Monday, December 19, 2016

This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson.

In Hell’s Angels, the gonzo journalist wrote about left-behind people motivated only by “an ethic of total retaliation.” Sound familiar?
By Susan McWilliams The Nation

In late March, Donald Trump opened a rally in Wisconsin by mocking the state’s governor, Scott Walker, who had just endorsed his Republican opponent, Ted Cruz. “He came in on his Harley,” Trump said of Walker, “but he doesn’t look like a motorcycle guy.”
“The motorcycle guys,” he added, “like Trump.”

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Thompson observed that the Hell’s Angels were alienated from a changing America in which they felt left behind.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.
Listen to Hunter S. Thompson speak with Studs Turkel about ‘Hell’s Angels’ in 1967.
Hell’s Angels concludes when the Angels ally with the John Birch Society and write to President Lyndon Johnson to offer their services to fight communism, much to the befuddlement of the anti-Vietnam elites who assumed the Angels were on the side of “counterculture.” The Angels and their retaliatory militarism were, Thompson warned, the harbingers of a darker time to come. That time has arrived.

* * *

Fifty years after Thompson published his book, a lot of Americans have come to feel like motorcycle guys. At a time when so many of us are trying to understand what happened in the election, there are few better resources than Hell’s Angels. That’s not because Thompson was the only American writer to warn coastal, left-liberal elites about their disconnection from poor and working-class white voters. Plenty of people issued such warnings: journalists like Thomas Edsall, who for decades has been documenting the rise of “red America,” and scholars like Christopher Lasch, who saw as early as the 1980s that the elite embrace of technological advancement and individual liberation looked like a “revolt” to the mass of Americans, most of whom have been on the losing end of enough “innovations” to be skeptical about the dogmas of progress.

But though Thompson’s depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture—one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals—is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as “white trash” or “deplorables.”

Thompson’s Angels were mostly working-class white men who felt, not incorrectly, that they had been relegated to the sewer of American society. Their unswerving loyalty to the nation— the Angels had started as a World War II veterans group—had not paid them any rewards or won them any enduring public respect. The manual-labor skills that they had learned and cultivated were in declining demand. Though most had made it through high school, they did not have the more advanced levels of training that might lead to economic or professional security. “Their lack of education,” Thompson wrote, “rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy.” Looking at the American future, they saw no place for themselves in it.

The Angels were the original “strangers in their own land”—clunky and outclassed like their Harleys.

In other words, the Angels felt like “strangers in their own land,” as Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it in her recent book on red-state America. They were clunky and outclassed and scorned, just like the Harley-Davidsons they chose to drive. Harleys had been the kings of the American motorcycle market until the early 1960s, when European and Japanese imports came onto the scene. Those imports were sleeker, faster, more efficient, and cheaper. Almost overnight, Harleys went from being in high demand to being the least appealing, most underpowered, and hard to handle motorcycles out there. It’s not hard to see why the Angels insisted on Harleys and identified strongly with their bikes.

Just as there was no rational way to defend Harleys against foreign-made choppers, the Angels saw no rational grounds on which to defend their own skills or loyalties against the emerging new world order of the late 20th century. Their skills were outdated; their knowledge was insubstantial; their powers were inferior. There was no rational way to argue that they were better workers or citizens than the competition; the competition was effectively over, and Angels had lost. The standards by which they had been built had been definitively eclipsed.

We parents tell our children that when you know you’ve lost an argument or a race, the right thing to do is to be a good sport and to “get ’em next time.” But if there is no next time, or you know that every next time you are going to be in the loser’s lane again, what’s the use of being a good sport? It would make you look even more ignorant, and more like a loser, to pretend like you think you have a chance. The game has been rigged against you. Why not piss on the field before you storm off? Why not stick up your finger at the whole goddamned game?

Therein lies the ethic of total retaliation. The Angels, rather than gracefully accepting their place as losers in an increasingly technical, intellectual, global, inclusive, progressive American society, stuck up their fingers at the whole enterprise. If you can’t win, you can at least scare the bejeesus out of the guy wearing the medal. You might not beat him, but you can make him pay attention to you. You can haunt him, make him worry that you’re going to steal into his daughter’s bedroom in the darkest night and have your way with her—and that she might actually like it.

* * *

It’s not hard to see in the demographics, the words, and the behavior of Trump supporters an ethic of total retaliation at work. These are men and women who defend their vote by saying things like: “I just wanted people to know that I’m here, that I count.” These are men and women whose scorn of “political correctness” translates into: “You can’t make me talk the way that you want me to talk, even if that way of talking is nicer and smarter and better.” These are men and women whose denials of climate change are gleeful denials of scientific expertise in a world where scientific experts have unquestioned intellectual respect and social status. These are men and women who seemed to applaud the incompetence of Trump’s campaign because competence itself is associated with membership in the elite.

Thompson would want us to see this: These are men and women who know that, by all intellectual and economic standards, they cannot win the game. So whether it be out of self-protection or an overcompensation for their own profound sense of shame, they lash out at politicians, judges, scientists, teachers, Wall Street, universities, the media, legislatures—even at elections. They are not interested in contemplating serious reforms to the system; they are either too pessimistic or too disappointed to believe that is possible. So the best they can do is adopt a position of total irreverence: to show they hate the players and the game.

Understood in those terms, the idea that Trumpism is “populist” seems misplaced. Populism is a belief in the right of ordinary people, rather than political insiders, to rule. Trumpism, by contrast, operates on the presumption that ordinary people aren’t going to get any chance to rule no matter what they do, so they might as well piss off the political insiders using the only tool left available to them: the vote.

While many commentators say Trump will have to bring back jobs or vibrancy to places like the Rust Belt if he wants to continue to have the support of people who voted for him, Thompson’s account suggests otherwise. Many if not most Trump supporters long ago gave up on the idea that any politician, even someone like Trump, can change the direction the wind is blowing. Even if he fails to bring back the jobs, Trump can maintain loyalty in another way: As long as he continues to offend and irritate elites, and as long as he refuses to play by certain rules of decorum—heaven forfend, the president-elect says ill-conceived things on Twitter!—Trump will still command loyalty. It’s the ethic, not the policy, that matters most.

The racism unleashed by Trump can be understood as directed at the political elite rather than minority groups.

Even the racism that was on full display in Trump’s campaign should be understood at least in part in retaliatory terms, as directed at the political elite rather than at struggling minority groups. The Hell’s Angels, Thompson wrote, did things like get tattoos of swastikas mostly because it visibly scared the members of polite society. The Angels were perfectly happy to hang out at bars with men of different races, especially if those men drove motorcycles, and several insisted to Thompson that the racism was only for show. While I have no doubt (and no one should have any doubt) that there are genuine racists in Trump’s constituency—and the gleeful performance of racism is nothing to shrug off—Thompson suggests we should consider the ways in which racism might not be the core disease of Trumpism but a symptom of a deeper illness.

* * *

Thompson would also direct our attention in the early days of the Trump administration to the armed forces and the policies that will mandate what they do. For one great exception to the Angels’ ethos of total retaliation against authority was the military, just as one great exception to the Trump voters’ ethos of total irreverence is the police. Thompson explains that such institutions, which are premised on brute force rather than the more refined rules of intellectual engagement, maintain both a practical and a cultural connection to people like the Angels. The military and the police draw mostly from poor and working-class communities to fill their ranks, and their use of violence is something the motorcycle guys understand. It is one aspect of American life they can easily imagine themselves being a part of.

For his part, Thompson thought that what might prove most dangerous about the ethic of total retaliation was the way it encouraged the distrust of all authority—except for the authority of brute force. The president-elect’s enthusiasm for waterboarding and other forms of torture, his hawkish cabinet choices, and his overtures to strongmen like Vladimir Putin are grave omens. We could end up back where Thompson left off at the end of his book: the Angels, marching with the John Birch Society, on behalf of the Vietnam War.

At the end of Hell’s Angels, having spent months with the motorcycle guys, Thompson finally gets stomped by them. For some offense he doesn’t understand (and which he probably didn’t commit), Thompson gets punched, bloodied, kicked in the face and in the ribs, spat at and pissed on. He limps off to a hospital in the dead of night, alone and afraid. Only in that moment does Thompson realize that as a journalist (and therefore a member of the elite), he could not possibly be a true friend of the Angels. Wear leather and ride a motorcycle though he might, Thompson stood on the side of intellectual and cultural authority. And that finally made him, despite his months of good-timing with the Angels, subject to their retaliatory impulses. The ethic of retaliation is total, Thompson comes to realize. There is nothing partial about it. It ends with violence.

There’s no doubt about it: trouble lies ahead. That Hell’s Angels foresaw all this 50 years ago underscores the depth and seriousness of Thompson as a political thinker and of ours as a singularly dangerous time. Trumpism is about something far more serious than Trump, something that has been brewing and building for generations. Let us take Thompson’s cautions seriously, then, so that this time we Berkeley types are not naive about what we face. Otherwise, we’re all liable to get stomped.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Revolutionary Guard faces new foe in Iran's opening economy

By JON GAMBRELL  AP
Vahid Salemi The Progressive

In this Sept. 21, 2008 file photo, Iranian Revolutionary Guard members march during a parade ceremony, marking the 28th anniversary of the onset of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988),

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran's Revolutionary Guard faces a new enemy: the gradual opening of the country's economy after the nuclear deal with world powers.

Though better known for its hard-line fervor as an elite force created to defend Iran's cleric-led system, the Guard holds vast business interests both public and hidden across the Islamic Republic. In times of international sanctions, the organization won massive no-bid government contracts and expanded its influence.

But comments made by one Guard general about a new ship deal worth $650 million betray the worry felt in the organization over potential competition, analysts say. It also offers a possible secondary motive for its detention of dual nationals on purported espionage charges and its confrontations with the West: keeping its share of Iran's market of 80 million people.

"They are worried about competition internally," said Alireza Nader, an analyst at the RAND Corporation who long has studied the Guard. "They want to make sure for any given deal, they get a part of it."

Last Friday, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines Co. signed a deal with South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries for 10 container ships. It marked the first deal with a foreign shipbuilder since the nuclear accord that limited Iran's enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions.

For the state-owned shipping company, the $650 million deal is essential as much of its fleet is so aged that it cannot be insured. For Hyundai, it meant a foot in the door for potential future deals as the shipper plans to spend $2.5 billion in total to revamp its fleet.

Not everyone, however, was happy.

"At a time when we are faced with the problem of youth unemployment in our country, unfortunately, we have heard that the contract to build 10 ships has been signed with South Korea and I hope it is not true and it has not been signed yet," Guard Gen. Ebadollah Abdollahi said Sunday. "Is it a lack of respect for our domestic capabilities? If it is true, we request the president cancels this deal."

While President Hassan Rouhani's administration backs the ship deal, Abdollahi's comments reflect the dual roles of the Revolutionary Guard.

The Guard formed out of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution as a force meant to protect its Shiite-cleric-overseen government. It operated parallel to the country's regular armed forces, growing in prominence and power during the country's long and ruinous war with Iraq in the 1980s.

In the war's aftermath, authorities allowed the Guard to expand into private enterprise.

Today, it runs a massive construction company called Khatam al-Anbia, with 135,000 employees handling civil development, the oil industry and defense issues. Guard firms build roads, man ports, run telecommunication networks and even conduct laser eye surgery.

The exact scope of all its business holdings remains unclear, though analysts say they are sizeable. The Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has been critical of the nuclear deal, suggests the Guard controls "between 20 and 40 percent of the economy" of Iran through significant influence in at least 229 companies.

Among the Guard's firms is the Iran Marine Industrial Co., a ship building and repair company. The company, also known by the acronym SADRA, lost out on the contract, likely spurring Abdollahi's comments.

Hyundai Heavy Industries spokesman Kim Moon-joo declined to comment Tuesday whether the company was aware of Abdollahi's comments. Kim also declined to say whether the company had any concerns about taking business from a Guard-aligned company.

Part of the Guard's worry may stem from the oversized role it took on in Iran's economy during sanctions, said Afshon Ostovar, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in the United States who recently published book on the Guard.

"The door is open to doing deals with the West and they don't want those doors to be floodgates," Ostovar said. "They want them to be a tiny little window where very discrete, deliberate transactions happen but not just sort of a gold rush for both the West and for Iranians trying to make a buck."

"That's what makes them more nervous than anything else: losing control," Ostovar added.

Maintaining that control for the Guard has included detaining a series of dual nationals since the nuclear pact, causing concern among international businesses hoping for contracts with Tehran. It continues to confront U.S. Navy ships and aircraft traveling through the Persian Gulf, even as Chicago-based Boeing Co. has signed a $16.6 billion to sell aircraft to Iran.

For Rouhani, who likely will run for re-election in May, showing economic benefits from the nuclear deal remains key as its effects largely haven't trickled down to the average Iranian. He also has backed the Guard's military missions abroad to Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, at the back of everyone's mind is the health of Iran's aging Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a major benefactor of the Guard who relies on its support.

"The Guard wants to make sure the country doesn't change," Nader said. "I think their approach now is not to allow any sort of change, even small change. They worry small change can lead to very big demands."

___

Associated Press writer Youkyung Lee in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.

Monday, December 05, 2016


THE AGE OF DONALD TRUMP AND PIZZAGATE

By Amy Davidson The New Yorker


Comet Ping Pong, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., has become the center of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.


When trying to understand what has befallen Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., over the past few weeks, should one start with the gun or with the lies? Both are durable; both are dangerous. The gun is an AR-15-style assault rifle that a man, reportedly a twenty-eight-year-old named Edgar Maddison Welch, carried into the restaurant on Sunday. According to press accounts, Welch waved the gun, pointed it at an employee, and then fired, thankfully not hitting anyone. Customers ran out; nearby businesses, including a bookstore, went into lock-down. The police managed to arrest Welch. He had another gun in his car, and he had a motive. He told the police that he had come to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory, or set of theories, known as Pizzagate. These theories, which, most broadly put, place Hillary Clinton at the center of an international child-sex-trafficking ring, are the lies, and they are almost incomprehensible. The mystery within the mystery is how anybody with a shred of good will would even try to connect point A to point B. Foremost among those nonetheless doing so are Donald Trump-supporting social-media figures, including the son of retired General Michael Flynn, the President-elect’s choice for national-security adviser. (General Flynn himself hasn’t tweeted Pizzagate allegations, but he has tweeted stories about different pedophilia-related conspiracy theories, also supposedly entangling Clinton.)

The charge at the center of Pizzagate is this: Comet Ping Pong is where high-ranking Democrats go when they want pizza. But “pizza” is not pizza. It is a code word for sexually exploitable young girls, or maybe for young boys, or for infants trafficked from Haiti and killed for their organs, which are then trafficked further. And John Podesta talked about pizza in his e-mails, which were released by Wikileaks. He talked about pizza more than once. Again, it’s hard to know where to start—by asking what the proof is or by asking why anyone would ever posit these notions as something that needed proving or disproving. Often, conspiracy theories are grafted onto something that seems like a mystery, even if it’s not, such as the suicide of Vince Foster, who had worked with Hillary Clinton in Arkansas and joined her husband’s Administration. That human tragedy was exploited by the Clintons’ political opponents and spun into strange stories involving murder. Pizzagate lacks even that nub. There is nothing to explain—no missing children, no accusers, no break-ins involving intelligence agents, no odd incidents, no inexplicable phone calls from powerful people, no baseless firing of someone asking questions, no hit-and-run death of someone who knew too much. But if you find it odd that any given person in America would, now and again, want to eat pizza; if you think that it is suspicious that people getting together to watch something on TV would do so at a pizza place; if you think that the phrase “I could bring a pizza home” is so bizarre that it must mean something else; or if hearing that something is baked in “a pizza oven” causes you to envision Hansel-and-Gretel-like images of child murder with the possible involvement of international terrorists and money launderers (and that is one of the charges), then this is the conspiracy theory for you.

Here is why Pizzagaters say that all this matters, though it’s not clear why any of it would: Comet Ping Pong is owned by a man named James Alefantis. He was once involved with David Brock, a former right-wing journalist who became a Hillary Clinton supporter and worked to get her elected. Alefantis has e-mailed with Podesta, including once to tell him about an Obama fund-raiser taking place at the restaurant, and to ask if he might want to stop by and maybe have dinner. Comet Ping Pong has a haute-hipsterish decor, and a certain number of its clients are journalists or work in politics. It has Ping-Pong tables and displays an image of two Ping-Pong paddles on its menu; if you squint, they look like a butterfly, and a butterfly may or may not be an international symbol beckoning people who sexually abuse children. There may be a subterranean network of rooms and tunnels beneath the restaurant that are used for imprisonment, trafficking, and other unspeakable things. (Alefantis told the BBC, “We don’t even have a basement.”) There is also an e-mail thread in which it is strongly suggested that Podesta may have once had a map that showed where to find pizza on Martha’s Vineyard. (So not only in Washington!) The authorities are, allegedly, covering it all up. These suppositions have been embroidered on and combined with other fabrications in long threads on Reddit, 4Chan, and elsewhere. (BuzzFeed has mapped out how the theory spread.) There is no real search for “truth,” only what amounts to conspiracy fan-fiction. The only actual threat to children seems to have come from Pizzagaters who, according to press reports, have collected pictures of children on the Instagram and Facebook pages of people who “liked” Comet Ping Pong’s pages, then republished them as identifying putative victims. The threats to families—to Alefantis and his staff, and to people in businesses nearby (who have been accused of, among other things, being linked to the ring via the tunnel network)—have become frequent and, as the events of this weekend indicate, have moved beyond the realm of fantasy.

On Sunday night, after the man with the gun walked into the restaurant, General Flynn’s son tweeted, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidence’ tied to it.” But this makes about as much sense as demanding that Comet Ping Pong prove that it is not the secret base of space aliens who are plotting to take over the world through their agents in the Democratic Party. Indeed, by some measures it makes less sense. (“Comet Ping Pong” is at least a plausible code name for interstellar travel. And do you know who talks unironically about U.F.O.s? John Podesta.)

Pizzagate seems to have really taken hold during the Presidential campaign, in the period after the release of an “Access Hollywood” video that showed Trump bragging about grabbing the genitals of women he had just met. He dismissed the comments by calling them “locker-room talk,” and by bringing up allegations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton. Trump’s supporters went farther, attempting to turn both Clintons into sex-crime monsters. The Washington City Paper, in a look at Pizzagate a few days before the election, offered the view that, when Podesta’s e-mails were publicized, some Trump supporters hoped that they would provide the ingredients to substantiate such a scandal. But all they found was pizza, and pizza would have to do.

Which is more alarming: the idea that Pizzagate is being promoted by politically motivated cynics who don’t actually believe it, or that people with influence and proximity to power, including people with access to the President-elect, are really susceptible to this sort of nonsense? Both can be the case; fabricators and wide-eyed believers can be side by side, in Twitter feeds or Trump Tower, or, soon, in the White House. Many things are likely to go wrong for Trump and to disappoint his supporters. The fear is that he and they will try to explain his failings by pushing conspiracy theories of all kinds. The spirit of Pizzagate could become as commonplace, in this country, as the smell of pizza. And how does one even measure power and influence in the context of social media, or, for that matter, in a country with few effective gun-control laws and a President-elect who got crowds cheering with talk of armed citizens taking down terrorists in crowded cafés? How much power belongs to a man in his twenties walking into a pizza place with an assault rifle, looking for secret chambers and hidden messages?

Tuesday, November 22, 2016


CAN HYPOTHERMIA SAVE GUNSHOT VICTIMS?

By Nicola Twilley The New Yorker

A new procedure freezes trauma patients who are bleeding out in order to buy time to operate.

Many trauma patients die of blood loss before treatable injuries can be fixed.

Brandon Littlejohn was shot just after 11 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, 2011. The day had started out cold and rainy, but by evening the temperature hinted at the summer to come. Littlejohn was playing basketball on a court at a corner of Harlem Square Park, in West Baltimore, when his girlfriend drove by to pick him up. He jogged over to her car, said he’d be back in a minute, and returned to the basketball court to tell his friends that he was leaving.

“She heard the gunshots,” Littlejohn’s aunt Roxanne Cunningham told me. “She looked, and he was falling.” One of Littlejohn’s friends helped his girlfriend get him into the car, and she drove him to the hospital. He had been shot multiple times in the chest and lower body, but he was still alive when he reached the emergency room, ten minutes away. “He told her to tell his family that he was sorry,” Cunningham said.

The hospital was the University of Maryland’s R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center (universally known as Shock Trauma), the oldest and probably the leading trauma unit in the country. Baltimore has one of the nation’s highest rates of gun violence, and Shock Trauma admits at least two or three shooting victims each week—often, like Brandon Littlejohn, young black men. Frequently, it sees that many cases in a single night. As it happens, Cunningham—a stylish, soft-voiced fifty-seven-year-old, born and brought up in West Baltimore—works at Shock Trauma, managing paperwork for the operating rooms. She was not on duty that night, however, so she didn’t have to watch as surgeons and nurses struggled to save her nephew’s life.

The Trauma Resuscitation Unit, or T.R.U., consists of twelve bays divided by curtains and arranged in a horseshoe configuration around three banks of workstations. Electrocardiographs, infusion pumps, and ventilators hum and beep incessantly, punctuated every few minutes by a ringing phone, followed by a nurse’s voice repeating the cryptic snippets of information relayed by emergency services—GSW face, arrest in the field, blood levels at thirty-nine—as colleagues take notes and ready the next bay.

That April evening, as Littlejohn was rolled into an open bay, a cluster of nurses, an anesthesiologist, a resident, and the attending surgeon descended on him and began performing dozens of complicated procedures at once. They worked with the efficiency and furious intensity of people who have tried to save many, many lives in exactly the same way. As the anesthesiologist took her position at the head of the bed to insert a breathing tube into Littlejohn’s windpipe, a nurse cut off what remained of his blood-soaked clothes, another attached electrocardiogram sensors to his chest, and others performed chest compressions, took samples, passed the X-ray machine over his abdomen, and attached an I.V. line to his arm to begin delivering blood. And then Brandon Littlejohn’s heart stopped.

Statistically speaking, Littlejohn’s chances of survival were now less than one in twenty. For most people who sustain traumatic injuries, whether from bullets or car crashes, death occurs within the hour. The primary cause is exsanguination cardiac arrest, the technical term for losing so much blood that too little is left for the heart to continue to circulate. Even as nurses pumped fresh blood into Littlejohn, it flowed straight back out of his bullet wounds, pooling in his abdominal cavity and soaking the bed on which he lay.

“There’s not a whole lot you can do at this point,” Deborah Stein, the attending surgeon that night, told me. “All you can try to do is get their heart re-started, but while they’re still actively bleeding . . .” She trailed off, gesturing to indicate the hopelessness of the situation. “They basically never make it.” Nonetheless, as soon as Stein lost Littlejohn’s pulse she used a scalpel to make a long, smile-shaped incision below his left nipple, then wedged a stainless-steel rack-and-pinion into the slit, cranking its lever to spread his ribs apart and expose his heart. By clamping the aorta in such a way as to cut off circulation to the lower body, she forced what little blood remained in Littlejohn’s body up to his brain, then cradled his heart between both hands to massage it.

Around her, a tight knot of nurses and residents in pink scrubs continued to work, putting in stitches, administering drugs, hanging fresh blood, suctioning out Littlejohn’s chest cavity. So much was being done to Littlejohn’s body with each fateful minute that the passage of time seemed to slow. “I got him back once or twice, but he kept arresting,” Stein said. Each time Littlejohn flatlined, Stein stopped operating on his bullet wounds in order to palpate his heart again, and each time she revived him his battered body became even weaker. “Everything was out of whack—his electrolytes, his pH, his platelets,” she said. “You’re trying to do two things at once, but you can’t. I just needed more time to fix what was bleeding.”

The third or fourth time his heart stopped beating—Stein lost count—it couldn’t be re-started. Just after midnight, Stein pronounced Brandon Littlejohn dead. He was twenty years old.

Losing a patient is always painful, but losing one like Littlejohn is also exasperating. Even though everyone at Shock Trauma knew that the odds were against him, they also knew that every injury he’d sustained was fixable. He hadn’t been shot in the head or in a vital organ. The holes in his body could have been sewn up—they just couldn’t be sewn up in less than the five or six minutes it takes for the brain to die from lack of oxygen. “It is the most frustrating thing, and it happens all the time,” Tom Scalea, Shock Trauma’s physician-in-chief, told me. “Some kid comes in with cardiac arrest from a fixable injury—an easily fixable injury—and you open them up in the T.R.U. and they kind of come back, and then they die. And then you get to go tell their mom that they are not coming home, when all we needed was a few more minutes.”

The R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center is named in memory of the pioneering surgeon who founded it, in the nineteen-sixties, and who is generally considered the father of trauma medicine. Today, Cowley is remembered for developing the concept of “the golden hour”: the idea that the sooner critically injured patients are treated the better their chances of survival. To get patients to properly equipped hospitals as quickly as possible, he developed the country’s first statewide E.M.S. system, including helicopter ambulances.

Earlier this year, the center announced that it was conducting a trial of a procedure that may revolutionize trauma care by buying patients and their doctors even more time. Known as E.P.R., for “emergency preservation and resuscitation,” it is the result of nearly thirty years of work. The procedure has long been proved successful in animal experiments, but overcoming the institutional, logistical, and ethical obstacles to performing it on a human being has taken more than a decade.

The director of the E.P.R. trial is Sam Tisherman, a professor of surgery at the University of Maryland, who works at Shock Trauma. He is fifty-seven, bespectacled, mild-mannered, and quick to blush, and he has an understated sense of humor. He trained as a trauma surgeon more than twenty years ago, but the memory of his first experience of running out of time while trying to resuscitate someone remains indelible. The patient was a twenty-three-year-old man. “We almost saved him,” Tisherman said. “We actually got him in the operating room, and then we just couldn’t keep his heart going.” He had been stabbed in an argument over bowling shoes.

Tisherman had previously launched the trial in April, 2014, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he was based until recently, but Pittsburgh has relatively few gunshot victims and no one met the criteria for enrollment. Now that Tisherman has moved to Shock Trauma, it seems certain that the first person to undergo E.P.R. will be in Baltimore, sometime in the coming months.

When this patient loses his pulse, the attending surgeon will, as usual, crack his chest open and clamp the descending aorta. But then, instead of trying to coax the heart back into activity, the surgeon will start pumping the body full of ice-cold saline at a rate of at least a gallon a minute. Within twenty minutes (depending on the size of the patient, the number of wounds, and the amount of blood lost), the patient’s brain temperature, measured using a probe in the ear or nose, will sink to somewhere in the low fifties Fahrenheit.

At this point, the patient, his circulatory system filled with icy salt water, will have no blood, no pulse, and no brain activity. He will remain in this state of suspended animation for up to an hour, while surgeons locate the bullet holes or stab wounds and sew them up. Then, after as much as sixty minutes without a heartbeat or a breath, the patient will be resuscitated. A cardiac surgeon will attach a heart-lung bypass machine and start pumping the patient full of blood again, cold, at first, but gradually warming, one degree at a time, over the course of a couple of hours. As soon as the heartbeat returns, perhaps jump-started with the help of a gentle electric shock, and as long as the lungs seem capable of functioning, at least with the help of a ventilator, the patient will be taken off bypass.

Even if everything works perfectly, it will take between three and five days to determine whether the patient’s brain has been damaged, and, if so, to what extent. There will be more surgeries, followed by months of rehabilitation. Nonetheless, it is possible that the next Brandon Littlejohn won’t die; that he will, instead, be able to walk out of Shock Trauma unaided and capable of playing basketball for many years to come.

Addressing a skeptical audience at a conference last year, Tisherman, awkward in a suit and tie, began his presentation by acknowledging that the idea of cooling a trauma patient is typically regarded as “blasphemy.” Hypothermia is one part of what physicians call “the triad of death.” (The others are falling pH in blood plasma and the failure of blood to coagulate; all three are triggered by severe blood loss, and all three exacerbate one another, resulting in a downward spiral that makes resuscitation increasingly difficult.) “That’s the dogma on the trauma ward,” Tisherman said, to nods of agreement. “Patients who get cold do badly, so we should do everything we can to keep them warm.”

In healthy humans, the body occupies a narrow temperature band between 97 degrees and 99 degrees Fahrenheit. Fifty degrees, the target temperature during E.P.R., is classified as profound hypothermia: the stage at which major organs fail and clinical death occurs. Even with rapid, advanced hospital care, the mortality rate from profound hypothermia is close to forty per cent. From this perspective, freezing gunshot victims seems like lunacy. Scalea told me, “I think it’s a fair statement that, back when we first started talking about it, many or most people thought it was nuts.”

Yet medicine has also long recognized that, in some circumstances, cold can protect as well as destroy. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates recommended packing bleeding patients in snow and ice. Napoleon’s surgeon general, Dominique Jean Larrey, observed that, the farther wounded soldiers lay from a campfire during the Army’s wintry retreat from Russia, the less likely they were to die. Cold buys time by slowing things down. Removing energy, in the form of heat, decreases the rate at which chemical reactions—in this case, metabolism—take place.

Accidents provide many examples of people miraculously saved by cold: an Austrian toddler revived after half an hour at the bottom of a frozen fishpond; a seventy-year-old man in Muskegon, Michigan, who spent forty minutes underwater and made a complete recovery; a twenty-nine-year-old woman who fell into an Arctic stream while skiing, and was pulled out after eighty minutes, limp and ashen, only for her heart to start beating again more than an hour later. In each case, the crucial factor was speed. The victims were essentially flash-frozen, bypassing the lethal damage that the body suffers during a slower descent into hypothermia.

Starting in the late nineteen-forties, doctors and researchers began experimenting with the effects that rapid cooling had on living creatures. In Toronto, the Canadian surgeon Wilfred Bigelow systematically chilled anesthetized dogs while measuring their oxygen intake. He discovered that the animals required about six per cent less oxygen to survive for every degree Celsius that their body temperature dropped, and calculated that, at 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), a dog could survive for up to fifteen minutes on just the residual oxygen diffused in its blood and its membranes.

Bigelow’s early experiments—cooling dogs, stopping their hearts, and then reviving them in a bath of warm water a quarter of an hour later—had mixed results, but the handful of successes inspired two University of Minnesota surgeons to wrap a five-year-old girl in refrigerated blankets in order to perform the world’s first open-heart surgery, in 1952. Today, deep hypothermia is routinely induced during scheduled cardiac surgery, with specially trained perfusionists using a heart-lung bypass machine to gradually cool patients’ blood until body temperature falls as low as 64 degrees Fahrenheit. With the brain’s metabolism, and thus its oxygen needs, reduced by more than three-quarters, doctors can suspend circulation for as long as forty-five minutes without harm in order to operate on a patient’s heart.

However, it is one thing to cool an anesthetized patient before a carefully planned, thoroughly controlled cardiac arrest and quite another to attempt to freeze and revive one who has technically just died. In the nineteen-fifties, while R Adams Cowley was pioneering emergency care, Peter Safar, an anesthesiologist working independently on the other side of Baltimore, was founding the field of resuscitation science. He later became Sam Tisherman’s mentor: Tisherman’s current work at Shock Trauma is, in many ways, the culmination of both Safar’s and Cowley’s work.

Safar’s innovations included the familiar CPR technique of combining mouth-to-mouth breathing with chest compressions, as well as the life-size doll, known as Resusci Anne, that is used to teach it. But CPR still couldn’t save someone who was bleeding to death, and there was a limit to how quickly even the fastest ambulance service could deliver a hemorrhaging patient to the nearest trauma unit.

The beginnings of a solution started to form in Safar’s mind during the mid-eighties, when he read a new study of combat casualties in the Vietnam War. The author, a U.S. Army surgeon named Colonel Ronald Bellamy, concluded that, in order to make an appreciable difference to trauma survival rates, “we need to be able to slow the casualty’s biological clock.” With funding from the military, Safar and Bellamy embarked on an entirely new area of research: to extend the window of opportunity for treating exsanguination cardiac arrest. They called the yet to be invented treatment “suspended animation for delayed resuscitation.”


By then, Safar had moved to the University of Pittsburgh, which is where Tisherman became his protégé. Inspired by Bigelow’s experiments, Safar began to explore therapeutic hypothermia as a way of protecting patients’ brains over longer periods of time. In between his first and his second year of medical school, Tisherman worked with Safar, studying the phenomenon of seemingly miraculous resuscitation following cold-water drowning. In the late eighties, after his graduation and his residency training, he returned to Safar’s lab to work on suspended animation. His goal was to see whether hypothermia might offer a way “to preserve and protect” a pulseless patient for two hours, which was Safar and Bellamy’s estimate of the time required to evacuate a wounded soldier from the battlefield and to conduct basic wound repair. Tisherman spent a decade inserting catheters into the femoral arteries of dozens of large, custom-bred hunting dogs, bleeding them out in less than five minutes. Then he would test a series of variables to learn how best to freeze and rewarm them. “I’m glad I don’t have to do that anymore,” Tisherman told me. A former vegetarian, he finds animal trials distressing.

In 1990, Tisherman and his colleagues published their first results. The findings were groundbreaking: dogs that had effectively died from blood loss and then been rapidly cooled to 59 degrees could be brought back to life an hour later with no brain damage. The cold reduced metabolic activity so precipitously that the oxygen that remained in the animal’s tissues from its final few breaths was sufficient to prevent brain death. During the next several years, by refining their technique and reducing their target temperature, the Pittsburgh group gradually managed to extend the interval between death and resuscitation to three hours.

As evidence mounted that suspended animation might actually work, other researchers joined the field. In 1996, Hasan Alam and Peter Rhee, researchers at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, in Bethesda, used pigs to expand on Tisherman’s successes. “We got to the stage where we could convert a hundred-per-cent-lethal injury to about a ninety-, ninety-five-per-cent survival rate, neurologically intact,” Alam told me.

To study the procedure’s impact on the pigs’ brains, Alam and Rhee created a memory test for them. Working nights and weekends in the basement of the U.S.U. medical center, they conducted experiments on a series of pigs, each of which was shown food-filled boxes in various colors and trained to recognize which one could be unlatched. Then the pigs were killed, chilled, and resuscitated. Post-resurrection, Alam and Rhee released the pigs into a maze of steel cages to see whether they were able to find the boxes and remember which ones they could open. The researchers videoed each experiment, and the footage makes for unnerving viewing. In clip after clip, you see a pig, open-chested and blood-spattered, its heart beating increasingly erratically before stopping, its flesh drained white. Footage of the same pig a few weeks later shows it eerily pink and whole, clattering across the concrete-floor maze and snuffling with pleasure as it flips open a blue plastic box full of food.

By 2002, Tisherman and Safar were convinced that they had assembled enough evidence to test suspended animation in humans. But it took another twelve years to put together the protocols, approvals, and funding necessary for a clinical trial, and, in 2003, Peter Safar died, at the age of seventy-nine. Although each year seemed to bring fresh evidence of the power of cold temperatures to preserve and protect, suspended animation in humans remained a promising but unproved idea.

On April 12, 2015, a twenty-five-year-old black man named Freddie Gray arrived at Shock Trauma in a coma. His spinal cord had been severed while he was in the custody of six police officers, and he died a week later. Gray’s death—like those of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and other African-Americans who were killed by police in recent years—provoked an outcry against racism and brutality in law enforcement. There were demonstrations across the country, and in Baltimore the protests lasted two weeks.

Six months later, on a breezy blue Friday morning, Tisherman, wearing pink scrubs, sat quietly behind a folding table in the atrium at Mondawmin Mall. On the day of Gray’s funeral, the mall, in West Baltimore, had been a flash point of confrontation among police clad in riot gear, protesters, and looters, but now the scene was placid. Shoppers strolled, people from a drug-treatment program were distributing needles, and the Black Mental Health Alliance offered free lip balm and brochures detailing its services. Tisherman and Leslie Sult, a clinical-research nurse, were handing out laser-printed leaflets about E.P.R., as part of a community consultation required before the trial could proceed. Among the difficulties facing the trial has been an ethical concern: enrollment is not voluntary. Prospective patients, being clinically dead, will be incapable of giving consent, and the speed of treatment—the decision to begin E.P.R. has to be made within a matter of seconds—precludes identifying, let alone contacting, the next of kin. (The F.D.A. requires informed consent for all human medical trials, but it does grant exceptions for emergency research.)

In Baltimore, the issue of waived consent has disquieting social implications. Of the more than nine hundred people who were shot in the city last year—three hundred of whom died—more than ninety per cent were male, more than ninety per cent were black, and most were under the age of thirty. In the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of West Baltimore, thirty per cent of households live below the federal poverty line. As these neighborhoods lie just north of Shock Trauma, it is a virtual certainty that the first person to be selected for E.P.R. will be black, low-income, and male.

Because of the consent issue, an institutional review board at the University of Maryland required Tisherman to devise a way for people to elect not to be enrolled in advance. He designed a red rubber bracelet, in the style of Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong wristbands, that says “no to epr-cat.” (E.P.R.-CAT is the trial’s full name; “CAT” stands for “cardiac arrest from trauma.”) Anyone wanting to opt out could request one and wear it at all times. Another stipulation made by the board was the community-consultation process. Over a three-month period, Tisherman and Sult visited various public spaces, distributing flyers, answering questions, and conducting surveys. There were interviews on local TV and radio stations, and ads in the city’s newspapers.

At Mondawmin, Tisherman and Sult encountered a range of responses. A short woman wearing a head scarf and a denim vest approached the table with a question: “This all about cat scans?” When Tisherman explained that it was an experimental new procedure for patients who bleed so much that their heart stops, she said, “I don’t think I have that.” Tisherman smiled and said, “Well, you never know,” before describing the trial. Several people asked for directions to the restrooms; others told Tisherman they supported anything that would help save lives. A few talked about the treatment family members had received at Shock Trauma in the past. A woman whose son had died of a gunshot wound nine years ago said, “I will never forget how long they worked to try to save him.”

Only two people voiced objections: both were young black men, and both left before Tisherman could speak to them. The first pointed at Tisherman, smiled, and said, “Y’all heard me say no.” The second man, listening while Tisherman explained E.P.R. to two women, announced, “We’re guinea pigs—your body language says it!”

Tisherman winced. The man’s point was essentially unanswerable. African-Americans have indeed been used as guinea pigs, the unwitting victims of full-body radiation or unnecessary surgeries conducted in the name of research. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which lifesaving treatment was withheld from black men for forty years so that scientists could study the disease, is merely the most infamous example. As a result, mistrust of the medical establishment has long been widespread among African-Americans. In 1982, Clive Callender, a surgeon at Howard University, published a study showing that many African-Americans feared that surgeons might actually withhold advanced resuscitation measures from black patients in order to harvest their organs for sick white people.

Lawrence Brown, a public-health professor at Morgan State University, a historically black college in northern Baltimore, considers the E.P.R. trial’s consultation process and opt-out mechanism to be insufficient—to the extent that it renders the entire trial harmful. He pointed out that the participation rate of minorities in clinical trials is already disconcertingly low; even if E.P.R. proved to be a success, it could further undermine efforts to recruit people of color. “If you save thirty lives a year and you keep thousands of people from participating in the advancement of science, do we really count that as a win?” he asked.

Brown and others have also repeatedly demonstrated that the medical care that African-Americans receive is routinely inferior to that received by whites, in ways that extend beyond issues of access and affordability. One well-documented example is the fact that African-Americans are still, on average, prescribed less medication for pain—an echo of an old slaveholder claim that black people had less sensitive nerve endings than whites and could thus better withstand beatings. Furthermore, research into gunshot injuries, from which blacks are more than twice as likely to die as whites, is chronically underfunded. There is no national funding body for trauma research, no trauma ribbon or month. John Holcomb, a trauma surgeon in Houston, told me that this should be a source of national shame. “There’s more funding in relation to the impact of disease for middle-ear infections than there is for injury,” he said. “Pretty amazing when you consider that trauma is the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of forty-seven.”

Tisherman is all too aware that the medical establishment reflects society’s systemic injustices. Nonetheless, he feels as though the procedure’s potential—giving a second chance to patients who would otherwise almost certainly die—makes the ethical quandaries surrounding a waived-consent trial acceptable. Others strongly disagree. Harriet A. Washington, a medical ethicist and the author of “Medical Apartheid,” a prize-winning history of experimentation on African-Americans, told me, “Often, when people give a rationale for this kind of research they talk about the fact that these people are urgently ill, need immediate intervention, and that better solutions are needed.” Such arguments, she said, conflate research and care, and clinicians and patients are prone to overestimate the efficacy of prospective treatments, a phenomenon known as “the therapeutic illusion.” “This is research, so, by definition, you can’t yet know that the advantages outweigh the risk,” Washington said. E.P.R. could potentially allow a patient who would otherwise have died to survive with debilitating brain damage. In Washington’s view, the E.P.R. trial, by operating without informed consent, “robbed an already marginalized group of the ability to say yes or no to a study that might harm them.”

A couple of months after the visit to Mondawmin Mall, I talked to Leslie Sult about the consultation process. She noted that Shock Trauma had an excellent reputation in West Baltimore, and deep connections with the communities there, but she also acknowledged that hundreds of conversations had brought home to her “just how delicate the situation is.” She said, “The community in general has an over-all mistrust of medicine, and they’re just very protective.”

Decades of research have established that suspended animation works in carefully planned animal experiments. But, with review-board approval secured and the trial finally under way, Tisherman is facing a fresh challenge: translating a laboratory procedure into the messy reality of the trauma unit. In December, 2015, I attended an E.P.R. training session in Shock Trauma’s simulation lab. The plan had been to do a complete run-through of the procedure, but there were so many questions about unforeseen complications that the rehearsal kept grinding to a halt. One nurse wanted to know how the team would be paged, by whom, and when; the protocol requires specially trained medics to materialize from various hospital departments within minutes, as the potential candidate flatlines. Another pointed to a risk that the entire unit might flood, given that the patient would leak not only every last drop of blood but also a potentially limitless amount of salt water. After several minutes of discussion, the team decided that they would direct the bulk of the flow into a garbage can using plastic sheeting and vacuum the rest into a biohazard cannister.

“That was not necessarily a well-oiled machine,” Tisherman said to me afterward. “But it was the beginnings of one.” He demonstrates boundless reserves of patience in the face of the endless delays that the trial has encountered, and his resolve seems to influence those around him. Still, Tisherman estimates that it will be at least another two years before the results from the first patients can be made public. (It is Shock Trauma’s policy not to comment while the trial is under way.) He expects to learn an enormous amount from the very first patient, and has even considered the possibility that he may have to revise the protocol midway—which would, in turn, mean going back to the F.D.A. and the hospital review boards for approval. The trial, he pointed out, may be the culmination of three decades of work, but it is actually just the beginning.

If the technique proves successful, Tisherman hopes that it will also save patients who bleed out from other kinds of injury, such as blunt trauma from car accidents. Eventually, he expects, refinements to the procedure will enable first responders to use it outside the hospital. In the United States, between thirty and forty thousand people a year bleed to death from fixable injuries. Ultimately, if the technique does evolve as Tisherman envisages, it will simply become the next step for treatment after CPR has failed, used to buy time and prevent brain death in almost any situation where a person’s heart has stopped and can’t be re-started quickly. It could save people dying from heart attacks or drug overdoses, or even kids who drown in back-yard pools. “This is almost like open-heart surgery was back in the sixties,” John Holcomb, the trauma surgeon in Houston, said. “It was only done in one or two places, it was extremely complex, it was considered very experimental. And now it’s routine.”

Some years before Brandon Littlejohn died at Shock Trauma, his aunt Roxanne Cunningham requested a job transfer. She had been working in the hospital’s admitting area and could no longer bear to see gunshot victims rushed past on gurneys and surgeons telling family members that they had lost a loved one. “I just used to sit there and cry,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t do that job no more.”

Earlier this year, Cunningham lost another nephew, Anthony Drumgoole, in a shooting. An Instagram photo shows Lil’ Tony, as he was known, grinning in his college-football uniform: he was shot in the head just before 9 p.m. on a Wednesday evening in February, a fifteen-minute walk from Mondawmin Mall and just a dozen blocks northwest of the park in which his cousin was shot five years earlier. “I don’t know why,” Cunningham said. “Nobody knows.”

With two of her seven nephews dead, Cunningham nonetheless considers her family blessed. “So many families have lost maybe three, four children to gun violence,” she said. Brandon Littlejohn’s homicide was one of nine shootings and stabbings reported in Baltimore that April weekend in 2011. Last year was the deadliest in the city’s history; this year, gun crimes look set to match those levels, despite an increase in illegal-weapons seizures and a city-sponsored Safe Streets program, which was implemented following Freddie Gray’s death. “I wish they had E.P.R. when Brandon was shot,” Cunningham said. “I wish he could have had that second chance.” ♦


Nicola Twilley is a contributing writer for newyorker.com. She is the author of the blog Edible Geography and a co-host of the Gastropod podcast. She is working on a book about refrigeration.

Monday, November 14, 2016




AFTERMATH: SIXTEEN WRITERS ON TRUMP’S AMERICA

The New Yorker Special




A DEMOCRATIC OPPOSITION
By George Packer

Four decades ago, Watergate revealed the potential of the modern Presidency for abuse of power on a vast scale. It also showed that a strong democracy can overcome even the worst illness ravaging its body. When Richard Nixon used the instruments of government to destroy political opponents, hide financial misdoings, and deceive the public about the Vietnam War, he very nearly got away with it. What stopped his crime spree was democratic institutions: the press, which pursued the story from the original break-in all the way to the Oval Office; the courts, which exposed the extent of criminality and later ruled impartially against Nixon’s claims of executive privilege; and Congress, which held revelatory hearings, and whose House Judiciary Committee voted on a bipartisan basis to impeach the President. In crucial agencies of Nixon’s own Administration, including the F.B.I. (whose deputy director, Mark Felt, turned out to be Deep Throat, the Washington Post’s key source), officials fought the infection from inside. None of these institutions could have functioned without the vitalizing power of public opinion. Within months of reëlecting Nixon by the largest margin in history, Americans began to gather around the consensus that their President was a crook who had to go.

President Donald Trump should be given every chance to break his campaign promise to govern as an autocrat. But, until now, no one had ever won the office by pledging to ignore the rule of law and to jail his opponent. Trump has the temperament of a leader who doesn’t distinguish between his private desires and demons and the public interest. If he’s true to his word, he’ll ignore the Constitution, by imposing a religious test on immigrants and citizens alike. He’ll go after his critics in the press, with or without the benefit of libel law. He’ll force those below him in the chain of command to violate the code of military justice, by torturing terrorist suspects and killing their next of kin. He’ll turn federal prosecutors, agents, even judges if he can, into personal tools of grievance and revenge.

All the pieces are in place for the abuse of power, and it could happen quickly. There will be precious few checks on President Trump. His party, unlike Nixon’s, will control the legislative as well as the executive branch, along with two-thirds of governorships and statehouses. Trump’s advisers, such as Newt Gingrich, are already vowing to go after the federal employees’ union, and breaking it would give the President sweeping power to bend the bureaucracy to his will and whim. The Supreme Court will soon have a conservative majority. Although some federal courts will block flagrant violations of constitutional rights, Congress could try to impeach the most independent-minded judges, and Trump could replace them with loyalists.

But, beyond these partisan advantages, something deeper is working in Trump’s favor, something that he shrewdly read and exploited during the campaign. The democratic institutions that held Nixon to account have lost their strength since the nineteen-seventies—eroded from within by poor leaders and loss of nerve, undermined from without by popular distrust. Bipartisan congressional action on behalf of the public good sounds as quaint as antenna TV. The press is reviled, financially desperate, and undergoing a crisis of faith about the very efficacy of gathering facts. And public opinion? Strictly speaking, it no longer exists. “All right we are two nations,” John Dos Passos wrote, in his “U.S.A.” trilogy.

Among the institutions in decline are the political parties. This, too, was both intuited and accelerated by Trump. In succession, he crushed two party establishments and ended two dynasties. The Democratic Party claims half the country, but it’s hollowed out at the core. Hillary Clinton became the sixth Democratic Presidential candidate in the past seven elections to win the popular vote; yet during Barack Obama’s Presidency the Party lost both houses of Congress, fourteen governorships, and thirty state legislatures, comprising more than nine hundred seats. The Party’s leaders are all past the official retirement age, other than Obama, who has governed as the charismatic and enlightened head of an atrophying body. Did Democrats even notice? More than Republicans, they tend to turn out only when they’re inspired. The Party has allowed personality and demography to take the place of political organizing.

The immediate obstacle in Trump’s way will be New York’s Charles Schumer and his minority caucus of forty-eight senators. During Obama’s Presidency, Republican senators exploited ancient rules in order to put up massive resistance. Filibusters and holds became routine ways of taking budgets hostage and blocking appointments. Democratic senators can slow, though not stop, pieces of the Republican agenda if they find the nerve to behave like their nihilistic opponents, further damaging the institution for short-term gain. It would be ugly, but the alternative seems like a sucker’s game.

In the long run, the Democratic Party faces two choices. It can continue to collapse until it’s transformed into something new, like the nineteenth-century Whigs, forerunners of the Republican Party. Or it can rebuild itself from the ground up. Not every four years but continuously; not with celebrity endorsements but on school boards and town councils; not by creating more virtual echo chambers but by learning again how to talk and listen to other Americans, especially those who elected Trump because they felt ignored and left behind. President Trump is almost certain to betray them. The country will need an opposition capable of pointing that out.


HEALTH OF THE NATION
By Atul Gawande

How dependent are our fundamental values—values such as decency, reason, and compassion—on the fellow we’ve elected President? Maybe less than we imagine. To be sure, the country voted for a leader who lives by the opposite code—it will be a long and dark winter—but the signs are that voters were not rejecting these values. They were rejecting élites, out of fear and fury that, when it came to them, these values had been abandoned.

Nearly seventy per cent of working-age Americans lack a bachelor’s degree. Many of them saw an establishment of politicians, professors, and corporations that has failed to offer, or even to seem very interested in, a vision of the modern world that provides them with a meaningful place of respect and worth.

I grew up in Ohio, in a small town in the poorest county in the state, and talked after the election to Jim Young, a longtime family friend there. He’d spent thirty-five years at a local animal-feed manufacturer, working his way up from a feed bagger to a truck driver and, in his fifties, a manager, making thirteen dollars an hour. Along the way, the company was sold to ever-larger corporations, until an executive told him that the company was letting the older staff go (along with their health-care and pension costs). Jim found odd jobs to keep him going until he could claim his Social Security benefits.

In the end, Jim said, he didn’t vote. Last year, his son, who was born with spina bifida, died, at the age of thirty-three, after his case was mismanaged in the local emergency room. Jim has a daughter in her forties, who works at Walmart and still lives at home, and another daughter trying to raise three kids on her husband’s income as a maintenance man at a local foundry and her work at an insurance company. Jim lives in a world that doesn’t seem to care whether he and his family make it or not. And he couldn’t see what Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or any other politician had to offer that would change that.

But he still believes in our American ideals, and his worry, like mine, is that those now in national power will further betray them. Repealing Obamacare, which has provided coverage to twenty-two million people, including Jim’s family members; cutting safety-net programs; downgrading hard-won advances in civil liberties and civil rights—these things will make the lives of those left out only meaner and harder.

To a large extent, though, institutions closer to home are what secure and sustain our values. This is the time to strengthen those institutions, to better include the seventy per cent who have been forsaken. Our institutions of fair-minded journalism, of science and scholarship, and of the arts matter more now than ever. In municipalities and state governments, people are eager to work on the hard problems—whether it’s making sure that people don’t lose their home if they get sick, or that wages are lifted, or that the reality of climate change is addressed. Years before Obamacare, Massachusetts passed a health-reform law that covers ninety-seven per cent of its residents, and leaders of both parties have affirmed that they will work to maintain those policies regardless of what a Trump Administration does. Other states will follow this kind of example.

Then, there are the institutions even closer to our daily lives. Our hospitals and schools didn’t suddenly have Reaganite values in the eighties, or Clintonian ones in the nineties. They have evolved their own ethics, in keeping with American ideals. That’s why we physicians have resisted suggestions that we refuse to treat undocumented immigrants who come into the E.R., say, or that we not talk to parents about the safety of guns in the home. The helping professions will stand by their norms. The same goes for the typical workplace. Lord knows, there are disastrous, exploitative employers, but Trump, with his behavior toward women and others, would be an H.R. nightmare; in most offices, he wouldn’t last a month as an employee. For many Americans, the workplace has helped narrow the gap between our professed values and our everyday actions. “Stronger together” could probably have been the slogan of your last work retreat. It’s how we succeed.

As the new Administration turns to governing, the mismatch between its proffered solutions and our aspirations and ideals must be made apparent. Take health care. Eliminating Obamacare isn’t going to stop the unnerving rise in families’ health-care costs; it will worsen it. There are only two ways to assure people that if they get cancer or diabetes (or pregnant) they can afford the care they need: a single-payer system or a heavily regulated private one, with the kind of mandates, exchanges, and subsidies that Obama signed into law. The governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, was elected last year on a promise to dismantle Obamacare—only to stall when he found out that doing so would harm many of those who elected him. Republicans have talked of creating high-risk insurance pools and loosening state regulations, but neither tactic would do much to help the people who have been left out, like Jim Young’s family. If the G.O.P. sticks to its “repeal and replace” pledge, it will probably end Obama’s exchanges and subsidies, and embrace large Medicaid grants to the states—laying the groundwork, ironically, for single-payer government coverage.

Yes, those with bad or erratic judgment will make bad or erratic choices. But it’s through the smaller-scale institutions of our daily lives that we can most effectively check the consequences of such choices. The test is whether the gap between what we preach and what we practice shrinks or expands for the nation as a whole. Our job will be to hold those in power to account for that result, including the future of the seventy per cent—the left out and the left behind. Decency, reason, and compassion require no less.


BRYANT PARK: A MEMOIR
By Hilary Mantel

The day before Election Day, the weather in New York was more like May than November. In hot sun, gloved ice-skaters, obedient to the calendar, meandered across the rink in Bryant Park, which showed itself ready for winter with displays of snowflakes and stars. It was a great afternoon to be an alien, ticket in your pocket, checked in already at J.F.K., and leaving the country before it could elect Donald Trump. Breakfast television had begged viewers to call the number onscreen to vote on whether Mrs. Clinton should be prosecuted as a criminal. Press 1 for yes, 2 for no. “Should Hillary get special treatment?” the voice-over asked. There was no option for jailing Trump.
During his campaign, Trump threatened unspecified punishments for women who tried to abort a child. We watched him, in the second debate, prowling behind his opponent, back and forth with lowered head, belligerent and looming, while she moved within her legitimate space, returning to her lecturn after each response: tightly smiling, trying to be reasonable, trying to be impervious. It was an indecent mimicry of what has happened at some point to almost every woman. She becomes aware of something brutal hovering, on the periphery of her vision: if she is alone in the street, what should she do? I willed Mrs. Clinton to turn and give a name to what we could all see. I willed Mrs. Clinton to raise an arm like a goddess, and point to the place her rival came from, and send him back there, into his own space, like a whimpering dog.

Not everything, of course, is apparent to the eye. The psyche has its hidden life and so do the streets. Midtown, the subway gratings puff out their hot breath, testament to a busy subterranean life; but you could not guess that millions of books are housed under Bryant Park, and that beneath the ground runs a system of train tracks, like toys for a studious giant. Activated by a scholar’s desire or whim, the volumes career on rails, in red wagons, toward the readers of the New York Public Library. Ignorant pedestrians jink and swerve, while below them the earth stirs. We are oblivious of information until we are ready for it. One day, we feel a resonance, from the soles of the feet to the cranium. Without mediation, without apology, we read ourselves, and know what we know.

There are some women who, the moment they have conceived a child, are aware of it—just as you sense if you’re being watched or followed. I have never had a child, but once in my life, a long time back and for a single day, I thought I was pregnant. I was twenty-three years old, three years a wife. I had no plans at that stage for a child. But my predictable cycle had gone askew, and one morning I felt as if some activity had commenced behind my ribs. It wasn’t breathing, or digestion, or the thudding of my heart.

I lived in the North of England then. My husband was a teacher, and it must have been half-term holiday, because we went into the city to meet a friend and spend the afternoon with his parents, who were visiting from rural Cornwall. They wondered why so many grand buildings were painted black, why even gravestones appeared to be streaked and smeared. That, we explained, was not paint—it was two centuries of working grime. They were startled, mortified by their ignorance. To them, heavy industry was something archaic, which you saw in a book. They didn’t know that its residue fluffed the lungs like Satan’s pillows, that it thickened walls and souped the air.

At lunchtime with my party of friends, I could not eat, or stay still, or find any way to be comfortable. I felt weak and light-headed. Heat swept over me, then chill. On our way home in early evening, we called on my mother-in-law, who was a nurse. I wonder if you might be expecting? she said. In the kitchen, my husband put his arms around me. We didn’t officially want a baby, but I saw that, at least for this moment, we did. None of us knew the next step. Were the drugstore tests reliable? Would it be better to go straight to the doctor? My mother-in-law said, I don’t know what the right way is, but I’ll find out first thing, as soon as I get into work.

But by the time I left her house the space of possibility that had opened inside me was filling with pain. Soon I was shaking. As the evening wore on, the pain expanded to fill every cavity in my body. Even my bones felt hollow, as if something were growing inside and pushing them out. In the small hours, I began to bleed. The episode was over. No test would ever be needed. I never had that particular set of feelings again, that distinctive physiological derangement. But women are full of potential. Thwart them one way and they will find another. What never left me was the feeling that something was knocking inside my chest, asking to be let out. A sensory error, I presumed. Only recently did I have the thought that it might have been a real pregnancy—an unviable, ectopic conception. Such a mistake of nature can result in a surgical emergency, even sudden death. It is possible I had a lucky escape, from a peril that was barely there.

A few days after this thought occurred, I had, not a dream, but a shadowy waking vision. It seemed to me that a bubble floated some three feet from my body, attached to me by an almost invisible thread. In the bubble was a tiny child, which asked my forgiveness. In its semi-life, lived for a single day, it had caused nothing, known nothing, created nothing other than pain; so it wanted me to pardon it, before it could drift away.

I do not cede the child any reality. Nor do I think it was an illusion. I recognize it as some species of truth, light as metaphor. It had not occurred to me that there was anything to forgive—that anything was ensouled that could grieve, that could endure through the years. But there was a hairline connection to that day in my early life, and at last I could cut the tie and it could sail free.

It was imagination, no doubt. Imagination is not to be scorned. Fragile, fallible, it goes on working in the world. Since I cut that thread, I have been more sure than ever that it is wrong to come between a woman and a child that may or may not elect to be born. Campaigners talk about “a woman’s right to choose,” as if she were picking a sweet from a box or a plum from a tree. It’s not that sort of choice. It’s often made for us. Something unrealized gives the slip to existence, before time can take a grip on it. Something we hoped for everts itself, turns back into the body, or disperses into the air. But, whatever happens, it happens in a private space. Let the woman choose, if the choice is hers. The state should not stalk her. The priest should seal his lips. The law should not interfere.

That whole week leading up to the election, it was warm enough to bask on garden chairs. The market at Grand Central displayed American plenitude: transparent caskets of juicy berries, plump with a dusky purple bloom; pyramids of sushi; sheets of aged steak, lolling in its blood. By the flitting light of the concourse, I checked out the destination boards of another life I could have lived. Twenty years ago, my husband worked for I.B.M. It was projected that we would move to its offices in White Plains. For a week or two, we imagined it, and then the plan disintegrated. In that life, I would have taken the train and arrived amid Grand Central’s sedate splendors, and walked about in my Manhattan shoes. Did the book stacks exist then? Surely I would have had foreknowledge, and felt the books stirring beneath Forty-second Street, down where the worms turn.

As the polls were closing, I was somewhere over the Atlantic. As we flew into the light, one of the air crew came with coffee and a bulletin, with a fallen face and news that shocked the rows around. They don’t think, she said, that Hillary can catch him now. I took off my watch to adjust it, unsure how many centuries to set it back. What would Donald Trump offer now? Salem witch trials? Public hangings? The lass who had prepared us for the news was gathering the blankets from the night’s vigil. Crinkling her brow, she said, “What I don’t comprehend is, who voted for him?”

No one we know—that’s the trouble. For decades, the nice and the good have been talking to each other, chitchat in every forum going, ignoring what stews beneath: envy, anger, lust. On both sides of the ocean, the bien-pensants put their fingers in their ears and smiled and bowed at one another, like nodding dogs or painted puppets. They thought we had outgrown the deadly sins. They thought we were rational sophisticates who could defer gratification. They thought they had a majority, and they screened out the roaring from the cages outside their gates, or, if they heard it, they thought they could silence it with, as it may be, a little quantitative easing, a package of special measures. Primal dreads have gone unacknowledged. It is not only the crude blustering of the Trump campaign that has poisoned public discourse but the liberals’ indulgence of the marginal and the whimsical, the habit of letting lies pass, of ignoring the living truth in favor of grovelling and meaningless apologies to the dead. So much has become unsayable, as if by not speaking of our grosser aspects we abolish them. It is a failure of the imagination. In this election as in any other, no candidate was shining white; politics is not a pursuit for angels. Yet it doesn’t seem much to ask—a world where a woman can live without jumping at shadows, without the crawling apprehension of something nasty constellating over her shoulder. Mr. Trump has promised a world where white men and rich men run the world their way, greed fuelled by undaunted ignorance. He must make good on his promises, for his supporters will soon be hungry. He, the ambulant id, must nurse his own offspring, and feel their teeth.

At Dublin airport by breakfast time, the sour jokes were flying over the plastic chairs: there’ll be plenty of work for Irishmen now—if you want a wall built, the Paddies have not lost the skills. I wanted to see a woman lead the great nation, so my own spine could be straighter this blustery sunny morning. I fear the ship of state is sinking, and we are thrashing in saltwater, snared in our own ropes and nets. Someone must strike out for the surface and clear air. It is possible to cut free from some entanglements, some error and painful beginnings, whether you are a soul or a whole nation.

The weekend before the election, we were in rural Ohio. The moon was a tender crescent, the nights frosty, and the dawns glowed with the crimson and violet of the fall. On Sunday morning, in a cloudless sky, a bird was drifting on the currents, circling. My husband said, “You know they have eagles in this part of the country?” We watched in silence as it cruised high above. “I don’t know if it is an eagle,” he said at last. “But I know that bird is bigger than you think.”


FOUR-CORNERED FLYOVER
By Peter Hessler

The day after Donald Trump’s victory, Susan Watson and Gail Jossi celebrated with glasses of red wine at the True Grit Café, in Ridgway, Colorado. Watson, the chair of the Ouray County Republican Central Committee, is a self-described “child of the sixties,” a retired travel agent, and a former supporter of the Democratic Party. Forty years ago, she voted for Jimmy Carter. Jossi also had a previous incarnation as a Democrat. In 1960, she volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. “I walked for Kennedy,” she said. “And then I walked for Goldwater.” These days, she’s a retired rancher, and until recently she was a prominent official of the Republican Party in Ouray County. “This is the first time in forty years that I haven’t been a precinct captain,” she said. “I’m fed up with the Republican Party.”

Initially, neither of the women had backed Trump. “I just didn’t care for him,” Jossi said. “I loved Dr. Carson.”

“I was a Scott Walker,” Watson said. “I thought a ticket with Walker and Fiorina would have been great.” Of Trump, she said, “He grew on me. He seemed to be getting more in tune with the people. The more these thousands and thousands of people showed up, the more he realized that this is real. This is not reality TV.”

Jossi didn’t begin to support Trump until September. “I couldn’t listen to his speeches,” she said. “His repetition. He’s not a politician. My mother and my husband have been big Trump supporters from the beginning, but I wasn’t.” Over time, though, the candidate’s rawness appealed to her, because she believed that he could shake up Washington. “After they’ve been in office, they become too slick,” she said. “I liked that unscripted aspect.”

Ouray is a rural county in southwestern Colorado, a state whose politics have become increasingly complex. On election maps, Colorado looks simple—a four-cornered flyover, perfectly squared off. But the state is composed of many elements: a long history of ranching and mining; a sudden influx of young, outdoors-oriented residents; a total population that is more than a fifth Hispanic. On Tuesday, Coloradans favored Hillary Clinton by a narrow majority, and they endorsed an amendment that will raise the minimum wage by more than forty per cent. They also chose to reject an amendment, promoted by Democratic legislators, that would have removed a provision in the state constitution that allows for slavery and the involuntary servitude of prisoners. If this seems contradictory—raising the minimum wage while protecting the possibility of slavery—it should be noted that the vote was even closer than Clinton versus Trump. In an exceedingly tight race, slavery won 50.6 per cent of the popular vote.

“The slavery thing was ridiculous,” Watson said.

“If it changes the constitution, then I vote no,” Jossi said.

“This is something that they do to get people to go out and vote,” Watson said. “That’s what they did with marijuana.”

“I voted for medical,” Jossi said. “Not recreational.”

“Not recreational,” Watson agreed.
Full disclosure: recreational. But during this election, while standing in a voting booth in the Ouray County Courthouse, at an elevation of seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-two feet, I experienced a sensation of vertigo that may have been shared by 50.6 per cent of my fellow-Coloradans. On a ballot full of odd and confusing measures, I couldn’t untangle the language of Amendment T: “Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning the removal of the exception to the prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude when used as punishment for persons duly convicted of a crime?” Does yes mean yes, or does yes mean no? The election of 2016 disturbs me in many ways, and one of them is that I honestly cannot remember whether I voted for or against slavery.

This election has given me a renewed appreciation for chaos, confusion, and the limitlessly internal world of the individual. Most analysis will shuffle voters into neat demographic groups, each of them with four corners, perfectly squared off. But there’s something static about these categories—female, rural, white—whereas a conversation with people like Watson and Jossi reveals just how much a person’s ideas can change during the course of decades or even weeks. For an unstable electorate, Trump was the perfect candidate, because he was also a moving target. It was possible for supporters to fixate on any specific message or characteristic while ignoring everything else. At rallies, when people chanted, “Build a wall!” and “Lock her up!,” these statements impressed me as real, tangible courses of action, endorsed by a faceless mob. But when I spoke with individual supporters the dynamic changed: the person had a face, while the proposed action seemed vague and symbolic.

“I think that was a metaphor,” Jossi said, when I asked about the border wall.

“It’s a metaphor for immigration laws being enforced,” Watson said.

Neither of the women, like most other Trump supporters I met, had any interest in the construction of an actual wall. I asked them about Clinton’s e-mail scandal. “I think she’ll be pardoned,” Watson said.

“I’m done with hearing about it,” Jossi said with a shrug. “I just want her gone.”

Trump’s descriptions and treatment of women didn’t seem to bother them. “I’m a strong enough woman,” Watson said. I often heard similar comments from female Trump supporters—in their eyes, it was a show of strength to ignore the candidate’s crudeness and transgressions, because only the weak would react with outrage.

It was hard to imagine a President entering office with less accountability. For supporters, this was central to his appeal—he owed nothing to the establishment. But he also owed nothing to the people who had voted for him. Supporters cherry-picked specific statements or qualities that appealed to them, but they didn’t attempt an assessment of the whole, because, given Trump’s lack of discipline, this was impossible. Does yes mean yes, or does yes mean no?

“Was Donald the right guy?” Watson asked. “I don’t know. But he was the alpha male on the stage with all the other candidates. He was not afraid to say the things that we were thinking.” She laughed and said, “I fought for the Equal Rights Amendment in the seventies. You have to evolve as a human being.”

MOURNING FOR WHITENESS
By Toni Morrison

This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.

Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.

In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.

To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?

These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.

The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.
THE DARK-MONEY CABINET
By Jane Mayer

During the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.

Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”

Many of Trump’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Trump made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.

For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Trump is relying on Michael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. According to Politico, McKenna also has ties to the American Energy Alliance and its affiliate, the Institute for Energy Research. These nonprofit groups purport to be grassroots organizations, but they run ads advocating corporate-friendly energy policies, without disclosing their financial backers. In 2012, Freedom Partners gave $1.5 million to the American Energy Alliance.

Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Trump’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. Wenona Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, says that Hamm has “done all he can to subvert the existing rules and regulations.”

Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Trump’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries. David Schnare, a self-described “free-market environmentalist” who has accused the E.P.A. of having “blood on its hands,” is a member of the E.P.A. working group. Schnare is the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, part of a nationwide consortium of anti-government, pro-industry think tanks. He is also the general counsel at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has received funding from coal companies. In 2011, Schnare started hounding the climate scientist Michael Mann, who had been a professor at the University of Virginia, by filing public-records requests demanding to see his unpublished research and his private e-mails. The legal wrangling tied up Mann’s work until 2014, when the Virginia Supreme Court ordered Schnare to desist. The Union of Concerned Scientists has described these actions against climate scientists as “harassment.”

Norman Eisen, who devised strict conflict-of-interest rules while acting as Obama’s ethics czar, says, “If you have people on the transition team with deep financial ties to the industries to be regulated, it raises questions about whether they are serving the public interest or their own interests.” He ruled out Obama transition-team members who would have had a conflict of interest in their assigned areas, or even the appearance of one. “We weren’t perfect,” he said. “But we tried to level the playing field because, let’s face it, in the Beltway nexus of corporations and dark money, lobbyists are the delivery mechanism for special-interest influence. ”

Questions to Trump’s transition team about its conflict-of-interest rules went unanswered, as did questions to the lobbyists and industry heads involved. But the composition of the group runs counter to a set of anti-lobbyist proposals that Trump released in October, to be enacted in his first hundred days. It called for a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave public office, and a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for a foreign government.

The tenth item on the list of proposals is the Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act, which would implement “new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Trevor Potter, who served as the commissioner of the F.E.C. under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, described Trump’s ethics proposals as “quite interesting, and quite helpful.” He was puzzled, though, by the vagueness of the “Drain the Swamp” act. “It’s a complete black box so far,” Potter said.

Potter wondered if Trump’s lack of specificity reflected internal divisions. He noted that Don McGahn, who served as the Trump campaign’s attorney, is an opponent of almost all campaign-finance restrictions. “Many on the transition team are registered lobbyists who are deeply invested in the system Trump says he wants to change,” Potter said. “It looks like the lobbyists and special interests are already taking over.”


ON SAYING NO
By Evan Osnos

If the leader of a government issues an order that men and women below him cannot, in good conscience, enact, what are they to do?

In July, 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of California, who had stunned the political establishment by leveraging his celebrity and outsider status to reach disaffected voters, was in an embarrassing political predicament. The Governor had brandished a broom at rallies, promising to “sweep out the bureaucracy” and defeat “girlie men” lawmakers who stood in his way. Now the Democratic-led legislature was unable to agree on a budget. So Schwarzenegger adopted a radical tactic: he ordered the state to reduce the pay of nearly two hundred thousand state employees to the federal minimum wage, of $6.55 an hour, until the legislature met his demands.

The order reached the desk of a bureaucrat named John Chiang, a former tax-law specialist who was the state controller. In that job, Chiang, a forty-six-year-old Democrat, was responsible for issuing paychecks and monitoring cash flow. Born in New York, to immigrants from Taiwan, he had grown up in the Chicago suburbs, in one of the first Asian families in the neighborhood. It was an uneasy mix. On the Chiangs’ garage, people spray-painted “Go home, gook,” “Go home, Jap,”and “Go home, Chink.”

After studying finance, and earning a law degree from Georgetown, Chiang started his career at the Internal Revenue Service in Los Angeles. In 1999, his younger sister, Joyce, a lawyer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, went missing. Three months later, her remains were found on the banks of the Potomac. The death was ruled a homicide, but no one was charged. It altered her brother’s life. “I will return to dust,” he said later. “You just want to use this life to do some good.” In 2006, Chiang ran for controller, upset a Democratic favorite in the primary, and won.

When he received Schwarzenegger’s order to reduce the pay of state workers, Chiang was surprised. Under Schwarzenegger’s plan, the workers would receive their full salaries once a budget was approved. But California had enough cash in its accounts, and, in Chiang’s view, the Governor’s move could violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. Moreover, he thought, it was cruel. It was the height of the financial crisis, and mortgage defaults were up more than a hundred per cent over the previous year.

“I wanted Governor Schwarzenegger to help lead California through this fiscal crisis,” Chiang told me last week. “Here’s a man who worked hard, he’s been blessed, but, more important, he’s been entrusted by the voters of California to lead in good and bad times. And to think that you take action that would endanger thousands of public servants just struck me as beyond the pale.”

Chiang refused to implement the Governor’s executive order. In a statement at the time, he said that the order was “nothing more than a poorly devised strategy to put pressure on the Legislature.” At a rally of state workers, Chiang called them “innocent victims of a political struggle.”

Schwarzenegger sued Chiang’s office. In court papers, Chiang replied that, even if he wanted to comply, he would need ten months to reconfigure the state’s computer system. As the case wound through the judicial system, Chiang became, to some, an unlikely hero. The Sacramento Bee, adapting the iconic image of a protester at Tiananmen Square, published a cartoon that depicted Chiang as a lone resister before a line of Hummers, with “Arnold” stencilled on the bumper of the lead vehicle. The Liberal O.C., a progressive blog, nicknamed him “the Controllernator.” Chiang’s resistance became a case study in how a bureaucracy stymies the requests of an executive who offends its professionalism and sense of mission. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to take office, Harry Truman predicted, “Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

Professor Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago Law School, is the co-author of “The Executive Unbound,” a chronicle of the expanding power of the U.S. Presidency. Last week, after Donald Trump won the election, Posner told me that, with both houses of Congress in Republican control, the greatest obstacle to the President’s use of power would be not the separation of powers but, more likely, the isolated actions of individuals in government. “Sometimes they won’t actually do what the President tells them to do, or they drag their feet, or they’ll leak to the press to try to embarrass him,” Posner told me. “That’s pretty unusual, because when that happens the employees risk losing their job, or even going to jail if they leak confidential information.”

Because Chiang held an independently elected office, his latitude to resist was far greater than it is for most government employees. The consequences of resistance can be dire. In 1981, nearly thirteen thousand air-traffic controllers challenged the new President, Ronald Reagan, by staging an illegal strike. Reagan fired them and broke their union.

Schwarzenegger’s attempts to impose his will eventually foundered. As a candidate, he reached beyond usual Republicans by vowing to create “fantastic” jobs and by thrilling audiences, at his rallies, with a soundtrack that featured Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” (a song that Trump used at his rallies). But Schwarzenegger, who had never held public office, proved incapable of reorganizing government, defeating labor unions, capping state spending, or weakening teacher tenure. His relationship with the G.O.P. soured. In 2011, he left office with his public approval rating at near-historic lows. The lawsuit against Chiang remained officially unresolved until Schwarzenegger’s successor, Jerry Brown, dropped the suit. (Chiang permitted himself a modest celebration: “I am pleased and thankful that Governor Brown saw this litigation as a frivolous waste of hard-earned tax dollars.”)

In 2015, Chiang became California’s Treasurer, and he will be a candidate for governor in 2018. When I asked him what lesson he takes from his refusal to obey the orders of the executive, he said, “I think, always, you look deep into your conscience and then you move from there. People have a sense of why they serve.” He added, “At times, we will prevail; at times, we will fail. But to stand and watch idly and do nothing—I think people will regret if things go along and they didn’t offer up their very best.”


THE HIGHEST COURT
By Jeffrey Toobin

The Supreme Court operates in counterpoint to the rest of the government. The Justices do not initiate; they respond. Every major political issue of the day eventually winds up in their courtroom, and they either embrace or resist what’s happening in the rest of the world. When Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the New Deal through Congress, the conservatives on the Court, for a time, fought him to a standstill. When the civil-rights movement gathered steam, the Justices gave first a hesitant and then a fuller endorsement of the cause. But resistance from the Justices never lasts too long. The truism that the Supreme Court follows the election returns happens to be true. Elections have consequences.

For the past eight years, the Court has been called upon to respond to President Obama’s agenda. In certain crucial ways, a majority of the Justices have upheld the work of the Administration, most notably in two cases that posed existential threats to the Affordable Care Act. In other cases, the Court has rebuked the President. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Court rejected the Administration’s view that the A.C.A. required closely held corporations to subsidize forms of birth control that the owners opposed on religious grounds. Over all, the Court has reflected the fierce partisan divisions in the country. Conservatives won many cases (striking down campaign-finance regulations and gutting the core of the Voting Rights Act), while liberals won others (expanding gay rights and reaffirming abortion rights). The Trump Presidency will shape the Justices’ work even before they decide a case. If Trump succeeds in overturning the Affordable Care Act, the Court’s two landmark endorsements of that law, in 2012 and 2015, will become nullities, like rave reviews of a closed restaurant.

George W. Bush, the previous Republican President, had to wait until his second term to make his first appointment to the Supreme Court. Trump will have a vacancy to fill as soon as he takes the oath of office. Antonin Scalia died in February, but Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, decreed that the seat would be held open, to be filled by the next President. The voters mostly ignored this brazen defiance of institutional norms, but its consequences, as McConnell intended, have been enormous. In an unusual move for a Presidential candidate, Trump released a list of twenty-one people whom he might consider as nominees. The list includes some curiosities, such as Mike Lee, the senator from Utah (who revealed, the morning after the election, that he had voted for the Independent Evan McMullin), and Margaret Ryan, who serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. But most are Republican appointees to the federal courts of appeal or state supreme courts, and all appear to be strongly conservative in outlook. If one is nominated and confirmed, the new Justice will probably vote much as Scalia did. McConnell’s blockade prevented the creation of the first liberal majority since the Nixon Administration. Instead, there will be a conservative majority of five Justices, with Anthony Kennedy occasionally and John Roberts rarely voting with the liberals.

Confirmation of any Trump nominee should be a mere formality. When Hillary Clinton appeared to be the likely winner, several Republican senators suggested that they would keep Scalia’s seat open throughout her term; eight Justices were enough for them. Democrats take a more genteel approach to judicial confirmations of nominees from the opposition party. At confirmation hearings, the senators from the Democratic minority will doubtless ask the nominee a series of questions about such issues as gay rights, Roe v. Wade, and the Citizens United case, regarding campaign finance. The nominee will answer with generalities and evasions. Trump’s party narrowly controls the Senate, but any Republican defections on a matter of this magnitude are unlikely. Democrats have never mounted a successful filibuster against a Republican Supreme Court nominee, and McConnell would probably abolish the practice if they even tried. So Trump will have his Justice in short order.

The new Court will then begin confronting the Trump agenda. Two issues are likely to stand out. In the period leading up to the 2016 election, Republican-dominated state legislatures passed a series of voter-suppression initiatives, including photo-identification requirements and limitations on early voting and absentee voting. (These efforts may have limited Democratic turnout in several battleground states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina.) Some lower federal courts, especially those with judges appointed by President Obama, began interpreting what was left of the Voting Rights Act as justification for curtailing these practices. A conservative majority on the Court would likely give the states a free hand, which would allow them to enact even greater restrictions.

The other area is immigration. Trump made the building of a wall along the Mexican border and the eviction of roughly eleven million undocumented immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign. He has not detailed how he plans to round up so many people, but he will surely tighten immigration enforcement; just as surely, the targets will turn to the courts for relief. Undocumented immigrants by definition enjoy fewer rights than citizens, and their fate is likely to become a defining issue for the new Court.

Looking farther ahead involves playing a high-stakes game of actuarial roulette. The Court’s senior liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are eighty-three and seventy-eight, respectively; Kennedy is eighty. The chances for dramatic change on such issues as abortion rights and affirmative action hinge on their continued service. The one certainty about the Court is that it never stands in the way for long. In broad terms, it reflects the political tenor of its era. If Trump and the ideological tendency he represents remain ascendant, the Court will mirror those views, too, and probably sooner rather than later. Presidents shape Supreme Courts, not the other way around, and it is Donald Trump’s turn now.

DONALD TRUMP, POET
By Mary Karr
At the risk of sounding like a total candy-ass, I swear I have developed P.T.S.D. from the venom of this election. O.K., even before voting season began, I was wobbly enough to be seeing a shrink. But when I confessed to her, a month ago, that I was sleeping less and checking news outlets compulsively, like a rat pushing a bar down for a pellet, she said, “So are a hundred per cent of my patients.” Then she added, “So am I.” A friend’s cardiologist told her that patients had been flooding into his office or calling from emergency rooms with false reports of tachycardia.

Those of us who experienced trauma as children, often at the hands of bullies, felt old wounds open up just hearing Trump’s fierce idiom of outrage. All of us used to be kids. All of us were, at some point, silenced by someone bigger and louder saying, “Wrong, wrong,” but meaning “It’s not what you’re doing that’s wrong—it’s who you are that’s wrong.”

Language is key. Trump’s taunting “nyah-nyah”s are the idiom of threat and vengeance. For him, it’s not enough to ban abortion; women who have abortions should be punished. It’s not enough to defeat Hillary Clinton; we have to hate, jail, and possibly even kill her. Eric Trump responded to David Duke’s endorsement not by saying, “We don’t want his vote,” but with the line “The guy does deserve a bullet.”

This violent poetry has been gathering force on our airwaves for decades. It started with shock-jock radio and moved to Fox News. Then, there’s the ubiquitous browbeating by social media, which, I suspect, has contributed to the tripling of the suicide rate for adolescent girls in the past fifteen years.
It was only a matter of time before a hair-triggered guy took this vernacular to the national political stage. Nasty talk didn’t start with Trump, but it was the province of people we all viewed as idiots—schoolyard mobs, certain drunks in bars, guys hollering out of moving cars.

When a Presidential candidate mocks a disabled man or a Muslim family that has sacrificed a son for our country, the behavior is stamped with a big “O.K.” Some Trump supporters felt O.K. shoving and hitting protesters. At a Wisconsin football game, a fan wore an Obama mask and a noose.

If you ever doubted the power of poetry, ask yourself why, in any revolution, poets are often the first to be hauled out and shot—whether it’s Spanish Fascists murdering García Lorca or Stalin killing Mandelstam. We poets may be crybabies and sissies, but our pens can become nuclear weapons.

Like Trump, I trained early for the gutter brawl. I grew up in a huge state with an “X” in its middle, marking the place where the mouthy and the well-armed crisscross the boundaries of propriety like cattle rustlers. Littler than my cohort, I learned that a verbal bashing had a lingering power that a bloody nose could never compete with. When a boy named Bubba said, “Your mama’s a whore,” I shot back, “So what? Your nose is flat.”

The vicious language of this election has infected the whole country with enough anxiety and vitriol to launch a war. American lawn signs used to be low-key. You might see venomous slogans on bumper stickers, but not where anybody actually lived. In Florida this Halloween, one yard featured black effigies hanging in the trees above a Trump sign. Strange fruit indeed.

Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton, there’s no question that she was the more circumspect candidate, and that’s partly why her detractors hated her. She was “politically correct.” By my yardstick, that means trying not to hurt people’s feelings (whether Bubba said something mean about your mother or not). And yet, among a huge portion of our population, this registers not as civility but as insincerity.

We Democrats have mostly tried to follow Clinton’s example, but I confess that, among friends, I’ve often enjoyed making ad-hominem attacks on Trump and his family in a way that—on reflection—shames me. And, certainly, the left has made use of that insidious “If/then” construction that Trump favors (i.e., “If I were President, you’d be in jail”). A putative friend once told me, “If you eat endangered fish, I won’t be friends with you anymore.” I replied, “If I cared more about a fish than a person, I’d examine my values.”

Today, I’m examining my values. As a Buddhist pal said to me on Election Night, “America has spoken.” Now it falls to us to listen with gracious and open hearts. This is not giving in or giving up. The hardest thing about democracy is the boring and irritating process of listening to people you don’t agree with, which is tolerable only when each side strives not to hurt the other’s feelings. To quote my colleague George Saunders, let today be National Attempt to Have an Affectionate / Tender Thought About Someone of the Opposing Political Persuasion Day. And (please, God) every day hereafter as well.

WARS WITHIN
By Jill Lepore

The beginning of an end is hard to see: the moment when a marriage started to fall apart, the half-sentence of heartless scorn, an unmendable cut; the hour when the first symptoms of a fatal illness set in, dizziness, a subtle blurring of vision, a certain hoarseness; the season when a species of sparrow, trying to fly north, falls, weakened by the heat; and the day when the people of a nation began to lose faith in their form of government. The election of Donald Trump, like all elections, is an ending, the ending of one Presidency and the beginning of another. But, unlike most elections, Trump’s election is something different: it ends an era of American idealism, a high-mindedness of rhetoric, if not always of action, which has characterized most twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Presidencies, from F.D.R. to Eisenhower, from Reagan to Obama, from the New Deal order to the long era of civil rights.

The beginning of another, very different end lies quite far back in American history. “The fate of the greatest of all modern Republics trembles in the balance,” Frederick Douglass said, in a speech he gave in Philadelphia, in 1862, titled “The Reasons for Our Troubles.” Born into slavery, Douglass had escaped in 1838. What astonished him, as the Civil War raged, was how blind Americans were to its origins. “To what cause may we trace our present sad and deplorable condition?” he asked. Americans of Douglass’s day blamed the election of Abraham Lincoln, abolitionists, and Southern politicians for the division of the nation. Douglass blamed slavery: “We have sought to bind the chains of slavery on the limbs of the black man, without thinking that at last we should find the other end of that hateful chain about our own necks.”

The rupture in the American republic, the division of the American people whose outcome is the election of Donald Trump, cannot be attributed to Donald Trump. Nor can it be attributed to James Comey and the F.B.I. or to the white men who voted in very high numbers for Trump or to the majority of white women who did, too, unexpectedly, or to the African-American and Latino voters who did not give Hillary Clinton the edge they gave Barack Obama. It can’t be attributed to the Republican Party’s unwillingness to disavow Trump or to the Democratic Party’s willingness to promote Clinton or to a media that has careened into a state of chaos. There are many reasons for our troubles. But the deepest reason is inequality: the forms of political, cultural, and economic polarization that have been widening, not narrowing, for decades. Inequality, like slavery, is a chain that binds at both ends.

Trump’s election does not mark the end of an era of civil peace: no state has seceded, or will. But, if the nation is not at arms, it is at war with itself and with its ideals. In Douglass’s day, the war that was fought over the meaning of the words “liberty” and “equality” claimed the lives of three-quarters of a million Americans. But it ended slavery. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, in January, 1863, Douglass was in Boston with “an immense assembly,” largely of black abolitionists. “We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky, which should rend the fetters of four millions of slaves,” Douglass recalled. The crowd sang the hymn “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow”: “Ye mournful souls, be glad.”

Many Americans, having lost faith in a government that has failed to address widening inequality, and in the policymakers and academics and journalists who have barely noticed it, see Trump as their deliverer. They cast their votes with purpose. A lot of Trump voters I met during this election season compared Trump to Lincoln: an emancipator. What Trump can and cannot deliver, by way of policy, remains to be seen; my own doubts are grave. Meanwhile, though, he has added weight to the burden that we, each of us, carry on our backs, the burden of old hatreds. Frederick Douglass, a man of Lincoln’s time and, decidedly, not of our own, tried to lift those burdens with the strength of his ideals.

Douglass had been fighting for women’s rights since Seneca Falls, in 1848, and he fought for female suffrage. He expected women to lead the nation by speaking for themselves, declaring, “I believe no man, however gifted with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and present the demands of women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority of woman herself.” Many Americans of Douglass’s day believed that they saw, in equal rights for black men and even for women, the beginning of the end of the American experiment. “It is thought by many, and said by some, that this Republic has already seen its best days; that the historian may now write the story of its decline and fall,” Douglass said, in a speech called “Composite Nation,” in 1869. To those who predicted doom, Douglass repeated what he had said when the war was just beginning: “The real trouble with us was never our system or form of Government, or the principles underlying it; but the peculiar composition of our people, the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.” For Douglass, the aftermath of the fight to end slavery was a lesson about the persistence of inequality: it had already begun to take a new form, in proposals to deny constitutional protections to Chinese immigrants. Hatred of the Chinese, especially by those who wanted to exploit their labor, was, Douglass argued, new wine in old bottles, slavery by another name. And he condemned it: “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man.”

Douglass had his blind spots. Everyone does. Mine drive me crazy—just knowing they’re there does. Trump was elected because he got something right, about the suffering of Americans, and about the arrogance of politicians, of academics, and of the press. What he got wrong can be proved only by the forces of humility, of clarity, and of honesty.

When does an ending begin? Douglass saw that the end of a republic begins on the day when the heroism of the struggle for equality yields to the cowardice of resentment. That day has not come. It is thought by many, lately, and said by some, that the republic has seen its best days, and that it remains for the historian to chronicle the history of its decline and fall. I disagree. Sparrows may yet cross the sky.

DYSTOPIA
By Gary Shteyngart

When my parents lived in the Soviet Union, having a Jewish-looking “physiognomy,” as it was called, proved a daily liability. Standing in line for eggs or milk or ham, one could feel the gaze of the shopkeeper running down one’s nose, along with the implied suggestion “Why don’t you move to Israel already?”

Social media in the era of Trump is essentially Leningrad, 1979. Trump supporters on Twitter have often pointed out my Jewishness. “You look ethnic” was one of the kinder remarks, along with the usual litany of lampshade drawings, oven photos, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at Auschwitz, and other stock Holocaust tropes. It is impossible to know if the person pointing out your ethnicity and telling you to jump into an oven is an amateur troll in St. Petersburg, Florida, or a professional troll in St. Petersburg, Russia. What this election has proved is just how intertwined those two trolls may be.

“Russia will rise from her knees!” Those were the lyrics I heard outside a suburban train station in St. Petersburg half a decade ago. The song was coming out of an ancient tape player next to a bedraggled old woman selling sunflower* seeds out of a cup. She examined my physiognomy with a sneer. At the time, this seemed like just a typical Russian scene, the nation’s poorest citizens bristling at their humiliation after losing the Cold War, their ire concentrated on a familiar target, the country’s dwindling population of Jews. The surprise of 2016—post-Brexit, post-Trump—is just how ably the Russians weaponize those lyrics, tweak them to “Whites will rise from their knees!” and megaphone them into so many ready ears in Eastern and Western Europe and, eventually, onto our own shores. The graffito “Russia is for the Russians,” scribbled next to a synagogue, and the words “Vote Trump,” written on a torched black church in Mississippi, are separated by the cold waters of the Atlantic but united by an imaginary grievance—a vigil for better times that may never have existed.

I can understand these people. Growing up in nineteen-eighties Queens, my friends and I, as young Russian immigrants, unfamiliar with the language, our parents working menial jobs, looked down on blacks and Latinos, who were portrayed as threats by the Reagan Administration and its local proxies. The first politicized term I learned in America was “welfare queen,” even as my own grandmother collected food stamps and received regular shipments of orange government cheese. We hated minorities, even though the neighborhoods many of us lived in were devoid of them. I didn’t attend public school, because my parents had seen one black kid on the playground of the excellent school I was zoned for, and so sent me to a wretched parochial school instead. There was an apocryphal story going around our community about a poor Russian boy beaten so badly by a black public-school kid that his mother killed herself.

If Ronald Reagan was the distant protector of us endangered white kids, then Donald Trump was a local pasha. My buddies and I walked past his family’s becolumned mansion, in Jamaica Estates, with a sense of awe. Donald was a straight shooter, a magnate, a playboy, a marrier of Eastern European blondes, a conqueror of distant Manhattan. He was everything a teen-ager in Queens could dream of being. If we were ever blessed to meet him, we knew he would understand the racism in our hearts, and we his. Successful people like him made us secure in our own sense of whiteness.

Thirty years later, every Jew on Twitter who has received a Photoshopped version of herself or himself in a concentration-camp outfit followed by “#MAGA” knows how fleeting that sense of security can be. The idea that Jews should move to their “own” country, Israel, brings together racial purists from Nashville to Novosibirsk. The jump from Twitter racism to a black church set aflame on a warm Southern night is steady and predictable. Putin’s team has discovered that racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism bind people closer than any other experiences. These carefully calibrated messages travel from Cyrillic and English keyboards to Breitbart ears and Trump’s mouth, sometimes in the space of hours. The message is clear. People want to rise from their knees. Even those who weren’t kneeling in the first place.

My parents and grandparents never fully recovered from the strains of having lived in an authoritarian society. Daily compromise ground them down, even after they came to America. They left Russia, but Russia never left them. How do you read through a newspaper composed solely of lies? How do you walk into a store while being Jewish? How do you tell the truth to your children? How do you even know what the truth is? A few days ago, I visited a local public school. On a second-grade civics bulletin board I saw written in large letters: “Citizens have rights—things that you deserve; responsibilities—things you are expected to do; rules—things you have to follow.” The message seemed to have come from a different era. What did those words have to do with America in 2016? I reflexively checked FiveThirtyEight on my phone. I thought, I grew up in a dystopia—will I have to die in one, too?

DAYS OF RAGE
By Nicholas Lemann

Less than a month after Barack Obama took office, Rick Santelli, of CNBC, announced from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party.” Santelli, a conservative showman, was complaining that day about the new Administration’s modest proposal to help struggling homeowners, whom predatory lenders had persuaded to take on unaffordable mortgages. Santelli is not a critic of Wall Street, but his rant reflected the wave of populist rage that began with the financial crisis of 2008. It set off revolutions within both parties, targeting just about anybody who seemed rich and powerful. In 2016, two utterly different and equally unlikely politicians ran for President, and succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations: first Bernie Sanders, then Donald Trump.

The economic crisis became obvious in September, 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed. Within days, it was evident that all the major American financial companies, and, by extension, all the major financial companies in the world, were faltering. To help avert the most devastating economic depression in history, the political system took a temporary break from its hyper-partisanship and paralysis. Barack Obama and John McCain interrupted their Presidential campaigns to fly to Washington for an emergency meeting with President George W. Bush. Congress authorized the government to spend as much as seven hundred billion dollars to stabilize the big banks. After Obama won the election, he made it clear that he would continue with this approach. Altogether, these fiscal interventions were more aggressive than any ever taken by the federal government, surpassing even those taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his Hundred Days.

The two parties shared the blame for the catastrophe. For decades after the New Deal, the government supervised the economic system, placing on it various restraints and controls. That role eroded in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when Republicans and Democrats reduced the constraints, allowing junk mortgages and the exotic financial products based on them to proliferate. By the start of the twenty-first century, Wall Street was donating heavily to Democrats, too. In 2008, Obama received more contributions from the financial sector than McCain, and the trend was resumed and magnified this year, with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Democrats happened to be in power when the economy bottomed out, in June, 2009; by then, millions of Americans had seen their life savings vanish. The system had failed, and when people think of the system they think of the party in charge.

In the end, financial institutions got trillions of dollars’ worth of help to stay afloat, far more than the government spent on economic stimulus, unemployment benefits, or mortgage relief. The cities where finance is headquartered, especially New York and San Francisco, recovered quickly, while the suffering in great swaths of the rest of the country continued. Bankers got bonuses; their neighborhood theatres and restaurants were full. The size and influence of the half-dozen or so largest financial institutions grew substantially, and almost no one who led them was visibly punished. This past March, the National Archives released documents that had been under seal, in which the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission made a series of “referrals” of cases to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. The most famous name on the list was Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and Citigroup executive.

The main government body responsible for dealing with the crisis, the Federal Reserve Board—removed from direct democracy and run rather mysteriously by academic economists—made an ideal target for populist rage. Fed policies benefitted the rich more than others: low interest rates were paired with “quantitative easing,” in which the Fed purchased the kinds of financial instruments that most people don’t have, like mortgage-backed securities and long-term bonds. Hedge-fund managers who played the rising markets with borrowed funds did well; people on salaries who saved a little money every month and put it in interest-bearing accounts did poorly. By 2010, the Tea Party had become a national movement, and dozens of its adherents were elected to Congress. The left generated a protest movement, too, with Occupy Wall Street, which revolted against the mainstream of the Democratic Party and led to the emergence of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as major Party figures.

Astonishingly, the main political beneficiary of all this energy was Donald Trump, a plutocrat with a long history of taking on too much debt, stiffing his business partners, and not paying taxes. But, while most of his primary opponents ran on more familiar limited-government themes, and Hillary Clinton was fending off the attack from Sanders, Trump figured out that a Republican could run against Wall Street. He made unsubstantiated, sweeping, and brutally effective attacks on Clinton for having “done nothing” for thirty years about the economic troubles of middle-class and poor Americans.

Trump is almost certain to enact policies that will exacerbate those difficulties. He will undo as much as he can of efforts like the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, which returned some regulation to the financial system. He will cut taxes in ways that will increase inequality, and restrict trade in ways that will decrease prosperity. He will not reappoint Janet Yellen, the most unemployment-obsessed Federal Reserve chair in American history—after having subjected her to a barely veiled anti-Semitic attack, in a campaign ad that called her a tool of “global special interests.” It is yet another tragic consequence of the financial crisis that it has brought to power the politician most likely to create the next one.

THE BIRTHER OF A NATION
By Larry Wilmore

“We are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles” is the opening line of “The Graduate.” It is heard in the background, as the camera lingers on the face of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), lost in uncomfortable reflection. The line sets the tone for the lurid tale that is about to unspool. I thought of this foreshadowing sixteen months ago, on the day that Donald J. Trump announced his bid for the Presidency. The sight of him riding a gold escalator down into the belly of Trump Tower to announce his good news made one thing clear to me: he was ready to begin his descent to the Presidency.

For a long time, it seemed like a joke. How could this six-time-bankrupt billionaire-slash-reality-TV star expect to be taken seriously? His opening move—labelling Mexican immigrants rapists—immediately lost the left, and his demotion of John McCain, a former P.O.W., from hero to loser looked as if it would cost him the establishment right. But, after tussling with Megyn Kelly at the first G.O.P. debate, and suggesting that she had blood coming out of her “wherever,” he accomplished the unthinkable: he lost Fox News. How did this mango Mussolini expect to win the White House? Who was left to vote for him? Apparently, half the country.

Shortly after that first debate, I joked in the writers’ room of my now defunct television program, “The Nightly Show,” that Trump could win. I was immediately shouted down and told, in very funny terms, that I was out of my mind. But I was half serious when I made that prediction: a part of me was deeply uneasy with the type of energy that surrounded the Trump insurgency. It was the same energy I’d felt around the “birther” movement a few years earlier—a concerted attempt to delegitimize the first black President. It was then that my colleagues and I decided to title our coverage of the election “Blacklash 2016, the Unblackening.”

A little more than a hundred years ago, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” was screened at Woodrow Wilson’s White House. The film gave a distorted but sensational view of the Reconstruction South, where white heroes, in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, put uppity black villains back in their places. It was the Klan’s job to rescue white women from the black devils who were trying to rape them and create a mongrel race. The reality, of course, is that mixed-race Americans were largely the result of the cream being poured into the coffee, as it were, and not the other way around. But this lie—the myth of the black sexual predator—was powerful, both onscreen and off. It provoked a resurgence of the K.K.K., and reportedly led President Wilson to say that Griffith’s film was “like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” For African-Americans, Wilson’s comment was not only an official delegitimization but, arguably, the worst movie review ever.

When Donald Trump expended so much effort not only criticizing President Obama but attempting to un-Americanize him, he was drawing a direct line from that horrible legacy to himself. During the election, I’d hear the campaigners chanting, “Take our country back,” or “Make America great again,” and I wondered who they thought had stolen their country. Well, the chief suspect lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It appears that Obama’s biggest mistake was P.W.B., Presidenting While Black.

I’m shocked by what happened last week, but not surprised. I don’t mean to suggest that every person who voted for Trump is a racist. But there’s no denying that his message appealed to the lesser angels of the American psyche. Questioning Obama’s birthright, threatening to ban Muslims, painting entire immigrant groups as felons to be feared—these are not policy positions. They are incendiary words and images meant to ignite a movement. My hope is that, right now, our country is more ready to come together than to be driven farther apart. But if making America great again means restoring a history that’s been written with lightning, buckle up—because we’re going to be on a collision course with very loud thunder.

ON THE STREETS
By Jia Tolentino

I’m twenty-seven, and in some ways my life has been consonant with the experience of women throughout history. The first time someone tried to grab me by the pussy, I was in middle school, and the next half-dozen times it likewise wasn’t by choice. But in most respects I have luxuriated in unprecedented choice and freedom. I was the child of immigrants in a conservative Southern state, yet I had birth control and a credit card and an uncontested right to education. Ambition and carelessness both came naturally to me. Even as a girl, I knew that I was uncommonly lucky, which is what encouraged me, when I was eleven, to write off pussy-grabbing as a pathetic, confusing cultural vestige. It would die out eventually, I thought, because women would be recognized as equals. Men who groped you—particularly the ones who did it on a whim, out of aggressive boredom—would be shamed into the mausoleum, shoved into a corner next to coat hangers and coverture.

Then, on Tuesday, nearly fifty per cent of the American electorate voted Donald Trump into the Oval Office. We picked a President whose ex-wife once testified that he ripped out her hair and raped her, a man who’s been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by almost two dozen women, a man whose own words corroborate his accusers’ claims. Trump bragged, on the “Access Hollywood” videotape, about committing sexual assault—one of many hideous offenses that he instinctively believed would make him appear powerful. And, for millions of Americans, it seems, they did.

The night after the election, my girlfriends and I joined a protest that had been announced, earlier that day, on Facebook, and which brought thousands of people to Union Square, in Manhattan. The crowd was young and colorful, restless and expectant. A gentle rain wilted signs that said “Not the End” and “We Will Look Out for Each Other”; two men in front of me waved a rainbow banner and a blacked-out American flag. An organizer with a bullhorn rebuked the Democratic Party, prompting wolf whistles and applause. My girlfriends and I hugged one another, our eyes smeared and swollen. We hadn’t thought that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was specifically focussed on women, but we experienced her loss as a woman-specific disaster. The men in our lives seemed to feel the stab of it somewhat less.
The rain intensified as we marched from Union Square to Trump Tower. We high-fived cabdrivers and whooped at the office workers who opened their windows to cheer. “Our body, our choice!” the women around us chanted, and men echoed, “Her body, her choice!” We traded flowers and cigarettes, yelled “Pussy grabs back.” But fifty-three per cent of white women voted for a white-supremacist sexual predator; selfishness, in so many circumstances, begets the same consequences as hate. A sign floated above the crowd, flashing red, white, and blue in the reflection of police lights: “Why Don’t Sexual Assault Victims Come Forward? Because Sometimes We Make Their Attackers the Leader of the Free World.”

I had been foolishly sure that the “Access Hollywood” tape would sink Trump’s chances. After its release, I asked my friends how many times someone had forcibly grabbed them. “Twenty,” a woman who grew up taking the subway in New York City said. “Five to ten?” another friend replied, adding, earnestly, “So not that much.” We were fortunate, I thought; we could talk about assault clearly and casually. We could trust that these men were losers. We were wrong.

I’m part of the generation that has forced a mainstream reckoning with the misuse of other people’s bodies; we are the victims and the dissidents of police brutality and sexual assault. During the Obama Administration, in no small part because of the respect that the First Couple instilled for women and people of color, I had begun to feel, thrillingly, like a person. My freedom no longer seemed a miraculous historical accident; it was my birthright.

But my freedom was always conditional, and perhaps never very important to anyone but me. I’m afraid that the empathy and respect that I have always had to display to survive as a woman of color will never be required from men or from whites. I understand, now, that I mistook a decrease in active interference for progress toward a world in which my personhood was seen as inextricable from everyone else’s.

On the march from Union Square, a woman with corn-silk hair under a baseball cap told me that she felt abandoned by the men in her family, who had voted for Trump, and had teased her for having what they saw as special interests. “I’m afraid that a man will hurt me in public, and everyone around will think it’s O.K.,” she said. I heard a friend shouting my name and I turned in her direction. “I’m here,” I said. “I can’t lose you,” she said, pulling me into the group. We were farther from being the equals of men, or even of one another, than we had imagined. But we’d been shown the distance. We kept walking uptown.

IN CHARACTER
By Mark Singer

In the campaign’s final days, even as members of Donald Trump’s inner circle had begun to acknowledge privately that he faced almost certain defeat, one of his advisers had the good sense to deprive him of his cell phone. The first, fatefully ill-advised letter from F.B.I. Director James Comey had dropped a week earlier, palpably complicating Hillary Clinton’s otherwise inevitable-seeming triumph. If, for once, Trump could be restrained from further Twitter self-immolation, who knew?

The day after Clinton’s concession speech, the President-elect had his phone back. Thursday morning, he met with President Obama at the White House and afterward described the experience in language that, uncharacteristically, approached humility. It didn’t last. Around dinnertime, he tweeted a familiar whine: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

A shock but not a surprise; no previous evidence suggested that Trump was familiar with the phrase “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” (Nine hours later, when a more conciliatory tweet issued forth—“Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country”—one sensed that the phone had been repossessed.)

After my first face-to-face encounter with Trump—twenty years ago, in his Trump Tower office—I returned to my own and told a colleague, “This guy’s a performance artist.” At the time, I innocently assumed that I would eventually glimpse a human self inclined to the occasional genuine emotion. Trump was then fifty. It had been two decades since he shifted the focus of the family real-estate business from middle-class housing in Queens to “classy” luxury Manhattan high-rises. His persona—inseparable from all that he intended the “trump” brand to signify—was fully, immutably intact.

To one degree or another, in our encounters with others we all inhabit a persona that masks our most intimate reflections, doubts, and feelings. Beyond Trump’s extraordinary talent as a salesman, his singular dubious achievement has been to remain fully in character at all times. He has deliberately chosen to exist only as a persona, never as a person.

The essential Trumpian conundrum: he seems the most legible of men, yet, for all the fine work of his many biographers, none has figured out what truly goes on inside his head. When Trump tells a lie—to paraphrase William Maxwell, he tends to “lie with every breath he draws”—it never feels premeditated. The lie is a reflex. And no persona, no matter how artfully devised, can stifle a reflex.

Among the grave uncertainties our country now faces, we can only wonder what becomes of “Donald Trump” once President Trump takes the oath of office. I asked a number of highly regarded actors and acting teachers what to expect from a leader with such a thoroughly calculated persona.

Richard Feldman (Juilliard): “My hunch—and it can only be a hunch—is that the persona is a complete creation, complete unto itself and almost without volition. What makes Trump so powerful is that he believes his own story. When he says that those women made up those stories of sexual assault, what makes him feel authentic is that some part of him believes that.

“My dismay is that millions of people don’t get that, no matter how deep their dissatisfactions, they were still willing to vote for someone who’s clearly a hollow person. Can you be deeply hollow? I don’t know what’s there. I wonder if ever, at three o’clock in the morning, he faces himself or is afraid. I don’t know how deeply he believes in what he’s created.”

Mark Wing-Davey (New York University): “The persona he’s chosen is a megalomaniacal persona with soft edges, because he wants to inspire confidence in the person with whom he’s doing the deal. Unfortunately, there’s a massive credibility gap between someone who believes himself to be this magnificent negotiator and someone who is carrying the hopes and dreams of the whole country. Empathy is a crucial ingredient to being an actor. Trump lacks the ability to produce empathy in the audience.”

Austin Pendleton (HB Studio): “With a really great actor, it always comes down to a feeling of spontaneity, that what they’re giving out is what happens to them in the moment. Trump has that—the freshness of a really fine actor-artist. The reason his positions are all over the map is because he lives in the moment. That’s electric to people, far more important than whatever it is he actually says. Because if people were really paying attention to what he says he would never, ever have been elected.”

Mercedes Ruehl (HB Studio): “ ‘Persona’ comes from Latin, and it means mask. When one acts, one tries to access the real self within the character. Trump is remaining at the level of persona. In the footage of that meeting with Obama, I saw what I felt was humility. Can he drop the persona and act out of his self? I hope he can; his self is the only thing that can save his Presidency. But he would have to be like St. Paul, cut down on the road to Damascus—the greedy tax collector, and God says ‘Follow me,’ and he does.”

RADICAL HOPE
By Junot Díaz

Querida Q.:

I hope that you are feeling, if not precisely better, then at least not so demoralized. On Wednesday, after he won, you reached out to me, seeking advice, solidarity. You wrote, My two little sisters called me weeping this morning. I had nothing to give them. I felt bereft. What now? Keep telling the truth from an ever-shrinking corner? Give up?

I answered immediately, because you are my hermana, because it hurt me to hear you in such distress. I offered some consoling words, but the truth was I didn’t know what to say. To you, to my godchildren, who all year had been having nightmares that their parents would be deported, to myself.

I thought about your e-mail all day, Q., and I thought about you during my evening class. My students looked rocked. A few spoke about how frightened and betrayed they felt. Two of them wept. No easy task to take in the fact that half the voters—neighbors, friends, family—were willing to elect, to the nation’s highest office, a toxic misogynist, a racial demagogue who wants to make America great by destroying the civil-rights gains of the past fifty years.

What now? you asked. And that was my students’ question, too. What now? I answered them as poorly as I answered you, I fear. And so I sit here now in the middle of the night, in an attempt to try again.

So what now? Well, first and foremost, we need to feel. We need to connect courageously with the rejection, the fear, the vulnerability that Trump’s victory has inflicted on us, without turning away or numbing ourselves or lapsing into cynicism. We need to bear witness to what we have lost: our safety, our sense of belonging, our vision of our country. We need to mourn all these injuries fully, so that they do not drag us into despair, so repair will be possible.

And while we’re doing the hard, necessary work of mourning, we should avail ourselves of the old formations that have seen us through darkness. We organize. We form solidarities. And, yes: we fight. To be heard. To be safe. To be free.

For those of us who have been in the fight, the prospect of more fighting, after so cruel a setback, will seem impossible. At moments like these, it is easy for even a matatana to feel that she can’t go on. But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.

But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. “What makes this hope radical,” Lear writes, “is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as “imaginative excellence.” Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future.

I could say more, but I’ve already imposed enough, Q.: Time to face this hard new world, to return to the great shining work of our people. Darkness, after all, is breaking, a new day has come.
Love, J ♦

Rosewood