Beachcombers: Workers

drag a large boom onto

Mae Ram Phueng Beach in
Thailand on January 28 to
prevent oil from a spill off
the coast of Rayong Province
from washing ashore.

F E AT U R E S E D I TO R I A L Q&A

B&A
4 46
A New March of George Aumoithe the
14 The Trail of Tragedies
KOVIE BIAKOLO
Folly in Europe
MICHAEL T. KLARE
DANIEL STEINMETZ-
JENKINS
B O O K S

A R T S

COMMENT
Black migrants who make the danger- 5
Rethinking Safety 22 32 The University Crisis
ous trek across the Americas to the US
Rather than defuse Does the pandemic mark
face racist policies everywhere they go. domestic calls, police a breaking point?
often do the opposite. ANDREW DELBANCO
14 SCOTT HECHINGER

6 COMMENT 40 Everyday Specters

Stumbling on History Edith Wharton’s ghosts.
Installing obstacles to K R I T H I K A VA R A G U R
C O L U M N S
forgetting in Chile.
ARIEL DORFMAN
7 No Offense 43 Unplugged
The Times’s Ukraine The return of the Matrix.
THE ARGUMENT
11 coverage is a series of STEPHEN KEARSE
Implement a 92
Percent Tax on shameless provocations.
D AV I D B R O M W I C H
Pandemic Profiteers
JOHN NICHOLS 8 The Front Burner
SWIPING LEFT January 6 helped
12
22 High Noon in
Clallam County
An Uphill Battle
A Í D A C H ÁV E Z
accelerate the right’s
assault on democracy.
K A L I H O L L O W AY
SASHA ABRAMSKY 32
How a group of QAnon-sympathizing 13 Deadline Poet
demagogues almost took over a town. Palin Redux Cover illustration:
C A LV I N T R I L L I N RYAN INZANA

28 President Biden’s
First Year
ROBERT L. BOROSAGE
32
“ Our higher education system
delivers concierge services to the
He seems to be headed toward a very affluent while consigning everyone
28

VOLUME
significant presidency, for good or ill. else to underfunded facilities.
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 E D I T O R I A L / M I C H A E L T. K L A R E F O R T H E N AT I O N

A New March of Folly in Europe

he kings, generals, and prime ministers who controlled europe’s

t armies in the summer of 1914 didn’t think their aggressive behaviors—

issuing ultimatums, calling up reserves, massing troops on one another’s
borders—would result in war. Rather, they believed that conspicuous
muscle flexing would impel their rivals to back down. But each show of
force on one side prompted an even more extravagant riposte, until the
march to war became unstoppable—and so tens of millions perished.
It is hard not to see parallels with today’s precarious moment in
Europe. As we go to press, Russia is adding even more troops to the NATO, which must remove its forces from the
100,000 or so already deployed in areas adjoining Ukraine, while Baltic states—will not lead to a peaceful outcome.
the United States and its allies are dispatching additional forces to NATO must acknowledge that Russia possesses
the NATO countries closest to Russia and Ukraine. If this military legitimate security concerns regarding its western
onrush is not halted soon, we could be drawn into another deadly approaches; Moscow must accept that Ukraine
conflagration—this time with nuclear weapons at the ready. cannot be made its vassal, and that the Baltic states
Let us be clear: While President Biden has ruled out direct US cannot be forced to abandon their ties to NATO.
military involvement should Ukraine be invaded by Russia, his Both sides share an interest in preventing minor
generals are making plans for US combatants to assist Ukrainian incidents from escalating into nuclear confron-
soldiers in guerrilla operations against the invaders and to resupply tation. Starting from these fundamental points,
Ukrainian forces from bases in adjoining NATO countries—moves it should be possible to give both sides sufficient
that could easily provoke Russian attacks on US/NATO staging satisfaction to back away from catastrophe.
areas, resulting in an escalating cycle of reprisals and counterattacks Should Russia invade Ukraine, or even occu-
until American forces are engaged in a full-scale war with Russia. py more territory in the Donbas, a major conflict
Given that NATO forces in the region include ships, planes, and will erupt, and the US and NATO will be sucked
artillery capable of striking deep within Russian territory and Russia into it one way or another. Such a conflict could
possesses comparable weaponry capable of persist for years, turning
striking well into NATO territory, combat Europe into a nightmarish
between the two would likely involve damage war zone—or could esca-
to vital targets on each side, prompting further A failure to find sufficient late overnight into some-
escalation. Both sides have nuclear weapons common ground with thing far worse. Even if the
deployed within reach of likely battle zones: Russia would be a conflict remained relative-
The United States stores nuclear bombs in ly contained, the United
Europe for use by specially equipped F-16 and
disaster for everyone States and its allies would
F-35 fighters, while Russia has nuclear war- on the planet. likely sever most econom-
heads for its medium-range ballistic missiles. ic ties with Russia, causing
Historians still debate the origins of World War I. Should we severe hardship for the Russian people and for
now follow that same path toward war—what the historian Barba- many others in Europe. The environment in
ra Tuchman termed a “march of folly”—future historians will no Washington would become even more bellicose,
doubt engage in similar debates. blocking progress on all of the domestic issues
Certainly Russia is to blame for igniting the current crisis, by revered by progressives, such as voting rights,
deploying such a large force within striking range of Ukraine’s poverty reduction, and climate change.
borders and by issuing ultimatums to the West. But the West also We all have a huge stake in this crisis. A failure
shares responsibility by rebuffing Moscow’s repeated warnings by Biden and his negotiators to find sufficient
that deploying NATO forces in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania common ground with their Russian counterparts
while promising Ukraine membership in the alliance posed a sig- would be a disaster for everyone on the planet.
nificant security threat to Russia. Our pleas for a peaceful outcome must
What matters now is not apportioning blame but avoiding a be heard in Washington—and, to the extent
4 disaster. Issuing nonnegotiable positions—that Ukraine has an possible, in London, Paris, Berlin, Kyiv, and
inalienable right to join NATO, or that Ukraine can never join Moscow. N
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

C O M M E N T / S C O T T H E C H I N G E R Perhaps McNeil, who had moved in months

earlier to support his mother following her serious
Rethinking Safety surgery and, aside from older, out-of-state arrests,
had been free from trouble with the law, knew
Given how the police can inflame rather than defuse a armed police would soon be in the apartment and
domestic argument, isn’t it time to try a new approach? that he would likely be arrested and possibly jailed.
A return to the past. He may have made the fateful
decision that he was not going to go through it all
n january 21, a mother’s call for help led to

o the deaths of two New York Police Depart-

ment officers and her son. The mother, Shirley
Sourzes, had requested assistance from the
police to resolve an argument she was having
with her 47-year-old son, Lashawn McNeil. The officers,
22-year-old rookie Jason Rivera and his partner, Wilbert
Mora, responded to the routine call and were fatally shot by McNeil
before he was shot and fatally injured in turn by a third officer.
again under any circumstances.
Imagine that instead of sending police officers,
the dispatcher had another option: a mental health
professional, a social worker, or a medic. Someone
trained in defusing domestic situations.
There are programs that give us a window into
what an alternative reality could look like. One of the
most prominent, the Oregon-based Crisis Assistance
Helping Out on the Streets program (CAHOOTS),
As we think about what we can do in the future to prevent such was launched in 1989; it dispatches one crisis worker
tragedies, we often overlook this critical question: Did the officers and one medic to nonemergency calls. This program
have to be there at all? has seen great success: In 2019, police backup was
To be sure, once the 911 call came in, dispatching armed units requested in only 0.6 percent of the estimated 24,000
was the default option under our current police-centric system. But calls to which CAHOOTS responded.
what if Sourzes had had a different option than calling 911, or the While we can’t yet say for sure what would
911 operator had had a different option than sending armed officers? work best for every community, much less that
Might a different presence have been more successful at defusing the the tragedy in Harlem could have been avoided,
situation than the police? we do know that the presence of armed officers in
As a civil rights attorney and longtime public defender, I believe altercations increases the chances that violence will
strongly that alternatives to policing are critical to the health and safety ensue. That every year, police kill roughly 1,000
of overpoliced people and communities, historically and predominantly people. That there are innumerable cases in which
Black and brown. We don’t talk enough, however, about how alterna- both police and civilians have been shot and killed
tives to policing are also critical for the health and safety of officers. Our unnecessarily. Given these realities, isn’t it time to
failure of imagination about how we deliver public safety fails them too. try a new approach?
During my eight years as a public defender in Brooklyn, I repre- Just days after the murders in Harlem, Mayor
sented countless parents, sons and daughters, and domestic partners Eric Adams released a plan to address gun violence.
who called 911 during heated arguments. In some cases, they wanted to He called for more police and stricter enforce-
scare or cause trouble for the person with whom they were squabbling. ment. He told New Yorkers, “The NYPD is our
Or they called out of desperation, believing that they had no other ave- first line of defense against gun violence.” Adams
nue to find help for their loved one. In most cases, they hoped the police responded to this tragedy by disregarding the very
would calm things down and ensure that violence would be avoided. lessons it contains.
Too often, however, the result was precisely—and tragically—the As a society, we have been taught that police
opposite. For many people, especially in overpoliced neighborhoods, should respond to every issue, and as a result, their
a police presence alone is traumatizing. They associate the police with outsize budgets take away resources from basic com-
being unfairly stopped, frisked, interrogated, arrested, handcuffed, munity needs, including schools, affordable housing,
assaulted, imprisoned, and even murdered. and infrastructure. This one-solution-fits-all ap-
Even if there is no wrongdoing on the part of the police, once they proach is backed by neither data nor common sense,
arrive, a whole system is unleashed. Handcuffs lead to interrogations, and all too often leads to violence and death.
fingerprints, and hours in holding cells and courtrooms. This, in turn, Reducing unnecessary interactions between the
is often followed by unaffordable bail and incarceration. And prosecu- police and the citizenry is good for the health and
tors often request protective orders that separate loved ones for months safety of both the public and the police themselves.
against their will, forcing people from their homes and all too often leav- Let’s give proven alternatives a try. N
ing children without key caretakers and families without needed incomes.
Considering these possible devastating consequences, it’s easy to Scott Hechinger is a civil rights attorney and the executive
see how the presence of the police can inflame rather than defuse a director of Zealous, a national coalition supporting
domestic argument. Might this have been what happened in the recent
tragedy in Harlem?
local initiatives to harness media and storytelling
for justice.
5
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

C O M M E N T / A R I E L D O R F M A N

Stumbling on History
Chile has a bright future, but it is still in need of
obstacles to forgetting.

or the three decades since democracy returned to

f Chile, as I walked the streets of Santiago, Valparaíso,

and other cities, I have often wondered what happened
in the houses I passed during the 17 years (1973-90) of
the Pinochet dictatorship. Who had been dragged out
in the dead of night? Who had never returned from the detention
center—or came back destroyed by what had been done to them?
What pain was hidden behind each door, and inside those who had survived?
Which was why I was glad to hear from my friend Francisco Estévez, the
director of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, that the museum
had begun a pilot program in 2017 to memorialize the victims of the dictator-
ship, imitating the Stolperstein initiative in Germany, which started in 1992 and
“A succinct, positive look at the great has spread across Europe
benefits, both historically and currently, to commemorate the Jews
of embracing immigration.”
and others (Roma, com-
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review munists, homosexuals) ex-
terminated by the Nazis
by placing inscribed brass
plaques, raised slight-
ly above the level of the
pavement, in front of the
houses where those taken
It Was Dark There away once lived.
All the Time The idea was that any-
Sophia Burthen and the one passing would stumble over these Steine (stones) and be awakened to the
Legacy of Slavery in Canada secret truth of that site. In Chile, five plaques were installed at the end of 2018
in the town of Limache. The program was called Residencia de la Memoria—
an allusion to Pablo Neruda’s magnificent collection Residencias en la Tierra,
answering the poet’s demand that we consecrate what both the stones and the
people have collectively witnessed.
Now that Chile is about to inaugurate a president who is a fierce champion
of human rights, perhaps it is time to amplify these Residences of Memory, so
that Chile overflows with plaques that stub the toes of our citizens as they go
about their oblivious daily lives. After all, millions of my compatriots—fully
44 percent of the electorate—voted against Gabriel Boric and for José Anto-
nio Kast, an ultraright admirer of the Pinochet dictatorship, a man who had
threatened to close the Museum of Memory. If there had been such plaques
COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF MEMORY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

scattered across the country, perhaps nobody would dare to aspire to become
president without repudiating Augusto Pinochet’s crimes.
Given my advanced age, it’s probably inevitable that in the near future I
will trip on a Chilean stone. Still, it would be a considerable consolation if the
reason I stubbed my toe was that I had been stopped by a Residencia de la Me-
moria, positioned there to make me and so many others aware of our country’s
tragic history—a reminder that we must never regress to a traumatic past. N
Order now at
bookshop.org
or gooselane.com
6 Ariel Dorfman is the author, most recently, of the novels Cautivos and The Compensation
Bureau and the forthcoming poetry collection Voices From the Other Side of Death.
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

NATO—specifically, a promise that Ukraine will

No Offense not be admitted. Yet the phrase “eastward expansion
of NATO” is only occasionally cited in mainstream
David Bromwich reports and is never explained. The average reader
of The New York Times would take it to be a Russian
locution of indeterminate origins.
Recent Times reporting on Russia is marked by
an overriding tendency. A brief selection follows.
(An antidote, in advance, is John Mearsheimer’s
Russia, Ukraine, and 2015 lecture—available on YouTube—“Why Is

The New York Times

Ukraine the West’s Fault?” The root cause of the
crisis, as Mearsheimer argues in detail, was the
decision to fortify Ukraine as a Western bulwark
The paper of record’s coverage of the crisis has been a series on Russia’s border. This began with the expansion
of the European Union and NATO, was heated
of shameless provocative conjectures posing as facts.
up by the US-sponsored Orange Revolution, and
finally ignited with the US-backed Ukraine coup
kraine shares a border with russia the way of 2014.)

u Mexico and Canada do with the United States. § Times print edition, January 16, Anton
Since 1823, we have claimed the right to defend Troianovski and David E. Sanger, “Putin Could
our hemisphere in accordance with the Monroe Cause Trouble Not Just in Ukraine but in West,
Doctrine, and now Russia is putting into practice Too.” The authors speak of “the security crisis
a similar policy against a militarized Ukraine. The parallels Russia has ignited by surrounding Ukraine on three
are close; the reasons for a defensive posture, obvious. Yet sides.” Note that Russia has “surrounded” Ukraine;
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the US no longer believes not that NATO put Russia’s back to the wall.
that there are spheres of influence. Troianovski and Sanger add that “by the White
Or rather, there is just one sphere: the ever-expanding terrain of legit- House’s accounting,” Russia has been “sending in
imate Western democracies approved by NATO. This worldview—an saboteurs to create a pretext for invasion” (italics
immediate, unexamined consequence of the fall of Soviet communism added). This is the same White House that cleared
in 1991—cut a clear path through the Clinton, George W. Bush, the August 29 drone strike that killed 10 civilians in
Obama, and (for all the fuss) Trump administrations. But there were Kabul. (An event, incidentally, on which Times re-
two bumps that might have served as a warning. In 2008, Georgia’s porting has been as forthright and penetrating as its
attack on Russian troops in South Ossetia was answered with decisive coverage of Russia, NATO, and Ukraine has been
and crushing force, and in 2014, Russia responded to the US-backed slanted and deceptive.)
coup in Ukraine by annexing Crimea. Vladimir Putin explained that Troianovski and Sanger continue: “There were
when he next visited Sevastopol, he would prefer not to be greeted by hints [by Russia]...that nuclear weapons could be
NATO sailors on the Black Sea. shifted to places—perhaps not far from the United
The US, long a one-party state in foreign policy, uses a different States coastline—that would reduce warning times
calendar from Russia. For us, the time line starts in 2014. For Russia, after a launch to as little as five minutes.” Hints?
it goes back to 1999, when the first group of former Eastern bloc From whom? And with what authority, what plau-
countries were admitted to NATO: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech sibility? The sentence is a shameless provocative
Republic. An additional group joined in 2004: Bulgaria, Romania, conjecture posing as a fact.
Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. To the US and its Again, the crisis was “touched off by the Krem-
dependent NATO allies, this was a natural reiteration of Manifest Des- lin’s release of a series of demands that…would
tiny and, like the first version, well-meaning, brave, and innocent. One effectively restore Russia’s sphere of influence close
look at a map will tell you what the Russian reaction was bound to be. to Soviet-era lines.” Here, at last, the authors arrive
Democrats, Republicans, and the liberal at a flat falsehood. The Soviet
corporate media now find themselves in pre- sphere encompassed Hungary,
dictable harmony on Ukraine—coordinating all Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bul-
their stage effects, and as uninstructed by his- One look at a map will garia, Romania, Latvia, Esto-
tory as they were in Iraq. Meanwhile, Putin, his tell you what the Russian nia, and Lithuania—all now
foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and his lead reaction to the prospect members of NATO—and none
negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ry- of Ukraine joining NATO of those countries is re-
ANDY FRIEDMAN

abkov, have clarified their chief demand again

and again: no further eastward expansion of was bound to be.
quired by Russia to exit
the West and install a
7
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

Soviet-style puppet government. How did

this sentence get past a fact-checker? The
§ January 14, Troianovski and Sanger,
“Russia Warns It May End Talks on
Front Burner
Ukraine.” Summaries can mislead by gram-
matical as well as historical omission. “Rus-
Kali Holloway
sia,” the authors say, “is demanding that
NATO drastically scale back its presence
near Russia’s borders in Eastern Europe.”
The adjective they omit before “presence”
Democracy at Risk
is “military.” Why elide that? And why The politics of the January 6 insurrection are increasingly
not mention the broken 1990 vow by the filtering out through the GOP and across the country.
George H.W. Bush administration: that
NATO would extend “not one inch” east
here was a sense, on the afternoon of the capitol
of Germany? Because if you say the very
presence of NATO is being pushed back,
you imply a return of Russian dominance
on the Soviet scale.
§ January 9, Sanger and Eric Schmitt,
“As Talks Loom, U.S. Draws a Line on
Ukraine.” Putin “is demanding an end
to NATO expansion,” and specifically a
pledge not to admit Ukraine. True, but
t insurrection, that violent white American Trump-
ism had reached its apex. But by the next morning,
as Republican politicians and right-wing media fig-
ures began rewriting history in real time—claiming
antifa actually did it, pretending the insurrectionists merely
went on self-guided tours of the building and “took selfies,”
portraying the white mobs as victims—it became clear that the previous
day’s act of sedition hadn’t been the final spasm of white supremacist
then the same sentence asserts, fantasti- anti-democracy but the harbinger of white supremacist anti-democracy
cally, that these “demands amount to a to come. And those who support and excuse it are attempting to give the
dismantling of the security architecture anti-democratic violence of the insurrection a veneer of respectability by
of Europe built after the Soviet Union’s dressing it up in the language of election integrity.
collapse.” No expansion has become synon- In the year since the Capitol siege, Republican lawmakers have continued
ymous with dismantling. their assault on democracy, not by condoning violent public rampages but via
§ January 15, Sanger, “U.S. Says Mos- the codification of undemocratic laws. GOP legislators have passed 34 bills
cow Sent Saboteurs to Roil Ukraine.” Con- that suppress voting in 19 states; undertaken extreme gerrymandering to en-
cerning “U.S. says,” no comment. Expect sure the maintenance of conservative white political power; killed federal vot-
much more of this from the Times, CNN, ing rights bills—with help from Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin,
and our one-party foreign policy. Afghani- unwavering supporters of a filibuster consistently used to oppose multiracial
stan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen were barely democracy; and in multiple states, are now working to make it perfectly legal
a first course. With Ukraine, they seem to to overturn free and fair elections. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Geor-
think they have found a man-size battle, gia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue have each proposed the creation of
worthy of the owner and proprietor of the law enforcement teams to police elections and, no doubt, to intimidate the
world’s only sphere of influence. N kinds of voters who tend not to vote Republican. “History will judge them
by their actions,” the old saw goes. But it does not hold here, since GOP leg-
MORE ONLINE islators have also outlawed the accurate teaching of history in a dozen states.
t h e na tio n. c om/hi ghl ig hts Elsewhere, members of groups that invaded the Capitol are continuing to
deform our politics. But instead of risking negative national attention, many of
i Ah Quon
LEFT FROM TOP: YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT, THE AH QUON MCELRATH PROJECT;

these groups have decentralized, inserting their members into political issues
McElrath and the
KOBI WOLF / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY; ILLUSTRATION: ANDY FRIEDMAN

at the local level. Labeled “patriots” and “martyrs” by establishment Repub-

Power of Multiracial licans, much of their “political” involvement involves physical intimidation.
Working-Class
Members of the ultraviolent Proud Boys—who have collectively been
Solidarity
named in three separate federal lawsuits filed by Capitol Police officers;
K IM KEL LY
the NAACP and 10 Democratic members of Congress; and the city of
i How the Washington, D.C., all accusing the group of inciting violence on Jan-
Democratic Party uary 6—have been especially active. Previously best known for instigating
Alienates Young street fights as long as they outnumber their opponents, Proud Boys mem-
Jews: A Reply to bers have become regular features at school board meetings and other public
Alexis Grenell
DAV E Z I RI N
8 meetings across the country, where they turn up as “muscle” for their fellow
right-wingers or simply intimidate political opponents. According to local
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 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

news reports, in July, Proud Boys “carrying ministrator and other attendees. A few months
guns, bats and body armor” served as “security” before that incident, two people wearing UADF
for anti-reproductive-justice demonstrators in The far-right gear showed up at a school board meeting to
Salem, Ore. At a Chicago-area school board groups that protest the teaching of what conservatives have
meeting in November, students who opposed stormed the consistently mislabeled “critical race theory.”
the removal of a graphic novel by a nonbinary Patriot Prayer, a militia group often linked to
author were “jeered” and called “pedophiles” Capitol are the Proud Boys, reportedly played a role in
by local Proud Boys in attendance. And Proud now focusing the shutdown of a school in Vancouver, Wash.,
Boys told a school board in Orange County, on local, and when its members spread a rumor that students
N.C., that, as one member recounted, “some- even electoral, without masks were being arrested and staged a
one should tie rocks around our necks and we disruptive rally near school grounds.
should throw ourselves in a river.” It seems likely politics. Members of these groups are also making
that this sudden burst of local “activism” by the forays into local electoral politics. In Eaton-
Proud Boys will continue for some time, since the national or- ville, a tiny rural town outside Seattle, members of the Three
ganization instructed members to “stand down” after the Cap- Percent—a national militia group with multiple members
itol insurrection. At least three dozen members of the group facing indictment for their role in the Capitol breach—now
are facing federal charges for their involvement in that event. occupy two of the seats on the local five-person school board,
The Proud Boys aren’t the only ones. Last October, one of which was won just before the new year. The Wash-
members of the Colorado-based militia United American ington Post notes that “the Washington Three Percent claims
Defense Force who came to a school board meeting to op- members in dozens of official posts throughout the state,
pose a school’s mask mandates were described as “agitated,” including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five
“angry,” “combative,” and “intimidating” by a school ad- school board seats.”
What’s more, spurred on by Trump ad-
viser turned podcast host Steve Bannon and
O P P A R T / P E T E R K U P E R micro-influencers on the QAnon message
boards, at least 57 people “who played a
role” in the events at the Capitol, “either
by attending the Save America rally that
preceded the riots, gathering at the Capitol
steps or breaching the Capitol itself,” are
now candidates for elected office, according
to Politico. Of those, at least three (though
the number might rise) are being charged for
their role on January 6. Certainly, it’s hard to
imagine that one or two won’t get elected.
This is what the creep of anti-democracy,
long a part of the GOP effort but accelerat-
ed by Trump and the Capitol takeover, has
brought us. This isn’t just bad for our politi-
cal process. Each incursion is another tear in
the fabric of democracy. And if history offers
any sign of what’s ahead, we are nowhere
near the end of this assault on democratic
norms and principles. What began as an ef-
fort by white conservatives to disenfranchise
Black voters has now spread so that a far
broader spectrum of citizens will also have
their voting rights eroded, their children’s
schools filled with ahistorical curricula, their
legislatures openly indifferent to the will of
the majority. And perhaps, once that be-
comes clearer, more people will realize the
immense danger we face, and a more intense
effort will be taken to stop it. Here’s hoping
that, by then, it won’t be too late. N
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

jobs, over 44.9 million have been sickened by the

THE virus, and over 724,000 have died from it.”

ARGU The number of deaths has grown since last fall.

So, too, has the inequality. We live in a surreal mo-
ment when there is open speculation about whether

MENT Implement a
92 Percent Tax on
Pandemic Profiteers
Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk will be the first trillionaire.
One CNBC report suggested Bezos could cross the
line as soon as 2026.
Unless, of course, we impose a little pandemic-era
J O H N N I C H O L S shared sacrifice on those who sacrificed nothing at all.
In my new book, Coronavirus Criminals and Pan-
ven before the covid pandemic super- demic Profiteers, I argue that politicians, Big Pharma

e charged economic inequality, Vermont CEOs, and billionaires who exploited the pandemic
to their advantage must be held to account. There’s
Senator Bernie Sanders announced as much to be said for criminal, civil, and congressional
a 2020 presidential candidate that “bil- action. But taxing the rich offers a double benefit.
lionaires should not exist.” That was It reduces inequality while collecting resources to
a perfectly reasonable argument from cover health care, housing, and child care costs for
a contender to lead a country that in the 1950s main- essential workers who have already done their part.
tained a top marginal tax rate of 92 percent. But, as A new study from the IPS, Oxfam, the Fight
with so many of the senator’s proposals, the notion of taxing the rich Inequality Alliance, and Patriotic Millionaires pro-
down to size proved to be a bit too bold for both parties—and for the poses a global “Taxing Extreme Wealth” regime,
pundit class that polices the political discourse to ensure that things with graduated rates of 2 percent on wealth starting
don’t get too interesting. at $5 million, 3 percent on wealth over $50 million,
So let me offer a more modest proposal: Let’s tax billionaires—and and 5 percent on wealth over $1 billion. “In the US,
übermillionaires—back to where they stood when the pandemic surged roughly 750 billionaires have seen their wealth in-
in March 2020. With authorization from Congress, Internal Revenue crease over $2 trillion since March 2020, for a com-
Service auditors can calculate the excess profits of the billionaire class bined wealth of over $5 trillion,” Collins said. “And
and then collect the cash in the spirit of shared sacrifice. there are over 63,500 individuals with wealth over
Two years ago, working-class Americans masked up and marched $50 million, with combined assets of $12.8 trillion,
into hospital wards and meatpacking plants to according to the new report,
do what they understood was essential work. ‘Taxing Extreme Wealth.’ An
Their level of sacrifice was immense: Thousands annual wealth tax would raise
of nurses, hundreds of transit workers, and an Let’s tax billionaires—and $928 billion a year—enough
untold number of employees in factories and übermillionaires—back to eliminate half of household
warehouses died from Covid-19. Millions of to where they stood when out-of-pocket health expenses
workers got sick, lost jobs, and faced the threat in the US.”
of eviction and hunger.
the pandemic hit That’s a good start. But
It was different for the rich. They decamped in March 2020. why stop there? At the height
to country homes and waterfront villas, where of the pandemic, Sanders pro-
they toted up their winnings from a game that, as Naomi Klein has posed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, which would
reminded us, is rigged to reward disaster capitalists. have imposed a 60 percent tax on wealth gains
“America’s billionaires have grown $2.1 trillion richer during the made by billionaires between March 18, 2020, and
pandemic, their collective fortune skyrocketing by 70 percent—from January 1, 2021. “At a time of enormous economic
just short of $3 trillion at the start of the COVID crisis on March 18, pain and suffering, we have a fundamental choice
2020, to over $5 trillion on October 15, 2021,” noted a groundbreak- to make,” Sanders explained. “We can continue to
ing report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax allow the very rich to get much richer while every-
Fairness in the fall of 2021. During the same period, the billionaire one else gets poorer and poorer. Or we can tax the
class expanded from 614 to 745 members. winnings a handful of billionaires made during the
The $5 trillion in wealth that was locked up by those 745 billion- pandemic to improve the health and well-being of
aires “is two-thirds more than the $3 trillion in wealth held by the tens of millions of Americans.”
bottom 50 percent of US households,” noted the IPS’s Chuck Collins. Yes! Let’s tax them, but with one proviso.
“The great good fortune of these billionaires over the past 19 months Sanders is too conservative. Let’s borrow
is even starker when contrasted with the devastating impact of the a page from the Eisenhower era and claim
coronavirus on working people. Almost 89 million Americans have lost 92 percent. N
11
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

tests to anyone who wants them. But the experience

Swiping Left
didn’t prompt any sort of introspection.
About a month after Psaki’s comments, Vice
President Kamala Harris appeared on NBC’s Today
and offered guidance for people struggling to find a
AÍDA CHÁVEZ
place to get tested: “Google it.” And recently, when
a reporter asked about the administration’s stalled

An Uphill Battle agenda and whether it was time to reconsider its

approach, Psaki gave another derisive response.
“We could certainly propose legislation to see if
With the midterm elections on the horizon, Democrats are people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but
alienating their base and losing public confidence. that wouldn’t be very rewarding for the American
emocrats are in retreat as they head into people,” she said.

d With just months remaining until the mid-

this election year. In a stark display of the term elections, the White House’s political op-
party’s lack of confidence in its prospects in eration has been unresponsive to Democratic
November’s midterms, 29 House Democrats campaigns. According to a CNN report, the pres-
have announced that they won’t be running ident and his political team haven’t been providing
for reelection. Given the party’s razor-thin majorities, Joe much support for Democrats seeking reelection,
Biden’s sinking popularity, and the fact that the party of the failing to respond to “basic requests for help
sitting president almost always suffers losses in midterm elections, it or information.”
looks as though the Democrats are going to get eviscerated if they Republicans need to win only five additional
don’t quickly change course. seats in November to gain control of the House. In
Some prominent lawmakers, like Senator Bernie Sanders, have the Senate, which is split 50-50, Democrats need to
publicly called for a change in strategy, saying that the Democratic defend 14 seats, including from states like Arizona
Party has “turned its back on the working class.” But the Biden ad- and Georgia where Biden won by narrow margins.
ministration remains deeply in denial about its failures, which range Republicans have to hold on to 20 Senate seats
from the death of the Democrats’ signature Build Back Better plan and face potentially vicious primaries in states like
to their doomed year-long push for federal voting rights legislation. North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The pandemic, which Biden promised to manage—his core cam- Since the 2020 election, GOP lawmakers have
paign promise—has spiraled even further out passed voting restrictions in
of control. The number of Covid cases has states across the country. It’s
reached record highs under his watch, soaring that onslaught, combined
into the hundreds of thousands. Hospitals are It looks as though the with the already bleak elec-
overwhelmed, and schools are still in crisis. Democrats are going to toral landscape, that recently
The monthly child tax credit payments, get eviscerated if led Democrats to make one
which Democrats promised would cut child they don’t quickly last push for voting rights
poverty in half, have ended. Biden has been reform. But when their ef-
telling people burdened with student debt to change course. fort fizzled in the Senate,
prepare for their payments to resume in May, Biden blamed Republicans
and debt forgiveness is off the table. Other popular pandemic-related for obstructing his agenda, highlighting his own
relief programs are being phased out as well. And the White House’s political impotence.
attitude has been to double down on condescension, expressing con- As a result of the administration’s back-to-back
tempt for the American working class, the very voters the Democrats failures, Biden’s support is crumbling among all
should be courting. Americans, including some of the most crucial
At a briefing with reporters in December, White House press sec- groups in his base: Black and Latino voters and
retary Jen Psaki boasted that the US would soon require private insur- young people.
ance companies to reimburse customers who buy rapid at-home Covid Some party leaders, like House majority leader
tests. When an NPR reporter asked why the United States doesn’t Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber,
send free rapid tests to everyone, as other countries have been doing, are still optimistic despite Biden’s approval ratings.
Psaki scoffed at the idea. “Should we just send one to every American?” “I think we’re going to hold the majority in the
she replied, clearly irritated. “How much does that cost?” fall,” Hoyer told reporters. “I know that’s contrary
Life comes at you fast. It took about two weeks’ worth of public to what some people think.”
12 outcry for the administration to reverse its position and announce that Democrats, Hoyer added, will have “a very solid
the federal government will be shipping a half-billion free at-home agenda to run on.” N
 S N A P S H OT/ L i n h Pham Buddhist monks surround the body of Thich Nhat Hanh on January 23 in
Hue, Vietnam, carrying it from his deathbed to the meditation hall at the
At Peace Tu Hieu Pagoda, where his funeral ceremony would take place. Thousands
of followers mourned the passing, at age 95, of the Vietnamese monk
and peace activist, who helped popularize mindfulness and meditation in
the West. His funeral was held on January 29.

By the were infected with

spyware by El Sal- 8
Numbers vador’s government
from 2020 to 2021
Number of jour-
nalists in India
criminally charged
19
T R I L L I N

DeadlinePoet

for their coverage of Palin Redux

farmers’ protests
Number of journal- Sarah Palin flouts a New York ordinance by dining in an
ists detained by the
Taliban after pro-
tests over a press
4
Number of journal-
Upper East Side restaurant unvaccinated.
—News reports

crackdown ists assassinated Refusing the vaccine means freedom, she says,
C A LV I N

in Mexico since

96 9 January 1 And no one can ever negate hers.

FROM TOP: GETTY IMAGES; C.J. BURTON / GETTY IMAGES

The shots would be o’er her dead body, she says.

Number of media
workers killed in
Number of journal-
ists, activists, and
critics who have
1
Number of journal- But what if the body’s the waiter’s?
Pakistan between
1992 and 2022 been imprisoned ists that Missouri
in Morocco for Governor Mike Par-
“offending” public son has threatened
35 institutions or
the king since
to sue for “hacking”
for viewing a state
Number of journal-
ists whose phones
November 2019 website’s public
source code
13
 THE
TRAIL OF TRAGEDIES
Black migrants who make the dangerous trek across the Americas
to the US face racist policies and practices everywhere they go.
KOVIE
BIAKOLO
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

Since 2020, Essengue has been ro-

mantically involved with a man, Em-

J
erson Dalmacy, from Haiti, one of the
companions she met early in her jour-
ney. For the couple, there was no re-
turning to Brazil—they had neither the
ulliana essengue arrived in tapachula, mexico, from são paulo, money nor the desire. And as far as they
Brazil, in March 2020. She was broke but determined to reach the were concerned, leaving for their home
United States. After nearly two months traversing rain forests, bor- countries was out of the question, espe-
ders, and rivers by bus, car, boat, and foot, she needed money. At cially for Essengue, whose Black migra-
first, Essengue and her travel companions squatted. “We slept on tion story begins in Cameroon in 2019.

E
the floor for two weeks in a hallway,” she told me. “There were Africans, Haitians—
everybody was sleeping on the floor.” ssengue is from the city
In Tapachula, near the Guatemala border, the United States operates what is of Kumba in an English-
effectively an open-air immigration prison by forcing migrants to wait to be granted speaking region of Cam-
refugee status in Mexico. When Essengue presented her documents to Mexican eroon, a country that was
immigration officials, the conditions were grim. “Some people, they were sleeping largely controlled by France
in front of the immigration [building] in tents,” she said, “because they did not have until 1960. But Great Britain had held
money to rent a house.” a territory between French Cameroun
Essengue began working on a mango plantation, where she collected and se- and Nigeria known as British Cam-
lected fruit to be packaged and sent to the United States. She called it “horrible,” eroons. In 1961, when the United
shaking her head as the memories returned. In addition to the intense sun, she faced Nations held a referendum on wheth-
discrimination in pay; Black workers like her would get less. “They’ll tell you that er British Cameroonians should join
JOHN MOORE / GETTY IMAGES

they will pay you this, and when the time reaches to pay, they will not pay you the neighboring Nigeria or reunify with
amount,” she said. Cameroon, Northern British Camer-
Essengue resigned herself to staying in Tapachula for however long it took to oonians favored Nigeria, while South-
wait for the necessary documents. But when she realized she was pregnant, reaching ern British Cameroonians favored
the safety of the US before the birth of her child took on a new urgency. reunification. Both groups got their
For many years, most published images of migrants making the journey across wish, and the territory was split.

S
the Americas were of brown-skinned people of diverse Central For Anglophone Cameroonians who
American origins, but the reality is far more varied. Essengue have been alienated from the country’s
is Cameroonian, one of the many thousands of Black migrants political systems and want their own
from Africa and the Caribbean whose plight across the Americas independent state—which wasn’t an op-
has been invisible for years. An immigration lawyer who intro- tion in the 1961 referendum—the area
duced me to Essengue called their path to the US “the Black is known as Ambazonia. In October
Immigrant Trail of Tears.” Out of respect for the Native Amer- 2016 through 2017, English-speaking
ican history from which that phrase Cameroonians began protesting in-
is derived, I think of it as the Black equalities perpetuated by the state. The
Migrant Trail of Tragedies. government responded with arrests and
As of 2019, there were about tear gas. By October 2017, separatists
“They’ll tell you that they 4.6 million Black immigrants in the proclaimed Ambazonia an independent
United States, 88 percent of whom state, and the Cameroonian govern-
will pay you this, and were born in African or Caribbe- ment declared war. The conflict, some-
when the time reaches an countries. Of the approximately times called the Anglophone Crisis or
to pay, they will not pay 1United million migrants who arrive in the
States annually, less than
the Ambazonian War, has resulted in
more than 4,000 civilian deaths and
you the amount.” 9 percent arrive from Africa and 700,000 people being displaced.
—Julliana Essengue the Caribbean. US Customs and Essengue was only 21 when the pro-
Border Protection, however, tracks tests began, and she did not participate.
only a limited number of national- “I’m not in a political group, so I was
ities in real time—none of which are African or Caribbean—at just looking at what was happening,”
the southwestern land border, which means there is no data on she told me.
exactly how many Black migrants from those regions are arriv- In 2019, Essengue, then a mother
Kovie Biakolo is ing at the southern border. But over the last year, the number is of two young boys, worked as a tai-
a journalist and estimated to be in the thousands. lor. So when the Southern Cameroons
the author of
The migration stories of people like Essengue are character- National Council (SCNC), a nonvi-
the upcoming
Foremothers: ized by anti-Blackness in policy and practice that persists from olent political organization that seeks
500 Years of country to country. Working on plantations for less pay than
Heroines From their non-Black counterparts is just one example of the racism
the African they endure. And even when they make it to the imagined prom-
Diaspora. ised land of the United States, the indignities don’t end.
15
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

independence for the Anglophone Catholic Church that is receiving people.”

regions, asked her to sew some of Once they arrived in São Paulo, the man
their paraphernalia, she thought of offered to share his cab ride, which Essengue
“The gangs nowadays it as a business transaction. But, she gratefully accepted. She was received by the
said, “when I got finished with the organizers of a church-sponsored shelter that
invade people’s houses material, that is when I saw the mili- offers food and sex-segregated lodging for mi-
and shoot people. And tary coming to my shop.” grants for up to three months. But as the weeks
Military officials accused her of went by, Essengue was unable to find work. As
that happens every day being a member of the SCNC. She she tells it, as soon as the residents of São Paulo
in Haiti.” tried to explain that she was sim- realized that she didn’t speak Portuguese, they
—Emerson Dalmacy ply sewing materials for money and would ignore her. As her three-month deadline
had no political motive. “When the at the shelter drew closer, she worried about re-
military comes to you, they don’t give you the opportunity to maining in Brazil. “My head was heavy. Where
say anything,” she said. “They beat me at the shop and put me am I going if I don’t have enough money to
inside their truck.” rent a house?” she said. “Other ladies were
The details of what happened next are painful and, in some saying they want to travel, that when you go
respects, still uncertain. Essengue remembers arriving at a to America, you find peace, and there they
camp. She was there for almost a week, she said, and during that speak English.”
time she saw many people die: “They were shooting…. There Essengue was excited by how other migrants
was a lot of blood through death. A lot, a lot of blood.” described the United States. She contacted her
Sometime during that week, an official accosted Essengue uncle and told him she wanted to try to make
We are family: and ordered her to have sex with him. “I said no,” she told me. the journey. He and a circle of friends raised all
Julliana Essengue
with her baby Jamer- “When I refused, he forced me, and he slept with me. And later, the money they could, and with that, in January
son and her partner his colleagues came and did the same thing. They raped me. 2020, Essengue left for the US with some of the
Emerson Dalmacy in There were two policemen that took me in another room and women she’d met at the shelter. They were not
Bradenton, Fla. slept with me there. From there, I don’t know what was happen- certain of the routes or their documentation
ing with me. I was feeling sick. All my body was paining me.” or whether they had enough money. As far as
She recalls seeing her uncle at the camp—he had found it while Essengue was concerned, though, getting to the
searching for her, hoping to explain to the officials that she was naive, not political. Es- US was her best chance of survival. “I was just
sengue isn’t sure how many days passed after she was raped before the military released going,” she said. “God was with me.”
her. Her uncle paid 500,000 Central African CFA francs, the equivalent of about $830 Then Essengue met Dalmacy, 43, who had
then, to free her. She was told to leave Cameroon. If she didn’t, the military officials been living in Brazil, first from 2013 to 2016
said, she might end up being taken to Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. “At that time,” she and then again from 2017. Dalmacy planned to
explained, “they were taking people to Yaoundé, and people were not coming back.” live in the United States for a second time. After
Essengue returned home with her uncle, initially to receive medical attention he made it across the border in 2016, he said he
from a neighbor who was a pharmacist. Then, with help from the pharmacist and filled out some paperwork and was allowed to
her uncle, she departed from Cameroon by bus, leaving her two children behind, stay in the US—with conditions. According to
entrusted to her mother’s care. Essengue crossed into Equatorial Guinea. Although Dalmacy, he was given a GPS ankle monitor to
she had her passport, she did not enter the country legally, instead following in- wear for three months and told to check in at
structions from her neighbor to stay with a contact. But this meant she could not the Immigration and Customs Enforcement of-
find work and was afraid to leave the contact’s compound. Immigration authorities fice in Tampa, Fla., every month. But 11 months
were scouring the country for Cameroonians like her. later, during one of his ICE visits, an officer in-
Essengue couldn’t keep living like that, and formed Dalmacy of a letter he
her uncle and neighbor in Cameroon again was supposed to have received
helped, purchasing a plane ticket to São Paulo to see a judge. Dalmacy said he
for her in late October 2019. With Brazil’s never received the letter, and
implementation of a relatively progressive mi- after that he was detained.
gration law in 2017 and its strong diplomatic Dalmacy did not have a
relations throughout Africa, the country be- lawyer, and ICE deported him
came a viable option for asylum seekers from shortly thereafter. Remaining
across the continent. Essengue, however, spoke in Haiti, however, was out of
no Portuguese, didn’t know anybody there, and the question. “The gangs nowa-
had no idea where she could stay. days invade people’s houses and

O
shoot people,” he told me. “And
n the flight to brazil, essengue that happens every day in Haiti.
connected with a fellow passenger. It is the gangs that hold power.”
“I saw one African guy from Sierra A few months after his de-
Leone. So he told me that he had portation, Dalmacy returned
been in Brazil, and I explained to to Brazil. Unlike Essengue, he
him that I’m coming to Brazil, and I don’t know speaks Portuguese, and with
anybody,” she said. “He told me that there’s a approximately 85,000 Haitians
16
migrating to Brazil between 2010 and 2017, he
also had a community. Still, he had family in the
United States, and as the economic boom that
brought Haitians to Brazil in the early 2010s
came to an end, anti-Haitian sentiment rose.
Dalmacy said he also felt unsafe due to street
violence and imagined he could find a safer life
in the United States.
Dalmacy and Essengue don’t know precisely
what first drew them to each other. She is 17
years younger than him. Though he’s fluent in
Creole, Spanish, and Portuguese, his French is
limited and he speaks little English. Essengue A Long Trek
is fluent in English, Cameroonian Pidgin, and Julliana Essengue
French—the language they use to communi- traveled more than
cate, though in a form only the two of them
6,500 miles from
fully grasp.
The pair met at the Brazil-Peru border after
São Paulo, Brazil,
law enforcement stopped the vehicle they were to Bradenton, Fla.
in. Following that encounter, Dalmacy, Es-
sengue, and a few others traveled by bus from
Peru to Ecuador. By the time they arrived in
Colombia, Essengue had run out of cash, but
Dalmacy came to her aid. To continue their follow-the-leader system. They trekked for days before they saw Panamanian mil-
trek, they each paid $40 for passage across a itary personnel and realized they had arrived in the country. The soldiers, who en-
river and waited three days by its bank for the tered the area by helicopter, gave them rice and warned that thieves from Colombia
waves to calm before crossing. Despite this often crossed into the Panama side to target migrants. “They said the Colombian
prudent decision, they did not avoid danger. guys come there, rape people, shoot people, take people’s money,” she said.
When they were on the water, the boat nearly Shortly after that meeting, Essengue’s group came across Colombian men who
capsized. “‘I’m going to die. They will not see fit the Panamanian soldiers’ description. “They did not rape us, I thank God,” she
my body anymore,’” Essengue said she thought said. “Instead, when they saw us, they were afraid.”
to herself. “The water at that place, I don’t Because Dalmacy and two other men in their group were
know if it’s black or blue.” tall, Essengue believes the suspected bandits thought they
Essengue said the turmoil lasted 10 minutes, were part of the Panamanian military. The group informed the
during which time everybody prayed. Had the Colombian men they were migrants looking for help with their
waves been larger that day, she added, they would route, but they didn’t receive any guidance.
have sunk. When they made it across, they were That night they made camp. But they heard strange noises
still in Colombia, with a jungle and mountains and, fearing it was a wild animal, ran back the way they came,
ahead. Essengue did not know it at the time, but only to bump into the Colombians again. This time, for $10 a
she was about to travel through the Darién Gap person, the Colombians let Essengue and her group sleep near
between Colombia and Panama—one of the them for safety. But when another migrant group showed up
world’s most treacherous journeys, with croco- in the morning, the Colombians again demanded money, and
diles in the rivers and bandits on the ground. when the new migrants refused to
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have give them anything, the men began
made the dangerous trip since 2010. According shooting at them. “We were afraid.
to a March 2021 report from Duke University, We started running,” Essengue
three-quarters of these migrants are from Cuba said. “We left them there.” “When I saw that it was
and Haiti, with increasing numbers coming Essengue and her group spent a
from the Indian subcontinent and African coun- week walking in the forest. Although
frightful and dangerous,
tries, notably Eritrea, the Democratic Republic no one she traveled with was killed, I was thinking, ‘I want
of Congo, and Cameroon. Panamanian authorities say more to go back, but am I
Even without knowing about the Darién than 50 people died in the Darién
Gap’s dangers, Essengue was instinctively Gap in 2021, compared with an av- going back alone?’”
afraid. “We were going and going to where erage of 20 to 30 in previous years. —Julliana Essengue
there was no end,” she said. “When I saw that it The group finally reached a
was frightful and dangerous, I was thinking, ‘I camp near a Panamanian military
want to go back, but am I going back alone?’” base. They stayed there for a week and a half, and then at two
Essengue said they crossed waters so dark other camps for a total of about a month, before boarding a bus
they couldn’t see the bottom. They had to step to Costa Rica, having obtained a laissez-passer—a travel permit
from rock to rock across the river, holding on to issued under special circumstances, such as seeking asylum.
trees for balance, each person moving in a slow At the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, they
17
 jumped a fence, only to run into immigration officials. The authorities in Nicaragua Fortunately for Essengue and her group, the
asked each of them to pay $150 before letting them go. Dalmacy again provided informal and seemingly isolated connections
Essengue’s funds. Then the group left for Honduras, where coyotes guided them that made up the network that was in place
through the bush at night. Essengue said she remembers a constant movement of to transport them from Guatemala to Mexico
people and horses. “We were seeing horses coming and going, coming and going. I accomplished their goal. In March 2020, the
don’t know if it’s trafficking or what they are doing,” she said. “In group reached Tapachula, Mexico, which was
that darkness, there are so many things happening.” supposed to be their last major stop before
The coyotes arranged for a car to take Essengue and the the United States. But just as they arrived, the
Mind the gap:
Migrants wait to be group to the Honduras-Guatemala border, where Honduran coronavirus hit.

T
transported to the immigration officials organized their transport to Guatemala.
Migrants Reception The hardships the group faced were no accident. In a 2021 he pandemic forced essengue and
Station in Panama report coauthored by the National Immigrant Justice Center Dalmacy to spend much longer in
after walking through
the Darién Gap.
(NIJC) and FWD.us, a bipartisan group focused on immi- Tapachula than they had anticipat-
gration and criminal justice reform, Azadeh Erfani and Maria ed, the income from working on
Garcia conclude that the migrant relationship between rich the plantation barely meeting their
countries and poor countries is designed to keep those in the needs. As Essengue’s pregnancy progressed,
latter from seeking asylum in the former. FWD.us’s Garcia she and Dalmacy became increasingly anxious
pointed out that for Black migrants in particular, these policies to reach the United States, desperately hoping
prolong their trek, because they often must travel through to avoid traveling with a baby. Meanwhile, the
many more poor countries and dan- Trump administration was issuing sweeping
gerous sites to get to safety. For mi- denials for migrants at the border using Title
grants coming from either Africa or 42, a section of US health law that grants the
the Caribbean, racially prejudiced government the right to block entrance into
policies may keep them longer in the country during public health emergencies.
ROGELIO FIGUEROA / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

“If you are a Black each place they pass through before Title 42 coincided with another policy of
migrant, you can’t hide. reaching their final destinations. “I which Essengue and Dalmacy were unaware:
And Black migrants are think Guerline Jozef from Haitian
Bridge Alliance has said this several
the Migrant Protection Protocols, sometimes
referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” poli-
targeted because of times, but if you are a Black mi- cy, in which certain asylum seekers who pass
the color of their skin.” grant, you can’t hide,” Garcia said. a credible-fear screening are forced to stay
—Maria Garcia, “And Black migrants are targeted in Mexico to await their asylum hearing. (A
FWD.us because of the color of their skin.” credible-fear screening is an interview in which
18
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

an asylum officer establishes whether an in- treated refugees arriving from

dividual’s fear of persecution in their home Cuba—such as offering them a
country is legitimate.) straightforward path to permanent
While there is some data collected on the residency after a short period— “We’re lacking the data
national origin of asylum seekers, there are Haitian asylum seekers were met
no government statistics on how race affects with visa rejections, detention re- in part because the
asylum determinations, and assumptions based quiring a $500 bond for release, system is pretending to
on national origin alone would fail to identify and mass work-authorization deni-
migrants from minority racial groups in their als. These harsh immigration poli- be color-blind and not
home countries. The NIJC’s Erfani said the cies became known as the Haitian tracking by race.”
exclusion of statistics about race may be by de- Program. —Azadeh Erfani,
sign. “We’re lacking the data in part because the Two important cases, Haitian National Immigrant Justice Center
system is pretending to be color-blind and not Refugee Center v. Civiletti (1980)
tracking by race, when, in effect, we’re seeing and Jean v. Nelson (1985), overturned many of the discrimina-
that…people are being treated disparately on tory immigration practices against Haitians. But the victories
account of race,” she said. were short-lived: Instead of criminalizing only Haitians, the
As their limited opportunities in Brazil US government began to target all immigrants. “The Reagan
and the discrimination against them in Mex- administration, after this ruling in Jean v. Nelson, says, ‘Well,
ico demonstrated, poor Black migrants like then we’ll just expand it to everyone. There won’t be a Haitian
Essengue and Dalmacy are at the bottom of a detention program; it’ll be an all-excludable-aliens detention
de facto migrant hierarchy. In their attempt to program,’” said historian Carl Lindskoog, the author of Detain
reach the United States—which is often still and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest
a safer haven than where the migrants came Immigration Detention System. “And so that’s a really tragic
from—the couple would nonetheless be enter- story about how successful legal resistance actually leads to a
ing a country that has historically been hostile proliferation of this system of injustice.”

U
In waiting:
to Black migrants. While the nation’s own his- A Haitian migrant
tory of slavery casts its shadow, the origins of the p to 15,000 migrants, most of them black hai- child eyes the camera
United States’ anti-Black immigration policies tians, assembled this past September under a outside a market in
can also be traced to Dalmacy’s home country of bridge in Del Rio, Tex., after crossing into the Tapachula, Mexico, in
September 2021.
Haiti—more specifically, to the US response country from Mexico. Photojournalists captured
to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, when images of US Border Patrol officers chasing them
Haiti defeated the French to become the first on horseback. Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the
free Black republic in the Americas. Haitian Bridge Alliance, went to the border town to aid the
Under President Thomas Jefferson (1801- migrants, and for her, the racialized experience of these migrants was obvious.
1809), the government, fearing a similar slave “As a Black woman, a Haitian American, I always think and I have asked the ad-
revolt, refused to recognize Haiti, a position ministration, ‘If the people who were under the bridge were coming from Norway,
the US held until 1862. Jefferson also imposed is this how they will have been treated?’” she told me in Del Rio, almost a week after
a devastating embargo on the the news broke.
country from 1806 to 1808, By October 1, about 5,500 migrants in
which hindered Haiti’s ability Del Rio were immediately deported to Hai-
to trade and pay its debts. ti, while 8,000 fled back to Mexico. The rest
France recognized Haiti in were put in removal proceedings and sent
1825, but only on the con- to different cities, their fate eventually to be
dition that Haiti pay for the determined by an immigration judge. One
losses France suffered during of those cities was El Paso, where I met with
the revolution. Together, the Jean-Jacob Jeudy, a retired Haitian Ameri-
United States and France all can US Army captain and a pastor at Walk
but ensured that Haiti would by Faith International Missionary Church.
be impoverished for decades, Since 2016, Jeudy has been providing
if not centuries, to come. This food and using the church to temporarily
contempt toward Haiti has shelter Black migrants. Almost every inch
characterized US-Haiti rela- of the space was filled with migrants—84 in
tions ever since. In 1915, the all, some of them children. He introduced
United States invaded Haiti me to two Haitian migrants: Dumas, 34,
and occupied the country until 1934. From 1957 and Alfond, 29, whose last names are withheld here to protect their identity. Both
to 1986, the US backed the autocratic regimes still wore the navy-blue tops, masks, and ankle monitors mandated in immigration
of François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude. detention. The two men had been in Chile for four years and two years, respectively,
MARCO UGARTE / AP

Between 1960 and 1988, about 125,000 Haitians after leaving Haiti and had made the journey to the United States with their wives
fled the violence of the Duvaliers and the disin- and children. They said their experience during and after Del Rio was traumatizing.
tegration of the Haitian government for the US. “What has saddened me more in the prison, and which will never be removed
In contrast with how the United States from my mind, is that my child was still not doing well,” Alfond said, referring to
19
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

his time in detention for three days Blackburn said. “I naively thought that it would
after being processed in Del Rio. be a warm, loving, Christian kind of supportive
“As the baby was crying, I asked community. Not so much, but she—bless her
“One of the officers for some milk for the baby. One of heart—she made the best of it.”
the officers threw the bottle away Blackburn indicated that Essengue had faced
threw the bottle away and told me that the baby was too racist treatment from some of the women at
and told me that the old to continue drinking milk. That Solve. The church provided her with material
has saddened me a lot. That’s the and legal support, but her future remained un-
baby was too old to biggest humiliation that I have ever certain. Her asylum case would not be decided
continue drinking milk.” had in my life.” for some time, and she would need to find hous-
—Alfond, The men also said they had no ing, earn a living, and provide for her future baby.
a Haitian migrant way to wash themselves or brush In January 2021, Essengue gave birth to a
their teeth during their detention son, Jamerson. She calls him a “miracle baby,”
and that their entire journey through the Americas had been because of everything she went through while
filled with similar treatment. When I asked whether they re- she was pregnant.
gretted attempting to come to the United States, Dumas said Meanwhile, in Mexico, although the US
with little apparent emotion, “We are more obliged to be hu- election had gone the way Dalmacy hoped,
miliated in the United States than elsewhere.” he was still hesitant to apply for asylum. After
It was the same sentiment Essengue and Dalmacy felt when Essengue gave birth, however, he attempted to
they left Tapachula in October 2020, after having spent nearly cross. And in February, he was picked up by the
eight months there. Essengue said she finally obtained docu- Border Patrol. “As soon as I entered the border,
mentation that would allow her to travel within Mexico and I did ask for asylum,” Dalmacy said. “They did
eventually present herself for asylum at the US border. From not give me the opportunity.”
Shameful scene:
A US Border Patrol Tapachula, she took a flight to Mexico City. Dalmacy came If this was as clear-cut as Dalmacy explained
agent tries to stop a with her but was hesitant to go to the US before the election. it, then the authorities violated refugee law. Dal-
Haitian migrant from He hoped that if Joe Biden won the presidency, he would make macy spent almost a month in detention, before
entering an encamp- it easier to declare asylum. They decided to separate: Dalmacy being deported back to Haiti.
ment near Del Rio, Tex.
stayed in Mexico, giving Essengue his cousin’s contact informa- But in early August, when Essengue and
tion in Florida before they parted ways. Essengue took a bus I made plans to finally meet in person after
to Ciudad Acuña, and with help from two Kenyan men, she months of exchanges, she surprised me with
crossed the Rio Grande. some good news: Dalmacy was with her.

B
After walking together for some time, they encountered US Border Patrol of-
ficers. “They asked us, ‘Where are you people going to?’” Essengue said. “We did radenton is less than an hour’s
not say anything. Then they took us to their camp.” drive south from Tampa. When I

A
arrived at her apartment complex
ccording to essengue, the officers took her fingerprints and early on a Friday afternoon in
brought her and the men to a camp. They were given a Mylar blan- September, Essengue was wearing
ket. Later, some officers took her to another camp, where she stayed green pants and an oversize red shirt as she greet-
for three days. Essengue said those 72 hours felt like two weeks, and ed me at the door, baby Jamerson in her arms.
she began to feel ill, even delusional: “You see only the light that is Essengue is about 5-foot-5, with arresting
on the ceiling, but you don’t see the day.” brown eyes. As she took off her mask on the
During her stay, she received some medical attention, and after being interviewed big couch, we reassured each other that we had
and exchanging documentation with the authorities, Essengue presented her asylum been vaccinated. She placed Jamerson in his
claim and was allowed into the US. At the border, she was met by members of an playpen, and for the next three hours she relived
NGO, the name of which she doesn’t remember, although she recalled the name her journey from Cameroon to the US.
of the representative who aided her: Tiffany, Essengue told me the
who helped her travel by bus to the home of church members had rented
Dalmacy’s cousin in Florida. this apartment for her and en-
On October 30, 2020, Essengue left the Bor- sured that all her needs are
der Patrol station where she’d been held. But met, including counseling.
when she arrived in Bradenton, Fla., in Novem- She talked excitedly about the
ber, Dalmacy’s cousin was unable to house her, future: The church communi-
although he did put her up in a hotel. Uncertain ty has organized online classes
of what would come next, Essengue called Tif- for her to obtain a GED. She
PAUL RATJE / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES (2)

fany, who sought help from the Florida Council laughed at her wish to become
of Churches. Trinity Lutheran Church, headed a nurse despite being afraid of
by the Rev. Bobbie Blackburn, heeded the call. blood. She paused periodically
The church community rented an Airbnb for to attend to Jamerson’s cries,
Essengue before putting her in a cost-free ma- but also because sometimes
ternity housing facility called Solve. the enormity of what she went
“It wasn’t what I had hoped, you know,” through overcomes her. She
20
lit up when I asked about life in Cameroon
before the conflict and turned solemn when she
talked about her mother and the two children
she left behind. “I pray, ‘Let them grant me
the asylum to bring my children over,’ because
Cameroon now is really horrible,” she said near
the end of the conversation. “It’s not a place to
stay anymore.”
Dalmacy arrived in the late afternoon. He is
a tall man, much younger-looking than his 43
years. He sat down in a chair opposite Essengue
and me. Since he doesn’t speak much English,
and both his French and mine cannot be trusted
for such a complex conversation, Essengue act-
ed as translator. After his eventual deportation
back to Haiti in February, he said, a near-death
experience was the catalyst for his decision to
flee the country again: “They had killed a gang-
banger right next to me.”
Essengue turned to me and narrated the
story as he told it to her. “Because the bullet hit “We have the elements of TPS, which has to do with temporary inhumane
the intended target, the person fell right in front conditions that are happening [because] of human rights abuses,” Daniel Tse, who
of him. Can you imagine that kind of shock?” founded the Cameroon Advocacy Network, said. “Cameroon meets the criteria
she said. “So he was traumatized again. He felt if for this TPS…. How long do they want to evaluate the country? It’s not that this
he stayed in Haiti, he was going to die.” country doesn’t meet the criteria. It’s just that they don’t want to give it.”

T
Soon after the incident, Essengue said, she
pushed Dalmacy to go to the Dominican Repub- wo days after meeting with essengue and dalmacy in their new
lic and obtain a travel document that would allow home, I attended church with her and Jamerson. Much of the con-
him to enter Mexico. With help from American gregation at Trinity Lutheran was made up of older white adults,
immigration advocates in Mexico, he was al- and many of them surrounded Essengue and Jamerson both before
lowed back in the country at the end of June. and after the 11 am service. I noticed, too, that
In August, the US Department of Homeland the church bulletin invited congregants to “join Julliana
Security announced a new temporary protected Essengue’s team.”
Outrage at the
status, or TPS, for Haitian nationals until Feb- It was the weekend of the 20th anniversary of September border: A US Border
ruary 3, 2023, covering those who’d arrived in 11, and Blackburn’s sermon focused on “drawing our families’ Patrol agent uses his
the United States by July 29, 2021. Dalmacy just circles bigger”—expanding whom we consider family. It would horse’s reins to try to
made the cut and is now navigating the applica- strike me later that throughout my reporting on this article, so deter Haitian migrants
tion process and, thereafter, the one for asylum. many of the migrants’ stories involved depending on people from crossing the Rio
Grande into Texas.
Neither Dalmacy nor Essengue has any guar- they’d just met as if they were family.
antee of a long-term future in the US. Essengue For now, Essengue remains on this side of the border, and
told me she had a court date set for January that she feels like one of the lucky ones: The church community
she was waiting to have rescheduled. In late Jan- has expanded its sense of family to
uary, US Citizenship and Immigration Services include her.
denied her application for a work authorization, Other Black migrants have not
though she said her lawyer will be reapplying. been and will not be as fortunate.
While asylum cases are supposed to be deter- What will become of them? Their “Cameroon meets the
mined within 180 days, there is currently a back- trail of tragedy may end as it began:
log of over 667,000 cases. It could be months or as a nightmare, with them dying on
criteria for TPS. How
years before she and Dalmacy obtain decisions. the journey to safety or spending in- long do they want to
Temporary protected status, which is afforded definite periods in detention. Many evaluate the country? It’s
to citizens from 12 countries including Haiti, will be deported back to the nations
leaves many migrants unable to plan a future here and circumstances that prompt- just that they don’t want
beyond a limited period of time. Yet advocates ed their migration to begin with, to give it.”
like the Haitian Bridge Alliance keep pressing leaving them to decide once again —Daniel Tse,
for an extension for Haitian migrants, while whether to flee or stay where they Cameroon Advocacy Network
others, like the Cameroon Advocacy Network, are—to determine which choice is
are pushing the US government to grant it to the better one for survival. N
Cameroonian nationals. Despite TPS’s uncertain
duration, it could offer Cameroonian nationals This story was published with the support of a fellowship from Colum-
who are already here, like Essengue and others bia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and
arriving at the southern border, some protection. Human Rights.
21
h Noon
to find my address to go to my house.”
Berry was receiving hundreds
of threatening phone messages and
e-mails every day. One text read: “Sleep
with one eye open. I’m coming for
you.” Much of the bile aimed at her,
she recalls, was “really misogynistic.
Think of your most colorful misogy-
nistic language—that’s what came my

in Clallam County way.” Young men in souped-up pick-

up trucks flying American flags would
cruise her neighborhood—her address
was kept private, but her enemies knew
Right-wing demagogues tried to take what part of the county she lived in.
over a small Northwestern town. “My daughter couldn’t go outside, be-
cause we didn’t want people to see
Here’s how concerned citizens stopped them. us,” she remembers. “I was so scared

T H E N AT I O N
I wasn’t sleeping. I’d keep it together

D
BY SASHA ABRAMSKY during the day and cry at night.” Even-
tually, fearing for both her safety and
her mental well-being, Berry and her
r. allison berry sits at a table at the young daughter left the county.
Rainshadow Café in downtown Sequim (pro- Shortly afterward, though, she re-
nounced “Squim”), a 110-mile drive north- turned, defiant. With the additional

2.21–28.2022
west of Seattle, describing the tsunami of staff she’d hired earlier that year, she
hatred that has come her way during the continued her push for mass vaccina-
pandemic. She’s young, smiles a lot, wears woolen sweaters and tions and other pandemic mitigation
scarves, and has been the health officer for Clallam and Jeffer- measures. Dr. Berry’s story was one
son counties since 2018; before that, she was a doctor at a local piece of a complex jigsaw puzzle. Over
clinic run by the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe. the past few years, partly because of
To be able to sit indoors at the café, customers have to show the pandemic and partly because of
proof of vaccination. The mandate was pushed by Berry this past underlying political schisms, Sequim
September following Washington state’s reopening. A subse- had spiraled into crisis.

A
quent Covid surge had swamped the two local hospitals, put all
elective procedures on hold, and led to a fearsome wave of intu- s with port angeles,
bations and deaths. Until the emergence of the vaccine-dodging Port Townsend, and the
Omicron variant, the mandate meant that diners in Clallam other picturesque, historic
County, on the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula, could port cities of the north-
eat and drink in relative safety. ern Olympic Peninsula,
But it also meant that Berry—who had already attracted the Sequim has a cute old downtown and
ire of anti-shutdown advocates in the summer of 2020 when clusters of houses—surprisingly af-
she asked the county to postpone fully reopening business- fordable despite the recent apprecia-
es by two weeks—became a lightning rod for anti-maskers, tion in real estate values—built on the
anti-government militias, and QAnon conspiracists. Unfor- windswept, rainy hills surrounding the
tunately for her, these included Sequim’s QAnon-supporting center of the city. Its main thorough-
mayor—a hairdresser and motorcycle aficionado named Wil- fare, Washington Street, is lined with
liam Armacost—as well as a majority of the city council, three restaurants, high-end cafés, art galleries,
of whose six members had been appointed during Armacost’s and shops. It’s the sort of place where
mayorship when sitting councillors died or resigned. This past retirees and tourists alike come to find
September, hundreds of demonstrators began showing up out- a refuge from high-stress urban living.
side the county courthouse in downtown Sequim. The council Sequim seems an unlikely setting
stood on the sidelines, finally passing a nonbinding resolution for a last stand against a local wannabe
condemning Berry’s public health mandate. strongman. Yet, in fact, it’s bitterly
“People called for my public hanging,” Berry says quietly. divided politically, as is the rest of the
This wasn’t, to say the least, what she had signed up for when she county. The political headline for the
joined the department three years earlier. “It was insane.” When region in the aftermath of the last
Berry implemented the vaccine mandate for indoor dining, presidential election is that Clallam
right-wing websites started focusing on her and the little town County holds the distinction of being
of Sequim. “We started getting calls and threats from way out- the longest-running presidential bell-
side the county. We became a rallying cry for anti-government wether county in the United States.
forces. People were threatening to kill me on Facebook, tried Going into the 2020 election, there
ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN INZANA
23
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

were 19 counties in the nation that had voted for the winner of every presidential his hair salon, located in a semi-residential area
election since 1980, when Ronald Reagan was first elected. Eighteen of those just off Washington Street, a neon-pink sign on
counties, all rural, lost their bellwether status in 2020 by going for Trump. Clallam the door advertised “sexy” haircuts. Inside, the
County became the sole holdout by narrowly supporting Biden. That the mostly mayor, whom I saw working without a mask,
rural county would trend blue in 2020 seemed as improbable as the existence of attended to his equally unmasked clients.
Sasquatch, the legendary creature that lurks in the shadows of the dense rain for- During street protests, the mayor’s sup-
ests of the peninsula but is somehow never clearly captured in photographs. porters weren’t averse to getting into physical
The results of the 2020 election hid a profound ideological and cultural divide tussles with opponents, those opponents allege.
in the remote, watery region that abuts the 96-mile-long windswept Strait of Juan His ally on the city council, the aptly named
de Fuca, which divides the US from Canada. In rural areas, signs were hung among Mike Pence, was caught on a hot mic at the end
the trees with wording like “Trump won the election. Wake up, sheeple.” Pickup of an April 2021 Zoom council meeting having
trucks could be seen with flags urging fealty to the “Trump Revenge Tour 2024.” a discussion with his wife, in which she referred
What was happening in America as a whole, as the to a female opponent, the
country fissured under, and after, Trump’s presidency, outspoken 72-year old pro-
was happening in microcosm in Clallam County. gressive organizer Karen
William Armacost was first appointed to the city Hogan, as a “cunt.”
council in 2018, was elected unopposed to a four-year But perhaps Arma-
term in November 2019, and was finally appointed cost’s most egregious act
mayor by his colleagues in January 2020. After he be- was orchestrating the
came mayor, he was caught on camera pushing a shop- forced resignation of the
ping cart at a Costco wearing a T-shirt emblazoned popular—and extremely
with a Stars and Stripes–painted skull and the words competent—city manager,
“THIS IS THE USA. We Eat Meat. We Drink Beer. Charlie Bush, after Bush
We Own Guns. We Speak English. We Love Freedom. criticized him for urging
If you do not like that GET THE FUCK OUT.” the listeners of a local ra-
Armacost ignored multiple requests to be inter- dio show in August 2020
viewed for this article. When I caught up with him to check out the QAnon
at his hair salon, Changes, late one afternoon in mid- conspiracy theory.
December, he flatly stated that he had no time and wouldn’t agree to an interview What ostensibly sealed Bush’s fate was
either then or at any other time. All of his allies on the city council and in local that he had followed city rules on zoning and
conservative organizations either ignored my interview requests or, when reached permitting, and as a result hadn’t nixed the
by phone, declined to comment. All told, upwards of a dozen conservative activists, Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s efforts to build a
political figures, and lawyers in Sequim and the surrounding area ignored repeated medication-assisted treatment center for opioid
attempts to get them to tell their side of this story. addicts—an important intervention in a county
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, Armacost that posted some of the highest addiction and
Community care: turned up at official city functions wearing a pin on his lapel overdose rates in the state. Opponents, mar-
Dr. Allison Berry, featuring the Marvel Comics character the Punisher, a coded shaled by a nurse named Jodie Wilke—who
the public health
officer for Clallam and shout-out to vigilantism that he claimed simply demonstrated lived not in Sequim but in a nearby town—into
Jefferson counties in his support for law enforcement. As the pandemic raged, a group named Save Our Sequim, or SOS,
Washington state. he logged on to Zoom council meetings while sitting under argued that the treatment center was part of
a large cross at his home—inserting religious iconography a conspiracy by Seattle and other big cities to
into what should have been a secular setting. He ended one dump their homeless and addicted populations
meeting with the cryptic rhyme “Jesus is the reason for the into small communities like Sequim. Backed
season.” According to Marsha McGuire, a former Library of by the mayor and several other councillors,
Congress researcher now living in Sequim, Armacost reposted they descended on council meetings to air their
and retweeted messages in which hostility to George Soros views. (Wilke ignored multiple interview re-
morphed into anti-Semitic rants. When motorcyclists gathered quests for this article.)
by the hundreds of thousands in Sturgis, S.D., in the summer of On SOS’s Facebook page, opposition to the
2020, Armacost made the pilgrim- tribe’s plans frequently degenerated into bar-
age and refused to self-isolate after- rages of racial slurs. Vicki Lowe, the executive
ward despite the fact that the event director of the American Indian Health Com-
was the source of major Covid out- mission for Washington State and a recently
That the mostly rural breaks around the country. When elected Sequim city councillor, who traces her
public health officials urged caution lineage to tribal ancestors as well as to pioneer
county would trend in the face of the Delta variant, he stock, recalls hearing phrases such as “Indian
blue in 2020 seemed appeared at an October 2021 “Cof- idiots” and “playing cowboys and Indians.” She
PENINSULA DAILY NEWS

fee with the Mayor” Zoom meeting once called out SOS at a council meeting by
as improbable as the and stated his opposition to more holding up a series of cardboard signs displaying
existence of Sasquatch. mandates, claiming to have access racist phrases uttered by the group—discarding
to better medical advice than did them one by one à la Bob Dylan in the music
the county public health officer. At video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
24
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

F
or two years, armacost ran sequim to fielding qualified candidates and exorcising the QAnon
like his personal fiefdom, at one time demons from their midst.
subjecting people who called his city “All these conservative people snuck onto the city council
council phone line to a recorded when nobody opposed them,” says Ron Richards, a rug-
message advertising herbal remedies ged 77-year-old onetime Clallam
(“in a capsule or gummy form”) that he was County commissioner who lives in
selling on the side. Armacost’s power was mag- a ranch house at the base of the
nified by the Independent Advisory Association, Olympic Mountains and regularly
a local group run by two longtime conservative hikes miles up into the snows for “All these conservative
operatives, Donnie Hall and Jim McIntire, exercise. “And then they appointed
with a Roger Stone–style take-no-prisoners their friends to government. It re- people snuck onto
approach. The IAA claimed to be nonpartisan, sulted in the most right-wing peo- the city council when
but locals recall that it would turn local political ple you could imagine running the
events into spectacles by red-baiting opponents city of Sequim.” Horrified, Rich- nobody opposed them.”
and accusing critics of being outside agitators. ards got involved in the SGGL. — Ron Richards
When city council seats opened up, as they did “It became apparent we had a
three times in the early days of the Armacost city council that needed to be re-
mayorship, the IAA reportedly groomed po- placed,” says Dale Jarvis, a retiree
tential appointees to be selected by the mayor from the Seattle area who relocated to Clallam County three
and his colleagues. As the pandemic intensified, years ago. “We needed to get them out. We started organizing.”

C
it tapped into public anger over lockdowns in
order to Trumpify government offices along lallam county’s fissures were a long time in
the peninsula. the making. The region contains some of the
When I visited Sequim, both members of most beautiful, dramatic landscapes in the Unit-
the IAA team either declined to be interviewed ed States. Its mountains—inhabited by bears
or ignored my attempts to contact them. But I and cougars—and coastline draw retirees from
know that they received my messages: Shortly around the country, as well as a constant stream of day tourists
after I reached out to them, they or their allies and backcountry hikers looking to explore Olympic National
doxxed me, posting my e-mail address, phone Park. At the same time, it is home to many impoverished fami-
number, and photograph on Facebook, noting lies, blue-collar residents who used to work in the Northwest’s
when I was in town, and urging their support- thriving timber industry until a combination of overharvesting
ers to call and tell me exactly what they thought and stricter environmental protections drove the industry into
of me and The Nation. the ground in the 1990s.
After I e-mailed Hall for comment, he sent The county’s small cities all have charming old downtowns
a long message explaining why he would not that draw in tourists from around the country and the world.
agree to be interviewed. He argued that the New arrivals look to set down roots in a place where, behind
Stars, stripes,
IAA was just “two guys and a website” and the cold, misty veneer, there is natural beauty in abundance. and skulls: Then–
that the organization only wanted to promote There are many huge ranch-style houses, their picture windows Sequim Mayor William
independent, nonpartisan candidates for office. offering spectacular views of the Olympic Mountains, snow- Armacost shopping
I suggested in response that there was a power covered for half the year. It’s no wonder so many retirees—many at Costco, in a picture
taken by a local
struggle taking place on the peninsula, of which bringing with them liberal political priorities from states like resident.
the IAA was a part. “I can’t stop laughing,” Hall California—have moved into the region over the past decade.
wrote back. “Your premises are so out of align-
ment with reality.”
Yet a power struggle there most assuredly
was. Armacost’s ascent to the mayorship was
a red flag. All around Sequim, residents—
whether they had previously been apolitical
or had long been involved in political organi-
zations and protests—reacted in horror to his
bullying persona and far-right antics. “It was
KEITH THORPE / OLYMPIC PENINSULA NEWS GROUP

so raucous, and some of the statements were so

ugly,” says Lisa Dekker, a member of the local
chapter of Indivisible. “It shocked the progres-
sive community.”
In the spring of 2021, several concerned
residents formed the Sequim Good Gover-
nance League (SGGL) with the initial goal of
defending City Manager Charlie Bush from
Armacost’s plan to force his retirement. Once
that ship had sailed, they expanded their focus
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

But in recent years, Clallam found itself caught up in many of the same bat-
County has gained a reputation for tles around public health and the future of the
having some of the highest rates local economy that were reshaping politics in
“People who don’t have of opioid use and overdoses in the
state. In 2019, The Washington Post
neighboring Sequim. City Councillor Lindsey
Schromen-Warwin, an Oberlin- and Gonzaga-
faith in the institutions reported that between 2006 and educated attorney and an avid hiker and wil-
of governance shouldn’t 2012, Clallam County residents derness camper, had been elected during a local
popped 37,838,060 pain pills, which progressive wave in 2017 but found himself in
be in charge of the averages out to a staggering 76.6 a tough brawl for reelection against an IAA-
government.” pills per person per year. Between backed candidate. Schromen-Warwin squeaked
—Bruce Cowan 2012 and 2016, the yearly opioid to victory with a tiny margin. “In 2017,” he says,
overdose rate in the county was 16.5 “I’d gotten the most votes of any city council
per 100,000 residents. member since 2005. In this last race, I won by
These catastrophic numbers led the Jamestown S’Klallam 104 votes—which is way too close for comfort
tribe to propose building its drug treatment clinic, which was when your opponent is the person with a bull-
modeled on a similar clinic opened up by a nearby tribe, the horn trying to shut down the county health
Swinomish, in 2017. “It was very successful,” Vicki Lowe says of commissioner’s forum.”
the Swinomish clinic. “So, of course, Jamestown was like, ‘We Jefferson County, Clallam’s next-door
want to do that too.’” In 2019 and 2020, the tribe went through neighbor, has historically been solidly blue.
all of the correct permitting processes and ended up getting The brick warehouses and canneries that once
approval for the project from the city manager. lined the waterfront of its one sizable city, the
But this triggered the Save Our Sequim–orchestrated back- Victorian-era Port Townsend, have recently
lash led by Wilke, as well as a slew of racist tirades against the been converted into bookstores, art galleries,
tribe at council meetings and protests. “They posted things on and restaurants, and the city has long been a
Facebook every hour, trying to keep the anger up,” Lowe re- bohemian refuge for artists escaping the crowds
Showing up: Sequim calls. “It was very impressive. People who didn’t like that, who and prices of big West Coast cities like Seat-
residents at a Black wanted to see the facility, we had to figure out how to organize.” tle and San Francisco. But Clallam County’s
Lives Matter protest In 2020, Clallam County went for Biden by just over three progressives had not solidified their position
on the town’s main percentage points. Yet that didn’t put the brakes on the slide in the way their Jefferson counterparts had.
thoroughfare.
into political chaos that had begun after Armacost’s election The QAnon movement had made inroads into
and the chance series of events that, over the course of a few Clallam County during the Trump years, and,
months, had led to several ultraconservatives being appointed to the city council— despite showing up for national elections, local
and then forming, with Armacost, a 4-2 voting bloc. In early 2021, even as Biden Democrats were slow off the mark when it came
was beginning his presidency, the little city of Sequim—despite nearly 60 percent to local politics. They didn’t field comprehen-
of its voters having supported Biden—slid toward far-right governance. sive slates of candidates for city council and
Had it happened elsewhere on the peninsula, the capture of a city government other regional offices, apparently not realizing
by the far right might not have been so surprising. After all, Clallam County until late in the day just how much of an elector-
counts among its three cities the ultraconservative al threat the extrem-
community of Forks—where a mixed-race family ists had become.
on a camping trip was accused of being antifa at “It does have a na-
the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in tional ramification,”
June 2020 and was trapped for several hours until says Bruce Cowan,
high school students cut the trees being used to pen a retired elementa-
them in at their campsite. Residents had been on ry school teacher.
high alert for the previous several days after BLM Cowan lives in Port
demonstrations spread across the country. That Townsend and has
same day in the more liberal Sequim, a city of only followed local poli-
8,000, a BLM protest drew hundreds of people. The tics in both Jefferson
protesters were met by camo-wearing, gun-toting and Clallam coun-
militias egged on by Seth Larson, a local gun store ties since he moved
owner who used Facebook and other social media to there in 1977; in his
spread disinformation about BLM and to sow fears retirement, he does
of an antifa-sympathizing mob of looters descending on the peninsula, moving volunteer consulting for progressive political
from Sequim on to Forks. campaigns. “Folks who don’t believe in govern-
MICHAEL DASHIELL / SEQUIM GAZETTE

But Sequim had, in recent elections, looked more like the progressive hub of ment—populists, people who don’t have faith
Port Angeles—a fishing and logging town, population 20,000, from which ferries in the institutions of governance—shouldn’t be
depart daily, their foghorns blaring as they set off to Victoria, British Columbia— in charge of the government. One of the things
than like conservative Forks. that happened in Sequim is that people were
That wasn’t enough, however, to buy immunity from the corrosive politics not engaged enough to see how important it
roiling the country. Both Sequim and Port Angeles experienced political upheavals was to find candidates for city council. Now
in the Trump era. And in 2021, even the usually reliably true-blue Port Angeles they understand the importance.”
26
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

Faced with the very real prospect of Volunteers would get up in the middle of the night to send out e-mail blasts.
QAnoners consolidating power over all tiers They’d drive around town putting up scores of signs for SGGL candidates. Above
of city and county government, the SGGL all, they’d talk with people. For months on end, door-knocking was the chief tool
got busy. Progressive candidates were recruit- that the organization—known to its founders as “the little engine that could”—
ed to run for office; moderate conservatives, relied on.
such as City Councillor Brandon Janisse, were On the night of the election, it became clear that the organizing had paid off.
wooed as voices to counter the IAA; dozens of In one race after another—for city council, for the local school board, for hospital
volunteers were trained to do the on-the- commissioners—SGGL candidates swept aside their IAA-backed opponents.
ground grunt work that can make the dif- “When it turned out to be two-to-one,” Rathbun remembers, his reaction was
ference between a painful election loss and a visceral: “Holy crap! We kicked butt.”
head-turning win. SOS, the IAA, Armacost, and the other conservatives had, for two years, told

F
everyone who would listen that they represented the silent majority of the county,
or concerned locals like lowell that their brand of divide-and-conquer politics was the only brand worth selling.
Rathbun, an engineer by training, But, says McGuire, the former Library of Congress researcher, “At the election we
it had become increasingly difficult proved it: They are not the majority.”
to sit on the fence in 2020 and 2021. When the votes were counted, they showed that the SGGL-backed candi-
With city councillors waging war dates had ridden a wave of genuine popular fury against the faux populists aligned
on the county’s public health department and with Armacost. In Sequim, the five SGGL candidates for city council—Rathbun,
targeted protests occurring against individuals Janisse, Vicki Lowe, Kathy Downer, and Rachel Anderson—all got between 65 and
in that department, this was, they felt, a fight 70 percent of the vote. Both hospital commissioners’ positions in the county went
about civic decency. to SGGL candidates, as did the fire commission and school district posts up for
This past May, Rathbun filed to run for the election last year.
city council. Then, throughout the summer It wasn’t so much that a given ideology triumphed—Iraq War veteran and
and fall, with backing from the SGGL and its county jail control-room technician Brandon Janisse’s conservative leanings are,
growing cadre of canvassers, postcard writers, for example, a far cry from the liberal politics of the tattooed, partly head-shaved
and other volunteers, he got to work. “We or- Rachel Anderson or the longtime tribal health administrator Vicki Lowe—as it was
ganized. I broke the town down into 54 neigh- that people’s better angels burst to the surface. The electorate in Sequim finally put
borhoods, and we worked every one of those the kibosh on Armacost and the Trumpian, QAnonist threat to civic well-being that
neighborhoods,” Rathbun recalls over a beer he and his colleagues embodied.
and mozzarella sticks at the local Applebee’s. (continued on page 30)

T H E N AT I O N A N D “
The Road to Justice
deserves wide distribution
DISTANT HORIZONS in schools, online, and
PRESENT wherever Americans wish to
learn about the past and

”
present of our society.
ERIC FONER, professor emeritus of history, Columbia
University, and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

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27
 President Biden’s
FIRSTYEAR
After a year that began with the Capitol riot

and ended with the Covid revival,

Joe Biden seems headed toward

a remarkably consequential presidency.

But whether as a success

or a failure

remains to be seen...
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

that “science” would govern Covid policy, but

W
the scientists at the CDC and the FDA were far
BY ROBERT L. BOROSAGE too timid and politically inept, exemplified by the
year-long delay before dispensing free N95 masks
and home tests. The foreign policy “Blob” ad-
visers were blindsided when the sudden collapse
ith a mobilized progressive movement at his back, of the Afghan government proved how little we
Joe Biden launched a clear break with the conservative knew about that country after two decades.
consensus that has dominated our politics since Ronald Biden’s unexpectedly bold agenda ran head-
Reagan. However, while this career centrist politician long into the limits of his political majority.
embraced what he called his “Roosevelt moment,” Republicans, literally bereft of a positive agenda
he enjoyed nothing like FDR’s majority in Congress or his connection with vot- other than obeisance to Trump, lined up in
ers. The fate of Biden’s presidency will likely depend not just on whether he can rancorous opposition. Despite the most unified
produce—but on whether the progressive movement that helped bring him into Democratic Party in memory, the 50-50 split
office will be roused once more. in the Senate and the three-vote margin in the
Despite a divided Senate and implacable Republican obstruction, the adminis- House handed immense power to Senators Joe
tration has passed two major investment bills. The American Rescue Plan, hailed by Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and to the Big
Bernie Sanders as the “single most significant piece of legislation for working-class Pharma Democrats in the House. The sordid
people that has been passed since the 1960s,” put money in people’s pockets, helping spectacle of endless Democratic negotiations
to trigger record growth and job creation. The child tax credit would cut childhood with their holdouts was political poison, dis-
poverty in half—if it were extended beyond the year for which it was authorized. tracting from Republican obstruction and mak-
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides a long-overdue down payment on ing the president look weak.
necessary investment in rebuilding America. The centerpiece of Biden’s agenda, his But Biden didn’t help. This lifelong transac-
Build Back Better bill, was torpedoed by Joe Manchin, tional politician’s inabili-
but its remnants may still provide the first major com- ty to reach—or force—a
mitment to addressing the climate challenge. deal with Manchin was
Biden—who campaigned as a moderate and famous- inexplicable, and he was
ly promised donors that “nothing fundamentally would also far too cautious in
change”—broke openly with the shibboleths of the exercising his executive
conservative era. He championed public investment to authority: The Depart-
meet the Covid threat and industrial policy to meet the ment of Education, for
challenge posed by climate change and by China. In the example, is still study-
face of corrosive inequality, he called for expanding the ing whether to fulfill
social safety net and hiking taxes on his promise to forgive
Bad timing: corporations and the wealthy. He $10,000 in student loan
Biden’s Atlanta offered vocal support to unions and debt. Worse, he flunked
speech on the worker organizing. His appoint- the primary task of a
importance of voting
rights was powerful, ments and executive orders signaled transformational presi-
persuasive—and a revival of antitrust actions to take on corporate monopoly and dent: to establish a direct connection with the
far too late to make corruption. His administration forged a global minimum tax on American people. While benefiting from the
a difference. corporations and sustained Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, break- contrast with Trump’s chaos, Biden failed to
ing with the free trade gospel of neoliberalism. communicate clearly and repeatedly about the
In foreign policy, Biden finally ended the forever war in challenges we face, name the ideas and interests
Afghanistan. He rejoined the World Health Organization and to blame, or boldly lay out what can be done.
the Paris Agreement on climate and extended the New START Those failures, compounded by a gotcha main-
nuclear arms treaty with Russia. He named climate change as an stream media, magnified every setback.
existential threat and corruption as a threat to democracy. The divided Senate rendered impossible the
LEFT: CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: PATRICK SEMANSKY / AP

Biden’s policy initiatives were structural reforms vital to consolidating a new

popular but inadequate, a testament change majority—ending the filibuster, safeguard-
to the depth of the hole we are in. ing voting rights, changing labor laws to empower
The “Biden boom”—5.5 percent workers, pushing statehood for D.C. and Puerto
The president’s most growth, unemployment plummeting Rico—that might alter the calculus in the Sen-
at a record pace, wages increasing, ate. Biden did well by appointing lower court
costly failures came particularly at the bottom end—was judges diverse in gender, race, and background—
in the areas run by marred by rising inflation, particu- but balked at expanding the Republican-packed
establishment officials— larlyIronically, in vital food and gas prices.
his most costly failures
and politically reactionary Supreme Court.
Biden added climate change and fighting
the supposed “adults came in the areas run by establish- corruption to his foreign policy agenda, but
in the room.” ment officials—the supposed “adults great-power tensions with China and Rus-
in the room”—appointed in the wake sia took precedence. Our bloated military
of Trump’s clown show. He pledged budget—greater than at the height of the Cold
29
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

War—passed with bipartisan support. America’s empire of bases (continued from page 27)
remains intact—augmented by the buildup in the South China Sea. “Four of the SGGL candidates are left-leaning. I’m
What of the movements that propelled Democrats to take right-leaning,” Janisse says. “But they endorsed me because of
the House, the Senate, and the presidency? The young see little how I think government should be run at the local level. We’re
progress on climate or on college affordability. Women see the worried about ‘Are the roads paved? Are the alleys good? Do you
right to abortion in peril. Progress on prison and police reform have sidewalks? Are the sewers not spraying leaks everywhere?’”
has been minimal, while immigration and labor law reform were For Dr. Berry, as the tide turned against the vocal right-
taken off the table by the Senate parliamentarian, a congressional wingers who had held Sequim hostage through 2020 and 2021,
bureaucrat. Meanwhile, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Wall Street, and her correspondence from residents shifted from a daily barrage
the military-industrial complex continue to make out like bandits. of threats to something rather different. At some point last fall, a
The contrast with Trump is stark. Despite its chaos, incompe- contingent of elderly people began writing letters to her and her
tence, and corruption, the Trump administration was dedicated public health colleagues expressing how much they appreciated
to delivering for its base: packing the Supreme Court for evan- the public health staff. Anonymous residents would swing by the
gelicals, passing tax cuts for corporations and the country club office and leave bouquets of flowers. “A good thing happened:
set, paying off entrenched interests from the military to Big Ag, There was a counterresponse in the community,” Berry recalls
and more. After Trump’s defeat, his Big Lie fueled and focused his with a smile. “It was incredibly heartening.”
movement’s anger. At the national level, craven Republican offi- On January 11, Armacost was voted out of the mayorship by
cials blocked voting reform, while state officials scrambled to rig his fellow city councillors, the majority of whom had been en-
the rules through partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and dorsed by the SGGL in the recent elections. The only councillor
empowering state legislatures to overturn election results. to vote in favor of Armacost remaining as mayor was Armacost
The Biden administration heads into its second year with the himself. The ousted mayor, his firebrand politics having been
president’s approval rating plummeting toward Trump levels. firmly rejected by the electorate, was replaced by Tom Ferrell,
The GOP’s base is aroused, while the Big Lie has alienated few a somewhat conservative but non-QAnon-supporting longtime
traditional Republicans. In contrast, progressive movements are member of the council, who had been nominated by both
demoralized. Inflation saps Downer and Rathbun. Janisse was elected as his deputy.
the joy of the recovery. The For the SGGL-backed candidates now in the majority, it
chances of holding the House represents a new beginning, a chance to restore competent,
and Senate seem dim. If Re- get-things-done local government. “We have issues here,”
Joe Manchin had publicans win either, progress says Lowe. “Housing issues. We have to work on bringing our
will depend solely on what community back together.” For Downer, a nurse who served
one thing right: The Biden is prepared to do with as a city councillor in the little town of Marietta, Ohio, before
only way to drive his executive authority. retiring and moving to Sequim to be near her children, her role
Still, a failed presidency in city governance in her new home means that she, too, can
the reform agenda is not inevitable. Forcing focus on affordable housing. “When you can’t find housing for
is to elect more votes on each popular ele- your nurses, policemen, firemen, and teachers—that’s a horrific
ment of the Build Back Bet- situation,” she says. Rathbun, who was widowed suddenly during
progressives—and ter package—particularly the the campaign and has since thrown his heart and soul into his
to take out those child tax credit, prescription political work, wants to focus on housing as well. But after
drug reform, and paid fami- being the target of death threats, he is at least as desperate to
legislators who are ly leave—would expose who restore faith in the basic workings of the democratic system and
standing in the way. stands in the way. The active to find a way to dial down the fear and invective that saturates
use of executive authority the social-media-dominated political discourse. “I would like to
could demonstrate what side see a healing in this town. We can’t have red and blue Sequim.
Biden is on—from forgiving student loan debt to protecting We have to have Sequim Sequim—and somehow start talking
workers on the job. Aggressive antitrust action could help deter to each other about what we have in common.” Janisse, with his
price gouging, and if Covid and inflation subside, Biden may get blue-collar roots, wants to focus on affordable housing and on
credit for the strong recovery. changing zoning regulations to encourage the building of more
Historically, transformational presidencies are driven by move- high-density, multifamily units. And 31-year-old Rachel Ander-
ments on the ground: the abolitionists for Lincoln, the labor son, a Head Start volunteer who was appointed to the council
movement for FDR, civil rights for Johnson. Movements broad- in early 2021 (Armacost was apparently unaware of her liberal
cast the need for change, popularize the agenda, mobilize voters. political leanings), wants to focus more on children’s issues, as
The fate of the emerging progressive majority and reform project well as on affordable housing and local health safety measures.
will depend significantly on how progressive movements—from “I think we’ll be more productive and actually make decisions
climate activists to Black Lives Matter—respond to the right-wing that mean something,” Anderson says of the SGGL’s victory, “in-
threat and the frustrating obstruction by all Republicans and two stead of saying, ‘We don’t like this.’
corrupted Democrats in the Senate. In the end, Joe Manchin had “I feel like there’s a lot more middle ground,” she continued.
one thing right: The only way to drive the reform agenda is to “I can only hope that, with a change in local leadership, there’s a
elect more progressives—and to take out those legislators standing change in the local political climate. I’ve worked with kids a lot,
in the way. The energy for that won’t come from a corrupted and and a lot of the time during council meetings, it felt like children
cosseted Democratic establishment—or from the White House. It throwing a tantrum. Now, with the change in leadership, it feels
will only come from the ground up. N like I’m having an adult conversation.” N
30
 “An activist. An author.
A scholar. An abolitionist.
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n january 2020, just days before the

The University
Crisis
Does the pandemic mark a
breaking point?
BY ANDREW DELBANCO
i first case of Covid-19 was identified in
the United States, Bryan Alexander,
a scholar at Georgetown University
known as a “futurist,” published a new
book, Academia Next: The Futures of
Higher Education. Alexander made no claim to clairvoy-
ance, only to “trend analysis and scenario creation.” But
one of his scenarios showed startling foresight:
Imagine a future academy after a major pandemic has struck
the world…. Would distance learning grow rapidly as people
fear face-to-face learning because of perceived contagion
risk?… How would we take conferences and other forms of
32 professional development online?… Would athletes refrain
from practice and play for fear of contagion, or would both
ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN JOHNSON
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

institutions and the general public demand more college sports as an inspirational for its endowment and current use (over
sign of bodily vigor in the context of sickness and death? $5 billion in its most recent campaign) and
attracts international as well as out-of-state
By the spring of 2020, these questions were no longer hypothetical. Classrooms emp- students at higher tuition rates than those
tied as “distance learning” became almost universal. Conferences moved online. Some charged to Michigan residents.
athletic programs canceled competition, while others kept up normal play and travel At private nonprofit colleges, which
(and partying) despite the risk. are often accused of charging exorbitant
Although the pandemic is far from over, the business of predicting what universities prices, fewer than one in six students pay
will look like after it’s gone is now in high gear. As early as the fall of 2020, months be- the published amount. Net tuition and
fore the first vaccines rolled out, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a booklet fees—the amount of revenue received af-
of essays titled The Post-Pandemic College, followed by (virtual) conferences on “The ter discounts in the form of full or partial
Post-Pandemic Campus” and “Higher Education and the Post-Pandemic Employer.” scholarships—have therefore been virtually
Thanks to vaccine reluctance, the Delta and Omicron strains, and the specter of new flat for decades, even while costs were ris-
variants, we’re still a long way from “post”—as of last fall only about half the jobs in high- ing. Over the coming decade, many small
er education that were lost to layoffs or colleges with modest reputations will likely
furloughs had been recovered, and student by more than 15 percent (adjusted face enrollment shortfalls due to regional
enrollment remains down by over one for inflation); meanwhile, tuition population shifts as well as the broad de-
million since the fall of 2019. But while and fees rose even faster, feeding cline in birth rates that followed the Great
we wait, any effort to envision the future the growth of personal debt that Recession of 2008. In short, except for the
ought to begin with some facts about the falls disproportionately on low- and most prominent institutions, and despite
recent past and the present. middle-income families. infusions of federal aid since Covid’s out-
Here are a few: break, many private and public colleges will
These are snapshots of an education find themselves in a battle to stay solvent.
• Ninety-five percent of US col- system that is profoundly and increasingly There is a racial dimension to this story
leges and universities have an en- stratified. If higher education once helped as well. In a valuable new book, Broke: The
dowment equivalent to less than 1 to reduce inequities in American life, it now Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public
percent of Harvard’s. too often sustains and fortifies them. Like Universities, Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly
• Some elite institutions spend more our health care system, it delivers concierge Nielsen write that “for most of the twen-
than $100,000 a year per student, services to the affluent while consigning tieth century, families of color, as part of
which means that even students low- and modest-income Americans to the tax base, were paying for wealthy white
who pay the full “sticker price” overcrowded or underfunded facilities. And students to attend universities where their
(around $75,000 in the Ivies) are the disparities are getting worse. In Unequal own offspring were not welcome.” But
subsidized, while most community Colleges in the Age of Disparity—published over the past four decades, as the numbers
colleges can spend only $10,000 to five years ago—Charles Clotfelter doc- of African American, Latinx, and students
$15,000 per student. umented this “re-sorting of customers” of Asian origin were rising, higher educa-
• Eighty percent of students en- upward and downward: At elite private col- tion funding was falling. It’s a suspicious
rolled in a community college— leges, the average family income of students symmetry. Under the old funding model,
around 7 million, the majority from has “surged ahead of the national mean,” “affluent whites would need to help pay
low-income, minority, or immigrant while students attending colleges with for the postsecondary education of Black
families—hope to earn a bachelor’s fewer resources lag ever farther behind. and Brown youth, as well as the white
degree, but fewer than 15 percent America’s top-ranked universities position working class. This did not happen.” In
succeed in doing so within six years. their mostly affluent students to accrue yet California between 1970 and 2014, the
• Low-income students with high more wealth, influence, and power, while share of the state budget devoted to higher
grades and test scores in high school far too many who attend institutions that education fell by nearly a third, while the
are nearly 20 percent less likely to stand lower in the hierarchy of prestige are share for prisons more than doubled. The
enroll in college than affluent stu- burdened by debt and struggle to graduate. effect—if not necessarily the intent—has
dents with low grades and scores. In the public sector, many regional been to place a heavy burden on students
• Students from families in the top universities are in trouble. A study from with comparatively limited income and as-
1 percent income bracket are almost 2019 classified a growing number of these sets, of whom a disproportionate number
80 times more likely to attend an institutions as “vulnerable,” meaning they are students of color.

A
Ivy League or other highly selective could be headed for contraction or even
college than those from families in closure. Institutions such as Central Mich- ll of these inequities have
the bottom 20 percent. igan University, where I met impressive been made worse by the
• Between 2008 and 2015, average students from high-poverty cities like pandemic. At wealthy in-
state appropriations per full-time Flint, face the dual challenge of declining stitutions like the Ivies, the
student at public universities fell public subsidies (in Michigan over the past problems are temporary.
20 years, state funding per student has Rather than start out their college days in
Andrew Delbanco teaches at Columbia. His most fallen 40 percent) and a projected decline the fall of 2020 on Zoom, some
recent book is The War Before the War: Fugi- in enrollment. By contrast, the University
tive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul. of Michigan at Ann Arbor raises large sums
newly admitted students took a
“gap year,” while others already
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enrolled went on a leave of absence, and foreign students found themselves unable to scramble. (Before the pandemic, my own
obtain visas. Top universities took hits as well on the expense side of the ledger in the university, Columbia, was charging more
form of unanticipated costs, such as administering Covid tests and enhancing digital than $10,000 for three weeks.) Still others
technology to facilitate remote teaching. But the costs were manageable, enrollments are enticing older customers into mas-
have bounced back, and in 2021 large endowments generated spectacular returns, in ter’s degree programs that charge scores
some cases growing by billions of dollars. of thousands of dollars for a credential of
Below the elites, the damage was much more severe and lasting. The number of 2021 dubious worth.

T
high school graduates filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid dropped
by 5 percent, which corresponds to roughly 100,000 low-income students who might he most effective strategy
have planned to attend college but have given up, at least for now. As for those already for balancing the books,
in college, Georgia State University, which serves a large population of Black, Latinx, however, is one that threat-
and low-income students, is both a hopeful and a cautionary example. A national leader ens to destroy the insti-
in using digital data to identify students who need timely academic help, financial assis- tutions it’s meant to save:
tance, or supportive counseling, Georgia State has made remarkable gains in academic namely, making deep cuts in the instruc-
performance and graduation rates over the past decade; but during the first pandemic tional budget. For many Americans, the
year, the number of dropped courses exceeded those of the previous academic year by word “professor” conjures up the image of
more than 30 percent. This means a longer road to graduation—a road from which many celebrity scholars shuttling between Aspen
first-generation, low-income, and minority students are at risk of being blocked. and Davos while a squad of teaching as-
As the pandemic took hold, it drove sistants does the scut work with students
down enrollments in community colleges can’t boast about how many applicants back home. This is a grotesque distortion.
by more than 10 percent. At the 10 com- they turn away, as the Ivies love to do. In fact, roughly two-thirds of college pro-
munity colleges in the City University of Instead, they struggle to attract enough fessors work today as adjuncts on con-
New York system, where dropout rates had students to cover operating costs. They tingent contracts—at community colleges,
been over 50 percent even before Covid, often have no choice but to provide incen- the figure is at least 70 percent—not a few
thousands of students—many of whom (or tives for relatively affluent candidates by of whom teach five or more courses per
their family members) lost jobs when the offering discounts (known as “merit aid”), semester, sometimes at more than one in-
restaurant and retail sectors imploded—had while pulling back from recruiting those stitution, in the hope of cobbling together
no access to an ade- who could attend only a living wage. For many, the workload is
quate Internet device or if offered bigger dis- overwhelming, the pay is meager, the bene-
Wi-Fi connection. The counts or a total waiv- fits are minimal, and tenure is a pipe dream.
political scientist Co- The most effective way to er (“need-based aid”). In a darkly prescient book, The Last
rey Robin, who teaches balance the books is also Long before Covid, the Professors, published more than a decade
at CUNY’s Brooklyn diversion of financial ago, Ohio State English professor Frank
College, wrote a pun- the most efficient way aid from needy to less Donoghue noted that “the dismantling of
gent response to the to destroy the university. needy students was al- the American professoriate is part and par-
president of Brown ready a national trend, cel of the casualization of labor in general.”
University, who had recommended that col- and there’s every reason to expect it to ac- In the national context of weakened unions,
leges control Covid outbreaks by deploying celerate—with the result, as Martin Kurz- outsourcing, and layoffs as means to protect
tracing technology and quarantining sick weil and Josh Wyner put it, that “rich kids shareholder profits, making the case that
students in hotels. Brooklyn College, Robin are eating up the financial aid pot.” academics deserve singular job security is a
pointed out, can’t afford contact tracers or Other revenue-raising and cost-cutting tough sell. When the case is made, it’s usu-
hotel rooms; it doesn’t even have bathrooms strategies are being tested. In the hope of ally on behalf of academic freedom, which
where the water runs reliably hot. The attracting students by lowering the pub- has been the chief rationale for tenure since
typical student doesn’t live in a dorm, and lished tuition price, some colleges have the outbreak more than a century ago of
if she falls sick, she “will, in all likelihood, abandoned the high-tuition/high-discount what the historian Walter Metzger called
end her day where it began: at home with financial model altogether. Others are try- “ideological conflict between academic so-
her family.” ing to reduce duplicative hiring, for exam- cial scientists and trustees of wealth.”
In other words, Covid has turned the ple, by sharing language instruction with The incendiary event occurred in 1900
gap between institutions serving main- nearby colleges. In order to conserve fel- in the person of Edward Ross, a Stanford
ly privileged students and those serving lowship funds, some research universities University sociologist who favored public
needy ones into a chasm. Some of the most temporarily suspended graduate student ownership of utilities, regulation of rail-
acute problems—student anxiety, faculty admissions in the humanities and social roads (from which Stanford derived its
fatigue—don’t appear as numbers on any sciences. A few institutions—Mills Col- wealth), and a ban on Asian immigration
balance sheet. But even for problems that lege and Northeastern University; Marl- as a source of cheap labor. When the
can be quantified, most colleges have few boro College and Emerson College—have university president came under pressure
and poor tools for addressing them. Except formally merged. Name-brand colleges from Mrs. Stanford to get rid of him, Ross
for the elite privates and flagship publics, are cashing in on the college admissions resigned, followed by colleagues who left
most colleges can’t simply open frenzy by offering high-priced summer in protest, including the great intellectual
34 the spigot to increase the inflow “immersion” programs to affluent high
of tuition-paying students. They school students seeking advantage in the
historian Arthur O. Lovejoy, who later
helped found the American Association
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

of University Professors (AAUP) on two in some cases (Johns Hopkins, Clark), the or need it repeated or presented in a dif-
principles still pertinent today: that ten- number of undergraduates was between ferent way. The Stanford physicist Carl
ure is necessary to protect “freedom of negligible and zero. In 1900, in the entire Wieman believes that “university teaching
teaching and research and of extramural United States, there were approximately is in the early stages of a historic transition,
activities” and is also a way to provide “a 200,000 college students. Today there are changing from an individual folk art to a
sufficient degree of economic security to around 16 million. Yet under the ten- field with established expertise, much as
make the profession attractive to men and ure system inherited from a century ago, medicine did 150 years ago.”
women of ability.” college faculty—most of whom, as the It is heartening that the STEM fields—
In our own era—when some pundits economist Noah Smith has written, “have which attract many first-generation col-
and opportunistic politicians on the right been essentially hired to be teachers”—are lege students but then tend to discourage
are trying to dictate what can be taught, still compelled to “prove their suitability them—may be shifting their teaching cul-
while some students and feckless faculty for the job by doing research.” As a result, ture from weed-them-out to help-them-
on the left are trying to police what can many good teachers who do little research learn. But it’s not clear that the recent
be said—the first rationale is more com- are denied tenure, while weak teachers explosion of work in the neuroscience of
pelling than ever. As for the second, the who do lots of research achieve it. cognition—lucidly reviewed in Grasp: The

S
distinguished chemist Holden Thorp— Science Transforming How We Learn by San-
formerly chancellor of the University of uch an outcome may be jus- jay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto—has done
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and pro- tifiable at institutions whose much to modify the basic insight shared
vost of Washington University; now the primary function is the pro- by all good teachers since Socrates: that
editor of Science magazine—has a sharp re- duction of new knowledge. to teach well is to ask questions or pose
tort for opponents of tenure who “lament More broadly, however, it problems that prompt students to reflect
the job security that they feel is exploited is not only unjustifiable but unjust. As the and respond with words, numbers, or oth-
or not earned”: University of Wisconsin philosophy pro- er expressive symbols, including the non-
fessor Harry Brighouse points out: discursive languages of the arts. A good
Ask them if they can think of any teacher will meet each response with more
other jobs that pay what an entry Instructional quality is the most questions, hoping to inspire students with
assistant professor in the human- neglected—and perhaps the most the excitement of discovering that the chain
ities pays with 10 years of postbac- serious—equity issue in higher ed- of questions has no end.
calaureate training and hundreds of ucation. Good instruction benefits The sociologist Steven Brint has pro-
applicants for every slot? And the so- everyone, but it benefits students posed some steps that would help provide
called exploitation? For every senior who attended lower-quality high this experience to as many young people
faculty member phoning it in, 10 are schools, whose parents cannot pay as possible. These include restoring robust
serving on every committee, teach- for compensatory tutors, who lack funding for regional public institutions;
ing extra courses, and still doing re- the time to use tutors because they doubling the maximum award amount of
search. It’s [tenure that is] a bargain. have to work, and who are less com- the federal Pell Grant for low-income stu-
fortable seeking help more than it dents, which once covered three-quarters
But because the job market for recent benefits other students. of the average tuition at public universities
PhDs is saturated, especially in the human- but now covers only 30 percent; making
ities and social sciences, universities are of- There is some reason to hope that tenure, repayment of student loans contingent on
ten able to avoid the tenure system and hire or at least renewable extended contracts, post-college income; and extending eligi-
contingent faculty at even lower pay. Under may become less strictly tied to research bility for tenure to adjunct faculty based on
these conditions, tenure is a bargain to productivity. For example, Worcester Poly- the quality of their teaching. For its part,
which more and more institutions are say- technic Institute recently announced the the AAUP is calling for “A New Deal for
ing no. In some fields the market for stable, creation of 45 tenure lines for faculty who Higher Education,” which would provide
decently paid teaching positions has all but “specialize in teaching.” And following a federal tuition subsidies, student loan for-
collapsed—one consequence of which is number of “J’accuse” books published over giveness, and support for staff and campus
the growing push for unionization among the last 15 years, including Derek Bok’s Our infrastructure. There have also been calls to
graduate students who have scant hope of Underachieving Colleges and Richard Arum restrict eligibility for federal funds to insti-
an academic career after putting in years of and Josipa Roska’s Academically Adrift: Lim- tutions that award tenure to some mandat-
advanced study and “apprentice” teaching. ited Learning on College Campuses, there has ed percentage of their faculty.
Meanwhile, for the shrinking fraction been a growing effort to assess and improve Given the divisions within the Dem-
of young faculty who do manage to obtain college teaching, even at institutions whose ocratic Party and the battered reputation
tenure-track jobs—jobs, that is, leading to core mission is research. Some teachers in of higher education among large sectors
an “up or out” moment when their con- the burgeoning fields of STEM (science, of the public, these proposals face daunt-
tract is either terminated or indefinitely technology, engineering, and mathematics) ing odds. Still, despite the excision of free
extended—the criteria for promotion and are discarding hour-long lectures in fa- community college from the Biden admin-
retention typically have little to do with vor of shorter segments on discrete topics, istration’s stalled Build Back Better bill,
how well they are serving students. The breakout groups, frequent quizzes, and dig- the next iteration of the proposed
idea of tenure is an artifact of the early
20th-century research university, where,
ital feedback systems that tell the instructor
whether students have grasped the material
legislation still seems likely to in-
crease the purchasing power of
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Pell Grants and include funds for programs

the
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profit competitor, edX, a partnership be- tion,” and “catalyze innovative knowledge
aimed to improve college retention and tween Harvard and MIT. Suddenly star production as well as its dissemination to
completion rates, as well as for infrastruc- professors were signing up as independent an increasing proportion of citizens.” Bur-
ture and financial aid at historically Black contractors to teach everything from as- ied in this technocratic prose is the news
colleges and universities, tribal colleges, trophysics to lyric poetry through so-called that previously excluded or underserved
and Latinx-serving institutions. massive open online courses, or MOOCs. students will be reached mainly through

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There was high-minded talk about how “technologically enabled delivery”—a eu-
ell before the pandemic hit, this new disruptive form would help de- phemism for online instruction.
serious commentators— mocratize education by reaching anyone Paul LeBlanc, the president of South-
including some academic anywhere on the globe with an Internet ern New Hampshire University, speaks
leaders—were predicting connection and an appetite to learn. Stan- more plainly but with comparable ambi-
that colleges and universi- ford president John Hennessy predicted tion to extend the reach of higher educa-
ties as we’ve known them are destined for a “tsunami” of technological innovation tion. Southern New Hampshire offers a
oblivion, and that any effort to stabilize that would sweep away all but a few super- curriculum taught almost entirely online,
or reform them is a proverbial case of wealthy colleges and universities. But on- mainly by part-time faculty, to 135,000
rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. line education has not brought about a new students, many of whom are older than
An early version of this view was set era of democratic higher education—at traditional college age, have limited
forth in the mid-1990s by the late Har- least not yet. Most consumers of MOOCs resources, and whose work and family
vard Business School professor Clayton turned out to be not young people looking responsibilities don’t fit the constraints of
Christensen, who advanced a theory of for a substitute for traditional college but conventional campus life, such as daytime
“disruptive innovation” in which new en- professionals looking for career advance- in-person classes.
terprises target customers who have limited ment. Coursera is increasingly a global Most traditional institutions continued
resources and bring “to market a product service for businesses, governments, and to ignore or condescend to these alter-
or service that is not as good as the best credentialed individuals, though it contin- native forms of college until mid-March
traditional offerings but is more affordable ues to provide a platform through which 2020, when the pandemic sent students
and easier to use.” Gradually, this low-end universities offer cours- and faculty rushing
service improves in quality and appeal until es and programs. It almost overnight into
higher-end providers embrace and adapt it. has raised hundreds distance learning—or,
For higher education, that disruptive inno- of millions in venture as some prefer to call it,
vation was online instruction, deployed by capital from investors “emergency remote in-
for-profit “universities” like the University betting that “these new struction.” People like
of Phoenix and initially sneered at in estab- alternative education me, for whom “Zoom”
lished institutions as a tacky product not to models are the future used to mean the sound
be taken seriously. of how people will be of a motorcycle or a car
Over the ensuing 25 years, “distance trained up for the la- with a punctured muf-
learning,” as it came to be known, made bor market.” This past fler, suddenly found
significant inroads into higher education— summer, Harvard and ourselves, like it or not,
even before Covid, 40 percent of students MIT sold edX to the The Zoom experiment teaching online. After
had taken at least one online course—at for-profit company 2U has worked in some a two-week hiatus be-
first almost entirely through the private for $800 million (a tidy tween the shutdown
for-profits. Lightly regulated during the return on their initial ways but not in others. of classes and their re-
Clinton and Bush administrations despite $30 million invest- sumption on the Inter-
their predatory recruitment practices, these ment), promising to use the proceeds for net, my students and I felt like friends who
for-profit “universities” played a dispropor- “transforming educational outcomes” and had been scattered by a storm and reunited
tionate role in driving up student debt. As “tackling learning inequities”—whatever in a shelter.
Tressie McMillan Cottom reports in her exactly that means. With a variety of mask and vaccine
aptly titled book Lower Ed, by 2008 more Though the MOOCs have so far failed mandates now in place, most colleges have
low-income Black and Latinx women were to shake up universities to anything like the nervously resumed in-person teaching, but
attending for-profits than were enrolled extent predicted, online instruction in other a full return to the status quo ante seems
in four-year private and public nonprofit forms is growing. The audaciously inven- unlikely. The Zoom experiment showed
institutions combined. tive president of Arizona State University, that even where physical space is scarce, it’s
By the late 1990s, established universi- Michael Crow, speaks of a “fifth wave” of possible to find breakout rooms for small
ties were also taking tentative steps into on- American higher education (the first four group discussions and to accommodate stu-
line teaching. Columbia led a failed attempt were colonial colleges, state universities dents with long commutes or mild illness
to market online courses through an entity founded in the early republic, land-grant who might otherwise be absent. Zoom
called Fathom.com, which folded in 2003. institutions following the Civil War, and made it easier to include guest speakers in
By 2012, two for-profit start-ups—Coursera research universities in the 20th century) class and harder for shy students to hide in
and Udacity—had been launched that will “redress the inequities associat- the back of the room, because in a Zoom
36 by entrepreneurs at Stanford and
Google, followed shortly by a non-
ed with the hierarchical differentiation of room there’s no front or back. On the
sectors, or vertical institutional segmenta- other hand, the screen is just that: a filter
BLACK HISTORIES, BLACK FUTURES
AMERICAN HISTORIES AND FUTURES OF RESISTANCE

“A righteous indictment of “This essential collection of

racism and misogyny.” Lawson’s visionary teaching is
—Publishers Weekly “A legend in the making!” more necessary today than ever.”
—DJ Kool Herc, The Father of Hip Hop —Marian Wright Edelman,
“We are better because of this book.” founder and president emerita,
—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Children’s Defense Fund
How to Be an Antiracist

“An indispensable addition to NEW FOREWORD BY

GERALD EARLY
the canon of work on Black
masculinity.” NEW IN PAPERBACK ‘’A rich and valuable reminder
—William Jelani Cobb, author of The
“A beautiful and moving book.” of how limited our progress has
Substance of Hope: Barack Obama been since the late 1960s.”
and the Paradox of Progress —Peace News
—New York Times

www.ucpress.edu
 B&A
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or barrier that screens both teacher and student from the serendipitous effects of gesture, (1) convenience, (2) service, (3) a quality
body language, and eye contact, making the relation less immediate and more impersonal. product, and (4) low cost.”
Though it’s hard to distinguish from the many forms of exhaustion induced by the pan- For faculty, this brave new world won’t
demic, “Zoom fatigue” feels very real. be a hospitable place. During the initial
One of the unfulfilled hopes of online instruction has been its promise to slow the rise excitement over MOOCs, Stanford’s John
in college costs and thereby make higher education more accessible to students with few Hennessy predicted that faculties would
resources. But with specialized exceptions like the online master’s degree in computer sci- shrink as technologies grow. As AI takes
ence offered by Georgia Tech, the prospect of matching affordability with quality remains over more and more human functions, a
elusive. At the outset of the pandemic, after the shift to online classes, a few mega-rich lot of college professors—much like ra-
institutions announced temporary tuition discounts (15 percent at Williams, 10 percent diologists or truck drivers—will be collat-
at Princeton). But prestigious institutions will also look for ways to use online technology eral damage. No doubt some traditional
to generate more revenue—perhaps by ro- institutions will survive, with students in
tating cohorts within an expanded under- es in hour-long segments crammed into a residence and faculty in classrooms on what
graduate class through cycles of on-campus fraction of each day is a relic of the indus- Bryan Stevenson calls the “Retro Campus”
and off-campus enrollment (this semester trial era. Years before the pandemic, the —a place “like a vinyl record store,” where
you’re living in a dorm; next semester you’ll formidable journalist Kevin Carey wrote eccentric customers go to indulge in re-
be Zooming off-campus), thereby forgoing a book, The End of College, in which he membrance of times past.

F
investment in new physical facilities while predicted that traditional colleges and uni-
collecting more tuition dollars. The econo- versities will eventually give way to what or anyone who cares about
mists Michael McPherson and Sandy Baum he called the “University of Everywhere.” equity, or about education
suggest that some institutions may be able This will not be a fixed institution with as something more than
to “charge as much or more for an on-line certifying authority but rather an array of the transmission of mar-
course, with lower overhead at an increased entities in the cloud that issue certificates ketable skills, this sci-fi
scale, as for the on-campus equivalent.” or “badges” based on competency tests vision of the future has at least three

I
to prove the mastery of certain skills— big problems. First, there is no reason
n the not-yet-aftermath credentials much more reliable than to- to believe that technology will broaden
of the pandemic, trying to day’s diplomas. Students will benefit from opportunities and improve learning for
predict the future of high- what Jeffrey Selingo, an education writ- unconfident students, many of whom are
er education is, even more er now serving as the special advisor for low-income, nonwhite, and from families
than usual, a dicey business. innovation at Arizona State, has called with no previous college experience. As
Contingencies include future birth rates; “adaptive learning technologies” that “ad- Thomas Bailey, the president of Teachers
regional population shifts driven by climate just to the speed at which an individual College, has written with his colleagues at
change; economic expansion or contrac- student learns.” In this imagined future, the Community College Research Cen-
tion; the needs and wants of students; the equity will be served, in Carey’s words, by ter, “online instruction…tends to rein-
capabilities of future technologies; public “increasingly sophisticated artificial intelli- force…disconnectedness and isolation,
opinion; the priorities of private philan- gence [that] will diagnose the strengths and while undermining many students’ suc-
thropy; and, most important, the scale and weaknesses of each individual learner and cess.” McPherson and Baum report that
focus of state and federal government fund- customize his or her education according- “moving coursework fully online increases
ing. Bryan Alexander, whose imagination ly, constantly challenging and motivating gaps in success” and that “students who
caught an early glimpse of the pandemic, people to work harder and better without take online classes do worse in subsequent
leads a group called the Future of Educa- breaching the threshold of frustration and courses and are more likely to drop out of
tion Observatory—but despite the astro- failure.” Liberated from the burdens of school. Males, students with lower prior
nomical metaphor, predicting what will time and cost imposed by ossified institu- GPAs, and Black students have particu-
happen to our colleges and universities is tions, people will become more capable, lar difficulty adjusting to online learning.
less like tracking a planet than playing with better informed, and even—because of The performance gaps that exist for these
a Ouija board. diminished frustration—happier. subgroups in face-to-face courses become
For now, as we wait and speculate, On the question of who the certifying even more pronounced in online courses.”
the question at hand is whether we are authorities will be, Levine and Van Pelt None of this should be surprising.
witnessing resourceful adaptations to an bring us down to earth. “The awarding Students need human—and humane—
exceptional event, or the beginnings of organization,” they write, “does not need teachers and mentors. They need recog-
deep change of which Covid is giving us a to be a college: it could be an industry nition from adults alert to their capacities,
preview. In a book written at the height of leader, such as Google or Microsoft, whose aware of their limitations, with concern and
the pandemic, The Great Upheaval: Higher endorsement would mean more than that time enough to counsel and guide them.
Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Fu- of most colleges.” In fact, the lines between Among the bitter realities of America’s cur-
ture, Arthur Levine, former president of for-profit businesses and nonprofit institu- rent higher education system is the fact that
Teachers College and the Woodrow Wil- tions have been blurring for some time as the students who most need these supports
son Foundation, and Scott Van Pelt, who students seek “the same kind of relationship are the least likely to get them.
teaches at the Wharton School, with their colleges that they have with their A second problem with the entrepre-
38 argue that awarding credentials banks, supermarkets, and internet provid-
based on “seat time” spent in class- ers. They ask the same four things of each:
neurial, global, and increasingly virtual
university is that it offers too little to the
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

local communities in which it is rooted. Bay Area; the Double Discovery Center years, as students from economically inse-
This is especially true of wealthy private at Columbia, which more than 50 years cure families entered college in growing
institutions, which enjoy a nonprofit status ago furnished the model for the federal numbers, this alignment has only become
that spares them from taxation on their Upward Bound program that helps mid- tighter, including at elite institutions that
real property and investment returns and dle and high school students prepare for serve predominantly affluent students. “It
confers tax deductibility on gifts from their college; the Knowledge for Freedom net- is a shame,” Ginsberg writes, “when that
donors—all of which represents revenue work (full disclosure: funded in part by the is all that the university offers.” “All” is an
withheld from the public treasury. When Teagle Foundation, where I am currently exaggeration, but at more and more insti-
pressed on what they are doing to meet president), which brings low-income high tutions it’s a fair approximation.
their public responsibilities, most presi- school students onto college campuses for What’s increasingly rare in higher
dents and trustees will point to advances in a “Great Books” seminar. Public institu- education, and almost entirely missing
medicine (if the institution has a medical tions, too, should be ramping up efforts from writings about its future, is a more
school), or to technologies derived from re- to serve students beyond their campus than nominal commitment to the value
search conducted on campus, or to the fact gates, as exemplified by the Newark City of learning undertaken in the hope of
that their institution is a local employer. of Learning Collabo- expanding the sympa-
These claims have merit. But private rative, led by the New- thetic imagination by
institutions, especially those with signifi- ark branch of Rutgers opening the mind to
cant resources, should be doing more, as University under the Dare we hope that the contesting ideas about
indeed some are. Many of these institu- leadership of its far- pandemic will force nature and history, the
tions, as the urbanist scholar Davarian L. sighted chancellor, power of literature and
Baldwin shows in grim detail in his book Nancy Cantor. As the
universities to confront art, and the value of
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, are islands prospect grows that their contradictions? dialectic in the pursuit
of privilege in or near areas of high poverty the Supreme Court of truth. These aspi-
and poor public schools—a reality made will disallow race-conscious admissions rations—traditionally gathered under the
painfully apparent by the disparate effects policies, such programs become all the term “liberal education”—are in desperate
of the pandemic. They should be partner- more important for widening the pipeline need of revival. To advance them requires
ing with public libraries on literacy and for talented Black and Latinx students teachers and institutions committed to a
civic programs; providing legal and other mired in poor schools. What all of these more capacious vision of education than
services to the needy; pledging, as Yale has programs have in common is that they are the prevailing idea of workforce training
done recently, larger payments in lieu of reciprocal learning experiences: They can and economic self-advancement.
taxes (or PILOTS) to their municipality; be life-changing for the teachers as well as Dare we hope that the shock of the
subsidizing rents or otherwise supporting for the taught. pandemic will confirm the urgency of this

F
locally owned businesses; and making di- need? The kinds of questions the virus has
rect investments in community improve- inally, there is a third— forced upon us are not, after all, ultimate-
ments. They should be opening their doors and perhaps the deepest— ly technical or empirical ones. They are
wider to qualified transfer students from problem with the futuristic political, ethical, and historical questions:
local community colleges. They should vision of education ad- How do we reconcile individual liberties
be serving veterans, incarcerated people, vanced by “technologically with the public good? How do we account
and local public school students, whose enabled delivery”: the debilitating fact that for savage inequities in health care and
prospects to attend college can be markedly it rests on a narrow, positivistic conception the quality of life? What should national
improved by after-school tutoring and oth- of knowledge. In this view, all teaching sovereignty mean in a world where patho-
er “wrap-around” services of the kind that is training, and all learning is a quest for gens go from local to global in a flash? To
affluent families take for granted. competence: the mastery of some field debate such questions with rigor and can-
There are some encouraging examples whose practitioners can expect compen- dor requires habits of the heart and mind
of such efforts that could be replicated or sation for their proficiency or expertise. that are, to put it mildly, sorely lacking in
adapted by many more institutions: the No one should dispute that colleges have our viciously polarized political culture. If
Clemente Course in the Humanities, a na- a vital responsibility to prepare students higher education, along with the legisla-
tionwide course for indigent adults taught for the world of work—to provide them tures, philanthropies, and private donors
by local academics and accredited by Bard with what the political scientist Benjamin who support it, does not recommit itself
College; the Warrior-Scholar Project, Ginsberg calls “more or less sophisticated in act as well as word to the principles
which brings veterans to study at emi- forms of vocational training to meet the of pluralist democracy—equity, opportu-
nent universities; the Netter Center for needs of other established institutions in nity, tolerance, rationality—our republic
Community Partnerships at Penn and the the public and private sectors.” In fact, doesn’t stand much of a chance. Certain
Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Part- preparation for economic productivity has habits of mind—distinguishing between
nerships at Drexel, which connect under- been the main aim of universities since the arguments and opinions, admitting self-
graduates with schools and social services decline of prescribed curricula in the 19th doubt, rethinking assumptions—are im-
in West Philadelphia; Mount Tamalpais century, when the introduction of electives perative for collective life. If these habits
College, a liberal arts institution for stu- and, later, majors aligned what students are not nurtured in the college
dents incarcerated at San Quentin staffed
by volunteer teachers from around the
chose to study in college with the work classroom, where else will they
they planned to do after. Over the past 50 be found? N
39
 B&AB O O K S the
A R T S

grounds staff some are trained not to see?

Was I, in other words, a sort of ghost pass-
ing through their domain?
The incident at Blo’ Norton Hall was
not obviously spooky at the time, and I re-
alized why it haunted me only months later,
when I read Edith Wharton’s ghost stories.
Though my experience was hard to contex-
tualize at first, it felt immediately at home
among these stories, with which it shared a
number of elements: a beautiful old house
with a name; a picturesque, remote setting;
a desultory leisure class; a young woman
out of her element; misunderstandings be-
tween visitors and staff and the owners or
residents of the beautiful old house. On top
of all this, the situation I found myself in
had precisely the ambiguous tension that
makes so many of Wharton’s ghost stories
scary. Her stories are haunted not by gore
or violent beings but by things like aging,
loneliness, and unresolved personal histo-
ries. And like my experience at Blo’ Norton
Hall, her tales tend to be indifferent as
to whether ghosts are supernatural beings
per se—some of these stories have literal
ghosts, but many don’t—or some other
imagined force. Either way, they derive
their subtle psychological horror from the
ways our everyday lives can haunt us.
Ghosts is a story collection originally
published in 1937, shortly after Wharton’s
death at age 75, and now reissued by New
York Review Books. Its opening story, “All

Everyday Specters Souls,” was the last piece of fiction she

completed. It tells the story of a stubborn
elderly woman, living alone in a New En-
Edith Wharton’s ghosts gland mansion, who sprains her ankle on
Halloween and is soon after abandoned
B Y K R I T H I K A VA R AG U R
by all her servants, who are perhaps ab-
sorbed in occult activity. The same mix of
ast fall, i was in the english countryside on a

l research trip and decided to visit Blo’ Norton Hall,

the moated, 16th-century manor house in Norfolk
where a prince I was writing about had once lived.
It was almost dusk when I arrived, but there were
several people my age walking the grounds: guests, I
assumed, of the bed-and-breakfast to which the house had been con-
verted after the prince’s death. I tried to maintain a friendly distance.
As I walked around the house’s rear, the
four young men, holding glasses of beer,
strolled directly past me, and I smiled at
them—but none appeared to see me. Mo-
my car, reversed for several minutes down
the long gravel driveway, and hightailed it
home. It felt like a close call. The occupants
a realistic social world and some eerie dis-
ruption therein is maintained throughout
the collection. We meet a well-to-do New
York lawyer who somehow receives letters
from his dead first wife, and the ghost of
a domestic servant who tries to warn her
successor about her abusive employer. The
stories are all suspenseful, but not grisly.
The possible witchcraft in “All Souls,” for
instance, is not the point of the tale, which
derives most of its plot and horror from
the protagonist’s painstaking, night-long
investigation, which reveals the abject iso-
ments later, I realized that this was not, in could have interrogated me or even called lation of her twilight years.
fact, a bed-and-breakfast through which I the police. But one more chilling possibility Originally published between 1902 and
was welcome to perambulate but a single, also struck me: Had those men seen me 1937, the stories are also haunted by the
large holiday home, and I was tres- at all? Or had I been somehow invisible ghosts of greater social change all around
40 passing on some friends’ private
vacation. Mortified, I ran back to
to them—perhaps as an interloper from
another realm, or perceived as the type of
Wharton. They were written from the
Progressive Era to the Great Depression,
ILLUSTRATION BY LILY QIAN
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

and through the First World War. Class conflict, the costs of new forms of business, in these stories are not that scary, which is
the growing pains of a rapidly industrializing society, and the particular toll of all those perhaps why their characters always spring
things on women are central to these stories as well. For Wharton, the ghosts of the into action when they encounter them. In
nascent American century were as much material as supernatural. “All Souls,” the elderly widow resists her

W
doctor’s orders to rest her sprained ankle
harton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City in 1862. The and stubbornly drags herself through every
daughter of an upper-crust New York family—some members of which in- room of the house to investigate her ser-
spired the expression “keeping up with the Joneses”—Wharton was raised vants’ abandonment, fortifying herself with
partly in Europe, summered in Newport, and was tutored by governesses. a stiff drink and her late husband’s loaded
She was not allowed to read novels until she got married, as their subject revolver. In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” a ser-
matter was considered unsuitable for virgins. vant comes to realize that her predecessor
Nevertheless, young Edith harbored literary ambitions and by her teenage years is haunting the house and, when she sees
was composing stories, plays, and poems, including a bound volume of poetry that was the apparition, boldly follows her into the
self-published with family funds when she was 16. At 23, she married a sportsman in her winter night, determined to find out what
circle named Teddy Wharton and spent she wants to say. In “Afterward,” a woman
several years in the stultifying leisure pre- probes her husband’s mysterious disappear-
scribed to her class, until she emerged in ance from their country house like a private
1900, at the age of 38, with her first book- Ghosts investigator and finally pieces together the
length work of fiction, The Touchstone. It’s a By Edith Wharton explanation—a man who had once been
somewhat soppy novella about a poor man New York Review scammed by her husband has spirited him
who conflictedly sells the letters of a dead Books. away to the afterlife—“with the look of
former admirer (a famous female author) 288 pp. $16.95 triumph of a child who has worked out a
to fund his marriage. A more mature work difficult puzzle.”

T
followed just a few years later: The House
of Mirth, her 1905 breakout hit about the he more affecting terrors
decline and fall of an aging society beauty. in Ghosts include domestic
It was a massive bestseller in her time and violence, lonely marriages,
remains a classic today. All told, Wharton private concerns. The earliest one from undignified old age, and
wrote 15 novels, seven novellas, 85 short this collection, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” suppressed identity. There
stories, a memoir, and several nonfiction was published in 1902 and is, among other are disastrous marriages galore: The titular
books on travel, interior design, wartime things, a lengthy consideration of a wage housekeeper of “Mr. Jones” turns out to
France, and more. laborer’s plight, written in the wake of be the malevolent, long-dead servant who
Her lifelong thematic preoccupations the Gilded Age. The last two stories were once helped an 18th-century nobleman iso-
were those of class and elite mores, the ten- written in the 1930s, a decade dominated late his deaf and mute wife there. In “The
sions between modernity and tradition, the by the Depression and Wharton’s old age, Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” servants come and go;
constraints on women’s lives, and the dys- which informs the sublime melancholy cast the only constant is the abuse and neglect of
functions of marriage. Wharton wrote in of “Pomegranate Seed” and “All Souls.” the invalid lady of the house by her alcohol-
a period caught between the 19th-century Several stories rely on a frame narrative, ic and philandering husband. In “Kerfol,”
novel of manners and 20th-century mod- a trope of the ghost story form. “All Souls” it turns out that the “most romantic house
ernism, but what is perhaps most helpful and “Miss Mary Pask” are related in ret- in Brittany” is haunted not by the sadistic
in understanding her oeuvre is that she rospect, and “Kerfol” and “The Eyes” use 17th-century aristocrat who owned it but
wrote to entertain a mainstream (rather stories-within-a-story à la The Turn of the by all the dogs he killed there, pets that had
than an elite or avant-garde) audience. It Screw; the locus of fright is not in “figuring briefly enlivened his wife’s “desolate” and
was partly to stay relevant in between her out” their endings. Others riff on Goth- “extremely lonely” life. That backstory is
novels that she dipped into genres like the ic themes like spooky old houses, stormy related through the records of a long-ago
ghost story. (This mainstream audience weather, and incest—sometimes in campy court case, which diffuses the real-time
was not without its challenges; she once ways, like “Miss Mary Pask,” in which the suspense but does not dull the horrors of
grudgingly dubbed her readers the “maga- “ghost” shown flirting with her terrified that cruel marriage.
zine morons,” when she had to add a more young male visitor is finally revealed to be a Even if they are not physically violent,
explicit ending to “All Souls.”) lonely but also amusingly lascivious old lady other marriages in these stories are haunt-
In her personal life, the three and a half in a “cataleptic trance.” All the stories are ingly lonely. Mary Boyne, who retires with
decades spanned by these stories’ compo- related through short, numbered sections her husband to England in “Afterward,”
sition saw Wharton emigrate to Europe, that move their plots along at a clip. In “Mr. prides herself on never asking too many
divorce her husband, and became a major Jones,” for instance, a young woman moves questions about his work or interrupting
novelist. The ghost stories reflect both into an old, inherited country house near him in his study, but that’s exactly what
her tumultuous times and some of her Kent and invites a writer friend to visit; the allows her husband to be abducted by a
two investigate the house’s sordid history ghostly visitor, leaving her shell-shocked
Krithika Varagur is the author of The Call: through its records and then deal with the and alone. In “Pomegranate Seed,”
Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project morbid consequences of their findings.
and an editor at The Drift. Most of the actual or potential ghosts
a lawyer’s beleaguered second wife
begs him to tell her about the
41
 B&AB O O K S

mysterious letters he’s received since their

the
A R T S

ed by their upstairs/downstairs dynamics. has called their “economic hauntings.” In

honeymoon, but he refuses. So she has to Servants in these houses alternately witness “All Souls,” Agnes, the “dour old Scottish
do something even scarier than compare and enable their employers’ misery, perhaps maid whom Sara had inherited from her
herself to a romantic forerunner: form an engage in supernatural activity, and some- mother-in-law,” leaves her infirm mistress
alliance with her mother-in-law. These times become ghosts with a tray of sand-
tales of failed and lonely marriages past and themselves. They col- wiches while she and
present reflect a career-long theme of the lectively reflect a terri- the other servants de-
author, who spoke even on her deathbed, as fied anxiety about what liberately clear out for
her biographer Hermione Lee notes, about the workers propping their secretive group
the “hopeless case” of her own abortive up these grand hous- activity. We never actu-
union with Teddy Wharton. es might do when they ally find out what they
In several other stories, growing old is band together, see too get up to on that night,
a catalog of ineluctable horrors. In “Miss much, or even—as in but the point is that
Mary Pask” (written when Wharton was the case of Mr. Jones, they are empowered to
63), the titular character is supposedly “like the housekeeper who do so by banding to-
hundreds of other dowdy old maids, cheer- still influences a coun- gether. Agnes begins
ful derelicts content with their innumerable try house from his the story as inherited
little substitutes for living.” When the nar- grave—do their jobs For Wharton, the human property but
rator, a young male painter, visits her on a too well. ghosts of the American ends it with a trium-
stormy night, it is out of the thinnest ob- Wharton inhabited phal performance. She
ligation to a woman nearly outside society. grand houses through- century were material puts on a “masterly”
The narrator of “All Souls,” a relative of the out her life, from Land’s as well as supernatural. display of surprise the
protagonist, Sara Clayburn, concludes that End in Newport to Pa- day after getting away
her cousin’s servants disappeared in order villon Colombe in France. But the world of with her scheme—essentially gaslighting
to participate in a witches’ coven, but Sara her youth, among the cloistered New York her prideful mistress. And why not? Sara
herself is never shown coming to terms with families for whom a Newport summer home knows, even after her terrifying solo ordeal,
her own dark night of the soul, which we’ve was wholly unremarkable, was transformed that “she was dependent on [the servants]
just spent several pages wincing through. by the breakneck growth of the Gilded Age, and felt at home with them.” But then the
The Wharton completist may recognize the world-historical fortunes of tycoons like same thing happens the following year, so
some of the raw material for these stories in Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, and Sara simply flees the house and its sup-
her earlier works. For instance, she used the increasingly violent struggles between cap- posedly “efficient, devoted, respectful and
Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone in ital and labor at the turn of the century. By respectable” servants. Agnes might see it as
a 1912 verse play before finding its subtle the time Wharton was born, her family was a successful collective action.
final expression in “Pomegranate Seed,” several generations past its income-earning Wharton usually writes about these
in which the ghostly letters keep the New phase and her circle prided itself on wasteful dynamics self-consciously, though some-
York lawyer figuratively tethered to the leisure. While they coasted on inherited times her biases emerge. She gives servant
underworld. And a 1926 volume of poems wealth, the new robber barons made huge characters in three separate stories the
contained an experimental riff on a dead profits that they strove to make even huger name Agnes (meaning “pure”—a little on
woman returning home on All Souls’ Day, by exerting downward pressure on their the nose), perhaps betraying a latent es-
published over a decade before Wharton workers’ wages and lifestyles. (Wharton sentialist view of the servant class. But she
revisited the holiday in her final short sto- memorably depicted this shift in The Age typically has a defter hand. In “The Lady’s
ry. The ghost story form transforms both of Innocence, whose old-money protagonist, Maid’s Bell,” the protagonist, Hartley, re-
these familiar materials and her evergreen Newland Archer, twiddles his thumbs at an counts a series of horrors directly, in the
themes: Once some donnée becomes a ghost undemanding law firm while the arriviste, first person. A poor immigrant, she has just
story, what may have been just an amusing scandal-shrouded financier Julius Beaufort recovered from typhoid and faced months
character study acquires a participatory el- makes vast sums that are utterly incompre- of precarious unemployment before land-
ement, since readers must meet her halfway hensible to families like the Archers.) Fur- ing at a gloomy American country house,
in becoming scared. To do so involves truly thermore, the once-farm-based American where she encounters fresh threats like the
contemplating what exactly it is in these economy rapidly industrialized; agricultural lecherous man of the house and crippling
texts—and it is never the literal ghosts— jobs shrank from 64 percent of the work- depression in the long, “unwholesome”
that elicits a chill. force in 1850 to 30 percent in 1920. The winter. Her sympathetic female boss de-

F
newly proletarianized working class had vises mundane shopping trips that render
raying social relations are many occasions to rebel, and they certainly her ecstatic; “I hadn’t known till then
not the only horrors afoot. did not escape the notice of Wharton, who how low my spirits had fallen,” Hartley
Six of these eleven stories conducted firsthand research into subjects admits in a moving aside. It is only after
are set in country homes like factory towns, cotton mills, and the lives all of these realistically scary things that
with names like Pang- of poor New Englanders. she finally sees a ghost. And we are hardly
bourne and Whitegates (which can That may be why the specter of under- surprised to read that the bored, poor,
42 wear on even the most devoted
Wharton fan), and all are animat-
class rebellion animates so many of Ghosts’ and utterly miserable Hartley chooses
stories—what the scholar Karen J. Jacobsen to follow her predecessor Emma Saxon’s
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

ghostly trail—at that point, maybe just to

feel something. After tramping through
the snow, Hartley comes home and sees
the “death-flutter” pass over her mistress.
Bad news for the lady of the house, but
above all, yet another traumatic event for
Hartley, on top of everything else she has
tolerated in the brief tale.

W
harton wrote that “the
‘moral issue’ question must
not be allowed to enter
into the estimating of a
ghost-story,” but it’s obvi-
ous that the vexed ethics of the violent new
forms of 20th-century capitalism animate
so many of her stories, whether because
their moral dimensions weighed on her ex-
plicitly or because they emerged from her
virtuoso social observation. “The Triumph
of Night,” about a lonely winter traveler,
includes speculation about a financial crisis
and ends with revelations about a cement
company corruption scandal that “shakes
Wall Street to its foundations.” Ned Boyne
in “Afterward” was embroiled in a murky
stateside business scandal before abscond-
ing to the English countryside, and it grad-
ually emerges that his white-collar crime
drove a man to suicide. Boyne has only a
moment of pastoral quiet before his vic-
tim returns from the underworld to exact
his revenge.
Such economic concerns are like
discreet piping in Wharton’s familiar,
Unplugged
smooth fictional edifices, and she would The return of the Matrix
be horrified were it otherwise. In a 1907
BY STEPHEN KEARSE
letter, she lamented that the introduction
of business courses at Harvard inspired
n one of its many exhausting moments of meta-
“such a depth of pessimism” in her that
she wanted to erupt in “Biblical curses.”
The vulgar explicitness of 20th-century
American business culture repelled her.
Much like how readers must meet her
i commentary, The Matrix Resurrections addresses Hol-
lywood’s relentless harvesting of existing intellectual
property: “We can’t see it, but we’re all trapped inside
these strange, repeating loops.” The line, uttered by
A SCENE FROM THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS (COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES)

“half-way among the primeval shadows”

to get scared by these ghost stories, they a new Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; previously
can make out these frightening economic Laurence Fishburne) who lives inside a video game version of The
fault lines only if they read with that Matrix that’s inside the Matrix, is meant to be uncanny. In today’s
in mind. But most of us probably are, ecosystem of shareholder-friendly adap-
these days; precarity and exploitation tations and reboots, The Matrix and its it’s all about taking our stories and reducing
have proved durable themes, and modern eccentric fusion of cyberpunk, anime, phi- them to the simplest ideas.” Lana agreed,
business practices remain not just dumb losophy, film noir, and Hong Kong cinema saying, “When you’re watching an original
but also terrifying. Wharton laments in would probably never get made. But as a story, anything can happen. Neo can die….
this collection’s preface about “what we reboot: Why not? There’s a tension that comes with original
shall lose when the wraith and the fetch Matrix co-creator Lana Wachowski di- storytelling.” In films like Jupiter Ascending,
are no more with us,” but upon reading rects the latest sequel without her sister Speed Racer, and Cloud Atlas, the Wachows-
these stories, it’s revealed to be a feint: Lilly, but the Wachowskis have long been kis brought this sensibility to life, mutating
These ghosts, of economic despair, iso- critics of Hollywood’s ingrained risk aver- the Hollywood blockbuster into
lation, senescence, and cruelty, are not
going anywhere. N
sion. “We work in an industry of reduction-
ists,” Lilly summarized in 2015. “Right now,
a baroque canvas on which space-
ships pursue a wolf man across the
43
 B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S

Chicago skyline and anime race cars zip across CGI landscapes. The sisters constantly trying to do things that are, I wouldn’t say
found ways to blur the line between art house and mainstream, the sublime and the silly. nostalgic, but are about the creation of
That iconoclasm devolves into contrarianism in The Matrix Resurrections. Despite pos- this piece of art from my past again,” she
turing as a riposte to Hollywood conservatism, Resurrections spends most of its run time said in a recent interview. “You know, it’s
relitigating the series’ cultural footprint and saluting the initial films’ originality. Though like I’m purposefully doing it again to say
it aspires to lambaste assembly-line filmmaking, its cheeky deconstructions and tedious something about the way that we do things
self-references feel more like a copyright renewal than a narrative. Watching Wachowski’s again and again in our lives and to mark
ideas spin in place unveils another truth of the IP epoch: Authors can be just as myopic and the difference and how the againness is
unimaginative as corporations. never again.” Although she says “we” and

S
an echo of his job as a software program- “our,” the new film never engages the view-
et 60 years after the end of mer in The Matrix. Anderson’s signature er. Wachowski wrests her dead creations
the original trilogy, Resur- creation is the Matrix game series, which from Warner Bros., then embalms them
rections explores the pecu- in Resurrections is the actual Matrix films, with memories. The gesture is inspired,
liar circumstances that have scenes from which fill background screens but Wachowski’s contempt for boardroom-
brought characters like and blip into the movie like hallucinations. appeasing art also disregards her own au-
Neo (Keanu Reeves), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Functioning as a kind of hacked fun house dience. Are artisan zombies really all that
Moss), and Agent Smith (Jonathan Groff; mirror, Resurrections delights in the delirium different from corporate ones?

T
previously Hugo Weaving)—all of whom of repetitions.
perished in the third movie—back to life. Snared in these prismatic loops, Ander- he strangest aspect of Res-
The main conceit remains unchanged: son struggles to distinguish fiction from urrections is how narrowly
Most humans live in a virtual simulation reality, a problem heightened by the deci- it understands the legacy of
called the Matrix that was built by sen- sion of his employer’s parent company— the series. Even if Warner
tient, parasitic machines who use them as Warner Bros.—to make a sequel to the Ma- Bros. were to zombify The
a source of energy, and a small group of trix games: a reference to the many rumors Matrix the way it has Looney Tunes (whose
liberated people resists that the real Warner characters, depressingly, appeared along-
this extractive system. Bros. once planned to side Matrix characters in last year’s Space
The film’s main continue the series with- Jam: A New Legacy), the series would always
mode is dissociation. Authors can be out the Wachowskis. belong to viewers and other artists, too. So
Mirrors—which have just as myopic and Endless sequels—and many terms, images, cultural marginalia,
replaced phones as the their outrageous box and other media lead back to or through
portals in and out of unimaginative as office grosses—may sus- those first three films: “a glitch in the
the Matrix—abound, corporations. tain studios and appease Matrix,” rabbit hole, unplugged, “Dodge
reflecting, warping, and viewers, we are told this,” Inception, Wanted, Equilibrium, white
transforming the series’ iconography. Im- without nuance, but they silence authors dudes with dreadlocks, Mr. Robot, “MISS-
ages and their tweaked doubles are con- and cheapen their work. TER ANNNN-DER-SON,” “There is no
stantly overlaid, highlighting contrasts That sentiment might be compelling spoon,” the rappers YUNGMORPHEUS
between old and new. Characters get re- if Wachowski took bold or surprising cre- and Erick the Architect, Zack Snyder’s
framed or reskinned or recast. Symbols ative turns in the new film, but her choices slow-motion panoramas, basic video game
like Zion—a human city from the previous are pedantic and circular. She counters the mechanics. The red pill is just one glyph in
films—and the Matrix itself take on new appropriation of the red pill, which has a rich, sprawling text.
meanings. Even the color grade, famously been taken up by gamers and the right as a Influence and authorial control aren’t
saturated slime green in the original mov- license to be misogynistic and reactionary, equivalent, of course, so Wachowski neces-
ies, has been traded for soft, warm hues. In with rote explanations of what the symbol sarily has a deeper investment in her series
an artist’s hands, Wachowski seems to be means—as if the misreading of the sym- than fans and acolytes do. But Resurrections
saying, a story evolves rather than repeats. bol were a problem of storytelling rather so heavily couches her connection to the
Yet instead of change we get navel- than ideology. Through various repetitive series in terms of ownership and author-
gazing. “We know this story,” says Bugs plot convolutions, she responds to the ity that it never articulates the nature of
(Jessica Henwick), a hacker modeled on casual sexism of Matrix fans who have that bond. In miniature and at scale, the
a minor character—the woman with the overlooked Trinity, a character already es- original movies are textured and slick, full
white rabbit tattoo—from The Matrix. She sential to the series, by making her a deity. of perverse physics and intense tactility.
says this as she watches a re-creation of an All the newer and more interesting threads Time expands. Space congeals. Concrete
opening scene from that film in which Trin- in Resurrections—the experience of pro- shatters. Leather shimmers. Bodies bend,
ity performs a balletic aerial kick that intro- grams living outside a computer system, float, fly. Every frame brims with craft and
duces bullet time. But in one of the many the spectacle of machines going to war care. Resurrections, by comparison, lacks
déjà vu moments to follow, the woman Bugs with one another, the novelty of machines such purpose. Awash in empty familiarity,
sees is not the actual Trinity. creating a political identity—get glossed stilted action, and half-hearted agitation,
It turns out that Bugs has hacked a pri- over in the service of empty nostalgia and this Matrix redux brings to mind a line de-
vate Matrix simulation owned by fussy revisionism. livered by the original Morpheus: “There’s
44 Thomas Anderson (aka Neo), now These strange loops grow dizzying for
a famous video game developer, the viewer and for Wachowski as well. “I’m
a difference between knowing the path and
walking the path.” N
 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

Joel Rogers, Karen Rothmyer, Robert Scheer, Herman Schwartz, Bruce Shapiro,
Edward Sorel, Jon Wiener, Amy Wilentz
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Sasha Abramsky, Eric Alterman, Ross Barkan, James
Carden, Zoë Carpenter, Wilfred Chan, Michelle Chen, Bryce Covert, Liza
Featherstone, Laura Flanders, Julianne Hing, Joshua Holland, Greg Kaufmann,
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER: Katrina vanden Heuvel
Stephen Kearse, Richard Kreitner, Amy Littlefield, Julyssa Lopez, Dani McClain,
EDITOR: D.D. Guttenplan PRESIDENT: Erin O’Mara Marcus J. Moore, Ben Moser, Ismail Muhammad, Erin Schwartz,
DEPUTY EDITOR: Christopher Shay Scott Sherman, Mychal Denzel Smith, Jennifer Wilson
LITERARY EDITOR: David Marcus EDITORIAL BOARD: Emily Bell, Deepak Bhargava, Kai Bird, Barbara Ehrenreich,
MANAGING EDITOR: Rose D’Amora Frances FitzGerald, Bill Fletcher Jr., Eric Foner, Bill Gallegos, Greg Grandin, Lani
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US CIVIL RIGHTS: ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

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 T H E N AT I O N 2.21–28.2022

Q&A
issue from a legal standpoint. Public policy after the
Affordable Care Act hasn’t eradicated the fundamental
drivers of costs and inequality: profit-driven private
insurance and health care delivery. The exclusion of
Black, brown, and working poor Americans from the
most beneficial tiers of that structure is class warfare.
That warfare relied on jurisprudential shifts that
moved the standard of discrimination away from
disparate adverse impact and toward discriminatory
intent. Ever since that shift, plaintiffs who have tried
George to show the class-based impacts of hospital closures
have carried a losing hand into court when it comes to
Aumoithe demonstrating discrimination.

DSJ: What parallels do you see between how an ear-

lier health regime shaped the disparate responses
One revelation of the Covid-19 crisis is how ill- to HIV/AIDS and how the current regime shaped the
prepared the United States turned out to be for an disparities with Covid-19 in the United States?
unexpected national medical emergency. There are GA: The demographic impact of both diseases has
deep historical reasons for why our welfare state disproportionately centered on Black and brown
proved incapable of dealing with the challenges of the pandemic. As is so Americans. And much like at the nadir of the AIDS
often the case, the consequences of this fell disproportionately on Black crisis, it’s clear that Reagan’s and Trump’s avowal of
Americans and other minorities whose health and finances were most austerity and personal responsibility both shaped
affected by the pandemic. The research of George Aumoithe, a historian the policy response. For instance, the US government
of global health at Stony Brook University, shows that a lack of ICU beds in issued blatantly contradictory advice regarding the
low-income communities is the result of spending cuts dating back to the transmission of Covid-19 to prevent a run on personal
1970s. At that time, Aumoithe argues, an inflationary crisis, combined with protective equipment. Anthony Fauci, director of the
urban flight to the suburbs, compelled politicians and health care experts National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
to cut costs by closing down hospitals in urban areas. This policy of “econ- at NIH, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams recom-
omizing” helps explain why half of low-income communities in the United mended to Americans that they need not wear masks.
States have no ICU beds. —Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins Very shortly after, it became clear that Covid-19 trans-
mission occurred via respiratory contact. In light of
DSJ: What do you mean by the “economizing” of health policy?
the East Asian experience with SARS and the effort
GA: “Economizing” is a euphemism for the cost-cutting. The Nixon admin- to contain the outbreak in Wuhan, it beggars belief
istration focused health planning on hard economic figures, abandoned the to assume the US government did not recognize the
development of social indicators of health, and terminated federal block immediate need for masks. Instead, policy-makers
grants to cities, which killed demonstration projects in their infancy. evidently misled the public to avoid a market panic
Often outpacing the federal government were local governments. No- over scarce N95 masks. These lies—all to make up for
where was this more so than in New York City. The New York City Health an unprepared government stockpile—led to needless
and Hospitals Corporation, founded in 1969 by Mayor John V. Lindsay, deaths and debilities. N
centralized control over 50 percent of municipal hospitals. Administrators
scoured the system, cutting medical procedures, technology, beds, and
staff. The HHC closed multiple hospitals concentrated in working-class
neighborhoods such as Harlem, the South Bronx, and South Brooklyn.

DSJ: On the one hand, many of these developments seem to be the

consequences of “color-blind” legal ideology. At the same time, it
shows how the benefits of Medicare and Medicaid became racialized in
the 1970s. Was this intentional or unintentional?
GA: Divining intention is not my bailiwick; I study effects. After more than
a year of a pandemic that has claimed well over three-quarters of a million
American lives and an estimated one in 555 Black lives, health outcomes
in the structure of health care we live under remain deficient regardless
of intent. In fact, it is clear that very little attention has been given to the

“Policy-makers evidently
misled the public to avoid
46 a market panic.”
ORIANA KOREN
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