise solutions: “Lead

The political threat of artificial intelligence with AI-powered voter data and intelligence
to expand margins and win elections,” reads
isn’t just exaggerated—it’s a distraction from a description of one such offering from the
tech company Resonate. GoodParty.org’s AI
more pressing issues. campaign manager similarly offers “power-
ful AI tools [that] help refine your strategy,
By Benjamin Charles text or images will turbocharge political find volunteers, create content, and more.”
misinformation.” The sentiment is echoed These innovations can be traced back at least
Germain Lee
in Washington, D.C., where think tanks like as far as Cambridge Analytica: A whistle-
Illustration by Gustavo Magalhães the Brookings Institution host frequent dis- blower reported that, before the company
cussions and primers on the topic, exploring became mired in scandal in 2018, it had been
WE LIVE IN the age of AI, goes the common “the dangers posed by AI and disinformation experimenting with AI for advertisement
refrain. The phrase can be found in the titles during elections.” personalization in order to maximize voters’
of books and in YouTube videos by pub- Events leading up to November’s presi- engagement with its clients’ campaigns.
lic figures as far-ranging as the late Henry dential election haven’t exactly discouraged It’s entirely possible that AI may some-
Kissinger and Robert Downey Jr. It seems as these fears. In January, thousands of voters how disrupt the election (and elections in the
though everyone is talking about generative in New Hampshire received robocalls featur- future). But what if the larger threat isn’t AI
artificial intelligence models like OpenAI’s ing an AI-generated impersonation (better itself but all of the attention surrounding it?
ChatGPT and dall-e—capable of producing known as a “deepfake”) of Joe Biden; the
realistic writing, photos, audio, and even recording misled voters by indicating that if SILICON VALLEY, RATHER than merely
code—and wondering what they mean for they voted in the Democratic primary, they trying to evade accountability around AI—a
our future. If our intellectual, social, and wouldn’t be eligible to vote in November’s tack that would be more in keeping with
professional lives are in for major disruption election. In August, Donald Trump posted a its historic resistance to regulation of any
at the hands of this new technology, the logic string of misleading (and tacky) AI-generated kind—has appeared eager to make com-
goes, so, too, are our elections. content on his social media platform Truth mitments about the election. In February,
Online and on television, pundits stoke Social: a video of himself dancing with Elon a host of major tech companies, including
the fire. In an interview with cnbc in Musk, an image of Kamala Harris speaking OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, signed
June 2023, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to an audience of communists, and images the “Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use
predicted that the 2024 elections “are go- suggesting Taylor Swift had endorsed him. of AI in 2024 Elections” at the Munich Se-
ing to be a mess because social media is (Swift would in fact endorse Harris.) curity Conference, advancing seven primary
not protecting us from false generative AI.” And then there are the seemingly banal goals: prevention, provenance, detection,
Bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari warned uses of AI in elections that extend beyond responsive protection, evaluation, public
that AI is creating a “political earthquake.” the tendrils of deepfakes. The maga-backed awareness, and resilience. Many of the same
The MIT Technology Review forecast in bold software Eagle AI empowers subscribers to companies have detailed concrete plans to
text, “Without a doubt, AI that generates generate and submit challenges to voter restrict certain types of prompts from eliciting

State of the Nation 7

 responses from generative AI models, to label mechanisms listed. Instead, they eschew without actually doing anything meaningful
STATE OF THE NATION

certain AI-generated content appearing on blanket regulation and offer attempts at to change their platforms.
platforms, and to watermark AI-generated remediation through even more AI. It is a Of course, some Silicon Valley elites are
content via computational processes that cat-and-mouse game that, in both creating more cynically minded. X owner Elon Musk
make it possible to determine digital authen- the problem and offering the solution, ben- has embraced the far right, disregarding,
ticity by consulting the file directly. efits the purveyors of the technology most. welcoming, and even participating in the
Silicon Valley is stressing technical solu- The tepid interventions proposed by these spread of disinformation and hate speech on
tions, in other words. The AI Elections Accord companies to combat the exacerbation of dis- his platform. Experts have pointed out that
itself asserts that AI “offers important op- information via their generative AI products actions such as Musk’s are more damaging
portunities for defenders looking to counter come in response to growing skepticism from than AI-generated content. (X is a signatory
bad actors” and argues that “it can support both the left and right. Under Joe Biden’s of the AI Elections Accord.)
rapid detection of deceptive campaigns, administration, the Department of Justice The United States has enacted some
enable teams to operate consistently across and the Federal Trade Commission have policy, albeit slowly. The Federal Communi-
a wide range of languages, and help scale pursued antitrust suits against tech com- cations Commission banned AI-generated
defenses to stay ahead of the volume that panies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon, voices in robocalls earlier this year, and
attackers can muster.” However, despite the while conservatives have increasingly called House Democrats have begun introducing
commitments made by the companies, critics for regulation of the industry. These compa- bills like the real Political Advertisements
of these efforts have pointed out that there nies are saying the right things in the hope Act, which would require “a communication
are no clear accountability or enforcement of reducing the likelihood of controversy (e.g., a political advertisement) to include, in
a clear and conspicuous manner, a statement
if the communication contains an image or
video footage that was generated in whole
or in part with the use of AI.” The Securing
WHO SAID IT? Elections From AI Deception Act, mean-
while, would “prohibit the use of artificial
JD Vance or ... Jonah Ryan? intelligence to deprive or defraud individuals
of the right to vote in elections for public
Veep’s Jonah Ryan—the White House liaison turned congressman turned vice president— office, and for other purposes.”
is one of the most loathsome and off-putting characters in American television history. “This commonsense legislation would
No one likes Jonah, and it’s easy to see why: He’s a misogynistic creep who rubs every-
update our disclosure laws to improve trans-
one the wrong way. In this sense—and in his curious ability to rise in the political ranks in
parency and ensure voters are aware when
spite of his behavior—he resembles Ohio Senator JD Vance, perhaps the least-liked vice
presidential nominee in the nation’s history. And Vance and Ryan are, above all, deeply this technology is used in campaign ads,”
weird. See if you can tell the difference between the fictional weirdo and the real one. said Amy Klobuchar about the real Political
Advertisements Act, which she introduced
1. “This is a horrific country that is falling 6. “Why do you guys hate Swiss cheese with fellow Democratic Senators Cory Book-
apart because it is full of people who so much?” er and Michael Bennet. Legislatures in New
are different than me.” York, Florida, and Wisconsin, among others,
7. “Are there any pictures where the
2. “Not every town can or should be saved.” president isn’t yelling at me?” have been successful in introducing and
enacting similar bills. Until the policy is
3. “‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ is a fake 8. “Who’s taking care of your pet cats and/
holiday created to sow division.” or tarantula while you hate tweet me?” officially enacted into federal law, however,
agreements such as the AI Elections Accord,
4. “If there’s one thing that you should 9. “We need like a de-Baathification
which lack accountability mechanisms, have
know about me, Washington insiders, program, a de-woke-ification program.”
they didn’t like me very much. So let’s no teeth.
10. “I don’t have any friends in D.C., Mom.
send them a message by shoving the Consider also the discursive benefits to
They all call me a dick behind my back.
guy that they hate the most right back Silicon Valley’s efforts surrounding gen-
But like, right behind my back, so I can
in their faces.” erative AI. Broadly speaking, they deflect
hear them.”
5. “Can Paul McCartney teach Kid Rock attention from other fraught practices. Ear-
11. “Why are women always checking in on
how to be a good songwriter? I mean, lier this year, Signal Foundation president
one another when I am talking to them?”
that’s a bad example. Kid Rock rules …” and AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith
FROM LEFT: JEFF SWENSEN/GETTY; HBO/PHOTOFEST

Whittaker argued on X that “the election

year focus on ‘deep fakes’ is a distraction,
conveniently ignoring the documented role
of surveillance ads--or, the ability to target
specific segments to shape opinion.” More-
over, any heightened sense of generative
AI as a threat ultimately bolsters the power
of the companies leading the charge on re-
search and development: It suggests that the
technology is so impressive as to be capable
of such dangerous outcomes in the first

8 8. Vance 9. Vance 10. Ryan 11. Ryan

November 2024
4. Ryan 5. Ryan 6. Vance 7. Ryan
Answers: 1. Ryan 2. Vance 3. Vance
place. The sentiment recalls the longtime and material impact. However, claims of interventions. In Adler-Bell’s mind, this
discourse surrounding AI’s existential risk, a what generative AI could mean for elections obsession “turned a political problem into a
historically fringe though growing alarmist are much like most claims in the age of AI: scientific one,” and to many Americans, “the
theory that forecasts AI’s rise as a possible above all else, speculative. rise of Trump called not for new politics but
extinction event. More directly, the recent new technocrats.” Two years later, generative
wave of announcements surrounding com- EXISTENTIAL FEARS AND salvational AI reigns supreme in the minds of investors,
mitments to election integrity simply makes hopes surrounding technology and demo- pundits, politicians, and the public alike.
for handy headlines that divert talk of the cratic elections are nothing new; just consider It comes as no surprise that November’s
election back to AI and those who market it. the attention given to televised debates, election brings with it increased attention on
Despite the press attention surrounding digital ballots, and online political advertis- the defining technology of our times. Once
Trump’s novel weaponization of deepfakes, ing when they were introduced. It was just again, we find ourselves confronted with a
it is significant that most of his statements 15 years ago that the social media platform technocratic vision of an election. In this
that have dominated media cycles since the formerly called Twitter was hailed as the reductive fantasy, democracy itself is threat-
rise of generative AI have involved his old catalyst of the Iranian presidential election ened by AI and will be saved by those in
habit of simply making things up. After all, protests. Technological advancements not Silicon Valley who understand it—those
it’s not as if Trump’s use of generative AI to only shape elections but do so in unexpected who can come up with the right techno-
suggest that Taylor Swift had endorsed him and significant ways; suggesting otherwise logical solutions. Perhaps, given that there
was his first lie to gain traction. And when would be to ignore how society and tech- are so many other issues constituting the
Trump took the debate stage against Harris, nology are fundamentally enmeshed. Yet, national discussion, we’d be better served
he relied on his tried-and-true method of observing the hyperbole in statements of the to just remind ourselves that a presidential
uttering real words on live TV to spread past is an opportunity to pause and reflect candidate is knowingly posting AI-generated
despicable, fearmongering lies about Hai- on the fears of the present. deepfakes—and then keep our focus trained
tian immigrants. On the demise of the White House’s not on the deepfakes, but on him.
Without question, we live in a moment in Disinformation Board in 2022, writer Sam
Benjamin Charles Germain Lee is an assistant
which generative AI is largely unregulated Adler-Bell detailed in New York Magazine
professor at the University of Washington. His
and ripe for abuse; it is a powerful technology both the liberal emphasis on disinformation writing has appeared in Wired, Current Affairs,
that undoubtedly has the potential for real and the preoccupation with quantitative and Real Life, among other publications.

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 This is no ordinary campaign, but it is
exactly the campaign we needed
at this extraordinary historic juncture:
one that is powered by the millions
of people who were just waiting for this
moment—and by the candidate
who so impressively rose to the occasion.

AMERICA
IS SO READY
FOR
KAMALA
HARRIS
By Kali Holloway

Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

I
MAGINE, FOR JUST A MOMENT, if Kamala Harris’s supporters were
prone to the sort of political idolatry that characterizes Donald Trump’s
devotees. It’s a thought experiment suited to an election for which the
word historic feels inadequate to capture either Harris’s political ascent or
the sheer number of unprecedented events that led to it. There is the
aberration of Trump, the twice-impeached, feloniously convicted,
rape-adjudicated former president—a bitter old racist returned for a third
time to usher in the white supremacist autocracy that his attempted coup
failed to. In any election, President Joe Biden’s age and enfeeblement
since taking office would have been an issue of concern, but under the threat
of Trumpism, Biden’s disastrous debate performance jettisoned the false
narrative that he alone was a bulwark for democracy. Harris—elected
in 2020 as the first woman, first Black, and first South Asian vice president because
her résumé of legislative and prosecutorial public service made her uniquely suited for
the job—should have been recognized as a better candidate than both of those men
from the start. And yet, as Biden’s post-debate numbers waned and Trump’s bandaged
ear crystallized his maga martyrdom, but her unpopularity became a tired echo of
2016’s but her emails. The commentariat, which began sowing doubts about Harris’s
viability nearly as soon as she assumed the vice presidency, even floated other names
for consideration as Biden’s exit became increasingly probable. Minyon Moore, chair of
the Democratic National Convention, said she watched with “fascination” as the media
spun a tale she always knew was divorced from reality.

“The rules dictated a lot. What they did not understand tones. Harris’s run, quite unexpectedly, infused it with color and
PREVIOUS SPREAD, SOURCE PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/

was the rules,’’ Moore told me. “First of all, she campaigned for light again. If the left had the same sanctification tendencies as
two years with Joe Biden. She raised money for Joe Biden. She the Trumpian right, the improbable events leading to Harris’s
took no shortcuts. What they were trying to do was put in place a nomination might have been cast as divine intervention—Jesus
process that did not exist…. Those 4,000 delegates literally voted taking the wheel, only to hand the keys to Harris, so she might steer
for Joe Biden—but they also voted for his ticket. And she was a America away from Trumpism and back onto a righteous road.
part of that ticket.” But the Democratic Party is not a cult of personality, a fact
When Biden, a record-breaking 107 days before the election, proved by Biden’s withdrawal. Harris’s run produced a jubilance
finally left the race and endorsed Harris, the act unexpectedly incomparable to anything seen since at least Barack Obama’s first
BLOOMBERG/GETTY

unleashed an outpouring of enthusiasm and joy, emotions rarely run, and it may even have eclipsed that. Within hours of becoming
associated with politics in recent years. The mood shift not only the presumptive nominee, Harris was buoyed by organizers who
proved Harris’s naysayers wrong but also revealed how Biden’s had begun laying the groundwork for her run years before. A Zoom
frailty and Trump’s darkness had drained the party to sepia organized by Win With Black Women drew 44,000 participants,

12 November 2024
an unprecedented number that required the site’s engineers to now are coming forward as part of the Kamala Harris coalition,
increase capacity. The call ultimately raised $1.5 million in just organizing themselves,” Allison told me. “The respect that she’s
three hours. At least a dozen other calls followed—South Asian shown to many, many groups—and she’s now seeing the results
Women for Harris, Win With Black Men, White Women: Answer of this kind of politicking.”
the Call—each enlisting volunteers and strategizing for a Harris It would be absurd to ignore the all-hands-on-deck efforts
win. In mid-September, Voto Latino reported a 200 percent surge of a massive, dedicated Democratic machine working at full
in its voter registrations since the day Harris replaced Biden. A capacity to ensure a flawless transition. But Harris, during what
senior analyst at TargetSmart, a data research firm, reported one veteran strategist labeled “a perfect 48 hours,” deserves
that registrations are up more than 85 percent among Black credit for stewarding the ship and keeping the operation steady.
voters overall and a staggering 98 percent among Black women. “The seamlessness of Ms. Harris’s ascent,” the Times reported,
Potential youth voters increased most impressively. In 13 states, “impressed a range of party leaders after years of private sniping
registrations have gone up nearly 176 percent and 150 percent and second-guessing of her political skills.” Not for the first time,
among 18- to 29-year-old Black and Hispanic women, respectively.
Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated endorsement of Harris, which
came moments after Harris thrashed Trump in the debate, drove
“a 400 or 500 percent increase” in people going to vote.gov to
register, according to a TargetSmart analyst. What’s more, young
Democrats are 14 percent more enthusiastic about voting than On Sunday, July 21, after Biden’s
their Republican counterparts. While party killjoys such as David
Axelrod suggested Democrats were feeling “irrational exuberance,” announcement, Harris hunkered
and James Carville chastised their “giddy elation,” organizers down with her team, working her way
were getting down to work and galvanizing people to get Harris through a who’s who list of
elected. Those on the ground, doing the real heavy lifting, helped
consolidate support for Harris, building a campaign powered not
Democratic bigwigs. Within the first
from the top down, but from the grassroots up. 10 hours, she had made roughly 100
calls, nailing down endorsements
and support from former presidents,
How Harris Seized Her Moment
members of Congress, and labor

O
F COURSE, NONE OF THIS would have happened union and civil rights players from
if Harris hadn’t proved herself so ready to meet the the Democratic coalition.
moment. First and foremost, she and her team did a
masterful job of staying out of the way while Biden
deliberated. Even as rumors swirled around her, Harris kept
her head down and remained “completely loyal to this admin-
istration,” to quote Moore. There were no leaks that suggested an underestimated Harris demonstrated a level of agility, skill,
she was secretly angling for the boss’s job, no little hints that she and savvy in keeping the campaign running with nary a misstep.
wanted to push the old guy down the stairs. And then, on Sunday, Choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate was
July 21, after Biden’s announcement, Harris hunkered down with yet another canny move.
her team, working her way through a who’s who list of Demo- Just as the inside game was expertly played, the outside game,
cratic bigwigs. Within the first 10 hours, she had made roughly the part visible to the electorate, may have been even stronger.
100 calls, per The New York Times, nailing down endorsements Much has been made of Harris’s rallies—the lines forming hours
and support from former presidents, members of Congress, and before start time and snaking for blocks, the exuberant multiracial
labor union and civil rights players from the Democratic coalition. crowds dancing to music from the last decade (for which Harris-
Some of those relationships had likely been forged over the last Walz campaign will not be sued), the supporters who appear rapt
year, during which Harris led administration outreach efforts instead of driven to “exhaustion and boredom.” Yes, size matters,
on lgbtq rights, gun reform, and Black civil and voting rights, but not in the way Trump thinks. It’s a sign that momentum is on
and as she engaged with young voters on college campuses. Even Harris’s side. But it’s also a testament to how her candidacy has
before Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court’s brought together a diverse swath of voters who share an eagerness
conservative supermajority, Harris had become recognized as a to get beyond the toxic divisions that have plagued the country
forceful defender of reproductive freedom, attending abortion since the rise of maga. For nearly a decade, Trump’s rallies have
rights rallies and even becoming the first sitting vice president been hate contagions, their poisonous us-versus-them serum in-
to visit an abortion clinic. fecting the entire body politic. It’s been such a relief to witness the
Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, an organization ded- palpable joy of Harris’s audiences, a reflection of the campaign’s
icated to helping elect women of color, emphasized Harris’s role tone—a kind of uplifting feedback loop between the candidate and
as a liaison to those marginalized communities. “Her presence in her supporters. A Harris presidency offers the opportunity to step
the White House has been critical for constituencies who, frankly, out of the darkness of Trumpism into a sunny, expansive future
didn’t have much access during Trump’s years. She made sure that welcomes all. It’s the difference between staring mournfully
to play a very important convening role, welcoming groups who backward and looking hopefully ahead, a task anathema to an

Features 13
embittered Trump, and one that a well-meaning but aged Biden Generational Change and the
could not quite muster the energy to pull off. Politics of Boomerism
In articulating their vision for the country, Harris and Minne-

P
sota Governor Tim Walz have moved rally and conventiongoers ERHAPS A FACTOR in the excitement accompanying
to wave U.S. flags and chant “U-S-A, U-S-A,” normally a rarity at Harris’s rise is the sense that her candidacy may usher
Democratic events. Republicans have long taken a proprietary in a long-awaited generational shift in Democratic
approach to the ideas of freedom, liberty, and patriotism, treating politics. Loosening the viselike grip of gerontocratic
them as property rather than principles, wielding them like empty boomerism has also proved that there is an updated way campaigns
slogans with brand value (when you use the word “freedom” so can be run. If the 2016 election was all about how the “left can’t
promiscuously that you rename french fries “freedom fries” in meme”—the mantra of alt-right shit-posters and 4chan edgelords
congressional cafeterias, as GOP lawmakers did briefly after 9/11, who helped elect Trump—the 2024 election so far has been about
you’ve cheapened a valuable word). Those chants and flags carry a Harris dominating the internet. From the outset, the campaign
completely different resonance at Harris’s rallies than when they has made smart decisions, embracing the coconut memes and
are invoked, and weaponized, by maga throngs. The very idea lime-green Brat color schemes. Its Taylor Swift–inspired friendship
of patriotism is transformed when advanced by a Black, biracial bracelets, made available shortly after the singer’s endorsement,
daughter of immigrants. There is the sense that what is actually quickly sold out. It’s funny to think that, should Harris win the
being invoked is the progressive idea that this country belongs election, Republicans will deserve just the teeniest nano-bit of
to all of us. The right-wingers don’t own patriotism; in fact, they credit for helping her get elected. It was the Republican National
have presented a corrupt and exclusionary version of it. The flag, Convention, after all, that repackaged old clips of Harris in an
the chant, and the ideals they represent were never theirs alone effort to embarrass her. Instead, those images of Harris laugh-
to define. There’s something deeply powerful in reclaiming these ing and quoting her mother humanized her, before Trump’s
symbols—in showing they can represent a diverse, forward- racist and sexist attacks could begin to corrupt her image.
looking vision of the country rather than just a nostalgic one. This It goes beyond coconut memes. Consider how videos of Harris
is a genuine show of patriotism—neither jingoistic nor national- and Walz chatting about beloved albums and taco recipes did more
istic, but rooted in a deep love for the country and the belief that to provide a portrait of the candidates on their own terms than
there is still work to be done. so many Republican talking points disguised as gotcha interview
“I’m of the notion that you can love something, critique it, and questions. In the early days of the shortest U.S. presidential cam-
help to make it better, all at the same time. I think that has often paign in modern history, the pair’s ability to present themselves
been Black America’s relationship with America. We love our directly to voters was an incredible asset. That’s not to say Harris
country just as much as anybody else, but we’ve often had to ask can ride social media alone to a win, but it’s certainly better than
the question, does our country love us the same?” Jotaka Eaddy, passively leaving the task to the media. Perhaps it took a campaign
founder of Win With Black Women, told me. “In this moment, headed by a woman who was born after the invention of color tele-
we feel that, at least as it relates to breaking and shattering the vision and Hula-Hoops, and who first won elective office in 2003,
barriers related to our representation, I think we’re continuing as the internet age was bursting into full flower, to understand
to see those barriers broken.” the true direct-to-voter value of social media. Obama, also born
She cited Langston Hughes’s famous poem I, Too, published after rock and roll was invented, is often called “the first social
in 1926—during the Harlem Renaissance, but long before Black Amer- media president,” a label that fits to a certain degree. But during
icans, even in New York City, enjoyed anything close to equality: his inaugural and incumbent runs in 2008 and 2012, no social
media sites had the audience or influence enjoyed by platforms
I, too, sing America. today. Roughly 170 million Americans are currently on TikTok,
I am the darker brother. which is used by almost two-thirds of Americans younger than 30,
They send me to eat in the kitchen Pew Research reports, and nearly 40 percent of Americans un-
When company comes, der age 50. Both there and on the platform formerly known as
But I laugh, Twitter—which since Elon Musk’s takeover has become a cesspool
And eat well, of right-wing misinformation, bots, and talking points too vile
And grow strong. to dignify here—the KamalaHQ account trolls Trump, slices up
Tomorrow, humiliating Trump and JD Vance clips to repurpose as campaign
I’ll be at the table ads on the fly, fact-checks Trump’s debate lies, boosts its favor-
When company comes. able news content, and does a far better job than the mainstream
Nobody’ll dare media does of highlighting the madness of Trump and his maga
Say to me, acolytes in real time.
“Eat in the kitchen,” It’s inspiring to see a Democratic Party that’s finally stopped
Then. volunteering its lunch money to bad-faith actors and insecure
Besides, clowns. Likewise, the Harris team’s trolling of Trump online, and
They’ll see how beautiful I am her face-to-face IRL baiting of his insecurities—demonstrated
And be ashamed— with such aplomb at the debate—have been delightful to watch.
I, too, am America. Calling Trump “dangerous,” “a bully,” or “a strongman” only
emboldens him. He’s been curating an image as a tough guy
“I think we, too, sing America,” Eaddy told me. since the 1980s, and he thrives, above all else, on being feared.

14 November 2024
But Trump isn’t powerful or strong. He’s a trust fund kid from some ways, quite literally. An estimated 20 million baby boomers
Queens who weaponized his daddy issues into everyone else’s have died over the last eight years. In the same period, around
problem. Elevating him to strongman status only played into 32 million young people have come of voting age, with nearly half
maga’s Trump-aggrandizing game. Perhaps a generation of of Gen Z voters identifying as people of color. This is a country
Democrats from another era remain obsessed with civility, but that has grown Blacker, browner, and gayer than it was in 2016,
sometimes you have to meet your opponents where they are—on the last time a woman appeared at the top of the ticket. The white
the low road, where they’ve built a detour to electoral wins. Get backlash that has defined the era since Trump arrived has been
on that road, knock them off it, and make sure you snap a pic of challenged by progressive activism including #MeToo, Black
them falling so you can caption it and share it on your socials. Lives Matter, and the kind of women-led political organizing that
Harris seems to get this; hence the green light she’s given to helped elevate Harris’s candidacy.
a crack team of Gen Z staffers, who have approached attention- All this is to say that while the country may not be as far along
grabbing so differently than Biden did. Her campaign knows, for as many of us would hope, it is in a different place than it was
better or worse, that this election is about playing the attention eight years ago. If Harris has not touted her “firstness” as much
game—a game Trump essentially created in his own image. Beating as Hillary Clinton did, it is perhaps because she does not have
him at it is critical. Harris can’t meme her way to victory, but we’ve to. The convention-breaking nature of her candidacy is apparent
reached a point where capturing the American public’s attention both in who she is as an embodied person and in what she stands
is, in itself, a key part of winning. Part of that is knowing how to for in terms of politics, morals, and outlook. Harris is able to per-
navigate online culture—and, more importantly, knowing how sonalize messaging about abortion, civil rights, gender equality,
and more far better than Biden ever could. She represents so much
more accurately who this country is today. We don’t need to yearn
for a fictional yesteryear—to make America great again—because
this is a better America we live in NOW.

The very idea of patriotism is Black Women Make History

transformed when advanced by

A
MERICA MAY VERY WELL BE “the greatest democracy
a Black, biracial daughter of
in the history of the world,” as Harris declared at the
immigrants. There is the sense convention, but our democracy has also been terribly
that what is actually being flawed by a legacy of exclusion and, often, plain old
invoked is the progressive idea cruelty and sadism. The Founding Fathers’ so-called democratic
vision was myopically limited by both white supremacy and
that this country belongs to all of patriarchy. And while we have made slow, painful steps toward
us. The right-wingers don’t own inclusive democracy, each advance has been met by violent oppo-
patriotism. The flag, the chant, sition and retrenchment. In nearly 250 years of American history,
only one white woman has clinched a major party’s nomina-
and the ideals they represent
tion, and the procession of white males into the Oval Office was
were never theirs alone to define. disrupted by a Black man only once. Trump, in fact, was elected
president by those seeking reassurance that Obama’s presidency
neither heralded a turn to multiracial democracy nor diminished
the enduring privileges of white mediocrity. In the split screen
that was so often on display during the September 10 debate,
to push back hard when necessary, and using the digital town Harris’s assured competence, in contrast to the sputtering incom-
square to your advantage. For the first time, this year’s DNC cre- petence of Trump—a man who after nine years could only hold
dentialed more than 200 digital content creators. Among these up the “concepts of a plan” like so much sand running through
was Brandy Star Merriweather, founder of BStarPR and a social his fingers—was a perfect encapsulation of a Black woman being
media influencer who has used her platform to help engage fellow twice as good as a white guy to get the same job.
Gen Zers with Harris’s campaign. Harris is no stranger to these presumptions. Amid the veep-
“I love that the memes have been able to reach a demographic stakes of 2020, she was criticized as “too ambitious” for the role,
who may not be involved in politics or care to read it, but then which is another way of saying she “didn’t seem to know her
they can look at a meme and kind of understand.... It’s beneficial place.” A mere six months into her vice presidency, outlets in-
to people who may not be in that world all the time hearing about cluding Business Insider, The Washington Post, and Politico
policy,” Merriweather told me. “They are breaking down solutions began publishing articles depicting the vice president as “a bully”
in a way that anyone can consume. And I think doing it on social who wasn’t diligent enough “to do the prep and the work”—but
media, we’re quick—we love things quick, we love things that are also—an “over-prepared” perfectionist who “berated” staff who
pretty funny and witty. I’ve not seen a candidate do that before.” didn’t meet her lofty standards. (One Biden staffer called it “a
Finally, the campaign’s approach on all these fronts is different whisper campaign designed to sabotage her.”) An op-ed from
from its predecessors because the electorate—the important The Hill written way back in November 2021 claimed she’d be
question of who now constitutes “the people”—is different. In “a 2024 problem for Biden and the Democrats,” calling her “an

Features 15
unpopular sharp-tongued incumbent female vice president.” And county jail, where she was beaten with billy clubs and sexually
just recently, The Washington Post ran a piece suggesting that a assaulted. She suffered permanent bodily damage, including the
potential shortcoming for Harris was her “demanding manage- worsening of a limp resulting from a childhood bout with polio, a
ment style,” including her prosecutorial habit of “asking pointed blood clot behind her eye that eventually left her nearly blind, and
questions” of staff. This included a former staffer’s lament that severe kidney damage. “All of this is on account we want to regis-
it was “stressful to brief her, because she’s read all the materials, ter,” Hamer noted in her speech, “to become first-class citizens.”
has annotated it, and is prepared to talk through it.” You cannot President Lyndon B. Johnson had already tried to muzzle
imagine these criticisms lodged against a man because that is Hamer through various advisers. In the middle of her testimony,
not a thing that happens. Make America Competent Again, I say. he called an impromptu press conference to divert television
Harris’s candidacy and her effort are in keeping with the per- cameras. But network news shows broadcast Hamer’s speech in
sistent resolve of Black Americans—particularly Black women—to full during prime time, effectively giving her a far bigger audience
push America toward fulfilling its democratic ideals. It was Win With than if it had aired live. “I question America,” Hamer concluded.
Black Women, a collective of prominent Black women formed in 2020 “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave,
to elevate the image of Black women and support their pursuit of where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because
political office, that got the fundraising ball rolling, encouraging the our lives are threatened daily because we want to live as decent
parade of affinity groups that followed. Some moments have even human beings in America?”
seemed imbued with historical resonance. The night of August 22, Hamer would be elected as a delegate to the 1972 convention
when Harris appeared at the Democratic National Convention to in Miami, the same year that Shirley Chisholm became the first
accept the presidential nomination, marked 60 years to the day Black woman to seek a major party’s nomination. Chisholm,
that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer delivered a blistering who like Harris was both of West Indian descent and was the
and rule-changing speech at the 1964 convention in Atlantic City. child of immigrants, had been the first Black woman elected to
Hamer, co-founder of the interracial Mississippi Freedom Dem- Congress in 1968. Four years later, without waiting for backing
ocratic Party, led the delegation to that convention to contest the from a Democratic Party machine she knew would never come,
seating of her home state’s all-white, segregationist delegation. In Chisholm launched a campaign that was both truly independent
her searing testimony before the DNC’s Credentials Committee, and disruptive. “I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat
Hamer detailed the horrific violence and abuses inflicted upon cats or special interests,” she stated in her announcement speech,
her by state-backed white aggressors for daring to vote. Hamer delivered at one of the oldest Black churches in her hometown of
had been fired from her job and evicted from her home, and the Ku Brooklyn, New York. Though she had expected to run up against
Klux Klan fired 16 bullets into the home where she sought refuge the commingled toxicity of anti-Black racism and misogyny, or
from the violence. (“The only thing they could do to me was to misogynoir, Chisholm was nonetheless disappointed by the lack
kill me,” she would tell a later interviewer, “and it seemed like
they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could
remember.”) After attending a workshop to learn how to register
other Black Mississippians, she was arrested and thrown in the

Climbing the
Mountain
From left: Coretta Scott King, Barbara Jordan,
Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shirley Chisholm,
Kamala Harris, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks,
Zora Neale Hurston, and Ida B. Wells
ILLUSTRATION BY KLAWE RZECZY
 of support she received from the overwhelmingly white, main- overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our
stream feminist movement, or Black civil rights figures. Neither democracy.” She has embraced this debt throughout her life, and it
the National Women’s Political Caucus nor the Congressional is imbued in her biography. Alpha Kappa Alphas like Coretta Scott
Black Caucus, both groups that Chisholm had co-founded, en- King and Toni Morrison. Divine Nine icon Barbara Jordan. Howard
dorsed her, essentially citing pragmatism over principles, and a alums from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison to Thurgood
desperate need to beat Richard Nixon. Notably, Hamer boasted Marshall. Her citation of these figures, all liberatory leaders who
of voting for Chisholm on the first ballot, stating, “Men couldn’t have made this union slightly less imperfect, is recognition of the
have talked about the real issues in this country the way she did. shoulders on which she, and so many of us, stand.
They bow to political pressure, but Chisholm didn’t bow to any-
one. She’s a great person, a Black person, and a great woman, and
she’s working for the kinds of change that the National Women’s What Comes Next
Political Caucus is working for. With the woman’s vote and the

L
youth vote—far more than 50 percent—we can have a candidate ESS THAN A MONTH OUT from Election Day, if there’s
like Chisholm in the White House one day.” anything that this campaign should have taught us,
Chisholm would later write in her memoir, The Good Fight: “I it’s that it’s impossible to predict what the final stretch
ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the will look like. Trump is desperate, and thus capable of
sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo…. The next time a anything, a prospect that is terrifying but in keeping with who he
woman runs, or a Black, or a Jew or anyone from a group that the has always been. Perhaps there will be missteps from Harris, who
country is ‘not ready’ to elect to its highest office, I believe that needs to strengthen her support among noncollege voters. And
he or she will be taken seriously from the start…. I ran because some major external event could derail things at the last minute.
someone had to do it first. In this country everybody is supposed But we know this already: America, just as Shirley Chisholm
to be able to run for president, but that’s never really been true.” hoped, is more than ready for Kamala Harris.
Harris has nodded to that lineage. In her 2020 vice presiden- From its inception, Harris’s campaign has been powered by the
tial victory speech, she paid tribute to the “women who fought people. The surge in voter registrations, the grassroots organizers
GETTY (X9)

and sacrificed so much for equality, and liberty, and justice for hitting the pavement, the supporters who have filled her rallies
all,” paying specific homage to Black women, “who are too often to capacity—all of these are a testament to the movement behind
her campaign, which is driven from the ground up.
This is no ordinary campaign, but it’s exactly the campaign
that we needed at this extraordinary moment. In it, there is the
potential for an America brought a little closer to giving everyone
a place at the table. Most Americans, I truly believe, would love
to see an end to maga. Harris, along with millions of energized
supporters, has the potential to shape a more promising future.
Within that, a rejection of revanchist politics, a renewed push
toward progress, and full-throated assertion—yet again—that
we are not going back.
Kali Holloway is a columnist for The Nation and a contributor to msnbc
and The Daily Beast. She is currently working on her first book.
In many ways, a mass deportation machine
already exists in the United States.
But Donald Trump has vowed that, if he
returns to office, he’ll begin an operation
that could involve a force larger than
the U.S. Army—and he promises that it
will be a “bloody story.”

THE
INCOMPREHENSIBLE
SCALE OF
TRUMP’S
DEPORTATION
PLANS
By Melissa Gira Grant

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

Jennifer crossed into the United States
last year, having reached the southern
border on June 16, 2023, the eighth anni-
versary of Donald Trump’s entrance down
a fading gold escalator and into the 2016
presidential election. (“Jennifer” is the
name she is using, given the situation.)
She had left Venezuela with her two young
sons, a difficult and traumatic journey
over thousands of miles on foot, she said,
ending in New York City, where they settled
as a family in a shelter for newly arrived
migrants. “I come here as a political
asylum,” she told me, through a Spanish
interpreter, when we spoke late in August.
“I come here because I fear for my life and
my children’s life back home.” But a little
more than two months later, she would
be separated from her sons, after she was
detained by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, or ICE. This wasn’t supposed
to happen to someone seeking asylum, but
it does. This wasn’t supposed to happen
in a sanctuary city, but that did not matter
to ICE. “I just needed help in regards to
my children,” said Jennifer, “and I didn’t
know this will just get me jailed.”

23
 While Jennifer was in a detention center in New Jersey, unsure plans do not seem so remote. The pieces seem already to be in
why she was being held, unable to speak to her children, Trump, in place. It may look like ICE officers coming at dawn, separating
an interview with Tucker Carlson on X, was promising a massive families in their living rooms, on their stoops. It may also look
deportation operation. As president, “number one is border,” he like someone behind the scenes, just doing her city job, speaking
said, leaning forward, as if to underline the word, as if “border” with ICE about a young mother.
was a complete thought. “And—taking hundreds of thousands
of criminals that have been allowed into our country and getting
them out and bringing them back to their country.” The next day,
■■■■■■■■■■■■
Trump would be arrested at the Fulton County Jail in Georgia, a TRUMP’S HIGHEST-PROFILE mass deportations promise, made
planned surrender after which he would only briefly be held in at the Republican National Convention, did not involve a detailed
custody, on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. plan, but it did follow the familiar beats of a Trump speech. First,
Jennifer would be hospitalized after a panic attack, she said, not the lie—“they’re sending their murderers to the United States
knowing what would happen to her sons. “The thought of being of America.” Then, the riff on the lie—“This is going to be very
separated from them nearly broke me.” bad. And bad things are going to happen. And you’re seeing all
When Jennifer asked ICE officers when she would be released, the time.” Last, the tough talk about how he’ll fix it. Mostly what
she recalled, they laughed at her and told her she was going to be made the news was the last part of his speech, which Trump’s
deported because she had a criminal case against her. But that spokesperson repeated: “On Day One back in the White House,
wasn’t true: ICE had detained her after information about her was President Trump will begin the largest criminal deportation op-
released to the agency, in violation of Jennifer’s rights. (ICE did not eration of illegal immigrants and restore the rule of law.” Trump’s
provide a response to a list of detailed questions about Jennifer’s rhetoric—“getting them out will be a bloody story,” he said at a
case.) She had asked the shelter for help getting family therapy, to September rally—is escalating.
support her kids after their journey, and someone at the shelter had This project has already been touted by Trump’s vice presiden-
called New York’s child protection agency, the Administration for tial candidate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and by Russell Vought, a
Children’s Services. Jennifer didn’t know that ACS was now inves- key author of Project 2025. Vance defended mass deportations
tigating her. She didn’t know, contrary to the agency’s own policy against what he called “the lying media” in a Fox interview in
and the city’s laws, that it would share this information with ICE. July. (It’s a phrase that may be more familiar in the original Ger-
A spokesperson for ACS confirmed that the agency had investi- man.) According to Vance, “You just start with the worst people”
gated “a complaint about an employee sharing data in a particular before worrying about the rule of law—“before you get into what
case, upon request from ICE,” and that “ACS took immediate you can’t do.” The rule of law need not be a concern. Vought has
corrective action, including reinforcing ACS policy prohibiting been more direct in saying that deportations are a racial purity
data sharing with ICE.” She added, “ACS takes our legal and moral project. In what he thought was a private meeting in July, Vought
responsibility to protect immigrant children, youth, and families mused, “We could save the country in a sense of, you know, the
from possible federal immigration consequences very seriously.” largest deportation in history…. That’s going to cause us, to get
It wouldn’t have been possible to watch Trump’s interview from us off multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the
within ICE detention in New Jersey, when Jennifer was incarcer- deportation, right?”
ated there. By the time I was introduced to her and got to ask her Then there are the guys Trump has already positioned to carry
about Trump’s mass deportation promises, a year had passed, and this project out: Stephen Miller, Trump’s former White House ad-
she was released, but not yet living with her sons. “Hearing him viser, and Tom Homan, his former acting ICE director. Both served
say these things makes me feel afraid to be deported, of course, in pivotal roles crafting the destructive “zero tolerance” policy
because of everything that happened with ICE,” she said. “I’m of 2018, separating families newly arrived in the United States.
literally innocent. The thing is, if they say I have a criminal record, Miller has detailed Trump’s plans in numerous interviews with
this could get me deported, and of course I’m afraid of that.” conservative media, sounding credible enough about its details,
Speaking with Jennifer not long after the Republican National such as constructing camps along the border. Homan, meanwhile,
Convention, with Trump’s latest “largest deportation operation” is rehearsing for his Trump administration roles, as both the
promises, here in New York in the late summer of 2024, Trump’s expert face of mass deportations and their merciless enforcer.

24 November 2024
Stephen Miller also chatted with Kirk about how a Trump
administration would fill these camps. “You go to the
red state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard.
We will deputize them as immigration enforcement
officers,’” Miller said. They would “go around the country
arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.”

Trump’s anti-immigration agenda “picks up right where he that challenging. Trump’s anti-immigration programs as president,
left off in 2020,” Miller said in an interview on The Charlie Kirk Miller said, were “far more legally complicated and challenging
Show in November 2023, with mass deportations as the “daring and novel by comparison than the mass deportation operation,”
and ambitious” centerpiece. When The New York Times asked which Miller regards as “primarily a massive logistical challenge.”
Trump about these plans, the campaign directed the paper to Trump has said the plan is to deport 15 million to 20 million
Miller. Those plans he shared included ending the Deferred people. As of 2022 , there were 11 million immigrants living in the
Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or daca; again invoking United States without authorization, according to Pew Research
Title 42, health emergency restrictions that expired last year, and Center; 11 million people is around 3.3 percent of the total popu-
that, by framing immigration as a public health threat, limited the lation of the United States as of this writing.
number of people entering the United States; and building “vast Trump proposes to deport nearly twice that many people. That
holding facilities,” otherwise known as camps, to house detained means that not only immigrants living in the country without au-
immigrants ahead of deportation. He emphasized that a Trump thorization would be targeted. In fact, Trump has expressly called
administration could pull this off working within existing laws. for some Haitian immigrants with protected status to be deported
Miller also chatted with Kirk about how a Trump administration as well. Given the extreme methods proposed, raids would almost
would fill these camps. “You go to the red state governors and certainly involve detaining family members, co-workers, and com-
you say, ‘Give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as munity members simply for being there when officers descended.
immigration enforcement officers,’” Miller said. He would have The Trump administration deported 1.5 million people throughout
“experienced ICE veterans” leading the operations, with “DEA, his entire four-year term, and President Joe Biden’s administra-
ATF, et cetera.” and “state and local sheriffs.” They would “go tion had deported 1.1 million as of February 2024. But those figures
around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale do not include the three million people who were immediately ex-
raids.” Trump has backed up the personnel plan, bluntly telling pelled after crossing the border when Title 42 was in effect, between
Time magazine, “We will be using local law enforcement.” March 2020 and May 2023—the overwhelming majority of those
Immigration enforcement is federal, not local. There are pro- Title 42 expulsions having taken place under Biden. According to
visions for authorizing state and local law enforcement agencies an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, “the Biden adminis-
for certain limited immigration enforcement, known as the 287(g) tration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any
program. The American Civil Liberties Union has called the pro- single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration.”
gram a “License to Abuse” and found that, during his presidency,
Trump expanded its use five times over, more than doubling the
deportations under the program. Sheriffs especially have pushed
■■■■■■■■■■■■
beyond the purported limits of the program, laying the groundwork THE MAN TRUMP HAS selected to oversee his planned mass
for further abuse, which is what Trump is proposing: turning any deportation of 15 million to 20 million people frequently ties his
law enforcement agency into an immigration enforcement agency. credibility to the four years he worked Border Patrol. “I know what
That, in fact, is what his plan would require. Once immigrants or it’s like to arrest an alien and feel bad about it. I know what it’s like
people who have been profiled as immigrants have been detained to see a dead alien on the trail,” Tom Homan said in a 2018 profile.
through various law enforcement agencies, Miller imagines they will Nearly his entire career has been immigration enforcement, most
be moved to camps—“throughput facilities”—where they will be recently as Trump’s acting director of ICE. At that time, he accused
detained just long enough to deport them. This would go far beyond the Oakland mayor, who opposed his impending sweeps, of acting
apprehensions at the border, since many immigrants have lived as a “gang lookout,” and called for elected officials’ prosecution
without authorization in the United States for years. It will separate if they followed suit. He has attacked sanctuary cities, in part
families: At least 1.1 million are married to a legal resident, and because he claims they interfere with what he regards to be the
they are parents to at least 4.9 million children. Lives built here safest way for his officers to round up immigrants for deporta-
over generations could be shattered with one agent’s haphazard tion: by picking them up from local police. “Sanctuary cities are
decisions, with one vindictive neighbor’s call. sanctuaries for criminals,” he claimed again in July.
At no point in this plan does anything resembling due process These days, Homan is the face of a group called Border911, pro-
figure in. Miller was confident that the legal side would not be all moting it often on X, offering group mottoes like “The border is our

Features 25
“I’m going to run the biggest deportation operation this
country’s ever seen,” Tom Homan declared on X in
December 2023. By July, he was representing Trump’s
plans at the Heritage Foundation’s “policy fest” at
the RNC. Homan, a Heritage fellow, assured the applauding
conventiongoers, “No one’s off the table.”

theater of war” and promo videos packed with shots of Homan and border without authorization was uncommon until the 1980s.
other men in tactical gear with the U.S. flag. This is the theater, Before then, if immigration enforcement detained people at all,
and Trump openly praises Homan’s performance. “He has been it was for a few days, after which they were released on parole as
so great on television,” Trump said at a campaign stop in April, immigration proceedings unfolded.
with a stop biden’s border bloodbath sign on the lectern. This is also when the narrative of “criminal aliens” took root,
Border911, with Homan leading the group, has essentially been Shah argues. It was beginning to show up in aspects of anti-drug
campaigning for Trump, promising crackdowns on immigration— legislation—like “detainer” policies, which authorized the Immi-
and seriously skirting tax law in doing so, in the eyes of some gration and Naturalization Service and local law enforcement to
experts. In April, Border911 held a fundraising gala at Mar-a-Lago coordinate so as to more quickly move immigrants arrested on
to support the group’s nationwide tour to battleground states, drug charges into INS custody and deportation proceedings. After
“educating the American people” to “vote for border security” the 9/11 attacks, policy and narrative about “criminal aliens” were
in November, Homan said. Three former Trump administration bound even more tightly together through the “war on terrorism.”
officials served on the host committee. Attendees could pay for By the time Congress scrapped INS in 2002, and ICE was born,
a photo with Trump. “We’re working on the border together,” federal legislation defined a greater number of immigrants as
Trump said at the gala. “Tom made a pledge: If you win, I’m com- “criminal aliens” by expanding the list of crimes for which immi-
ing back.” ABC News asked the group’s representatives about its grants could be detained or deported, and, through the kick-started
apparent endorsement of Trump, for example, with the t-shirt 287(g) program, local police could help ICE track them down,
Border911 sold and Homan promoted, reading, “trump comes streamlining the arrest-to-deportation pipeline. “The arguments
back. i come back. we fix this shit!”—tom homan. The group used to expand immigrant detention cemented xenophobic beliefs
then removed the shirt and other pro-Trump materials from its that migrants are undeserving of rights,” Shah writes, “and over
website. Border911 could have been violating tax law, because time the law changed to support the belief.”
501(c)(3) charitable organizations are barred from supporting Homan, Trump, Miller, and many others are not really innovat-
specific candidates. The group’s attorney said it was in the process ing with the substance of this rhetoric—immigrants are criminals.
of registering a 501(c)(4 )that would allow Border911 to support a “It’s a very intentional narrative, but it goes beyond a narrative,”
candidate, and that “Tom is very committed to cleaning it up…. said Marlene Galaz, director of immigrant rights policy at New
As a former law enforcement officer, he wants to follow the [law].” York Immigration Coalition, or nyic. “Painting immigrants and
asylum seekers as criminals has been a strategy for a while now.
■■■■■■■■■■■■ But I do think that that narrative leads into actual policy.” Trump
et al. are popularizing the narrative, taking it to a new extreme: a
“I’M GOING TO RUN the biggest deportation operation this more straightforward, scapegoating narrative about what to do
country’s ever seen,” Tom Homan declared on X in December 2023. with immigrants, one with a catchy solution that can be captured
By July, he was representing Trump’s plans at the Heritage Foun- in a campaign sign.
dation’s “policy fest” at the Republican National Convention.
Homan, a Heritage fellow, almost bellowed as he assured the
applauding conventiongoers, “No one’s off the table. The bottom
■■■■■■■■■■■■
line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in IT IS NOT EASY to assess whether Trump actually can deport
violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country illegally.” the many millions of people he has promised to remove from the
The idea that the United States should arrest, detain, and de- United States. You could ask the plan’s architects. You could run a
port every single person who crosses the border unlawfully is not sober assessment of the numbers, of the current system’s capability,
built into the immigration system. The crime of “unlawful entry” and come to the conclusion that such an operation is impossible.
was created only in 1929. The system of immigration detention You could consider all of the ways mass deportation might shred
we have today came much later, in tandem with the rise of mass both the law and legal norms, something well on its way. But, as
incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s, writes Silky Shah, executive Andrea Pitzer, who has written a history of concentration camps,
director of Detention Watch Network, in her 2024 book Unbuild said in a recent essay in Scientific American, “The argument that a
Walls. Routinely detaining and deporting people who crossed the second Trump administration wouldn’t be able to launch such an

26 November 2024
operation because of a lack of personnel or legal authority should but it’s not necessarily true—it may just be a shift in priorities,
be understood as largely irrelevant because it presupposes the or it may be that someone is just noticing something that’s long
intention of running a precise, legal project at all.” been common to immigration enforcement. “The kind of mass
We should take as a given that mass deportations in the United deportation that is being called for by the people attending the
States would involve its enforcers violating the law while being Republican National Convention is already here,” said Mark,
shielded by the law. It may seem like a paradox, but it is the only way “and is already being experienced by communities that include
I can make sense of the conditions we are in. Radley Balko, author immigrants.” We’ve seen before when Trump approaches mass
of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police deportations, “there’s an element of intentional chaos to the
Forces, offered in his newsletter a highly detailed analysis of the terror,” she said. “I think there is a certain amount of disbelief
logistical complexities of such a scheme and of the potential steps about how much worse it could get.”
beyond the law that could be taken to deputize any law enforce-
ment officer as an immigration officer, and the broad exemptions
from civil liability such officers would enjoy. Balko estimated
■■■■■■■■■■■■
such a force would exceed the number of active-duty U.S. Army TRUMP’S DEPORTATION MACHINE is an inheritance, built by
troops, detaining a population at least twice that of New York City, the administrations before him. The laws may not be new, a fact
deporting them on thousands of flights. Jessica Pishko, author of that makes the attitudes of the people Trump is bringing with
The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs him so significant. “The Thomas Homans, that kind of ethos,”
Threatens Democracy, said in a recent essay that sheriffs would be said Paulos, “the feeling like the laws are restricting them in ways
key players here, not only as enforcers for ICE, which some have that they can’t do their jobs—right?—is a very dangerous, and,
been for years under 287(g), but in the manner that sheriffs like I think, very different mentality than what we have under the
Arizona’s Joe Arpaio have paved the way for mass deportations. Democrats.” This is not to say that Democrats aren’t also taking a
Making sense of Trump’s plans is something many immigrants very tough stance right now. But Trump needs the kind of people
and immigrants’ rights attorneys and organizers have had to carrying out mass deportations who are real preserve-law-and-
grapple with for nearly a decade now. “The Trump administration order guys, who will also say that’s why they should be able to
shined this kind of spotlight on the cruelty of our immigration violate people’s rights under the law.
system, and the way it severs people from their families and com- Given the further mainstreaming of the far right and the per-
munities,” said Marie Mark of Immigrant Defense Project. “But sistence of far-right violence even after Trump left office, Trump’s
that was all legal. That is all already part of our law and continues potential return clears a path for such people to get their hands on
to be the law—was the law before Trump, and was the law after the deportation machine. Where there are police, the last several
Trump.” If the goal is to arrest as many immigrants as possible, years have also shown, there are “patriots,” those who would rather
Mark said, a Trump administration will do what already works. cloak their vigilantism in law-and-order officialdom. Sometimes,
IDP has documented ICE’s deception tactics to lure someone the patriots are the police, waiting for a sign. In 2017, Trump was
into arrest or gain access to their home without a warrant. ICE that sign, “letting us do our job and taking the handcuffs off the
trains agents on such techniques—it calls them “ruses,” part men and women of the Border Patrol and ICE,” as Tom Homan
of ICE policy—which escalated under Trump. They knock and said on Fox at the time.
pretend to be local police. They call and pretend they found lost Meghan Maloney de Zaldivar, a senior director of advocacy
IDs. They pretend a target’s child is a victim of a crime. Mark with the nyic, organizing around Buffalo, New York, remembered
emphasized, “They’ll do what works, and what we’ve seen is encountering this sort of permission-giving during Trump’s first
that lying to people at their door does work.” They may use the term. “He doesn’t necessarily have to make those things explicit,
same lies on people’s employers, their friends, their family, to because of the hate and the message that he has been sending,”
find them. “People’s desire to comply with people in authority is she told me. “The people who work within those forces now feel
what’s being used against them.” like they don’t have to restrain themselves, and take it upon them-
There are these “moments of crisis,” Abraham Paulos, deputy selves to take that initiative. It’s not necessarily that he’s going to
director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, or baji, told every sheriff’s department and saying, Hey, will you help us out?”
me, “that folks feel like things actually change on the books,” Campaigning is a way for Trump to draw on and embolden the

Features 27
racism and hate for immigrants that already exists, she explained: Homan and Trump harbor a “cruelty-and-chaos agenda,” as
“And then, when he is in power, that message is sent to those folks Zachary Mueller of the immigrants’ rights group America’s Voice
that they have the power and the backing of the White House to referred to it, speaking with del Bosque after her brush with
use their authority to take out that racism and hate on immigrants Border911. They wield the threat of mass deportations to terrorize
in their communities.” immigrants, using “nativist and xenophobic rhetoric,” he said,
Those people haven’t moved on entirely just because Trump which in turn could empower a range of vigilante projects. “They
has been out of power. They are watching and waiting. “There’s are using immigrants as the vehicle,” said Mueller, “to socialize
a lot of patriots out there that want to come back,” Tom Homan why we should not have a democracy.”
told Breitbart News in a 2022 interview, saying he’d had phone
calls from dozens of former ICE and Border Patrol agents, “also
retired, and they watch TV. They get fed up. They’re just as upset
■■■■■■■■■■■■
as I am.” Homan claimed that, in a second Trump administration, THIS MASS DEPORTATION machine we already have requires
there would be “no problem finding leaders within [the Depart- continuous maintenance—justifying it, creating demand. Today it’s
ment of Homeland Security] to secure this border and shut it the dangerous rhetoric referring to an “invasion” by immigrants,
down once and for all.” allegedly threatening national sovereignty, and calls for the U.S.
And if Trump loses? They still may be waiting. Homan’s military to “defend” the border. Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s
Border911 group itself is something these guys could rally around, busing of newly arrived immigrants—to New York, to Chicago, to
still feeling that they were serving Trump. Los Angeles, to Washington, D.C.—supported the fearmongering
In January, one of the boldface names of Border911 was sighted notion that “every state is a border state.”
near the border wall in Arizona, as reported firsthand by immi- And while Republicans are leading such vilification of immi-
gration journalist Melissa del Bosque. Jaeson Jones, a former grants, some Democrats are joining in. After the recent arrivals
Texas Department of Public Safety captain turned far-right media of immigrants in New York City, the idea that they were a drain
personality, accompanied a small group of masked, armed men, on the city became a reason for detaining and deporting them.
who were conducting their own “patrol,” dressed in tactical gear, Mayor (and former police officer) Eric Adams has said that these
appearing similar to immigration officials—“a maga media mili- immigrants “will destroy” New York City. “The police budget is
tia,” as del Bosque referred to them—frightening migrants, and continuously increasing every year, and our educational budget
“implying that they were a federal agency,” said one volunteer with is not, and they’re actually blaming migrants for it,” said Abraham
an NGO aiding migrants who had arrived at this organization’s Paulos at baji. “There’s no room in the shelters. There’s no room
makeshift camp. Jones went on Newsmax later and accused the for housing … but are they ever out of beds in Rikers?” he added,
NGO volunteers of “smuggling” people into the country. He said referring to the large New York City jail.
what they were doing was “absolutely illegal.” That’s not true. “The reality in New York state is that local law enforcement has
The far-right, conspiratorial element of Border911 goes back colluded with immigration for decades, and that has been weapon-
to its origins as part of the America Project, a group founded by ized in different ways under different administrations,” said Maloney
Michael Flynn, former Army general, former Trump national se- de Zaldivar from nyic. “We expect them to continue to be weap-
curity adviser, and election conspiracy theorist, and Patrick Byrne, onized under a new Trump administration, and frankly they’re
founder of Overstock.com and a major funder behind many efforts weaponized under the current administration as well.” Defeating
to overturn the 2020 election results and install Trump. Homan, Trump does not bring this weaponization of police as immigration
who has served as the America Project’s CEO since March 2023, enforcement officers to an end. “There is infrastructure definitely to
is also the director of the Justice for All Project, most notable for implement a deportation agenda,” said Marlene Galaz at nyic. But,
its connection to the song “Justice for All,” a performance of “The as several advocates told me, New York’s state legislature could pass
Star-Spangled Banner” by January 6 defendants, recorded from the New York for All Act, meant to block state and government agen-
jail and mixed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Byrne cies, police, and sheriffs from sharing information with ICE, across
told the Associated Press that the America Project had helped New York; other states could take similar measures. Given Miller
create the song, which Trump has prominently featured at rallies and Homan’s plans to deputize local police, one way to make that
as a tribute to those who laid siege to the Capitol on his behalf. more difficult would be to put a check on the power of those police.

28 November 2024
Journalist Radley Balko offered a highly detailed analysis
of the logistical complexities of such a scheme,
estimating such a force would exceed the number
of active-duty U.S. Army troops, detaining a population
at least twice that of New York City, deporting them
on thousands of flights.

As advocates are working to prevent Trump from further impractical” and rejected it. Trump ultimately ran with the policy,
exploiting the deportation systems that already exist, people are and Homan is listed as one of three authors on the 2018 memo
stuck in that system right now. All the advocates and organizers I that authorized Border Patrol agents to take children away from
spoke to emphasized the work they are doing now—defending and their parents, causing pain and chaos in federal courts, jails, and
accompanying people through immigration proceedings, locating shelters. Trump’s team justified themselves with the rhetoric Ho-
enough lawyers skilled at working in the immigration system man used in the beginning, and still uses: that family separation
who aren’t themselves overburdened, uncovering and challeng- was nothing new, and that family separation wasn’t meant to hurt
ing abuse of immigrants in detention. This ever-accumulating families and children, but to protect them.
workload would continue into a Trump administration. As Marie Family separations are likely to return in force; as Dickerson
Mark at IDP said, “We are already struggling with the scale of reported, the policy’s architects “argued that Zero Tolerance had
deportation that exists.” been effective—or that it would have been, if only it had been
left in place a little longer.” They offer a chilling, clear forecast
■■■■■■■■■■■■ for mass deportations: a policy driven by nativist ideologues in
Trump’s inner circle; pushed through despite serious legal and
ONE YEAR HAS PASSED since Jennifer was released from ethical questions from at least some people in leadership; rolled
immigrant detention. Envision Freedom Fund, a community-run out without notice, including to some of those tasked with carrying
bail fund, paid for her bond. We were put in touch after she had it out; and then, when the press and immigrants’ rights groups
given testimony about ICE, ACS, and the shelter, outside city demanded answers, a policy its backers denied even existed.
hall. She was living in the Bronx, working at a hair salon. Her The denial was deep. It came from top DHS officials when ques-
teenage sons have started school in New York. tioned about family separation by then-Senator Kamala Harris,
“A lot of families, a lot of mothers that come here, we come days after the family separation memo Homan had co-written
truly because we want a better life,” she told me. “And we just was signed. In a House hearing in 2019, as he was questioned by
don’t know what will happen.” What she had not known, she said, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Homan appeared to
would be “what I went through—and that I’m still going through, deny that separating immigrant families was exceptional. “When I
because I’m still not living with my children”—and how could she was a police officer in New York, and I arrested a father for domestic
have known? She was separated from her family, after all they had violence, I separated that father from his family,” said Homan.
been through, when keeping them safe is why she came here. In May 2018, not long after the policy had been announced, when
Border Patrol separated a father from his family near the border
■■■■■■■■■■■■ in Texas, where they were requesting asylum, the child’s father
was so distressed, he began shaking and punching the chain-link
THOUGH NO LONGER BORDER CZAR, Tom Homan frequently detention cell. He was moved to a local jail that night, and the next
appeared on Fox and other venues, backing up his former boss. morning he was found lifeless in his cell. This does not justify but
Sometimes he even called back to his work at ICE under Presi- perhaps explains why some agents reportedly started lying to
dent Barack Obama. In 2023, on a Heritage Foundation podcast, parents about where they were taking children, with Border Patrol
an interviewer asked Homan about Trump and “these so-called officers saying that their children were going to go have a bath.
kids in cages.” Homan replied, “The cages were built under the Family separation angered people more than almost anything
Obama administration, I was there.” He’s not wrong; but he spun else Trump did until January 6. It sparked calls to abolish ICE and
on: “They’re not cages, they’re chain-link dividers,” he claimed, immigrant detention. Yet, as of April 2024, at least 1,400 children
adding they were meant “for the protection of the children.” are still separated from their families. By the time Trump could
Homan has been identified as the “father” of the Trump admin- return to the White House in January, some of those immigrant
istration’s family separation policy, after a Pulitzer Prize–winning families—among countless others—will still likely be apart. We
investigation by Caitlin Dickerson in The Atlantic, reporting can’t know how many more might go missing if Trump returns to
that involved numerous records of the program’s development. the White House. If he remains in power, we may never know.
In 2014, Homan pitched the idea to Jeh Johnson, then head of
DHS under President Obama, who considered it “heartless and Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic.

Features 29
Campaigns spend billions on ads that change
outcomes by a few points, if at all.

An inside view of where the money goes—and

how it drives our political parties.

The Greatest
Treasure
In Politics
By Colin Jones

I
T WAS FRIDAY, JULY 19, one of the last days before Joe And that was true, to an extent. Biden was still in the race,
Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Kamala Harris but since the world witnessed him flailing during his debate
was rolling calls in a pre-lit film studio at the Democratic with Donald Trump, his campaign had been running on fumes.
National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill, as some- His staff flipped into damage control. The donations dried up.
one in the room described to me. The morning had been Once Thomas Matthew Crooks put a bullet through Trump’s
consumed by video conferences with panicked donors and vol- right ear, the gears ground to a halt. Biden’s team pulled their
unteers, screens of distant little faces looking to Harris for some attack ads from the air and hunkered down until they got a
kind of encouragement. The calls were followed by a series of read on the national temperament. By that Friday, as Harris
scripted, direct-to-camera spots. In one, Harris, wearing a black made her calls, the campaign’s whole media apparatus—spread
blazer that set her off against the beige and white background, between Biden’s campaign committee, the DNC, and an array
asks for “a donation to support Joe and me. This is going to be a of allied PACs—had been hanging in a state of suspended an-
tough fight and we are all up for it.” imation for nearly a week. If the prospect of Trump getting a

Photographs by Oliver Farshi

second term as president was distressing to you, these days Daunting as that project was, in practice the choice before Harris
were agony. was simple. As our elections have swelled into multibillion-dollar
And then they were over. On Sunday, Biden announced he media spectacles, the private sector has correspondingly spawned
was bowing out of the race and endorsed Harris. By evening, an array of for-profit firms to which campaigns outsource this
Harris’s campaign had filed with the Federal Election Commis- work. Harris’s choice boiled down to who would run her paid
sion. That began the process by which she could assume control media, and what constellation of firms would get the contracts to
of the $96 million in Biden’s campaign committee. By Monday, make and place her ads.
donations were pouring in at record pace: $81 million in the first And at that point, political decisions also touched people in
24 hours. Endorsements followed in short order. In a matter of their pockets. “There’s just this massive pile of money, and it is
days, Harris had become the presumed nominee—and stupen- the greatest treasure in politics as far as what we do,” a Demo-
dously loaded. But all those dollars were still just promissory. cratic media consultant told me shortly after Harris launched
There was as yet no clear plan for how to convert them into the her campaign. “So you can imagine there’s a lot of feelings about
real grist of a campaign: the ads. how that pie will be split.”

I
In Athens, they had the agora. In Vienna, the coffee shop. Here
in the states, we have a cyclical barrage of multiplatform political
advertising. Regulations governing campaign finance have been HAD BEEN FOLLOWING this world since early summer,
rolled back considerably over the last several decades, and ever when I began corresponding with a freelancer beset by
since Citizens United in 2010, when the Supreme Court decided a nagging sense of doom. (Everyone directly involved in
that money had First Amendment rights, there have been virtually making ads spoke to me on condition of anonymity, because
no limits on fundraising or spending in our political system, while they were not authorized to talk to the press.) The freelancer
only the most paltry regulations govern how our data is harvest- had been shuttling between battleground states for weeks, living
ed. The results are awing. Every couple of years, our country is out of a suitcase while he made testimonials that would be used
thrown into paroxysms by campaigns that start sooner and set in ads supporting the president. The work brought him into
new benchmarks for how data scientists try to extract dollars factories and union halls, into people’s homes. In these settings,
from likely donors and place ads in front of possible supporters. ordinary Americans, handpicked by data analysts and producers
The bills for this add up. In 2016, just under $3 billion was spent to resonate with key demographics, explained to the camera why
on ads. In 2020, that figure had climbed to $9 billion. the country should reelect Joe Biden. The thing was, so far as the
Until Harris swapped in for Biden, this cycle was no excep- freelancer could tell, none of it was sticking.
tion. Biden announced plans to run for reelection in April 2023 The freelancer had made campaign ads for several cycles before
and was making ads by the fall. The independent expenditures this. Four years ago, even while the country was still in the grips
supporting him snapped into action soon after. Future Forward, of the pandemic, the atmosphere had been hopeful. Biden was
one of the biggest pro-Democrat super PACs for the past several running strong on a message of change and sanity, and although
cycles, announced in January that it was buying $250 million much of the film industry had been idled by Covid, the production
of ads for later in the year—what it claims is the single largest process had felt light-footed. Teams of underemployed editors,
buy any unaffiliated group had ever made. Trump, for his part, working out of their homes, were shipping video spots at a light-
had never spent as lavishly as other candidates on ads. In 2016, ning pace. Four years before that, during Hillary Clinton’s 2016
Trump won the presidency while spending almost half of what run, the freelancer had called the election for Trump by the end
Hillary Clinton did. But the big money was with the super PACs of summer. The consultants writing Clinton’s ads seemed to have
that backed him—Preserve America, maga Inc.—and they were open contempt for their client. This year, in a different way, the
going up with a major buy on TV spots. vibes were bad again.
It’s estimated that this race will burn through $10.7 billion on At the top, Biden’s media team was pretty much a reshuffled
ads—a new record for our country and, quite likely, the world. For version of the people who had carried it off in 2020. Mike Donilon,
comparison, that’s on par with Montana’s total state spending for a longtime Biden confidant and a seasoned media maker, had

PREVIOUS SPREAD INSERT: YOUTUBE SCREEN GRAB: HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT

the fiscal year 2023. come on again as head strategist. Jen O’Malley Dillon and Ani-
When campaigns ask you for money, they typically list a variety ta Dunn, both of whom had worked on 2020 campaign, were
of expenses. Harris, in that ad she cut on July 19, mentioned hiring also back, Dillon as campaign chair, and Dunn as senior adviser
organizers and staff and opening field offices. She didn’t say a word to Biden himself. Overseeing the ads was a young firm called
about advertising, but the lion’s share of your money, north of Blue Sky Strategy. Blue Sky was founded in the run-up to the
60 cents on the dollar, will go to making and placing ads, primarily 2022 midterms, but it, too, really had its roots in 2020. At its helm
video spots, which are the real big-ticket item within the industry. were the former head of paid media for Biden’s 2020 campaign,
In a literal sense, then, these videos are the main grist of all that Patrick Bonsignore, and Jon Fromowitz, a media consultant who
data and cash that drive modern American politics. And now, with worked for the super PAC Future Forward.
only a little more than 100 days to go until the polls would close, Four years ago, this team had marshaled an impressive ad-
Harris’s campaign needed to start churning them out at a clip. vertising campaign built around testimonials from nonactors
The logistical complexities of that problem were many. A and clips of Biden, parading around in a Covid mask or holed
fresh, mediated version of Harris needed to be conjured up, up in an office with dark turquoise walls, talking directly to a
with image and messaging calibrated for the campaign map. camera. This year, with the pandemic behind us, the cameras
This Harris—ad Harris—would then need to be delivered to had been able to follow Biden to his campaign rallies, capturing
these potential supporters across a fragmented media landscape. tape of him working the lines and chopping it up with smiling

32 November 2024
In the 2016 presidential race, just under $3 billion
was spent on political ads. In 2020, that figure
had climbed to $9 billion. This year, it’s estimated
we’ll burn through $10.7 billion—a new record
for our country and, quite likely, the world.

supporters who had come out to see him. Even so, many of his structure of feeling—that a reluctant voter might allow herself to
ads still leaned hard on testimonials, using a chorus of ordinary see a candidate or issue in a new light.
Americans to underline the appropriate message for whatev- The affective alchemy could work when the ad highlighted the
er demographic track to which the ad was targeted: veteran, threat Trump posed, especially when it concerned abortion access.
faith, Latino, rural, etc. The effect was Whitmanesque, fram- The 2022 midterms demonstrated how effective that message was
ing Biden as the focal point of a broad coalition of voters who in the wake of Dobbs. But selling Biden’s own record proved much
supported his administration and feared a second coming of harder. “I remember like when Bidenomics started being talked
Trump. In this, one could discern the campaign’s belief that the about, it was just like this is never going to work,” the freelancer
voters who had carried Biden in 2020, and even more notably said. “No one cares about this.” He had spoken to people whose
those who had turned out during the midterms in 2022 to break whole towns were rejuvenated by the Inflation Reduction Act,
the supposed red wave—these voters were a reliable base, and but the ads that came from this weren’t connecting that well. I’d
so long as Biden could hold them together, he could run through heard similar things from a camera and lighting technician who’d
the tape again. made ads for Biden. Tasked with an ad about the environmental
What this all looked like on the ground, with the camera run- upshots of the IRA, they arrived on location to find nothing but
ning, was not so reassuring. The freelancer and his team were not a bunch of storage sheds in the desert. Their interviewee was a
finding people who were enthusiastic about the president. Among single engineer, who could talk shop all day but struggled to
the score of interviews the freelancer had done this summer, connect the dots between the recondite technical problems he
only one person, he figured, was an actual Biden fan. The others was facing and Biden turning the tide against climate change.
certainly wanted Biden to win again, but they seemed lukewarm In many ways, it seemed to me, that was Biden’s problem tout
on the man himself. Other interviewees didn’t want to talk about court. He had changed the Democrats’ position on antitrust and
Trump, as if to do so would have been unsuitably partisan. None corporate power at large, while he also saw through some of the
of this had been an issue in 2020. most ambitious legislative accomplishments of any president
In contrast to the excessive prudence of their interviewees, since Roosevelt. These were political feats, particularly given
Trumpian ardor surrounded the film crew. “It’s every shoot, ev- how slim the Democratic majority was and how it relied on the
ery single shoot, we have to be careful,” the freelancer told me. intractable Joe Manchin. But for far too many Americans these
“Like the guy across the street is pro-Trump, so we don’t want to victories might as well have taken place in the astral plane, so
block the driveways [with the crews’ cars] and get into this con- remote were they from our lives. Consultants and ad makers I
frontation.” Union reps told stories about arguing with their rank spoke with complained that Biden wasn’t getting the credit he
and file over which candidate would be better for labor. In a factory deserved, but they knew it was a hard sell.
in Pennsylvania, the person giving the tour pointed at a guy on What was obvious in the present was that buying groceries had
the line and said that he would take up arms if he found out the gotten more punishing, that rising housing costs were forcing
film crew was working for Biden. working people onto the streets, that credit card debt had shot up.
Then there was the problem of selling Biden’s accomplish- And then, good Lord, there was the sustained atrocity of Israel’s
ments. Talk to ad makers, and they will tell you that, out of all assault on Gaza, all those maimed and dead children, the gory
the various means campaigns use to reach voters—direct mailers, horror of the prison camps, and the president signing off on every
email, texts, static ads in your Instagram feed, viral marketing— new arms shipment put before him. A large number of Americans
video is the medium for persuasion. (The rest are there mainly seemed inured to this suffering caused by our government, but
to drive you to the polls or to tip you over the edge to donate.) more than half the country had come to view Biden as too weak to
The combination of image, sound, and narrative found in video effectively run foreign policy, and only 33 percent approved of his
is uniquely capable of evoking emotion, and it is through such handling of Gaza. The utter fecklessness of Biden and Secretary of
amalgamations—where political content is fused with a specific State Antony Blinken in the face of Benjamin Netanyahu’s open

Features 33
defiance set a bad tone for Biden’s final year in office, one that incumbents Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both outspoken
his advanced age only accentuated. His administration appeared critics of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, each lost their primary races
listless over these past months, weighed down by decisions that after the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or aipac, spent
muddled its accomplishments and tarnished it with blood. more than $23 million to unseat them. Still, counterexamples are
On these points, the freelancer and I did not see eye to eye. He just as easy to come by, such as when, in the 2020 South Carolina
was still a true believer in Biden. What I saw as the president’s nox- Senate race, Jaime Harrison outspent Lindsey Graham by more
ious bovarism, he saw in a more tragic light. Biden’s was the story than $30 million only to lose by double digits.
of a good man depleted by the ordeals of the office and the ex- “As a scholar of political communication, I could never tell
cessive contradictions of American politics and the Democratic you that the narrative doesn’t matter, right?” said Erika Franklin
coalition. And despite being clear-eyed about the challenges Fowler, one of three political scientists who run the Wesleyan
Biden faced, he wasn’t sure there was anyone better. “I felt like I Media Project, which tracks how political ads are used in federal
could make the argument of why Biden could or should be presi- and gubernatorial elections. “I think the narrative matters. But I
dent again, should win, is the best person for the
ticket,” the freelancer said when I spoke with him
on July 21, after Biden announced his withdrawal
from the campaign. “I felt that way yesterday. I
felt that way this morning, you know.” At other
times, the divisions in the country seemed as if
they ran too deep. “We are Bud Light,” he told me
during another conversation. Just as Bud Light
couldn’t stanch their loss of market share after
conservatives boycotted the brand for hiring a
trans spokesperson, so Team Biden struggled to
move the needle, no matter how much money they
threw at the problem. It didn’t matter how good
the ads were. Greater forces seemed to be at play.

F
OR WHAT IT’S WORTH, that sentiment
is largely borne out by academic work
on political advertising. Given that our
political system is organized around
raising money to pay for campaigns,
and that advertising is by far the major cost those
campaigns incur, it is remarkable that the political
scientists who study these matters agree that, on
the whole, ads have only marginal effects on the
vote share. Evidence of this goes back to some of
the earliest academic work on how voters make
up their minds, as Adam Sheingate shows in his
history of political consulting, Building a Business
of Politics. In the run-up to the 1940 election, the sociologist Paul think to pin it all on political advertising specifically would be far
Lazarsfeld tracked a group of people in Erie County, Ohio. Only too great of power to ascribe to this particular medium.”
8 percent changed their views over the course of the survey, and And yet, like clockwork, the ad buy grows with every cycle. This
these shifts were best explained by their socioeconomic standing, is because winning is the main thing that matters to campaigns
religious beliefs, and where they lived. The ads piped through and to our political parties, and, for around the past 30 years, ads
their radios had only a faint presence in the data. have been one of the primary tools they rely on to try to shift the
INSERT: YOUTUBE SCREEN GRAB: HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT

Successive generations of scholars have refined Lazarsfeld’s balance amid historically tight races. It is at this level that the effect
conclusions, but the fundamental insight—that ad effects are of ads in our political system becomes anything but marginal. The
extremely modest—has stood the test of time, even as the media money needed to finance political ads has turned fundraising into
landscape changed from radio to TV and from TV to our current the first test of a would-be candidate’s viability. “You can’t just
platform multiverse. A landmark study from 2011 found that TV be the scrappy upstart who’s willing to, like, roll up their sleeves
ads could shift voters’ sentiments by up to 5 percentage points, and knock on every door. That’s not gonna quite do it. And to
but those feelings vanished within days of the ad going down. A be honest, the party’s not gonna go for that,” one consultant
macro study from around the same time disaggregated whom explained to me. “They’d rather you be in the phone booth for
ads were affecting the most, concluding, “political ads influence 16 hours a day, dialing for dollars.” Gregory Martin, a professor of
mostly the political ignorant.” For others, the effects were minimal. political economy at Stanford, put it this way: The main effect
There is, of course, plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that of advertising “is not changing the vote shares of the candidates
advertising can turn the tide in a race. Just this summer, House who run. It’s in changing who runs in the first place.” The emphasis

34 November 2024
placed on fundraising means that wealthy candidates have a leg up All of these were bought by the super PACs maga Inc., SAG Inc.,
over others, and that the particular interests of the wealthy loom and Preserve America. The ads they were running, you could
larger in party platforms. Political scientists have demonstrated see, were working fairly well, improving support for Trump
as much with historical surveys and regression analysis, but a by around 2 percent in randomized-control-trial ad tests. The
thought experiment makes the same point: Chuck Schumer has following week, the Democratic side had cut that difference in
been a reliable advocate for crypto—a industry that originated in Harrisburg to less than 200 GRPs, with significant ad buys by the
libertarian fantasies of stateless monetary systems, has been the campaign and Future Forward. At the same time, the Democrats
source of one financial scam after another, and also happens to be had opened up a whole new front in North Carolina, where for the
a driver of climate disaster. What’s in crypto for a Democrat other time being the Republicans had yet to commit a dime. Looking
than deep pockets? The low rate of taxation on carried interest, at all this, I had the sensation of being a general taking in reports
which benefits private equity managers and enjoys support from on the state of the war, where with enough resources, the right
both parties, is another such issue. messaging, and powerful creative, victory seemed within reach.
That our politicians are beholden to moneyed interest is a You have to pinch yourself to remember that under the hood of
truism, of course, and ads have not made them any more so. the system producing such data is a profound contradiction—
For that, the most proximate cause is the rollback of campaign whereby our parties try to reach small percentages of persuadable
finance regulations. Ads, however, foster the incentive structure voters through ads, using money that welds the same parties to
that thickens the nexus between American politics and money interests wholly unrepresentative of their voters.

A
with every cycle. Running in a major race nowadays requires an
immense body of specialized knowledge and technical ability, far
exceeding the capacities of any campaign. Included in this are film DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST put it to me this way:
crews, editors, and graphic designers, but that is only the start. If Ritz wanted to roll out a new line of snacks, the
There’s also polling and the ability to track and test ads. The heart company would want a 12-week media campaign,
of the industry is in the ad buys. That’s where the big money is, at minimum, to lay the groundwork for a successful
and it’s also where the task becomes the most complicated. In launch. Harris was given just a bit more time than
the 1970s, when political consultants became a fixture in U.S. that, during what was historically the fiercest part of a race, when
politics, buying ads was mainly a matter of using past election about 70 percent of the spending occurs. Given a longer runway,
results to pick your target audience and then buying up airtime political ads tend to follow a sequence. Early spots introduce
in the desired media markets. Today, it means trying to figure the candidate to the public, boost name recognition, and frame the
out how best to disburse funds across multiple platforms, where kind of race the candidate would want to run. Later, the ads begin
each has not only its own demographic skew but its own systems hammering on the campaign’s messaging while drawing contrasts
for identifying its viewers and measuring an ads reach. Analytics with the opponent and also trying to respond to attacks. In the
are everything here. “We’re aiming one set of ads at persuasion last weeks, when you’re not likely to win any more voters to your
targets, a different set at turnout targets, and avoiding those who side, the emphasis shifts to driving out the vote. With Harris, the
oppose us altogether,” explained Jim Margolis, a founding partner whole race would be squeezed into an election window more
of gmmb and former adviser to both Barack Obama and Harris. like those in Europe, where regulations prevent the protracted
With smart TVs, which can capture data on what their viewers ordeals we allow ourselves. Everything would have to happen
watch, it gets even more granular. Consultants who know you’ve almost simultaneously. “There’s kind of a walk and chewing gum
seen an attack ad against their candidate can make sure you see at the same time” thing, a consultant said.
their response on another platform, like your Instagram feed. Trump’s side had started in almost the instant Harris received
The image of American politics that these systems produce an endorsement from Biden. That same day, the super PAC maga
is incredible to behold. I was forwarded a few installments of a Inc. went live with an ad accusing her of covering up Biden’s
weekly newsletter Future Forward puts out called Flight Radar. It “mental decline.” A slew of other ads followed, many of which
circulates among Democratic ad makers and offers an ad-focused focused on immigration. The GOP had already calibrated their
summary of the previous week in the presidential race (“Nearly ad campaign to attack Biden’s handling of the border. When
all Republican ads deal with immigration and crime, with the Harris entered the race, they simply rolled over the playbook.
former seeming to pack a heftier punch”), with links to videos She became the “border czar,” shown dancing alongside other
of relevant ads and the latest data. Clicking through on the data Black folk, with a filter on the footage to distort it. Over this,
sends you into a spreadsheet of ad buys in all the major swing a male voice insinuated that Harris allowed isis to establish a
states over the previous week. These figures are further broken beachhead in the United States. Most of the GOP’s best-testing
down by the source of spending (whether party or campaign ads followed in the same vein—tendentious, conspiratorial,
committee, or a super PAC), by the major target track (“White clear dog whistles. One exception, bearing the title “Meet San
Women 35+” or “Latino,” for example), and by the efficacy of the Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris,” was basically a super cut of
ads being aired. Functioning as a public audit of political ads for old interview tape of Harris from when she took more liberal
the presidential race, Flight Radar lets everyone in the industry positions than she has this year. In one clip, she says she does
see what the others are making and how well their products and not believe in treating undocumented people who cross borders
the messaging that underlies them are performing. as criminals. In another, she insists that putting more police on
In a given week in July in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for ex- the street won’t fix crime. At a time when Trump still appeared
ample, Republicans had outspent Democrats by more than confused about how he was going to talk about Harris, the people
600 gross rating points, a unit that measures the reach of an ad. cutting his ads had set a clear tack.

Features 35
 Still, none of it could compete with the earned media Harris Biden ad from July, which contained the exact same line. Yet from
had gotten simply from entering the race. In the dark days after the start Harris also made her campaign about affordability. It was
Biden crashed and burned in the debate, it had been cathartic probably not a coincidence that message testing from earlier in
just to imagine what it would be like to have a candidate that the year showed that rising prices were the most salient source
was not so encumbered. And then it was a reality, and the elation of displeasure with Biden, beating out even his advanced age.
spilled from social media into Harris’s rallies and then into her What followed was a stretch of weeks in which a peculiar
ads. Among the ad makers I spoke with, there were some linger- dynamic set in. Outwardly, Harris’s campaign was spreading joy
ing resentments about what had happened to Biden. “They’re around the country and watching its polling numbers rise. Her
just using texts and tweets and other stuff to call this guy all the choice of Tim Walz as her running mate was a high point here,
names in the book,” one consultant said. “Then, the minute he onboarding Walz’s commonsense verdict that Trump and JD
drops out, he’s the greatest patriot that we’ve seen since Thomas Vance were “weird” and yielding the best campaign hats I’ve ever
Jefferson and George Washington.” But even this person had to seen. But inside the campaign, the transition was still working
admit that the enthusiasm around Harris was impressive. “There’s itself out. Mike Donilon, Biden’s head strategist, was on his way
some energy, which is, you know, you can’t fake energy.” Seeing out. I had heard that about a week before it was confirmed in
that and the outpouring of support for her, they could feel that the press, but that was the only information that seemed solid.
maybe the switch wasn’t a complete disaster. Rumors abounded about who would come in to replace him and
To her great credit, Harris showed remarkable political in- what would happen to the rest of the campaign staff. On August 2,
stincts in these early days, riding the good vibes while gradually The New York Times reported that David Plouffe, who had run
defining her candidacy. Her ads followed suit. An ad internally Obama’s campaign in 2008, was joining Harris’s team, although
dubbed “Freedom,” which arrived on July 25, relied on footage no one I talked to seemed sure how real Plouffe’s role would
of Harris’s first rally as the presumed nominee in Milwaukee be. There was more certainty about Jim Margolis from gmmb.
only two days earlier, along with a big assist from Beyoncé on Margolis had also appeared in the news as a new addition to the
the backtrack. It was necessarily a rush job, but the images were team, but everyone I spoke with said so far his position existed in
gorgeous, warmed by natural light and filled with motion from name only. When I talked with Margolis, he told me that he ended
ample use of a crane and a Steadicam rig. The footage benefited, up working with Future Forward and other super PACs instead.
too, from the uncontrived delight that broke across Harris’s face As for the situation a bit further down the food chain, people
every time she paused for the cheers. In her first speech in Mil- seemed to be on tenterhooks. One described the uncomfortable
waukee, Harris had opened with fulsome praise for Biden before challenge of keeping your head down enough not to cause problems
lightly discarding the emphasis he’d placed on Trump’s threat to while also making sure everyone knew you were still “seen in the
democracy. Instead, Harris offered a more forward-looking vision. room.” “I can’t speak to anyone’s particular contractual deals and
“Freedom” did something similar stylistically. The footage had whatnot, but I can tell you that the tension that is there is not just
been shot and cut by some of the same people making Biden’s ads, about power or responsibility,” another consultant told me. “It’s
but the feeling was far different. Aesthetically, if you overlooked about money and who gets it.” Fears of being replaced (“Or layered,
the distorted clips of Trump and JD Vance that were spliced in here as they say in the corporate world,” one consultant remarked)
and there, “Freedom” lived in the vicinity of a Nike commercial. mixed with fears about Harris’s campaign strategy: whether the
As an ad, “Freedom” was mainly doing fan service. At one campaign would decide to bring in cheaper and less-experienced
minute and 19 seconds, it was of irregular length and was not in- people; whether she was going a bit too hard on her digital ad
tended for broadcast. Its main home would be Harris’s Instagram buy over linear TV. These were self-interested concerns, as those
grid and other social media platforms. It took another week before expressing them admitted freely. But they also seemed to come
the campaign came out with a more standardized spot aimed at from a genuine desire to see Harris win. Campaigning in the United
persuadable voters. This was “Fearless,” which dropped July 30. States is a business, after all, and no bright line cordons off one set
Stylistically, “Fearless” was a tamer affair, hewing close to the of concerns from the others. It helped that Harris’s fundraising
familiar grammar of a political ad, with an anonymous male machine was cranking along so well. “There’s going to be some
narrator relating Harris’s background while text callouts ham- really dumb, dumb money happening in the last 30 days because
mered home the salient points (“prosecutor for 20+ years,” they’re going to spend it all out,” one consultant said.
read one). Contentwise, “Fearless” was packed, stuffing Harris’s Whatever contretemps were occurring behind the scenes,
biography, agenda, and her catchphrases (“We are not going Harris’s team and the super PACs backing her kept banging out
back!”) all into 60 seconds. ads. (I counted 32 different spots on air by the end of July.) Her
In these ads and her rallies, Harris made it clear she was first policy speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, went off well,
building her campaign atop lessons learned from Biden’s run. too. In proposing anti–price gouging regulations for groceries,
The best-testing ad that was made for Biden this cycle was the she picked a fight with the neoclassical economics hive mind,
testimonial of a woman who had a brain tumor, explaining in a who dutifully went to press insisting that she didn’t understand
remarkably frank tone that she “would be better off dying instead the principle of efficient markets. But she also allayed many
of leaving my family with generational debt.” The Affordable Care of the fears of those who had worried that Harris, with her close
Act saved her from this when she relapsed. Looking directly into connections to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, might reverse Biden’s
the camera, she says that Donald Trump wants to kill the law. In successes in regulating big capital.
“Fearless,” Harris echoed those same words. Likewise, the claim I talked to Russ Schriefer, a seasoned Republican political
that Donald Trump “has no plan to help the middle class,” which strategist, around this time. He was full of praise for Harris’s
was featured in a Harris ad from early August, was a callback to a campaign. “I’ve gotten up campaigns pretty quickly, you know in

36 November 2024
“I can’t speak to anyone’s particular contractual
deals and whatnot, but I can tell you that
the tension that is there is not just about power
or responsibility,” one consultant told me.
“It’s about money and who gets it.”

24 [or] 48 hours, and they did it really well,” Schriefer said. About between his exit from the race lengthened. Typically, a polling
three weeks after Harris had tapped in for Biden, the lead she had bounce is expected. Harris’s lead in the national polls remained
opened in the polls was holding, and, Schriefer thought, it was tight, and the people making ads for her hunkered down for a
clear “the fundamentals of the race” had changed. The media grueling few weeks. (At the start of September, more than 125 ads
consultants on Harris’s side were similarly feeling positive. “You supporting Harris were airing in battleground states. Trump’s
want to be optimistic, but also the trajectory is good,” said one. side was running at least another 50, some of which had started
“It feels like the information environment could be good for the hitting Harris on economic issues, on top of a still healthy list of
next two weeks or a week.” All eyes were on Chicago. spots going after her over immigration.) A Democratic strategist

T
told me about breaking a bad habit of checking polling numbers
right before bed. Another was more sanguine. “Depending on how
HE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION began this all turns out, it could really change the way it’s done going
on August 19, one month to the day after Harris had forward,” they said. “I don’t know if you can necessarily replicate
filmed her last ad for the Biden campaign. A water- everything about it, but why would you want to run a two-year
shed was expected, and Chicago delivered. Save for campaign when you could run a 200-day campaign?” There had
the handful of uncommitted delegates I saw wander- been so much “mission creep” in the past decade. Harris might
ing the halls of the United Center in kaffiyehs, hoping in vain that show this wasn’t needed. Although, if so, they added, “I know it
Harris would allow them to address the crowd with a pre-vetted would hurt my own bottom line.”
speech, the Democratic Party showed itself to be united behind Around this time, I caught back up with the freelancer. Like
Harris. And except for a small breach of the police perimeter on many of the people I had met with then, he had weathered the
Monday, the protests against sending more military aid to Israel transition from Biden to Harris and was back making ads. He’d
were likewise kept at bay. The order of the day was a tight ship, and done a couple of quick spots that had already gone online. Now,
in her speech accepting the nomination, Harris hewed closely to he was moving on to some new testimonials. These were in
the script that had already been laid out in her ads and her rallies. keeping with the decidedly conservative tone Harris had struck
Her speech even followed the standard progression of a media during her speech accepting the nomination. They were focused
campaign, beginning with her biography, continuing into a list of on swing voters who had decided to go with Harris, with the idea
contrasts with Trump, and finishing with a call to vote. The most these people might offer a framework for like-minded folk to find
notable difference that night was the overarching conservative their way to Harris as well.
tone, even as she ran through meticulously hedged lines (“We The guy the freelancer had shot recently was a white man,
can create an earned pathway to citizenship—and secure our whom they framed as generically as possible. That way, if the tes-
border”). Harris signaled she would not withhold arms shipments timonial came out well, his ad could play to almost any audience.
to pressure Israel to negotiate for peace, and she promised to The goal was to see if he might polish up Harris’s credentials as
“ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting a moderate. During the shoot, though, it had been hard to direct
force in the world.” Notably, she never mentioned the anti–price the interview into these matters. Mainly, the guy just appeared
gouging regulations she had touted in Raleigh a week earlier, and to like Harris’s energy and the joy of her campaign. It seemed
she spent little time talking about the problems of affordability so much lighter and brighter than what Trump had on offer.
that had been central to her ads. Some commentators read all this “But, you know, that’s not what the ad wants to be about, at least
as a sign that Harris was addressing herself to undecided voters. from our side,” the freelancer told me. So, during the shoot, he
If so, she had chosen a sliver of the sliver: the neocons. prodded his subject about Harris’s economic policies. The man
In retrospect, the convention marked the end of the beginning couldn’t identify any. “He said the word ‘vibes’ at some point,”
of Harris’s campaign. The aura of possibility that had defined her said the freelancer.
first weeks in the race had evaporated, and Harris’s departures
from Biden’s platform also seemed to foreshorten as the distance Colin Jones is a writer and documentary film producer in New York.

Features 37
 In Tucson, a legendary attorney was
suspended for two years
from representing clients in
immigration court.
Was the punishment warranted?

THE IMMIGRATION
LAWYER WHO
HELPED TOO MANY
PEOPLE
By Sasha Abramsky

W PHOTO SOURCES: CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: GREGORY BULL/AP PHOTO; SAUL LOEB/AFP/
HEN HECTOR WAS around three years old, into the United States as children. But a minor drug charge, for
and his brother was just a baby, their parents solicitation to possess marijuana, brought him to the attention

GETTY; WILL SEBERGER/ZUMAPRESS/ALAMY; BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY

decided to take the children north, from the of immigration officials. In early 2019, shortly after his two years’
little town in Durango, Mexico, where they probation was up, armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement
lived, to the United States. They crossed the agents stopped him while he was driving with his children. The
border through the unforgiving desert, and agency brought him to a federally run immigration detention
ended up in Tucson, Arizona. The boys’ moth- facility in Florence, Arizona, and two weeks later sent him to a
er put in long hours as a chef; their father worked for a company privately operated facility at Eloy, where, he said, he remained,
that made water fountains and concrete benches. To all intents in squalid conditions, for nearly three months.
and purposes, the children grew up American. Eventually, Hector’s wife managed to get him released on bond.
More than three decades later, Hector—who told me that he But his legal woes worsened. At a critical hearing about whether
has never once returned to Mexico, and whose entire family (his Hector should be deported, his attorney, Margo Cowan, sent to
wife and their four children, who are U.S. citizens) and business as represent him a volunteer lawyer he had never met or spoken with
a personal trainer are Tucson-based—still lacks paperwork. Like before. That lawyer knew nothing about his case, and showed up
millions of others, he is trapped within the shameful dysfunction, only 10 minutes before the hearing was set to begin. Not surpris-
and congressional stalemate, that pass for U.S. immigration policy. ingly, the judge ruled that Hector should be deported—though
Years ago, the young man had status under daca, which pro- no date was set for his removal from the country, and he remains
vided a degree of protection from deportation, along with the right in Tucson as of this writing. Cowan’s team filed an appeal. But
to work, for undocumented immigrants who had been brought then Hector received several letters from the courts saying that

Illustration by Joan Yang

required information for his file was missing. The appeals, in case, Monica ended up seeking advice from Margo Cowan and
consequence, went nowhere. “I trusted her,” Hector, a heavily her small team of volunteers.
tattooed, squat man, said of Cowan. “But she wasn’t there for me.” It should have been pretty straightforward; there was, after all,
Cowan’s paid job was as a public defender. After hours, on abundant medical documentation of Jose Angel’s treatment, and
weekends, whenever she wasn’t defending those charged with the family, which had repeatedly been targeted by the cartels,
criminal offenses, she put her heart and soul into working gratis were prime candidates to qualify for asylum under the provisions
with Tucson’s undocumented immigrant community. Fluent in of the Convention Against Torture. Instead, Monica alleges, the
Spanish, she ran a locally famous volunteer organization called volunteers at Keep Tucson Together lost her documents and failed
Keep Tucson Together, or KTT, out of a small, blue, adobe bun- to submit required paperwork by the deadlines the courts had set.
galow on a residential street, and offered free legal advice at a Finally, Monica received a notification informing her that she now
Thursday evening clinic at Pueblo High School, a huge, redbrick had a removal order against her. “The judge asked them what
campus on the largely Hispanic south side of town. Cowan had was the evidence I had to defend my case, and they never submitted
been fighting the good fight for more than half a century, was the evidence,” Monica told me, sitting in an airy conference room
lionized by progressives in Tucson, and thought of herself as an in Jesse Evans-Schroeder’s art-filled offices. “Things about my
indispensable part of Tucson’s radical fabric. Her work was, to say nephew who had been disappeared, newspaper articles.”
the least, challenging; as the federal government sought to deter Monica alleged that she provided Cowan’s team with her family’s
undocumented immigration by channeling would-be migrants original documents, including her children’s birth certificates,
into particularly lethal areas of the desert, increasing numbers and that all of those documents subsequently went missing. “I
of them ended up in those desert wildernesses. The strategy, never got anything back,” she said angrily. When she insisted on
implemented from the mid-1990s on, was a fiasco: It did not a meeting with Cowan, the attorney would say words to the effect
succeed in tamping down migration but did lead to hundreds of of, “Yes, I am going to help you, this is a very easy case.” But she
thousands of migrants trying to cross into remote parts of Arizona didn’t. And when they lost, Cowan promised to appeal—but Monica
each year, and it has resulted in upward of 20,000 of these men said the paperwork for the appeal was never filed, and one of the
and women being processed through the Tucson immigration volunteers later admitted to her that he had forgotten to do so.
courts annually. Cowan disputes such claims, arguing that paperwork was always
For many of them, Cowan’s willingness over the years to work returned promptly, and insisting that the KTT offices have a first-
for free was a godsend, a true gesture of kindness in an otherwise rate methodology for filing the documents entrusted to its care.
bleak environment. Yet as the crisis accelerated, it appeared that Eventually, Monica decided to get another attorney and filed a
Cowan, and the small roster of volunteer attorneys who would bar complaint against Cowan, alleging inadequate counsel. As of
step in every so often to do pro bono work for the organization, this writing, Monica remains undocumented but is protected from
were bungling some of their cases. Something was going on at removal because she has a pending asylum application (filed by
Keep Tucson Together. But what was it? Jesse Evans-Schroeder’s team); she also has an extension on her
Eventually, with the threat of deportation and permanent work permit that is valid while the application is being processed.

U
separation from his family hanging over him, Hector and his wife
decided to raid what little savings they had and pay for a private SUALLY, scandals about immigration attorneys involve
attorney to represent him. He ended up with the firm of Green scam artists taking the money of vulnerable and desper-
Evans-Schroeder, an outfit specializing in immigration law that ate clients and essentially failing to follow through on
had taken on scores of Cowan’s disgruntled ex-clients and helped the outlandish promises they make. The grifters peddle
file bar complaints against Cowan in roughly 15 of these cases. dreams to the poor and walk away with what little money
(Cowan, for her part, dislikes immigration attorneys who, she those folks can cobble together. A few years ago, a husband-and-
says, “extort money” from their clients by “selling knowledge” wife team of attorneys in Tucson were sentenced to months in jail
that should be shared.) His new attorney is now working to rem- and lost their attorney’s licenses for similar practices. By any rea-
edy the errors made by the Keep Tucson Together team. Hector sonable measure, Cowan isn’t a scam artist. In fact, from the 1970s,
hopes it isn’t too late. “I don’t know nothing about Mexico,” the when she served as the youthful director of the immigrants’ rights
33-year-old told me. Then, incongruously, the tough guy with group Manzo Area Council in Tucson, she has spent her adult life
the fighter’s crooked nose started to cry. “I don’t want to leave my working, for either low pay or no pay, with marginalized people,
family. I don’t want to leave everything I’ve built since I was little.” and her efforts to secure publicly funded representation for

M
anybody in need who has a case in immigration court have been
ONICA SILVA VALENZUELA faced a similar crisis. A backed by U.S. Representative Raúl Grijalva and have received
middle-aged woman, who kept her long gray hair tied financial donations from luminaries such as Lin-Manuel Miranda.
back in a ponytail, she had arrived in Tucson from Cowan cut her teeth organizing at Cesar Chavez’s side, on a
Mexico in 2017, with her son, Jose Angel, then aged 21, farmworker unionizing effort in north San Diego County. “He
and three more of her children, after Jose Angel taught me how to be fearless,” she recalled fondly. (Decades on,
had been set on fire with gasoline and horribly injured by cartel she remains friends with Chavez’s partner-in-organizing, Dolores
members in Magdalena de Kino, in the Mexican state of Sonora. Huerta, now 94 years old.)
The immigration authorities immediately took Jose Angel to In the mid-1970s, she, along with others, was prosecuted by
a hospital, where over the following weeks doctors treated the the federal government for “aiding and abetting” undocumented
third-degree burns that snaked up his tattooed arms and his back. immigrants. Cowan herself faced dozens of felony counts, one of
Not knowing where to turn for help with the family’s immigration which concerned giving an undocumented young woman a ride

40 November 2024
“I trusted her,” Hector, a heavily tattooed,
squat man, said of Margo Cowan.
“But she wasn’t there for me.”

in her car to juvenile court so that she could seek permission to government indicted Fife and more than a dozen others, including
marry the father of her child. “That,” Cowan remembered, with two Roman Catholic priests and three nuns, on aiding and abetting,
a sardonic smile, “was a transporting charge.” transporting, and harboring charges. After a high-profile trial,
It was around this time that she got to know legendary civil eight of the defendants received five years’ probation; upon the
rights lawyers such as New York’s William Kunstler. Cowan’s Tucson trial’s conclusion, however, many publicly pledged to immediately
clinic—with its files, its colorful Central American fabrics hung return to their sanctuary movement work.
over the windows, its grimy sofa coverings, its piles of folders and A generation later, Cowan and Fife were among the co-founders
books, its disposable coffee cups and plastic containers of takeout of the activist group No More Deaths, which in recent years has
food—bears more than a passing resemblance to Kunstler’s clut- worked to try to prevent fatalities along the brutal migrant trails
tered Greenwich Village office, which I visited in the mid-1990s as that snake through the Sonoran Desert and traverse the U.S.-
a young journalist. The charges were eventually dismissed and, Mexico border south of Tucson, often baked by temperatures
after Jimmy Carter became president and the political climate soaring upward of 120 degrees. To the fury of the Border Patrol,
became slightly less hostile for undocumented immigrants and as well as the plethora of right-wing militias that now patrol those
would-be asylum-seekers, Cowan was made a certified represen- desert lands, they helped set up water stations in the desert,
tative, allowing her to represent people in immigration court. engaged in food drops, and took four-wheel drives out into the
Her victory over the federal government made her something wilderness to distribute emergency medical supplies.
of a hero in Tucson. Over the decades, she built on that status to All of this helped build up Cowan’s progressive bona fides. She
become one of the proudly liberal city’s most influential figures. became—and remains—close friends with Representative Grijal-
A few years after her successful fight against the feds, at the va, who for many years led the progressive caucus in Congress.
side of the storied immigrants’ rights attorney Peter Schey, who (He declined to comment for this story.) She is tight with several
successfully sued Texas to establish the right of undocumented ex-mayors. She is regularly fêted by leading progressive academ-
immigrant children to K-12 education, she witnessed the possibil- ics, journalists, and authors in the city. In 2021, the American
ities of immigration law to fundamentally transform community. Immigration Lawyers Association recognized her outstanding
In the 1970s and early 1980s, she was the first attorney from pro bono work for immigrants. She is also a onetime Museum of
Arizona to go into immigration detention facilities in Califor- Contemporary Art Tucson “local genius” honoree.
nia that were holding hundreds of Central American refugees, Yet, as the numbers of desperate, impoverished undocumented
and was one of the first to start providing legal advice to those immigrants skyrocketed, even a woman with Margo Cowan’s pro-
individuals—whom the U.S. government was determined to gressive chops and seemingly bottomless wells of energy struggled
deport, since it was allied with the right-wing juntas of Central to keep up with the demand for legal services. The attorney’s
America as part of its Cold War efforts versus the spread of “whole strategy,” Fife noted, “was to keep families in Tucson.
communism and didn’t want to alienate these governments by Battling for their immigration and political asylum cases for as
providing succor to their enemies. long as possible and doing it all for free.” That meant accepting
Shortly afterward, the young attorney began working with a huge number of cases and, with scarcely any resources, hoping
sanctuary movement founder the Reverend John Fife, then the to somehow perform miracles.
pastor of the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, who Cowan’s bare-bones team at Keep Tucson Together—long on
helped smuggle across the border hundreds of refugees fleeing the sort of idealism that had inspired community organizing ef-
death squads in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and who forts from the 1960s on, but desperately short on resources—was,
built up a nationwide coalition of churches, synagogues, and other it seemed, floundering. It hadn’t filed a request with the IRS to
religious centers willing to provide sanctuary. qualify for 501(c)(3) status allowing for donors to deduct their
“We knew deportation could mean death,” recalled Fife—now donations (not until spring 2024 did it file for—and receive—this
in his eighties, his shock of hair fully white, his walk slowed by a status), and, perhaps as a result, was perennially short of funds
recent injury, his handshake still bone-crushingly strong. He sat and unable to hire any salaried attorneys.
in a conference room off the church property’s central courtyard. One of Cowan’s right-hand men, Ulises, an asylee from Mexico,
“Margo was the first one to sound the alarm about Central Amer- sometimes, clients alleged, passed himself off as an attorney when
ican refugees being deported from El Centro [detention center] dealing with them, despite his having no U.S. legal credentials.
and said they needed representation. We organized the deten- (Cowan and Ulises denied that this occurred, and it is certainly
tion center to resist deportation.” In the mid-1980s, the federal possible that, in the chaos of the high school clinic, some of these

Features 41
 PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA NOBLE FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC
The Keep Tucson Together office in Tucson’s Barrio Viejo

clients simply didn’t understand the difference between an attorney But while she is selfless with her work and with her time, she
and a community adviser, and that in the heat of the moment Ulises has a stubborn streak—which seems only to have gotten more
didn’t bother to spend the time making clear the distinction.) In pronounced with age—that some critics say lends itself to the
many ways, the wheels seemed to be coming off KTT’s bus. belief that she, and only she, has the wherewithal to save these

C
vulnerable people. Faced with a dysfunctional and often cruel
OWAN’S ORGANIZING MODEL resembles that of Saul immigration court system, an increasingly militarized border, and
Alinsky, whose legendary Industrial Areas Foundation demagogic political rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies
taught organizers in poor communities to empower regarding immigrants—faced too with state laws in Arizona that
themselves through local work and on-the-ground cam- have empowered local sheriffs to go after people they suspect to
paigns; and she fervently believes that knowledge—in be undocumented—Cowan has, over the past decade, responded
her case legal know-how—is to be shared with the community. in two ways: Firstly, she has tried to slow down the machinery,
She is, in many ways, on the side of the angels, a foot soldier in the hoping that if she can delay her clients’ deportations long enough,
campaigns for social justice that have helped transform so many eventually the laws will change in their favor, as they did in 1986,
American communities over the past 60 years. “Am I proud of the when President Reagan signed an amnesty for large numbers of
work we’ve done at this clinic?” she asked, and then answered undocumented in the country, and later when Central American
her own question. “Yes, I am. I was fortunate enough to go to law asylees were granted temporary protected status and work permits.
school, and I have an obligation to share that knowledge with Secondly, on the not-unreasonable theory that, given the absence
the community, not sell it.” When she goes to the supermarket of other clinics in Tucson with a no-fees model for providing legal
near her home in the Barrio Hollywood neighborhood of Tucson, assistance to the undocumented, any representation is better
people stop her, she told me, to thank her for the work she has than no representation, she has taken on as many cases as she
done, free of charge, on behalf of one or another family member. possibly can—even though, realistically, one attorney working in
“That’s the magic you make in community,” she explained, “when her spare time and a group of community volunteers who mostly
your values are to keep families together. And so that’s what you lack paralegal qualifications can’t possibly effectively represent
do. And you don’t ever sell that. You just make magic.” hundreds, even thousands, of people simultaneously.

42 November 2024
 In the Trump era, with the president calling undocumented Luis remains in the country, but he still lacks paperwork and
immigrants animals and predators, and as ICE agents rounded knows that, unless his new attorney can convince a judge to let
up undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions who him file for a green card, he might well one day be separated from
had under previous administrations been low on the priority list his family. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. He desperately wants the
for deportation, Margo Cowan was, it appeared, simply swamped legal status, and the right to work, that his new attorney tells him
by the needs of desperate people. Under American law, while the he would now have had Keep Tucson Together done a better job
landmark Gideon case established a right to an attorney in criminal with his case; and he wants to be able to travel to visit his father,
cases, there is no right to public counsel for most of those appearing in Mexico, whom he hasn’t seen since 2008, without fearing that
in what Cowan contemptuously terms “crimmigration” court. In he won’t be able to come back into the United States afterward.

A
the absence of a federal right to counsel, Cowan has worked locally
for years to persuade Pima County, where Tucson is located, to set S THUNDER CLOUDS rolled into Tucson on a
up an office to pay for legal representation for the undocumented. particularly hot and windy summer day, University of
But, at the same time, with no public moneys being spent on Arizona professor emeritus of law Andy Silverman sat in
programs to help people navigate the immigration bureaucracy, his second-floor office and pondered Cowan’s situation.
and with her local efforts to expand guaranteed representation Long a friend to Keep Tucson Together, Silverman is
stuck in quicksand, out of good motives Cowan signed on as the among the small group of local attorneys and law school professors
attorney of record for more and more and more immigration cases. who have frequently represented the clinic’s clients pro bono.
Driven by an almost obsessive idea that, for Tucson’s thousands He considers himself close with Cowan, whom he has known for
of undocumented, she and her plucky team of volunteers repre- more than four decades, yet reluctantly he has come to believe
sented the thin line between deportation and salvation, she was that in recent years she has bitten off more than she can chew.
trying to represent so many indigent clients simultaneously that, “Margo basically had two full-time jobs,” he explained: working
in the end, critics allege that she hurt many of the sorts of people at the public defender’s office, where she led the lawyers who
she’d spent more than half a century trying to help. represent Spanish speakers, and running KTT. “It was a lot—too
It was, many fellow attorneys came to believe, a cascading much for anybody to really handle. Margo has this feeling that
tragedy. “We have a crisis of representation, a lack of represen- no one should go before the immigration court unrepresented,
tation in Arizona, especially for non-detained people,” said one so she does everything she can.” This translated, he said, into a
Arizona-based immigration attorney who was particularly critical caseload that was “clearly into the hundreds,” without any paid
of Cowan but wanted to explain the context out of which her ac- staff attorneys to handle them. “It’s [just] Margo. I think a lot of
tions arose. “My understanding is KTT has helped a ton of people. us told her, or expressed concern, about the fact it’s just too many
But her thinking is, ‘These people, they’re going to lose anyway; cases. There were mistakes made along the way. There were things
we’re just going to be a cog in the wheel and slow the process, and that probably should have been done that weren’t done.”
down the road there’s going to be reform.’ She doesn’t prepare the In the years before the pandemic, the number of complaints
clients for the hearings at all. She takes on way more clients than against Cowan grew by leaps and bounds. There were allegations
she can handle. Individuals are sacrificed, and they’re sacrificed that, because of failures to file basic paperwork or to ensure that
without their knowledge. People with viable claims aren’t being clients completed biometric requirements, men and women
adequately prepared. Any attorney knows, you can’t expect to had lost their daca or lawful permanent resident status. That
win a case if you don’t prepare it.” asylum-seekers with viable claims had instead been ordered
That’s what happened to Juan Gonzalez Plata, a father of five removed. That people who ought to have been able to adjust their
who, in 2004, migrated to the United States as a 15-year-old, immigration status because they were married to U.S. citizens or
worked for years in restaurants and in construction, and ended could prove that their deportation would result in extraordinary
up detained in the Eloy Detention Center in 2017. Cowan took on and unusual hardship for family members instead had their cases
Juan’s case but then neglected to provide the courts with required closed and were entered into the deportation process. That people
information, including getting his fingerprints put into his court with viable cases to stay in the country under the provisions of
record. Because of the length of time he had been in the country, the Convention Against Torture had their appeal dismissed after
and because he and his wife had newborn twins, he had a strong no brief was filed.
case for the courts to cancel his removal order. But the judge denied In 2020, an adjudicating official, after completing a disci-
his application, specifically citing Cowan’s failure to provide her plinary hearing triggered by complaints from immigration court
client’s fingerprints to the court as the reason for his decision. judges and members of the Board of Immigration Appeals, found
It is also what happened to Luis Ochoa, a young man with a that Cowan had “failed to manage her workload such that she
trim goatee beard, who was represented by Cowan for nearly could comply with court imposed deadlines.” In his scathing
a decade. In 2018, Cowan called him out of the blue to tell him 45-page decision, Munish Sharda concluded that “the respon-
that his case, which had been closed during the Obama era, was dent’s misconduct injured her clients, the legal system, and
reopened once Trump became president. Only then did Cowan the legal profession as a whole.” She had demonstrated a “lack
learn that he had gotten married to a U.S. citizen, a development of competency,” Sharda wrote, and exhibited a “failure to act
that ought to have made him eligible to apply for a green card. with reasonable diligence and promptness” in representing her
Cowan did not, apparently, follow through on this knowledge. To clients. He suspended her right to practice immigration law for
Luis’s surprise, by January 2021 he had received a deportation a minimum of five years.
letter. Despite this glaring failure on the attorney’s part, the judge Cowan is tall and somewhat stout with age, her hair gray and cut
refused to grant an extension of the case. short. Her lawyer, William Walker, suggested to the Arizona Daily

Features 43
Cowan’s is a story of who has power and who is left vulnerable
in an immigration system burdened by historically
large numbers of cases. It’s also a story of human fallibility
and self-destructive pride.

Star that the actions against her were motivated by the Trump By Cowan’s reckoning, she has long filled a void: giving free
administration’s effort to deprive immigrants of representation. legal counsel to impoverished immigrants, many lacking not
“This isn’t about Margo Cowan,” Walker told the Star. “This is only legal status but basic documentation, and trying, against
about an administration that has wanted undocumented people the odds, to rescue as many of these poor souls as she can. She is,
thrown out of this country.” Cowan appealed the decision, and in her mind’s eye, a fearless warrior for social justice. Of course,
in 2023 the suspension was reduced to two years. The Arizona she argues, in perhaps her only concession to the messy realities
Daily Star reported that on 11 counts, “the government claimed of the case against her, it would be better if the initiative that she
Cowan failed to provide specific grounds for an appeal” for the has pushed to get on the ballot for years now—that would man-
decisions against her clients. She also “failed to file an appeal after date Pima County to guarantee the right to counsel for indigent
stating an intent to do so in the Notice of Appeal,” and “did not immigrants as they go through the notoriously byzantine immi-
timely notify the board that she didn’t intend to file an appeal in gration courts, and that would fund an office devoted exclusively
any of the cases listed in the Notice of Intent.” Yet, even with the to this—were to pass. It would be better if the undocumented
reduced penalty, Cowan continued to be vocal in her views that community didn’t have to rely on KTT. But each election cycle
the sanction was unjust and that border officials and conservative that she and her allies have tried to get the initiative on the ballot,
judges, who had long opposed activist groups that stood on the side the coalition has failed to gather enough signatures to qualify it
of the undocumented, were looking to remove an effective thorn for a vote. And so, absent representation paid for by the county,
in their sides. The longtime attorney-activist wouldn’t, maybe and absent any other law clinics that will guarantee free repre-
couldn’t, admit that she and the team of community volunteers sentation to the immigrant poor, Cowan and her team struggle
had made any mistakes along the way. on, taking delight in organizing methods that they see as pissing
Meanwhile, however, her erstwhile colleagues at No More off the powers that be, and issuing broadsides against critics both
Deaths, which had long marched to the same tune as KTT, lost from within the government and from within the immigrants’
patience. They were no more sympathetic than was Margo Cow- rights and legal communities in Tucson.
an to the immigration courts and to the government agencies “When you start standing with people, the show ain’t smooth,”
that policed the border and targeted community members for the aging attorney told me, in a small conference room of her
deportation, yet as the pandemic raged they became convinced cluttered Keep Tucson Together offices. Interviewed by local
that Cowan’s team was responsible for a growing number of journalist Todd Miller on the podcast The Border Chronicle in
serious legal errors. September 2023, Cowan told listeners that she had created “a lot
In 2022, No More Deaths severed ties with KTT, announcing of animosity” among judges by gumming up the works, that she
that the number of cases alleging inadequate counsel was sim- was representing people who previously didn’t have counsel and
ply too great to ignore. “The stories shared by the families are thus could be deported after only two or three hearings.
devastating and we honor their bravery in coming forward,” the As for the allegations from ex-clients, the KTT founder argued
group’s statement read. “After several requests for information that the fault was usually theirs, that they didn’t provide needed
and exhaustive efforts to hold KTT accountable internally, we documents, didn’t let her know when they moved homes, missed
have decided to no longer be associated with services provided court dates, and so on. “We are always there when we say we’ll
by KTT.” be there, and we always produce when we say we’ll produce,”
Cowan continues to defend her methods. “When you’re a com- Cowan told me. “And if we don’t produce it’s because the client
munity organizer, you organize a model that meets the needs of didn’t come in and sit with someone and bring in the documents.
the community,” she argued to me. “I am a lawyer, but I’m first Clients didn’t do what would allow us to produce the work. I have
and foremost an organizer. You don’t turn anyone away. You not seen one complaint yet that has been valid.” These clients,
don’t. You organize. That’s what you do in community; you tie she said, were free to go elsewhere, but were in “good positions”
up shit until there’s something else.” Her helper, Ulises, agreed. with her as their attorney.
“As long as God gives us license, we’ll continue to fight,” he said. Not surprisingly, Evans-Schroeder—who years ago did volun-
“I won an asylum case for myself, and I know how scary it is to go teer work for Cowan’s daca and Naturalization Fairs and expressed
to court—and what awaits me if I’m deported, and what awaits a healthy appreciation for Cowan’s efforts to get public funding
these people who I prepare forms for.” for immigration attorneys—disagrees. She wants to admire the

44 November 2024
Keep Tucson Together founder, but over the past several years In some cases they did, as Cowan had always argued they would,
she has come to the conclusion that Cowan, despite her storied charge thousands of dollars for their services. In other cases, they
past, has harmed so many clients that her suspension from worked pro bono or charged clients on a sliding scale. Against the
practicing immigration law is merited. “She sacrificed them,” odds, many of those men and women got their deportation orders
Evans-Schroeder told me in frustration. “She was trying to make reopened on appeal, having successfully shown that they received
a statement, but at what price?” “ineffective assistance of counsel” from Cowan and her KTT team.

C
Dulce Alvarado was one of the lucky ones. Her hearing was
OWAN ISN’T WRONG that the immigration court system extended by a month, and Evans-Schroeder’s team prepared all
is broken. Nor is she incorrect in saying that the lack of the files and gathered all the necessary documents, submitted
right to counsel is a scandal. After all, in the criminal her youngest child’s birth certificate, produced proof of her elder
justice system a person has a right to counsel no matter son’s epilepsy, documented the extreme abuse she had suffered
the triviality of the case against them; in the immigration at the hands of her onetime partner. At the end of the process,
system, however, where a court decision can permanently uproot the judge canceled the removal order.
lives, fracture families, and deprive people of livelihoods and of “I’m trying to get my life back,” Dulce, who is currently apply-
homes, there is no such right. In a city such as Tucson, which is only ing for jobs, said simply. “Because I lost it this whole time this
an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, and which has long been happened. I lost Dulce down the road and I’m trying to still find
a key stopping point on the journey north, this fact leaves tens of her daily. I live with hope the Dulce that was lost will come back.”

U
thousands of people particularly vulnerable to the ever-changing
whims of federal immigration policy, of law enforcement, and of LTIMATELY, THIS IS a story of good intentions gone
popular opinion. That knowledge, however, seems to have driven awry. “Anything she’s done has been out of her feeling
Cowan and her KTT colleagues, in their aim to serve as many of what needed to be done,” Silverman said, talking of
people as possible, to take shortcuts with immigration cases; his friend’s efforts over the years to plug the gaps of a
and those shortcuts over time hurt a growing number of people. broken, dysfunctional, and often merciless immigra-
“Every time I phoned her, I never got a call back. She never tion system. “She’s very devoted to the migrant community and
returned my email,” said Dulce Alvarado, who was brought into always has been.”
the United States by her parents when she was a young girl and Cowan’s is a story of who has power and who is left vulnerable
became a permanent resident in 2010, after qualifying for a work in an immigration system burdened by historically large num-
permit under the Violence Against Women Act—she had suf- bers of cases, and in an era in which the undocumented, fleeing
fered for years at the hands of her violent partner. Then, in 2019, poverty, government and cartel violence, environmental collapse,
she lost her legal status after being detained (although not con- and political dysfunction, have been increasingly demonized
victed) on suspicions of people-smuggling connected to illegal by demagogues such as Trump and Arizona’s own Kari Lake, by
activities engaged in by one of her close friends. “I lost peace, I Fox News, by rifle-toting militias and self-aggrandizing county
lost a lot of weight. I was very depressed. I’d end up in the hospital sheriffs. It’s also a story of human fallibility and self-destructive
every so often.” pride: the septuagenarian Cowan’s refusal to acknowledge that,
Dulce, who is now a pro bono client of Evans-Schroeder, said after a half-century working in a pressure-cooker environment,
that she gave all her personal documents to KTT, including those she was overwhelmed; that her desire to push through despite
detailing her interactions with the United States Citizenship and not having the resources had ultimately ended up harming the
Immigration Services over the years, but that, in the course of her very people she had devoted her life to and, finally, led to her fall
many deportation hearings, it filed hardly any relevant paperwork from grace in the immigration courts. And it’s a story of friend
with the courts. “She was all over the place and was just losing pitted against friend in Tucson, where No More Deaths has very
everything,” she recalled of Cowan. Finally, Ulises told Dulce that publicly distanced itself from Cowan and KTT.
she had to show up for a court hearing—but allegedly neglected “I’m using up my leave time and then I’ll probably retire,”
to tell her that it was her final hearing, the one that could result Cowan said. When asked what she wanted her epitaph to say,
in her deportation. He promised her that Cowan would show up, she had no doubt: “She was a good old girl,” the attorney told me,
but she showed up so late that Dulce was already in conversation pondering her nearly 60 years on the community organizing front
with the judge. The defendant stated on the record that she was lines. “That’s the line. ‘She was a good old girl.’”
unhappy with her legal representation. And then, she recalled, Others, however, aren’t so sure. “I don’t want to believe that
Cowan walked out of the courtroom. she just doesn’t care,” said Dulce, her hair tied back, her eyebrows

A
carefully sculpted, looking far younger, now that she is no longer
S OF THIS WRITING, Cowan is not allowed to practice worn down by daily panic, than her 43 years. “Maybe she just had
before the Board of Immigration Appeals, the immigra- a lot of cases in hand and had to deal with a lot of people. But she
tion courts, or the Department of Homeland Security— was just going around the bushes with me, and I don’t know why.
though she still visits Keep Tucson Together on a regular I forgive her. I bless her and I bless her soul for being who she is.
basis, and attends the weekly clinic at Pueblo High School. But I hope that if they [KTT] are still operating, they’re taking
In the wake of the decision that suspended her from practicing care of the people who need her assistance. Not to feel hope and
immigration law, the floodgates opened. Suddenly, immigrants see the light at the end of the tunnel is the worst feeling a person
who had long been dismissed or ignored were getting their stories can go through.”
told. A number of private attorneys stepped forward to try to undo Sasha Abramsky is the author, most recently, of Chaos Comes Calling:
the damage that Cowan’s allegedly inadequate counsel had caused. The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America.

Features 45
 Books & the Arts

46
November 2024
CURTIS AND HIS GOLF CART FROM THE SERIES SUN CITY: LIFE AFTER LIFE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KENDRICK BRINSON
The Threat
to the current moment: when many people
face precarious and delayed retirements
fraught with grim choices about long-term

To American
care, while others with lavishly funded re-
tirements and abundant options find the
very idea of retirement offensive. This isn’t
just a cultural problem or individual denial

Retirement
of our own decline, Chappel insists. This
is a crisis created by policy, exacerbated by
a great deal of political dishonesty about
where the actual crisis is located.

The wealthy don’t want to retire. THERE ARE MANY myths about why
aging is particularly fraught in this coun-
The middle class can barely afford to. try, each of which Chappel dismantles in

We need a better vision for old age. turn. The first to fall is the prelapsarian
vision of a once-harmonious aging process
that industrialization disrupted: that “once
upon a time” intergenerational homes were
the norm, and those who made it to old
age were cared for with respect by family.
But intergenerational households were
actually a minority in the United States in
the nineteenth century. Farmers, Chap-
By Heather Souvaine Horn pel acknowledges, typically had a grown
child or two “stick around in the hope of
OLD AGE HAS become a strangely tangled in the United States? Many fear they lack inheritance.” But that means many older
subject in the United States. Even after Joe the funds to weather old age with dignity; people—who were still doing some farm
Biden delivered one of the worst debate per- they worry about health and long-term labor—had a child living with them, not
formances in recent history, his defenders care, and what they will do if they lose the that most children had a parent living
routinely denounced his critics as ageist. ability to drive in a country built first and with them. Given the high birth rates of
The same thing happened with Senator foremost around cars. Scratch an appar- the era, there were “fewer older relatives
Dianne Feinstein: Three years after The ent paradox in U.S. society, and you will to go around, and more grown children to
New Yorker reported that the then 87-year- usually find simple inequality. But in the choose from.” And families today do more
old’s cognitive decline was an open secret matter of old age, inequality has driven our care for their elders than families used to,
and source of concern on the Hill, pub- political discourse to almost unparalleled he writes, because modern medicine has
lic debate over whether she should resign levels of incoherence. enabled people to live longer with age-re-
was still dogged by accusations of age dis- Golden Years: How Americans Invented lated disability than they used to.
crimination. And when Justice Ruth Bader and Reinvented Old Age, by intellectual his- The instinct to tie security in old age
Ginsburg actually died in office at age 87, torian James Chappel, is a story about how to work—thus duplicating significant in-
paving the way for a conservative court that the very concept of “retirement” came into equalities in the labor market—started
is steadily unraveling her legacy as well as being. But it’s also a story about how we got early. Prior to the New Deal, organizations
the hopes, health, and security of millions seeking to expand state pensions beyond
of Americans, both the American Society Civil War veterans typically made argu-
on Aging and the aarp portrayed this stag- ments about moral desert, based on years
gering own goal as a triumph over ageism. of labor. But their successes were mostly
Ageism is real, but it’s a hard accusation limited to private pension plans and public
to parse when the individuals in question, pensions for state employees. It wasn’t until
holding the fate of millions in their hands, Golden Years: the introduction of Social Security in 1935
are demonstrably in ill health. And it’s How Americans that expectations of old age truly changed.
even more discordant in a country where Invented and “Social Security,” Chappel writes, “created,
many would love to look forward to the Reinvented Old Age for the first time, a legitimate expectation
kind of cushy retirement that these elites by James Chappel that Americans could look forward to ten
seem to fear. Basic Books, or fifteen years of comfortable life on the
How do we reconcile American 368 pp., $32.00 far side of the labor market. It created, in
gerontocracy—the average age in the other words, a broadly shared idea of what
Senate, after all, is 64, and the elderly pov- old age could be.”
erty rate is below average, while the child But it came about in a backward way. Po-
poverty rate is above it—with the grim litical support for what was initially called
reality facing millions of elderly people old-age insurance materialized over the

Books & the Arts 47

worry that the elderly were “putting strain insurance ignored those who worked Reformers continued to imagine radically
on their children’s families” during the without compensation, like women labor- better versions of Social Security once it
Great Depression. The goal was to eliminate ing in their own homes. was established—each one a gut punch to
“dependence”—the burden the elderly rep- There were compelling alternative the reader who knows how this story ends.
resented, not the poverty they experienced. paths that could have been taken, Chappel In the late 1960s, for example, sociologist
The policy now known as Social Security notes—both fairer and more hedonic. The Jacquelyne Jackson proposed different
was instead “based on the premise that Townsend movement, named for Califor- age thresholds based on racial discrepan-
gainfully employed older Americans, in nian physician Francis Townsend, wanted cies in life expectancy: Making everyone
order to maintain independence from their to institute a national 2 percent sales tax reach 65 before drawing benefits, Chappel
children and from charity, would need vari- and use it to give $200 a month (nearly explains, meant that white people, who
able amounts of resources depending on $5,000 in today’s cash) to anyone over had on average longer life expectancies,
the income and lifestyle they were used to.” the age of 60, on the condition that they would benefit more than Black people.
POMS HULA HOOP FROM THE SERIES SUN CITY: LIFE AFTER LIFE
That’s how we got the model in which spend it all within 30 days—no lengthy By 1980, “the median white man would
people contribute with a portion of their debate about who deserved what, no hand- enjoy its benefits for nine years, and the
paycheck, and later receive benefits in wringing about worthwhile pursuits, just median Black man for only two.”
proportion to those contributions. It was pure yolo consumer power to zap the All of these paths to a more equitable
a system, the book stresses, that would country out of the Great Depression and future were rejected. And yet Social Se-
“reproduce, rather than challenge, the hi- help it into a machine age where fewer curity ultimately worked, even for the
erarchies of race and gender that governed workers would be needed. The Ex-Slave people it treated unfairly, Chappel ar-
the labor market itself.” Those who earned Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Asso- gues, as it reduced rates of elder poverty
a low wage during their working years ciation, which campaigned for pensions and specifically of Black elder poverty. It
would have a leaner retirement than peo- for formerly enslaved people who had been continues to work far better than most
ple who had held high-income positions. In emancipated into poverty and disability, people—particularly those trumpeting its
addition to initially cutting out agricultural would likewise “have used old-age policy ever-incipient demise—give it credit for.
workers and domestic workers—many of to attack and redress some of the most Within a decade or two, New Deal
whom were Black—this model of old-age insidious injustices of American society.” policies gave rise to fresh imaginings of

48 November 2024
old age as a kind of Disneyland with lots
of pottery classes. With that faint hint of Within a decade or two,
the manic the 1950s and ’60s did so well,
a new industry and discourse exploded New Deal policies gave rise to
fresh imaginings of old age
around how newly minted “senior citizens”
should spend their time and stave off de-
cline. Medicare’s passage in 1965 helped
address escalating health care expenses—
yet another policy, in Chappel’s telling,
as a kind of Disneyland with
adopted due to politicians’ skepticism of
intergenerational households, although
lots of pottery classes.
this time the concern was that grandparents
returned to dependency for short-term
health needs would mar the image of the
perfect anti-communist nuclear family.
But almost from the moment that re-
tirement as a universal life stage became
imaginable, it came under threat. Just as Association of Retired Persons’ fight against READING CHAPPEL’S ACCOUNT of the
policymakers were gearing up to tackle ageism in this era, which focused on lob- interplay between policy and culture, it’s
the inequities in Social Security, Milton bying against mandatory retirement and perhaps a little easier to understand the ap-
Friedman showed up suggesting the best age discrimination in the workplace. Yet parent tension between people persisting
way to do this was to get rid of it, and re- Golden Girls, Chappel argues, also spoke to a in jobs far past the point of reason (Biden,
place it with a poverty program instead. harsher emerging reality: that the financial for example), and the misery of some older
Given that, from a political perspective, lives of older people felt precarious. Was the people who don’t have that choice to begin
“Social Security works precisely because phenomenon of more older women going with. It’s easier to understand how we got
it latches help for the poor to a broad back to work, or engaging in self-care via to the odd patchwork of social programs
middle-class benefit,” Chappel finds it careful nutrition and exercise, desirable—a we now have. But that doesn’t fully eluci-
hard to take Friedman’s and his allies’ pur- blow against ageism—or merely a necessity date the raging dysfunction that is old-age
ported goal of targeted poverty reduction as good pensions grew rarer and medical politics in the United States.
at face value: The replacement program costs rose? Is the ideal of “independence” Histories are the stories of change—
would have been “ripe for budget cuts at liberating, or an insidious form of social they’re not always disciplinarily inclined
the earliest opportunity.” control? In Chappel’s story, there aren’t to identify the constants, let alone em-
Neoliberalism is one of the villains in easy answers to these questions. Ageism phasize them. And yet constants are a
this book. With increasing vehemence was and is a real problem, he acknowledges. powerful form of cultural conditioning,
throughout the 1970s, its prophets pushed But focusing on ageism to the exclusion of and surely at work when it comes to mass
the idea of a “crisis” in Social Security, other policy debates relevant to old people, unwillingness to think clearly, creatively,
portraying the program as a wasteful and as the aarp did in this era, reinforced the and compassionately about old age.
inefficient “Ponzi scheme” that could idea that the goal should be to remain em- The uncomfortable truth is this: We do
implode at any minute. At just this time, ployed and independent as long as possible. treat retired people as irrelevant. And as
employers were also growing wary of the The aarp, in this story, was to old age another historian, Samuel Moyn, recently
cost of pension plans. The result was a what the Obama-era “girl boss” movement observed while contemplating gerontocrat-
huge move toward private retirement sav- was to feminism: correct in identifying ic tendencies in this country: “In a society
ings: People worried about Social Security inequality, but deeply and narcissistical- in which elderly people are treated as irrel-
were instructed to invest in the individual ly misguided in thinking this could be evant and are subject to neglect, those of
retirement accounts (IRA) and 401(k) plans fixed by, say, sufficient numbers of the them holding authority have no incentive
that became available via new tax policy in disadvantaged group in question excelling to hand over the reins.” Our cultural denial
the 1970s. But 1980s culture takes some in the workplace. It’s tempting to see the of old age is surely part of why it’s so dif-
heat as well in Chappel’s narrative. New and organization’s name change as revealing: ficult to pass policies that would improve
more pernicious ideals of independence, Once the “American Association of Re- the material conditions for old age. And
he notes, provided moral cover as the state tired Persons,” the interest group in 1999 our society’s insistence on individualism
and employers shifted the responsibility became just “aarp.” Maybe dropping the makes it very hard to shift cultural norms
for security in old age away from society “retired” partly reflected the organization’s that make paid work essential not only
and onto individuals. long-standing interest in attracting mem- to receiving benefits, but also to defining
Depictions of older people in pop culture bers from the sub-60 crowd, or the reality one’s identity.
reflected the individualist mood. The sit- that “both Social Security and pensions A recurring theme, for example, in Chap-
com The Golden Girls pushed back against were on the ropes and mandatory retire- pel’s story is of seniors not wanting to retire.
stereotypes of “old ladies,” by depicting four ment was illegal.” Or maybe, somewhere People being pressured to retire solely be-
older women leading active, independent, between the 1950s and the year 2000, retire- cause of age is a problem, and ageism is a
and even sexual lives. It was a vision of ment stopped smelling of ceramics to most good label for it (although it’s worth noting
empowerment, in sync with the American people and started smelling of irrelevance. that age-specific restrictions are far more

Books & the Arts 49

Almost from the moment that done this, particularly via publicly funded
health care. Yet America’s work fixation lies

retirement as a universal at the center of this entire narrative—an

origin story for Social Security’s inequities

life stage became imaginable,

and a fig leaf for attempts at privatization.
Workism is closely tied to ableism, and is
often deployed in political contexts for
it came under threat. deeply racist purposes. It overlooks and
stigmatizes unpaid caregiving, often per-
formed by women, and drives the “welfare
queen” stereotype, used by politicians to
discredit the provision of public assistance
to impoverished Black people. There’s con-
siderable evidence that work requirements
for food stamps exacerbate poverty. And
common for young people than old ones, address this: You have to run through your the idea that only people who work really
and minimum ages for voting, drinking savings first and then get funding from matter is exacerbating the cultural forces
alcohol, or hiring a rental car, say, mostly Medicaid instead. Twentieth-century old- that drive many seniors to despair and
hold up in court). People not wanting to re- age pop culture didn’t address this: “the cause elite seniors to cling to power.
tire, however, because they cannot imagine discussion of aging in the 1980s was about Plenty of people are already starting to
who they are or how they can justify their individualism and entrepreneurialism,” question the primacy of the career in de-
existence to others without gainful em- and many old people feared being lumped fining identity: a form of identity that has
ployment? That’s just as big of a problem. in with the “old-old,” i.e., the disabled. Not always left a lot of people out, and that,
There are some signs of change on this retiring isn’t an option either: You can only in addition to subtly disparaging certain
front, although from wildly different cor- work as long as you are able. types of work, undervalues unpaid ways
ners: on the collective action side, young Again, activists have presented appeal- of spending our time that can be more
socialists’ and climate activists’ embrace ing alternatives: turning senior centers fulfilling than we grow up hearing a career
of policies like the four-day workweek; into hubs complete with “meal delivery should be. Think hobbies, think childcare,
and on the individual side, the surprising services, home health aides, and even end- think spending time with friends and fam-
traction in recent years of the Finan- of-life care.” But instead of facilitating the ily, think sleep. We don’t actually need to
cial Independence, Retire Early, or fire, large-scale adoption of these models and lead a national charge to unseat the prima-
movement. This subculture, which once recruiting “well-trained and well-paid” cy of work in the American mind, which
seemed populated exclusively by thirty- people to staff them, Chappel writes, pol- has led so many affluent people to fear
something techbros eating ramen in a icymakers leveraged “familial affection to the emotional side of retirement even as the
shack to achieve a 70 percent savings rate solve a policy problem,” telling caregivers less-affluent fear the financial side. Lots of
and retire by 40, has now broadened to in- that “long-term care was a natural obliga- people are already trying to do that. But it
clude more than a few women, people of tion of grown children, and one that their would be easier for them to pursue those
color, single parents, teachers, and others ancestors had done without complaint”— alternative visions of a worthwhile and
outside the stereotypical demographic. For an ahistorical lie that has caused real balanced life if we stopped making access
these people, cutting consumption dras- damage. With a dearth of options, fami- to good, cheap health insurance, 401(k)s,
tically is worth it if they can ditch their lies that reach a breaking point have little and Social Security dependent on full-time
boss a decade or more ahead of schedule choice but to put a parent in a nursing jobs at large companies.
and fill the time with family, friends, and home they can’t really afford with staff Chappel closes his book with a mov-
passion projects instead. These surprising who aren’t well paid. They often feel hid- ing image of senior citizens sitting on a
moments of resonance between the Green eous about it—a problem exacerbated by beach guarding turtle eggs: “Sentinels
New Deal, the TradCath homesteaders, the messaging around filial duty. watching over the precious life teeming
and the fire movement make you wonder The answer to our current mess, Chappel underground, and watching, too, the chil-
whether Gen Xers and millennials across argues, is inclusion: an old-age movement dren laughing.” It’s a role similar to one
the political spectrum might be ready to that includes the disabled rather than that Bill McKibben’s Third Act movement
rethink work-as-identity, as well as the con- simply leaving people to hope they won’t for climate action has imagined: seniors
sumerism that keeps the affluent wedded become disabled; health care policies with using their experience and influence to
to work-as-identity. fewer seams—maybe Medicare for All, and look out for the planet and for the next
maybe with long-term care provisions; generation. It’s a powerful vision, but it
THE REAL PROBLEM with aging in the Social Security reform, not cuts; transpor- only works at scale if we manage to sep-
United States, for Chappel, isn’t ageism, tation that doesn’t depend on cars. arate meaning from market value—both
but ableism. “A great deal of the anxiety These are all good ideas. But there is when it comes to retirement, and when it
about retirement income,” he writes, “is another, related way out of this crisis: to comes to the worthy ways people might
really an anxiety about retirement health: sever the link in this country between paid spend that retirement.
what will happen to me and my family if work and the provision of a basic social Heather Souvaine Horn is deputy editor at
I need long-term care?” Medicare doesn’t safety net. Other countries have already The New Republic.

50 November 2024
 ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE MARTIN
PHOTO: BRIAN BOHANNON/SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The End of
IT IS A risky business to try to parcel
American politics into periods, especial-
ly American conservative politics. As

Empathy
popular writers like Rick Perlstein or, more
recently, John Ganz have noted, many of
the most seemingly distinctive elements
of the current era have deep roots. Ameri-

How useful are attempts to understand can nativism is as old as America, and from
Goldwater and Reagan to stranger figures
grievances of the far right? like Ross Perot, the character of the charis-
matic “outsider” who promises to come in
and bust up the establishment, the Beltway
consensus, the deep state, whatever, is a
common animal in our political bestiary.
Nevertheless, if we are to date the present
epoch to the start of Donald Trump’s unlike-
ly 2016 presidential campaign, then what
emerges as perhaps its defining structural
feature is the increasingly stark geographic
sorting of American ideology and voting
habits. This is the so-called urban-rural di-
vide, which expanded after Bill Clinton won
the last geographically diverse presidential
election, deepened mightily through the
2000s and 2010s, and has now become a
chasm in American electoral politics.
The question of why this occurred—why
By Jacob Bacharach rural voters, specifically white rural voters,

Books & the Arts 51

have abandoned the Democratic Party a sort of diptych with her 2016 Strangers in go to extraordinary, vile lengths to threaten,
en masse—sent a whole cohort of com- Their Own Land, which examined the Tea intimidate, and denigrate their opponents.
mentators into a panic in 2016. The class Party movement by embedding in the com- Hochschild doesn’t shy away from present-
of people—writers, pollsters, TV talkers, munity of Lake Charles, Louisiana. This ing her own subjects’ more troubling views,
journalists—whose job is to perform a del- new volume takes an ethnographic look but her own villains tend to come across as
icate meteorology on the colliding fronts at Appalachian communities in eastern more pathetic and dismal than frightening
and barometric pressures of American pol- Kentucky, particularly Pikeville, around a or dangerous, and they ultimately receive a
itics experienced a crisis of confidence. moment when far-right figures are organiz- kind of clinical generosity. Hochschild seeks
They dispersed into the flat states, the small ing a white nationalist march through the to explicate; Abramsky wants to expose.
towns, the eight-lane exurbs that had just town. Sasha Abramsky, a peripatetic British The former tendency, which drives some
made a mad clown the president and set journalist who has written widely on life readers of those New York Times diner
about trying to understand the social psy- in America, particularly on U.S. prisons, pieces to distraction, attempts to give voice
chology of some real, Völkisch Americans has turned in the more straightforward- to its rural conservative subjects and to
whose angers, biases, and demands must ly journalistic Chaos Comes Calling: The let them explain themselves. To critics,
be true because, well, after all, they won. Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of this is malpractice, bordering on apolo-
You know the scene. A New York Times re- Small-Town America. Abramsky alternates gy. Should voters who support politicians
porter walks into a rural diner in Indiana. It between small communities in Northern and policies that look, at least fuzzily, like
sounds like the setup to a joke, because it is. California and Washington’s Olympic Pen- fascism, be given a blank page onto which
Likewise, this question has already pro- insula, where, beginning in the strange and to write their grievances in the most sym-
duced a small library of literature. The past dislocating early days of the pandemic, the pathetic possible light? I am often one
year saw a contretemps as Colby College local far right began a series of putsches of those frustrated readers myself, but
professors Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel to take over mayor’s offices, city councils, I don’t think the approach can be dis-
Shea published The Rural Voter: The Poli- election boards, and school districts. missed out of hand. Whether or not we
tics of Place and the Disuniting of America, Stolen Pride is less academic than The call Trump’s movement fascism, what it
a long, measured argument about how Rural Voter, and Chaos Comes Calling is shares with fascism is that it is intensely
some unique characteristics of rural com- less polemical than White Rural Rage, but personal—personal in its singular focus on
munal identity (among other factors) and they are similar to those works in their the character of Donald Trump, but also
patterns of investment and disinvestment respective emphases. Abramsky’s cast of personal in the sense that it arises from ex-
undergird this geographic polarization. This conservative characters is often quite odi- ceptionally personal sets of particularized
was followed in early 2024 by White Rural ous, and while he is sympathetic to some, he grievances, prejudices, disappointments,
Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, is willing to paint others plainly as villains, and idiosyncratic beliefs. And Hochschild
by University of Maryland poli sci professor driven mad by the right-wing media and is a skilled and careful interlocutor.
Thomas Schaller and American Prospect insane conspiracy theories and willing to Abramsky takes a different approach—
columnist Paul Waldman, which proposed more episodic, and more narrative. He also
that the pathologies of rural whites—anger, lets the people of rural Washington and
racism, violent separatism, and fanaticism— California speak for themselves (for better
represent a unique and urgent threat to and for worse), but he is doing something
American democracy itself, and which ar- that Hochschild generally is not: He is tell-
gued that academics and the mainstream ing a story about the very specific, and
press were dangerously overgenerous in sometimes very harrowing, political con-
their attempts to understand, rather than Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, sequences of these right-wing beliefs. He is
condemn, this disordered worldview. They and the Rise of the Right less interested in diagnosing the psycho-
were in short order accused by Shea and by Arlie Russell Hochschild social origins of conservative reaction than
others of misrepresenting the academic The New Press, in examining the way reactionaries change
research, and they, in turn, in the pages 400 pp., $30.99 and impact the communities where they
of this magazine, accused the research- put their ideas into action. And in a few
ers of engaging in a discourse of “shouts cases, he is interested in what amounts to
and whispers.... Find no difference be- Chaos Comes Calling: a communal course of treatment.
tween the political attitudes of rural whites The Battle Against the
and other Americans, or show that they Far-Right Takeover HOCHSCHILD’S WIDE-RANGING
have admirable values? Shout it from the of Small-Town America portrayals of the residents of an Appala-
rooftops. Uncover transgressive political by Sasha Abramsky chian community—from businesspeople
beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at Bold Type Books, to recovering addicts, university admin-
a conference panel with a dozen people 288 pp., $30.00 istrators to prisoners—are sympathetic,
in attendance and no media to be found.” fascinating, sometimes funny, and often
Two new books take up the debate over quite moving. Hochschild had, she writes,
America’s geographic divide and complicate “come to Pikeville with a growing concern
it. Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of about the nation’s growing political divide,
the Right, by the highly regarded Berkeley a keen interest in an unfamiliar place, and
sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, forms an idea about emotion in politics that I

52 November 2024
thought could illuminate the storm I felt
brewing.” The explanatory task she sets Arlie Russell Hochschild identifies
for herself is daunting, because she finds
that so much of this idea about emotion in a “pride paradox”: Americans
are both proud of their community
politics grows out of a fundamental para-
dox in the conservative worldview. On the
one hand, a sense of deservingness, a belief
that they are owed access to an American
Dream of wealth, prosperity, and respect;
and its values and ashamed
on the other hand, a sense of unworthiness,
grounded in a belief that hard work is re-
of its poverty and disintegration.
warded and those without rewards aren’t
working hard enough.
The time Hochschild spent in Pikeville
coincides with a white nationalist attempt
in 2017 to organize a march in the town, led
by a neo-Nazi named Matthew Heimbach. others—minorities, immigrants, etc.—are Some of this empathy begins to feel like
Why Pikeville? It is not entirely clear, even to somehow “cutting in line,” and she remarks special pleading. I grew up in one of these
Heimbach himself, who originally hails from that this notion, however incorrect, is a communities. Uniontown, Pennsylvania,
a D.C. exurb. He was, he claimed, “focusing powerful motivator of political reaction, was not quite as small as Pikeville (though
on his ‘grassroots brothers’ from Appala- especially in impoverished communities. it may be even poorer), but it was still an
chia,” and it seems that he and his allies As she notes, many residents of these com- old coal-and-coke town with a dying main
mostly just saw the poor, relatively ethnical- munities do go into cities, some of them street, whose population had declined
ly and racially homogeneous community as in patterns of almost seasonal vocational from more than 20,000 in the ’40s and
a naturally sympathetic audience for their migration, and see the scope and scale of ’50s to barely 12,000 when I was in high
views. (They overestimate its homogeneity. investment—buildings; roads; airports; school there in the ’90s (and continued
There are longtime Black residents, Jews; a restaurants—and then return to the hol- to decline to under 10,000 today). There
well-known doctor is a Muslim immigrant.) lowed-out, deindustrialized landscape of were, and are, plenty of good and noble
Hochschild treats Heimbach—who months the post-extraction economy. Hochschild people, but, as anyone in Fayette County,
later attended the deadly “Unite the Right” identifies a “pride paradox”: Americans Pennsylvania, or anywhere like it, will also
rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—relatively do want to live with pride and with dig- happily volunteer, there are plenty of ass-
gently, and gives him a lot of space to ex- nity and find themselves simultaneously holes. (Abramsky’s book is more forthright
pound upon his own rather pat origin story proud of their community and its values and on this point.) You don’t need to embrace
(distant father, self-diagnosed autism), in- ashamed of its poverty and disintegration. the full thesis of a book like White Rural
cluding one anecdote, rather questionable Yet the book has a regrettable tendency Rage, or even Thomas Frank’s What’s the
to my ears, about a Black student threaten- to fit people into this schema in ways that Matter With Kansas, to see that for some
ing his schoolteacher mother with a gun in can feel both narrow and, frankly, a bit people at least, the cruelty is the point, as
order to get a passing grade. She seems to naïve. She finds many cases of the “pride The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer put it. Sophis-
see in this ungainly, dyspeptic young man paradox,” like Alex Hughes, a small entre- ticated racists with an understanding of
a bit of a skeleton key—a person in whom preneur who “yes-sure’d” his way into jobs journalism and, to some extent, social sci-
pride and shame are so tightly wound that and businesses—self-training and pick- ence are capable of invoking terms such as
they cannot be untangled, with results both ing up work others wouldn’t or couldn’t disinvestment and material deprivation
ugly and wildly incoherent. do—until “by the 1990s Alex’s bootstrap as little more than a convenient excuse
Hochschild’s generosity toward her sub- ‘yes sure’ strategy no longer brought in for their corrosive beliefs. We should be
jects isn’t necessarily a drawback—it is a steady work,” and he found himself di- careful not to be too readily taken in by
sociologist’s tool, and she sometimes allows vorced, underemployed, and $128,000 in self-representation—a weakness, perhaps,
people just enough rope to hang them- hock to the IRS. Like many of the Pikeville in the ethnographic form itself.
selves. One pro-Trump, pro-coal organizer, residents Hochschild meets, Hughes pur- We should also be mindful that, while
for example, is given a great deal of space to ports to want nothing to do with the white rural regions vote in much higher percent-
expound in calculated and reasonable tones nationalists. He tells her, “I am three emer- ages for Republicans than other parts of the
about the values of his community and to gencies past a deadline at a job that I worry country do, there are plenty of reactionary
portray himself as fundamentally moder- I could lose”; he has no interest in “racial conservative voters in rich metropolitan
ate, thoughtful, and reasonable ... until, in strife.” But like 80 percent of Pike County, areas. More than 650,000 New York City
a concluding chapter, she permits him to he voted for Donald Trump, who showed residents voted for Donald Trump last time
reveal that he in fact admires the “illiberal scarcely less animosity toward racial mi- around, more votes than he received in the
democracy” of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. norities or immigrants than did the Nazis entire state of West Virginia. I am uncon-
Many of Hochschild’s conclusions are at the march. I couldn’t help but wonder if vinced that the reactionary mind, as the
sound but not particularly striking. She ob- the paradoxes Hochschild identified were political scientist Corey Robin has called
serves both here and in Strangers in Their really explanations, or if they were just ex- it, can be understood straightforwardly as
Own Land that many of her subjects feel that cuses and justifications all along. a matter of either communal principles or a

Books & the Arts 53

deficit of personal pride. The reactionary’s
persistent idea that there is a single, cor- That curious amalgam, “the white
rect, and unchanging hierarchy of peoples,
races, religions, genders, and modes of liv- working class,” cleverly elides
the true character of the American
ing is more complex, durable, and difficult
to untangle. This is why, I think, books
like Hochschild’s particularly struggle to
explain the people that the historian and
podcaster Patrick Wyman has referred to
working class, which is as likely
as the “local gentry,” the wealthy upper
crust that sits atop even the poorest com-
to be a Black service employee or
munities and keeps the country clubs and
golf courses afloat. In the poorest pockets a Latino agricultural worker.
of America, there are still very rich people
who very much understand that their posi-
tions are strengthened and maintained by
keeping the poor down and by keeping the
poor angrier and more suspicious of one
another than they are of the local bosses.
It is notable, too—as recent research And for every batty and dismissible Julie driven to distraction by the derangements
from Cornell University has shown—that Jaman, there is a William Armacost, a ra- and bitter political acrimony of the Trump
there is no major equivalent polarization bidly reactionary “hair-salon owner and presidency. Taken together, these cyclical
among nonwhite rural populations. They motorcycle aficionado” who wears a Pun- and mutually reinforcing disasters, where-
vote, by and large, like their urban and isher pin and peddles QAnon conspiracies. in the government seemed to fail, did fail,
suburban counterparts. Why should rural He becomes mayor of the small town of Se- again and again, created a fertile territo-
Black populations, for example, who like- quim, Washington, in a series of elections ry for a whole set of unresolved national
wise often live in some of the poorest and and council maneuvers that no one seemed sins and conflicts to rear up in new and
most disinvested places in America, not to pay attention to at the time, and then he nasty ways. “We all have to ask ourselves,
perceive themselves as being left behind relentlessly and heedlessly pursues, harass- are we becoming so ensconced in the ide-
by an urban professional elite? And if they es, and threatens city civil servants, political ologies we believe that we’re becoming
do, why is their wounded pride not a gate- enemies, and, really, anyone who gets in his terrible people?” laments Jodi Wilke, a
way to conservative reaction? In any case, way or looks at him wrong. His type—mostly, nurse and community activist from Port
the concatenation of rural whites and the though not exclusively, male; vindictive; Hadlock-Irondale, Washington. “People
working class into that curious amalgam, prone to intimations of violence; unwilling who say ‘you should get that vaccination or
“the white working class,” cleverly elides to brook dissent; dismissive; mocking; and I hope you die.’ How far is that from what
the true character of the actual American plain mean—recurs throughout the book. happened in Germany” in the Nazi era?
working class, which is as likely to be a Such men often seem driven, like Donald Chaos Comes Calling is not entirely de-
Black woman service employee or a sea- Trump himself, by a poisonous combination spairing. Abramsky also shows us the people
sonal Latino agricultural worker as it is to of personal vanity and inadequacy. They who oppose this change in their communi-
be a white man in a traditional industrial delight to see others suffer harm. They are ties. Doctors who work despite the threats.
or extractive trade. not the forgotten men of the hollers. Local liberals, and even a few last moderate
The public dialogue grows harsher and Republicans. The lives of these political
CHAOS COMES CALLING is therefore more vulgar. Chaos Comes Calling jumps minorities tell a different story than the
a useful counterbalance to Stolen Pride. back and forth rapidly between Shasta Coun- ones we are used to reading in the sociol-
Focusing mostly on the emergence of ty, in California, and the small communities ogy of Trump country genre. The leftists
Covid and its odd aftermath, Abramsky of the northern Olympic Peninsula. Much of and liberals here come to, or stay in, rural
captures a grab bag of political beliefs that the story is a ratchet of tension and threat, places because they are beautiful, because
can—and did—twist into some quite ugly as, beginning with pushback to local and they are quiet, because they are where they
formations. “Jaman’s politics were diffi- state mask mandates, extreme right-wing and their families grew up. In such places,
cult to categorize,” he writes in a typically figures in both communities colonize and leftists, liberals, and moderates are often
arch and understated fashion, as he de- take over local governments, school boards, made to suffer the very unkindnesses and
scribes the transformation of an 81-year-old and libraries. There is a grim undercurrent indignities that conservatives so often claim
Port Townsend, Washington, resident of possible violence—these communities are as their own unique lot. Conservatives
named Julie Jaman from anti-Vietnam rural, and they are heavily armed. worry about some vague consequences if
protester and “granola personality” to an Abramsky connects some of this change they post something racially insensitive on
anti-vaccine conspiracist and, finally, to a to the pandemic, still a great, unprocessed Facebook, while Doni Chamberlain, a local
screaming bully who emerges naked and national trauma, a catastrophe that frayed liberal journalist who runs a bumptious
still dripping from a locker-room shower a national psyche barely recovered from muckraking blog called A News Café—
to demand whether transgender staff of the awful economic dislocations of de- “Northern California’s Premier Online News
the local Y have penises. industrialization and the Great Recession and Magazine”—is manhandled out of an event

54 November 2024
for a new local far-right organization and
then escorted from the premises by the
California Highway Patrol. Flute
To some extent, the right-wing take-
overs were as much the result of inattention by Bruce Bond
and Democratic Party ineffectualness as
anything. “Despite showing for national
elections, local Democrats were slow off
My first word had a hollow in the middle,
the mark when it came to local politics,”
Abramsky observes. “They didn’t field com- a breath to blow a wish from a candle.
prehensive slates of candidates for city
council and other regional offices, appar- I backed away from the wall of a canvas
ently not realizing until late in the day just to see the dry leaves falling into focus.
how much of an electoral threat extremists
at the local level had become.” The Demo- I read once there is an angel of history
crats! In Sequim, though, a local alliance
who faces us with wings of fire, her body
of good-government types managed to
take back significant control in subsequent
elections. Powered by grievance and driven
only to punish, the far right had forgotten blown backward through epistemes to come
to fix sidewalks and pave roads. in ever deeper exile from her home.

WHAT IS THE right approach to the far Dear Reader, she writes, when you read this,
right? What is the right tool? Is it the scal-
swallow it, drink. Think of it as music
pel, or the psychiatrist’s couch? Is the far
right something to be excised from the body that is, like history, made of lost time,
politic, or something to be talked through
and understood and maybe cured? Stolen time recalled, and a resonating chamber.
Pride is a useful and often fascinating con-
tribution to our understanding of “the rise
of the right” in rural America, but it is by Today I read a letter by a friend
laying bare the very real, human, social,
too beautiful to bear. Sometimes he sends
moral, and economic consequences of put-
ting their extreme beliefs into practice that word the precise moment that I wake.
Abramsky makes perhaps the more inci-
sive contribution. It is all fine and well to When I am most alone and breakable.
ask why people believe what they do, but Today I stood too long in the shower
you have to follow through and see what
happens when they get the keys to city hall. like a soldier. What good is beauty now.
In the end, these approaches are prob-
ably both necessary and complementary.
This is not a problem that will soon go I have heard that and looked to the garden
away. The right is very angry, and very
well-established. Despite the recent ap- some call nature, others conversation.
parent turn of Democratic fortunes with
I have heard our oldest instrument
the nomination of Kamala Harris and the
return of a competitive national electoral is a flute made of bone. And in the past,
environment, I am profoundly doubtful
that the fever will simply break, that, as
people came together by the fire,
some hope, the political center has learned to marvel at the bone with a hole inside.
a few lessons and is up to the task. Wheth-
er we suffer in this country from a surfeit
of pride or from a deep deficit, I worry that
pride is a central and necessary compo-
nent of whatever it is we call the American
Dream. That is indeed a problem. What
comes before destruction, and a fall?
Jacob Bacharach is a novelist and essayist.
His most recent book is A Cool Customer: Bruce Bond is the author, most recently, of The Dove of the Morning
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. News: Poems.

Books & the Arts 55

Originalism’s
A Historical Critique, injects a fresh,
powerful new argument against original-
ism into the debate.

Sins
The book is careful and thorough—
chock-full of historical evidence—but
Gienapp’s argument is ultimately straight-
forward. Founding-era Americans didn’t
The Founders didn’t believe the think of the Constitution as the kind of
thing that had a fixed meaning. Therefore,
Constitution had a fixed it wouldn’t have made sense to look for

meaning. So why does today’s unchanging original meanings that were

fixed for all time in the Constitution’s text.
Supreme Court? So if one would like to be an originalist, that
original history says not to be an originalist.
“When we recover Founding-era constitu-
tionalism,” Gienapp writes, “we discover
how deeply at odds originalism is with
the history it claims to recover.” His book
reveals “how un-originalist originalism
turns out to be.”

BEFORE DIGGING INTO that critique, it’s

worth spelling out what originalists cur-
rently say. Since the 1980s, the theory has
By Andrew Lanham multiplied in a truly head-spinning number
of directions. As Gienapp observes, it feels
IN EARLY JULY 1985, U.S. Attorney General claimed that “constitutional language like “originalism has entered a baroque
Edwin Meese launched a legal revolution should be construed as it was publicly stage in its life cycle, marked by exces-
from the tony confines of the Sheraton understood at the time of its drafting sive and increasingly esoteric theorizing.”
Washington Hotel. Speaking to the Amer- and ratification.” All government lawyers Moreover, while the originalist justices do
ican Bar Association, he argued that “far “should attempt to construct arguments cite academic literature, Gienapp rightly
too many” Supreme Court decisions had based solely” on that original meaning. notes that “originalist academics often
devolved into mere “policy choices,” driv- Thus did originalism—which had been seem to be peddling a much different theo-
en by the justices’ personal preferences, percolating among conservative scholars ry” than jurists are. Nevertheless, the public
rather than following “constitutional prin- and jurists like Antonin Scalia and Robert deserves to know how it’s ruled—ideally
ciple.” In a fiery line that Meese skipped Bork—surge onto the public stage. without needing a philosophical decoder
when he read the speech but that appeared Thirty years later, after Donald Trump ring. So let’s take a quick tour through the
prominently in the published version, he appointed a conservative supermajority to originalist landscape.
said the court’s turn to policymaking was the Supreme Court, originalism has come There are various ways to map out
most evident in “the radical egalitarian- to rule us all. Through the court, origi- contemporary originalism. The leading
ism and expansive civil libertarianism of nalism shapes our social, political, and originalist Lawrence Solum offers one
the Warren Court.” The Warren court had, economic systems, from global problems framework, though he concludes that any
among other things, desegregated pub- like climate change to national issues like “quest for agreement on a single definition
lic schools in Brown v. Board, guaranteed voting rights to deeply personal questions of originalism is likely to prove Quixot-
equal voting rights in Reynolds v. Sims, like what kind of medical care a doctor ic.” Gienapp provides a slightly different
and protected the right to contraception can provide. framework in his book. There are forms
in Griswold v. Connecticut. Now, in 1985, Originalism has been subjected to a of progressive originalism, too—but that’s
Meese labeled the court’s “egalitarianism” a variety of searching critiques. The most a topic for another day. For our purposes,
“threat” to the proper legal order. common focuses on the difficulty—or even it’s most useful to trace four major strands
Meese demanded a different form of the outright impossibility—of discovering of originalist thought.
judging. He called it “a Jurisprudence of Orig- what a constitutional clause might have The first wave of originalism focused on
inal Intention.” The Constitution’s framers meant centuries ago, based on a thin, frag- original intent—what Meese called “a Juris-
“chose their words carefully,” he said, and mentary, sometimes puzzling, and often prudence of Original Intention.” For these
those words “meant something.” The Su- contradictory historical record. I’ve made interpreters, the Constitution means what
preme Court’s job was to find and enforce the same point about the constitutional its authors intended it to mean. But this
that meaning. Meese then promised that the amendments passed after the Civil War. model faced withering criticism, including
Justice Department would “press for a Juris- But that critique, though it’s quite com- from later originalists, because it’s hard to
prudence of Original Intention.” In 1988, pelling, is by now well-trodden ground. pin down someone’s subjective intent, let
the department duly released its Guide- The historian Jonathan Gienapp’s new alone the intentions of the dozens of differ-
lines on Constitutional Litigation, which book, Against Constitutional Originalism: ent people who helped compose the text.

56 November 2024
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

So a second wave of originalists, back then would have read it, while the because it doesn’t require all “the tools
including Justice Scalia, focused on orig- framers would have intended us to read of modern intellectual history.” Rather,
inal public meaning. For public meaning the text’s legal language with the typical it only recovers “legal doctrines,” which
originalists, the question isn’t what the au- tools of legal interpretation. are “an extraordinarily narrow slice of any
thors intended. It’s what the Constitution Finally, a new and increasingly influen- society’s intellectual life.”
meant to readers when it was ratified. This tial strand of originalism emphasizes the If these byzantine distinctions between
approach has the advantage of looking for idea of “original law.” Originalists in this original intent, original public meaning,
general public meanings, rather than sub- vein start with the commonsense point original methods, and original law original-
jective intentions. And it claims a kind of that the law simply is whatever it is until it ism seem abstruse, recall Gienapp’s point
democratic legitimacy on the ground that changes. Next, they say that clauses in the that “originalism has entered a baroque
it merely enforces the objective meaning Constitution were legal terms of art when stage.” This would all be an intellectual
of the text that the voting public ratified. they were ratified. There was a specific le- curiosity—an interesting but ultimately
This approach also avoids any critique gal idea of “Habeas Corpus,” for example, arcane debate among historians, literary
that the Founders might not have want- that founding-era lawyers would have un- theorists, and legal philosophers—were it
ed us to be originalists, because it asserts derstood when the Constitution mentions not for the current Supreme Court super-
that, whatever the Founders intended, the Habeas Corpus, and that founding-era majority. In the court’s avowedly originalist
Constitution just is a text, and a text just legal meaning just was in fact the law at decisions, these esoteric theories have a dai-
does mean whatever its public meaning the founding. Putting those two points ly and decisive impact on the entire public.
was when it was written. together, these originalists argue that the
More recently, a wave of “original meth- founding-era legal meaning of the text GIENAPP THINKS ALL these theories are
ods” originalists argue that the Constitution still simply is the law that we have today, mistaken. Across all of these strands of
was written in technical legal language, because it hasn’t changed in the interim, originalism, he notes, the debate centers
so we should use the same methods of so judges can’t lawfully do anything other on questions of meaning: What does a giv-
legal interpretation that were used at the than enforce that original meaning. Advo- en clause in the Constitution mean, and
founding. That could unify original intent cates of this approach like William Baude can we tell what it meant in the past? But
with original public meaning, because the and Stephen Sachs claim that it avoids the Gienapp shifts our attention to a deeper,
public meaning of the text is how people thorny problems of historical recovery more metaphysical question: What kind

Books & the Arts 57

of thing is the Constitution? Depending on amid a debate with Thomas Paine, “The back with any of its former Materials.” In
what it is, it will hold different meanings. Constitution of a country is not the paper the same way, the Constitution could si-
Think of an actor confessing to a murder or parchment upon which the compact is multaneously change and stay the same.
on a stage. It means something different written, it is the system of fundamental Finally, Gienapp argues that originalists
from a witness confessing to a murder in laws, by which the people have consented wrongly assume the Constitution would
court, even if the words are the same, be- to be governed, which is always supposed to have been seen as law like other laws. Many
cause plays and courtroom testimony are be impressed upon the mind of every indi- Americans, he says, would have seen it
very different kinds of things. vidual, and of which the written or printed as “a people’s document, not a lawyer’s
Gienapp argues that originalists im- copies are nothing more than the evidence.” document,” and they would have thought
pose onto the founding their own modern The Constitution wasn’t just a text. It was it should be read in a less lawyerly and
picture of what a constitution is. Most a practical “system” of self-government. more popular way—especially by empow-
originalists, he says, make three basic as- What about originalists’ second assump- ering the legislature, not the courts, to
sumptions about what the Constitution is. tion, that the Constitution’s meaning is interpret the Constitution. It took years for
First, they assume the Constitution is only fixed? Gienapp argues that founding-era Federalists like Chief Justice John Mar-
the written text of the document. Second, Americans thought its meaning was both shall to transform the Constitution into
they assume it has a fixed meaning, pre- fixed and evolving. James Madison, for a legalized document. And even then, his
cisely because it’s written down. Third, example, wrote in The Federalist Papers political opponents pushed back, advanc-
they assume the Constitution is a law just in 1788 that “All new laws” are “more or less ing an ­anti-legalist perspective. Thomas
like other laws, so its fixed meaning must obscure and equivocal, until their meaning Jefferson, for example, argued in 1820 that
be read the same way lawyers read other be liquidated and ascertained by a series of making judges “the ultimate arbiters of
laws. All three assumptions, Gienapp con- particular discussions and adjudications.” all constitutional questions” was “a very
tends, are wrong. He reiterated in 1819 that “it might require dangerous doctrine” that “would place us
Start with the idea that the Constitution a regular course of practice to liquidate and under the despotism of an Oligarchy.” “The
is only its text. Many eighteenth-century settle the meaning of some” terms. Actual people themselves,” Jefferson said, were
Americans would have been surprised. legal and political “discussions” and con- the only “safe depository of the ultimate
They thought a constitution was a mix crete political “practice” would work out powers of the society.”
of text and preexisting legal and political constitutional meaning over time. This all amounts to a very different pic-
principles. Constitutional rights, for exam- The idea that the Constitution was both ture of founding-era constitutionalism
ple, were preexisting. The text didn’t create fixed and evolving was not a contradiction than originalists portray. If the Constitu-
those rights. It declared the rights that the in terms. Gienapp’s brilliant first book, The tion was widely seen as a mix of text and
people already had. As Alexander Hamil- Second Creation, explored the idea of con- a fluid, popular set of principles and gov-
ton put it, “The sacred rights of mankind stitutional fixity in the 1780s and ’90s in ernment practices—not as a fixed set of
are not to be rummaged for, among old depth. He showed that people like Madison written-down rules—then interpreters who
parchments, or musty records. They are would have agreed with the leading jurist want to grasp the Constitution as it was ini-
written, as with a sun beam, in the whole Matthew Hale, who explained in 1713 that tially understood must admit that doing so
volume of human nature.” although “Use and custom” create “Vari- would require us not to limit the Constitu-
Similarly, when it comes to the federal ations” in the law, nevertheless, “They are tion to what Justice Clarence Thomas calls
government’s powers, many founding-era the same English Laws now, that they were “historically fixed meaning.” As Gienapp
Americans would not have focused, as 600 Years since.” The law, Hale said, was puts it, in the face of history, originalism
courts do today, on the powers enumerated like “the Argonauts Ship”—he meant the “collapses under its own weight.”
in the Constitution’s text. They would have Ship of Theseus—which “was the same
focused on the idea of the social contract: when it returned home, as it was when it FAR FROM COLLAPSING, of course,
the idea that human beings began in a state went out, tho’ in that long Voyage it had originalism is ascendant. This summer, the
of nature but gave up certain liberties to successive Amendments, and scarce came Supreme Court decided a major gun rights
form a political society. To determine what case called Rahimi. The case involved a Sec-
powers the federal government has, people ond Amendment challenge to a federal law
would have asked what kind of political that bans gun possession for individuals
community created the Constitution—what who are subject to domestic violence re-
underlying social contract authorized the straining orders. The conservative justices
government. If it was a nation that created purported to apply originalism, but they
Against Constitutional
the Constitution, the federal government wrote five separate opinions articulating
Originalism:
would have all the powers of a national different views about what originalism
A Historical Critique
government. But if the Constitution was requires. Those diverging views affected
by Jonathan Gienapp
more like a treaty among the states, fed- the outcome of the case, and they’ll shape
eral powers would be more circumscribed.
Yale University Press, future cases, too. Tracking the justices’
Interpreting the Constitution thus
368 pp., $35.00 disagreements reveals the current state
meant reasoning about the history and of play and bears out Gienapp’s critique.
social structure of the political community At the strictest end of the spectrum,
and analyzing its proper form of govern- Justice Thomas argued that originalism
ment. As John Quincy Adams said in 1791, requires a precise historical analogue. If

58 November 2024
there isn’t a founding-era analogue for The New Republic called this a “break” INSTEAD OF INDULGING in historical
a law, it’s unconstitutional. For that rea- with the court’s “originalists,” while Slate fiction, Gienapp asks us to historicize the
son, Thomas would have struck down the said Barrett expressed “disillusionment Constitution, appreciating the very dif-
gun regulation at issue in Rahimi. But he with conservative orthodoxies.” But Barrett ferent social, intellectual, and political
was the only justice to reach that conclu- wasn’t abandoning originalist orthodoxy context in which it arose. People in the
sion—the rest of the court upheld the law. in Vidal. Rather, she was observing that past “did not think like us,” he writes. They
In contrast to Thomas, Chief Justice sometimes “history and tradition” don’t “spoke a different constitutional language.”
John Roberts wrote for the majority that the tell us anything about “original meaning.” We can’t read what their Constitution meant
court’s originalist cases “were not meant Traditions from after the Constitution was without grasping that older theory of what
to suggest a law trapped in amber.” The ratified might be quite old, but they don’t a constitution was.
Second Amendment therefore “permits reveal what the text meant when it was Crucially, that older theory was itself
more than just those regulations identical ratified. Hence Barrett’s conclusion that contested. “Because the federal Consti-
to ones that could be found in 1791.” What “tradition is not an end in itself.” tution was constructed during a time
matter are “the principles” originally rati- Some conservative judges and law pro- of enormous constitutional change and
fied in the text, and the court can find and fessors have similarly observed what may experimentation unleashed by the Revo-
apply those principles. be an emerging split between originalism lution,” Gienapp explains, “much about it
Falling in between Roberts and Thomas, and traditionalism. Justice Kavanaugh was unprecedented, which raised doubts
Justice Neil Gorsuch said the Constitution defended the use of “tradition” in Rahimi, about the kind of thing the Constitution
does provide “directions that are ‘trapped and Justice Samuel Alito might turn out was.” Consequently, “deep constitu-
in amber.’” Judges must rigidly apply those to be the most “traditionalist” in his ap- tional contestation” was “the defining
rules. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s view is proach. Alito’s majority opinion striking feature of the period.” It wasn’t so much
harder to distill, but he treated originalism down abortion rights in Dobbs, for ex- that everyone agreed with the views of
as an important but not exclusive source ample, never used phrases like “original John Quincy Adams or Thomas Jeffer-
of authority. Where constitutional provi- meaning,” but it emphasized that there son quoted above. It was that Adams was
sions are “relatively clear,” Kavanaugh said, was “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting arguing with Thomas Paine, and Jeffer-
courts must “interpret that text according abortion” from early English common law son was waging a political battle against
to its ordinary meaning as originally un- until 1973. Justice Barrett’s recent opinions John Marshall. Their ideas were moves in
derstood.” But the text itself always comes seem to be rejecting pure traditionalism a political debate, as they fought to define
first, so any “history contrary to clear text is as a way to decide cases. But her opinion the still-unsettled nature and meaning of
not to be followed.” And when the text isn’t in Rahimi makes clear that she is still very their new Constitution.
clear, Kavanaugh suggested a willingness much an originalist. It was that political contest over the
to follow the court’s existing precedents, The five competing originalist opinions Constitution—fights about things like
while using history to “inform interpreta- in Rahimi bring the word “baroque” back rights and government power—that
tion of vague constitutional provisions.” to mind. And frankly it’s a problem that breathed life into the Constitution, shaping
Most interestingly, Justice Amy Coney the justices can’t agree on how originalism its nature and meaning over time. The “dy-
Barrett channeled original law original- works. The rule of law requires stability and namic process” of “constitutional debate,”
ism. Citing work by Stephen Sachs, Barrett predictability. But in the last few years, the Gienapp says, is what “constituted that
took the position that the original meaning court has swerved from long-established Constitution.” It was a “generative source”
of the text “remains law until lawfully al- methods of constitutional interpretation of “creativity that has never ceased.”
tered.” Barrett therefore focused more on into a novel experiment with originalism. It is precisely that ongoing, creative
the meaning of the Second Amendment On top of that, it’s hard to decipher what dialogue that allows self-rule. We should
itself—the unaltered constitutional law— kind of originalist arguments the court continue the constitutional conversation—
rather than requiring the government to even wants to hear, making it difficult to and continue working to expand that
identify precise historical analogues for predict how the court will parse supposedly conversation beyond the elite white men
modern gun regulations, as Justice Thomas originalist evidence in future cases. That’s like Madison and Jefferson whose ideas
demanded. That’s because founding-era a funny way to run a country. typically occupy center stage in the orig-
gun regulations “do not themselves have At a deeper level, beyond these practi- inalism debate. The supposed views of
the status of constitutional law.” Rather, cal problems with originalism, Gienapp’s long-dead generations should not be the
those early regulations help courts iden- book also shows the court’s entire inquiry is last word on constitutional questions. Our
tify “concrete principles” that show the wrong by its own self-professed originalist elected officials, judges, and we the peo-
“contours” of the right to bear arms, as it standard. All of the methods espoused by ple should forthrightly debate, in light of
was understood at the time of ratification. the originalist justices in Rahimi claim to modern conditions, the evolving meanings
Those founding-era “principles” were orig- recover some fixed legal meaning from of constitutional cornerstones like free
inally our law, in Barrett’s view, and they the text. But Gienapp’s conclusions— speech, the government’s duty to “promote
remain our law today. that the Constitution was more than text, the general Welfare,” and the equal protec-
Barrett’s opinion in Rahimi helps ex- it was fixed but evolving, and it was a pop- tion of the laws. Such dialogue about the
plain other recent disagreements between ular document, not a legal one—mean that shape of our political community is what
the justices, too. In an earlier case, Vidal v. the fixed meaning the conservative justices democracies do.
Elster, Barrett made headlines by criticizing purport to find is, in Gienapp’s words, “a Andrew Lanham is an assistant professor of
the court’s use of “history and tradition.” contrived modern legal fiction.” law at the University of Houston Law Center.

Books & the Arts 59

PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACH GROSS

No Place Like
IMAGINE A STORY—a novel; a movie; a
show—set in Washington, D.C. Maybe you
see marble hallways, swinging briefcases,

Washington
men in suits. Maybe you see Julia Child’s
house in Georgetown. Maybe you see a ho-
tel bar, cars loitering outside embassies, the
Capitol or one of the many brutalist agency
Dinaw Mengestu’s novels of grief and headquarters along the Mall, or maybe you
just see the Mall. All these settings belong
dislocation in the D.C. suburbs to Washington: nation’s capital, hub of in-
ternational politicking, hotbed of American
symbolism. But not much fiction of any sort
goes beyond Washington to D.C.’s huge net-
work of suburbs in Maryland and Virginia,
beyond politics to the real population of
a city that is shaped and overshadowed
by the federal government, but that often
looks, sounds, and acts nothing like the
people ruling on Capitol Hill.
D.C.’s greatest writer is Edward P. Jones,
whose story collections Lost in the City and
All Aunt Hagar’s Children contain beau-
tifully rigorous tales of ordinary, working
Washingtonians who are so deeply root-
ed in the city that their memories turn
into maps. Jones’s characters are nearly
all Black, with ancestry in the U.S. South—
By Lily Meyer which, until the early 2010s, was true of a

60 November 2024
majority of D.C.’s inhabitants. But it is also but when he leaves Paris to visit home,
a heavily international city, with, among he misses his flight on purpose, then re-
many other immigrant communities, one books himself on a plane to Chicago. His
of the biggest Ethiopian diasporas in the monologue—the novel is, essentially,
world. As a Washingtonian, I would say you Mamush’s inner monologue—contains no
Someone Like Us
can’t understand my hometown without admission that he wants to unearth what
by Dinaw Mengestu
reading Jones, nor can you understand it happened to Samuel in Chicago, but that
Knopf,
without reading Dinaw Mengestu’s 2007 de- is plainly his goal. Once he lands, he heads
272 pp., $28.00
but, The Beautiful Things That Heaven straight for the courthouse, posing as a
Bears, a piercing story of dislocation set journalist who’s looking into Samuel’s life.
in a then rapidly gentrifying section of Really, though, his investigation is even
Northwest D.C. more personal than finding out why his
Mengestu isn’t quite as geographically uncle was incarcerated: He wants to know
precise as Jones, but he gets close. His pro- what Samuel’s troubles meant, or could
tagonist, an Ethiopian immigrant named character is opaque to himself, uninterested have meant, for him. Mengestu signals
Sepha Stephanos, owns a small, struggling in explaining his actions or confronting his the amplification of Mamush’s curiosity
grocery store on P Street, just beside Lo- desires. He is also grieving. When the novel by writing in unusual geographic detail.
gan Circle. Stephanos has opinions about starts, he’s just found out that his moth- Mamush recognizes a specific former cor-
his street and circle that go beyond the er’s close friend Samuel, who is Mamush’s ner store; he Google Maps his way to “the
feelings anyone might have about their father but occupies the role of an uncle 3400 block of Randolph.” Such precise loca-
neighborhood: Moving there and open- in his life, has died. Samuel was also an tions are common in The Beautiful Things
ing his store, after years working at a hotel addict, and had been since Mamush was That Heaven Bears, but appear nowhere else
and living in the Maryland suburbs with a child. One of the novel’s questions is in Someone Like Us. They don’t last long.
his uncle, were “the first real decisions I whether his overdose was intentional. An- On reaching his first setback, Mamush puts
had made on my own since coming to this other is whether his addiction threatened aside his quest and embarks on a bender.
country. I loved them.” Although the novel Mamush’s family. Chicago’s details fade away, subsumed in
is full of heartbreak, that love animates it, Samuel dies just as Mamush, who lives alcohol, drugs, and the scrim of memory.
standing between Stephanos and the void in Paris, is coming to visit D.C. His death For Mengestu, this collapse of time and
of displacement and grief. sparks a spiraling investigation of both detail is in part a novelistic strategy: It lets
Mengestu, who grew up near Chicago, men’s pasts; the novel moves through time him weave his storylines together so tightly
left D.C. behind in his second and third fluidly, sometimes blurring chronologies they become almost indistinguishable. But
novels. But the city reappears—as does or mixing fantasy into reality in a way that this isn’t—or isn’t only—literary flexing.
Stephanos—in his fourth, Someone Like evokes the bender Mamush is on for much Mamush’s short-lived investigative journey
Us, which is set in the “sprawling empire of of the book. and his blurring of past and present are re-
the D.C. suburbs.” Years have gone by, and Mamush’s mother immigrated to the flective of his addiction, his deep-seated
Stephanos is now a minor character, the United States while pregnant with him, mov- conviction that “acknowledging any desire
quietly empathetic proprietor of a halfway ing to Chicago, a city whose cold shocked guaranteed that whatever I wanted would
house in Northeast D.C. Mamush, the nov- her so much she wondered if it was a bodi- never happen,” and of his terror of detail.
el’s narrator, isn’t a resident, although he is ly hallucination. Samuel soon followed Visiting the hazy past is much less fright-
an alcoholic and a “true democrat when it her there, sometimes living with her and ening for him than doing anything in the
came to consumption” of all other drugs. Mamush but often “abruptly disappear[ing] present. Indeed, he avoids his life’s spec-
Someone Like Us is an exploration of for weeks in search of ‘opportunities’ un- ificities: Mamush and his wife, Hannah,
grief, inheritance, and addiction—and, like available to him in the Midwest.” Mamush communicate obliquely and imprecisely,
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, only remembers snatches of his eight years often using photographs, and although
of dislocation. But whereas Stephanos in Chicago. He insists that he didn’t grow he’s lived in Paris for years, he refuses to
pursued connection in the earlier novel, up in “the world of happy and unhappy learn French. He looks back on the D.C.
Mamush is afraid of it. Mengestu traces that childhoods, happy and unhappy families,” part of his childhood as a time of soothing
fear through Mamush’s history, using place but slowly, Mengestu assembles a frag- featurelessness, describing his suburban
to get deeper into the mind of a character mented image of Mamush’s Chicago years hometown as “apartment buildings, sur-
who won’t engage in self-examination. that suggests buried trauma: a brush with rounded by other apartment buildings,
He writes the D.C. suburbs as a cascade a sexual predator; Samuel developing ad- behind which were four-lane highways that
of anodyne buildings whose lack of iden- dictions to pills and alcohol and spending led to similar apartments.” For Mamush,
tifying detail becomes a blueprint for the time in prison; the state threatening to take this is safety: no distinction, nothing un-
way Mamush wants to live. Mamush is in Mamush away. Mamush’s mother tells him usual, just a quiet wash of tall buildings.
search of the comfort of placelessness—but that the family moved to D.C.’s suburbs so
as Mengestu knows, there’s no such thing. they could get “away from the city, in a big SAMUEL SAW THE world differently—and
apartment building that was like a maze Samuel is very, very present in Mamush’s
MAMUSH NARRATES FROM the center where no one could find you.” head. Although he is dead when the novel
of his addiction, which makes Someone In the present, Mamush isn’t explicitly begins, Samuel is Someone Like Us’s sec-
Like Us both painful and slippery: Its main interested in putting these pieces together, ond voice, almost its second protagonist.

Books & the Arts 61

Mamush is constantly remembering and
imagining conversations with him, So much of the fiction set in
and through those discussions Mengestu
creates an entirely distinct picture of D.C. D.C. paints it too broadly,
treating it as a symbol of power
Samuel was a cab driver with intimate
knowledge of the city and its surroundings;
on meeting Hannah some years before
the book starts, he promised her, “I will
show you [D.C.] No one knows this city
rather than a real, living city.
better than me.” He had a similar sense of
intimacy with the suburban apartment
complexes that Mamush describes as con-
crete blurs. On moving to D.C., Samuel
shared a one-bedroom with “as many as
six other men who, like him, drove cabs
in the evenings and worked in parking in the novel undermines Mamush’s ability contrast—and dialogue—between Samuel
garages in the mornings and afternoons.” to fit himself into that narrative. and Mamush is Mengestu’s way of rejecting
Years later, he still sees the lives inside Of course, Samuel himself is the root this flattening. The two men share their
those buildings, the often-frightened, of much of Mamush’s trauma. He also blood, their troubles, their addictions, and
often-displaced people trying to create carries a significant amount of his own: yet their characters are nothing alike. Nor
homes. He does his best to teach Mamush addiction, incarceration, racist abuse as are their visions. Mamush looks around
the same perspective, but Mamush is too an immigrant in the United States, a year the Maryland suburbs of his childhood,
frightened and displaced himself. as a soldier in Ethiopia that led him to de- or the Virginia ones where his mother and
Mamush’s story, on its own, contains cide to leave the country he loves. And yet Samuel live by the time he’s a grown man,
all the hallmarks of what literary critic Samuel is a social being and a dreamer, not and sees the nothingness he’d love to in-
Parul Sehgal calls “the conventional trauma a closed-down isolate like Mamush. His habit. Samuel sees people with places to
story”: repression, disaffection, the sugges- great goal is to create a national network of go—even when he’s too sick to help get
tion that growth after trauma is too much cab drivers who can get a frightened person them there.
to hope for. His resistance to place and to anywhere they want to go—a network that, So much of the fiction set in D.C. paints
detail are, really, ways of resisting the cer- at the novel’s climax, gets Mamush out of it too broadly, treating it as a symbol of
tainty of pain. But Mengestu isn’t interested Chicago. ­Sehgal writes that the trauma power rather than a real, living city. In
in conventionality, and Samuel’s presence plot “reduces character to symptom.” The The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,
Mengestu wrote it as a place of small, stub-
born, damaged hopes. Someone Like Us
revisits and revises that understanding. Its
Black Hole D.C. is a whole world, layered with crisis,
rejuvenation, and heartbreak. We see this
by William G. Gillespie in Someone Like Us’s span of decades, in its
geographical expanse: Where The Beautiful
Things That Heaven Bears took place over a
There comes a time when time comes to its crystalline point year on one block, the newer novel sprawls
through time and space, reaching through
And the world, arrayed in its binaries
the suburbs that are so dull in Mamush’s
And in its mammalian yearning for clarity, imagination, so full in Samuel’s.
Receives hundreds of millions of emails These competing images of the same
place—a place rarely seen for what it is, or
for who really lives there—are the book’s
Declaring confidence and stability.
essence. No town, no building, and no per-
son can be as empty of detail as Mamush
Your bank is on the run. wants. Samuel’s ghost won’t permit it. Nor
will Mengestu. At the novel’s very end,
The Pentagon
Mamush sends Hannah a text that is at
Is at defcon 3. once customarily oblique and a promise
Your money, like a dead star, has sucked into itself. that detail is coming, that he’s going to
start filling in the blanks. It’s a gesture not
quite of hope—Mamush isn’t there yet—but
of resistance to hopelessness. Mengestu,
once again, is writing against the void.
William G. Gillespie’s most recent poems appeared
in BOMB. He is currently at work on a manuscript. Lily Meyer is a writer and translator.

62 November 2024
COURTESY OF APPLE TV+

Before
WE ARE IN the midst of a Shyamalan-
aissance. While responses to M. Night
Shyamalan’s filmography have waxed and

Your Eyes
waned since he was first designated the
Alfred Hitchcock of the new century, his
latest, Trap, seems to have newly reestab-
lished his reputation as a master of the
Disclaimer has something to hide crowd-pleasing, expertly crafted original
thriller—a dying breed. I’ve been thinking
from the audience. a lot about Shyamalan recently, because
I’ve been watching Disclaimer, the new
Apple TV+ miniseries from Shyamalan’s
contemporary Alfonso Cuarón.
Disclaimer reminds me, in good and bad
ways, of my favorite of Shyamalan’s films,
The Village. The Village tells the story of an
isolated community in an unspecified olden
time, cut off from the rest of the world by a
terrifying, mysterious beast who patrols the
forest surrounding their village. It’s incred-
ibly suspenseful, visually stunning, and
it skillfully manages a tenuous tonal bal-
ance between world-consuming dread and
breathless romance. Its one flaw is that its
dialogue is atrocious. Just the worst, most
contrived Ye Olde lines you can imagine.
Not even extraordinary actors like Joaquin
By Phillip Maciak Phoenix, William Hurt, and Cherry Jones

Books & the Arts 63

can keep the stiltedness from becoming in the theater to inhabit a blinkered world marriage, and parenting. That said, the
distracting. But, it turns out, that’s the before its truth is revealed to us. Disclaimer, pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett shop
point. At the risk of spoiling a 20-year-old which stretches for seven episodes, asks us for, prepare, and summarily throw away
movie, what we eventually learn is that the instead to live in the lie, to build identifi- an elaborate meal of sole meunière might
film is actually set in the present. cations with characters in the lie, to have be worth the cost of admission.
The village is a community of people emotional responses, to laugh at jokes, to The second narrative is that of Brig-
who, sometime in the 1980s, built a com- spend time in the lie. For all its exquisite stocke plotting and executing his scheme in
mune in a remote area of Pennsylvania and performances, visual pyrotechnics, and the present. Kevin Kline, a great American
decided to live off the grid in the manner narrative contraptions, Disclaimer never actor in search of a showcase role on TV,
of early American settlers. The beast is a fully earns, or maybe even deserves, our regrettably does not find one here. Playing
fiction meant to prevent their now-grown trust. Cuarón cleverly and convincingly a kind of perverse twist on the inspira-
children from leaving the grounds and tells us that nobody really understands tional boarding school teacher from The
realizing what’s going on. The characters Catherine Ravenscroft. I’m not sure Dis- Emperor’s Club, Kline seems less like he’s
seem as if they’re being played by bad ac- claimer understands her either. embodying a character than like he’s do-
tors because the characters themselves ing a bit. Every time a new part of his plot
are bad actors. ONE OF THE first lines in Disclaimer comes snaps into place, for instance, Brigstocke
The risk Shyamalan took in structuring from a speech in honor of Ravenscroft’s mimes arming a grenade and throwing it
his film in this way is that he asked viewers work as a filmmaker. “Beware of narrative over his shoulder, softly cackling with glee.
to sit through something that was a little and form,” the voice says. “Their power Narrated in voice-over by Kline, sounding
bit wooden, a little bit contrived, a little bit, can bring us closer to the truth, but they can like an emeritus professor from Hogwarts
well, bad, to vouchsafe a payoff that would also be a weapon with a great power to ma- after a few too many pints of butter beer,
make everything make sense. I loved the nipulate.” Cuarón’s televisual version of the segment has a cartoonishness that sits
audacity of this choice, the sheer genius Ravenscroft’s story plays fast and loose uneasily alongside Ravens­croft’s narrative.
stupidity of it, and, as a result, it’s a film I’ve with these dangerous elements of narrative Finally, there’s the flashback narrative, the
returned to many times over the years with and form. In many ways, it is a refreshingly vignette-style retelling of the events from
great delight. For a tight 108 minutes, this energetic TV debut for an accomplished Ravenscroft’s youth as represented in the
is a bargain I am very willing to take, a con filmmaker. Rather than labor to make the mysterious novel. This sequence unfolds
I am more than willing to walk right into. medium more “cinematic,” Cuarón embrac- as a kind of romantic, new wave romp on
Disclaimer is a bit of a con, too. I’m offi- es the narrative expansiveness and time the Italian coast. Brigstocke’s son (Louis
cially not at liberty to disclose what happens afforded by serialized storytelling. Cuarón’s Partridge) loafs his way through cobble-
at the end of this series, though readers of visual signatures remain in force—lots of stone squares and down the picturesque
the breakout sensation novel upon which long tracking shots!—and there is a good beach, eventually running into a young
it is based will be familiar with the sto- bit of art film ponderousness, but, at its Catherine Ravenscroft (Leila George) and
ry’s twists and turns. At base, Disclaimer heart, this is avowedly a TV melodrama, undertaking an erotic voyage that Cuarón
tells the story of Catherine Ravenscroft and, in its best moments, that’s precisely stages at length and in relatively startling
(Cate Blanchett), a renowned documen- how it plays. detail. The gauzy quality of these scenes,
tary filmmaker who lives a life of comfort A kind of chopped and screwed Ra- as well as their sleepless horniness, sug-
and wealth with her husband and grown shomon, the series is built around three gest nostalgia. And while they lack the firm
son in London. One day, she receives a different narrative contrivances that inter- narrative identification that the show’s
self-published novel that she immediately weave throughout every episode. There’s dueling voice-overs provide in the other
recognizes as a thinly veiled roman à clef the narrative of Ravenscroft, in the present, sections, it gradually becomes clear that
about a traumatic, secret event from her dealing with the earth-shattering effects of these sun-swept recollections are also sub-
youth—an event that resulted in the death this novel in her life. Her husband and son ject to bias, prejudice, false memory.
of a young man she met on vacation in process the shock with varying degrees of Whether these three narratives are com-
Italy. The source of the book, we learn, hysteria, and Ravenscroft herself spirals peting, contradictory, or merely emerging
is that young man’s father, Stephen Brig- out of control. This thread is narrated in from different perspectives is the cen-
stocke (Kevin Kline), who is now plotting second-person voice-over by the actress tral question of the show. And Cuarón
revenge against Catherine for her apparent Indira Varma, and it goes out of its way skips fleetly between them. One of my
complicity in, or even responsibility for, to show us how Ravenscroft is suffocated favorite sequences in the series begins in
the death of his son those many years ago. by this sudden life twist. (At one point, Ravens­croft’s narrative, as she tries to fig-
It should not be a spoiler to reveal that she impulsively strikes a co-worker, and ure out a way to prevent Brigstocke from
all is not as it seems in Disclaimer. There is her assistant, in perhaps the year’s most further circulating the novel but without
a revelation very late in the series that will ham-fisted line of dialogue, shouts, “You upsetting him. She drafts and then al-
upend everything we’ve been led to believe are so canceled, Catherine!”) This section most too professionally delivers a speech
about the events on our screens, and we’ll houses Blanchett’s molten performance, about how much she liked and respected
need, ultimately, to ask ourselves why we but it also showcases some of the limited the novel, a speech that manages to be
were so ready to believe certain versions of series’ most limited ideas about gender both obsequious and condescending, into
the truth but not others. What do we do with (masculinity, in particular, in the form of Brigstocke’s answering machine. Her easy
a show that hides its true self from us? In a Ravenscroft’s effete doofus husband and her facility with bullshit, her first turn to thin
film, we have only the length of our time detached, drug addict son), cancel culture, flattery as a defense, tells us a great deal

64 November 2024
about her panicked hope that this act was
one of ego, rather than evil. Disclaimer never gives us
It also reveals something of how she
approaches her relationships with other enough clues to solve
the puzzle, but it does create
people: making first concessions, letting
moronic men feel in control. But we hear the
voicemail recorded live from Brigstocke’s
perspective, and, likewise, his reaction—
offense, even giddiness at seeming to have
a feeling that something
been proved right—and this is revealing.
That Ravenscroft would think a speech
important remains unsolved.
like this would mollify him only confirms
Brigstocke’s suspicion of her villainy. But,
as is often the case in this show, what seems
like a misunderstanding on the part of one
character will eventually be revealed as a
misunderstanding on the part of the viewer.
It’s a misunderstanding we have no power or as if a camera operator were intentionally the most recent and high-profile example,
information to correct—a misunderstand- adjusting the apparatus. Leila George, who but it shares a structure and a philosophy
ing the show, indeed, insists we have—but plays the young Ravenscroft, is by no means with other similar series like FX’s Fleish-
it’s a misunderstanding, a misjudgment, impersonating Cate Blanchett, but every so man Is in Trouble and Apple TV+’s own
all the same. often she’ll utter a word or phrase in such The Changeling. It’s not just that they
distinctly Blanchettian dialect you’ll get share late-breaking, paradigm-shifting
THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG with a chill. Some of these disunities are small narrative twists, but that those twists are
Disclaimer. The show never gives us enough that they might even read initially tethered to the previously unheard, or at
enough clues to solve the puzzle, but it as mistakes, but, with enough of them in least unconsidered, perspectives of female
does create a feeling that something im- line together, it’s clear that Cuarón is using characters. To pull off this trick, these se-
portant remains unsolved. Cuarón keeps these techniques to unsettle the viewer. M. ries have to create narrative worlds that
the viewer in near-constant discomfort, Night Shyamalan made his actors act as if also don’t care about these women, often
his show in a constant state of instabili- they were acting in order to set up a devas- for many, many hours. Disclaimer, along
ty. An off-putting smoothness pervades tating and clever twist; the reason Cuarón is with these other series, commits the sin
the production. The series zeroes in on destabilizing the visual and sonic world of in order to eventually point a finger at us
its own artificiality, particularly through its his series turns out to be much more grave, viewers for committing it, too.
management and differentiation of the much more laden with lessons about the There is great value and meaningful
three separate narrative lines. Cuarón sig- world. But, in the end, I’m not sure which insight in series like these that depict the
nals the flashback timeline, for instance, trick made me feel sillier. warped inattention through which men
with a distinctively retro iris in, iris out are often allowed to perceive the world.
transition. These scenes are color-corrected THERE’S A GREAT joke on 30 Rock that Catherine Ravenscroft deserves her own
quite differently and even seem to be the vacuous c-list celebrity Jenna Ma- say the same as Rachel Fleishman did. That
filmed on a different stock. The dialogue in roney went to acting school at the “Royal these acts of empowerment must also be
these sequences also features what sounds Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks.” It acts of valediction—narrative gotchas at
to the ear like slightly awkward dubbing, seems that, recently, a not-insignificant the end of these series—suggests that the
with lines sometimes not quite matching number of television creators may also series themselves don’t take those voices
mouths. The two “present” timelines are be alumni. The trick I’m thinking about terribly seriously. Early in the show’s final
also somewhat misaligned. Despite nomi- in particular is not dissimilar to the one episode, as Ravenscroft begins the long
nally occurring simultaneously, sometimes Shyamalan pulls off in The Village, the monologue that unravels everything we’ve
they’ll be slightly off. We might witness idea that the story you see and believe in seen in the six hours previous, Brigstocke
an event in one timeline and then check is eventually revealed to be a mere distrac- interrupts her. Ravenscroft booms back:
in with the other timeline only slightly tion from reality, a disguise that the truth is “Shut up, I’m talking!” It’s addressed as
before it. There’s no real reason for this wearing. The viewer is so immersed in the much to Brigstocke as it is to us, to Cuarón.
to occur, just a momentary stutter in the show’s narrative voice, they’d never guess Disclaimer is a story about a woman who
film’s narrative address. they were being fooled until that fact is is never ever listened to by the men in
One character is shot, repeatedly and deliberately revealed. her life. And it seems, sometimes, that
exclusively, with the use of almost random, Several recent series have taken this Cuarón would rather tell a polemical story
off-rhythm zooms. Sometimes they seem basic format and used it to tell stories and about the injustice of that inattention, to
tied to a heartbeat, sometimes they to level criticisms about the way wom- indict the galleries of men who ignore her,
seem syncopated to some unheard music. en’s voices are drowned out, ignored, or to show the audience its own complicity,
There are several ordinary conversation simply silenced, even and especially in than just let her speak.
scenes in which the camera jitters, not media contexts where they might other-
producing a handheld verité effect, but wise seem front and center. Disclaimer is Phillip Maciak is The New Republic’s TV critic.

Books & the Arts 65

Twilight Zone
After playing Lydia Tár, where could she go
except straight to Angela Merkel?
It’s pretty evident early on that none
of Rumours’ major characters are meant
Guy Maddin’s Rumours plunges to be direct stand-ins for actually existing
world leaders, although the tendency of
world leaders into a surreal G-7. Charles Dance’s U.S. president to nod off
mid-anecdote could be perceived as a jab at
Sleepy Joe Biden (his accent, meanwhile, is
pretty far from Delaware—closer to Wester-
os). Instead, Maddin, Johnson, and Johnson
are capering in the realm of nationalistic
caricature, conceiving each of their pro-
tagonists as exaggerated embodiments of
By Adam Nayman various social or cultural traditions: hence
the portly French president (Denis Méno-
SOME FOOTNOTES TO history are more breeze swings through their luxurious chet) with his untethered flights of poetic
mortifying than others. Recall if you will outdoor gazebo, disrupting their reverie pretentiousness, or the revelation that the
that, earlier this election year, the Acad- and scattering pages of brainstormed solu- Italian premier (Rolando Ravello) likes
emy Award–winning screenwriter Aaron tions into the nearby woods—the answer, cosplaying as Mussolini, and also keeps
Sorkin penned an op-ed in The New York my friends, is blowing in the wind. scraps of charcuterie in his breast pocket
Times hypothesizing that the best way Between its isolated setting, discreetly for round-the-clock snacking purposes.
to mend America’s battered fences (and to charming characters, and ultra-bourgeois The results vary in inspiration—there’s
keep Donald Trump from finally building trappings, Rumours is clearly a movie made not a lot going on with either Nikki Amuka-
that wall) would be for liberals and conser- under the sign of Luis Buñuel, the Spanish Bird’s buttoned-up U.K. figurehead or
vatives to not only reach across the aisle master whose shadow falls over nearly a Takehiro Hira’s Japanese P.M.—but when
but attempt a sort of collective group hug. century’s worth of cinematic absurdism, the strategy hits, it’s hilarious, as in the
Sorkin’s modest proposal—that the Demo- including Maddin’s. The most distinctive character of Maxime (Quebecois movie
cratic Party nominate a moderate (that is, filmmaker ever to emerge from the frozen star Roy Dupuis), the craggily handsome,
an actual Republican) like Mitt Romney tundra of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Maddin tragically man-bunned Canadian prime
for the presidential slot—was goofy even has been practicing his form of handmade, minister reeling from a combination of
by the standards of The West Wing, but heart-on-sleeve surrealism since the mid- fraud scandals, serial philandering, and
it drew a bead on a pernicious species of 1980s. For the uninitiated, a good place impostor syndrome, stemming from being
liberal fantasy: that in the face of certain to start would be 2000’s ecstatic, award- the cohort’s junior member. Dupuis’s perfor-
doom, our best chance for salvation lies in a winning short The Heart of the World, which mance as a smoldering himbo bears traces
rousing, perfectly delivered stump speech. compresses an epic narrative about love, of the recently embattled (and likely soon-
Think Abraham Lincoln, or Atticus Finch in capitalism, and incipient apocalypse into six to-be-ousted) P.M. Justin Trudeau—there’s
Sorkin’s recent Broadway revival of To Kill whipcrack minutes, or perhaps 2007’s auto- a hollow gravitas that Dupuis skillfully strip-
a Mockingbird. Or maybe The Manchurian fictional My Winnipeg, a phantasmagorical mines for humor and pathos, as Maxime
Candidate, moments before a shot rings out exercise in personal and civic portraiture and his world leader pals slowly and imper-
at the presidential nominating convention. narrated by Maddin himself and canonized ceptibly cross from simple inconvenience
One could argue that, at this point, this by no less than the Criterion Collection. If into Twilight Zone–style outrageousness.
particular brand of grandstanding centrist David Cronenberg is English-Canadian cine- Not only have the leaders seemingly been
rhetoric is beyond parody. Enter the Cana- ma’s reigning contemporary master, Maddin abandoned by their entourages, but they’ve
dian trio of Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and is something like its weirdo-intellectual been cut off from the outside world entirely,
Galen Johnson, who give it a good try via jester, cheerfully spelunking through his and with it from any sense of authority. All
the wry new corridors-of-power comedy own cluttered subconscious in a series of that’s left over are the trappings of privilege,
Rumours (note the Canadian spelling). The shorts, features, and gallery installations. which prove useless: What happens if a wine
film, which premiered out of competition at Before Rumours, Maddin’s highest-profile glass goes empty in the forest and nobody
the Cannes Film Festival, is set at a whim- muse was probably Isabella Rossellini, who is around to refill it?
sically stylized version of the annual G-7 memorably adorned 2003’s black-and-
Summit, where the leaders of the world’s white melodrama pastiche The Saddest THE MOST EXPLICITLY Buñuelian aspect
most prosperous and ostensibly progres- Music in the World as a Depression-era of Rumours is its grasping, dreamlike sense of
sive countries—including the filmmakers’ beer baroness propped up by prosthetic futility. Like the partygoers in Buñuel’s mas-
home and native land of Canada—renew legs filled with lager. For his latest, though, terpiece The Exterminating Angel, they can
interpersonal pleasantries and sip snifters he’s recruited no less than Cate Blanchett, check out of their fancy summit anytime
of wine en route to drafting a “provisional who’s also listed as an executive producer, they like, but—for whatever reason—they
statement” about some apparent new global and whose casting as a sleekly coiffed, im- can never leave. Their much-discussed
crisis. Just as the Group of Seven is getting peccably accented German chancellor is group statement, meanwhile, functions as
down to brass tacks, however, a mysterious something in between a stunt and a coup. an existential MacGuffin, along the lines

66 November 2024
 hearts-and-minds-winning oratory is as
sublimely ridiculous as everything else on
display, though not particularly cutting.
For a truly subversive bit of spoofery, you’d
need to look at Maddin and Johnson and
Johnson’s scabrous and brilliant 2015 short
Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, which
used the conceit of a the-making-of doc-
umentary about the big-budget Canadian
military drama Hyena Road to skewer both
the archetypal tropes of combat movies and
the vanity of its writer-director-star Paul
Gross. It was a tricky little IED of a mov-
ie, designed ingeniously to blow up in its
subjects’ faces. Rumours wants to be just
as incendiary, quite literally in a closing
montage that charbroils the notion of inter-
national coalition-building, but the impact
of its provocation is arguably diffused by
the production’s larger scale; it’s harder to
style your movie as a Trojan horse when
you’ve got one of the most acclaimed ac-
of the perpetually delayed gourmet meal here: no turbocharged editing tricks or tresses in the world riding shotgun.
in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. quasi-documentary interventions; no That Blanchett would show up—and give
The harder our (anti?)heroes work to craft semisecret handshakes with Russian con- her all—for a movie as off-kilter as Rumours
a coherent response to the problem at hand structivism. Instead, it’s as if the directors is at once admirable and unsurprising:
(which also pointedly goes unspecified), the were trying to channel—and, concurrent- This is, after all, the same devoted cinephile
more they remain at odds and out to lunch. ly, critique—the glossy, anodyne tone of who did the Lord of the Rings series because
They can perhaps be forgiven for their public-facing diplomacy by simplifying she wanted to work with “the guy who made
distraction in light of the other obstacles the film’s form and letting the charisma Brain Dead” and was paid little more than
being strewn in their way by Maddin and of the assembled a-listers carry the day. a set of elf ears for her performance. Her
company. These include a horde of recently This choice places more emphasis on participation here ensures that Rumours
exhumed, surpassingly slimy, and enthu- the film’s political vision, which is about will have more eyeballs on it than the rest
siastically self-pleasuring bog people and as far from Aaron Sorkin’s soaring rheto- of Maddin’s oeuvre put together—a fact
a giant, disembodied, pulsating brain that ric as you can get. The putative theme of that speaks as much to the market logic
looks like a prop from a 1950s sci-fi cheapie the summit is “regret,” and as the global of movie stardom as to the film’s relative
or maybe a vintage prog rock video; it ap- power brokers trade supposedly harrowing quality when compared to its predecessors.
pears at roughly the point where we start stories of various administrative failures Maddin has surely gone further in the past,
wondering if our heroes are just fools or and frustration, we’re cued to understand and sometimes to stranger places. But for
have been lobotomized. Symbolism is a slip- that they’re really just stroking their frag- anyone with a rooting interest in the fate
pery slope, and at its core Rumours is less ile egos. Signifiers of weaknesses abound: of artists working stubbornly and exuber-
allegorical than it is surrealist: What makes Maxime is an alcoholic who goes to pieces antly on their own terms, Rumours offers
it so enjoyable is the way that the charac- every time he reflects on his love life; af- an object lesson in the art of deceptive
ters take even the wackiest developments ter injuring his leg, the French president compromise—one that any enterprising
in stride. That’s why when Alicia Vikander has to be carted around in a wheelbarrow. auteur (or aspiring head of state) would
shows up as a high-ranking Scandinavian There’s fatigue (the U.S. president’s chronic be wise to try to emulate.
government official in erotic thrall to the narcolepsy) and gluttony (the ever-present
Adam Nayman is the author of books on
giant brain, the joke is that her delirious charcuterie) and suggestibility: In the fun- the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson,
writhing is no big deal. niest set piece, the characters exchange and David Fincher.
For all its expressive esoterica, Rumours increasingly fraught text messages with an
may be Maddin’s most conventionally unseen stranger who might be an imperiled THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 255, No. 11,
Issue 5094, November 2024. Published monthly (except for
structured and produced feature to date. child or a piece of advanced to-catch-a- two double issues of Jan/Feb and Jul/Aug 2024) by TNR II,
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by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C.
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restraint of the filmmaking, which is solid As any political movie ultimately must, unsolicited manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submis-
sions must be emailed to [email protected]. For subscription
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Books & the Arts 67

Res Publica “We are the first generation that learned from experience, in our
by Win McCormack innocent twenties, that things were not really getting better, that
we shall not overcome. We felt, by the time we reached thirty,

An RFK that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders

our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated.
And from this time forward, things would get worse: our best

For Today?
political leaders were part of memory now, not hope…The stone
was at the bottom of the hill and we were alone.”
Newfield also wrote, “The militant young blacks who wore
‘Free Huey Newton’ buttons as they cheered Kennedy in San Fran-
cisco the day before he was shot, and the low-income whites who
How Kamala Harris became signed George Wallace petitions in July, would have both voted
an inspiring figure for Kennedy in November. He was able to talk to the two polarities
of powerlessness at the same time.” This many years later, what

I
Newfield projected would be impossible. Polls indicate a white
n early June 1968, I was working in Boston as a substitute working class that not only has abandoned its longstanding alle-
schoolteacher in the city’s public school system and living giance to the Democratic Party but is strongly drawn to Donald
in an apartment across the Charles River in Cambridge. Trump, not because Trump is actually offering them anything
I would walk down to the Central Square subway station in the way of legislation that would benefit them economically (on
to catch a train to work. Sometimes I would go into the the contrary, as during his previous term as president, he would
greasy spoon Hayes-Bickford cafeteria next to the station cut taxes on the corporations and impose tariffs that would raise
for a cup of coffee or a full breakfast of bacon and eggs. On the the cost of living for average Americans), but, it seems, for the sake
morning of June 6, as I approached the restaurant, I saw through of protest against a system in which they no longer have faith.
the plateglass window an elderly lady, unmistakably Irish, with a There is an old saw that a month, or a week, or even a day can be
newspaper spread out in front of her, weeping silently, with tears an eternity in politics, but the period of time between the election
running down her face. of Republican Richard Nixon as president in 1968 following Ken-
I knew immediately what must have happened, and why she nedy’s death and the election of the next Democratic president,
was crying. Two days before was the finale Jimmy Carter, in 1976 is a chasm. Political scien-
of the California primary in that year’s race tist Robert D. Putnam, in his book The Upswing,
for the Democratic nomination for president has described these years as the period when my
of the United States, pitting Bobby Kennedy generation—the ’60s generation—abandoned
against Eugene McCarthy, and the news was the idealism of our youth and became (in essence)
trickling out that, after declaring victory, Bob- materialistic “yuppies,” while commentators
by—like his brother Jack, like the civil rights such as journalist Michael Lind and political
leaders Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King philosopher Michael Sandel have identified
and Malcolm X—had been assassinated. In President Carter as the first in an extended line
Bobby’s case, it had nothing to do with civil of presidents, both Democratic and Republican,
rights. The assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, a Pal- who imposed the economic philosophy of neo-
estinian Jordanian, was irate at Bobby for liberalism on the American economy, a creed
supporting Israel in the 1967 Six Day War with that calls for putting the dictates of the capi-
surrounding Arab states. Kennedy was shot talist marketplace above the economic needs
point-blank as he was being led through the of the American people. Trump disdained the
kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Ange- free-trade agreements that were part and parcel
les, after giving his victory speech for having of the neoliberal worldview, which is one of the
won the California primary. But murder and mayhem were in main factors that made him popular among American workers.
the air in 1960s America, with the Vietnam War killing many America, in 1968, was a fractured country, and Bobby Kenne-
thousands of U.S. troops, riots in the major cities every single dy’s campaign that year has been characterized as a redemption
summer, and the decade’s grand finale, the ghoulish Manson tour. One of Kennedy’s greatest strengths, which Newfield point-
family murders of August 1969. ed out, was that he was capable of uniting members of both the
Years later, in preparation for a column I was writing for the black and white working classes in the common cause of helping
GARY FRIEDMAN/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY

fiftieth anniversary of Bobby’s death, I reread Jack Newfield’s to redeem a nation seething with discord. Vice President Kamala
masterful book RFK: A Memoir, and two things stood out for Harris is also embarked on a redemption effort, but her challenge
me after all those years. The first was Newfield’s fascination at is greater than Kennedy’s was, since the current right wing, under
Bobby’s memorial service in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York the aegis of Trump, has set much of the white population on edge
with the fact that both Richard Daley, the hard-nosed mayor of about our emerging multiracial society. Qualities Harris possess-
Chicago, and Tom Hayden, the young 1960s radical, were seated es to counter this phenomenon include a shining intelligence, an
in the cathedral and weeping openly. Newfield comments: “No infectious optimism, a deep-seated integrity, and a manifest love
other public figure could have so touched, at the same time, a of a country that allowed the child of two nonwhite immigrants
young radical and an old machine boss.” And then this comment to ascend as far as she has already. She could restore the nation to
at the very end of the book: a condition of political health.

68 November 2024
 Explore Cuba!
“The plan of this trip was so
imaginatively thought
through and done with such
efficiency that it all now
seems a bit of a miracle.”
—Stanley, TNR traveler

To Your Most Adventurous Self,

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