How a 'Broken Windows' was misconstrued

How a 50-year-old study was misconstrued to create destructive broken-windows policing 

The harmful policy was built on a shaky foundation. 

By Bench Ansfield Washington Post

Bench Ansfield is a PhD candidate in American studies at Yale University. In March 2020 their article, “The Broken Windows of the Bronx: Putting the Theory in Its Place,” will be published in the journal American Quarterly. 

2019 marked the 50th anniversary of a study that unwittingly contributed to the violent and racialized policing that dominates our criminal justice system today. In 1969, social psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo published research that became the basis for the controversial broken-windows theory of policing, which emerged in a 1982 Atlantic article penned by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. These two social scientists used the Zimbardo article as the sole empirical evidence for their theory, arguing, “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” 

The problem? Wilson and Kelling distorted the study to suit their purposes. In short, the broken-windows theory was founded on a lie. 

Even in the face of direct and damning challenges by the Movement for Black Lives and scholars of policing, the broken-windows theory has maintained its hold on police precincts across the nation. Most recently, broken windows has seen a resurgence in the subways of New York, where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority police doubled down on its assault against fare evasion. 

By laying bare the fabrications at the foundation of the broken-windows theory, we can see what critics have long alleged and what those targeted by the policy have known to be true: By focusing on low-level offenses, this theory of policing works to criminalize communities of color and expand mass incarceration without making people safer. 

This isn’t what Zimbardo set out to do. In the immediate wake of the 1960s urban uprisings, Zimbardo wanted to document the social causes of vandalism to disprove the conservative argument that it stemmed from individual or cultural pathology. His research team parked an Oldsmobile in the South Bronx and Palo Alto, Calif., surveilling the cars for days. Zimbardo hypothesized that the informal economies of the Bronx would make quick work of the car. 

He was right. 

Although the research team was surprised that the first “vandals” were not youths of color but, rather, a white, “well-dressed” family, Zimbardo considered his basic hypothesis confirmed: The lack of community cohesion in the Bronx produced a sense of “anonymity,” which in turn generated vandalism. He concluded, “Conditions that create social inequality and put some people outside of the conventional reward structure of the society make them indifferent to its sanctions, laws, and implicit norms.” 

The Palo Alto Oldsmobile, in contrast, went untouched. After a week-long, unremarkable stakeout, Zimbardo drove the car to the Stanford campus, where his research team aimed to “prime” vandalism by taking a sledgehammer to its windows. Upon discovering that this was “stimulating and pleasurable,” Zimbardo and his graduate students “got carried away.” As Zimbardo described it, “One student jumped on the roof and began stomping it in, two were pulling the door from its hinges, another hammered away at the hood and motor, while the last one broke all the glass he could find.” The passersby the study had intended to observe had turned into spectators and only joined in after the car was already wrecked. 

Zimbardo’s conclusions were the stuff of liberal criminology: Anyone — even Stanford researchers! — could be lured into vandalism, and this was particularly true in places like the Bronx with heightened social inequalities. For Zimbardo, what happened in the Bronx and at Stanford suggested that crowd mentality, social inequalities and community anonymity could prompt “good citizens” to act destructively. This was no radical critique; it was an indictment of law-and-order politics that viewed vandalism as a senseless, unpardonable act. In a line that could have been lifted directly out of the countless “riot reports” published in the late 1960s, Zimbardo asserted, “Vandalism is a rebellion with a cause.” 

Zimbardo’s study claimed little immediate impact outside academic circles. Almost 15 years later, Wilson and Kelling gave it new life, building their broken-windows theory atop a fundamental misrepresentation of Zimbardo’s experiment. In Wilson and Kelling’s account, Zimbardo’s experiment proved that “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” 

Their misleading recap of Zimbardo’s study not only conflated the Stanford and Palo Alto experiments but also so distorted the order of events that it routed readers away from Zimbardo’s conclusions. In their version, “the car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in.” What they conveniently neglected to mention was that the researchers themselves had laid waste to the car. 

By omitting this crucial detail, Wilson and Kelling manipulated Zimbardo’s experiment to draw a straight line between one broken window and “a thousand broken windows.” This enabled them to claim that all it took was a broken window to transform “staid” Palo Alto into the Bronx, where “no one car[ed].” The problem is, it wasn’t a broken window that enticed onlookers to join the fray; it was the spectacle of faculty and students destroying an Oldsmobile in the middle of Stanford’s campus. In place of Zimbardo’s critique of inequality and anonymity, Wilson and Kelling had invented a broken window and invested it with the ability to spur vandalism. 

Why would Wilson and Kelling go through the trouble of introducing Zimbardo’s study only to misrepresent it? Because what they got out of the study was not its empirical evidence, but the evocative, racialized image of the Bronx’s broken windows, which had already been drilled into the national psyche. 

During the 1970s, journalists frequently invoked the South Bronx as “the American urban problem in microcosm,” in the words of one New York Times article. These reports about the Bronx featured photographs of empty-eyed tenements and opened with lines like “abandoned buildings, with smoke stains flaring up from their blind and broken windows.” Media outlets thereby weaponized the broken windows of the Bronx as a symbol of urban and racial degeneration. 

So potent and “unnerving” was the symbol of the broken window that one of the few municipal housing initiatives in the early-1980s Bronx was devoted to papering over empty window frames that faced commuters on the Cross Bronx Expressway. The vinyl decals the city installed depicted “a lived-in look of curtains, shades, shutters and flowerpots.” 

It was the symbol of the “unnerving” broken window that Wilson and Kelling sought to fold into their theory. In their telling, the Bronx’s “thousand broken windows” were juxtaposed with Palo Alto’s one. For them, the danger was proliferation — the creation of many Bronxes — through small signs of disorder. The racist subtext rang loud and clear. Citing Zimbardo’s experiment allowed Wilson and Kelling to sound alarms over the possibility that all cities would go the way of the Bronx if they didn’t embrace their new regime of policing. What was missing, of course, was Zimbardo’s restrained, but resolute, focus on structural causation and systemic inequality. 

By exploiting this set of fears and meanings, the broken-windows theory gained currency in policy circles and police precincts across the nation and globe. Accordingly, to “dislodge this boulder,” in the words of prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, we need to challenge its intellectual foundations head-on. The movement against this criminological cockroach has largely drawn attention to the violence that broken windows policing has inflicted on communities of color. This is urgent and essential work, which can be bolstered by the project of exposing and then obliterating the shaky intellectual ground upon which it stands. 

From its origins to its ruinous rise, the broken-windows theory was just that — broken. It’s time to tear it down. 

When It Seemed Like Communism Would Take Over the World

When It Seemed Like Communism Would Take Over the World 

At the end of 1919, the Bolsheviks were consolidating power in Russia, and spreading their message abroad. 

By Clayton Black NY TIMES

Dr. Black is an associate professor of history at Washington College. 

Grigory Zinoviev addressing workers at the Baku oil fields in 1919.Credit...Hulton Archive/Getty Images 

On Dec. 21, 1919, this newspaper reported that Bolshevik forces in Russia had won a sweeping victory along the Estonian border, capturing 2,500 prisoners in a campaign to solidify their northwestern border. For a moment, their future seemed bright. The month before in Petrograd, about 100 miles to the northeast, the Bolsheviks had celebrated the second anniversary of the Soviet revolution with lengthy processions with red banners and brass bands. Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, had stood on a podium in the cold fall air, with factory workers, soldiers and sailors from the Baltic fleet arrayed below him, to report on the regime’s accomplishments for the last two years and its prospects for the immediate future. 

The average Russian could be forgiven for feeling that she had lived through a great deal in those two years. All of Europe reeled from the Great War, but the Russians had suffered more than most, enduring revolution in 1917, followed now by a savage and chaotic civil war. Among the tasks facing Zinoviev as he took the stage was to create a triumphant narrative out of so much misery. 

Public opposition to the czarist government’s inept handling of the world war had forced Nicholas II to give up his throne in early 1917. The failures by the new Provisional Government to do much better than the fallen monarch had turned much of the country against it as well. By that fall, antiwar sentiment, combined with popular revulsion at a failed attempt to impose a military dictatorship, pushed the people increasingly to the left. Vladimir Lenin, the charismatic leader of the Bolshevik Party, orchestrated a seizure of power in the name of councils, or “soviets,” of workers, peasants, sailors and soldiers. 

Portly, curly haired and slightly disheveled, Zinoviev cut a curious figure for a hero of the revolution. Audiences were initially startled by his high, almost falsetto voice. But just as Lenin and the equally talented Leon Trotsky mesmerized listeners with the intensity of their oratory, Zinoviev knew how to sway a crowd. Simple logic, homey phrases, ironic biblical allusions and well-timed crescendos and pauses made him adept at solidifying the support of the committed and winning over the skeptical. This was a vital skill for a man who frequently found himself racing about Petrograd, cajoling disgruntled workers into returning to their machines, promising wage or ration increases, and convincing them that sacrifices in the present would be repaid in the future. 

Zinoviev was not only the de facto ruler of the city but, alongside Lenin, one of the party’s most widely recognized figures. He had been in exile in Switzerland with Lenin during the war, returned with him by train across German territory after the czar had abdicated, and fled with him again into hiding in August 1917 when the Provisional Government accused them of organizing a coup d’état. He briefly fell into disgrace for revealing the plot to take power in October, but his betrayal was (temporarily) overlooked once it was obvious how critical was the need for qualified administrators. 

Petrograd, renamed from the more Teutonic-sounding “St. Petersburg” when the war broke out in 1914, teetered on the edge of ruin in late 1919. 

Petrograd, renamed from the more Teutonic-sounding “St. Petersburg” when the war broke out in 1914, teetered on the edge of ruin in late 1919. Russia’s cultural capital had lost tens of thousands of its residents amid world war, revolution and now civil war. Those with relatives in the countryside departed for steadier access to food; former privileged elites fled the reprisals of open class hostility; factory workers sympathetic to the Bolsheviks — or, at least, fearful of what the victory of their opponents might bring — joined the Red Army to fend off the counterrevolutionary “Whites.” And, after the political capital was moved to Moscow in March 1918, thousands of bureaucrats — many of them holdovers from the czarist administration — headed south with the government. With coal and oil in short supply, factories now either stood silent or produced a trickle of their former output. City streets remained unlit at night. The once-bustling storefronts of Nevsky Prospect were either shuttered or offered their wares only intermittently. And work brigades, desperate for heating fuel, pried apart wooden houses and buildings all across the city. 

The Bolshevik government in 1919 had a feeble hold on Russia, and it faced military challenge on all sides. Lenin, always insistent, had convinced his reluctant comrades in early 1918 that they had no choice but to accept an “obscene” peace with Germany. Angered that the separate peace in the East might allow Germany to tip the balance in the West, the Allied powers — England, France, the United States and Japan — turned their pledges of military aid to active (but eventually halfhearted) assistance to remnants of the czarist army, who were eager to take up the fight against the red menace. 

In the north, British, French, American and Polish troops, originally sent to secure food and munitions in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, soon found themselves in a campaign to link up with the anti-Bolshevik movement in Siberia. To the south, 40,000 to 50,000 French and Greek troops landed in Odessa to help keep Ukraine out of communist hands. And in the Russian Far East, 8,000 Americans landed alongside 57,000 Japanese troops to protect the rear of an armed legion of Czech prisoners determined to reach their homeland by reversing their trek across Siberia. In the end, however, the Whites and their Great Power supporters mistrusted one another, worked at cross-purpose, had little or no coordination among themselves and could not agree on a political program to win popular support (if they even cared about it). 

Bolshevik efforts to control internal opposition, feed the cities and supply the Red Army also kept the territories under their control in a state of constant tension. In August 1918, an assassin murdered the chief of the Petrograd political police, known as the Cheka, and another in September took three shots at Lenin, hitting him twice. The Bolsheviks responded with the so-called Red Terror, in which hundreds were arbitrarily arrested or shot. Self-proclaimed revolutionary authorities acted first and asked questions later as they requisitioned apartments and detained “class enemies” in the name of revolutionary justice. Grain collection brigades from the cities often left peasants in rural areas with meager supplies for themselves. And when factory workers threatened to strike over wages, food rations or the arrest of their comrades, the city’s new leaders were not above sending in troops to restore order, a measure that unfortunately resembled the acts of the czarist state in its final years of desperation. 

But despite Petrograd’s enfeebled state, Zinoviev was in high spirits for the revolution’s anniversary. Under the general leadership of Trotsky — who proved himself a brilliant strategist — the Red Army had only a few days earlier repulsed a White Army that had reached the southwestern edges of the city while British ships in support bombarded the naval garrison on the island of Kronstadt. Though one account claimed that Zinoviev panicked at news of the Whites’ approach, now he could bask in light of victory. Territories well to the west of the city were back in Bolshevik hands, and Moscow had likewise escaped capture by armies from the south. And although this was no time to let down their guard, Zinoviev said, the communists should take a moment to remember those who had fallen defending the Soviet republic and look forward to the time when their sacrifice would be repaid in the inevitable victory of worldwide socialist revolution. 

What followed in Zinoviev’s speech was an elaborate characterization of the White generals and Russia’s neighbors as pawns of French, British and American capitalists, a cabal of imperialists determined not to tolerate a workers’ state in their midst. Such portrayals of “capital” in Russia’s press were also nearly a mirror of what the Bolsheviks themselves had created earlier in the year, when they founded the Third Communist International known as the Comintern, an alliance of left-wing parties dedicated to defending the revolution in Russia and advancing the proletarian cause across the globe. The first two international movements had fallen apart over sectarian disputes or over members’ support for the war in 1914. Now the first avowedly socialist state was to be the world headquarters for workers’ movements and Zinoviev, among his other heavy responsibilities, had been elected its first chairman. 

And so he approached the stage to describe a world that he saw bending in Russia’s direction. The Bolshevik vision of world revolution may now seem a utopian fantasy, but it appeared much more plausible in the aftermath of the Great War. Exhausted men from every front returned to economies that could offer work to only a fraction of them. In Germany, the Kaiser’s regime had collapsed, and Soviet-style councils hoisting red flags popped up in northern cities, much as they had in Russia in 1917. To the south, Bavarian socialists announced the formation of a people’s republic. In Italy, workers poured into trade unions and set up factory councils, paralyzing the industrialized north in a wave of strikes. In England, police had been put on alert in January and February when calls arose for a general strike, followed by the initiation of a “Hands-Off Russia” campaign in London. American politicians faced their own growing labor movement with anxiety. In the newly independent Hungary, the communist Bela Kun announced the establishment of a Soviet Republic. And some of the most important socialist parties across Europe, whose numbers were growing steadily, soon affiliated themselves with the Third International. 

The Bolshevik vision of world revolution may now seem a utopian fantasy, but it appeared much more plausible in the aftermath of the Great War. 

A man of emotional extremes, Zinoviev optimistically predicted that within a year of the Comintern’s founding the world would have forgotten that there had ever even been a struggle for communism in Europe. Even the usually more sober Lenin ended his May Day speech in 1919 by proclaiming, “Long live the international republic of Soviets!” 

But there were also signs that such hopes were premature. A communist uprising in Berlin in January had led to the murder of two of the movement’s most brilliant spokespeople, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Germany’s president, Friedrich Ebert, had enlisted the aid of armed right-wing veterans’ groups, known as Freikorps, to suppress the rebellion. They followed that with the violent overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet state and the execution of its leaders. Successive Republican administrations in the United States deployed fears of Bolshevism as anti-American and kept labor’s causes at bay. Kun’s Hungarian republic proved short-lived, as French-supported Romanian troops crushed that experiment by Aug. 1. And although the popularity of socialist parties continued to grow, leftists everywhere were divided among themselves. Aside from a few sympathetic correspondents such as John Reed, reporters told of the chaos in Russia and the regime’s brutality, which made many in the West wary of associating themselves too closely with Moscow. 

As an additional burden, the Bolsheviks and their allies in the West had to face the fact that the prominence of Jews among their leaders made them fodder for representations of the international communist movement as a grand Jewish conspiracy. Zinoviev, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Kun and many others — all were caricatured in conservative outlets in crassly stereotypical fashion. Lenin’s government consistently denounced anti-Semitism in its many forms, but it was endemic across Europe and especially inside Russia, where both White and Red troops used the disruptions of the conflict to carry out pogroms against Jewish communities. 

But even the bonding effect of common enemies did not prevent egos, personal ambitions and conflicting views on policy from creating tensions among the party leaders. Few among them avoided Lenin’s ire at one point or another, but Lenin did not hold grudges for long. One consequential case, however, foretold inevitable conflicts once Lenin had left the scene. In the summer of 1918, Lenin sent the ambitious and uncompromising commissar of nationalities, Joseph Stalin, to take charge of efforts to secure the Volga River and improve food supplies to central Russia. Though Trotsky (whom several of the leaders mistrusted as a latecomer to the Bolsheviks in 1917) commanded the Red Army, Stalin disapproved of his use of former officers from the czarist military. Defying Trotsky’s orders, Stalin unleashed terror on his subordinates and on the areas around Tsaritsyn, the city that eventually bore his name as Stalingrad. Trotsky eventually had Stalin recalled, but the two butted heads again in the war against Poland in 1919-20. Stalin’s animosity toward all his perceived enemies, especially Trotsky — who was murdered on his orders in 1940 — grew together with his power in the coming years. 

No one could know what fate had in store for them on that cold November day in 1919. As his audience huddled closely against the cold, Zinoviev could offer sunny fantasies about proletarian emancipation and the worldwide collapse of capitalism. But though he identified so many foreign threats, he was slow to perceive a danger closer to home. In 1936, as he awaited execution by judgment of Stalin’s court on fabricated charges as an “enemy of the people,” his hopes and his will largely crushed, he might have done well to remember that November marks only the beginning of winter.

Trump letter to Speaker Pelosi

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON

December 17, 2019

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi

Speaker of the House of Representatives

Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme — yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America's founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build. Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!

Your first claim, “Abuse of Power," is a completely disingenuous, meritless, and baseless invention of your imagination. You know that I had a totally innocent conversation with the President of Ukraine. I then had a second conversation that has been misquoted, mischaracterized, and fraudulently misrepresented. Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect. I said to President Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States. Every time I talk with a foreign leader, I put America's interests first, just as I did with President Zelensky.

You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense — it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.

1

You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: “I said, “I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars'...I looked at them and said: “I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it “looked bad.” Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did.

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. He further emphasized that it was a “good phone call,” that “I don't feel pressure," and explicitly stressed that “nobody pushed me." The Ukrainian Foreign Minister stated very clearly: “I have never seen a direct link between investigations and security assistance.” He also said there was “No Pressure.” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a supporter of Ukraine who met privately with President Zelensky, has said: “At no time during this meeting...was there any mention by Zelensky or any Ukrainian that they were feeling pressure to do anything in return for the military aid.” Many meetings have been held between representatives of Ukraine and our country. Never once did Ukraine complain about pressure being applied — not once! Ambassador Sondland testified that I told him: “No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on.”

The second claim, so-called “Obstruction of Congress,” is preposterous and dangerous. House Democrats are trying to impeach the duly elected President of the United States for asserting Constitutionally based privileges that have been asserted on a bipartisan basis by administrations of both political parties throughout our Nation's history. Under that standard, every American president would have been impeached many times over. As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley warned when addressing Congressional Democrats: “I can't emphasize this enough…if you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It's your abuse of power. You're doing precisely what you're criticizing the President for doing."

Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening. Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. You have developed a full-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump Derangement Syndrome and sadly, you will never get over it! You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!

Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party's impeachment effort has been going on for two and a half years," long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post

2

published a story headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.” Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, “I'm going to fight every day until he's impeached.” House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country's best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports) — who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen. A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared just hours after she was sworn into office, “We're gonna go in there and we're gonna impeach the motherf****r." Representative Al Green said in May, “I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected.” Again, you and your allies said, and did, all of these things long before you ever heard of President Zelensky or anything related to Ukraine. As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president. It only has to do with your attempt to undo the election of 2016 and steal the election of 2020!

Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me. His shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.

You and your party are desperate to distract from America's extraordinary economy, incredible jobs boom, record stock market, soaring confidence, and flourishing citizens. Your party simply cannot compete with our record: 7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans; a rebuilt military; a completely reformed VA with Choice and Accountability for our great veterans; more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices; historic tax and regulation cuts; the elimination of the individual mandate; the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century; the first new branch of the United States Military since 1947, the Space Force; strong protection of the Second Amendment; criminal justice reform; a defeated ISIS caliphate and the killing of the world's number one terrorist leader, al-Baghdadi; the replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada); a breakthrough Phase One trade deal with China; massive new trade deals with Japan and South Korea; withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal; cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord; becoming the world's top energy producer; recognition of Israel's capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem, and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release, and the building of the Southern Border Wall — and that is just the beginning, there is so much more. You cannot defend your extreme policies — open borders, mass migration, high crime, crippling taxes, socialized healthcare, destruction of American energy, late-term taxpayer-funded abortion, elimination of the Second Amendment, radical far-left theories of law and justice, and constant partisan obstruction of both common sense and common good.

There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing Democrats. Unfortunately, I don't know that you will ever give me a chance to do so.

3

After three years of unfair and unwarranted investigations, 45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors, the entire force of the FBI, headed by leadership now proven to be totally incompetent and corrupt, you have found NOTHING! Few people in high position could have endured or passed this test. You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family. You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United States, and you are doing it yet again.

There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time, and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens. But instead of putting our country first, you have decided to disgrace our country still further. You completely failed with the Mueller report because there was nothing to find, so you decided to take the next hoax that came along, the phone call with Ukraine — even though it was a perfect call. And by the way, when I speak to foreign countries, there are many people, with permission, listening to the call on both sides of the conversation.

You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the ones subverting America's Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.

Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt. Against all evidence, and regardless of the truth, you and your deputies claimed that my campaign colluded with the Russians — a grave, malicious, and slanderous lie, a falsehood like no other. You forced our Nation through turmoil and torment over a wholly fabricated story, illegally purchased from a foreign spy by Hillary Clinton and the DNC in order to assault our democracy. Yet, when the monstrous lie was debunked and this Democrat conspiracy dissolved into dust, you did not apologize. You did not recant. You did not ask to be forgiven. You showed no remorse, no capacity for self-reflection. Instead, you pursued your next libelous and vicious crusade-you engineered an attempt to frame and defame an innocent person. All of this was motivated by personal political calculation. Your Speakership and your party are held hostage by your most deranged and radical representatives of the far left. Each one of your members lives in fear of a socialist primary challenger — this is what is driving impeachment. Look at Congressman Nadler's challenger. Look at yourself and others. Do not take our country down with your party.

If you truly cared about freedom and liberty for our Nation, then you would be devoting your vast investigative resources to exposing the full truth concerning the FBI's horrifying abuses of power before, during, and after the 2016 election — including the use of spies against my campaign, the submission of false evidence to a FISA court, and the concealment of exculpatory evidence in order to frame the innocent. The FBI has great and honorable people, but the leadership was inept and corrupt. I would think that you would personally be appalled by these revelations, because in your press conference the day you announced impeachment, you tied the impeachment effort directly to the completely discredited Russia Hoax, declaring twice that “all roads lead to Putin,” when you know that is an abject lie. I have been far tougher on Russia than President Obama ever even thought to be.

4

Any member of Congress who votes in support of impeachment — against every shred of truth, fact, evidence, and legal principle — is showing how deeply they revile the voters and how truly they detest America's Constitutional order. Our Founders feared the tribalization of partisan politics, and you are bringing their worst fears to life.

Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistle blower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made. Once I presented the transcribed call, which surprised and shocked the fraudsters (they never thought that such evidence would be presented), the so-called whistle blower, and the second whistle blower, disappeared because they got caught, their report was a fraud, and they were no longer going to be made available to us. In other words, once the phone call was made public, your whole plot blew up, but that didn't stop you from continuing.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

You and others on your committees have long said impeachment must be bipartisan — it is not. You said it was very divisive — it certainly is, even far more than you ever thought possible — and it will only get worse!

This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution.

Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person believes what you are saying. Since the moment I won the election, the Democrat Party has been possessed by Impeachment Fever. There is no reticence. This is not a somber affair. You are making a mockery of impeachment and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans. The voters are wise, and they are seeing straight through this empty, hollow, and dangerous game you are playing.

I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.

5

There is far too much that needs to be done to improve the lives of our citizens. It is time for you and the highly partisan Democrats in Congress to immediately cease this impeachment fantasy and get back to work for the American People. While I have no expectation that you will do so, I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.

One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another President again.

Donald J Trump

President of the United States of America

cc:

United States Senate

United States House of Representatives

PLUCK or LUCK

PLUCK or LUCK

David Labaree Brought to you by Curio, an Aeon partner 

Edited by Sam Dresser AEON

Lee L Jacks professor (emeritus) at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. He is the former president of the History of Education Society and former vice president of the American Educational Research Association. His most recent book is A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (2017). 

Meritocracy are accustomed to telling stirring stories about their lives. The standard one is a comforting tale about grit in the face of adversity – overcoming obstacles, honing skills, working hard – which then inevitably affords entry to the Promised Land. Once you have established yourself in the upper reaches of the occupational pyramid, this story of virtue rewarded rolls easily off the tongue. It makes you feel good (I got what I deserved) and it reassures others (the system really works). 

But you can also tell a different story, which is more about luck than pluck, and whose driving forces are less your own skill and motivation, and more the happy circumstances you emerged from and the accommodating structure you traversed. 

As an example, here I’ll tell my own story about my career negotiating the hierarchy in the highly stratified system of higher education in the United States. I ended up in a cushy job as a professor at Stanford University. How did I get there? I tell the story both ways: one about pluck, the other about luck. One has the advantage of making me more comfortable. The other has the advantage of being more true. 

I was born to a middle-class family and grew up in Philadelphia in the 1950s. As a skinny, shy kid who wasn’t good at sports, my early life revolved about being a good student. In upper elementary school, I became president of the student council and captain of the safety patrol (an office that conferred a cool red badge that I wore with pride). In high school, I continued to be the model student, eventually getting elected president of the student council (see a pattern here?) and graduating in 1965 near the top of my class. I was accepted at Harvard University with enough advanced-placement credits to skip freshman year (which, fortunately, I didn’t). There I majored in antiwar politics. Those were the days when an activist organisation such as Students for a Democratic Society was a big factor on campuses. I went to two of their annual conventions and wrote inflammatory screeds about Harvard’s elitism (who knew). 

In 1970, I graduated with a degree in sociology and no job prospects. What do you do with a sociology degree, anyway? It didn’t help that the job market was in the doldrums. I eventually ended up back in Philadelphia with a job at the Federal Reserve Bank – first in public relations (leading school groups on tours) and then in bank relations (visiting banks around the Third Federal Reserve District). From student radical with a penchant for Marxist sociology, I suddenly became a banker wearing a suit every day and reading The Wall Street Journal. It got me out of the house and into my own apartment but it was not for me. Labarees don’t do finance. 

After four years, I quit in disgust, briefly became a reporter at a suburban newspaper, hated that too, and then stumbled by accident into academic work. Looking for any old kind of work in the want ads in my old paper, I spotted an opening at Bucks County Community College, where I applied for three different positions – admissions officer, writing instructor, and sociology instructor. I got hired in the latter role, and the rest is history. I liked the work but realised that I needed a master’s degree to get a full-time job, so I entered the University of Pennsylvania sociology department. Once in the programme, I decided to continue on to get a PhD, supporting myself by teaching at the community college, Trenton State, and at Penn. 

In 1981, as I was nearing the end of my dissertation, I started applying for faculty positions. Little did I know that the job market was lousy and that I would be continually applying for positions for the next four years. 

As someone who started at the bottom, I can tell you that everything is better at the top 

The first year yielded one job offer, at a place so depressing that I decided to stay in Philadelphia and continue teaching as an adjunct. That spring I got a one-year position in sociology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In the fall, with the clock ticking, I applied to 60 jobs around the country. This time, my search yielded four interviews, all tenure-track positions – at Yale University, at Georgetown, at the University of Cincinnati and at Widener University. 

The only offer I got was the one I didn’t want, Widener – a small, non-selective private school in the Philadelphia suburbs that until the 1960s had been a military college. Three years past degree, I felt I had hit bottom in the meritocracy. The moment I got there, I started applying for jobs while desperately trying to write my way into a better one. I published a couple of journal articles and submitted a book proposal to Yale University Press. They hadn’t hired me but maybe they’d publish me. 

Finally, a lifeline came my way. A colleague at the College of Education at Michigan State University encouraged me to apply for a position in history of education and I got the job. In the fall of 1985, I started as an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at MSU. Fifteen years after college and four years after starting to look for faculty positions, my career in higher education finally took a big jump upward. 

MSU was a wonderful place to work and to advance an academic career. I taught there for 18 years, moving through the ranks to full professor, and publishing three books and 20 articles and book chapters. Early on, I won two national awards for my first book and a university teaching award, and was later elected president of the History of Education Society and vice-president of the American Educational Research Association. 

Then in 2002 came an opportunity to apply for a position in education at one of the world’s great universities, Stanford. It worked out, and I started there as a professor in 2003 in the School of Education, and stayed until retirement in 2018. I served in several administrative roles including associate dean, and was given an endowed chair. How cool. 

As someone who started at the bottom of the hierarchy of US higher education, I can tell you that everything is better at the top. Everything: pay, teaching loads, intellectual culture, quality of faculty and students, physical surroundings, staff support, travel funds, perks. Even the weather is better. Making it in the meritocracy is as good as it gets. No matter how hard things go at first, talent will win out. Virtue earns its reward. Life is fair. 

Of course, there’s also another story, one that’s less heartening but more realistic. A story that’s more about luck than pluck, and that features structural circumstances more than heroic personal struggle. So let me now tell that version. 

Professor Robert M Labaree of Lincoln University in southeast Pennsylvania, the author’s grandfather. Photo courtesy of the author 

The short story is that I’m in the family business. In the 1920s, my parents grew up as next-door neighbours on a university campus where their fathers were both professors. It was Lincoln University, a historically black institution in southeast Pennsylvania near the Mason-Dixon line. The students were black, the faculty white – most of the latter, like my grandfathers, were clergymen. The students were well-off financially, coming from the black bourgeoisie, whereas the highly educated faculty lived in the genteel poverty of university housing. It was a kind of cultural missionary setting, but more comfortable than the foreign missions. One grandfather had served as a missionary in Iran, where my father was born; that was hardship duty. But here was a place where upper-middle-class whites could do good and do well at the same time. 

Both grandfathers were Presbyterian ministers, each descended from long lines of Presbyterian ministers. The Presbyterian clergy developed a well-earned reputation over the years of having modest middle-class economic capital and large stores of social and cultural capital. Relatively poor in money, they were rich in social authority and higher learning. In this tradition, education is everything. In part because of that, some ended up in US higher education, where in the 19th century most of the faculty were clergy (because they were well-educated men and worked for peanuts). My grandfather’s grandfather, Benjamin Labaree, was president of Middlebury College in the 1840s and ’50s. Two of my father’s cousins were professors; my brother is a professor. It’s the family business. 

Rev Benjamin Labaree, who was president of Middlebury College, 1840-1866, and the author’s great-great-grandfather. Photo courtesy of the author 

Like many retirees, I recently started to dabble in genealogy. Using Ancestry.com, I’ve traced back 10 or 12 generations on both sides of the family, some back to the 1400s, finding ancestors in the US, Scotland, England and France. They are all relentlessly upper-middle-class – mostly ministers, but also some physicians and other professionals. Not a peasant in the bunch, and no one in business. I’m to the manor born (well, really the manse). The most distant Labaree I’ve found is Jacques Laborie, born in 1668 in the village of Cardaillac in France. He served as a surgeon in the army of Louis XIV and then became ordained as a Calvinist minister in Zurich before Louis in 1685 expelled the reformed Protestants (Huguenots) from France. He moved to England, where he married another Huguenot, and then immigrated to Connecticut. Among his descendants were at least four generations of Presbyterian ministers, including two college professors. This is a good start for someone like me, seeking to climb the hierarchy of higher education – like being born on third base. But how did it work out in practice for my career? 

I was the model Harvard student – a white, upper-middle-class male from an elite school 

My parents both attended elite colleges, Princeton University and Wilson College (on ministerial scholarships), and they invested heavily in their children’s education. They sent us to a private high school and private colleges. It was a sacrifice to do this, but they thought it was worth it. Compared with our next-door neighbours, we lived modestly – driving an old station wagon instead of a new Cadillac – but we took pride in our cultural superiority. Labarees didn’t work in trade. Having blown their money on schooling and lived too long, my parents died broke. They were neither the first nor the last victims of the meritocracy, who gave their all so that their children could succeed. 

This background gave me a huge edge in cultural and social capital. In my high school’s small and high-quality classrooms, I got a great education and learned how to write. The school traditionally sent its top five students every year to Princeton but I decided on Harvard instead. At the time, I was the model Harvard student – a white, upper-middle-class male from an elite school. No females and almost no minorities. 

At Harvard, I distinguished myself in political activity rather than scholarship. I avoided seminars and honours programmes, where it was harder to hide and standards were higher. After the first year, I almost never attended discussion sections, and skipped the majority of the lectures as well, muddling through by doing the reading, and writing a good-enough paper or exam. I phoned it in. When I graduated, I had an underwhelming manuscript, with a 2.5 grade-point average (B-/C+). Not exactly an ideal candidate for graduate study, one would think. 

And then there was that job at the bank, which got me out of the house and kept me fed and clothed until I finally recognised my family calling by going to grad school. After beating the bushes looking for work up and down the west coast, how did I get this job? Turned out that my father used to play in a string quartet with a guy who later became the vice-president for personnel at the Federal Reserve Bank. My father called, the friend said come down for an interview. I did and I got the job. 

When I finally decided to pursue grad school, I took the Graduate Record Examinations and scored high. Great. The trouble is that an applicant with high scores and low grades is problematic, since this combination suggests high ability and bad attitude. But somehow I got into an elite graduate programme (though Princeton turned me down). Why? Because I went to Harvard, so who cares about the grades? It’s a brand that opens doors. Take my application to teach at the community college. Why hire someone with no graduate degree and a mediocre undergraduate transcript to teach college students? It turns out that the department chair who hired me also went to Harvard. Members of the club take care of each other. 

If you have the right academic credentials, you get the benefit of the doubt. The meritocracy is quite forgiving toward its own. You get plenty of second and third chances where others would not. Picture if I had applied to Penn with the same grades and scores but with a degree from West Chester (state) University instead of Harvard. Would I really have had a chance? You can blow off your studies without consequence if you do it at the right school. Would I have been hired to teach at the community college with an off-brand BA? I think not. 

And let’s reconsider my experience at Widener. For me – an upper-middle-class professor with two Ivy League degrees and generations of cultural capital – these students were a world apart. Of course, so were the community-college students I taught earlier, but they were taking courses on weekends while holding a job. That felt more like teaching night school than teaching college. At Widener, however, they were full-time students at a place that called itself a university, but to me this wasn’t a real university where I could be a real professor. Looking around the campus with the eye of a born-and-bred snob, I decided quickly that these were not my people. Most were the first in their families to be going to college and did not have the benefit of a strong high-school education. 

In order to make it in academe, you need friends in high places. I had them 

A student complained to me one day after she got back her exam that she’d received a worse grade than her friend who didn’t study nearly as hard. That’s not fair, she said. I shrugged it off at the time. Her answer to the essay exam question was simply not as good. But looking back, I realised that I was grading my students on skills I wasn’t teaching them. I assigned multiple readings and then gave take-home exams, which required students to weave together a synthesis of these readings in an essay that responded to a broad analytical question. That’s the kind of exam I was used to, but it required a set of analytical and writing skills that I assumed rather than provided. You can do well on a multiple-choice exam if you study the appropriate textbook chapters; the more time you invest, the higher the grade. That might not be a great way to learn, but it’s a system that rewards effort. My exams, however, rewarded discursive fluency and verbal glibness over diligent study. Instead of trying to figure out how to give these students the cultural capital they needed, I chose to move on to a place where students already had these skills. Much more comfortable. 

Oh yes, and what about that first book, the one that won awards, gained me tenure, and launched my career? Well, my advisor at Penn, Michael Katz, had published a book with an editor at Praeger, Gladys Topkis, who then ended up at Yale University Press. With his endorsement, I sent her a proposal for a book based on my dissertation. She gave me a contract. When I submitted the manuscript, a reviewer recommended against publication, but she convinced the editorial board to approve it anyway. Without my advisor, no editor. And without the editor, no book, no awards, no tenure, and no career. It’s as simple as that. In order to make it in academe, you need friends in high places. I had them. 

All of this, plus two more books at Yale, helped me make the move up to Stanford. Never would have happened otherwise. By then, on paper I began to look like a golden boy, checking all the right boxes for an elite institution. And when I announced that I was making the move to Stanford in the spring of 2003, before I even assumed the role, things started changing in my life. Suddenly, it seemed, I got a lot smarter. People wanted me to come give a lecture, join an editorial board, contribute to a book, chair a committee. An old friend, a professor in Sweden, invited me to become a visiting professor in his university. Slightly embarrassed, he admitted that this was because of my new label as a Stanford professor. Swedes know only a few universities in the US, he said, and Stanford is one of them. Like others who find a spot near the top of the meritocracy, I was quite willing to accept this honour, without worrying too much about whether it was justified. Like the pay and perks, it just seemed exactly what I deserved. Special people get special benefits; it only makes sense. 

And speaking of special benefits, it certainly didn’t hurt that I am a white male – a category that dominates the professoriate, especially at the upper levels. Among full-time faculty members in US degree-granting institutions, 72 per cent of assistant professors and 81 per cent of full professors are white; meanwhile, 47 per cent of assistants and 66 per cent of professors are male. At the elite level, the numbers are even more skewed. At Stanford, whites make up 54 per cent of tenure-line assistant professors but 82 per cent of professors; under-represented minorities account for only 8 per cent of assistants and 5 per cent of professors. Meanwhile, males constitute 60 per cent of assistants and 78 per cent of professors. In US higher education, white males still rule. 

Oh, and what about my endowed chair? Well, it turns out that when the holder of the chair retires, the honour moves on to someone else. I inherited the title in 2017 and held it for a year and a half before I retired and it passed on to the next person. What came with the title? Nothing substantial, no additional salary or research funds. Except I did get one material benefit from this experience, which I was allowed to keep when I gave up the title. It’s an uncomfortable, black, wooden armchair bearing the school seal. Mine came with a brass plaque on the back proclaiming: ‘Professor David Labaree, The Lee L Jacks Professor in Education’. 

Now, as I fade into retirement, still enjoying the glow from my emeritus status at a brand-name university, it all feels right. I’ve got money to live on, a great support community, and status galore. I get to display my badges of merit for all to see – the Stanford logo on my jacket, and the Jacks emeritus title in my email signature. What’s not to like? The question about whether I deserve it or not fades into the background, crowded out by all the benefits. Enjoy. The sun’s always shining at the summit of the meritocracy. 

Is there a moral to be drawn from these two stories of life in the meritocracy? The most obvious one is that this life is not fair. The fix is in. Children of parents who have already succeeded in the meritocracy have a big advantage over other children whose parents have not. They know how the game is played, and they have the cultural capital, the connections and the money to increase their children’s chances for success in this game. They know that the key is doing well at school, since it’s the acquisition of degrees that determines what jobs you get and the life you live. They also know that it’s not just a matter of being a good student but of attending the right school – one that fosters academic achievement and, even more important, occupies an elevated position in the status hierarchy of educational institutions. Brand names open doors. This allows highly educated, upper-middle-class families to game the meritocratic system and to hoard a disproportionate share of the advantages it offers. 

In fact, the only thing that’s less fair than the meritocracy is the system it displaced, in which people’s futures were determined strictly by the lottery of birth. Lords begat lords, and peasants begat peasants. In contrast, the meritocracy is sufficiently open that some children of the lower classes can prove themselves in school and win a place higher up the scale. The probability of doing so is markedly lower than the chances of success enjoyed by the offspring of the credentialed elite, but the possibility of upward mobility is nonetheless real. And this possibility is part of what motivates privileged parents to work so frantically to pull every string and milk every opportunity for their children. Through the jousting grounds of schooling, smart poor kids can, at times, displace dumb rich kids. The result is a system of status attainment that provides advantages for some while at the same time spreading fear for their children’s future across families of all social classes. In the end, the only thing that the meritocracy equalizes is anxiety.