Yoni Appelbaum | The Atlantic

How Progressives Froze the American Dream

2025-02-10T05:59:00-05:00

Illustrations by Javier Jaén

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The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.

No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American “is devoured with a passion for locomotion,” the French writer Michel Chevalier observed in 1835; “he cannot stay in one place.” Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come. They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive. “We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” one 19th-century newspaper explained. “We have cut loose from the old styles of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, as two world wars passed, as the Baby Boom began, Americans kept on moving. And as Americans moved around, they moved up. They broke away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, declining towns, dead-end jobs. If the first move didn’t work out, they could always see a more promising destination beckoning them onward.

These ceaseless migrations shaped a new way of thinking. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” And as diverse peoples learned to live alongside one another, the possibilities of pluralism opened. The term stranger, in other lands synonymous with enemy, instead, Becker wrote, became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less like a threat than a welcome addition: Howdy, stranger.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on.

But over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans have become less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or even to switch residences within a city. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.

The sharp decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, although other shifts have attracted far more attention. In that same span, fewer Americans have started new businesses, and fewer Americans have switched jobs—from 1985 to 2014, the share of people who became entrepreneurs fell by half. More Americans are ending up worse off than their parents—in 1970, about eight out of every 10 young adults could expect to earn more than their parents; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half of young adults. Church membership is down by about a third since 1970, as is the share of Americans who socialize several times a week. Membership in any kind of group is down by half. The birth rate keeps falling. And although half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same.

These facts by now form a depressingly familiar litany. They are often regarded as disparate phenomena of mysterious origins. But each of them can be traced, at least in part, to the loss of mobility.

In 2016, Donald Trump tapped into the anger, frustration, and alienation that these changes had produced. Among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a solid six-point lead in the vote that year. Those living within a two-hour drive, though, backed Trump by nine points. And those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points. Eight years later, he tapped that support again to recapture the White House.

Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood.

As a result, many Americans are stranded in communities with flat or declining prospects, and lack the practical ability to move across the tracks, the state, or the country—to choose where they want to live. Those who do move are typically heading not to the places where opportunities are abundant, but to those where housing is cheap. Only the affluent and well educated are exempt from this situation; the freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

Reviving mobility offers us the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way.

Javier Jaén

I. Moving Day

The great holiday of American society at its most nomadic was Moving Day, observed by renters and landlords throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th with a giant game of musical houses. Moving Day was a festival of new hopes and new beginnings, of shattered dreams and shattered crockery—“quite as recognized a day as Christmas or the Fourth of July,” as a Chicago newspaper put it in 1882. It was primarily an urban holiday, although many rural communities where leased farms predominated held their own observances. The dates differed from state to state and city to city—April 1 in Pittsburgh, October 1 in Nashville and New Orleans—but May 1 was the most popular. And nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.

For months before Moving Day, Americans prepared for the occasion. Tenants gave notice to their landlords or received word of the new rent. Then followed a frenzied period of house hunting as people, generally women, scouted for a new place to live that would, in some respect, improve upon the old. “They want more room, or they want as much room for less rent, or they want a better location, or they want some convenience not heretofore enjoyed,” The Topeka Daily Capital summarized. These were months of general anticipation; cities and towns were alive with excitement.

[Jerusalem Demsas: The right to move is under attack]

Early on the day itself, people commenced moving everything they owned down to the street corners in great piles of barrels and crates and carpetbags, vacating houses and apartments before the new renters arrived. “Be out at 12 you must, for another family are on your heels, and Thermopylae was a very tame pass compared with the excitement which rises when two families meet in the same hall,” a Brooklyn minister warned. The carmen, driving their wagons and drays through the narrow roads, charged extortionate rates, lashing mattresses and furnishings atop heaps of other goods and careening through the streets to complete as many runs as they could before nightfall. Treasure hunters picked through detritus in the gutters. Utility companies scrambled to register all the changes. Dusk found families that had made local moves settling into their new home, unpacking belongings, and meeting the neighbors.

In St. Louis, the publisher of a city directory estimated in 1906 that over a five-year span, only one in five local families had remained at the same address. “Many private families make it a point to move every year,” The Daily Republican of Wilmington, Delaware, reported in 1882. Moving Day was nothing short of “a religious observance,” the humorist Mortimer Thomson wrote in 1857. “The individual who does not move on the first of May is looked upon … as a heretic and a dangerous man.”

Moving Day was, The Times-Democrat of New Orleans attested, “an essentially American institution.” Europeans might move “in a sober, quiet, old-world way, once in a decade or thereabout,” the paper explained, but not annually, in the “excessive energetic manner of the nomadic, roving American.” European visitors made a point of witnessing the peculiar ritual and included accounts of carts flying up and down the streets in their travelogs.

For some, Moving Day meant trauma and dislocation. In tightening markets, landlords seized the opportunity to jack up rents. But in most places and for most people, Moving Day was an opportunity. The housing stock was rapidly expanding. You could spot the approach of the holiday, a Milwaukee paper explained, by the sight of new buildings being rushed to completion and old houses being renovated and restored. As wealthier renters snapped up the newest properties to come to market, less affluent renters grabbed the units they vacated in a chain of moves that left almost all tenants better off. Landlords faced the ruinous prospect of extended vacancies if they couldn’t fill their units on Moving Day. Tenants used their leverage to demand repairs and upgrades to their house or apartment, or to bargain for lower rent.

The habit of annual moves was not confined to the poor or the working class. Nor was it confined to local relocations. Americans moved to new territories, thriving towns, and rapidly growing cities, driven forward by hope. “That people should move so often in this city, is generally a matter of their own volition,” the journalist and social reformer Lydia Maria Child wrote of New York. “Aspirations after the infinite,” she added tartly, “lead them to perpetual change, in the restless hope of finding something better and better still.” It’s not a bad summary of the American dream.

What lubricated all of this movement was not an abundance of space but rather a desperate eagerness to put space to better use. The viability of their communities, Americans believed, rested on their capacity to attract merchants and manufacturers and, above all, residents. Land use was regulated as early as the colonial era, but the rules were sparse, and written to maximize development. A fallow field or an abandoned mine could be seized; a vacant lot could draw a stiff fine. Noxious businesses, such as tanneries and distilleries, were consigned to the margins, for fear that they would deter construction in the center. The goal was growth.

The nation’s push westward in the 1800s created new opportunities, and Americans moved toward them—dispossessing Native peoples of their land—but westward migration was never the whole story, or even most of it. The rate of migration within the East was even higher, as Americans drained away from farms and into market towns, county seats, and teeming industrial cities. There were few rules about what could be constructed on private property, and a diverse array of buildings sprang up to meet demand. A new arrival might rent a room in a private home, boardinghouse, tenement, residential hotel, or bachelors-only apartment building. Some of these structures were garish, or stuck out from their surroundings like tall weeds. Reformers were eager to manage the chaos, and cities began to adopt more extensive building codes, aimed at reducing the risk of fire and protecting the health of residents. But old buildings continually yielded to newer ones, as neighborhoods climbed higher to meet demand; the first townhouse on a block of freestanding homes might, a couple of decades later, be the last remaining townhouse sandwiched between apartment buildings.

So long as speculators erected new buildings, so long as aging houses were turned over to the rental market or split up into flats, so long as immigrant entrepreneurs built new tenements, people could reasonably expect to find a new home each year that in some way exceeded their old. And through the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th, the supply of homes steadily expanded.

Javier Jaén

Americans of that era tended to look at houses the way Americans today look at cars or iPhones—as useful contrivances that nevertheless lose their value quickly and are prone to rapid technological obsolescence. Every year, newly constructed and freshly renovated homes offered wonders and marvels: water that ran out of taps, cold and then hot; indoor plumbing and flush toilets and connections to sewer lines; gas lighting, and then electric; showers and bathtubs; ranges and stoves; steam heating. Factories created new materials and cranked out hinges, doorknobs, hooks, wooden trim, and railings in a dizzying variety of styles. One decade’s prohibitive luxury was the next’s affordable convenience and the third’s absolute necessity. A home was less a long-term investment—most people leased—than a consumer good, to be enjoyed until the next model came within reach.

The cultural implications of an always-on-the-move society were profound, and perhaps counterintuitive. As they observed the nomadic style of American life, some critics worried that the constantly shifting population would produce an atomized society, leaving people unable to develop strong ties, invest in local institutions, maintain democratic government, or build warm communities. In fact, that got the relationship between mobility and community precisely backward. Over the course of the 19th century and well into the 20th, Americans formed and participated in a remarkable array of groups, clubs, and associations. Religious life thrived. Democracy expanded. Communities flourished.

The key to vibrant communities, it turns out, is the exercise of choice. Left to their own devices, most people will stick to ingrained habits, to familiar circles of friends, to accustomed places. When people move from one community to another, though, they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness. American individualism didn’t mean that people were disconnected from one another; it meant that they constructed their own individual identity by actively choosing the communities to which they would belong.

[Jacob Anbinder: The pandemic disproved urban progressives’ theory about gentrification]

All of this individual movement added up to a long, grand social experiment—a radical reinvention of what society could be. In the European lands that many immigrants had come from, successive generations lived in the same towns, inhabited the same houses, plied the same trades, and farmed the same land. Experience had taught them that admitting new members left a community with less to go around, so they treated outsiders with suspicion and hostility. They learned that rifts produced lasting bitterness, so they prioritized consensus and conformity. Village life placed the communal above the individual, tradition ahead of innovation, insularity before acceptance.

But when the earliest settlers crossed the Atlantic, they left behind their assumptions. They had moved once, so they should be able to move again. The Puritans soon codified into law the right to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony, likely the first time anywhere in the world that this freedom was put into writing and defined as a fundamental right. Two centuries later, as the midwestern territories competed to attract residents, they would add a complementary freedom, the right to arrive—and to stay, without the need to secure the formal consent of the community. Together, these revolutionary rights conferred on Americans a new freedom to move, enabling the American story.

Mobility was not always uncontested, of course. Waves of immigrants faced discrimination from those who had come only slightly before, turned away from communities just because they were Irish, or Italian, or Jewish. Laws excluded the Chinese, and vigilantes hounded them from their homes. Women seldom enjoyed the full privilege of mobility, constrained by social strictures, legal barriers, and physical dangers. And even after the end of slavery, Black Americans had to fight at every turn to move around, and toward opportunity, in the face of segregation and racist violence. But by the end of the 19th century, mobility was a deeply ingrained habit throughout the United States.

That habit has now been lost, and the toll is enormous. By one estimate, the decline in mobility is costing the American economy nearly $2 trillion each year in lost productivity. The personal costs may be even greater, albeit sometimes harder to recognize. Residential relocation is like physical exercise in this way: Whether you’re sitting on a couch or ensconced in a home, you’re unlikely to identify inertia as the underlying source of your problems. It’s only when you get up that the benefits of moving around become clear. People who have recently changed residences report experiencing more supportive relationships and feeling more optimism, greater sense of purpose, and increased self-respect. Those who want to move and cannot, by contrast, become more cynical and less satisfied with their lives. And Americans are shifting from that first category to the second: Since 1970, the likelihood that someone who expects to move in the next few years will successfully follow through on that ambition has fallen by almost half.

Americans of previous generations would be shocked by our stagnation. The inclination to keep moving was long the defining feature of the American character. And yet today, we’re stuck. What went wrong?

II. Who Killed American Mobility?

Blame Jane Jacobs. American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors. And Jacobs, the much-celebrated urbanist who died in 2006, played a pivotal role.

In 1947, when Jacobs and her husband, Robert, moved to their new home in Manhattan’s West Village, the area was still filled with immigrants and their children, with people constantly moving in and moving out. Before the Jacobses arrived at 555 Hudson Street, the building had been rented by an immigrant named Rudolph Hechler, who lived with his family above the store they operated. A large sign read FOUNTAIN SERVICE—SODA—CANDY, and a cheerful awning added cigars and toys to the list of promised delights. Hechler had come to the U.S. from Austrian Galicia when he was 13, and spent much of his life working in the garment industry, chasing the American dream. He moved between apartments and neighborhoods until he had finally saved enough to move his family from the Bronx to the West Village and open his own shop.

Bob and Jane were different. They were young, urban professionals, Bob an architect and Jane a writer for a State Department magazine. And they came to stay. With dual incomes and no kids, they were able to put down $7,000 in cash to purchase a house, placing them among the scarcely 1 percent of families in all of Greenwich Village who owned their home.

Instead of finding a new tenant for the storefront, the Jacobses ripped it out, transforming their building into a single-family home. They cleared the bricks from the lot behind the house, turning it into a fenced-in garden. On the first floor, they installed a modern kitchen, dining room, and living room, with French doors opening onto the backyard. “The front of No. 555,” a preservation report later noted, “was rebuilt in 1950 at considerable expense, using metal sash and two-colored brick to complete the horizontality of the wide windows. It retains no vestige of its original appearance.” (The new facade, the report concluded, had been “badly remodeled,” and was “completely out of character” with the neighborhood.)

That Jacobs would later celebrate the importance of mixed-use spaces to urban vitality, drawing a vivid portrait of the remaining shops on her street, presents no small irony. But in doing as she pleased with the property she had purchased, she was only upholding a long American tradition. The larger irony involves what Jacobs did next. Although she is widely remembered as a keen-eyed advocate for lively and livable cities, her primary legacy was to stultify them—ensuring that no one else could freely make changes as she had and, most important, ruling out the replacement of existing buildings with larger structures that could make room for upward strivers.

[From the August 2019 issue: The economist who would fix the American dream]

Jacobs arrived in the West Village just as many Americans were abandoning dense, urban neighborhoods for the attractions of suburbia. For decades, city officials and reformers had worried about the spread of urban blight. They looked at the crowding, chaos, and confusion of immigrant neighborhoods like the West Village with horror. They wanted to sweep away neighborhoods that grew and decayed organically and replace them with carefully planned blocks. Urban planners sought to provide families with affordable homes, consolidate the jumble of corner stores into supermarkets, and keep offices at a distance. Everything would be rational, everything modern. They wanted to take the rich stew of urban life and separate out its components like a toddler’s dinner—the peas to one quadrant, the carrots to another, the chicken to a third—safely removed from direct contact.

In 1916, the year Jacobs was born, New York City began an ambitious effort to achieve this sort of separation: enacting the first comprehensive zoning code in the United States. By the time Jacobs moved there almost two decades later, the once-radical scheme of zoning, with sections of the city separated out for different uses, seemed less a startling change than a natural feature of the city’s environment. Urban planners had hailed it as a cure for poverty and blight; it was supposed to ensure a better future for the city. But zoning failed to produce these benefits, instead limiting the ability of New York and like-minded cities to adapt to evolving needs. Officials soon embraced a more radical scheme of urban renewal: bulldozing old, dense neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance. And Jacobs, whatever her other sins, had the courage to stand up and demand that it stop.

From her renovated home on Hudson Street, Jacobs fell in love with the city as it was—not the city as urban planners dreamed it might be. She saw shopkeepers greeting customers and schoolchildren buying candy. She watched her neighbor wheeling his handcart, making laundry deliveries to customers, in what she later described as an “intricate sidewalk ballet.” She realized that many of the things professional planners hated about cities were precisely what most benefited their residents.

And so Jacobs sat down before her Remington and pounded out The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book, published in 1961, took aim at urban renewal and all that it destroyed in the name of progress. When, that same year, Jacobs learned that the city intended to designate her own neighborhood for renewal, she rallied a small group of residents to its defense. They wrote letters and showed up at hearings and plastered the neighborhood with flyers, creating the illusion of mass opposition. And it worked. Jacobs and her collaborators were among the first residents of a city neighborhood to successfully block an urban-renewal scheme. Jacobs’s book—its brilliantly observed account of urban life, its adages and conjectures—paired with her success as an activist to catapult her to fame. She became the apostle of urbanism, and eager disciples sought her out to learn how they might defend their own neighborhood.

But in halting the ravages of clearance, Jacobs advanced a different problem: stasis. For centuries, the built form of the West Village had continually evolved. Old buildings were torn down and larger structures were erected in their place. The three-story houses to one side of Jacobs’s, at 553 and 551 Hudson, which had once held small businesses of their own, had been bought by a developer in 1900 and replaced with a six-story apartment building. Zoning had already begun to put some limits on this evolution but had not stopped it.

Jacobs’s activism blocked efforts to add any more buildings like the one next to her house. Other three-story houses could no longer be consolidated and built up into six-story apartment blocks; the existing six-story walk-ups couldn’t be turned into 12-story elevator buildings. Such development would change the physical appearance of the neighborhood, and also risk displacing current residents or small businesses—eventualities to which Jacobs was fundamentally hostile. Before, the neighborhood had always grown to accommodate demand, to make room for new arrivals. Now it froze.

At an intellectual level, Jacobs understood that simply preserving historic buildings cannot preserve a neighborhood’s character; she warned that zoning should not seek “to freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death.” A neighborhood is defined by its residents and their interactions, as Jacobs herself so eloquently argued, and it continually evolves. It bears the same relation to its buildings as does a lobster to its shell, periodically molting and then constructing a new, larger shell to accommodate its growth. But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.

To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them. Over the decades that followed, that idea would take hold throughout the United States. A nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.

Javier Jaén

Jacobs’s book marked a shift in American attitudes. Where civic boosters once sketched fantastical visions of future development, competing to lure migrants their way, by the 1960s they had begun to hunker down and focus on preserving what they had against the threat of what the architectural critic Lewis Mumford called the “disease of growth.” State legislatures had authorized local governments to regulate land use at the beginning of the 20th century, but now activists pressed for even more local control—for what the writer Calvin Trillin has called “neighborhoodism.” They were justifiably concerned that unrestrained growth was degrading the environment, displacing residents, and leveling historic structures. More than that, they were revolting against the power of Big Government and Big Business, and trying to restore a focus on the public interest. They demanded that permitting processes consider more fully the consequences of growth, mandating an increasing number of reviews, hearings, and reports.

But in practice, the new processes turned out to be profoundly antidemocratic, allowing affluent communities to exclude new residents. More permitting requirements meant more opportunities for legal action. Even individual opponents of new projects had only to win their lawsuits, or at least spend long enough losing them, to deter development.

The preservation of the West Village itself, long celebrated as a triumph of local democracy, was in fact an early case study in this new form of vetocracy. What saved it from being bulldozed like other working-class areas in Manhattan was not the vitality of its streetfronts. Instead, it was saved because the displacement of working-class immigrants by college-educated professionals was already further along than the urban planners had appreciated when they’d designated it a slum. The night after the first public meeting of the Committee to Save the West Village in 1961, the activists reconvened in the apartment of a recent arrival who conducted market research for a living. He showed them how to survey residents to compile a demographic profile of the area. Jane’s husband, Bob, the architect, began looking at the condition of the existing buildings. Carey Vennema, who’d graduated from NYU Law School a few years before, began researching tax records. A sound engineer compared recordings he took in the West Village with those in affluent neighborhoods. This small group of professionals leveraged their training and expertise to mount a challenge to the planning process—a form of bureaucratic warfare unavailable to the great majority of Americans.

Their success in limiting new housing in the West Village hasn’t just kept the neighborhood from expanding; it’s helped empty it out. The neighborhood that Jacobs fought to preserve in the 1960s was already shrinking. Jacobs celebrated the fact that her neighborhood’s population, which peaked at 6,500 in 1910, had dropped to just 2,500 by 1950. This represented, she argued, “unslumming”—what today we would call gentrification. As households more than doubled the space they occupied, amid rising standards of living, the neighborhood would have needed to replace its existing townhouses with apartment buildings that were at least twice as tall, just to maintain its population. Instead, the neighborhood kept its townhouses and lost most of its population. Despite her strident insistence that not a sparrow be displaced from the Village of the ’60s, Jacobs cast the displacement of a dynamic working-class community of immigrant renters in the 1950s by a stable, gentrified population of professional-class homeowners as a triumph. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out,” she wrote. Jacobs prized stability over mobility, preferring public order over the messiness of dynamism.

Yet in one respect, preservation proved more lethal to the texture of the community than redevelopment. Jacobs bought her home for $7,000 in 1947, rehabilitated it, and sold it 24 years later for $45,000. “Whenever I’m here,” Jacobs told The New Yorker in 2004, “I go back to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now.” Five years after that interview, it sold again, for $3.3 million; today, the city assesses it at $6.6 million. If you could scrape together the down payment at that price, your monthly mortgage payment would be—even adjusted for inflation—about 90 times what the Hechlers paid each month to live in the same building.

Jane Jacobs, of course, is not the only suspect in the death of American mobility; there are many others. People have always been most mobile while they’re relatively young, and the country is aging; the median American was just 16 years old in 1800 and 28 in 1970, but is nearly 39 today. The rise in two-career households might have made relocation more difficult. The prevalence of joint custody makes it harder for members of divorced couples to move. More Americans own their home, and renters have always been more mobile. Some Americans, perhaps, have simply grown more successful at locating jobs and communities that meet their needs, reducing their impulse to move someplace else. Some are relying on remote work to stay where they are.

But none of these answers can possibly explain the broad, persistent decline in geographic mobility. The country may be older, but the drop in mobility has been particularly steep among younger Americans. Two-earner households may be less mobile, but their mobility has declined in tandem with that of other groups. Mobility is down not just among homeowners but also among renters, and its decline predates the rise of remote work. And there is little to suggest that staying put over the past half a century has left Americans more satisfied with their lives.

Jacobs’s activism capped a century of dramatic legal change that eroded the freedom to move. Zoning may have been adopted, eventually, by well-meaning urban planners, but the process began in 1885 in Modesto, California, where bigoted local officials were looking for a tool to push out Chinese residents. The federal courts would not allow them to segregate their city by race, but they hit on a workaround, confining laundries—whose proprietors were overwhelmingly Chinese and generally lived in their shops—to the city’s Chinatown. Over the ensuing decades, other cities embraced the approach, discovering that segregating land by its uses and the size of the buildings it could hold was a potent means of segregating populations by race, ethnicity, and income. New York, for example, first adopted zoning in part to push Jewish garment workers down fashionable Fifth Avenue and back into the Lower East Side. As zoning proliferated, it was put to a wide variety of uses, some laudable and others execrable. The housing programs of the New Deal then spread the system nationally, by limiting federal loans only to those jurisdictions that had put in place tight zoning rules and racially restrictive covenants.

But zoning alone was not enough to halt American mobility, even if it did serve to widen inequalities. Zoning had introduced a new legal reality: Putting up any housing now required government approval. It was progressives like Jacobs who then exploited this reality, creating a new set of legal tools, beginning around 1970, for anyone with sufficient time, money, and patience to challenge government decisions in court, handing neighbors an effective veto over housing approval.

Not every place in America is having its growth choked off by zoning, or by the weaponization of environmental reviews or historic-preservation laws. The opposition to mobility appears concentrated in progressive jurisdictions; one study of California found that when the share of liberal votes in a city increased by 10 points, the housing permits it issued declined by 30 percent. The trouble is that in the contemporary United States, the greatest economic opportunities are heavily concentrated in blue jurisdictions, which have made their housing prohibitively expensive. So instead of moving toward opportunity, for the first time in our history, Americans are moving away from it—migrating toward the red states that still allow housing to be built, where they can still afford to live.

[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]

It is hard to overstate how much is lost when people can no longer choose to move toward opportunity. Social-science research suggests that the single most important decision you can make about your children’s future is not what you name them, or how you educate them, or what extracurriculars you enroll them in—it’s where you raise them. But if Americans cannot afford to move to the places with growing industries and high-paying jobs, or if they can’t switch to a neighborhood with safer streets and better schools, and instead remain stuck where they are, then their children will see their own prospects decline.

Not far from where I live, in Washington, D.C., two lawn signs sit side by side on a neatly manicured lawn. One proclaims NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE FROM, WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE OUR NEIGHBOR, in Spanish, English, and Arabic. The other reads SAY NO, urging residents to oppose the construction of an apartment building that would house the new neighbors the other sign purports to welcome. Whatever its theoretical aspirations, in practice, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.

III. Building a Way Out

In December, the Census Bureau reported that the United States had set a dismal new record: The percentage of Americans who had moved in the previous year was at an all-time low. That same month, the economist Jed Kolko calculated that geographic inequality—the gap in average incomes between the richer and poorer parts of the country—had reached an all-time high. The loss of American mobility is a genuine national crisis. If it is less visible than the opioid epidemic or mounting political extremism, it is no less urgent. In fact, the despair it fosters is fueling these and other crises, as Americans lose the chance to build the best possible lives for themselves and their children.

Even partial analyses of immobility’s costs yield staggering results. Consider, for instance, just the economic growth that has been lost by preventing people from moving to where they would be most productive. The economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti recently imagined a world of perfect mobility, in which the three most productive U.S. metropolitan areas—New York, San Francisco, and San Jose—had constructed enough homes since 1964 to accommodate everyone who stood to gain by moving there. That alone, they calculated, would have boosted GDP by about $2 trillion by 2009, or enough to put an extra $8,775 into the pocket of every American worker each year. It’s a rough estimate, but it gives a sense of the scale of the distortions we have introduced, and the price we are each paying for them.

But the social costs are arguably even greater than the economic ones. Among academics, the claim that housing regulations have widened inequality is neither novel nor controversial. The economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag offer an illustration: If a lawyer moved from the Deep South to New York City, he would see his net income go up by about 39 percent, after adjusting for housing costs—the same as it would have done back in 1960. If a janitor made the same move in 1960, he’d have done even better, gaining 70 percent more income. But by 2017, his gains in pay would have been outstripped by housing costs, leaving him 7 percent worse off. Working-class Americans once had the most to gain by moving. Today, the gains are largely available only to the affluent.

Many of the country’s more dynamic cities, along with the suburbs around them, have continued to wall themselves off in recent years, using any means available. In Manhattan, for instance, 27 percent of all lots are now in historic districts or are otherwise landmarked, predominantly in the borough’s most affluent areas. And once a neighborhood in these areas is designated historic, new construction within it drops dramatically below the city’s already grossly inadequate rate. In D.C., where nearly 19 percent of buildings are similarly protected, residents of the well-off Cleveland Park neighborhood once stopped the construction of an apartment building by getting the old Park and Shop on which it was going to be built designated as historic; it was one of the first examples of strip-mall architecture in the country, the research of one enterprising resident revealed.

The good news is that addressing this crisis of mobility doesn’t depend on your moving anywhere, if you’d rather stay where you are. It doesn’t depend on your surrendering your single-family home, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can keep your lawn, your driveway, your garden. Solving crises often requires great sacrifice. But the simplest solution to this one promises to leave everyone better off. All you have to do is make room for some new neighbors—maybe even new friends—to join you, by allowing other people to build new housing on their own property. Americans are generally skeptical of the hassles of development and tend to focus on the downsides of change in their neighborhood. But if you ask them about the benefits—whether they’d allow construction in their neighborhood if it meant letting people live closer to jobs and schools and family members—they suddenly become overwhelmingly supportive of the idea.

If we want a nation that offers its people upward mobility, entrepreneurial innovation, increasing equality, vibrant community, democratic participation, and pluralistic diversity, then we need to build it. I mean that quite literally. We need to build it. And that will require progressives, who constitute overwhelming political majorities in almost all of America’s most prosperous and productive areas, to embrace the strain of their political tradition that emphasizes inclusion and equality.

There are at least some signs that this message is taking root. California has enacted a series of legislative reforms aimed at paring back local zoning regulations. Cities across the country are banning zoning that restricts neighborhoods to single-family homes. Where older environmental activists rallied to block any new construction, a new generation of environmentalists sees building new housing near public transit as an essential tool in the fight against climate change. And national politicians have started to talk about our affordable-housing crisis.

These changes are encouraging, but insufficient. And sometimes the solutions on offer solve the wrong problem: Building subsidized housing in a place where land is cheap because jobs are scarce will help with affordability, but only worsen immobility.

Any serious effort to restore mobility should follow three simple principles. The first is consistency. Rules that apply uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses, while providing equitable protections to residents. Rules that are tailored to the desires of specific neighborhoods will tend, over time, to concentrate less desirable land uses and more affordable housing in poorer areas. Just as the federal government once used its power as a housing lender to force local jurisdictions to adopt zoning laws, it could now do the same to reform those laws, encouraging states to limit the discretion of local authorities.

[From the November 1961 issue: “Moving Day,” a short story]

The second principle is tolerance. Organic growth is messy and unpredictable. Giving Americans the freedom to live where they want requires tolerating the choices made by others, even if we think the buildings they erect are tasteless, or the apartments too small, or the duplexes out of place. Tastes evolve, as do neighborhoods. The places that thrive over the long term are those that empower people to make their own decisions, and to build and adapt structures to suit their needs.

The third principle is abundance. The best way to solve a supply crunch is to add supply—lots of it, and in places that are attractive and growing, so that housing becomes a springboard, launching people forward rather than holding them back.

How much housing do we need? For 50 years, we’ve been falling behind demand. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation estimates that it would take another 3.7 million units just to adequately house our current population, with the shortfall concentrated among starter homes. Treat that as the lower bound. The trouble is, most existing units are located where regulation is loose and land is cheap, not in the places richest in opportunity; a considerable amount of the nation’s housing is in the wrong place. Another recent estimate that tries to account for that, by the economists Kevin Corinth and Hugo Dante, puts the tally above 20 million. And even that might be too low.

Here’s another way to think about what we really need: As things stand, roughly 20 percent of American workers relocate from one metropolitan area to another over the course of a decade. If all the moves that would happen anyway in the next 10 years brought people to the most prosperous regions, where productivity is highest—places like New York and the Bay Area, but also Austin and northwestern Arkansas—we’d have to add some 30 million new units, or 3 million a year. That’s, perhaps, an upper bound. It’s an ambitious target, but at roughly double our current pace, it’s also an attainable one.

These three principles—consistency, tolerance, and abundance—can help restore American mobility. Federal guidelines can make the environment more amenable, but the solutions by and large cannot come from central planning; states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn’t be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans’ hopes and desires alight.

That would return agency to people, allowing them to pursue opportunity wherever they might find it and to choose the housing that works best for them. For some, that might mean reviving faded towns; for others, it might mean planting new ones. Whatever level of education they have attained, whatever city or region they happen to have been born in, whatever occupation they pursue, individuals—janitors and attorneys alike—should be able to make their own choices.

The genius of the American system was never that its leaders knew what was coming next, but rather that they allowed individual people to decide things for themselves, so that they might collectively make the future.

This article is adapted from Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Stuck In Place.”

What The Atlantic Got Wrong About Reconstruction

2023-11-13T05:55:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

The last time The Atlantic decided to reckon with Reconstruction in a sustained way, its editor touted “a series of scholarly, unpartisan studies of the Reconstruction Period” as “the most important group of papers” it would publish in 1901.

That was true, as far as it went. The collection of essays assembled by Bliss Perry, the literature professor who had recently taken the magazine’s reins, was a tribute to the editor’s craft. The contributors were evenly split between northerners and southerners, and included Democrats and Republicans, participants and historians, professors and politicians. One had been a Confederate colonel, another a Union captain. The prose was as vivid as the perspectives seemed varied.

Yet “The Reconstruction Papers,” as they were billed, were equally an indictment of the journalistic conceit of balance. Perry prided himself on the diversity of the voices he featured in his magazine. “It is not to be expected that they will agree with one another,” he once wrote. “Perhaps they will not even, in successive articles, agree with themselves.” That was a noble vision, but the forum he convened fell well short of the ideal. Despite their disagreements, on the most crucial points, the authors of his Reconstruction studies shared the common views of the elite class to which nearly all of them belonged—and much of what they wrote was both morally and factually indefensible.

The first essay came from Perry’s old Princeton colleague Woodrow Wilson—or “My dear Wilson,” as Perry addressed him. Wilson, then a prominent political scientist, focused on the constitutional legacies of the era—he believed Congress had overstepped its role by protecting civil rights—but slipped in a broad critique of the enterprise. “The negroes were exalted; the states were misgoverned and looted in their name,” he wrote, until “the whites who were real citizens got control again.”

“It’s pretty much the plot of The Birth of a Nation,” Kate Masur, a historian at Northwestern University, told me. She meant that literally. D. W. Griffith’s flamboyantly racist film adapted quotes from the future president’s monumental A History of the American People, in which he expanded on the story he’d sketched in The Atlantic.

The last essay in the collection came from William A. Dunning, a Columbia University historian. The work of his students—who became known as the Dunning School—would promote the view that Black people were incapable of governing themselves, and that Reconstruction had been a colossal error. Dunning portrayed the end of Reconstruction as a reversion to the natural order, with Jim Crow enforcing “the same fact of racial inequality” that slavery had once encoded.

What came in between Wilson and Dunning was somehow even worse. One contributor lauded slavery for lifting “the Southern negro to a plane of civilization never before attained by any large body of his race” by teaching him to be “law-abiding and industrious,” and lamented that emancipation had encouraged idleness. Another wrote an apology for the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps its murderous violence couldn’t quite be excused, he allowed, but the restoration of white supremacy was still “clearly worth fighting for” and “unattainable by any good means.” How could a magazine founded on the eve of the Civil War by abolitionists, which had fervently championed Reconstruction as it unfolded, ever have published such tripe?

The simplest answer is that, by 1901, many elite Americans had soured on the messiness of democracy. In the North, they met the surge of immigrants into industrial cities with creative efforts—civil-service reforms, independent commissions—to take power out of voters’ hands. Out West, they persecuted Chinese immigrants and excluded them from citizenship. In the South, they were busily amending state constitutions to strip Black voters of their rights and to enshrine Jim Crow. And in the territories that America had just acquired in the Spanish-American War, they were building an empire by force of arms. The old sectional divides could be healed, they found, through a new consensus—that only well-educated, propertied white men were capable of governing themselves, and that it was folly to give anyone else the chance to try.

The essays on Reconstruction fit snugly within this consensus, finding that its fatal flaw had been an excess of democracy. To a man (and they were all men), their authors agreed that granting newly emancipated Black men the right to vote had been a terrible mistake, producing corrupt governments that took from the propertied classes to support the poor. The debate was limited to why the mistake had happened, and how it could best be undone.

Except, that is, for one extraordinary contribution. Perry selected a rising star in the world of sociology, W. E. B. Du Bois, to write about the Freedmen’s Bureau—the federal agency that had been charged with protecting the formerly enslaved. But Du Bois, the sole Black author invited to take part, had larger ambitions. The first and last lines of his essay were identical: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” In between, he sketched a vision of Reconstruction as an incomplete revolution, one that had accomplished much before its untimely end left the work for future generations to complete. “Despite compromise, struggle, war, and struggle,” he wrote, “the Negro is not free.”

[From the March 1901 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois on the Freedmen’s Bureau]

Not many magazines of the era, the historian Gregory Downs told me, would have given him the assignment. “It signals a surprising openness to engagement and argument,” he said. In fact, Du Bois failed to interest The Century, perhaps the nation’s preeminent magazine, in an ambitious article on Reconstruction. The Atlantic helped introduce him to a national audience, and although it was the first time he tackled the subject, it would not be the last. His 1935 opus, Black Reconstruction, became the foundation on which our modern understanding of the era is built.

After the last essay, Perry appended a dispirited note. The gravest error of Reconstruction, he conceded, had been “the indiscriminate bestowal of the franchise upon the newly liberated slaves.” But he hastened to add that, unlike most of his essayists, he objected only to the pace of enfranchisement, not to the ultimate goal. The Atlantic, Perry wrote, still believed “in the old-fashioned American doctrine of political equality, irrespective of race or color or station.”

Today, the essays Perry gathered are of interest mostly as windows into a distant era. If there is a useful lesson to take from the Wilsons and the Dunnings, it lies not in any insights they purported to offer, but in their delusions of objectivity. They wrote their history as a just-so story, an explanation of why they deserved the privileges they enjoyed while others were better suited for subservient stations. Du Bois, by contrast, looked to the past not to justify present-day hierarchies but to understand them, and to explore abandoned alternatives. The problem with America, he concluded, wasn’t that democracy and equality had gone too far, but that they had not gone nearly far enough.

Perry’s note closed by voicing his hope that “the old faith that the plain people, of whatever blood or creed, are capable of governing themselves” would eventually reassert itself. Today, at a moment when the old faith is faltering again, we might wish the same.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Atlantic and Reconstruction.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Impeach Trump Again

2021-01-06T16:32:18-05:00

The president of the United States summoned his supporters to Washington, D.C., today, and then stood in front of the White House and lied to them, insisting that he had won the election and that extraordinary measures were necessary to vindicate his win. They took his message to heart, marching up the National Mall toward Capitol Hill. Breaking through barricades and police lines, Confederate battle flags dotting the crowd, the insurrectionists seized control of the United States Capitol, putting Congress to flight.

Four years ago, Donald Trump swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He lost little time in breaking that oath. On December 18, 2019, the House of Representatives reluctantly and belatedly performed its constitutional duty, impeaching the president for abusing his power and obstructing Congress. The Senate refused to similarly perform its own constitutional duty, declining to take up the charges in earnest and failing to muster the requisite two-thirds majority for removal. Only a single Republican, Senator Mitt Romney, acknowledged the obvious truth of the charges, voting to remove the president from office.

[David A. Graham: This is a coup]

Trump has today broken his oath in even more spectacular fashion. The seeds sown by Republican obeisance and congressional quiescence have now yielded their bitter harvest. With his incitement of a direct assault on the people’s house, the president has forfeited his claim to finish his term. The House must again impeach him, and the Senate must vote to remove him. And as it does so, it must bar him from ever again serving in public office.

As the sun set on Washington on Friday, February 21, 1868, the nation braced itself for a second Civil War. In open defiance of Congress, President Andrew Johnson had dismissed his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, and appointed General Lorenzo Thomas in his stead. Stanton stood his ground. He posted an armed guard outside the War Department. The Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ group, mobilized battalions of members in civilian dress to patrol the city; its commander began planning a secret, nationwide mobilization. “If violence is used to eject Mr. Stanton, one hundred thousand men are ready to come to Washington to put him back,” newspapers reported. Union veterans, the San Francisco Chronicle promised, “who whipped the flower of the Confederacy, before they had kissed the dust in the humiliation of defeat,” stood ready to renew the fight.

Yet Stanton turned not to violence, but to law. First, he appealed to the Senate, which on Friday night approved a resolution backing his position, 29–6. Then, he swore out an affidavit for Thomas’s arrest; early Saturday morning, constables dragged Thomas into court, where he was released on $5,000 bail. But the real drama was in the House of Representatives. At 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, its Reconstruction Committee initiated impeachment proceedings against Johnson on the floor of the House.

Meanwhile, fearing a coup, Johnson summoned the general commanding the forces around Washington to the White House, asking him to swap the units of U.S. Colored Troops deployed in the capital for (presumably more sympathetic) white soldiers. The garrison commander refused, telling Johnson that Congress had stripped him of the right to directly issue orders; all commands had to be passed through General Ulysses S. Grant, who was still taking his instructions from Stanton. The president had lost control of the Army. Wild rumors swirled. Had the governor of Maryland offered Johnson the use of his state’s militia? Were 100,000 volunteers on offer from Missouri? Was Johnson asserting control of the War Office in order to use the arsenal of weapons in the capital to arm his supporters?

Johnson’s defenders in the House argued that impeachment—or worse, conviction—posed the clearest threat to the constitutional order. It would be “the overthrow and destruction of our form of government,” thundered the New York Democrat James Brooks, presenting impeachment as an attempt to “depose the president of the United States.” Democrats insisted the matter was best left to the courts, or the consequences could be dire. “We are evidently on the eve of a revolution that may, should appeal be taken to arms, be more bloody than that inaugurated by the firing on Fort Sumter,” warned the staunchly Democratic Boston Post.

Nonsense, replied John Bingham of Ohio, the principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment. The question was whether the president would be allowed “to set himself above the Constitution and above the laws.” The Constitution gave the House, and the House alone, the responsibility for determining whether the president had committed an impeachable offense; the question could not be delegated to the courts. Impeachment, Bingham insisted, was not a threat to public order, but rather, the constitutional means of restoring it. The debate continued in that vein—Democrats insisting that impeachment threatened violence, and Republicans, that it would avert it. On Monday, the House put the question to the test. For the first time in American history, it voted to impeach a president of the United States.

And with that, the fever broke. “Affairs to Be Settled Without Bloodshed,” the Louisville Daily Courier sighed with relief. “To-day but for Congress there would be war,” the Philadelphia Post applauded. Instead of raising armies and firing cannons, the parties hired lawyers and filed motions. Impeachment took the fight off the streets and into the halls of Congress, channeling partisan passion into parliamentary procedures.

[From the March 2019 issue: Impeach Donald Trump]

This has always been the greatest value of impeachment. It is most often debated in legalistic terms, as a question of evidence and constitutional interpretation. Views of particular efforts at impeachment are usually reasoned backward from the preferred result, along partisan lines. But that is too narrow a view. Impeachment is the constitutional mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law, or abusing his power, or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic.

That was what the American people were really debating in 1868. It is what they debated again in 1974, during the presidency of Richard Nixon. And it is the question they confront again today.

We have seen today the terrible cost of Congress’s abdication of its constitutional responsibilities, the chaos and the violence that come when it refuses to hold the chief executive to account for breaking his oath and violating his constitutional responsibilities. Trump poses a danger each day he remains in office, wrapped in solipsistic self-pity, heedless of the damage he inflicts on his supporters, and on the country.

Congress must now act, not just to remove Trump—but to ensure that no president ever risks behaving in this way again. Impeachment is the constitutional mechanism for holding a president accountable, a defiant emphasis upon the rule of law in the face of mob violence, a reassertion of the primacy of American institutions over the rule of passions.

Trump has authored his own indictment, and the evidence of his lips condemns him. If senators could not see it a year ago, when the violence he incited was visited upon the most vulnerable, perhaps they have seen it today, as the violence arrived at their doorstep.

The president must be impeached.

How America Ends

2019-11-12T03:00:00-05:00

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

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“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,” Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. “They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This is the core of the president’s pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss.

In October, with the specter of impeachment looming, he fumed on Twitter, “What is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” For good measure, he also quoted a supporter’s dark prediction that impeachment “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”

Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric matches the tenor of the times. The body politic is more fractious than at any time in recent memory. Over the past 25 years, both red and blue areas have become more deeply hued, with Democrats clustering in cities and suburbs and Republicans filling in rural areas and exurbs. In Congress, where the two caucuses once overlapped ideologically, the dividing aisle has turned into a chasm.

As partisans have drifted apart geographically and ideologically, they’ve become more hostile toward each other. In 1960, less than 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans said they’d be unhappy if their children married someone from the other party; today, 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would be, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute/Atlantic poll—far higher than the percentages that object to marriages crossing the boundaries of race and religion. As hostility rises, Americans’ trust in political institutions, and in one another, is declining. A study released by the Pew Research Center in July found that only about half of respondents believed their fellow citizens would accept election results no matter who won. At the fringes, distrust has become centrifugal: Right-wing activists in Texas and left-wing activists in California have revived talk of secession.

Recent research by political scientists at Vanderbilt University and other institutions has found both Republicans and Democrats distressingly willing to dehumanize members of the opposite party. “Partisans are willing to explicitly state that members of the opposing party are like animals, that they lack essential human traits,” the researchers found. The president encourages and exploits such fears. This is a dangerous line to cross. As the researchers write, “Dehumanization may loosen the moral restraints that would normally prevent us from harming another human being.”

Outright political violence remains considerably rarer than in other periods of partisan divide, including the late 1960s. But overheated rhetoric has helped radicalize some individuals. Cesar Sayoc, who was arrested for targeting multiple prominent Democrats with pipe bombs, was an avid Fox News watcher; in court filings, his lawyers said he took inspiration from Trump’s white-supremacist rhetoric. “It is impossible,” they wrote, “to separate the political climate and [Sayoc’s] mental illness.” James Hodgkinson, who shot at Republican lawmakers (and badly wounded Representative Steve Scalise) at a baseball practice, was a member of the Facebook groups Terminate the Republican Party and The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans. In other instances, political protests have turned violent, most notably in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a Unite the Right rally led to the murder of a young woman. In Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere, the left-wing “antifa” movement has clashed with police. The violence of extremist groups provides ammunition to ideologues seeking to stoke fear of the other side.

What has caused such rancor? The stresses of a globalizing, postindustrial economy. Growing economic inequality. The hyperbolizing force of social media. Geographic sorting. The demagogic provocations of the president himself. As in Murder on the Orient Express, every suspect has had a hand in the crime.

But the biggest driver might be demographic change. The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests. If there are precedents for such a transition, they lie here in the United States, where white Englishmen initially predominated, and the boundaries of the dominant group have been under negotiation ever since. Yet those precedents are hardly comforting. Many of these renegotiations sparked political conflict or open violence, and few were as profound as the one now under way.

Within the living memory of most Americans, a majority of the country’s residents were white Christians. That is no longer the case, and voters are not insensate to the change—nearly a third of conservatives say they face “a lot” of discrimination for their beliefs, as do more than half of white evangelicals. But more epochal than the change that has already happened is the change that is yet to come: Sometime in the next quarter century or so, depending on immigration rates and the vagaries of ethnic and racial identification, nonwhites will become a majority in the U.S. For some Americans, that change will be cause for celebration; for others, it may pass unnoticed. But the transition is already producing a sharp political backlash, exploited and exacerbated by the president. In 2016, white working-class voters who said that discrimination against whites is a serious problem, or who said they felt like strangers in their own country, were almost twice as likely to vote for Trump as those who did not. Two-thirds of Trump voters agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.” In Trump, they’d found a defender.

[Robert P. Jones: The electoral time machine that could reelect Trump]

In 2002, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John Judis published a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that demographic changes—the browning of America, along with the movement of more women, professionals, and young people into the Democratic fold—would soon usher in a “new progressive era” that would relegate Republicans to permanent minority political status. The book argued, somewhat triumphally, that the new emerging majority was inexorable and inevitable. After Barack Obama’s reelection, in 2012, Teixeira doubled down on the argument in The Atlantic, writing, “The Democratic majority could be here to stay.” Two years later, after the Democrats got thumped in the 2014 midterms, Judis partially recanted, saying that the emerging Democratic majority had turned out to be a mirage and that growing support for the GOP among the white working class would give the Republicans a long-term advantage. The 2016 election seemed to confirm this.

But now many conservatives, surveying demographic trends, have concluded that Teixeira wasn’t wrong—merely premature. They can see the GOP’s sinking fortunes among younger voters, and feel the culture turning against them, condemning them today for views that were commonplace only yesterday. They are losing faith that they can win elections in the future. With this come dark possibilities.

The Republican Party has treated Trump’s tenure more as an interregnum than a revival, a brief respite that can be used to slow its decline. Instead of simply contesting elections, the GOP has redoubled its efforts to narrow the electorate and raise the odds that it can win legislative majorities with a minority of votes. In the first five years after conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 39 percent of the counties that the law had previously restrained reduced their number of polling places. And while gerrymandering is a bipartisan sin, over the past decade Republicans have indulged in it more heavily. In Wisconsin last year, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes cast in state legislative races, but just 36 percent of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans tried to impeach the state Supreme Court justices who had struck down a GOP attempt to gerrymander congressional districts in that state. The Trump White House has tried to suppress counts of immigrants for the 2020 census, to reduce their voting power. All political parties maneuver for advantage, but only a party that has concluded it cannot win the votes of large swaths of the public will seek to deter them from casting those votes at all.

The history of the United States is rich with examples of once-dominant groups adjusting to the rise of formerly marginalized populations—sometimes gracefully, more often bitterly, and occasionally violently. Partisan coalitions in the United States are constantly reshuffling, realigning along new axes. Once-rigid boundaries of faith, ethnicity, and class often prove malleable. Issues gain salience or fade into irrelevance; yesterday’s rivals become tomorrow’s allies.

But sometimes, that process of realignment breaks down. Instead of reaching out and inviting new allies into its coalition, the political right hardens, turning against the democratic processes it fears will subsume it. A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up.

Photograph: Sam Kaplan; prop styling: Brian Byrne

Trump has led his party to this dead end, and it may well cost him his chance for reelection, presuming he is not removed through impeachment. But the president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.

Adam Przeworski, a political scientist who has studied struggling democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America, has argued that to survive, democratic institutions “must give all the relevant political forces a chance to win from time to time in the competition of interests and values.” But, he adds, they also have to do something else, of equal importance: “They must make even losing under democracy more attractive than a future under non-democratic outcomes.” That conservatives—despite currently holding the White House, the Senate, and many state governments—are losing faith in their ability to win elections in the future bodes ill for the smooth functioning of American democracy. That they believe these electoral losses would lead to their destruction is even more worrying.

We should be careful about overstating the dangers. It is not 1860 again in the United States—it is not even 1850. But numerous examples from American history—most notably the antebellum South—offer a cautionary tale about how quickly a robust democracy can weaken when a large section of the population becomes convinced that it cannot continue to win elections, and also that it cannot afford to lose them.

The collapse of the mainstream Republican Party in the face of Trumpism is at once a product of highly particular circumstances and a disturbing echo of other events. In his recent study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe, the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt zeroes in on a decisive factor distinguishing the states that achieved democratic stability from those that fell prey to authoritarian impulses: The key variable was not the strength or character of the political left, or of the forces pushing for greater democratization, so much as the viability of the center-right. A strong center-right party could wall off more extreme right-wing movements, shutting out the radicals who attacked the political system itself.

[Read: Daniel Ziblatt on why conservative parties are central to democracy]

The left is by no means immune to authoritarian impulses; some of the worst excesses of the 20th century were carried out by totalitarian left-wing regimes. But right-wing parties are typically composed of people who have enjoyed power and status within a society. They might include disproportionate numbers of leaders—business magnates, military officers, judges, governors—upon whose loyalty and support the government depends. If groups that traditionally have enjoyed privileged positions see a future for themselves in a more democratic society, Ziblatt finds, they will accede to it. But if “conservative forces believe that electoral politics will permanently exclude them from government, they are more likely to reject democracy outright.”

Ziblatt points to Germany in the 1930s, the most catastrophic collapse of a democracy in the 20th century, as evidence that the fate of democracy lies in the hands of conservatives. Where the center-right flourishes, it can defend the interests of its adherents, starving more radical movements of support. In Germany, where center-right parties faltered, “not their strength, but rather their weakness” became the driving force behind democracy’s collapse.

Of course, the most catastrophic collapse of a democracy in the 19th century took place right here in the United States, sparked by the anxieties of white voters who feared the decline of their own power within a diversifying nation.

The slaveholding South exercised disproportionate political power in the early republic. America’s first dozen presidents—excepting only those named Adams—were slaveholders. Twelve of the first 16 secretaries of state came from slave states. The South initially dominated Congress as well, buoyed by its ability to count three-fifths of the enslaved persons held as property for the purposes of apportionment.

Politics in the early republic was factious and fractious, dominated by crosscutting interests. But as Northern states formally abandoned slavery, and then embraced westward expansion, tensions rose between the states that exalted free labor and the ones whose fortunes were directly tied to slave labor, bringing sectional conflict to the fore. By the mid-19th century, demographics were clearly on the side of the free states, where the population was rapidly expanding. Immigrants surged across the Atlantic, finding jobs in Northern factories and settling on midwestern farms. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the foreign-born would form 19 percent of the population of the Northern states, but just 4 percent of the Southern population.

The new dynamic was first felt in the House of Representatives, the most democratic institution of American government—and the Southern response was a concerted effort to remove the topic of slavery from debate. In 1836, Southern congressmen and their allies imposed a gag rule on the House, barring consideration of petitions that so much as mentioned slavery, which would stand for nine years. As the historian Joanne Freeman shows in her recent book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, slave-state representatives in Washington also turned to bullying, brandishing weapons, challenging those who dared disparage the peculiar institution to duels, or simply attacking them on the House floor with fists or canes. In 1845, an antislavery speech delivered by Ohio’s Joshua Giddings so upset Louisiana’s John Dawson that he cocked his pistol and announced that he intended to kill his fellow congressman. In a scene more Sergio Leone than Frank Capra, other representatives—at least four of them with guns of their own—rushed to either side, in a tense standoff. By the late 1850s, the threat of violence was so pervasive that members regularly entered the House armed.

As Southern politicians perceived that demographic trends were starting to favor the North, they began to regard popular democracy itself as a threat. “The North has acquired a decided ascendancy over every department of this Government,” warned South Carolina’s Senator John C. Calhoun in 1850, a “despotic” situation, in which the interests of the South were bound to be sacrificed, “however oppressive the effects may be.” With the House tipping against them, Southern politicians focused on the Senate, insisting that the admission of any free states be balanced by new slave states, to preserve their control of the chamber. They looked to the Supreme Court—which by the 1850s had a five-justice majority from slaveholding states—to safeguard their power. And, fatefully, they struck back at the power of Northerners to set the rules of their own communities, launching a frontal assault on states’ rights.

But the South and its conciliating allies overreached. A center-right consensus, drawing Southern plantation owners together with Northern businessmen, had long kept the Union intact. As demographics turned against the South, though, its politicians began to abandon hope of convincing their Northern neighbors of the moral justice of their position, or of the pragmatic case for compromise. Instead of reposing faith in electoral democracy to protect their way of life, they used the coercive power of the federal government to compel the North to support the institution of slavery, insisting that anyone providing sanctuary to slaves, even in free states, be punished: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Northern law-enforcement officials to arrest those who escaped from Southern plantations, and imposed penalties on citizens who gave them shelter.

The persecution complex of the South succeeded where decades of abolitionist activism had failed, producing the very hostility to slavery that Southerners feared. The sight of armed marshals ripping apart families and marching their neighbors back to slavery roused many Northerners from their moral torpor. The push-and-pull of democratic politics had produced setbacks for the South over the previous decades, but the South’s abandonment of electoral democracy in favor of countermajoritarian politics would prove catastrophic to its cause.

Today, a Republican Party that appeals primarily to white Christian voters is fighting a losing battle. The Electoral College, Supreme Court, and Senate may delay defeat for a time, but they cannot postpone it forever.

[From January/February 2009: Hua Hsu’s cover story on the end of white America]

The GOP’s efforts to cling to power by coercion instead of persuasion have illuminated the perils of defining a political party in a pluralistic democracy around a common heritage, rather than around values or ideals. Consider Trump’s push to slow the pace of immigration, which has backfired spectacularly, turning public opinion against his restrictionist stance. Before Trump announced his presidential bid, in 2015, less than a quarter of Americans thought legal immigration should be increased; today, more than a third feel that way. Whatever the merits of Trump’s particular immigration proposals, he has made them less likely to be enacted.

For a populist, Trump is remarkably unpopular. But no one should take comfort from that fact. The more he radicalizes his opponents against his agenda, the more he gives his own supporters to fear. The excesses of the left bind his supporters more tightly to him, even as the excesses of the right make it harder for the Republican Party to command majority support, validating the fear that the party is passing into eclipse, in a vicious cycle.

Photograph: Sam Kaplan; prop styling: Brian Byrne

The right, and the country, can come back from this. Our history is rife with influential groups that, after discarding their commitment to democratic principles in an attempt to retain their grasp on power, lost their fight and then discovered they could thrive in the political order they had so feared. The Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, criminalizing criticism of their administration; Redemption-era Democrats stripped black voters of the franchise; and Progressive Republicans wrested municipal governance away from immigrant voters. Each rejected popular democracy out of fear that it would lose at the polls, and terror at what might then result. And in each case democracy eventually prevailed, without tragic effect on the losers. The American system works more often than it doesn’t.

The years around the First World War offer another example. A flood of immigrants, particularly from Eastern and Southern Europe, left many white Protestants feeling threatened. In rapid succession, the nation instituted Prohibition, in part to regulate the social habits of these new populations; staged the Palmer Raids, which rounded up thousands of political radicals and deported hundreds; saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan as a national organization with millions of members, including tens of thousands who marched openly through Washington, D.C.; and passed new immigration laws, slamming shut the doors to the United States.

Under President Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party was at the forefront of this nativist backlash. Four years after Wilson left office, the party faced a battle between Wilson’s son-in-law and Al Smith—a New York Catholic of Irish, German, and Italian extraction who opposed Prohibition and denounced lynching—for the presidential nomination. The convention deadlocked for more than 100 ballots, ultimately settling on an obscure nominee. But in the next nominating fight, four years after that, Smith prevailed, shouldering aside the nativist forces within the party. He brought together newly enfranchised women and the ethnic voters of growing industrial cities. The Democrats lost the presidential race in 1928—but won the next five, in one of the most dominant runs in American political history. The most effective way to protect the things they cherished, Democratic politicians belatedly discovered, wasn’t by locking immigrants out of the party, but by inviting them in.

Whether the American political system today can endure without fracturing further, Daniel Ziblatt’s research suggests, may depend on the choices the center-right now makes. If the center-right decides to accept some electoral defeats and then seeks to gain adherents via argumentation and attraction—and, crucially, eschews making racial heritage its organizing principle—then the GOP can remain vibrant. Its fissures will heal and its prospects will improve, as did those of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, after Wilson. Democracy will be maintained. But if the center-right, surveying demographic upheaval and finding the prospect of electoral losses intolerable, casts its lot with Trumpism and a far right rooted in ethno-nationalism, then it is doomed to an ever smaller proportion of voters, and risks revisiting the ugliest chapters of our history.

Two documents produced after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 and before Trump’s election in 2016 lay out the stakes and the choice. After Romney’s stinging defeat in the presidential election, the Republican National Committee decided that if it held to its course, it was destined for political exile. It issued a report calling on the GOP to do more to win over “Hispanic[s], Asian and Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Indian Americans, Native Americans, women, and youth[s].” There was an edge of panic in that recommendation; those groups accounted for nearly three-quarters of the ballots cast in 2012. “Unless the RNC gets serious about tackling this problem, we will lose future elections,” the report warned. “The data demonstrates this.”

But it wasn’t just the pragmatists within the GOP who felt this panic. In the most influential declaration of right-wing support for Trumpism, the conservative writer Michael Anton declared in the Claremont Review of Books that “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” His cry of despair offered a bleak echo of the RNC’s demographic analysis. “If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988,” he wrote, averring that “the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us.” He blamed “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” which had placed Democrats “on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate [their] need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties.”

The Republican Party faced a choice between these two competing visions in the last presidential election. The post-2012 report defined the GOP ideologically, urging its leaders to reach out to new groups, emphasize the values they had in common, and rebuild the party into an organization capable of winning a majority of the votes in a presidential race. Anton’s essay, by contrast, defined the party as the defender of “a people, a civilization” threatened by America’s growing diversity. The GOP’s efforts to broaden its coalition, he thundered, were an abject surrender. If it lost the next election, conservatives would be subjected to “vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent.”

Anton and some 63 million other Americans charged the cockpit. The standard-bearers of the Republican Party were vanquished by a candidate who had never spent a day in public office, and who oozed disdain for democratic processes. Instead of reaching out to a diversifying electorate, Donald Trump doubled down on core Republican constituencies, promising to protect them from a culture and a polity that, he said, were turning against them.

[The gravest danger to American democracy isn’t an excess of vitriol, argues Adam Serwer. It’s the false promise of civility.]

When Trump’s presidency comes to its end, the Republican Party will confront the same choice it faced before his rise, only even more urgently. In 2013, the party’s leaders saw the path that lay before them clearly, and urged Republicans to reach out to voters of diverse backgrounds whose own values matched the “ideals, philosophy and principles” of the GOP. Trumpism deprioritizes conservative ideas and principles in favor of ethno-nationalism.

The conservative strands of America’s political heritage—a bias in favor of continuity, a love for traditions and institutions, a healthy skepticism of sharp departures—provide the nation with a requisite ballast. America is at once a land of continual change and a nation of strong continuities. Each new wave of immigration to the United States has altered its culture, but the immigrants themselves have embraced and thus conserved many of its core traditions. To the enormous frustration of their clergy, Jews and Catholics and Muslims arriving on these shores became a little bit congregationalist, shifting power from the pulpits to the pews. Peasants and laborers became more entrepreneurial. Many new arrivals became more egalitarian. And all became more American.

By accepting these immigrants, and inviting them to subscribe to the country’s founding ideals, American elites avoided displacement. The country’s dominant culture has continually redefined itself, enlarging its boundaries to retain a majority of a changing population. When the United States came into being, most Americans were white, Protestant, and English. But the ineradicable difference between a Welshman and a Scot soon became all but undetectable. Whiteness itself proved elastic, first excluding Jews and Italians and Irish, and then stretching to encompass them. Established Churches gave way to a variety of Protestant sects, and the proliferation of other faiths made “Christian” a coherent category; that broadened, too, into the Judeo-Christian tradition. If America’s white Christian majority is gone, then some new majority is already emerging to take its place—some new, more capacious way of understanding what it is to belong to the American mainstream.

So strong is the attraction of the American idea that it infects even our dissidents. The suffragists at Seneca Falls, Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Harvey Milk in front of San Francisco’s city hall all quoted the Declaration of Independence. The United States possesses a strong radical tradition, but its most successful social movements have generally adopted the language of conservatism, framing their calls for change as an expression of America’s founding ideals rather than as a rejection of them.

Even today, large numbers of conservatives retain the courage of their convictions, believing they can win new adherents to their cause. They have not despaired of prevailing at the polls and they are not prepared to abandon moral suasion in favor of coercion; they are fighting to recover their party from a president whose success was built on convincing voters that the country is slipping away from them.

The stakes in this battle on the right are much higher than the next election. If Republican voters can’t be convinced that democratic elections will continue to offer them a viable path to victory, that they can thrive within a diversifying nation, and that even in defeat their basic rights will be protected, then Trumpism will extend long after Trump leaves office—and our democracy will suffer for it.

Trump Should Go Back to Where He Came From

2019-07-14T11:26:55-04:00

This morning, the president of the United States decided to share his thoughts with the American people:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

It’s not clear to whom the president thought he was referring. There are 10 naturalized American citizens in the House, five of them Democratic women, but few of Donald Trump’s favorite targets number among them. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, was born in the Bronx, Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, and Ayanna Pressley in Cincinnati. And irrespective of their origins, every single member of Congress is as American as democratic dissent.

[Adam Serwer: Trump Tells America What Kind of Nationalist He Is]

There is, however, a prominent American politician on the national stage to whom this description might be applied—a man who came from a county whose government was a complete and total catastrophe, which might hyperbolically be described as the worst, most corrupt and inept, anywhere in the world (if it even had a functioning government at all). And now he loudly and viciously tells the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth, how our government is to be run.

That man, of course, is Donald Trump.

He grew up in Queens, one of New York City’s five boroughs. In 1971, he fled his native county, leaving behind a community wracked by violence, strife, and corruption, crossing the water in search of greater opportunity and a better life in Manhattan. But Trump seems to have brought the very worst aspects of his native political culture along with him.

Consider the political leadership of Queens the year Trump crossed the East River. Donald Manes was elected Queens borough president in 1971. He killed himself in 1986, after being implicated in a massive kickback scheme, in which associates were trading political appointments and other favors for cash.

The man who aided Manes’s rise, a lawyer and politician named Matthew Troy, secured the post of Queens Democratic Party boss in 1971. He’d later plead guilty to taking $37,000 from his clients’ estates and concealing the income on his 1972 tax forms.

But Troy and Manes weren’t corrupting Queens; they were simply abiding by the indigenous political culture. In 1988, Troy delivered a talk to law students taking a class titled “Corruption and Integrity in Government” that offers a bracing look at the culture in which Trump came of age.

[David A. Graham: The Unchecked Corruption of Trump’s Cabinet ]

The public has the impression that politicians are corrupt, Troy told the students, and “usually they are right.” When he was first elected to the city council, in 1964, a reporter offered him the chance to get his name in the paper a lot for just $300 a week. (A native of such a media culture is likely to conclude that it’s perfectly normal to, say, use a newspaper to pay off a porn star who’s threatening to go public with allegations of an affair.)

And bribery was endemic. “There were so many instances where bribes were offered to me—that I did not ever take—that, while I can’t teach you the difference between right and wrong, I have an obligation to help you better understand,” Troy said. The going rate for judgeships, he explained, was $35,000 for a lower-court post and $75,000 for the state supreme court, New York’s trial-level court. He left the class with this thought: “If you are going to enter public life, and you are a young guy with a large family, there are lots of debts. It takes a super man or woman to say no.”

Wasn’t anyone enforcing the laws? Well, the Queens County district attorney at the time was Thomas J. Mackell. In 1972, federal investigators announced that they were looking at nine assistant district attorneys in his office for investing in a Ponzi scheme and concealing the income on their taxes. The ensuing scandal would eventually lead to Mackell’s resignation, indictment, and conviction for blocking the prosecution of the operator of the scheme. (The conviction was later thrown out on appeal.)

New York was a rough, violent city. Homicides spiked by 30 percent in 1971, to 1,650. Fourteen officers died in the line of duty; 11 of them were shot to death.

But even though residents desperately needed police protection, they had little reason to trust the police. Officers staged a five-day wildcat strike in January. In October, the Knapp Commission began public hearings into police corruption, and a parade of witnesses testified that payoffs and shakedowns were endemic in the police force.

[David Frum: Why Is Trump Hiding His Tax Returns? ]

This was the culture in which Trump came of age. To some extent, it persists even today. State Senator Shirley L. Huntley pleaded guilty to funneling $87,000 through a nonprofit to cover shopping sprees; State Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin pleaded guilty in 2008 to pilfering funds from unions, the state, and even a Little League; State Senator Hiram Monserrate pleaded guilty to financing his campaign with municipal funds; State Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio admitted to soliciting half a million dollars in bribes; State Senate Majority Leader Malcolm A. Smith was convicted of bribery, wire fraud, and extortion; and State Comptroller Alan Hevesi—a Queens native—pleaded guilty in connection to a massive corruption scandal involving pension funds. That’s just within the past decade.

But instead of going back to fix the place from which he came, Trump appears to have brought its endemic corruption and pay-to-play transactional culture with him to the nation’s capital. His administration has been repeatedly rocked by scandals. Paul Manafort, his campaign chair, and Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, are guilty of a variety of federal charges. His first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was taking cash from Turkey without properly disclosing it, and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. A former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, and implicated the president in a scheme to violate campaign-finance laws by using the National Enquirer to buy the silence of women alleging affairs with Trump. And that doesn’t even touch on the conspicuous corruption of Trump’s Cabinet, much less the various allegations of self-dealing facing the president and his family.

Queens today is a thriving, multiethnic community. It remains saddled, however, with a corrupt political culture that’s holding back its growth. If Donald Trump could clean it up, I suspect the public would then welcome him back on the national stage to show us how it’s done. It could use the help very badly; he can’t leave fast enough.

And if he’d like to resign his office and go back to Queens, I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements.

The Mueller Report Is an Impeachment Referral

2019-04-18T14:45:28-04:00

The redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report released on Thursday runs 448 pages. But its most important implication can be summarized in a single sentence: There is sufficient evidence that President Donald Trump obstructed justice to merit impeachment hearings.

A basic principle lies at the heart of the American criminal-justice system: The accused is entitled to a fair defense and a chance to clear his name. Every American is entitled to this protection, from the humblest citizen all the way up to the chief executive. And that, Mueller explained in his report, is why criminal allegations against a sitting president should be considered by Congress and not the Justice Department. The Mueller report, in short, is an impeachment referral.

In his report, Mueller took pains to detail why he “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” as to whether the president had broken the law by obstructing justice. He began by noting that he accepted the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)—which issues guidance for the executive branch on questions of law—that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

[Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Donald Trump]

That, Mueller explained, posed an insurmountable problem. A normal investigation would end with a prosecutor deciding to bring charges, or to drop the case. It’s a binary choice. But “fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought.” Ordinarily, a criminal charge would result in “a speedy and public trial, with all the procedural protections that surround a criminal case.” But if Mueller were to state plainly that, in his judgment, the president had broken the law and obstructed justice, it would afford “no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.” In other words, because a sitting president cannot be indicted, making such a charge publicly would effectively deny Trump his day in court, and the chance to clear his name.

Mueller also pointed to the OLC’s guidance on seeking sealed indictments, which could be unsealed when a president leaves office, or leveling such charges in an internal (and, presumably, nonpublic) report. Secrecy, the OLC counseled, would be difficult to preserve—and so either step could place a president back in the same unfair situation, accused of a crime without the chance to clear his name.

Crucially, the same concerns don’t operate in reverse. If—examining the evidence and the law—a prosecutor were to determine not to charge an individual, there would be no fear that public disclosure of that decision would be unfair. But if Mueller believed he could not fairly say that the president had committed a crime, he also believed he could not honestly say that he hadn’t. “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” the report explained:

Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Attorney General William Barr reviewed the same evidence, though, and came to a different conclusion. In his summary of the report, he wrote, “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

[Read: 14 must-read moments from the Mueller report]

There is a vital distinction here between the two findings. Mueller wrote that his evidence was not sufficient to clearly establish that the president had not committed a crime; Barr insisted that it was not sufficient to establish that he had. It’s possible to read the two conclusions as different ways of stating the same finding; it’s equally possible to read them as fundamentally at odds with each other.

This points back to Mueller’s basic concern about fairness. In the report, he laid out 10 specific incidents his team examined, each of which might constitute—singly or in aggregate—evidence of obstructive conduct on the part of the president. “The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” Barr wrote.

But there is another, simpler way to understand Mueller’s report. A footnote spells out that a criminal investigation could ultimately result in charges being brought either after a president has been removed from office by the process of impeachment or after he has left office. Mueller explicitly rejected the argument of Trump’s lawyers that a president could not be guilty of obstruction of justice for the conduct in question: “The protection of the criminal justice system from corrupt acts by any person—including the President—accords with the fundamental principle of our government that ‘[n]o [person] in this country is so high that he is above the law.’”

[Read: Robert Mueller’s written summaries of his Russia report]

But if Mueller believes a president could be held to account after he leaves office, he also spelled out another concern with alleging a crime against a sitting president: the risk that it would preempt “constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.”

The constitutional process for addressing presidential misconduct is impeachment.

As I wrote for this magazine in January, impeachment is best regarded as a process, not an outcome. It’s the constitutional mechanism for investigating whether an executive-branch officer is fit to serve. It requires his accusers to lay out their evidence in public, provides the opportunity for witnesses to be cross-examined, and ultimately forces the House of Representatives to decide whether to impeach—that is, to approve charges that will force a trial in the Senate—or to drop the inquiry, thereby clearing the accused.

The process of deciding whether questionable conduct rises to the level of an impeachable offense is itself a vital civic function of impeachment. Not all crimes are impeachable offenses; not all impeachable offenses are crimes. That’s one reason why only Congress can uphold the basic guarantee of fairness that entitles the accused to be charged with or acquitted of impeachable offenses. And in the past, it’s often been the accused who see this most clearly.

[David Frum: The question the Mueller report has not answered]

In 1826, Vice President John C. Calhoun sent a remarkable letter to the House of Representatives, “in its high character of grand inquest of the nation.” He complained that claims of “impeachable offenses” had been lodged against him in an executive agency. Because he was “conscious of innocence,” he explained, he could “look for refuge only to the Hall of the immediate representatives of the people.” He asked the House to convene impeachment proceedings against him, so that he would have the chance to clear his name. The House agreed and, after an investigation, effectively cleared Calhoun.

Mueller has now delivered 10 credible allegations of obstructive behavior on the part of the president. For all of Trump’s bluster, those claims are now a matter of public record, and will hang over his presidency, despite the decision of his own appointee to clear him in the matter.

The constitutional mechanism for resolving this situation is impeachment. The president, no less than Calhoun, deserves a chance to clear his name. The public deserves a chance to examine the evidence against him. And his supporters and opponents alike deserve the clarity that only convening impeachment hearings can now provide.

It’s Time to Impeach Trump

2019-01-17T09:59:37-05:00

Impeachment is a powerful tool. The time to wield it is now, argues the Atlantic senior editor Yoni Appelbaum. In the latest Atlantic Argument, Appelbaum invokes Andrew Johnson’s impeachment in 1868 to make the case for democratically removing President Donald Trump from office. Appelbaum underscores that this measure is not meant to resolve a policy dispute; rather, it is an attempt to rectify the problem of Trump’s inability to discharge the basic duties of his office.

“The president is unfit for the office he holds,” Appelbaum says in the video. “Congress needs to act now and open an impeachment inquiry.”

For more, read Appelbaum's Atlantic article, “The Case for Impeachment.”

Impeach Donald Trump

2019-01-16T23:00:00-05:00

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

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Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing.

[Read the editor's note]

“The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” the late senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain lamented last summer. “The president has not risen to the mantle of the office,” the GOP’s other recent nominee, the former governor and now senator Mitt Romney, wrote in January.

The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency. He has failed to disclose or divest himself from his extensive financial interests, instead using the platform of the presidency to promote them. This has encouraged a wide array of actors, domestic and foreign, to seek to influence his decisions by funneling cash to properties such as Mar-a-Lago (the “Winter White House,” as Trump has branded it) and his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Courts are now considering whether some of those payments violate the Constitution.

More troubling still, Trump has demanded that public officials put their loyalty to him ahead of their duty to the public. On his first full day in office, he ordered his press secretary to lie about the size of his inaugural crowd. He never forgave his first attorney general for failing to shut down investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and ultimately forced his resignation. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Trump told his first FBI director, and then fired him when he refused to pledge it.

Trump has evinced little respect for the rule of law, attempting to have the Department of Justice launch criminal probes into his critics and political adversaries. He has repeatedly attacked both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. His efforts to mislead, impede, and shut down Mueller’s investigation have now led the special counsel to consider whether the president obstructed justice.

As for the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, Trump has repeatedly trampled upon them. He pledged to ban entry to the United States on the basis of religion, and did his best to follow through. He has attacked the press as the “enemy of the people” and barred critical outlets and reporters from attending his events. He has assailed black protesters. He has called for his critics in private industry to be fired from their jobs. He has falsely alleged that America’s electoral system is subject to massive fraud, impugning election results with which he disagrees as irredeemably tainted. Elected officials of both parties have repeatedly condemned such statements, which has only spurred the president to repeat them.

These actions are, in sum, an attack on the very foundations of America’s constitutional democracy.

[50 moments that define Trump’s presidency]

The electorate passes judgment on its presidents and their shortcomings every four years. But the Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment.

Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe. But the United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.

That is precisely backwards. It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits—to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system—accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.

The fight over whether Trump should be removed from office is already raging, and distorting everything it touches. Activists are radicalizing in opposition to a president they regard as dangerous. Within the government, unelected bureaucrats who believe the president is acting unlawfully are disregarding his orders, or working to subvert his agenda. By denying the debate its proper outlet, Congress has succeeded only in intensifying its pressures. And by declining to tackle the question head-on, it has deprived itself of its primary means of reining in the chief executive.

With a newly seated Democratic majority, the House of Representatives can no longer dodge its constitutional duty. It must immediately open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.

Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections. Despite this clear rebuke of Trump—and despite all that is publicly known about his offenses—party elders remain reluctant to impeach him. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, has argued that it’s too early to talk about impeachment. Many Democrats avoided discussing the idea on the campaign trail, preferring to focus on health care. When, on the first day of the 116th Congress, a freshman representative declared her intent to impeach Trump and punctuated her comments with an obscenity, she was chastised by members of the old guard—not just for how she raised the issue, but for raising it at all.

In no small part, this trepidation is due to the fact that the last effort to remove an American president from office ended in political fiasco. When the House impeached Bill Clinton, in 1998, his popularity soared; in the Senate, even some Republicans voted against convicting him of the charges.

Pelosi and her antediluvian leadership team served in Congress during those fights two decades ago, and they seem determined not to repeat their rivals’ mistakes. Polling has shown significant support for impeachment over the course of Trump’s tenure, but the most favorable polls still indicate that it lacks majority support. To move against Trump now, Democrats seem to believe, would only strengthen the president’s hand. Better to wait for public opinion to turn decisively against him and then use impeachment to ratify that view. This is the received wisdom on impeachment, the overlearned lesson of the Clinton years: House Republicans got out ahead of public opinion, and turned a president beset by scandal into a sympathetic figure.

Instead, Democrats intend to be a thorn in Trump’s side. House committees will conduct hearings into a wide range of issues, calling administration officials to testify under oath. They will issue subpoenas and demand documents, emails, and other information. The chair of the Ways and Means Committee has the power to request Trump’s elusive tax returns from the IRS and, with the House’s approval, make them public.

Other institutions are already acting as brakes on the Trump presidency. To the president’s vocal frustration, federal judges have repeatedly enjoined his executive orders. Robert Mueller’s investigation has brought convictions of, or plea deals from, key figures in his campaign as well as his administration. Some Democrats are clearly hoping that if they stall for long enough, Mueller will deliver them from Trump, obviating the need to act themselves.

But Congress can’t outsource its responsibilities to federal prosecutors. No one knows when Mueller’s report will arrive, what form it will take, or what it will say. Even if Mueller alleges criminal misconduct on the part of the president, under Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted. Nor will the host of congressional hearings fulfill that branch’s obligations. The view they will offer of his conduct will be both limited and scattershot, focused on discrete acts. Only by authorizing a dedicated impeachment inquiry can the House begin to assemble disparate allegations into a coherent picture, forcing lawmakers to consider both whether specific charges are true and whether the president’s abuses of his power justify his removal.

Waiting also presents dangers. With every passing day, Trump further undermines our national commitment to America’s ideals. And impeachment is a long process. Typically, the House first votes to open an investigation—the hearings would likely take months—then votes again to present charges to the Senate. By delaying the start of the process, in the hope that even clearer evidence will be produced by Mueller or some other source, lawmakers are delaying its eventual conclusion. Better to forge ahead, weighing what is already known and incorporating additional material as it becomes available.

Critics of impeachment insist that it would diminish the presidency, creating an executive who serves at the sufferance of Congress. But defenders of executive prerogatives should be the first to recognize that the presidency has more to gain than to lose from Trump’s impeachment. After a century in which the office accumulated awesome power, Trump has done more to weaken executive authority than any recent president. The judiciary now regards Trump’s orders with a jaundiced eye, creating precedents that will constrain his successors. His own political appointees boast to reporters, or brag in anonymous op-eds, that they routinely work to counter his policies. Congress is contemplating actions on trade and defense that will hem in the president. His opponents repeatedly aim at the man but hit the office.

Democrats’ fear—that impeachment will backfire on them—is likewise unfounded. The mistake Republicans made in impeaching Bill Clinton wasn’t a matter of timing. They identified real and troubling misconduct—then applied the wrong remedy to fix it. Clinton’s acts disgraced the presidency, and his lies under oath and efforts to obstruct the investigation may well have been crimes. The question that determines whether an act is impeachable, though, is whether it endangers American democracy. As a House Judiciary Committee staff report put it in 1974, in the midst of the Watergate investigation: “The purpose of impeachment is not personal punishment; its function is primarily to maintain constitutional government.” Impeachable offenses, it found, included “undermining the integrity of office, disregard of constitutional duties and oath of office, arrogation of power, abuse of the governmental process, adverse impact on the system of government.”

Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has lied or dishonored the presidency. The most serious allegations against him ultimately rest on the charge that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy. That is the situation impeachment was devised to address.

Video: It’s Time to Impeach Trump

After the House impeaches a president, the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove him from office. Opponents of impeachment point out that, despite the greater severity of the prospective charges against Trump, there is little reason to believe the Senate is more likely to remove him than it was to remove Clinton. Indeed, the Senate’s Republican majority has shown little will to break with the president—though that may change. The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.

But this sort of vote-counting, in any case, misunderstands the point of impeachment. The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office. The country will benefit greatly regardless of how the Senate ultimately votes. Even if the impeachment of Donald Trump fails to produce a conviction in the Senate, it can safeguard the constitutional order from a president who seeks to undermine it. The protections of the process alone are formidable. They come in five distinct forms.

The first is that once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered this, much to their chagrin. Johnson, the irascible Tennessee Democrat who succeeded to the presidency in 1865 upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, quickly found himself at odds with the Republican Congress. He shattered precedents by delivering a series of inflammatory addresses that dominated the headlines and forced his opponents into a reactive posture. The launching of impeachment inquiries changed that. Day after day, Congress held hearings. Day after day, newspapers splashed the proceedings across their front pages. Instead of focusing on Johnson’s fearmongering, the press turned its attention to the president’s missteps, to the infighting within his administration, and to all the things that congressional investigators believed he had done wrong.

It isn’t just the coverage that changes. When presidents face the prospect of impeachment, they tend to discover a previously unsuspected capacity for restraint and compromise, at least in public. They know that their words can be used against them, so they fume in private. Johnson’s calls for the hanging of his political opponents yielded quickly to promises to defer to their judgment on the key questions of the day. Nixon raged to his aides, but tried to show a different face to the country. “Dignity, command, faith, head high, no fear, build a new spirit,” he told himself. Clinton sent bare-knuckled proxies to the television-news shows, but he and his staff chose their own words carefully.

Trump is easily the most pugilistic president since Johnson; he’s never going to behave with decorous restraint. But if impeachment proceedings begin, his staff will surely redouble its efforts to curtail his tweeting, his lawyers will counsel silence, and his allies on Capitol Hill will beg for whatever civility he can muster. His ability to sidestep scandal by changing the subject—perhaps his greatest political skill—will diminish.

As Trump fights for his political survival, that struggle will overwhelm other concerns. This is the second benefit of impeachment: It paralyzes a wayward president’s ability to advance the undemocratic elements of his agenda. Some of Trump’s policies are popular, and others are widely reviled. Some of his challenges to settled orthodoxies were long overdue, and others have proved ill-advised. These are ordinary features of our politics and are best dealt with through ordinary electoral processes. It is, rather, the extraordinary elements of Trump’s presidency that merit the use of impeachment to forestall their success: his subversion of the rule of law, attacks on constitutional liberties, and advancement of his own interests at the public’s expense.

The Mueller probe as well as hearings convened by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have already hobbled the Trump administration to some degree. It will face even more scrutiny from a Democratic House. White House aides will have to hire personal lawyers; senior officials will spend their afternoons preparing testimony. But impeachment would raise the scrutiny to an entirely different level.

In part, this is because of the enormous amount of attention impeachment proceedings garner. But mostly, the scrutiny stems from the stakes of the process. The most a president generally has to fear from congressional hearings is embarrassment; there is always an aide to take the fall. Impeachment puts his own job on the line, and demands every hour of his day. The rarest commodity in any White House is time, that of the president and his top advisers. When it’s spent watching live hearings or meeting with lawyers, the administration’s agenda suffers. This is the irony of congressional leaders’ counseling patience, urging members to simply wait Trump out and use the levers of legislative power instead of moving ahead with impeachment. There may be no more effective way to run out the clock on an administration than to tie it up with impeachment hearings.

As Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered, once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. (Everett Historical; Charles Tasnadi; J. Scott Applewhite / AP)

But the advantages of impeachment are not merely tactical. The third benefit is its utility as a tool of discovery and discernment. At the moment, it is often hard to tell the difference between wild-eyed conspiracy theories and straight narrations of the day’s news. Some of what is alleged about Trump is plainly false; much of it might be true, but lacks supporting evidence; and many of the best-documented claims are quickly forgotten, lost in the din of fresh allegations. This is what passes for due process in the court of public opinion.

The problem is not new. When Congress first opened the Johnson impeachment hearings, for instance, the committee spent two months chasing rumor and innuendo. It heard allegations that Johnson had sent a secret letter to former Confederate President Jefferson Davis; that he had associated with a “disreputable woman” and, through her, sold pardons; that he had transferred ownership of confiscated railroads as political favors; even that he had conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. The congressman who made that last claim was forced to admit to the committee pursuing impeachment that what he possessed “was not that kind of evidence which would satisfy the great mass of men”—he had simply based the accusation on his belief that every vice president who succeeds to the highest office murders his predecessor.

There was public value, though, in these investigations. The charges had already been leveled; they were circulating and shaping public opinion. Spread by a highly polarized, partisan press, they could not be dispelled or disproved. But once Congress initiated the process of impeachment, the charges had to be substantiated. And that meant taking them from the realm of rhetoric into the province of fact. Many of the claims against Johnson failed to survive the journey. Those that did eventually helped form the basis for his impeachment. Separating them out was crucial.

The process of impeachment can also surface evidence. The House Judiciary Committee began its impeachment hearings against Nixon in October 1973, well before the president’s complicity in the Watergate cover-up was clear. In April 1974, as part of those hearings, the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed 42 White House tapes. In response, Nixon released transcripts of the tapes that were so obviously expurgated that a district judge approved a subpoena from the special prosecutor for the tapes themselves. That demand, in turn, eventually produced the so-called smoking-gun tape, a recording of Nixon authorizing the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation into Watergate. The evidence that drove Nixon from office thus emerged as a consequence of the impeachment hearings; it did not spark them. The only way for the House to find out what Trump has actually done, and whether his conduct warrants removal, is to start asking.

That is not to say that impeachment hearings against Trump would be sober and orderly. The Clinton hearings were something of a circus, and the past two years on Capitol Hill suggest that any Trump hearings will be far worse. The president’s stalwart defenders are already attacking the integrity of potential witnesses and airing their own conspiracy theories; an attempt to smear Mueller with sexual-misconduct claims collapsed spectacularly in October. His accusers, meanwhile, hurl epithets and invective. In Congress, Trump’s most committed detractors might be tempted to follow the bad example of the Clinton impeachment, when, instead of conducting extensive hearings to weigh potential charges, House Republicans short-circuited the process—taking the independent counsel’s conclusions, rushing them to the floor, and voting to impeach in a lame-duck session. Trump’s opponents need to put their faith in the process, empowering a committee to consider specific charges, weigh the available evidence, and decide whether to proceed.

Hosting that debate in Congress yields a fourth benefit: defusing the potential for an explosion of political violence. This is a rationale for impeachment first offered at the Constitutional Convention, in 1787. “What was the practice before this in cases where the chief Magistrate rendered himself obnoxious?” Benjamin Franklin asked his fellow delegates. “Why, recourse was had to assassination in wch. he was not only deprived of his life but of the opportunity of vindicating his character.” A system without a mechanism for removing the chief executive, he argued, offered an invitation to violence. Just as the courts took the impulse toward vigilante justice and safely channeled it into the protections of the legal system, impeachment took the impulse toward political violence and safely channeled it into Congress.

Nixon’s presidency was marked by an upsurge in political terrorism. In just its first 16 months, 4,330 bombings claimed 43 lives. As the Vietnam War wound down and the militant left began to lose its salience, it made opposition to the president its new rallying cry. “Impeach Nixon and jail him for his major crimes,” the Weather Underground demanded in its manifesto, Prairie Fire, in July 1974. “Nixon merits the people’s justice.” But that seemingly radical demand, intended to expose the inadequacy of the regular constitutional order, ironically proved the opposite point. By the end of the month, the House Judiciary Committee had approved three articles of impeachment; in early August, Nixon resigned. The ship of state, it turned out, had the capacity to right itself. The Weather Underground continued its slide into irrelevance, and political violence eventually receded.

The current moment is different, of course. Today, the left is again radicalizing, but the overwhelming majority of political violence is committed by the far right, albeit on a considerably smaller scale than in the Nixon era. Trump himself has warned that “the people would revolt” if he were impeached, a warning that echoes earlier eras. When Congress debated impeachment in 1868, some likewise predicted that it would provoke Andrew Johnson’s most ardent supporters to violence. “We are evidently on the eve of a revolution that may, should an appeal be taken to arms, be more bloody than that inaugurated by the firing on Fort Sumter,” warned The Boston Post.

The predictions were wrong then, as Trump’s are likely wrong now. The public understood that once the impeachment process began, the real action would take place in Congress, and not in the streets. Johnson knew that inciting his supporters to violence would erode congressional support just when he needed it most. That seems the most probable outcome today as well. If impeached, Trump would lose the luxury of venting his resentments before friendly crowds, stirring their anger. His audience, by political necessity, would become a few dozen senators in Washington.

And what if the Senate does not convict Trump? The fifth benefit of impeachment is that, even when it fails to remove a president, it severely damages his political prospects. Johnson, abandoned by Republicans and rejected by Democrats, did not run for a second term. Nixon resigned, and Gerald Ford, his successor, lost his bid for reelection. Clinton weathered the process and finished out his second term, but despite his personal popularity, he left an electorate hungering for change. “Many, including Al Gore, think that the impeachment cost Gore the election,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior member of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s team, told me. “So it has consequences and resonates outside the narrow four corners of impeachment.” If Congress were to impeach Trump, whatever short-term surge he might enjoy as supporters rallied to his defense, his long-term political fate would likely be sealed.

In these five ways—shifting the public’s attention to the president’s debilities, tipping the balance of power away from him, skimming off the froth of conspiratorial thinking, moving the fight to a rule-bound forum, and dealing lasting damage to his political prospects—the impeachment process has succeeded in the past. In fact, it’s the very efficacy of these past efforts that should give Congress pause; it’s a process that should be triggered only when a president’s betrayal of his basic duties requires it. But Trump’s conduct clearly meets that threshold. The only question is whether Congress will act.

Here is how impeachment would work in practice. The Constitution lays out the process clearly, and two centuries of precedent will guide Congress in its work. The House possesses the sole power of impeachment—a procedure analogous to an indictment. Traditionally, this has meant tapping a committee to summon witnesses, subpoena documents, hold hearings, and consider the evidence. The committee can then propose specific articles of impeachment to the full House. If a simple majority approves the charges, they are forwarded to the Senate. The chief justice of the United States presides over the trial; members of the House are designated to act as “managers,” or prosecuting attorneys. If two-thirds of the senators who are present vote to convict, the president is removed from office; if the vote falls short, he is not.

Although the process is fairly clear, the Founders left us only vague instructions about when to implement it. The Constitution offers a short, cryptic list of the offenses that merit the impeachment and removal of federal officials: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The first two items are comparatively straightforward. The Constitution elsewhere specifies that treason against the United States consists “only in levying War” against the country or in giving the country’s enemies “Aid and Comfort.” As proof, it requires either the testimony of two witnesses or confession in open court. Despite the appalling looseness with which the charge of treason has been bandied about by members of Congress past and present, no federal official—much less a president—has ever been impeached for it. (Even the darkest theories of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia seem unlikely to meet the Constitution’s strict definition of that crime.) Bribery, similarly, has been alleged only once, and against a judge, not a president.

It is the third item on the list—“high crimes and misdemeanors”—on which all presidential impeachments have hinged. If the House begins impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, the charges will depend on this clause, but Congress will first need to decide what it means.

At the Constitutional Convention, an early draft included “treason, bribery, and corruption,” but it was shorn of that last item by the time it arrived on the floor. George Mason, of Virginia, spoke up. “Why is the provision restrained to Treason & bribery only?” he asked, according to James Madison’s notes. “Treason as defined in the Constitution will not reach many great and dangerous offences … Attempts to subvert the Constitution may not be Treason as above defined.” Mason moved to add “or maladministration.”

Madison, though, objected that “so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” Gouverneur Morris further argued that “an election of every four years will prevent maladministration.” Mere incompetence or policy disputes were best dealt with by voters. But that still left Mason’s original concern, for the “many great and dangerous offences” not covered by treason or bribery. Instead of “maladministration,” he suggested, why not substitute “other high crimes & misdemeanors (agst. the State)”? The motion carried.

Constitutional lawyers have been arguing about what counts as a “high crime” or “misdemeanor” ever since. The phrase itself was borrowed from English common law, although there is no reason to suppose Mason and his colleagues were deeply familiar with its uses in that context. The Nixon impeachment spurred Charles L. Black, a Yale law professor, to write Impeachment: A Handbook, a slender volume that remains a defining work on the question.

Black makes two key points. First, he notes that as a matter of logic as well as context and precedent, not every violation of a criminal statute amounts to a “high crime” or “misdemeanor.” To apply his reasoning, some crimes—say, violating 40 U.S.C. §8103(b)(2) by willfully injuring a shrub on federal property in Washington, D.C.—cannot possibly be impeachable offenses. Conversely, a president may violate his oath of office without violating the letter of the law. A president could, for example, harness the enforcement powers of the federal government to systematically persecute his political opponents, or he could grossly neglect the duties of his office. That sort of conduct, in Black’s view, is impeachable even when it is not actually criminal.

His second point rests upon the principle of eiusdem generis—literally, “of the same kind.” As the last item in a list of three impeachable offenses, surely “high crimes and misdemeanors” shares some essential features with the first two. Black suggests that treason and bribery have in common three essential features: They are extremely serious, they stand to corrupt and subvert government and the political process, and they are self-evidently wrong to any person with a shred of honor. These, he argues, are features that a “high crime” or “misdemeanor” ought to share.

Black’s views on these points are not uncontested. Nixon’s attorneys argued that impeachment did require a crime. In 1974, before Black published his book, a report from the Justice Department split the difference, concluding that “there are persuasive grounds for arguing both the narrow view that a violation of criminal law is required and the broader view that certain non-criminal ‘political offenses’ may justify impeachment.”

John Doar, the attorney hired by the House Judiciary Committee to oversee the Nixon investigation, handed off the question of what constituted an impeachable offense to two young staffers: Bill Weld and Hillary Rodham. They determined that the answers they were seeking were to be found not in old case law, but in the public debates that raged around past impeachment efforts. The memo Weld and Rodham helped produce drew on that context and sided with Black: “High crimes and misdemeanors” need not be crimes. In the end, Weld came to believe that impeachment is a political process, aimed at determining whether a president has fallen short of the duties of his office. But that doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary. In fact, the Nixon impeachment left Weld with a renewed faith in the American system of government: “The wheels may grind slowly,” he later reflected, “but they grind pretty well.”

Some Democrats have already seen enough from the Trump administration to conclude that it has met the criteria for impeachment. In July 2017, Representative Brad Sherman of California put forward an impeachment resolution; it garnered a single co-sponsor. The next month, though, brought the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump’s defense of the “very fine people on both sides.” The billionaire activist Tom Steyer launched a petition drive calling for impeachment. A second resolution was introduced in the House that November, this time by Tennessee’s Steve Cohen, who found 17 co-sponsors. By December 2017, when Representative Al Green of Texas forced consideration of a third resolution, 58 Democrats voted in favor of continuing debate, including Jim Clyburn, the House’s third-ranking Democrat. On the first day of the new Congress in January, Sherman reintroduced his resolution.

These efforts are exercises in political messaging, not serious attempts to tackle the question of impeachment. They invert the process, offering lists of charges for the House to consider, rather than asking the House to consider what charges may be justified. The House should instead approve a resolution authorizing an impeachment inquiry and allocating the staff, funding, and other resources necessary to pursue it, as the resolution that initiated the proceedings against Richard Nixon did.

Still, the resolutions proposed so far offer a valuable glimpse at the issues House Democrats are likely to pursue in such an inquiry. Some have made a general case that Trump has done violence to American values—Green’s stated that Trump “has betrayed his trust as President … to the manifest injury of the people of the United States”—but others have claimed specific violations of statutes or constitutional provisions. Both types of allegations may turn out to be important.

Despite the consensus of constitutional scholars that impeachable offenses need not be crimes, Congress has generally preferred to vote on articles that allege criminal acts. More than a third of representatives, and an outright majority of senators, hold law degrees; they think like lawyers. Democrats are thus focused on campaign-finance regulations, obstruction of justice, tax laws, money-laundering rules, proscriptions on bribing foreign officials, and the Constitution’s two emoluments clauses, which bar the president from accepting gifts from state or foreign governments.

They have studiously avoided, however, the primary area of public fascination when it comes to Trump’s alleged misdeeds: whether the president or his campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. Lawmakers are clearly wary of bringing charges that could bear on Robert Mueller’s report, lest they interfere with an ongoing investigation that they hope will somehow force Trump from office. “It all depends on what we learn from hearings and from the Mueller investigation,” Representative Cohen told me. But the highly anticipated Mueller report is unlikely to provide the denouement lawmakers are seeking. Whether a president can be impeached for acts committed prior to assuming office is an unsettled question. As Trump himself never tires of pointing out, collusion with Russia is not itself a crime. And even if Mueller produces a singularly damning report, one presenting evidence that the president himself has committed criminal acts, he cannot indict the president—at least according to current Justice Department guidelines. Congress will have to decide what to do about it.

Once the House authorizes an impeachment inquiry, the committee must distill the evidence of Trump’s alleged crimes into articles capable of garnering a majority vote in that chamber. But that’s just the first challenge. To remove Trump from office, the House managers will then have to persuade the Senate to vote to convict the president. When the articles of impeachment are filed with the Senate, where the president will be tried, each article will be considered and voted on individually.

And then, suddenly, the members of the United States Senate will be forced to answer a question that many have long evaded: Is the president fit to continue in office? There will be no press aides to hide behind, no elevators into which they can duck. Some Democrats have already made their opinions clear. Others will have to decide whether to vote to remove a president backed by a majority of their constituents. For Republicans, the choice will be even harder.

This is where the dual nature of impeachment as both a legal and a political process comes into sharpest focus. The Founders worried about electing a president who lacked character or a sense of honor, but Americans have long since lost the moral vocabulary to articulate such concerns explicitly, preferring to look instead for demonstrable violations of rules that illuminate underlying character flaws. It is Trump’s unfitness for office that necessitates impeachment; his attacks on American democracy are plainly evident, and should be sufficient. But some Republican senators may continue to dismiss the more sweeping claims against the president, particularly where no statutory crimes attach. And so the strength of the evidence supporting narrower charges such as obstruction of justice and campaign-finance violations may ultimately determine his fate. If the committee can substantiate these charges, it will place even the most reluctant senators in a bind. When the moment finally comes to cast their vote, and the world is watching, how many will acquit the president of things he has clearly done?

The closest the Senate has ever come to removing a president was in 1868, after Andrew Johnson was impeached on 11 counts. Remembered today as a lamentable exercise in hyper-partisanship, in fact Johnson’s impeachment functioned as the Founders had intended, sparing the country from the further depredations of a president who had betrayed his most basic responsibilities. We need to recover the real story of Johnson’s impeachment, because it offers the best evidence that the current president, too, must be impeached.

The case before the United States in 1868 bears striking similarities to the case before the country now—and no president in history more resembles the 45th than the 17th. “The president of the United States,” E. P. Whipple wrote in this magazine in 1866, “has so singular a combination of defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation of Providence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his will, he unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of demagogue and autocrat.” Johnson, he continued, was “egotistic to the point of mental disease” and had become “the prey of intriguers and sycophants.”

Whipple was among Johnson’s more verbose critics, but hardly the most scathing. A remarkable number of Americans looked at the president and saw a man grossly unfit for office. Johnson, a Democrat from a Civil War border state, had been tapped by Lincoln in 1864 to join him on a national-unity ticket. A fierce opponent of the slaveholding elite and a self-styled champion of the white yeomanry, Johnson spoke to voters skeptical of the Republican Party’s progressive agenda. He horrified much of the East Coast establishment, but his raw, even profane style appealed to many voters. The National Union Party, seeking the destruction of slavery and the Confederacy, swept to victory.

No one ever thought Johnson would be president. Then, in 1865, Booth’s bullet put him in office. The end of the war exposed how different Johnson’s own agenda was from the policies favored by Lincoln. Johnson wanted to reintegrate the South into the Union as swiftly as possible, devoid of slavery but otherwise little changed. Most congressional Republicans, by contrast, wanted to seize the moment to build a new social order in the South, enshrining equality and protecting civil rights. Johnson sought to restore America as it had been, while the Republicans hoped to make it more perfect.

The two visions were irreconcilable. As the feud deepened, each side pushed its commitments to their logical extremes. Congressional Republicans approved the Fourteenth Amendment, voted to enlarge the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and passed the Civil Rights Act. Taken together, these measures established the equality of Americans before the law and, for the first time, made its preservation a federal concern. They amounted to nothing less than a social revolution, a promise of an America that belonged to all Americans, not just to white men.

From the archives: [W. E. B. Du Bois on the Freedmen’s Bureau]

Johnson and his supporters found this intolerable. In federal efforts to establish racial equality, they saw antiwhite discrimination. Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act, insisting that “the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.” For the first time in American history, Congress overrode a veto to pass a major piece of legislation. Three months later, he vetoed the renewal of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, complaining that its plan to distribute land to former slaves constituted “discrimination” that would establish a “favored class of citizens.” Congress again overrode his veto. That set up an unprecedented situation, as the president was asked to administer laws he had tried to block. Instead of the promised peace, the nation found itself gripped by an accelerating crisis.

The Senate trial of Andrew Johnson. Recalled today as a folly, in fact Johnson’s impeachment spared the U.S. from the further depredations of a president who had betrayed his most basic responsibilities. (Library of Congress / Getty)

The question facing Congress, and the public, was this: What do you do with a president whose every utterance and act seems to undermine the Constitution he is sworn to uphold? At first, Republicans pursued the standard mix of legislative remedies—holding hearings and passing bills designed to strip the president of certain powers. Many members of Johnson’s Cabinet worked with their congressional counterparts to constrain the president. Johnson began to see conspiracies around every corner. He moved to purge the bureaucracy of his opponents, denouncing the “blood-suckers and cormorants” who frustrated his desires.

It was the campaign of white-nationalist terror that raged through the spring and summer of 1866 that persuaded many Republicans they could not allow Johnson to remain in office. In Tennessee, where Johnson had until the year before served as military governor, a white mob opposed to black equality rampaged through the streets of Memphis in May, slaughtering dozens of people as it went. July brought a second massacre, this one in New Orleans, where efforts to enfranchise black voters sparked a riot. A mob filled with police, firemen, armed youths, and Confederate veterans shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and mutilated dozens, many of them black veterans of the Union Army. Johnson chose not to suppress the violence, using fear of disorder to build a constituency more loyal to him than to either party.

Congress opened impeachment hearings. The process unfolded in fits and starts over the next year and a half, as Johnson’s congressional opponents searched vainly for some charge that could gain the support of a majority of the House. Then Johnson handed it to them by firing his secretary of war, defying a law passed, in part, to stop him from undermining Reconstruction. The House passed 11 articles of impeachment, forcing Johnson to stand trial before the Senate. But the effort fell short by a single vote.

When Johnson’s supporters learned that he had been spared, they were ecstatic. In Milwaukee, they careened down the street in a wagon, shouting for Johnson and liberty, sharing a keg of beer. In Boston and in Hartford, Connecticut, they fired 100‑gun salutes; in Dearborn, Michigan, they settled for 19 guns and bonfires. “We have stood for the last few months upon the verge of a precipice, a dark abyss of anarchy yawning at our feet,” the Maryland Democrat Stevenson Archer said, sketching an alternative result whereby “dark-skinned fiends and white-faced, white-livered vampires might rule and riot on the little blood they could still suck out by fastening on helpless throats.”

But the euphoria proved short-lived. The New York Times urged Johnson’s supporters to look at the bigger picture: “Congress has assumed control of the whole matter of reconstruction, and will assert and exercise it.” Any effort to wrest control back from the House and Senate was held in check by the specter of another impeachment, which haunted Johnson’s remaining months in office. The Democrats took up Johnson’s political cause; their convention theme in 1868 was “This Is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.” But when the politically damaged Johnson made a bid for the Democratic nomination—“Why should they not take me up?”—he was refused. Ulysses S. Grant won on the Republican ticket, and threw the full force of the Army behind the project of Reconstruction. Johnson went home to Tennessee.

If the goal of impeachment was to frustrate Johnson’s efforts to make America a white man’s country again, it was an unqualified success. Instead of being remembered as a triumph, however, in the years that followed, it was memorialized as a failure. Defending the impeachment on substantive grounds required believing that all people born in the United States—white and black alike—deserved the same civil liberties. And a decade later, America changed its mind about that, abandoning the project of Reconstruction and reneging on its promise of civil rights for African Americans. Johnson had said he was fighting to preserve a “white man’s government,” and for the next century, that’s what the country largely had. Robbed of its animating force, the bill of particulars against Johnson began to seem hollow, petty, and misguided. How could it have been proper to impeach a president for undermining the Constitution’s guarantee of equality, when the nation as a whole had subsequently done the same?

The chorus of experts who now present Johnson’s impeachment as an exercise in raw partisanship are not learning from history but, rather, erasing it. Johnson used his office to deny the millions freed from bondage the equality that God had given them and that the Constitution guaranteed. To deny the justice of Johnson’s impeachment is to affirm the justice of his acts. If his impeachment was partisan, it was because one party had been formed to defend the freedom of man, and the other had not yet reconciled itself to that proposition.

The senators who voted against convicting Johnson insisted that they were standing on principle and upholding the Constitution. Yet some of the same lawmakers who expended so much effort defending the prerogatives of the presidency simultaneously turned a blind eye to the gross civil-rights violations that pervaded the South; their deep concern for constitutional niceties with respect to the president gave way to willful indifference when blacks were the ones who were systematically and violently deprived of their rights. It was a bitter irony: The impeachment proceedings were greeted with alarm by those who feared they would destroy the Constitution. In the end, though, it was the regular process of government that eventually ratified Jim Crow, the most outrageous abrogation of constitutional protections in the nation’s history. Impeachment drew the United States closer to living up to its ideals, if only fleetingly, by rallying the public against Johnson’s assault on the Constitution.

Today, the United States once more confronts a president who seems to care for only some of the people he represents, who promises his supporters that he can roll back the tide of diversity, who challenges the rule of law, and who regards constitutional rights and liberties as disposable. Congress must again decide whether the greater risk lies in executing the Constitution as it was written, or in deferring to voters to do what it cannot muster the courage to do itself. The gravest danger facing the country is not a Congress that seeks to measure the president against his oath—it is a president who fails to measure up to that solemn promise.

This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “The Case for Impeachment.”

That Time Trump Violated the Boy Scout Oath

2019-01-13T21:05:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.

On July 24, 2017, President Donald Trump looked out at a crowd of tens of thousands of Boy Scouts, gathered for their quadrennial jamboree, and told them how glad he was to leave the partisan warfare of Washington behind. “Who the hell wants to speak about politics when I’m in front of the Boy Scouts? Right?”

Wrong. Trump proceeded to deliver a 40-minute speech to the crowd, interspersing his respectful, scripted remarks with long tangents. Perhaps the strangest was an inspirational story from the president’s own youth, about a long-ago cocktail party featuring “the hottest people in New York,” hosted by TimeWarner’s Steve Ross. “He had a lot of successful people at the party,” the president of the United States boasted to the Scouts. “And I was doing well, so I got invited to the party. I was very young.”

But most of Trump’s improvisations were baldly political. He revisited the glories of Election Night, decried “fake news,” raged against the War on Christmas, disparaged his predecessor, and questioned the loyalties of civil servants. His campaign-style speech was such a breach of tradition and decorum that the chief scout executive rushed to apologize for the “political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree.”

[Read: Trump’s mistake at the Boy Scout jamboree]

Over Trump’s first two years in office, that jamboree speech may be the most shocking instance of the president choosing to politicize an apolitical institution, but it faces fierce competition. Trump delivered a campaign-style stump speech in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall. He signed the first version of his Muslim ban in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes. He stood on the hangar deck of the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford and implored the sailors to lobby Congress in support of his agenda. He demanded that the Department of Justice protect his aides and prosecute his rivals. He visited troops in Iraq, and signed their “Make America Great Again” hats.

Other presidents have sometimes struggled to distinguish their personal interests from those of their party, or from those of the nation as a whole. Trump gives no sign that he recognizes the existence of any such distinctions. As a result, he has clashed repeatedly with judges, civil servants, and military officers who insist that their loyalty is to constitutional governance, and not to the president’s political expedience.

Like millions of other boys in America, I grew up reciting the Scout Law, a list of a dozen virtues. I understood it as an affirmation that the path to leadership lay through service, and as a recognition that there is more to life than self-gratification—ideals I aspired to uphold, even as I generally fell short.

[Read: A scout is trustworthy—but is the president?]

Trump was not a scout. He is the only American president never to have devoted even a single day to the service of his country—in uniform or in public office—before ascending to the chief magistracy. But his speechwriters set down the list of virtues for him to recite to the assembled scouts. “As the Scout Law says, ‘A scout is trustworthy, loyal,’” the president began. He paused. “We could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.” That was as far as he got.

Not Even Trump Wants to Praise Robert E. Lee

2018-10-15T10:00:51-04:00

On Sunday morning, President Trump broke with precedent, discarded norms, and did something few of his predecessors would ever have considered: He angrily denied the suggestion that he had praised Robert E. Lee.

“NBC News has totally and purposely changed the point and meaning of my story about General Robert E Lee and General Ulysses Grant,” Trump objected in a tweet. “Was actually a shoutout to warrior Grant and the great state in which he was born. As usual, dishonest reporting. Even mainstream media embarrassed!”

Trump didn’t respond to NBC by attacking the network for its clear implication that praising a Confederate leader would be inappropriate. Instead, he emphasized that he’d really been praising Grant, not Lee. And that represented a break—from his own past remarks, from the messages of some current Republican candidates, and from almost all his recent predecessors in the White House.

The fuss began with an NBC report on a Friday rally in Ohio. “President Trump says ‘Robert E. Lee was a great general’ during Ohio rally, calling the Confederate leader ‘incredible,’” the network tweeted. As the network later acknowledged, Trump was right—he hadn’t called Lee incredible. At the rally, he’d launched into a riff about Ohio’s favored sons.

[Yoni Appelbaum: Take the Confederate statues down]

“It also gave you a general, who was incredible. He drank a little bit too much. You know who I’m talking about, right?” Trump asked. The crowd understood he meant Ulysses S. Grant, even if not all the assembled reporters grasped the reference. Trump did go on to praise Lee as “a true great fighter and a great general,” but even that was in the service of his larger point—that Grant was all the more remarkable for defeating him.

It’s not news that Trump thinks Lee was a great general. Lee took his place in Trump’s familiar pantheon of military leaders—alongside George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and Ulysses S. Grant—even before Trump ran for office.

And, as president, Trump has not been shy about exploiting Lee’s contested memory to stoke divisions. It was a violent protest against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville that produced Trump’s equivocations at an August 2017 press conference. He proved unable to simply condemn the tiki-torch fascists, instead declaring there “were very fine people on both sides.” And when a reporter asked him to acknowledge the difference between Lee and George Washington, he rejected the premise of the question—instead suggesting that if the statue of Lee were removed, statues of Washington and Thomas Jefferson might be next to go. “You’re changing history, you’re changing culture,” he objected.

There are, moreover, good reasons to doubt Trump’s understanding of the Civil War. He has little grasp of its causes. When he discusses the conflict, he tends to reflect the views prevalent in the textbooks of his youth—downplaying the role of slavery.

But all of this only underlines the significance of the moment. Corey Stewart, formerly Trump’s Virginia campaign chair and now the GOP nominee for Senate in the state, has praised Lee as “a hero & an honorable man” and made defending his statues a centerpiece of his campaign. Until Sunday, there was no reason to think Trump might distance himself from praise for Lee. In the 20th century, in fact, it would have been hard to imagine any president distancing himself from praise for Lee.

[Adam Serwer: The myth of the kindly General Lee]

For Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to win the presidency after Reconstruction, affection for Lee was deeply personal. Lee visited Augusta, Georgia, when Wilson was 13. All his life, Wilson savored “the delightful memory of my standing, when a lad, for a moment by General Lee’s side and looking up into his face.” After he left the presidency, he wrote a hagiographic portrait of Lee for The Journal of Social Forces, holding him up as a “national hero” who was “in some regards unapproachable in the history of our country.”

But it wasn’t just Wilson. Lee was held up as the embodiment of Southern honor, duty, and sacrifice; by lionizing him, presidents were advancing the cause of sectional reconciliation. That the cause for which Lee had fought was, as Grant put it, “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse,” was seldom mentioned. That the reconciliation had been built on a shared commitment to white supremacy or, at the very least, on the tacit approval of Jim Crow went entirely unsaid. And Lee’s personal cruelty as a slave owner—so ably detailed by my colleague Adam Serwer—was simply omitted.

FDR praised Lee as a “knightly figure without reproach and without fear,” and as he unveiled a statue of the general in Dallas, as “one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.” Dwight Eisenhower kept portraits of “four great Americans” on the Oval Office wall: Franklin, Washington, Lincoln—and Lee. He told the United Daughters of the Confederacy that Lee was “a great and noble character,” and that he “remained always a pure soul.” JFK looked upon Lee’s wartime service as a “gallant failure.” Lyndon Johnson dubbed him “a great son of the South, a great leader of the South.” “As a man, he stood as the symbol of valor and of duty,” said Gerald Ford as he signed a bill restoring Lee’s U.S. citizenship. “Robert E. Lee was a man who understood the values of a region which he represented,” said Jimmy Carter, praising him as a “great leader.” Reagan said he was “an American legend.” George W. Bush, addressing the United States Military Academy, called Lee “the perfect West Point graduate.”

[Read: There are 11,518 Robert Lees in America]

The notable exception is Barack Obama, who rarely mentioned Lee. In 2009, at the Alfalfa Dinner, held to celebrate Lee’s birthday, he joked, “If he were here with us tonight, the general would be 202 years old. And very confused.”

Measured against these standards, simply calling Lee “a great general,” as Trump did, is faint enough praise. And for Trump to blast the media for daring to suggest that he’d called Lee “incredible” is, well, incredible.

The United States is changing. The events in Charlottesville last year helped to elevate the debate over Robert E. Lee into broader public consciousness and to raise awareness of just how—and why—Lee came to be elevated into the American pantheon. And as more Americans focus on the cause that Lee defended, and on the fact that the canonization of Lee was intended to make him the patron saint of a reconciliation built on white supremacy, the elevation of Lee to an American icon becomes increasingly indefensible.

A century ago, Wilson wrote that Lee “is secure of his place” in history. That Trump—scarcely a year after Charlottesville—no longer sees political advantage in praising Lee proves that’s no longer the case.

Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore

2018-09-13T06:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying?

Democracy is a most unnatural act. People have no innate democratic instinct; we are not born yearning to set aside our own desires in favor of the majority’s. Democracy is, instead, an acquired habit.

Like most habits, democratic behavior develops slowly over time, through constant repetition. For two centuries, the United States was distinguished by its mania for democracy: From early childhood, Americans learned to be citizens by creating, joining, and participating in democratic organizations. But in recent decades, Americans have fallen out of practice, or even failed to acquire the habit of democracy in the first place.

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The results have been catastrophic. As the procedures that once conferred legitimacy on organizations have grown alien to many Americans, contempt for democratic institutions has risen. In 2016, a presidential candidate who scorned established norms rode that contempt to the Republican nomination, drawing his core support from Americans who seldom participate in the rituals of democracy.

American government’s most obvious problems—from its dysfunctional legislature to Donald Trump himself—are merely signs of this underlying decay. The political system’s previous strength and resilience flowed from Americans’ anomalously high rates of participation in democratically governed organizations, most of them apolitical. There is no easy fix for our current predicament; simply voting Trump out of office won’t suffice. To stop the rot afflicting American government, Americans are going to have to get back in the habit of democracy.

In the early years of the United States, Europeans made pilgrimages to the young republic to study its success. How could such a diverse and sprawling nation flourish under a system of government that originated in small, homogeneous city-states?

One after another, they seized upon the most unfamiliar aspect of American culture: its obsession with associations. To almost every challenge in their lives, Americans applied a common solution. They voluntarily bound themselves together, adopting written rules, electing officers, and making decisions by majority vote. This way of life started early. “Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. “The same spirit pervades every act of social life.”

By the latter half of the 19th century, more and more of these associations mirrored the federal government in form: Local chapters elected representatives to state-level gatherings, which sent delegates to national assemblies. “Associations are created, extended, and worked in the United States more quickly and effectively than in any other country,” marveled the British statesman James Bryce in 1888. These groups had their own systems of checks and balances. Executive officers were accountable to legislative assemblies; independent judiciaries ensured that both complied with the rules. One typical 19th-century legal guide, published by the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal order, compiled 2,827 binding precedents for use in its tribunals.

The model proved remarkably adaptable. In business, shareholders elected boards of directors in accordance with corporate charters, while trade associations bound together independent firms. Labor unions chartered locals that elected officers and dispatched delegates to national gatherings. From churches to mutual insurers to fraternities to volunteer fire companies, America’s civic institutions were run not by aristocratic elites who inherited their offices, nor by centrally appointed administrators, but by democratically elected representatives.

Civic participation was thus the norm, not the exception. In 1892, the University of Georgia’s president, Walter B. Hill, reported (with perhaps only slight exaggeration) that he’d made a test case of a small town “and found that every man, woman, and child (above ten years of age) in the place held an office—with the exception of a few scores of flabby, jellyfish characters.” America, he concluded, is “a nation of presidents.”

This nation of presidents—and judges, representatives, and recording secretaries—obsessed over rules and procedures. Offices turned over at the end of fixed terms; new organizations were constantly formed. Ordinary Americans could expect to find themselves suddenly asked to join a committee or chair a meeting. In 1876, an army engineer named Henry Robert published his Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies, and it improbably became a best seller; within four decades, more than 500,000 copies were in print. It was, a Boston newspaper declared, “as indispensable as was the Catechism in more ecclesiastical times.”

Democracy had become the shared civic religion of a people who otherwise had little in common. Its rituals conferred legitimacy regardless of ideology; they could as readily be used to monopolize markets or advance the cause of nativism as to aid laborers or defend the rights of minorities. The Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP relied on similar organizational forms.

Time and again, groups excluded from democratic government turned to democratic governance to practice and press for equal citizenship. In the 1790s, a group of New Yorkers locked in debtors’ jail adopted their own version of the new Constitution, governing themselves with dignity despite their imprisonment. Free blacks in the antebellum North and formerly enslaved blacks in the postwar South were more likely to create and participate in civic groups than were their white neighbors. Women used charitable societies and ladies’ auxiliaries to join in public debates and, eventually, to secure the right to vote.

Voluntary associations have “provided the people with their greatest school of self-government,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote in 1944. “Rubbing minds as well as elbows, they have been trained from youth to take common counsel, choose leaders, harmonize differences, and obey the expressed will of the majority. In mastering the associative way they have mastered the democratic way.”

But the United States is no longer a nation of joiners. As the political scientist Robert Putnam famously demonstrated in Bowling Alone, participation in civic groups and organizations of all kinds declined precipitously in the last decades of the 20th century. The trend has, if anything, accelerated since then; one study found that from 1994 to 2004, membership in such groups fell by 21 percent. And even that likely understates the real decline, as a slight uptick in passive memberships has masked a steeper fall in attendance and participation. The United States is no longer a nation of presidents, either. In a 2010 census survey, just 11 percent of respondents said that they had served as an officer or been on a committee of any group or organization in the previous year.

Putnam was concerned about the effects of this decline on “social capital,” which he defined as the “norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement.” His financial metaphor values civic life primarily for the assets it provides individuals. This perspective lends itself to a certain optimism. Not every measure of social capital is in decline: Americans still volunteer and attend religious services at relatively high rates. They can also use social media to connect with one another in new ways, forging communities of interest across vast geographic distances. In these ways, individuals can still accrue substantial social capital. The metaphor has its limits, however: In focusing on the importance of ties between individuals, it neglects the intrinsic benefits of participating in civic life.

Volunteerism, church attendance, and social-media participation are not schools for self-government; they do not inculcate the habits and rituals of democracy. And as young people participate less in democratically run organizations, they show less faith in democracy itself. In 2011, about a quarter of American Millennials said that democracy was a “bad” or “very bad” way to run a country, and that it was “unimportant” to choose leaders in free and fair elections. By the time Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, Gallup polling showed that Americans’ faith in most of the nation’s major institutions—the criminal-justice system, the press, public schools, all three branches of government—was below the historical average.

Trump turned the long-standing veneration of civic procedure on its head. He proclaimed that America is “rigged”; that “the insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money.” The norms and practices of democratic governance, he insisted, had allowed elites to entrench themselves.

Trump secured the Republican nomination by speaking directly to those voters who had the least experience with democratic institutions. In April 2016, when the Republican field had narrowed from 17 candidates to three, a PRRI/The Atlantic survey found Trump enjoying a narrow lead over second-place Ted Cruz among Republican-leaning voters, 37 to 31 percent. But among those who seldom or never participated in community activities such as sports teams, book clubs, parent-teacher associations, or neighborhood associations, Trump led 50 to 24 percent. In fact, such civically disengaged voters accounted for a majority of his support.

Trump’s coalition in the general election was more varied, fusing disengaged voters with stalwart Republicans who reluctantly backed him over Hillary Clinton. He didn’t alter his message, though. “This election will decide whether we’re ruled by a corrupt political class or whether we are ruled by yourselves, the people,” Trump said on the eve of the election. In office, he has run roughshod over established protocols, displaying a disdain for democratic procedures that Henry Robert would have found incomprehensible.

This disdain has not, however, cost him much political support. “Democratic government, being government by discussion and majority vote, works best when there is nothing of profound importance to discuss,” the historian Carl Becker wrote in 1941. But in the polarized political environment of 2018, the stakes seem incomprehensibly high. For Democrats and Republicans alike, abiding by the old rules can seem a sucker’s game, an act of unilateral disarmament. Norms are difficult to enshrine but easy to discard. Every time Trump does something that just isn’t done, he all but guarantees it will be done again in the future.

The relative stability of the American government, even when led by a proudly disruptive president, is a perverse testament to just how integral democracy has been to American culture. But this is changing. Trump insists on prioritizing outcomes over processes, spurring many of his opponents to respond in kind. Willingness to adhere to settled rules, even when in the short term doing so ensures your opponent’s triumph and your own defeat, is the hardest of all democratic habits to acquire—and increasing numbers of Americans never did.

The golden age of the voluntary association is over, thanks to the automobile, the television, and the two-income household, among other culprits. The historical circumstances that produced it, moreover, seem unlikely to recur; Americans are no longer inclined to leave the comforts and amusements of home for the lodge hall or meeting room. Which means that any revival of participatory democracy won’t be built on fraternal orders and clubs.

Such a revival will need to begin where the erosion of the democratic impulse has been most pronounced—among the youngest generations. Happily, youth is when new things are most easily learned. The best place to locate new schools of self-government, then, is schools. That does not mean adding civics classes to the already onerous requirements imposed on students; habits like these cannot be picked up from textbooks.

It means carving out the time, space, and resources for students to govern themselves. One recent study found that, holding all else equal, greater knowledge of civics among high-school seniors correlated with a 2 percent greater likelihood of voting in a presidential election eight years later. Active participation in extracurricular activities, however, correlated with a 141 percent increase.

Unfortunately, the privileges of student government are unequally distributed. Take one essential element of democratic practice: the existence of written rules. As a school’s percentage of minority students increases, the likelihood of its student council having a charter declines; student councils in public schools with a high concentration of poor students are only half as likely as their more affluent counterparts to have a written charter. And in poorer public schools that do have a chartered student council, the decisions it makes matter less—such schools are more likely than wealthier ones to allow faculty and administrators to constrain the council’s decisions.

Young Americans of all backgrounds deserve the chance to write charters, elect officers, and work through the messy and frustrating process of self-governance. They need the opportunity to make mistakes, and resolve them, without advisers intervening. Such activities shouldn’t be seen as extracurricular, but as the basic curriculum of democracy. In that respect, what students are doing—club sports, student council, the robotics team—matters less than how they’re doing it and what they’re gaining in the process: an appreciation for the role of rules and procedures in managing disputes.

The next step is to translate that activity into other realms. It’s no coincidence that the peak decades of associational activity, in the 19th century, also brought the peak turnout of eligible voters. “A vast body of evidence now suggests that habits form when people vote,” a review of the research concluded in 2016. Persuading potential voters to cast a ballot in one election raises the odds of their voting in the next one. When Americans turn 18, they should be automatically registered to vote.

But that’s just the start. Over the past half century, the cult of efficiency has driven democratic governance into retreat. As the sociologist Theda Skocpol has noted, more and more American organizations—from charities to trade associations—are run by salaried professionals and supported by dues-paying members who seldom if ever attend a meeting. Some 95 percent of AARP members are uninvolved in their local chapters; the AAA card in your wallet will secure you roadside assistance, but no longer is it a passport to monthly gatherings at a clubhouse or weekend “sociability” rides. Labor unions are shrinking as the protections they once enjoyed are chipped away. A relatively small number of enormous corporations exercise increasing control over the economy and public life. (Meanwhile, the shareholders of those corporations have discovered, to their dismay, how little power they hold over the boards of directors they nominally elect.)

This is where the truly hard work begins. Democratic governance is never the most efficient means of running an organization, as anyone who’s attended a local zoning hearing can attest. Its value lies instead in harmonizing discordant interests and empowering constituents. A nation of passive observers watching others make decisions is a nation that will succumb to anger and resentment—witness the United States.

It is worth reengaging all Americans in the governance of daily life, even if that means sacrificing some degree of efficiency, and displacing expert administrators with elected amateurs. The American system of government functions properly only when embedded in a culture deeply committed to democracy; that culture sustains the Constitution, not the other way around.

This article appears in the October 2018 print edition with the headline “Losing the Democratic Habit.”

Which America Is Trump Celebrating?

2018-06-05T15:21:14-04:00

Here’s the thing about the pilgrimages that championship sports teams make to the White House each year. It’s a tradition rooted in efforts to achieve national unity. Like the broader American project, at their best these visits promote an expansive vision of America, a diverse society finding commonality in shared symbols and common rituals.

But the first such visit was rooted in a very different vision of American society—uniting white Americans by excluding blacks from sports, from civic rituals, and from political equality. As President Trump disinvited the Philadelphia Eagles from the White House on Monday, he loudly insisted that he still wished “to honor our great country” and “celebrate America.” His statement did not specify, though, which version of America he intended to celebrate.

In 1865, the United States was engaged in the project of Reconstruction, building a new society in the wake of the Civil War. It was also engaged in playing ball. Union soldiers brought home with them a passion for the American game, and fans flocked to ballfields to enjoy the pleasures of peacetime.

Baseball teams proliferated. Black squads and white squads used the same fields in many cities, fans mingling freely. In Washington, the prime spot was the White Lot, on the grounds of the executive mansion. And in August, it hosted an extraordinary three-team tournament, pitting the Atlantic from Brooklyn and the Athletic from Philadelphia against Washington’s own Nationals.

These games took place against a backdrop of profound uncertainty. It remained unclear what form the reconstructed nation would take. A constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, ratified by the northern states, remained stalled—waiting for southern states to take it up. President Andrew Johnson, himself a southerner, was pushing for a rapid restoration of the Union as it was before the war. “The people must be trusted with their government,” he wrote the day of the first game. But he had a particular vision of what that meant. “This is a country for white men, and by G-d, so long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men,” he told the governor of Missouri, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported at the time.

The games riveted the federal city. The stands were generously sprinkled with the stars of general officers, and tinged blue with their staffs. Thousands of Washingtonians, and at least two members of the Cabinet, turned out to watch the Athletic trounce the hometown club, 87–12. The following day brought a crowd that may have numbered 20,000. The president, one participant later recalled, “permitted the government employees to suspend work and join the throng on the White Lot.” This time, the Nationals posted a more credible tally of 19 runs and kept their lead into the seventh inning. But, dear reader, it will surprise you not to learn that it was the Atlantic that prevailed—posting 22 runs in the final two frames. “The Atlantic Victorious,” proclaimed the next day’s paper.

The Athletic had made a visit to Congress and the White House before the tournament kicked off, but the president had not been available to meet with them. But on August 30, the host Nationals took the newly crowned champions to meet Andrew Johnson. One by one, the Atlantic players filed in, were introduced to the president, and shook his hand.

The last to be introduced was a reporter, not a player. The New York Times’ Henry Chadwick—often described as the “Father of Baseball”—stepped forward. He urged Johnson to meet with another club set to visit the following month, for “such countenance of the game would give a national stamp to it.”

This, of course, was the whole point; national unity through baseball. The White House visit that day had been arranged by the ambitious young president of the National club, Arthur Pue Gorman. He was a political client of Johnson’s, who had arranged for his patronage appointment as postmaster of the Senate. Like Johnson, Gorman identified as a conservative, white southerner who favored restoring the Union as it had been, not trying to make it more perfect. He saw baseball as a tool to accomplish that goal; the White House visit he arranged provided a presidential imprimatur to that project.

In 1867, Gorman was elected president of the National Association of Base Ball Players, one of the sport’s first governing bodies. Gorman’s installation, the Ball Player’s Chronicle, was an effort to demonstrate that “sectional prejudices did not rule the fraternity of the North.” The installation of a white southerner was an explicit invitation, an effort to reconcile on southern terms, and to enshrine baseball as a national game—a game for a reunited nation. But if sectional prejudices did not rule baseball, it was because racial prejudices did.

It’s a story brilliantly recounted in Ryan Swanson’s When Baseball Went White. During Gorman’s tenure, the organization’s annual convention considered the question of race. “If colored clubs were admitted,” argued the NABBP’s secretary, “there would be in all probability some division of feeling, whereas, by excluding them no injury could result to anybody, and the possibility of any rupture being created on political grounds would be avoided.” Chadwick said the aim was to “keep out of the convention any subject having a political bearing, as this undoubtedly had.” The convention ratified a bar on any club with one or more persons of color—one of the nation’s very first Jim Crow rules. The galleries hissed, and an animated Gorman threatened to have them cleared.

To keep the game apolitical meant keeping it exclusionary; mollifying disagreements among white members required excluding blacks entirely. No injury could result to anybody, they argued, relegating the excluded to the status of nobodies.

Having done his part to segregate baseball, Gorman joined the effort to segregate the nation. He was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Bourbon Democrat, intent on rolling back the halting racial progress made during Reconstruction. “We have determined that this government was made by white men and shall be ruled by white men as long as the republic lasts,” he thundered, echoing his political mentor. He made his name opposing protections for black voters in the South, and with a major push to systematically disenfranchise black voters in Maryland.

American sports, meanwhile, would remain segregated for generations—as White House visits increased in frequency. And then, as courageous players like Jackie Robinson integrated America’s professional leagues, the White House visits began to take on a different layer of meaning. They increased in frequency. The first Super Bowl champions were welcomed by Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Ronald Reagan regularized the ritual. The athletes—almost invariably more diverse in ethnicity and experience than either the White House staff or press corps hovering around them—were honored by a succession of presidents, celebrating what Americans could accomplish by working together.

At least, until now. Andrew Johnson’s latest successor in office appears determined to reverse that approach to sports. Like Chadwick, Trump insists that racial inclusivity is a political act; like Gorman, he divides and excludes even as he loudly insists that he is uniting the country; like the NABBP, he seems oblivious to those he harms.

Many of the Eagles players had reportedly decided on their own to withdraw from the visit even before Trump canceled it. In its place, Trump ordered up a performative pageant of patriotism, with brass bands playing on the White House lawn—just as they did in August of 1865.

And then, as today, the question lingers in the air: When the fighting is done, and the dust settles, what sort of nation do we intend to reconstruct?

A Twitter Tirade on Christmas Eve

2017-12-24T11:30:41-05:00

Once upon a time—of all the good days of the year, on Christmas Eve—President Donald Trump sat at Mar-a-Lago, counting his grievances.

The president began this morning, like most mornings, by watching Fox News, and sharing his thoughts on Twitter. He redoubled his attacks on the FBI’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, insinuating that he had behaved unethically—in the process, again mangling the details of the case.

He proceeded to retweet an image from a follower, showing Trump in the backseat of a limo talking on the phone, a figure labeled “CNN” reduced to a bloody splotch on the sole of his upturned shoe. WINNING, read the caption. And then, to drive the point home, he tweeted:

The Fake News refuses to talk about how Big and how Strong our BASE is. They show Fake Polls just like they report Fake News. Despite only negative reporting, we are doing well - nobody is going to beat us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2017

The FBI is conspiring to smear him; negative news reports are fake; the polls lie. In the face of all of this, the president finds a consoling thought: His base supports him.

There’s no question that many of Trump’s most loyal voters have stuck by him. They agree that his treatment at the hands of the news media has been unfair, share his suspicions that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has devolved into a partisan witch hunt, and join him in disregarding negative stories and polls.

The trouble for the president and his party may be that, although his base has indeed stuck with him, it appears neither big enough to secure electoral victories, nor strong enough to resist the constant barrage of negative news without eroding.

A Wall Street Journal / NBC poll recently found that 24 percent of respondents strongly approved of Trump’s performance in office, and another 17 percent somewhat approved; 56 percent strongly or somewhat disapproved. (Those numbers are roughly in line with the average of other recent polls.) Ratings that tilt so far negative usually presage electoral setbacks for the president’s party—and indeed, the past year has seen Republican candidates underperform at the polls, on average, by wide margins.

But the more worrisome finding in that same poll may be the question that Trump himself most cares about: Would respondents vote for Trump if he runs for reelection? Fifty-two percent indicated they’d support a generic Democrat; just 36 percent backed Trump, and only 18 percent said they’d definitely vote for him.

Those findings, taken together, suggest that at least a quarter of those who tell pollsters they strongly approve of his performance aren’t certain they’ll vote for him next time around; at least one in eight of those with positive views aren’t even willing to affirm that they will probably vote for him.

On the other side of the political spectrum, voters appear to have been radicalized by Trump’s tenure in office, much as Obama’s presidency galvanized Republican opposition. In contrast to the 18 percent who will definitely vote for Trump, 38 percent said they would definitely vote for his Democratic opponent; if 24 percent of voters strongly approve of Trump, fully 48 percent strongly disapprove. The polling suggests that the media’s primary failure hasn’t been a refusal to report on Trump’s base of support—it’s hard to open a newspaper without turning to a profile of a Trump supporter—but rather, its relatively scant coverage of the strength and size of the base of opposition Trump has aroused.

But with Fox News switched off, the mood at Mar-a-Lago quickly shifted. Ten minutes after sending the last of his tweets, the president sat down behind his desk at Mar-a-Lago for a videoconference with active-duty military personnel around the world. “I just want to wish everybody a very, very merry Christmas,” he said, according to the pool report. “We say Merry Christmas, again, very, very proudly.”

(In 2016, as in every year of his presidency, President Obama addressed Americans from the White House. “Tomorrow, for the final time as the First Family, we will join our fellow Christians around the world to rejoice in the birth of our Savior,” he said. “And as we retell His story from that Holy Night, we’ll also remember His eternal message, one of boundless love, compassion and hope.” He closed that message, “Merry Christmas, everybody.”)

After extending warm holiday wishes to servicemen and women separated from their families, with only occasional political asides (“Many Republicans are very happy!”) the president turned to the representatives of the fourth estate gathered to record the scene.

And then, as is so often the case, when the president came face to face with the targets of his ire, his harsh denunciations gave way to conciliatory words.

“We’re going to be speaking with the wonderful people of the media and asking them to leave,” he told the servicemembers. To the press, he said, “Enjoy yourselves. Really appreciate it, have a great Christmas and we’re going to do some very personal questions between these great people and myself. We want to thank you very much for being here. If I don’t see you during the day, have a great holiday and a great Christmas, thank you very much.”

When the call was done, the president departed for his golf club.

The Banality of White Nationalism

2017-11-26T12:27:45-05:00

In 1963, Air Force Captain Ed Dwight was assigned as the deputy for flight test at the bomber test group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, Ohio. Dwight was a hot-shot pilot—a recent graduate of the elite Aerospace Research Pilot School, recommended by an Air Force board for NASA’s astronaut training program. A Catholic publication put news of his arrival on its cover; a parishioner heard that Dwight was having trouble finding a nice home for his family, and rented him a house in the booming suburb of Huber Heights.

Dwight was black. Ebony reported what happened next:

Soon after the Dwights moved in, the harassment began. His auto took the most punishment: grease was smeared over the spark plugs, air was let out of tires, and at night the vehicle was pelted with rocks. Shouts of “niggers, go home!” met the family almost every day. Dwight finally decided to move after a brick was thrown through a window and his daughter, Tina, was showered with broken glass.

The New York Times reporter Richard Faussett recently sat down to dinner with Tony Hovater, and his wife, Maria, at an Applebee’s in Huber Heights. Faussett was struck by how ordinary Hovater seemed. “His Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother,” he wrote, calling him “polite and low key.” They had turkey sandwiches at a Panera Bread. Faussett had come to Ohio, “amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes,” to solve a riddle, as he later reflected: “Why did this man—intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases—gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?”

Because Hovater, it turns out, is a white nationalist; as Faussett put it, he’s “the Nazi sympathizer next door.”

Huber Heights, now home to Panera and Applebee’s, sprang up almost overnight. There were just 1,900 residents in the township in 1950; Charles H. Huber began erecting neat red-brick ranch homes in 1956, and soon built 9,000. His houses offered a step up for those who had flocked to Dayton to find jobs in its wartime factories—affordable, single-family homes. White families moved out to the suburbs first, and most did their best to preclude black families from following.

Desegregation was an uneven process in the Dayton suburbs. Alan Arthur Anderson moved with his family into Huber Heights in 1963, the same year as the Dwights, but local ministers spent two weeks clearing the way for their arrival. The county sheriff told The Cincinnati Enquirer that “neighbors brought cakes, cookies, candies and good wishes.” But down the road in Townview, the Fuller family was met with up to 500 protestors, including some wearing white sheets; the sheriff had to invoke the riot act and send in 100 police to break up the protest.

That legacy lingers to the present. The Urban Institute ranks Dayton as the 14th most segregated city among the largest 100 American commuting zones. There are, according to the Census, just 28 black residents among Hovater’s nearly six thousand neighbors in New Carlisle.

There were racist displays in Dayton before and after the battles over desegregation. The Second Klan, which flourished in the 1920s, flourished in the area. In 1923, Klansmen paraded four abreast through the streets, the winding column taking 45 minutes to pass by onlookers. One Dayton member of the Night Riders, the Klan’s activist arm, described its purpose as “horse-whipping, tar and feathering, barn burning, bombing—a regular reign of terror.” In 1966, Lester Mitchell was sweeping the sidewalk in front of his house in West Dayton at 3 a.m., when witnesses said three white men drove past, delivering a fatal shotgun blast to his face. Rioting ensued. And in 1994, 11 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan staged a rally in downtown Dayton to recruit new members.

The point isn’t that the Dayton area is some exceptional hotbed of American racism. It’s that it’s a very American city—embodying the nation’s complicated and contradictory history. It’s been home to radical abolitionists and to pro-slavery rioters; to black entrepreneurs and to white segregationists; to civil-rights heroes and to white-sheeted Klansmen. This was true long before the creation of 4chan or the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville; they are not needed to explain it.

Faussett went to Ohio, he wrote, determined to find Hovater’s “Rosebud,” the extraordinary, radicalizing experience that set him on a path to extremism. His reporting contrasts the “quotidian” details of Hovater’s life with the virulence of his beliefs. Ultimately, he conceded, “there is a hole at the heart of my story,” which “would have to serve as both feature and defect,” the inability to explain a white nationalist growing out of an ordinary suburban landscape.

But if Faussett was asking the right question, he may have been looking in the wrong places for answers. Faussett was looking for a radical disjuncture to explain Hovater. But the disjuncture in America’s history is not the emergence of virulent racism, it’s the uneven, often halting progress the nation has made toward greater equality, enlarged tolerance, and defensible rights. It’s a complicated story. It requires understanding what made a man like Dwight hold the nation to its articulated ideals, despite the risks. Or what made a man like Fuller, a mason who laid the bricks for many of his neighbor’s homes, insist that he, too, had the right to live in such a house.

The Hovaters of Ohio, though, are perhaps less mysterious. Ed Dwight would not have been surprised to meet Hovater. Neither would the Fullers, nor the Mitchells, nor the hundreds who rallied against the Klan in downtown Dayton in 1994. They’re a vestige of a long tradition—as American as Applebee’s.

Is the American Idea Doomed?

2017-10-10T06:00:00-04:00

On May 5, 1857, eight men sat down to dinner at Boston’s Parker House hotel. They had gathered to plan a magazine, but by the time they stood up five hours later, they had laid the intellectual groundwork for a second American revolution.

These men were among the leading literary lights of their day, but they had more in mind that night than literary pursuits. The magazine they envisioned would, its prospectus later promised, “honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.”

That prospectus bore the unmistakable stamp of The Atlantic’s founding editor, James Russell Lowell, but “the American idea” had been popularized by Theodore Parker, the radical preacher and abolitionist. The American idea, Parker declared in an 1850 speech, comprised three elements: that all people are created equal, that all possess unalienable rights, and that all should have the opportunity to develop and enjoy those rights. Securing them required “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people,” Parker said.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, another Atlantic founder, put the matter more concisely. There was, he observed, a single phrase, offered by the little republicans of the schoolyard, that summed the whole thing up: “I’m as good as you be.”

As a vision, it was bold and improbable—but the magazine these men launched that November, 160 years ago, helped spur the nation to redefine itself around the pursuit of the American idea. And as the United States grew and prospered, other peoples around the globe were attracted to its success, and the idea that produced it.

Now, though, the idea they articulated is in doubt. America no longer serves as a model for the world as it once did; its influence is receding. At home, critics on the left reject the notion that the U.S. has a special role to play; on the right, nationalists push to define American identity around culture, not principles. Is the American idea obsolete?

From the first, the idea provoked skepticism. It was radical to claim that a nation as new as America could have its own idea to give the world, it was destabilizing to discard rank and station and allow people to define their own destinies, and it bordered on absurd to believe that a nation so sprawling and heterogeneous could be governed as a democratic republic. By 1857, the experiment’s failure seemed imminent.

Across Europe, the 19th century had dawned as a democratic age, but darkened as it progressed. The revolutions of 1848 failed. Prussia busily cemented its dominance over the German states. In 1852, France’s Second Republic gave way to its Second Empire. Spain’s Progressive Biennium ended in 1856 as it began, with a coup d’état. Democracy was in full retreat. Even where it endured, the right to vote or hold office was generally restricted to a small, propertied elite.

On the surface, things appeared different in Boston, where The Atlantic’s eight founders—Emerson, Lowell, Moses Dresser Phillips, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley, James Elliot Cabot, Francis H. Underwood, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—dined in May 1857. Almost all adult males in Massachusetts, black and white alike, could vote, and almost all did. Almost all were literate. And they stood equal before the law. The previous Friday, the state had ratified a new constitutional amendment stripping out the last significant property qualifications for running for state Senate.

But even in Boston, democracy was embattled. The state’s government was in the grip of the nativist Know-Nothings, who resented recent waves of immigrants. That same Friday, voters had ratified an amendment imposing a literacy test for voting, a mostly symbolic effort at exclusion. But slavery, the diners believed, posed an even greater threat to democracy. Most of them had been radicalized three years before by the Anthony Burns case, when federal troops marched into their commonwealth to return Burns, an escaped slave then living and working in Boston, to bondage in Virginia—inspiring protests and lethal violence on his behalf. To the west, Kansas was bloodied by fighting between pro- and antislavery elements; to the south, politicians had begun defending slavery not as a necessary evil but as a positive ideal.

The fight against slavery had become a struggle for the American idea; the two could not coexist. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s election led the South to conclude that it had lost the argument. The seceding states left Congress with a Republican majority, able to translate the principles of equality, rights, and opportunity into practical action: homesteads for all who sought them; land-grant colleges to spread the fruits of education; tariffs to protect fledgling industries; and a transcontinental railroad to promote commerce and communication. Here was the American idea made manifest.

But the Civil War tested whether a nation built around that idea could “long endure,” as Lincoln told his audience at Gettysburg in 1863. His address aimed to rally support for the war by framing it as a struggle for equality, rights, and opportunity. He echoed Parker’s speech defining the American idea in order to make clear to his listeners that it fell to them to determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

When the Union prevailed, it enshrined this vision in the Constitution with a series of amendments banning slavery, extending equal protection of the law, and safeguarding the right to vote for Americans of all races. In the ensuing decades, the rapid growth of the United States attracted further waves of immigrants and transformed the country into a global power. Some countries and peoples attempted to replicate American success by embracing American principles. Others recoiled and embraced alternatives—monarchy, empire, communism, and fascism among them.

The United States and its allies triumphed in two world wars and in a third that was undeclared—the first, Woodrow Wilson said, waged so that the world might “be made safe for democracy”; the second, Franklin D. Roosevelt explained, “to meet the threat to our democratic faith”; and the third, Ronald Reagan declared, to settle “the question of freedom for all mankind.” Each victory brought with it a fresh surge of democratization around the world. And each surge ebbed, in part because the pursuit of equality, rights, and opportunity guarantees ongoing contention while the alternatives offer the illusion of stability.

The American story isn’t simply an arc of history bending toward justice; it’s far messier. Americans have never agreed on when to prioritize the needs of individuals and when their collective project should come first. If this tension wasn’t itself unifying, it nonetheless helped stake out the terrain over which productive national debate could be waged.

So where does the American idea stand today? To some extent, it is a victim of its own success: Its spread to other nations has left America less distinctive than it once was. But the country has also failed to live up to its own ideals. In 1857, the United States was remarkable for its high levels of democratic participation and social equality. Recent reports rank the U.S. 28th out of 35 developed countries in the percentage of adults who vote in national elections, and 32nd in income equality. Its rates of intergenerational economic mobility are among the lowest in the developed world.

On opportunity, too, the United States now falls short. In its rate of new-business formation and in the percentage of jobs new businesses account for, it ranks in the lower half of nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Today, Americans describe China as Europeans once described the United States—as an uncouth land of opportunity and rising economic might.

It is no surprise that younger Americans have lost faith in a system that no longer seems to deliver on its promise—and yet, the degree of their disillusionment is stunning. Nearly three-quarters of Americans born before the Second World War assign the highest value—10 out of 10—to living in a democracy; less than a third of those born since 1980 do the same. A quarter of the latter group say it’s unimportant to choose leaders in free elections; just shy of a third think civil rights are needed to protect people’s liberties. Americans are not alone; much of western Europe is similarly disillusioned.

Around the globe, those who dislike American ideas about democracy now outnumber those who favor them. Vladimir Putin’s Russia offers a bellicose, authoritarian alternative. China whispers seductively to rulers of developing nations that they, too, can keep a tight grip on power while enjoying the spoils of economic growth.

All of this has left many Americans feeling disoriented, their faith that their nation has something distinctive to offer the world shaken. On the left, many have gravitated toward a strange sort of universalism, focusing on America’s flaws while admiring other nations’ virtues. They decry nationalism and covet open borders, imagining a world in which ideas can prevail without nations to champion them.

Even as the left is made queasy by the notion that an idea can be both good and distinctively American, many on the right now doubt that America is a land defined by a distinctive idea at all. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric is curiously devoid of references to a common civic creed. He promotes instead a more generic nationalism—one defined, like any nation’s, by culture and borders and narrow interests and enemies.

Both of these visions are corrosive, although not equally. America is an ethnically, geographically, and economically varied land. What helped reunite the states a century and a half ago was a nationalism grounded in a shared set of ideals, ideals that served as a source of national pride and future promise. But nationalism, the greatest force for social cohesion the world has yet discovered, can be wielded to varied ends. Trump embraces an arid nationalism defined by blood and soil, by culture and tradition. It accounts for his moral blindness after the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia—his inability to condemn the “very fine people” who rallied with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis against “changing culture.” That sort of cultural nationalism can easily shade into something uglier, and glues together only a fraction of Americans.

With democracy in retreat abroad, its contradictions and shortcomings exposed at home, and its appeal declining with each successive generation, it’s 1857 all over again. But if the challenges are the same, the solution may also be familiar. Vitriol and divisiveness are commonly blamed for the problems of contemporary politics. But Americans aren’t fighting too hard; they’re engaged in the wrong fights. The universalism of the left and cultural nationalism of the right are battering America’s sense of common national purpose. Under attack on both flanks, and weakened by its failure to deliver exceptional results, the nation’s shared identity is crumbling.

Americans have been most successful when fighting over how to draw closer to the promise of their democracy; how to fulfill their threefold commitment to equality, rights, and opportunity; and how to distribute the resulting prosperity. They have been held together by the conviction that the United States had a unique mission, even as they debated how to pursue it.

The greatest danger facing American democracy is complacence. The democratic experiment is fragile, and its continued survival improbable. Salvaging it will require enlarging opportunity, restoring rights, and pursuing equality, and thereby renewing faith in the system that delivers them. This, really, is the American idea: that prosperity and justice do not exist in tension, but flow from each other. Achieving that ideal will require fighting as if the fate of democracy itself rests upon the struggle—because it does.

Take the Statues Down

2017-08-13T15:17:16-04:00

On Saturday in Charlottesville, a rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a reenactment of the cause he led—white supremacists marching behind the Confederate battle flag, their opponents left injured or dead on the ground.

But like Lee’s soldiers, today’s defenders of white supremacy are fighting for a losing cause, a defeat that their violence will only serve to make deeper and more lasting than it otherwise would have been. Across the United States, the statues are starting to topple, the streets renamed, the memorials removed. These visible inscriptions of white supremacy into the American landscape are being erased.

In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu recently hauled down three public monuments to the Confederacy and to white supremacy. “These statues were a part of … terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city,” he explained. In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington responded to Charlottesville by accelerating his efforts to move statues of two Confederate leaders from the courthouse lawn to a public park. This was the rising tide of change that the Charlottesville rally hoped to stem.

As of August 2016, there were still more than 1,500 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries: 718 monuments and statutes still stood, and 109 public schools, 80 counties and cities, and 10 U.S. military bases bore the names of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate icons, according to a tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 200 of these were in Virginia alone.

And one sits in the center of Charlottesville. It was commissioned exactly 100 years ago, a gift to the city from a local philanthropist, to honor his parents with a physical incarnation of Southern ideals. But the statue was hardly the only contemporary effort to enshrine and defend these ideals. As it was being commissioned, sculpted, and erected, the second Ku Klux Klan was surging through the country. In Charlottesville, the local Klan gave $1,000 to the University of Virginia’s Centennial Endowment Fund in 1921, funds it gratefully received; there was a second Klan chapter for the students on campus.

The statue stands 26-feet tall, despite its oddly small pedestal. “Let it stay that way,” urged a speaker at its dedication. “The planet as a pedestal would be too small for Robert Edward Lee.” It was unveiled in 1924, as the conventions of the Confederate Veterans and Sons of Confederate Veterans met, with “the greatest procession that ever threaded its way through the streets of Charlottesville.” The Boy Scouts policed the route; the National Guard and governor marched; the president, board, faculty, and students of the university joined in. The man who introduced the ceremonies praised the “deathless devotion” of the veterans, who had fought “at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg,” and now worked “to keep the record of Confederate heroism free from the stain of calumny!”

It was less a dedication than a canonization. The master of ceremonies called Lee “the greatest man who ever lived.” The president of Washington and Lee proclaimed him “a Christian saint.” Lee, he explained, embodied “the moral greatness of the Old South,” with its “unusual combination of manly courage and womanly tenderness, its habitual tenderness toward the weak and helpless.” (When three slaves escaped, Lee had them tied to posts and whipped—50 lashes for the men, 20 for the woman—and then had their backs washed with stinging brine.)

His defenders today insist that Lee’s heroism lay not least in his laying down his sword when the war was done, deciding to “promote harmony once he recognized defeat.” The speakers at the dedication likewise stressed Lee’s role as a peacemaker; one went so far as to imagine the statute depicted “not the lurid splendor of the battlefield,” but instead, Lee riding to Lexington to begin his tenure as a university president.

Yet this is not what the statue depicts. Not this one, nor the others. Where are the statues of Lee seated at Appomattox, signing the terms of that surrender? Where are the marbles and bronzes of Lee the college president, wearing civilian clothes, ensconced behind a desk piled high with paperwork? Why is this peacemaker always immortalized girded for war?

Perhaps it’s because this, too, is largely myth, as my colleague Adam Serwer has so ably documented. Grant excoriated Lee for “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.” And the reconciliation he offered was between whites—it pointedly excluded those he had held as property, whose freedom the war secured, but whose equality he bitterly contested.

Lee himself, after the war, encouraged a friend to banish the 90 newly freed women, children, and old men working on his plantation. The government could pay for their care, Lee advised; better to replace them with white labor. “I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.” That is the harmony Lee promoted.

But the Lee memorialized in Charlottesville isn’t even the conciliator of myth. He’s attired in uniform, riding his horse. He’s the general who took an invading army north into Pennsylvania in 1863, in defense of a slave society. And not merely in the abstract. Lee’s army was ordered to respect white property, but chose to regard the blacks it encountered as contraband—to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. The army seized scores of their fellow Americans as slaves, actions sanctioned at the highest level of command; it took as many as a thousand back to Virginia. Those actions are among the “calumnies” that speakers at the statue’s dedication praised the veterans of Gettysburg for contesting.

“Some of the colored people who were raised here were taken along,” wrote Rachel Cormany in Chambersburg. “I sat on the front step as they were driven by just as we would drive cattle.” Women, children, and infants alike were marched off to slavery. Philip Schaff, a prominent theologian, watched as Lee’s army seized neighbors born and raised in the town. “One, Sam Brooks, split many a cord of wood for me.” He appealed to the conscience of one of their captors; he insisted he felt “comfortable,” because they were merely reclaiming stolen property.

Lee’s army, retreating in defeat, released some, but most were hauled South to the auction block. For the crime of refusing to cross back to Virginia, one boy was horribly mutilated, doused in turpentine, his genitals sliced off, and left to die in a barn by his Confederate captors. If there is no evidence that Lee, the living embodiment of womanly tenderness, sanctioned such crimes, neither is there evidence he acted to stop them. Nor was the Gettysburg campaign an anomaly; slave raids were a persistent feature of Confederate campaigns out of Virginia. At the Battle of the Crater, Lee’s army slaughtered black prisoners; one soldier lamented that some survived because “we could not kill them as fast as they [passed] us.” This is what the uniform Lee wore represented; this is what the army he commanded did; this is the pose in which he is immortalized in the center of Charlottesville.

There is a reason why statues of Confederate generals are still powerful political symbols; a reason why a candidate came a hair’s breadth from securing the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Virginia by campaigning to preserve them. The statues in public squares, the names on street signs, the generals honored with military bases—these are the ways in which we, as a society, tell each other what we value, and build the common heritage around which we construct a nation.

The white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville saw this perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. They understood the stakes of what they were defending. They knew that Lee was honored not for making peace per se, but for defending a society built upon white supremacy—first by taking up arms, and then when the war was lost, by laying them down in such a way as to preserve what he could.

On Saturday, President Trump told Americans they “must be united” and “condemn all that hate stands for.” He deplored the “violence on many sides.” A century before, such remarks would have been heartily applauded in Charlottesville. At the statue’s dedication, the keynote speaker deplored the violence of the Civil War, and praised Lee for his efforts at “reunion and reconciliation,” and for forging a nation with “hearts unspoiled by hate.”

The myth of reunion was built around this understanding, that the nation should treat both sides in a war that killed three-quarters of a million Americans as equal, or at least not inquire too closely into the merits of each cause. And that unity would come not from honestly grappling with events, but from studiously ignoring injustice, and condemning those who oppose it as hateful.

But the swift backlash against the president’s remarks by leaders of his own party and leading figures of his own administration signaled that the United States of 2017 is not the same nation it was in 1924. Republicans and Democrats alike saw the white nationalists in the streets of Charlottesville for what they were, and rejected their vision of a nation built on white supremacism.

This is why the city council of Charlottesville voted, a century after it was commissioned, to remove the statue of Robert Edward Lee.

And ultimately, it is why the others will come down, too. The statues will be moved, the streets renamed, and the military bases will honor patriots who fought for their country and not against it. Because a century and a half after Reconstruction began, America is still working on the project of constructing a more equal society, and reinvesting in the experiment of a multi-ethnic democracy.

The white nationalists in Charlottesville hoped to halt this project. Instead, they have simply given it fiercer, redoubled urgency.

A Scout Is Trustworthy—but Is the President?

2017-08-01T20:04:39-04:00

In President Trump’s remarkable speech to the Boy Scout’s quadrennial Jamboree, he began to recite the Scout Law, making it through just the first two principles in the list: “As the Scout Law says: ‘A Scout is trustworthy, loyal.’”

Remarkably, he seems to have gotten both virtues backward in the process.

Last week, I observed that he was offering an inverted definition of loyalty:

When Trump paused at “loyal”—when he interjected, “we could use some more loyalty”—I was stunned. This is the president who told James Comey, “I expect loyalty.” Over the weekend, he’d inveighed against Republicans who “do very little to protect their President.” And there he was, looking out at a sea of Scouts, telling them that “Boy Scout values are American values,” apparently unaware that his own definition of loyalty—something that he himself is owed—is precisely the opposite of the definition those Scouts are taught to embrace—something that we owe to others.

After several days of controversy, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh issued a statement distancing the Scouts from the president’s decision to inject overt partisanship into an apolitical gathering. “I want to extend my sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree. That was never our intent,” he wrote, adding that “We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program.”

But this afternoon, Politico published a transcript of Trump’s July 25 interview with The Wall Street Journal. They asked him about the mixed reaction to his speech, and he objected:

I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful. So there was—there was no mix.

How to reconcile that with the strongly worded statement from the Scouts?

The Boy Scouts of America responded to the claim, simply, “The Chief Scout Executive’s message to the Scouting community speaks for itself.” A Boy Scout official said they’re not aware of any call from their national leadership to the White House.

A Scout is trustworthy. But the president?

Trump's Mistake at the Boy Scout Jamboree

2017-07-24T23:57:45-04:00

Donald Trump continued his ongoing tour of cherished American institutions on Monday night, delivering yet another jarringly partisan speech to an apolitical audience—this one, comprising tens of thousands still too young to vote.

During the campaign, his performance at the Al Smith dinner—where presidential candidates roast their rivals and themselves every four years—devolved into overt attacks on his opponent. Shortly after his election, he stunned CIA employees by delivering a campaign-style stump speech before the agency’s Memorial Wall. On Saturday, he surprised the crowd of uniformed personnel at the commissioning of the USS Gerald R. Ford by imploring them to lobby Congress in support of his agenda.

So his speech on Monday night to the 2017 Boy Scout Jamboree ought to have been unsurprising. Trump, after all, seems to have only one mode, irrespective of the setting, or the nature of the audience he’s addressing; one familiar litany of triumphs and grievances to which he constantly returns, delighting his fans and galling his critics.

But he retains the capacity to surprise.

“As the Scout Law says: ‘A Scout is trustworthy, loyal’—we could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that,” Trump said, and paused there. The assembled scouts shouted the rest of it for him: “…helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

Like millions of other boys, I grew up reciting that creed on weekends. I had always taken it to be a list of obligations; its lessons that the path to leadership lay in serving others, and that there are ideals greater than self-interest. The Scout Oath is a pledge to “do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law,” to subordinate self gratification to the pursuit of that litany of virtues.

So when Trump paused at “loyal”—when he interjected, “we could use some more loyalty”—I was stunned. This is the president who told James Comey, “I expect loyalty.” Over the weekend, he’d inveighed against Republicans who “do very little to protect their President.” And there he was, looking out at a sea of Scouts, telling them that “Boy Scout values are American values,” apparently unaware that his own definition of loyalty—something that he himself is owed—is precisely the opposite of the definition those Scouts are taught to embrace—something that we owe to others.

I wasn’t a very good Boy Scout. Measured against the ideals of the Scout Law, I’d have fallen short, then or now. But as I listened to Donald Trump, I thought back to the opening ceremony of the Jamboree I’d attended in 1993. There were boys of all faiths, all political stripes. The Scouts occupy an increasingly complicated place in America’s shifting cultural landscape, but still provide a rare space, however flawed, in which those of radically divergent backgrounds and beliefs can interact on common ground.

We were seated by region. The opening act that year was supposed to be the Southern-rock group Alabama. When instead, Lee Greenwood took the stage, the South stood and roared its approval. In the Northeast, we turned and looked at each other: Lee who?

We’d also hoped for a presidential appearance; the chief executive of the United States is, by tradition, also the honorary president of the Boy Scouts. We had the perfect theme that year to lure Bill Clinton—“A Bridge to the Future,” a line George H.W. Bush had used during the campaign, and which Clinton would claim as his campaign theme in 1996—but he didn’t show.

“The Boy Scouts of America must not … involve Scouting in political matters,” the group’s Rules and Regulations plainly state. But a presidential visit—Clinton would come to the next Jamboree, in 1997—was about the place that scouting occupied in the civic fabric of the nation. It wasn’t about politics. Or at least, it wasn’t supposed to be.

That’s the line that Trump crossed on Monday night, the same one he crossed on the Ford, and at the CIA, and at the Al Smith dinner. It’s the interjection of partisan politics into a space where it doesn’t belong. And every time he does it, every time he goes before some nonpartisan group and speaks to its members as if they had come to attend a campaign rally, a little more of our shared civic culture gets chipped away. He’s not the first to erode such lines, but he stands apart for his persistent disregard.

Perhaps Trump did it out of ignorance. Ten members of his cabinet are former Scouts, including Rex Tillerson, a one-time president of the group. But Trump himself never belonged, never recited the Scout Law, never pledged to “help other people at all times.”

His closest prior association with the group appears to have come in 1989, when his charitable foundation made the smallest donation it ever gave—$7—to the Boy Scouts of America, as David Fahrenthold has reported. His son, Donald Trump Jr., turned 11 that year; $7 was then the cost of registering a new Scout.

If he’d read to the end of the Scout Law, he’d have learned that “a Scout is…reverent.” We could use some more reverence, I could tell you.

Is Big Philanthropy Compatible With Democracy?

2017-06-28T12:27:32-04:00

In 1912, John D. Rockefeller went to Congress with a simple request. He wanted permission to take the vast wealth he’d accumulated, and pour it into a charitable foundation.

Many were outraged.

John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian minister and a cofounder of the NAACP and ACLU, told the Senate that from the standpoint of the leaders of democracy, “this foundation, the very character, must be repugnant to the whole idea of a democratic society.” Rockefeller’s effort failed. He ultimately chartered it in the state of New York instead.

A few years later, Missouri Senator Frank Walsh cited the Rockefeller Foundation as he declared that “huge philanthropic trusts, known as foundations, appear to be a menace to the welfare of society.”

These were hardly isolated concerns. Contemporaries, as the Stanford professor and scholar of philanthropy Rob Reich has written, worried about how private foundations “undermine political equality, affect public policies, could exist in perpetuity, and [be] unaccountable except to a hand-picked assemblage of trustees.”

They are, he argues, extraordinary exercises of power. “Rather than responding to power with gratitude,” Reich said, “we should respond with skepticism and scrutiny.”

It’s an unfamiliar perspective. These days, wealthy philanthropists are more likely to be lauded, their names emblazoned on buildings, their pictures on magazine covers. And Reich delivered it in an unusual setting, speaking Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, to an audience that included more than a few philanthropists and foundation executives.

But he’s not alone. Judge Richard Posner, the idiosyncratic jurist and leading legal theorist, has complained that “a perpetual charitable foundation ... is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody. It competes neither in capital markets nor in product markets ... and, unlike a hereditary monarch whom such a foundation otherwise resembles, it is subject to no political controls either.”

It’s a genuine dilemma. At its worst, big philanthropy represents less an exercise of individual freedom, Reich said, than a tax-subsidized means of taking private profit and converting it into public power. And he argued that big foundations possess the leverage to bend policy in their favored direction in a coercive manner, pointing to the example of the Gates Foundation’s funding of educational reform.

Not all his listeners were convinced. Steven Seleznow, who had worked for the Gates Foundation to fund public-education reform and now leads the Arizona Community Foundation, argued that there is already abundant accountability built into the system. He pointed out that educational grants had to be negotiated with public officials, and then approved by an elected school board, mayor, city council, or governor. Reich, though, believes that this elides the disparities in power between a foundation offering funds, and the government entity requesting them.

If large foundations are a threat to democracy, then, is there a way to reform them short of abolishing them altogether? Reich said yes, arguing for turning “the apparent vice of unaccountability” into a virtue. Philanthropies operate over longer time horizons than either government or private business. At their best, Reich said, they can serve as “an extra-governmental form of democratic experimentalism,” piloting risky or unproven policies, testing them, then presenting them to the public “for a stamp of democratic legitimacy.”

It’s only this sort of bold experimentation, Reich argued, that can ultimately justify the array of benefits and protections big philanthropy enjoys. “Foundations are free, unlike commercial entities, to fund public goods because they need not compete with other firms or exclude people from consuming the goods they fund,” he wrote in The Boston Review. “And they are free, unlike politicians who face future elections, to fund minority, experimental, or controversial public goods that are not favored by majorities or at levels above the median voter.”

In Aspen, Reich analogized this to academic tenure—granting freedom to work on unpopular subjects or long-term projects without the demand for immediate results. It would, he said, allow philanthropy to “domesticate plutocrats to serve democratic institutions.”

Of course, the vast majority of charitable foundations won’t have the resources to pursue the approach that Reich claims is the only potential justification for their existence. Of the 80,000 private foundations in the United States, 98 percent possess less than $50 million. “Rather than there being a ceiling on the size of foundations, there should be a floor,” Reich said. He argues that donors, instead of endowing their own, small charitable foundations, which may not be able to pursue bold, risky, long-term experiments, should write checks directly to nonprofit institutions and other charitable causes.

What Reich envisions would require a radical reimagination of the philanthropic sector: vastly fewer foundations, making much bolder bets, over longer time horizons. It wouldn’t be easy to achieve. But, Reich argues, it would have a crucial advantage: It would provide a model of philanthropy that would strengthen democracy, instead of undermining it.

How One Pastor Is Bridging the Partisan Divide

2017-06-27T15:48:17-04:00

A recent study found that Methodism is one of America’s most politically divided denominations, with both congregants and their pastors roughly split between the Democratic and Republican Parties. That makes rising partisanship a particular challenge for pastors like Adam Hamilton, of the Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. He estimates his congregants are perhaps 60 percent Republicans, and 40 percent Democrats—slightly more liberal than the communities from which they’re drawn, but still a decidedly red-state congregation. And, he argues, it gives the ways in which he navigates those tensions broader import.

Hamilton wanted to challenge his congregants to address pressing social challenges, despite their partisan divisions. “I’d like for them to look at the news every day, and think: ‘I wonder how the Gospel calls me to respond to this,’” he said.

So Hamilton teamed up with a local TV news station for Sunday services. Newscasters at KMBC 9 News created segments to be aired at the church, which Hamilton would then discuss with his congregants. One of the first dealt with the struggles of Kansas City’s public schools, left with few resources by decades of white flight, which in 2011 had just had their accreditation revoked.

“You could feel the discomfort in the room, because our folks lived in the suburbs with the best school systems,” he recalled. But he stressed to his flock that this was, in fact their shared responsibility. “Do you think God cares about the 32,000 children, or the teachers?” Hamilton asked his congregants. “And if he doesn’t, what do you think God cares about?”

“We took this thing that was uncomfortable for people,” he said, and forced them to grapple with what it meant, through the prism of their faith.

They passed around the offering plates. But instead of asking for donations, Hamilton used them to distribute postcards with the contact information of teachers and administrators, urging congregants to reach out to them and offer help. Today, the church gives more than half a million in donations every year to six area elementary schools, and supports a variety of tutoring and enrichment programs.

Hamilton retold the story Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. He offered it as an example of how his United Methodist Church has found ways to bridge partisan divides to engage with its community. “We try to bring both the evangelical and social gospel together regularly,” he said.

Hamilton is engagingly unassuming; his church website refers to him as Pastor Adam. The church now claims nearly 20,000 congregants spread over its four Kansas City-area locations.

Predictably, he looks back to the Gospel for inspiration.

“Among his disciples, [Jesus] chose Matthew the tax collector, who was a collaborator with the Romans, and he chose Simon the Zealot, who was absolutely opposed to the Roman occupation, and he was willing to kill and terrorize to drive them out.” Hamilton sees a model in that approach. “In essence, he took a hardcore Democrat and a hardcore Republican, and asked them both to be his disciples,” he quipped.

But finding ways to respect divergent views doesn’t mean that people will agree. “We’ve had members of both parties running against each other,” he said, stressing that congregants could share goals even as they disagree over the means of achieving them.

The election of Donald Trump has proved particularly challenging. After the election, Hamilton said, his church had Republicans and Democrats who were distraught, but also fiscal conservatives excited about the course that Trump might steer, and a congregant who showed up in a “Make America Great Again” hat. And even though Hamilton parts ways with the president on both personal and political matters, he says he’s hoping for the best. “I’m going to pray that the office will ennoble him,” Hamilton said. “And that’s about redemption, and about hope.”

For his own part, Hamilton strives to position himself as above partisanship or political ideology. “People ask me this question all the time: Are you liberal or conservative? I can’t figure you out. And I say, ‘Yes, of course,’” he said.

But it’s not that simple, of course. The United States is seeing a rising tide of negative partisanship; people orienting themselves in opposition to the views of their opponents. Hamilton tries to stay nonpartisan, distinguishing between campaigns and policy. “When it comes to speaking about candidates, I’m as neutral as Switzerland,” he insisted. “But when it comes to issues there’s a way of talking about issues.”

Even so, when he tackles controversial topics from the pulpit, he hears from congregants who disagree. Some say they stay with the church out of affection for their pastor and community, and despite his bringing these issues into the church. But engaging with particularly controversial topics can tip the balance. “Those sermons, I get people who stop coming to church,” he said.

He recalled a sermon on Trump’s travel ban. “I understand what’s behind it, because we’re afraid,” he said. But he pointed back to things Americans had done in the past out of fear that the country now regrets. He cited scriptural passages on caring for the stranger and the alien, and challenged the factual basis of the ban. He ended with an interview he’d filmed with a local family of Syrian refugees, and the testimony of his Iraqi translator, putting a human face on the question.

Many said they were deeply moved.

But a few weeks later, one of his staffers reached out to a man who hadn’t been to services lately, and discovered that the sermon had driven him away. Hamilton reached out; they talked, came to a better understanding of each other’s positions, if not perfect agreement, and reconciled. But for every such example, Hamilton said, there are likely hundreds of others who depart without giving him the chance to change their minds.

Trump's Foreign-Policy 'Adhocracy'

2017-06-27T11:07:01-04:00

The Trump administration’s lack of structure or experience is hobbling its ability to conduct an effective foreign policy, argues Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations. “I think it is a recipe for disaster to have multiple centers of authority, to have informal lines of authority,” he said. “I think this administration is doing itself a disservice.

“It’s a decentralized, improvisational administration,” Haass said; he dubbed it an “adhocracy.”

Haass, who served as a high-ranking State Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush, was sharply critical of the results of that organizational incoherence. “It’s very hard for the administration to have a single doctrine or policy,” he said, citing rival factions within the administration and widespread vacancies in its senior ranks.

Haass was speaking Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. His remarks amounted to a striking rebuke from a leading foreign-policy analyst, who was reportedly considered for the job of deputy secretary of state by the Trump transition team. “I respect Richard Haass, who’s on your show a lot,” Trump said on Morning Joe last year. “And I like him a lot. I have a few people that I really like and respect.”

Haass noted that the Trump administration could have built a disciplined process to compensate for its relative lack of experience. Trump instead modeled his administration on his decades of success in business, where he relied on a similarly improvisational style, Haass said. The result has been adhocracy.

“Virtually no one in the administration has any interagency experience,” he pointed out. “Some of them have never been in government before, including the president and the secretary of state. … If you know that going in, this ought to be the most tightly structured administration in history to compensate for it. Instead, it’s the most loosely structured I’ve seen.” He added that, to judge by its moves, the administration has not yet acknowledged the problems it faces. Indeed, hours after Haass spoke, the White House released a terse statement alleging Syrian preparations for another chemical-weapons attack. The New York Times reported that “several military officials were caught off guard” by the late-night announcement, though the White House said Tuesday morning it had coordinated with the relevant agencies.

That’s left America’s allies, as well as its rivals, unsettled. “It’s the number one, two, and three question I get around the world,” said Haass. World leaders, he said, are trying to figure out whether Trump represents a permanent shift in American policy, or a temporary aberration. “They are trying to get a fix on us.” The combination of inexperienced personnel and an incoherent structure makes that difficult.

And don’t look to well-established bureaucracies to compensate. For all the talk about an international community, domestic institutions, and established norms, Haass argued, the reality is that individual presidents still exercise tremendous discretion. That means that what Trump decides to do—or declines to pursue—remains enormously consequential. “There’s almost nothing that’s inevitable,” he said, citing the first President Bush’s resolute response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

“A couple of days before at the Cabinet meeting, that wasn’t obvious that that was going to be the outcome,” he recalled. He pointed to the magnitude of the military effort involved, and the widespread press predictions of thousands of American casualties. “If someone else had been president, it’s not axiomatic … that we were going to do what we did.”

And Trump’s decisions are having a similar impact today. In its early months, the Trump administration has been aggressive in remaking its foreign policy around interests, and not principles, reversing decades of U.S. positions in multiple realms.

“I’m a card-carrying realist,” Haass said, “but I think we’ve taken that way too far. We ought to stand up for things we believe.”

Memo to Trump: This Is Why You're Losing

2017-06-15T12:33:54-04:00

It would be hard to fashion a more exquisite snare for a man like Donald Trump than the modern, institutional presidency. Just five months into his term, he appears trapped by its constraints—and the harder he tries to escape them, the more thoroughly entangled he becomes.

On Thursday morning, President Trump again lashed out at the “bad and conflicted people” investigating him for obstructing justice. “They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story,” he tweeted. But to take Trump’s charge at face value is to read it as an indictment of his own blunders. Trump is claiming that there was no underlying wrongdoing, but his decision to fire his FBI director sparked the appointment of a special counsel who’s now exploring whether it was a criminal act. This, he says, is a purely self-inflicted wound—or, as a senior administration official told The Daily Beast, “The president did this to himself.”

Trump is, in many ways, a man out of his time. He ran his business as he is attempting to run the presidency, as a 19th-century style entity, built around its proprietor. But the federal government has long-since evolved into a modern bureaucracy, an institution Trump appears to have neither the experience nor the patience to successfully operate.

Trump’s business empire sprawls into hundreds of LLCs and licensing agreements, but at its core, it takes a familiar form: the proprietary firm. Built around its founder, generally branded with his name, its reputation intertwined with his, and its affairs directly under his management—this was the dominant form of business in the United States until the final decade of the 19th century.

There are real advantages to that arrangement. It confers flexibility, allowing leaders to react to shifting circumstances with speed, and to take risks without fear of being second-guessed. It mitigates the agency problem—the danger that professional managers will prioritize their own interests. And to the proprietors, it offers the satisfactions of independence; they control their own destinies.

It is a form almost perfectly adapted to play to Trump’s strengths, and cover his weaknesses. As a CEO hired by an independent board, he might not have survived the bankruptcies of some of his businesses, a string of failed ventures, constant lawsuits, or the other setbacks of his career. But the Trump Organization is his to do with as he pleases, and if not all the risks he chooses to take, the loopholes he exploits, the deals he strikes, or the ventures he launches have succeeded, enough have paid off to preserve and expand the fortune he inherited.

But America is now a century or more past its managerial revolution—the heyday of the proprietary firm is gone, displaced by the corporate bureaucracy. It swept through industry in the Great Merger Wave at the turn of the 20th century, and through the federal government in the decades that followed. Bureaucracies offer a solution to the challenge of scale; they create rules and procedures, and the corps of professionals who populate bureaucracies abide by them, allowing business to be performed in a predictable fashion, even between actors with no personal relationship. And they bring with them their own set of costs and benefits, requiring the surrender of a degree of autonomy and flexibility in exchange for stability and scale, and putting systems ahead of individual initiative.

The presidency itself underwent a similar transition. In the 19th century, as the historian Brian Balogh has argued, it was already tremendously powerful—but operated indirectly, through third-party entities like state and local governments. It was a great deal like the Trump Organization—a relatively small staff, multiplying its influence by striking deals with larger entities that had the personnel to put its plans into action. As late as 1900, William McKinley had just 13 staffers working directly for him in the White House. Today, the Executive Office of the President claims more than two thousand personnel; the federal government, more than two million.

It is a world against which Trump seems to rebel at every turn. He refuses to empower his chief of staff to create a rule-bound White House, preferring instead to pit advisers against each other in a more freewheeling style. He insists on reaching directly down to subordinates, instead of moving through the hierarchy—calling the acting head of the National Park Service to complain about a photo, tweeting his defense of his travel ban instead of issuing statements through his press office, and meeting with the FBI director instead of the attorney general.

And each time, he has only worsened the trouble he sought to address, or created new problems for himself—producing mockery of his exaggerated crowd-size claims, court injunctions against his executive orders, and now an investigation for obstruction of justice. His repeated defeats seem only to deepen his anger as he strains against bureaucratic rules, the thousands of Lilliputian strings that not even presidential giants can snap.

There is no better example of this than the memo, that humblest—most spare and restrained—of literary genres. It was born in early modern Europe, but came of age during America’s managerial revolution, a key technology of the administrative bureaucracy. They institutionalized memory, making decisions legible to those not personally present, and creating records of conversations that could be referenced later by other bureaucrats.

In the process, they became the key tool of bureaucratic warfare. As MIT’s JoAnne Yates wrote, in her history of the memo as a managerial genre, “This extension of documentary communication also reflected more specific political motivations. As companies grew, allegiances to and rivalries between departments created friction, and each side of each dispute wanted to document its view of the issue.”

When Trump breached protocol and met alone with Comey, the FBI director went back to his office, and wrote a memo. When Trump called NSA Director Mike Rogers to criticize the intelligence community’s conclusions on Russian interference and to pressure him to publicly disavow the possibility of collusion, The Wall Street Journal reports, the NSA’s deputy director dutifully recorded it in a memo. There’s no indication the president ordered his own staff to document his view of these conversations. His preferred form of written communication to subordinates is the personal message scrawled with a Sharpie, not the memorandum dictated to file.

Memo to the president: You’re losing this game because you don’t understand its rules.

There’ve been no shortage of op-eds and talking heads telling the president that he disregards the institutional constraints at his considerable political and legal peril. Many White House advisers have reportedly told him the same, even as others have egged him on. But Trump obtained his clearest warning of all from the man from whom he was least inclined to receive it.

A week after Trump’s election, President Obama held a news conference. He was asked, among other things, about his handling of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. “Keep in mind,” he replied, “that it's not just a matter of what I'm willing to do.” Obama was no minimalist when it came to executive authority; he had pushed the powers of his office further than any of his recent predecessors, often in ways that federal courts would later strike down for exceeding his authority, or failing to follow prescribed bureaucratic procedures. And along the way, he had been humbled to discover that there are limits to what a president can achieve through sheer force of will and disregard of precedents.

“One of the things you discover about being president is that there are all these rules and norms and laws and you've got to pay attention to them,” he continued. “And the people who work for you are also subject to those rules and norms. And that's a piece of advice that I gave to the incoming president.”

Maybe it’s a lesson each president needs to learn for himself.

Trump’s Ignorance Won’t Save Him

2017-06-08T21:42:14-04:00

The president’s defenders have a simple explanation for the conduct James Comey described to Congress: Trump didn’t know what he was doing. Washington Bureau Chief Yoni Appelbaum argues that the president’s ignorance is no excuse. Trump is the commander-in-chief and is responsible for his actions.

Comey's Duty to Correct

2017-06-07T15:33:03-04:00

Former FBI Director James Comey believes that when he offers Congress assurances about an ongoing investigation, and those claims cease to be true, he has a duty to correct the record. His willingness to act on that belief may well have tipped the 2016 election to Donald Trump. And, it turns out, that unwavering stand is also what led Donald Trump to fire him.

Comey’s statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee, released on Wednesday ahead of his testimony, tells the story in dramatic fashion. At its heart is a clash between a president who insists he’s being smeared and demands to be defended, and a lawman who refuses to repeat in public the assurances that he offered in private.

That conflict played out most clearly in a March 30 phone call between the two. Trump, as Comey tells the story, described the Russia investigation as “a cloud” hovering over his presidency, and demanded to know what the FBI could do to “lift the cloud.” Comey insisted that a thorough, fair, and impartial investigation was the best way to resolve the matter.

But that didn’t placate the president, who wanted an explanation of Comey’s testimony the previous week confirming the existence of an investigation into the potential for collusion between Russia and associates of the Trump campaign. “I explained that we had briefed the leadership of Congress on exactly which individuals we were investigating and that we had told those Congressional leaders that we were not personally investigating President Trump,” Comey recalled. “I reminded him I had previously told him that. He repeatedly told me, ‘We need to get that fact out.’”

But Comey wouldn’t do it. He refused repeated, direct demands from the president that he say publicly what he had several times assured him in private—that the Bureau “did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him.” Comey said there were “a number of reasons” for his refusal, “most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change.”

For Comey, “duty to correct” is a loaded phrase.

On July 5, 2016, Comey held a press conference to announce his conclusion that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails should be closed without prosecution. In October, he learned that Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained thousands of emails from the account of Weiner’s wife, the Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and authorized his agents to examine them. Comey decided he had a “duty” to correct the “impression” he had left that the investigation was closed, according to The New Yorker, and announced on October 28 that he had reopened the investigation.

Others agreed. “He had an absolute duty, in my opinion, 11 days or not, to come forward with the new information that he has and let the American people know that, too,” then-Senator Jeff Sessions said at the time. Trump said “it took a lot of guts.”

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has concluded that the Comey letter “probably cost Clinton the election”; Nate Cohn, of The New York Times, is more skeptical. But there’s little debate it had a major impact on the race. “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election,” Comey later told Congress.

So when Trump demanded that he publicly attest to the lack of an investigation, the bile surely rose again. But Comey said that he never explained to Trump his fear of again feeling a duty to correct, and there’s no evidence that Trump understood his rationale, or how Comey’s continued silence might ultimately protect him from a damaging public declaration.

To the contrary. “This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt, and he was reportedly infuriated that Comey would not publicly affirm that he was not under investigation.

When Trump fired Comey, his administration initially insisted that he was being dismissed for his handling of the Clinton investigation. But Trump’s own letter told a different story; he was evidently determined to tell the public what Comey would not. "While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau," he wrote.

On Wednesday, Comey’s statement confirmed those three conversations, just as Trump had long demanded. But it also offered a detailed accounting of his interactions with Trump—contradicting the president’s claims on any number of crucial points.

It was as if Comey, once more, perceived a duty to correct the record.

Why There Was a Civil War

2017-05-01T12:32:08-04:00

Editor’s Note: We’ve gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race and racism in America. Find the collection here.

President Trump has peppered his first months in office with periodic announcements about the history of the nation he now leads, which he shares in the apparent presumption that others will be similarly amazed and astonished. In February, he marked Black History Month with a rambling speech, name-checking a variety of historical figures. “I am very proud now that we have a museum, National Mall, where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things,” he said. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

“Great president,” he told the congressional campaign committee of the Party of Lincoln back in March. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anyone know?”

But more striking than these episodes in the education of Donald Trump are the lessons he chooses to draw from these snippets of the past. On Monday, he was speaking to SiriusXM’s Salena Zito about his admiration for Andrew Jackson, a favorite theme of Steve Bannon’s, and veered dramatically off course:

I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

There is, as my colleague David Graham has noted, a tremendous amount to unpack in those short few lines. Most charitably, Trump may have been contrasting Jackson’s successful resolution of the Nullification Crisis in 1832 with President Buchanan’s fecklessness a few decades later, making the case that a strong leader could have imposed a deal that would have averted the war.

Jackson was prepared to use force, militia drilled in South Carolina, but a compromise averted the crisis. “We want no war, above all, no civil war, no family strife,” Henry Clay said in 1832, defending that compromise on the Senate floor. “We want to see no sacked cities, no desolated fields, no smoking ruins, no streams of American blood shed by American arms!”

But if Clay and Jackson averted war, their continuance was purchased in the blood and pain of others. There were 2 million slaves in 1830; by the time the Civil War came, there were more than 4 million held in bondage.

The question Trump says that “people don’t ask” may be the most debated historical question in America. Union veterans of the war tended to stress the moral imperative of their cause. But by the 1890s, historians like James Ford Rhodes were starting to understand the conflict as the inevitable clash of a slave system with an industrializing economy, with slavery less a moral cause than a tectonic force impelling the conflict forward. Charles and Mary Beard, in the 1920s, deemphasized slavery in favor of class conflict between the agrarian South and industrializing North, but saw the war as no less inevitable.

In the wake of the First World War, though, revisionists like James Randall and Avery Craven argued that the Civil War was a terrible, avoidable blunder. Slavery was inefficient, and left alone, would have extinguished itself, they insisted—it was weak politicians and crumbling institutions that produced unnecessary bloodshed.

This was the reigning interpretation when Trump was in school; if he studied the causes of the Civil War, it’s likely what he would have learned. And asking the question does Trump no discredit; when I taught the history of the Civil War to lecture halls of college students, we spent weeks discussing it. What’s alarming is the answer he proposes; that the conflict might have been averted by a strong leader. And the omission of a critical word: slavery.

By the civil-rights era, historical interpretations of the war were shifting. Historians looked more closely at slavery, and saw a rapidly expanding, even thriving, system. They looked at the words of those who pushed the nation into war. And they concluded that there was a remarkably straightforward answer to the question posed by the president: “Why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

Because the Civil War was fought over slavery. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” Mississippi declared as it seceded. “The people of the slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery,” said Louisiana. “The servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations,” insisted Texas.

And Lincoln understood it, too. “All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war,” he said. “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”

The entirely uncontroversial consensus among professional historians is that slavery caused the war, although this conclusion has not reached much of the general public. Leaders like Jackson, then, only postponed the inevitable reckoning. It’s still tempting, though, to believe that the Civil War might have been avoided, the loss of three-quarters-of-a-million lives averted, the bloodiest conflict in our history forestalled. And for a century, many of America’s political leaders did everything in their power to turn a blind eye to the carnage of slavery, staving off sectional crises.

The first century of American history, in fact, can be told through the long litany of deals struck by strong leaders working to suppress, or at least delay, open conflict over slavery. The delegates in Philadelphia were deal makers; the Constitution they produced strengthened the federal government, but at the price of shielding slavery. The three-fifths compromise ensured the South would wield disproportionate power in the House and in presidential elections; the document protected the international slave trade for 20 years.

If some at the convention had hoped that compromise might buy enough time for slavery to pass out of existence on its own, they were disappointed. Instead, slavery—in all its horrifying brutality—became a cornerstone of American economic development. An ever-increasing number of human beings were held in bondage, their labor forcibly extracted, and their financial worth heavily leveraged.

The deals piled up, the list like a history-textbook index. The Missouri Compromise, in 1820. The Nullification Crisis in 1832. The Compromise of 1850. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed in 1854. Even on the eve of war, there was the failed Crittenden Compromise.

One hundred and sixty years ago, the founders of this magazine promised that, in politics, “It will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity.” Their point was that some issues aren’t personal, aren’t partisan, and aren’t amenable to compromise—that sometimes it is striking a deal which weakens a nation, and taking a principled stand which strengthens it.

There are some conflicts that a leader cannot suppress, no matter how strong he may be; some deals that should not be struck, no matter how alluring they may seem.

This was the great moral truth on which the Republican Party was founded.

Perhaps most people don’t know that.