APRIL 2025

THE CRUEL
WORLD OF
STEPHEN
MILLER
D AV I D K L I O N
E S T. 1 8 6 5
HOW TO
FIGHT TRUMP
LEAH GREENBERG
AND EZRA LEVIN

Are
Men
OK?
According to Richard V.
Reeves, American society
is failing to address the
needs of men and boys. Are
his solutions the flip side of
feminism—or just another
form of backlash?
EAMON WHALEN

THENATION.COM
 SPRING FORWARD WITH THE NEW PRESS

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE BAD LAW COPAGANDA

by Natasha Hakimi Zapata by Elie Mystal by Alec Karakatsanis

“An illuminating survey of how “A smart, big-picture takedown “After Copaganda, you’ll never
America’s most pressing social issues of the legal bulwarks of white read the news the same way again.”
have been handled by other countries.” supremacism and its privileges.” —Michelle Alexander, author
—Publishers Weekly —Kirkus Reviews of The New Jim Crow

KING OF THE NORTH POLICING WHITE SUPREMACY THE SUSTAINABILITY CLASS

by Jeanne Theoharis by Mike German, by Vijay Kolinjivadi and
with Beth Zasloff Aaron Vansintjan
“A powerful must-read that
sheds new light on King and “An urgent call for a different “A scathing critique. . . .
the Civil Rights Movement.” approach to policing and containing Readers will come away more
—Kirkus Reviews radical right-wing violence.” savvy and empowered.”
(starred review) —Kirkus Reviews —Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

thenewpress.com
 Erasure: Protesters
outside the Stonewall
Inn in New York after
the word transgender
was erased from
the National Park
Service’s website.

B&A
F E AT U R E S 4 THE BIG PICTURE
20 N AT I O N V O I C E S
A Pair of Kings Testing the
26 Are Men OK?
EAMON WHALEN
D.D. GUTTENPLAN Rule of Law
Can our institutions stand
B O O K S the
A R T S

Richard V. Reeves thinks American 5 EDITORIAL

up to arbitrary power?
Courage Is
men and boys are falling behind. Some Contagious MICHELE GOODWIN AND 60 The Loyalist
GREGORY SHAFFER
The cruel world
feminists might need convincing. LEAH GREENBERG AND
EZRA LEVIN 24 Letters according to
Stephen Miller.
34 Uruguay’s Green
Power Revolution
6 COMMENT
Raiding the Swamp
24 O U R B A C K PA G E S
Gatsby at 100
D AV I D K L I O N

DOGE’s private-equity- RICHARD KREITNER 65 Across a Continent

N ATA S H A H A K I M I Z A PATA Andrée Blouin’s
style shakedown.
Lacking fossil fuel reserves, the MAUREEN TKACIK
C O L U M N S revolutionary lives.
BILL FLETCHER JR.
South American country had to get 10 Razing Hell
creative just to keep the lights on. 7 COMMENT
The LA fires show 69 Wisner’s Ghosts
A New Strategy
Democrats need why housing must The making of a
42 Who Gave Away the
Skies to the Airlines?
to confront two
foundational failures.
be socialized.
K AT E WA G N E R
Cold War spy.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD

E L I E M Y S TA L
JEE KIM AND 11 Town Called Malice 72 The B-Sides of
In 1978, Jimmy Carter signed the law
WA L E E D S H A H I D
January 6 is the model the Golden Record...
for Trump’s agenda. (poem)
that made air travel miserable—and 8 COMMENT
Our Long Covid CHRIS LEHMANN
S U M I TA C H A K R A B O R T Y
ushered in neoliberalism. The US response to the 74 Sunbelt Ringstrasse
pandemic has created a 14 The Front Burner
Atlanta’s Beltline and
52 Life Under Sanctions
D AV I D M O N T G O M E RY
nastier society.
JEET HEER
As DEI is snuffed out,
we’re all going to suffer. the effort to re-create
pedestrian cities.
K A L I H O L L O W AY
Cubans are caught in a vicious circle 16 Q&A KARRIE JACOBS

of government mismanagement Roxane Gay 15 Deadline Poet 79 Office Politics

SARA FRANKLIN The Ballad of Elon Musk The workplace
exacerbated by the US embargo. C A LV I N T R I L L I N
nightmares of
17 T H E D E B AT E
Severance.
Is Political Violence Cover illustration:
Ever Acceptable? ÀDRIA FRUITÓS
JORGE COTTE

N ATA S H A L E N N A R D A N D 81 Kakakin (poem)

KENA BETANCUR / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

D AV I D C O R T R I G H T HUSSAIN AHMED

VOLUME
The Nation (ISSN 0027-8378) produces 12 issues per year, which may include special double issues, by The Nation Company, LLC, 520 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018; (212) 209-5400.
320 Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription orders, changes of address, and all subscription inquiries: The Nation, PO Box 384, Congers, NY 10920-0384;
or call 1-800-333-8536. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to Bleuchip International, PO Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement No. 40612608.
NUMBER
When ordering a subscription, please allow four to six weeks for receipt of first issue and for all subscription transactions. Back issues available online for $9.99 plus S&H from: shop.thenation.
4
3
com. If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. The Nation is available on microfilm
APRIL from: University Microfilms, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Nation, PO Box 384, Congers, NY 10920-0384. Printed in the USA.

20
25 Read this issue on March 11 at TheNation.com—before anyone else. Activate your online account: TheNation.com/register
 US standards, but then Argentina is not the United

The
States. Manufacturing plays a minor role in the econ-

the natio
n.
B I G omy here, which is based on service industries and
agricultural exports. Nor does the country enjoy the
benefits of serving as the world’s reserve currency,
which so far has allowed the US to continue export-
ing its debt. Finally, at least for now, Americans are

Picture not haunted by the memory of a dictatorship like the

junta that ruled here from 1976 to 1983, waging a vi-
cious dirty war against its own citizens, during which
30,000 Argentines were murdered or disappeared.

A Pair of Kings This is a country where every cab driver can

quote you the “blue rate” to exchange pesos for dol-
lars (currently about 25 percent higher than the offi-

i
cial rate of roughly 1,000 to 1) and where the middle
Buenos Aires
have been over into the future, and it class tends to keep its savings in dollars—often in
cash. But it is also a place where successes in the
doesn’t work. For anyone curious about where fictitious economy preempt criticism of the actual
Elon Musk’s economic storm troopers may be underlying economy, whose structural weaknesses
headed, a trip to Argentina is instructive. Even (lack of investment, reliance on imports) Milei has
before President Javier Milei gifted the Boer done little to address. Eventually, those chickens
billionaire a chain saw onstage at February’s Conservative will come home to roost, though a fresh round of
Political Action Conference, the US right has long been funding from the IMF might delay the reckoning.
fascinated by this country’s cherub-faced caudillo. And not just be- Can Trump and Musk pull off a similar conjuring
cause he espouses a libertarianism that would sanction a free market trick? They certainly seem eager to try. But other
in the sale of human organs—and, potentially, human children. Or worlds remain possible—as we hope to remind you
because of his claims to have cloned his dead pet dog, whose canine in this issue, which brings Natasha Hakimi Zapata on
counsel he reportedly consults through a medium. how Argentina’s neighbor Uruguay achieved green
Milei may be crazy enough to make Donald Trump look normal— energy independence in record time; Elie Mystal on
though the red posters I saw on every avenue how neoliberalism was born in
here asking “¿Que hacemos con el rey loco?” (“What the skies; David Montgomery
can we do about the mad king?”) seemed per- on Cuba’s continuing torments;
tinent to both leaders. For political prognosti- A grim preview: and Eamon Whalen’s fascinat-
cators, Milei matters because after winning the So many moves in ing cover story on the state of
2023 election, he issued executive orders shred- the Project 2025 American men and boys.
ding Argentina’s public sector. Yet he remains playbook were tried out Plus our new columnist Da-
popular enough to give his party, La Libertad vid Klion reviewing the rise and
Avanza, currently a minority in both houses of in Argentina first. rise of Stephen Miller, Karrie
the National Congress, a decent chance to im- Jacobs on Atlanta’s Ringstrasse,
prove its position significantly in this year’s midterm elections—in Bill Fletcher Jr. on the African Pasionaria Andrée
a country where more than half the population (and 42 percent of Blouin, Adam Hochschild on the spy game, and
households) are stuck below the poverty line. Even Milei’s recent Jorge Cotte on the return of Severance.
cryptocurrency scandal doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent. By the time you read this, I’ll be back at my
So many moves in the Project 2025 playbook were tried out here desk—and perhaps the Democratic opposition to
first, from terminating state employees with probationary status to Trump will have figured out how to actually oppose
gutting and then shuttering entire government departments (includ- his and Musk’s power grabs. A few days after I ar-
ing the housing ministry, despite skyrocketing rents and shrinking rived here, Milei announced he was going to bypass
pensions forcing increasing numbers into poverty and homelessness). the National Congress and name Supreme Court
What’s Milei’s secret sauce? Deep fear of inflation plays a big role. justices himself by decree. You can be sure our new
Under his predecessor, the Peronist Alberto Fernández, inflation rose rulers are paying close attention. N
to an annual rate of 211 percent in 2023. Prices for food and health-
care more than doubled. In December of that year alone, prices rose
25.5 percent. That’s more in a single month than Americans experi-
4 enced during Joe Biden’s entire presidency.
A year later, monthly inflation had fallen to 2.7 percent—still high by
d.d. guttenplan
Editor
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

E D I T O R I A L / LEAH GREENBERG AND EZRA LEVIN FOR THE NATION

Courage Is Contagious

f or americans desperate to reclaim our democracy from the plutocratic

vandalism of the second Trump administration, our challenge is simple: We
have to unify and fight back. Defeating authoritarianism depends on a per-
sistent, courageous, broad-based opposition. We side with the two-thirds of
Democrats who want their congresspeople to oppose Trump at every turn.
As an organizing matter, this is a winning strategy. Trump is overreach-
ing. Voters wanted lower prices; instead, they’re being served techno-dystopian fascism
with a side of egg shortages. Neither Trump nor Elon Musk has
a mandate for this brazen assault on democracy. corralling their caucuses to produce a unified front
Congressional Democrats should be leading this charge, but their with aggressive, creative tactics and messaging.
response has been sluggish, ineffective, and boring. Many House Frightening times call for courageous leader-
Democrats have professed their powerlessness. Senate Democrats ship. Our enemy is not Musk or Trump—it’s apa-
have provided votes for almost all of Trump’s nominees. Strategic thy and cynicism, the authoritarian-friendly belief
silence and bipartisan appeals to fascists haven’t worked. that we are victims of world events rather than
We need an aggressive, creative, unified opposition. Here’s what participants in a global struggle for freedom and
that could look like: justice. Each time one of us takes a step forward
Slow the Senate. The Democratic minority can’t magically stop in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and
everything, but they can dramatize their opposition by blocking learn. Courage is contagious.
nominees from being considered, denying unanimous consent at ev- Take that step and steel yourself with the
ery opportunity, and forcing Republicans to waste time with quorum knowledge that you are the defender of a 250-
calls, among other procedural jujitsu. year experiment in self-governance—a real-life
Make Republicans own their complicity. pluralistic democracy, im-
Democrats should use their votes as leverage— perfect as it is, striving to be
by demanding safeguards against Musk’s cuts in more perfect.
exchange for any votes to fund the government,
We need aggressive, Our predecessors de-
and by using the budget process to make Re- creative, unified posed an addle-brained
publicans own the full political costs of their tax opposition to Trump king; crushed the vio-
cuts for the rich. and Musk. Here’s what lent insurrectionists of a
Break norms around collegiality. GOP slaveholding confederacy;
complicity demands the kind of loud, frequent
that could look like. forced the robber barons
confrontation that will cause Washington Post to contend with workers
editorial writers to clutch their pearls. For Republicans who refuse to and unions; kicked the Nazis’ asses throughout
face their constituents, Democrats should travel to their districts or Europe; broke the back of the Southern segrega-
states. For those who share concerns only privately, Democrats should tionist political bloc; and fought the terrorizing
expose their cowardice. forces at Stonewall. We have planted ourselves in
Work with the grass roots. Democrats should treat the protests stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of
against the Trump-Musk putsch as an opportunity rather than a threat. one form or another for a quarter of a millenni-
We run Indivisible, a national pro-democracy grassroots movement um. No entitled reality-TV has-been backed by
organization. Since November, we’ve seen record-breaking numbers an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video
of new Indivisible groups and members. Volunteers are making calls, games is going to roll over us now. We will not
protesting, showing up at congressional offices, attending town halls, finish this fight, but we can each be damn sure to
and demanding accountability from their representatives. This is, as do our part. Together, we are the opposition, and
they say, what democracy looks like; the only major pro-democracy this is our republic—if we can keep it. This is the
party in the country ought to tap into that energy. part where we keep it. N
It’s up to each of us to try and build this opposition. Constituents
should be organizing in their communities. Rank-and-file Demo- Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin are the cofounders
crats should feed off that energy. And Democratic leaders should be and co–executive directors of Indivisible.
5
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

C O M M E N T / M A U R E E N T K A C I K of employees and outsource as much as possible

to India; and cut off funds to anyone not on the

Raiding the Swamp payroll or expecting an interest payment. Before

Krause left the firm in January, he’d axed hundreds
of workers and demanded that the remaining ones
The DOGE rampage through the public sector is
justify their value in an e-mail. Now he’s cutting off
a classic private-equity-style shakedown, with bogus churches that contracted with the government to

t
numbers and sociopathic executives. help resettle Afghan refugees and farmers who in-
he nation’s capital is teeming with people vested tens of thousands of dollars in cost-sharing
contracts with the USDA, while instructing 2 mil-
who serve the interests of sadists who have lion federal employees to reply with a list of their
converted seemingly every crevice of our econ- accomplishments or face termination.
omy into a Sopranos plotline. But unlike tens As with any Wall Street looting, everything
of millions of Americans in every state of the is a lie, especially when numbers are involved. In
union, virtually none of these people has ever personally one representative case, a debt-burdened company
known the peculiar hell of having had their employer annexed accumulates a more than $1,000 balance at the
by a private-equity firm. local pizza shop to improve its short-term cash
That changed quite dramatically a few days after Donald Trump’s flow while it secretly pays its CEO and the deputy
second inauguration, when the DOGE raid on the administrative defense secretary’s private-equity fund a combined
state began. Scammy-looking generic e-mails began appearing in the half-billion dollars. Thousands of IRS officials
inboxes of federal employees, and very young men in hoodies began are axed to close a budget deficit that widens by
showing up in federal buildings and demanding access to computer $100 million for every $115,000 auditor you fire.
systems. Most of the first batch of e-mails claimed to be just “tests,” Line cooks and Social Security Administration
though a dozen or so informed the recipients that they had been workers are eliminated, while bloated outsourcing
fired. Phyllis Fong, who’d just celebrated her 22nd anniversary as contracts are doled out to insiders.
inspector general of the US Department of Agriculture, thought the Still, DOGE’s shakedown operation is different
two-sentence message with the subject line “White House Notifica- from standard private-equity raids in one respect:
tion,” which purported to terminate her “due to changing priorities,” Most PE mercenaries speak in bland business-school
seemed so dubious that she showed up to work on Monday anyway, pabulum; they don’t brandish chain saws at public
only to have her phone, computer, and IT systems access revoked gatherings to menace displaced workers or talk about
that afternoon. the need to inflict “trauma” on subject workforces.
Then the checks stopped showing up. Ten emer- Most of the hundreds of trauma-
gency clinics in Syria and anti-HIV efforts in Malawi tized private-sector workers I have
had their funding shut off; community health centers in interviewed over the past few years
Oregon, Maine, Nebraska, and Virginia and preschools As in any voted for Trump, I assume mostly be-
in 23 states swiftly met the same fate, as did state pro- looting carried cause, while neither party threatened
grams to clean up toxic waste dumps abandoned by out by private- to exact revenge on their predators,
private-equity-owned mine operators and frackers. equity firms, Trump had at least acknowledged the
It soon emerged that DOGE had detailed a doughy destruction these workers had en-
Florida software CEO named Tom Krause to the Trea- everything is a dured. But none of them wish the hell
sury Department to ensure “that the Treasury DOGE lie, especially they suffered on other people; if any-
Team was leveraging its unique technological expertise when numbers thing, their experience as casualties
to help operationalize the president’s policy priorities.” are involved. of private equity had highlighted the
Stiffing creditors and alienating staffers were something appeal of rules and regulations and in-
of a specialty for Krause, who’d been hired in 2022 by stitutions capable of enforcing them.
Vista Equity Partners to clean up a massive leveraged-buyout fiasco What’s more, when you’ve worked a job where
in which another private-equity firm and a hedge fund had floated resources are so stretched that every workday feels
$15.5 billion in high-interest debt to buy out four software companies like going to war and things only ever get worse, the
with combined profits of $1 billion. The numbers made no sense; sophomoric nihilism of Team DOGE begins to look
interest rates surged three percentage points while the bonds were like what it is: a wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive
being “sold,” and the company ran out of cash before it could make a indulgence no one can afford right now. N
single interest payment. In a less stupid era, everyone involved would
be in prison right now. Maureen Tkacik is the investigations editor at The
6 But Krause knew what to do: force customers into predatory American Prospect and a senior fellow at the American
subscription agreements to maintain basic systems; lay off thousands Economic Liberties Project.
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

C O M M E N T / J E E K I M A N D WA L E E D S H A H I D laws and winning elections; it’s also about shaping

the broader information environment in which

A New Strategy those laws and elections take place. Conservatives

understand this. That’s why they’ve spent decades
building an infrastructure that doesn’t just partici-
Democrats need to confront two foundational failures.

d
pate in political debate but defines the terms.
Take the Conservative Partnership Institute. It
emocrats see themselves as a lighthouse—
doesn’t just train far-right movement organizations
steady, guiding, a safeguard against chaos. But and leaders; it is a nonprofit that supplies them
a lighthouse only works if people look to it. with staff, strategy, media booking, podcasting
And more and more, they don’t. The problem platforms, and an ideological home in Washington.
isn’t just that the light is dimming; it’s that It ensures that when the far right takes office, they
voters have stopped navigating by it altogether. Beneath the don’t flounder—they build a movement and exe-
surface, something deeper is stirring: economic frustration, cute. It’s not just a think tank; it’s a media-steeped
cultural disillusionment, and a growing sense that the party isn’t at- and savvy strategy hub that coordinates the insur-
tuned to the struggles of working people. The question isn’t whether gency inside the Republican Party.
Democrats can keep the light shining. It’s whether they understand Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy wasn’t
what’s rising in the darkness, and whether they can adapt before it just misinformation—it was volume. Trump didn’t
overtakes them. just seek headlines; he turned his base into mega-
The Democratic Party isn’t in inevitable decline. It’s in crisis—one phones. Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s migrant
facing center-left parties everywhere—resulting from busing stunt wasn’t a policy proposal
two fundamental failures. but a viral political weapon designed
The first failure is the party’s fraying connection to to seize the conversation and force
the working class—not just white working-class voters, Voters don’t just Democrats into a defensive crouch.
whose defection to the Republican Party has been see Democrats The actual policy debate—on asy-
widely discussed, but also young men and non-college- as out of touch, lum law, refugee resettlement, the
educated voters of color, who have begun shifting away but slow, weak, border—became tangential. Abbott
from the Democratic coalition at an alarming rate. A wasn’t trying to win a debate; he was
party that once cast itself as the vehicle for working- and ineffective. trying to win attention. And by win-
class political power now struggles to articulate what, ning attention, score votes and shape
exactly, it is delivering for working people. That failure isn’t just reality. Until we build an infrastructure that can con-
about policy, but about perception: More and more working-class test at this level, we’ll remain stuck playing defense.
voters see the Democrats as a party of affluent professionals, more The answer isn’t just sharper messaging or a bet-
plugged in to the priorities of college-educated liberals than to the ter policy agenda. Political realignment also requires
everyday economic struggles of the majority. a high-functioning ecosystem, an interplay between
In focus groups, voters don’t just see Democrats as out of touch. movements that mobilize pressure from below and
They see them as slow, weak, ineffective. Slugs. Snails. Sloths. Mean- parties that channel that pressure into governance.
while, they describe Republicans as lions and sharks, as tigers on the Movements create political will; parties institutional-
attack—aggressive, dominant, and willing to fight for what they want. ize it. Often, they exist in tension. But when aligned,
That perception gap is devastating in a moment of economic anxiety. they don’t just win elections—they rewrite history.
When voters feel like they’re drowning under the cost of rent and Think of movements, media, and parties as
groceries, they don’t want a party that explains why change is hard. interlocking gears. If they aren’t synchronized,
They want a party that picks a fight and wins. nothing moves. Movements generate urgency, ex-
The Democratic Party needs to throw a punch, to make it clear pand the base, and push the boundaries of what’s
who is hoarding wealth and power and who is paying the price. And possible. Media shapes how ideas are framed, de-
above all, it needs to be relentless about one thing: affordability. Bil- bated, and absorbed. Politicians can harness that
lionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump loot from working fam- momentum and translate it into governance.
ilies while using culture wars to distract, divide, and conquer. They We must engage with surround sound, compel,
stoke outrage over DEI, put mass deportations on daytime TV, and and move people in this age of populism and the
flood social media with spectacle to keep attention off their smash- attention economy under Trump and Musk. N
and-grab tactics. Meanwhile, life keeps getting more expensive—
healthcare, housing, childcare, groceries—and the people in charge Jee Kim has served at numerous start-ups focused on media,
keep telling us to blame anyone but them. technology, and politics. Waleed Shahid is the di-
The second failure is structural, and just as consequential: Demo- rector of The Bloc and the former spokesperson for
crats are losing the war for attention. Politics isn’t just about passing Justice Democrats.
7
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

C O M M E N T / J E E T H E E R of trust in the scientific community. In late 2024,

Pew reported: “In April 2020—the early days of

Our Long Covid COVID-19—87% of Americans had confidence in

scientists to act in the public’s best interests. By fall
of last year…the figure had dropped 14 percentage
Treating the pandemic as a temporary
points to 73%. This was driven by a disproportion-

o
emergency has created a nastier society. ately steep loss of confidence among Republicans.”
In the wake of Covid, Americans have become
n february 13, 2020, the centers for disease
more individualistic, more conspiracy-minded, and
Control and Prevention confirmed the 15th case less committed to collective social effort. This new
of Covid-19 in the United States, an early sign social Darwinism helped elect Donald Trump—
that the pandemic was a spark on the verge of and now it’s being put into practice by RFK Jr. and
becoming a wildfire. Exactly five years later, Elon Musk.
the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a virulent foe of It didn’t have to be this way. The initial mo-
mainstream science, as secretary of health and human services. ment of Covid brought with it a utopian burst of
Twelve days after that, RFK Jr., in keeping with his deep-seated collective effort: Donald Trump deserves credit
anti-vaccination agenda, paused a Biden administration program to for Operation Warp Speed (which created the first
test a new Covid vaccine. At roughly the same time, his colleague vaccine with remarkable alacrity) and for working
Elon Musk, in his capacity as de facto head of Donald with Democrats to pass the gener-
Trump’s so-called Department of Government Effi- ous payments that helped Americans
ciency, gutted government funding for Ebola preven- survive the lockdown. But once out
tion in Africa. RFK Jr.’s of office, Trump found it easier to
RFK Jr. might be cavalier about the need to continue accession to harness the anger of conspiracy the-
fighting Covid, but his accession to power is itself proof power is orists and cranks. The Trump of
of how the pandemic has remade America and the world. 2020 listened to Dr. Anthony Fauci;
The half-decade since Covid emerged as a pandemic
proof of how the Trump of 2025 removed Fauci’s
has seen a remarkable boomerang effect, wherein sci- the pandemic security protection.
entific and public health success has provoked an anti- has remade But Democrats share some blame
intellectual and antisocial backlash that threatens our America and for too quickly abandoning programs
ability to fight future pandemics—while empowering to fight Covid. In April 2023, Joe
extreme right-wing politics. This historic whiplash came
the world. Biden declared the Covid emergency
about because politicians across the spectrum treated over. Well before then, economic
Covid as a temporary emergency rather than a lasting challenge. relief for Covid had been scaled back. As the
Covid hasn’t gone away. It’s become less virulent, but it’s still killing Columbia University economics historian Adam
people. Seven million people have died, including a disproportionately Tooze has noted, the Biden administration gave
large number of Americans (at least 1.2 million). Among the survivors, up on “supporting a generous extension of the
one study estimated, at least 14 percent of Americans have suffered at American welfare state, which was in fact adopted
some point from long Covid, a complex mix of lingering ailments that during the crisis. Child tax benefits, for instance,
include tiredness and brain fog. Harvard economist David Cutler esti- halved American child poverty during the crisis.”
mates that in the US alone, the cumulative cost of long Covid over the Biden ended those benefits in January 2022, re-
lifetime of people who have it—in lost wages, medical expenses, and trenching on commitments that were still needed
diminished quality of life—will be $3.7 trillion. That is the equivalent by struggling Americans. This cutback, combined
of the 2008 Great Recession, albeit spread over a longer period. with the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest
Beyond illness, there’s the persistent economic problem: inflation rates to fight inflation, created a nation of enraged
caused by supply-chain disruptions and ballooning deficits, now used and financially strapped Americans. A more equi-
to justify austerity. In commercial business districts in the United table anti-inflation measure, controls on corporate
States, the value of property has fallen by 60 percent since 2019. Be- price-gougers, was largely neglected.
hind that statistic lies the story of increasing numbers of white-collar In 2020, the world, and Americans, were un-
workers doing their jobs from home, leading to boarded-up businesses prepared for Covid; five years later, there has been
and restaurants, and testifying to a desolation of urban social life. the opposite of a learning process. The medical
And not just urban social life. There is a robust international liter- infrastructure and the social cohesion to deal with
ature, some of it summarized in National Institutes of Health reports, a pandemic have frayed rather than undergone re-
showing loneliness increased during the pandemic. For Americans, pair. What remains is a selfish, antisocial mood that
8 the pandemic meant not just more loneliness but also less trust in the is perhaps the most pervasive feature of our time:
government. Among Republicans, there has also been a steep decline the Covid Era. N
 Impo
Was ssible Pric
$499
, Nowe

59
★★★★★
“It’s a beautiful
ring with incredible
brilliance!”
J. A., Ft Lauderdale, FL

Hundreds of
★★★★★
Reviews

We’re Bringing You Some Star Power

Nobel Prize Winner Brings Us Perfection From Deep Space
T he story begins in 1893 when Nobel Prize-winning French
scientist Henri Moissan discovered an extraordinary gem while
studying rock samples from a meteor in Canyon Diablo, Arizona.
but all yours for just $59! Why such a spectacular price?
Because we want you as a long term client. This carat weight of
moissanite is sold for $1,700 at a major national retailer, but
Extremely rare in nature, moissanite is the cosmic treasure that that is ridiculous. Only 1,000 563 available for this offer. So
has been perfected by scientists right here on Earth, offering an don’t wait—once this deal is gone, it’s gone!
unrivaled brilliance that outshines even diamonds.
Jewelry Specifications:
According to the Gemological Institute of America, moissanite • Moissanite in gold-finished .925 sterling silver settings
surpasses all other gems in brilliance, fire, and luster. • Ring: Available in whole sizes 5-10
Its unique “double refraction” means that light enters the
stone and exits not once but twice—something no diamond Star Power Moissanite Ring
can achieve. 1-½ carat moissanite solitaire $499 $59* + S&P Save $440

Now, for an extremely limited time, you can own this celestial *Special price only for customers using the offer code.
beauty at an unheard-of price! The Star Power Moissanite Ring
features a stunning 1-½ carat moissanite 1-800-333-2045
set in yellow gold-finished .925 sterling silver—normally $499 Your Insider Offer Code: SPM127-01

Stauer, 14091 Southcross Drive W., Dept. SPM127-01, Burnsville, MN 55337 | www.stauer.com

AFFORD THE EXTRAORDINARY®

 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

slack where private companies pulled out. But as

Razing Hell Bloomberg predicted almost a year ago, questions
are arising as to how much Californians can or
Kate Wagner will pay in the face of a catastrophe. One thing
remains as clear as it was when Davis articulated it
30 years ago: It is neither fiscally nor environmen-
tally sustainable to keep building single-family
homes in extremely risky areas.
Many of the houses affected in the recent fires
We’re Not Prepared were built in the mid-20th century, a time when
growth seemed limitless and land was cheap. As
After the disastrous LA wildfires, it’s clearer than ever that changed, the houses grew and grew in val-
that state intervention is needed to house people safely. ue and became repositories of wealth that could

t
be passed down to the next generation—many
he numbers coming out of los angeles coun- members of which are now unable to afford new
housing of similar quality. They also often can’t
ty are staggering: more than 16,000 buildings afford the outrageous insurance premiums, and
destroyed, some 2,000 structures damaged, what insurance they do have doesn’t always pay
and over 150,000 people ordered to evacuate. out in full what a house is worth on the market. So
Whole swaths of Pacific Palisades and Altadena what was once a repository for wealth on the basis
have been wiped off the map. Obliterated along with them: of its exchange value is reduced to what it actually
basic shelter; countless families’ primary source of wealth; and is: a house on land that’s prone to fire.
the incalculable loss of memories, sensations, routines, possessions, The heart of this problem is not only climate
and a sense of normalcy. change but the commodification of housing itself,
Whenever something like this happens, the vultures of displace- which turned a simple concept (basic shelter)
ment and development start circling. Mike Davis put it succinctly into a nest egg at best and a risky financial asset
during the Woolsey Fire of 2018 when he was asked what he expected at worst. The 20th-century ideal of the house as
to see after the flames died down: “Bigger mansions.… What tends the most stable asset—one whose value will sure-
to disappear is rental properties, trailer parks, people who don’t have ly go up, up, up—may seem unassailable if you
adequate insurance.” In other words, the poor and working classes browse Zillow. But California is only the start of
suffer first—and often permanently—while the rich can just keep the other shoe dropping. Almost 100 years ago,
building. Davis’s famous essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” Herbert Hoover invoked homeownership as the
not only decried overdevelopment in a fire-prone ecosystem but re- pinnacle of prosperity, a patriotic American’s
minded us that the overdevelopment was paid for by pilfering from ultimate goal. But it’s no longer a plausible goal
funds intended for public use. He first made that case back in 1995, for most of us and won’t be again anytime soon.
and he’s only been proven more right ever since. We have yet to face that fact; we are not socially
As firefighters struggled to contain the Palisades and Eaton fires, or politically ready for the evaporation of so
landlords in the surrounding area jacked up rents. This form of much wealth so quickly. One can easily see a slide
price gouging is illegal under California law, but in the absence of further into revanchism: either in the form of “I
enforcement, citizens took it upon themselves to report the violat- already got mine, and the state should pay for
ing landlords. The state and local authorities, meanwhile, including it,” or by shifting the blame for these crises from
Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass, were more the people and policies responsible for climate
concerned with denouncing the alleged looting taking place and change to our neighbors. We are already seeing
dispatched the National Guard as well as the LAPD to menacingly sensational social media outrage linking the fires
surveil the immolation of people’s possessions. to DEI programs, the homeless, and drug users.
California, along with Florida, now finds It’s ugly, but insurance
itself at the epicenter of an insurance crisis companies will continue to
that has the potential to trigger a 2008-caliber flee California. Insurance is
financial collapse, as climate-driven disasters Housing is the most profitable only when the risk
threaten to overwhelm insurers. Many insurers obvious sector in is offset, and right now there
want to exit high-risk areas and are canceling society where the is too much risk. Although
policies en masse, including in Pacific Palisades. choice is between the state will be pressured
In California, FAIR—a state-created insurance to keep the carriers there or
socialism
10
JOE CIARDIELLO

program that offers coverage when tradition- insure these properties itself,
al insurers won’t—has been picking up the or barbarism. this strategy can only work
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

for so many more fires before the futility

becomes obvious and the risk becomes Town
systemic. The housing system is already
under tremendous strain from a lack
of supply and from landlord collusion.
Called Malice C H R I S L E H M A N N
Rents rose over 20 percent during Joe
Biden’s presidency, and mass displace-
ment and homelessness are swallowing
more and more families. As much as
The J6 Government
market-based solutions are touted, they The Capitol insurrection is now Trump’s model for how to
do not work for the most vulnerable carry out his authoritarian agenda in Washington.

a
among us, because building supportive
or truly affordable housing is not and
mid the chaos and rubble of president trump’s
never will be profitable. This is not to
say that we shouldn’t build more market-
assault on the US government, one telling develop-
rate housing—by all means, build, build, ment has received minimal attention. After Trump,
build; upzone, upzone, upzone. But state under the dimwitted ideological tutelage of Elon
intervention, which has long been lav- Musk, leveled the US Agency for International De-
ished on single-family houses and now velopment, the lead administrator left standing over the smol-
on the insurance of a way of living that dering wreckage was a hard-right federal bureaucrat named Pete
is no longer feasible, will be necessary to Marocco. A former assistant to a chief administrator at the agency, Marocco was
house people safely. ousted from no less than three different executive departments—State, Commerce,
Housing is the most obvious sector and Defense—during Trump’s first term for creating toxic working conditions and
in society in which the choice is between visiting retribution on rival staffers.
socialism or barbarism. The people who If Marocco were just another glorified brigand placed atop a government agen-
have lost everything in the LA fires de- cy, that would make him a standard-issue appointee in this administration.
serve to be treated with dignity and sup- But he brings another crucial selling point to the Trumpian table: He
port and instead are being surveilled, appears to have participated, along with his now-wife, in the attempted
price-gouged, and left holding the bag. January 6 coup. Online sleuths identified the pair entering the US Capi-
But we cannot go back to 20th-century tol through a broken window. Marocco was never charged in connection
ideas of planning, growth, and wealth with the insurrection. When the footage tying him to the assault was re-
accumulation. If we do not start orga- vealed, he responded with the kind of high dudgeon perfected by Defense
nizing for a new way of building and Secretary Pete Hegseth and so many other MAGA figures with (to put
living together—one that is environmen- it mildly) checkered pasts—decrying what he called “petty smear tactics
tally resilient and insulated from market and desperate personal attacks by politicians with no solutions,” without
shocks; one that will ease the inevitable actually denying his participation in the insurgency.
mass relocations as more and more disas- Marocco’s J6 pedigree matters not just for its outrageousness, but also
ters make places unlivable—we will truly because it is a leading indicator of the dominant approach adopted by the
reach the end of the line. N Trump White House to enact its authoritarian agenda. Far from being an
inescapable legal and moral stain on the Trumpified GOP and its far-right
supporters, January 6 is the new Republican model for how to get things
LEFT FROM TOP: MICHAEL NIGRO / SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES; RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD

MORE ONLINE done in Washington.

TheNat ion.com /h i gh l i gh t s
January 6, after all, was a giant MAGA vendetta against all traditional
› Reject the constraints on raw executive power, up to and including duly monitored
Linguistic Coup: and certified election outcomes. The insurrection’s notional rationale—
Speak Up for that the 2020 Biden campaign, in conjunction with a never-specified cabal
Trans People of state election officials, local vote tabulators, and shadowy foreign voting-
WILLOW SCHENWAR machine contractors—was obviously a ginned-up ruse to create the mo-
mentum behind the power grab. That’s why, just as obviously, all the alarms
› Ronald over insecure voting machines and corrupt balloting officials vanished as
Johnson’s soon as Trump won reelection in the standard fashion last November.
American But the larger lesson of January 6 proved to be that even a violent mass
Romanticism insurrection founded on conspiratorial lies can fall under the expansive
DAVID B. HOBBS 11 domain of executive impunity in our decaying constitutional order.
It was entirely fitting that Trump began his second administration by
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

granting pardons or clemency to the 1,500- damental nationalist birthright and abridging
plus rioters with criminal cases stemming from your racial-cum-gender purity. They must not
the assault on the Capitol. His White House Trump and merely be scrutinized, but delegitimized and
proceeded to dismiss Justice Department law- Musk’s assaults eliminated—in the same way that Congress had
yers who’d worked on special prosecutor Jack
Smith’s now-mothballed case against Trump
on the federal to be throttled into overturning the results of
the 2020 election, and Mike Pence condemned
for leading the insurrection, and Trump has government to be hanged if he didn’t play along.
threatened the same fate for FBI officials who all spring from It’s no exaggeration to say that the mood of
investigated the coup attempt. the same toxic militant J6 absolutism is the default setting of
These maneuvers were more than a
Stalinesque exercise in manipulating and fal-
mythology as the second Trump administration. It finds its
purest, and most deeply unhinged, expression
sifying the historical record; they were also the January 6 in the fulminations of Trump’s centibillionaire
precursors to the wide-ranging and ongoing attacks. consigliere Musk.
campaign of MAGA pillage that’s now rolling In the midst of his controlled demolition of
through the federal bureaucracy. USAID, Musk platformed phony videos about made-up ce-
The pretext for Musk’s mandate at the comically misnamed lebrity boondoggle tours financed by the agency, elevated the
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is just as deranged conspiratorial imaginings of alt-right vlogger Mike
fanciful and half-assed as the basis of the 2021 “Stop the Steal” Benz, and promoted his own fanciful vision of the agency as a
uprising—and Musk’s illegal and unconstitutional seizure of clearinghouse of lethally weaponized wokeness. Musk wrote
payment data at the Treasury Department is in the service of a that USAID was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who
similarly slapdash effort to override congressionally mandated hate America” and that it was clearly “time for it to die.”
expenditures and abolish basic government services by follow- Trump concurred and obliged, declaring that the agen-
ing a bullshit priority list generated by an AI server. cy was infested with “radical left lunatics”; in short order,
Toggle over to the allied effort to root out DEI-inflected his team at USAID notified nearly all of the agency’s “di-
speech, destroy government sites meant to help minority rect-hire” personnel that they were going on indefinite
groups, and trash racial-sensitivity training throughout federal leave. This left little more than 290 staffers standing, out of
officialdom; the cruel and unjustified suspension of funding a former roster of 14,000 employees in the US and abroad.
at the National Institutes of Health; the push to raze the Trump’s incoming cabinet is charged with following the
Department of Education; the overlapping trans panics now same basic playbook, as they root out imaginary thought-
enshrined in government policy; or the blatantly unconstitu- crimes and lurch into unholy MAGA deviationism through-
tional attempt to end birthright citizenship. It’s all the same out the government. Trump’s election is proof positive that
toxic mythology at the heart of January 6: Shadowy elite forces January 6 worked—and the insurrection is now the estab-
are denying you, the righteous MAGA acolyte, your fun- lishment. Just ask Pete Marocco. N

O P P A R T
P E T E R
K U P E R
 ADVERTISEMENT

Fish Oil Failure Shines Grim Light

on America’s Memory Crisis
America’s Top Memory M.D. Reveals Why Fish Oil Doesn’t
Protect You from Senior Moments – and the #1 Alternative
M ore than 16 million Ameri-
cans suffer from age-asso-
ciated cognitive impairment, and
you get older…
Dr. Sears recommends a differ-
ent approach.
according to nationwide research,
these numbers are only rising. THE SECRET TO A
Thankfully, anti-aging specialist LASTING MEMORY
and best-selling author Dr. Al Sears Research has shown our paleo
says there’s an easy way to banish ancestors were able to grow bigger
senior moments and brain fog for and smarter brains by eating foods
good. rich in one ingredient — DHA.
It’s a safe, natural compound “Our hippocampus thrives off
called DHA – one of the building DHA, and grows because of it,”
blocks of your brain. It helps chil- explains Dr. Sears. “Without DHA,
dren grow their brains significantly our brains would shrink, and our
bigger during development. And in memories would quickly fade.”
adults, it protects brain cells from A groundbreaking study from Why the ‘brain fuel’ ingredient in fish oil is slowly drying up.
dying as they get older. the University of Alberta con-
For years, most people thought firmed this. Animals given a diet ty DHA supplement that doesn’t all-time high. I’ve always had trou-
fish oil was the best available rich in DHA saw a 29% boost in come from a farmed source. That ble concentrating, and now I think
source of DHA… their hippocampus — the part of will protect your brain cells and I know why,” raves Bernice J. “The
But industrial fish farming prac- the brain responsible for learning the functions they serve well into difference that Omega Rejuvenol
tices have depleted the nutritional and memory. As a result, these an- old age.” makes couldn’t be more notice-
content of nearly every fish oil you imals became smarter. Dr. Sears and his team worked able.”
can buy. Another study on more than tirelessly for over two years devel- And 70-year-old Mark K. says,
Today, roughly 20 million Amer- 1,500 seniors found that those oping a unique brain-boosting for- “My focus and memory are back to
icans are wasting their money on whose brains were deficient in mula called Omega Rejuvenol. age-30 levels.”
fish oils that hardly do anything at DHA had significantly smaller It’s made from the most pow- These are just a handful of the
all. brains — a characteristic of ac- erful source of DHA in the ocean,
celerated aging and a weakened thousands of reviews Dr. Sears
And since they think they are squid and krill — two species that receives regularly thanks to his
addressing the problem, fish oil’s memory. cannot be farmed. breakthrough memory formula,
failure has led to America’s memo- PEOPLE’S BRAINS ARE According to Dr. Sears, these are Omega Rejuvenol.
ry crisis continuing to grow practi- the purest and most potent sourc-
cally unchecked.
SHRINKING AND THEY WHERE TO FIND
DON’T EVEN KNOW IT es of DHA in the world, because
Fortunately, Dr. Sears says, they haven’t been tampered with. OMEGA REJUVENOL
“there’s still hope for seniors. Dr. Sears uncovered that some- To secure bottles of this
“Omega Rejuvenol is sourced
Getting more DHA can make a time during the 1990s, fish farm- brain-booster, buyers should con-
from the most sustainable fishery
life-changing difference for your ers stopped giving their animals a tact the Sears Health Hotline at
in Antarctica. You won’t find this
mental clarity, focus, and memo- natural, DHA-rich diet and began 1-800-307-3156. “It takes time to
oil in any stores.”
ry.” feeding them a diet that was 70% manufacture these bottles,” says
vegetarian. MORE IMPRESSIVE Dr. Sears. “The Hotline allows us
Dr. Sears, a highly-acclaimed,
board-certified doctor— who has “It became expensive for farm- RESULTS to ship the product directly to cus-
published more than 500 studies ers to feed fish what they’d eat in Already, the formula has sold tomers who need it most.”
and written four bestselling books the wild,” explains Dr. Sears. “But more than 850,000 bottles. And for Dr. Sears feels so strongly about
— says we should be able to get in order to produce DHA, fish need a good reason, too. Satisfied cus- this product he is offering a 100%
enough DHA in our diets… but we to eat a natural, marine diet, like tomers can’t stop raving about the money-back guarantee on every
don’t anymore. the one they’d eat in the wild.” memory-boosting benefits of quali- order. “Send back any used or un-
“For thousands of years, fish “Since fish farmers are depriv- ty-sourced DHA oil. used bottles within 90 days and I’ll
were a great natural source of DHA. ing these animals of their natural “The first time I took it, I was rush you a refund,” says Dr. Sears.
But due to industrial fish farming diet, DHA is almost nonexistent in amazed. The brain fog I struggled The Hotline is taking orders for
practices, the fish we eat and the the oils they produce.” with for years was gone within 24 the next 48 hours. After that, the
fish oils you see at the store are no “And since more than 80% of hours. The next day, I woke up phone number may be shut down
longer as nutrient-dense as they fish oil comes from farms, it’s no with the energy and mental clarity to allow for inventory restocking.
once were,” he explains. wonder the country is experienc- of a new man,” says Owen R.
Call 1-800-966-5612 to secure
DHA is backed by hundreds of ing a memory crisis. Most people’s “I remember what it was like your limited supply of Omega
studies for supporting razor-sharp brains are shrinking and they don’t before I started taking Omega Re- Rejuvenol. Readers of this
focus, extraordinary mental clarity, even know it.” juvenol… the lack of focus… the publication immediately qualify
and a lightning quick memory… So, what can people do to im- dull moods… the slippery memo- for a steep discount, but supplies
especially in seniors. prove their memory and brain ry… but now my mind is as clear are limited. To take advantage of
So, if you’re struggling with fo- function most effectively. as it’s ever been,” says Estelle H. this great offer use Promo Code
cus, mental clarity, or memory as Dr. Sears says, “Find a quali- “My mood and focus are at an NATOM425 when you call.
THESE S TAT E M E N T S HAVE NOT BEEN E V A L U AT E D BY THE FOOD AND DRUG A D M I N I S T R AT I O N . THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, T R E AT, CURE OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE. R E S U LT S M AY VA RY 12
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

making a big show of signing an anti-DEI order

The aimed at the FAA after the Potomac crash. He also
Front Burner revoked the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity
rule that prohibited government contractors from
Kali Holloway discriminating on the basis of race or gender.
The bad news? The rest of us are about to reap
the consequences of unrestrained white mediocrity.
Take the new, DEI-less FAA. As of this writing,
there have been at least five more plane accidents
White Flops Rejoice! since the Potomac crash. It’s almost as if DEI was
the only thing keeping the planes in the sky.
DEI is being snuffed out in DC. Mediocre whiteness Or check out Trump appointees like Secretary of
reigns. And we’re all going to suffer for it. Defense Pete Hegseth. His predecessor was Lloyd

i
Austin, a Silver Star awardee with more than four
n the wake of the catastrophic plane and decades of military experience. Hegseth’s résumé
includes being ousted as the head of not one but two
helicopter collision over the Potomac in January, veterans’ advocacy groups because of “allegations of
Donald Trump spoke to the nation—not to offer financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and
words of consolation or comfort, but to blame personal misconduct,” according to The New Yorker.
diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs During his confirmation hearing, he dodged ques-
for the tragedy. By turning instantly to racism, Trump skirt- tions about whether he would follow unlawful direc-
ed some difficult issues about America’s worst commercial tives from Trump to shoot protesters. According to
aviation disaster in 16 years. Like the fact that just nine days earlier, Senator Tammy Duckworth, another Army veteran,
Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Whitaker had resigned Hegseth didn’t know the most “basic, 101 stuff for
after months of public pressure by Trump’s deputy president, Elon someone who wants to be secretary of defense.”
Musk. Or that Trump had issued a federal employee hiring freeze that Or what about Edward Coristine, a main char-
failed to include an explicit carve-out for air traffic controllers, a pro- acter in Musk’s Department of Government Effi-
fession that’s been understaffed since the pandemic. Or that 24 hours ciency? Coristine is 19, graduated high school in
after the crash, FAA employees were sent an e-mail containing buyout 2024, goes by “Big Balls” online, and is now a senior
offers and the suggestion that they “find a job in the private sector.” adviser at both the Department of Homeland Secu-
Or that Trump had gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee rity and the State Department. Coristine and five
the day after his inauguration. other DOGE employees whose ages top out at 24
Instead, Trump chose to eke out a little more mileage from were allowed access to the Treasury Department’s
DEI, the right’s current favorite racist bugaboo. In recent years, payment system, making them privy to millions of
conservatives have twisted the term into shorthand for the idea that Americans’ most sensitive private data. (A judge
unqualified and unfit Black folks—and, when convenient, women temporarily blocked this, but the data could still
and other gender and racial minorities—are undeservedly elevated have been scraped.) Did I mention that Coristine
to roles for which white men were denied the right of first and last was fired from his last internship for leaking compa-
refusal. JD Vance even claimed that DEI “puts stress on the people ny secrets? What could possibly go wrong?
who are already there,” which, as columnist Ed Kilgore has noted, The list goes on. Does anyone really think
suggests “that even if a white man were responsible for the crash, it Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the poster child for “I did
was probably a white man ‘stressed’ by DEI practices.” my own research,” is going to be a great steward
DEI was always just an effort to ensure that qualified members of America’s healthcare agency? Or that Project
of underrepresented groups had access to opportunities historically 2025 coauthor Russell Vought should have discre-
denied to them. But here’s Trump and Musk, asserting that white men tion over federal spending as head of the Office of
succeed purely on “merit” and presumably considering themselves Management and Budget? Or that Tulsi Gabbard
living proof. The former, a man who looked di- and Kash Patel, both of whom
rectly into a solar eclipse; the latter, the heir to an have been derided by scores of
apartheid emerald mine who was allegedly doing national security officials, can
so much “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and A 19-year-old who be trusted to run our intelli-
ketamine” that it worried his board members at goes by “Big Balls” gence agencies or the FBI?
Tesla and SpaceX, per The Wall Street Journal. is helping Elon Musk A lot of people who voted to
The good news for MAGA is that DEI is dead. run DOGE. What could hurt others will learn that when
ANDY FRIEDMAN

14 Trump signed a slew of executive orders to purge

it from both the public and private sector—even possibly go wrong?
a tech billionaire and a known
real estate scammer unite to
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

wreck the government, the resulting harm will extend far beyond and banks. If conspiracists support Trump’s gag orders on the
the presumed beneficiaries of DEI. CDC and withdrawal from the World Health Organization, they
If anti-DEI farmers don’t care about the global death toll might care about outbreaks of tuberculosis and a quickly morph-
resulting from the demise of the US Agency for International ing bird flu virus. And if they still haven’t bothered to look up how
Development, which sourced 41 percent of its food aid from US tariffs work, maybe they’ll get interested if the $800 tax increase
farms, they will care about the roughly $2 billion in lost food sales. predicted by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation hits home.
If Trump voters don’t care about Vought’s slashing of workers at Or maybe those people will look at the destruction to them-
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, perhaps they will care selves and the country and still take pride in the fact that trans girls
about the wanton financial fraud inflicted by mortgage companies can’t play girls’ sports and airplane pilots keep getting whiter. N

SNAPSHOT An Unwelcome Alliance

David Gannon Berlin activists wearing masks of Elon Musk, Alternative for Germany leader Alice Weidel,
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and JD Vance protest foreign influence in Germany’s
national election, which was held in February.

By the expected to pro-

duce no savings 5K C A LV I N T R I L L I N
Numbers
0.9%
Number of Forest
Service employees
DeadlinePoet
who were laid off
Total savings The Ballad of Elon Musk
claimed by DOGE,
as a percentage of 11
FROM TOP: AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; ANNA MONEYMAKER / GETTY IMAGES

(Sung to the tune of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”)

the federal budget Number of lawsuits
filed against DOGE
0.12%
Amount of savings
for violating the
Privacy Act of 1974
Attend the tale of Elon Musk.
He fires folks from dawn till dusk.
DOGE has been
able to itemize $21B He seems to treat their woes as zest.

40%
Portion of con- 2M
Amount the
US government
And while he’s about it, he feathers his nest.

tracts canceled by Number of federal

has awarded or His gestures weird, his manner brusque—
promised Elon
Elon Musk’s De- workers who were Musk’s companies That’s Elon Musk,
partment of Gov- asked by DOGE to
ernment Efficiency
(DOGE) that are
“justify their work
or lose their jobs”
since 2008
The chain-saw killer from Tesla. 15
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Q&A
I also wanted to go beyond theory, so I wanted
to bring in a lot of applied feminism, like feminism
and disability, feminism and race, transfeminism,
ecofeminism—because, of course, we live on a
planet. Reproductive freedom, of course. I tried to
do as much as possible. And, you know, it’s almost
700 pages long. So there’s a lot to say, clearly.

SF: You write that it’s detrimental to us to try to de-

fine what feminism is or isn’t, but you also condemn

Roxane Gay “striving to emulate the worst of men as neither good

nor bad feminism, but unacceptable feminism.” How
do you see those two assertions coexisting? Where’s
the line between an expansive, inclusive feminism
and truly unacceptable feminism?
Roxane Gay is one of the most incisive cultural
critics writing today. She landed in the center of RG: Well, you know, “expansive” and “inclusive”
are incredibly important concepts, but that doesn’t
contemporary American political discourse in mean that it’s a free-for-all. One of the things that
2014 with her New York Times best-selling essay was really frustrating after Bad Feminist came out
collection Bad Feminist. In 2017, she published the nationally best- was a bunch of, like, pro-life “feminists” who were
selling story collection Difficult Women and the memoir Hunger. She like, “I’m a feminist, and I’m pro-life,” and it’s like, “No,
is also a coauthor of the Marvel comic book series World of Wakanda, ma’am, you really are not.” You cannot be pro-life
a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and writes the and pro-feminism. Words mean things! And so many
popular newsletter The Audacity. Gay’s latest project is The Portable people were like, “Ha ha! I’m a bimbo, but I’m a ‘bad
Feminist Reader (to be published this March by Penguin), in which feminist.’” Like, wow! It’s just a lot when you see that.
she offers a nuanced look at the evolution of feminist theory, prac- I think that some of the ideas in the book did invite
tices, and movements. I spoke with Gay about the new book in early that kind of response, because I’m talking about the
February, just weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump. reality that we’re all flawed, we’re human, we are incon-
—Sara Franklin sistent. And I stand by that. But if I were to do the book
over again, I would focus on accountability—that, yes,
SF: What effect has putting this project together had on you person- it’s well and good that we’re flawed and that we’re hu-
ally, ideologically, politically? man, but then how do we hold ourselves accountable
RG: I think it has reminded me that the canon is something that should for that and for the inconsistencies in our ideologies?
be ever-evolving, that it shouldn’t be something that is static and rigid.
SF: Can you say a little bit more about that?
Of course there are going to be your mainstays, but there should always
be new entries into the canon, and new ways of thinking about feminism RG: A lot of times, people focus on the choices. OK,
and how we apply feminism to our lives and to the world around us. yes, we can focus on the choices that we make, and
those choices do matter. But what’s next? What do
SF: In your introduction, you talk about how people misconstrued (continued on page 22)
some of the ideas you put forth in Bad Feminist, or how they took up
those ideas in a way that was different from what you had intended.
Did you do anything differently in the conception or explicit framing
of this book that you hope will lead to a different result?
RG: I really tried to be both focused and expansive. What I mean by that
is that I recognized it was best to focus on American feminism primarily—
not because the rest of the world doesn’t matter, but because I didn’t
want to do a disservice to global feminism and the very real issues that
women are facing around the world. I did also want to acknowledge that,
and so I included pieces like the one from Chandra Mohanty, “Under
Western Eyes,” and a couple of others to make clear that, yes, fem-
inism is a global concern, but here are pieces that focus primarily
on American feminism. You can’t be everything in every text. I
was very mindful of that this time around.

“The canon is something

that should be ever-evolving,
that shouldn’t be static.”
16
EMMIE AMERICA
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Is Political Violence
Ever Acceptable?
Yes! No!

w t
N A T A S H A L E N N A R D D AV I D C O R T R I G H T

hy do we continue to debate the he support that luigi mangione

acceptability of political violence received on social media after he
on the left? It is a well-rehearsed was arrested for the murder of
and often tired debate, with famil- UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian
iar arguments on both sides. Yet it Thompson in December and from
is evidently not something we will settle easily. protesters outside his pretrial hearing in Feb-
But what’s important is that we are still debating ruary was shocking. It reflects not only the
it on terrains in which violence is ubiquitous, structural, and callousness and anonymity of the Internet but the false belief
consistently accepted—if not lauded. that violence can be an appropriate response to injustice.
I will not rehash the most well-worn arguments in defense We should fight against corporate and political oppres-
The Debate
of political violence here, but they fall into a few broad cate- sion, but there are no quick solutions, and violence inevitably
gories: historical—we defenders of political violence point to makes matters worse. In the struggle for social justice, there
instances wherein some violent actions were central to suc- is no alternative to the difficult task of engaging politically
cess, from slave revolts to anti-colonial uprisings to the civil and organizing mass movements of nonviolent resistance.
rights movement; taxonomical—we reject categorizations of Some misunderstand the nature of nonviolence. Many
violence as determined by the violence-monopolizing state people think of it as passive resistance, but nonviolent action
and its sovereign, capital, wherein a broken bank window is is not merely prayerful protest or an appeal to conscience.
deemed violent and the mass denial of healthcare to the poor It is a means of exercising power. It is a form of contentious
or forced birth are not; and necessity-based—we question politics that seeks to win the support of third parties and
whether radical change is possible without some forms of shift political loyalties away from the oppressor toward
The Debate

organized violence against the ruling class and its interests. those failed by justice. It’s based on the idea that persistent
For the most part, these abstracted debates don’t play protest and performative action can reach mass audiences
out during the planning of a specific political action. When and communicate compelling narratives for justice.
questions of taking action do come up, it’s almost always in This means that those who participate in nonviolent
the context of groups that have already found broad ethical struggles must be prepared to sacrifice, not only because
agreement on acceptable militancy. If you’re at an open DSA power never yields without a fight and repression is common
meeting and a stranger starts talking about Molotov cocktails against effective movements, but because those sacrifices,
and assassinations, that person is an idiot or a cop. when performed by peaceful protesters, have redemptive
I am neither an idiot nor a cop, so I have not come here to qualities. Unjustified repression against disciplined nonvio-
publicly advocate that the US left, in the face of 21st-century lent protest erodes the legitimacy of the oppressor and at-
fascism, commit to strategies of armed resistance. We are tracts the sympathy of those who were previously indifferent
grossly out-armed, surveilled, and unready. or opposed to the movement.
My point, though, is that left debates about political The moral logic of using nonviolent means is clear: If we
violence are rarely in the business of decision-making. In- strive for a more just and peaceful world, we must use just and
stead, they tend to be activities of judgment—of justifica- peaceful means. Our ends and means must be compatible.
tion or condemnation: Something violent happens, and we Immoral or destructive means cannot bring about moral and
are called to either condemn or justify it, and we argue ac- constructive ends.
cordingly. In this way, acts of political violence can work as Too many think that violence is the most effective way
critical interventions, drawing attention to their conditions to exert political power, but empirical research shows the
of possibility. After a militant act occurs, we ask questions opposite. The scholars Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan
about causes and motives and grounds; we are pushed to studied hundreds of struggles for political change and
consider whether a given state of affairs constituted accept-
able grounds for a violent response, whether an existing
found that nonviolent methods were twice as effective
as using military force in achieving the desired results.
17
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

› ›
context is more justified than an act of violence against it. Nonviolent action is also more likely to generate greater

L E N N A R D

C O R T R I G H T
My focus here is on politically motivated and planned acts democracy and political freedom. Research on political
of deadly or potentially deadly violence. Many of us have transitions shows that nonviolent campaigns are more likely
been in protests that involved property damage, empty cop to result in democratic societies, while violent transitions
cars set alight, frays with police, scuffles with the far right, tend to result in authoritarian regimes. These results tell us
and so on, all of which falls into the category of violence that nonviolent action is not only the right thing to do; it is
according to the state, but the ethics of which I take to be the most effective way of achieving positive change.
beneath serious intra-left debate when it comes to questions What accounts for the success of nonviolent action? The
of violence. No doubt some actions at riotous protests can be essential ingredient is mass participation. Case studies indi-
ill-thought, with risks poorly calculated, but it is harmful to cate that a large following is decisive to the effectiveness of
acquiesce to the state’s determinations of violence and non- civil resistance campaigns. The single most important factor
violence. Segmenting movements by the old canard of “good in achieving success, according to Chenoweth and Stephan,
protester” versus “bad protester” is a gift to repression. is the scale and range of popular participation.
There are, however, serious debates to have around how These findings are highly relevant to the choice of using
we relate to political actions that are unambiguously violent. I nonviolent versus violent means. Groups that engage in
will take a minimal stance: A leftist political position insistent violent and destructive acts are by their nature small and
on condemning all political violence is a reactionary one. conspiratorial, usually male-dominated, and often require

The Debate
When “I condemn Hamas!” became a prerequisite for specialized knowledge of weaponry. Nonviolent actions, by
entry into public criticism of Israel’s genocide, we saw all too contrast, are welcoming to all: Women, children, the elderly,
clearly how condemnations of political violence can align with the disabled—everyone can contribute to the cause. Mass
the side of greater violence. The demand that every denuncia- nonviolent action prefigures the diverse, inclusive society we
tion of Israel’s eliminationist violence also carry the speech act seek to create in campaigning for peace and justice.
“I condemn Hamas!” worked In the current US context,
to contain the context in which any attempt to use violence,
the genocide was understood. It or to emulate the assassination
A leftist political promoted Israel’s narrative, in of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, We must be
position insistent which history seemed to start on would be disastrous. It would prepared to put
on condemning October 7, 2023, and occluded a generate sympathy for the vic- our bodies on the
The Debate

all political focus on 75 years of occupation, tims and turn people against line to engage
displacement, and apartheid. It the perpetrators and the cause
violence is a is not the left’s obligation to of justice they claim to rep- in peaceful
reactionary one. agree uncritically with every act resent. It would activate the resistance.
of violent resistance, but it is our powers of repression and lead
responsibility to reject frameworks of judgment that sustain to the continued erosion of civil liberties. The best viable
conditions of constant, systemic violence. strategy for countering an assault against the foundations
Let’s take another example. Reams have already been of our democracy is to mobilize massive nonviolent protest.
written on the outpouring of support that Luigi Mangione Many of us are stunned at the breadth and severity of
has received as the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare Donald Trump’s onslaught, but we cannot be silent. We must
CEO Brian Thompson. A morbid symptom? Perhaps. A speak out in defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.
rebirth of insurrectionary propaganda of the deed? Unlikely. We must be prepared to put our bodies on the line to engage
But thousands of supporters of the assassination had little in peaceful resistance, including civil disobedience. We must
difficulty in seeing it as an act of defensible counterviolence act to protect the most vulnerable and defend the institutions
to a death-dealing establishment of capitalist accumulation. of government against those who seek to destroy them.
Writing about the assassination and its aftermath, Sam We must prepare now to mobilize mass participation in
Adler-Bell noted that “we can’t kill our way out of a society the 2026 midterm elections. The goal needs to be delivering
premised on human disposability.” He’s right; for one, we lit- a resounding vote of no confidence to Trumpian extremism,
erally don’t have the capacity, and more importantly, political fielding and electing candidates who are committed to pre-
violence alone cannot deliver liberatory collective futures. But serving democracy and restoring constitutional principles.
a deed like the CEO assassination offers not so much an an- The task before us is to organize a true majority of Amer-
swer as a question, which should supersede our typical debates icans to oppose the current trajectory. Acts of violence are
over political violence: Which violent activities continue every contrary to that purpose and will only deepen the crisis and
day without the demand for justification at all? N entrench the forces of reaction. N

Natasha Lennard is a columnist at The Intercept and the author of

Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life.
18 David Cortright is a scholar, peace activist, and professor emeritus at
the University of Notre Dame.
Urgent: Special Summer Driving Notice

To some, sunglasses are a fashion accessory…

But When Driving,

These Sunglasses
May Save Your Life! Studies by the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) show that most (74%)
of the crashes occurred
Drivers’ Alert: Driving can expose you to more
on clear, sunny days
dangerous glare than any sunny day at the beach can…
do you know how to protect yourself?

T he sun rises and sets at peak travel periods,

during the early morning and afternoon
rush hours and many drivers find themselves
lens technology was
first discovered when
NASA scientists looked to nature for
Navigator™
Black Stainless
temporarily blinded while driving directly a means to superior eye protection— Steel Sunglasses
into the glare of the sun. Deadly accidents are specifically, by studying the eyes of eagles,
regularly caused by such blinding glare with known for their extreme visual acuity. This
danger arising from reflected light off another discovery resulted in what is now known as
Receive the Navigator™ Gold
vehicle, the pavement, or even from waxed Eagle Eyes®. Sunglasses (a $59.95 value) FREE!
and oily windshields that can make matters The Only Sunglass Technology Certified just for trying the Navigator™ Black
worse. Early morning dew can exacerbate this by the Space Foundation for UV and Blue-
situation. Yet, motorists struggle on despite Light Eye Protection. Eagle Eyes® features
being blinded by the sun’s glare that can cause the most advanced eye protection technology
countless accidents every year. ever created. The TriLenium ® Lens
Not all sunglasses are created equal. Technology offers triple-filter polarization to
Protecting your eyes is serious business. With block 99.9% UVA and UVB—plus the added
all the fancy fashion frames out there it can benefit of blue-light eye protection. Eagle Navigator™ Gold Stainless Steel Sunglasses
be easy to overlook what really matters––the Eyes® is the only optic technology
lenses. So we did our research and looked that has earned official recognition Certified EAGLE EYES® was developed
to the very best in optic innovation and from the Space Certification from original NASA Optic technology
technology. Program for this remarkable and was recently inducted into the Space
Sometimes it does take a rocket scientist. technology. Now, that’s proven Foundation Technology Hall of Fame.
A NASA rocket scientist. Some ordinary science-based protection.
sunglasses can obscure your vision by The finest optics: And buy one, get one Fit-ons available for
exposing your eyes to harmful UV rays, FREE! Eagle Eyes® has the highest customer $39 +S&H
Black or Tortoise-Shell design
blue light, and reflective glare. They can also satisfaction of any item in our 20 year history.
darken useful vision-enhancing light. But now, We are so excited for you to try the Eagle
independent research conducted by scientists Eyes® breakthrough technology that we confidence, knowing your eyes are protected
from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has will give you a second pair of Eagle Eyes® with technology that was born in space for the
brought forth ground-breaking technology to Navigator™ Sunglasses FREE––a $59.95 human race.
help protect human eyesight from the harmful value! Two Pairs of Eagle Eyes® Navigator™
effects of solar radiation light. This superior That’s two pairs to protect your eyes with the Sunglasses $119.90†
best technology available for less than the
Eagle Eyes® price of one pair of traditional sunglasses. Offer Code Price $49 + S&P Save $70.90
Lens You get a pair of Navigators with stainless Offer includes one pair each Navigator™
steel black frames and the other with stainless Black and Navigator™ Gold Sunglasses
steel gold, plus one hard zipper case and one
micro-fiber drawstring cleaning pouch are
included. Keep one pair in your pocket and
1-800-333-2045
one in your car. Your Insider Offer Code: ENS243-01
You must use this insider offer code to
Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. get our special price.
If you are not astounded with the Eagle
Eyes® technology, enjoying clearer, sharper 14091 Southcross Drive W.,
simulation
and more glare-free vision, simply return Dept. ENS243-01
Slip on a pair of Eagle Eyes® and everything one pair within 30 days for a full refund of Burnsville, Minnesota 55337
instantly appears more vivid and sharp. You’ll the purchase price. The other pair is yours www.stauer.com
immediately notice that your eyes are more to keep. No one else has such confidence in
comfortable and relaxed and you’ll feel no need to Rating of A+
squint. The scientifically designed sunglasses are their optic technology. Don’t leave your eyes
in the hands of fashion designers, entrust them † Special price only for customers using the offer code
not just fashion accessories—they are necessary
to protect your eyes from those harmful rays to the best scientific minds on earth. Wear versus the price on Stauer.com without your offer code.
produced by the sun during peak driving times. your Eagle Eyes® Navigators with absolute Smart Luxuries—Surprising Prices ™
 tion
Na Voices

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

V O I C E S / M I C H E L E G O O D W I N Judges can issue injunctions temporarily or per-

A N D G R E G O R Y S H A F F E R manently barring Trump’s executive orders from
going into effect. In fact, the national legal organi-
Testing the Rule of Law zation Democracy Forward has secured a number
of injunctions halting Trump’s numerous orders in
The American experiment depends on institutional checks on the first week of February, and states have authority
power. If there are no checks, these will be devastating times. independent of the federal government.

i
So while Trump seeks to undo the policies of
previous administrations, both Democratic and
n the first three weeks of his second
Republican, with his myriad executive orders, the
term, President Donald Trump has tested president is not exempt from abiding by the rule of
the rule of law in the United States like law. The act of signing his name to unconstitutional
never before. We are in a constitutional executive orders does not make those documents
crisis. Not since Watergate has there been enforceable or legal.
such a glaring abuse of presidential power as Trump at- Indeed, Trump has lost 15 times in court, where
tempts to seize more control, flout checks and balances, judges have blocked his executive orders related to
and instill fear in government employees and, really, all Americans. ending birthright citizenship for American-born
Already there have been threats against civil servants related to their children whose parents are immigrants; placing
employment, attacks on journalists for reporting on unlawful executive 2,200 employees of the United States Agency
orders, vows to investigate critics of the administration, an atmosphere for International Development (USAID) on leave;
of hostility toward civil rights, and even threats to prosecute officials sending transgender women to men’s prisons; and
who served in previous administrations, further heightening alarm. offering buyouts to 2 million federal employees,
APRIL 2025

We are reminded of the authoritarian trope “For my friends, every- among others. Even though bringing litigation is
thing; for my enemies, the law.” As his first term made clear, Trump an onerous process, civil society organizations have
will test and defy the limits on his authority while creating a chilling refused to back down.
atmosphere of intimidation and embedding thuggery into the national The rule of law is designed to protect individ-
discourse and politics. But can the rule of law curtail Trump’s ability to uals from the arbitrary exercise of power, and yet
T H E N AT I O N

get away with what he’s doing? Trump has shown time and again that he intends
There are important checks on presidential authority that can be to disregard laws and is almost daring anyone to
used by Congress, the courts, governors, and state legislatures. State stop him. In too many cases, it appears no one
attorneys general can push back against the executive orders and pol- will, which is what the administration is counting
icies implemented by this administration. Congress possesses the au- on. The Department of Education, for example,
thority under Article I, Section 8, to control the federal purse. Trump will soon be a hollowed-out shell. Referring to his
does not have that authority. secretary of education, Linda McMahon, and the
Since 1862, members of Congress have sworn that they “will sup- dismantling he hopes for, the president said on
port and defend the Constitution of the United States against all en- February 4: “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a
emies, foreign and domestic.” This oath includes a provision to “bear great job in putting yourself out of a job.’ I want her
true faith and allegiance to the same…without any mental reservation to put herself out of a job.”
or purpose of evasion, and…[to] faithfully discharge the duties of the Meanwhile, USAID has effectively been shut
office.” In other words, they need not be stunned into paralysis while down. Most employees have been told not to return
staffers of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under to work. And without approval, Trump froze all
Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire tech mogul at Trump’s side, payments, including those previously appropriated,
20 gains seemingly unchecked access to sensitive data.
The courts also can and should check Trump’s unlawful agenda.
meaning that he blocked the United States from
paying its debts. After this was challenged in court,
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

a federal judge lifted the freeze. Alarmingly, the years, pundits have noted that Trump speaks in hyperbole, but his slew
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was of executive orders, mass firings, and more suggest that his extreme
established to protect consumers against predatory statements are not all hot air. The president is claiming power that ex-
lending and financial abuse, has stopped its work, ceeds his constitutional authority and waiting to see what happens next.
and its director has been fired. As well, federal pro- The United States has institutional machinery to protect against
tections for employee safety may soon be gutted. such defiance of the rule of law, yet its vulnerabilities are clear. For in-
Some maintain that the only checks on Trump’s stance, after a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled on February 10 that
lawless actions to eliminate government agencies the White House had defied his injunction pausing its federal grants
will be the Republicans in Con- freeze, a White House spokesperson said, “Each
gress, who hold the majority. executive order will hold up in court because
But they are not a sure bet, every action of the Trump-Vance administration
given how the White House Checking the arbitrary is completely lawful. Any legal challenge against
successfully bullied lawmakers exercise of power it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine
into voting to approve Trump’s will be the country’s the will of the American people.”
cabinet nominations. Others central challenge over It’s not only that the White House is brazenly
say the courts will fail to hold ignoring the rule of the courts. It is also hiring
Trump accountable because he the next four years. prosecutors, civil servants, and senior military
has vowed to stack them. And officials who signal that they will favor Trump’s
should even the Supreme Court rule against him, policies over constitutional norms. Supporters of Trump call his ap-
there’s no guarantee that Trump would comply. His pointees institutional “disruptors.” But it is one thing to disrupt an
advisers have told him to ignore the courts. institution’s policies; it is another to undermine institutional checks
Checking the arbitrary exercise of power will against the uncontrolled exercise of power. And there is something al-
be the country’s central challenge in the next together unprecedented in the chaos unleashed on millions of citizens,
four years, because Trump’s attempt to expand his who now experience considerable anxiety regarding their future. As
presidential authority is unprecedented. Richard Trump proceeds to weaponize the government, it is difficult to avoid
Nixon’s conduct pales in comparison. the conclusion that the team of loyalists he has appointed are not meant
Most of the challenges to Trump’s executive to serve all Americans, but rather to carry out the MAGA movement’s
orders argue that his conduct is arbitrary—a red white nationalist agenda while keeping the opposition at bay.
flag in constitutional law, because laws should It’s important to remember that this is not a new playbook. For
not be based on whim, personal discretion, or the example, Vladimir Putin weaponized Russian law to destroy his op-
intent to discriminate. This has been a smart and position in Russia. One test will be how the Trump administration
necessary tactic. Yet there are concerns in the legal uses tax law against his political opponents. This is a tactic used by au-
community about this approach. thoritarians around the globe. Indeed, Trump has warned that he will
Historically, federal courts have refused to give target organizations with a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status that are doing
safe harbor to laws whose application is deemed work he doesn’t like. In this way, any agency of the government can be
to be arbitrary, such as ones that do not apply to weaponized, including the Internal Revenue Service. Further, Trump
those in power. Yet the Supreme Court’s deci- has already declared three “national emergencies” and deployed the
sion in Trump v. United States last year created a military to the border. More may follow. Such tactics aim to create
new doctrine of “absolute immunity” for “core” openings for lawlessness and test the rule of law like no other act has.
presidential acts combined with “presumptive im- For democracies to continue and thrive, the rule of law must be
munity” for other “official acts.” Armed with this preserved. This nation’s founders stressed the importance of institu-
decision, Trump will test it when he is challenged, tional checks against “factions.” As James Madison wrote, “Ambition
under the belief that the rule of law does not apply must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must
to him when he is in office. To our point, JD Vance be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”
posted this on X on February 9: “If a judge tried to The president does not operate in a vacuum. In addition to the
tell a general how to conduct a military operation, constitutional checks and balances, independent media outlets can be
that would be illegal.… Judges aren’t allowed to a bulwark against authoritarianism. The media must document it all.
control the executive’s legitimate power.” Protecting the rule of law is a radical accomplishment in human
None of this should come as a surprise given history. It is the result of persistent, hard-fought struggles over time.
that Trump vowed to be a dictator “on day one.” The struggle is ongoing precisely because power is at stake. The Amer-
He also told his supporters, “We’ll have it fixed so ican experiment depends on institutional checks on power’s exercise. If
good, you’re not going to have to vote” again. What there are no checks, then these will indeed be devastating times. N
could he have possibly meant? That voting rights
under a Trump presidency would be suspended or Michele Goodwin and Gregory Shaffer are law professors at Georgetown
suppressed? That voting would be rigged? Over the University.
21
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

(continued from page 16) government are deep in their tears, because
we do after that? So much of feminist conversation they’re saying, “We thought you were only going
and, quite frankly, all social justice conversation “A lot of the after Black people.” But no, that’s not really what
sort of stops at a certain point, as if we don’t have any of this was about. They want all of us gone
work we have from public life and from positions of power. And
the imagination to take it further, or we don’t have
the political will to take it further. And so, yes, we to do now as some people don’t realize there is a price that’s
going to be extracted from them for that proximity
can and should think about our choices, but we feminists is at to power. If you think that they’re not also going
also have to think about accountability and then the community to come for you, you are either being delusional
what we do with that accountability. For example,
in Bad Feminist, I talk about loving hip-hop, which level.” or you are right there alongside them, committing
these bad acts.
I absolutely do. But as long as we keep consuming
the supply of misogynistic music, musicians have no incentive, SF: Given where we are with the Trump administration, what can
across all genres, to make better music that doesn’t degrade and feminism do in this moment?
diminish women. And so at some point we have to decide what’s RG: Man, I wish I knew. I do. It’s hard to figure out how to resist a
more important: that women aren’t consistently diminished system where you literally have no access to power and no con-
across popular culture, or that we enjoy the bop? It’s hard to trol. The Democrats are feckless, with very few exceptions. So
make the better choice to say, “You know what, I’m actually not now we have to grapple with the reality that our democracy, such
going to listen to that music.” But the more that we do that, the as it is, is so much more fragile than any of us thought. I believe
more real and sustained change becomes possible. that a lot of the work we have to do as feminists now is at the
community level. But I also think that we have to figure out how
SF: The flip side, though, is that plenty of women and people
we’re going to protest what’s going on, and it has to be more than
who fancy themselves as “free” or “liberated” are keen to
catchy slogans and hats. Those symbols clearly mattered to a
deny any association with feminism, as you point out in this
great number of people, so I’m not going to denigrate them. But
book. Is it the same old story about wanting to be proximate
we need something more forceful this time. I also think we have
to patriarchal power?
to agitate for a general strike, which seems logistically impossi-
RG: It really is that simple. It’s about proximity to power. I mean, ble. But the only way, I think, to really make a difference here is
we just saw that in the 2024 election. We’re seeing that now. A for everyone to just say, “No, we’re not gonna do our jobs until
lot of Republican women who are losing their jobs in the federal something changes here.” N

B&A
Get our biweekly collection
of the best of The Nation ’s
B O O K S the literary, nonfiction, film,
A R T S TV, and music coverage,
including short essays
exclusively for newsletter
subscribers, curated by the
editors themselves.
Sign up for The Nation ’s
Books & the Arts Newsletter

SIGN UP TODAY AT THENATION.COM/BANEWSLETTER

OR SCAN THE QR CODE.
 ADVERTISEMENT

Popular CoQ10 Pills Leave Millions Suffering

Could this newly discovered brain fuel solve America’s worsening memory crisis?

PALM BEACH, FLORIDA — Millions macology reports that PQQ is up to 5,000

of Americans take the supplement known times more efficient in sustaining energy
as CoQ10. It’s the coenzyme that super- production than common antioxidants.
charges the “energy factories” in your cells With the ability to keep every cell in your
known as mitochondria. But there’s a seri- body operating at full strength, Ultra Accel
ous flaw that’s leaving millions unsatisfied. Q delivers more than just added brain pow-
As you age, your mitochondria break er and a faster memory.
down and fail to produce energy. In a People feel more energetic, more alert,
revealing study, a team of researchers and don’t need naps in the afternoon. The
showed that 95 percent of the mitochon- boost in cellular energy generates more
dria in a 90-year-old man were damaged, power to your heart, lungs, muscles, and
compared to almost no damage in the mi- more.
tochondria of a 5-year-old. “With the PQQ in Ultra Accel, I have en-
Taking CoQ10 alone is not enough to ergy I never thought possible at my age,” MEMORY-BUILDING SENSATION: Top
solve this problem. Because as powerful as says Colleen R., one of Dr. Sears’s patients. doctors are now recommending new Ultra
CoQ10 is, there’s one critical thing it fails “I’m in my 70s but feel 40 again. I think Accel Q because it restores decades of lost
to do: it can’t create new mitochondria to clearly, move with real energy and sleep brain power without a doctor’s visit.
replace the ones you lost. like a baby.”
And that’s bad news for Americans all The response has been overwhelmingly Instead of falling victim to that afternoon
over the country. The loss of cellular ener- positive, and Dr. Sears receives countless slump, you enjoy sharp-as-a-tack focus,
gy is a problem for the memory concerns emails from his patients and readers. “My memory, and concentration from sunup to
people face as they get older. patients tell me they feel better than they sundown. And you get more done in a day
have in years. This is ideal for people who than most do in a week. Regardless of how
“We had no way of replacing lost mito- exhausting the world is now.
chondria until a recent discovery changed are feeling old and run down, or for those
everything,” says Dr. Al Sears, founder and who feel more forgetful. It surprises many Dr. Sears reports, “The most rewarding
medical director of the Sears Institute for that you can add healthy and productive aspect of practicing medicine is watching
Anti-Aging Medicine in Palm Beach, Flor- years to your life simply by taking Ultra my patients get the joy back in their lives.
ida. “Researchers discovered the only nu- Accel Q every day.” Ultra Accel Q sends a wake-up call to ev-
trient known to modern science that has You may have seen Dr. Sears on tele- ery cell in their bodies… And they actually
the power to trigger the growth of new mi- vision or read one of his 12 best-selling feel young again.”
tochondria.” books. Or you may have seen him speak And his patients agree. “I noticed a dif-
at the 2016 WPBF 25 Health and Wellness ference within a few days,” says Jerry from
Why Taking CoQ10 is Not Enough Festival in South Florida, featuring Dr. Oz Ft. Pierce, Florida. “My endurance has al-
Dr. Sears explains, “This new discovery and special guest Suzanne Somers. Thou- most doubled, and I feel it mentally, too.
is so powerful, it can multiply your mito- sands of people attended Dr. Sears’s lecture There’s a clarity and sense of well-being in
chondria by 55 percent in just a few weeks. on anti-aging breakthroughs and waited in my life that I’ve never experienced before.”
That’s the equivalent of restoring decades line for hours during his book signing at
of lost brain power.” the event. How To Get Ultra Accel Q
This exciting nutrient — called PQQ This is the official nationwide release of
Will Ultra Accel Q Ultra Accel Q in the United States. And so,
(pyrroloquinoline quinone) — is the driv-
Multiply Your Energy? the company is offering a special discount
ing force behind a revolution in aging.
When paired with CoQ10, this dynamic Ultra Accel Q is turning everything we supply to anyone who calls during the of-
duo has the power to reverse the age-relat- thought we knew about youthful energy on ficial launch.
ed memory losses you may have thought its head. Especially for people over age 50. An Order Hotline has been set up for
were beyond your control. In less than 30 seconds every morning, you local readers to call. This gives everyone
Dr. Sears pioneered a new formula — can harness the power of this breakthrough an equal chance to try Ultra Accel Q. And
called Ultra Accel Q — that combines both discovery to restore peak energy and your your order is backed up by a no-hassle, 90-
CoQ10 and PQQ to support maximum cel- “spark for life.” day money back guarantee. No questions
lular energy and the normal growth of new So, if you’ve noticed less energy as asked.
mitochondria. Ultra Accel Q is the first of you’ve gotten older, and you want an easy Starting at 7:00 AM today, the discount
its kind to address both problems and is way to reclaim your youthful edge, this offer will be available for a limited time
already creating huge demand. new opportunity will feel like blessed re- only. All you have to do is call TOLL FREE
In fact, demand has been so overwhelm- lief. 1-888-733-8378 right now and use promo
ing that inventories repeatedly sell out. But The secret is the “energy multiplying” code NATUAQ425 to secure your own sup-
a closer look at Ultra Accel Q reveals there molecule that activates a dormant gene in ply.
are good reasons why sales are booming. your body that declines with age, which Important: Due to Ultra Accel Q recent
then instructs your cells to pump out fresh media exposure, phone lines are often
Science Confirms the Many energy from the inside-out. This growth busy. If you call and do not immediate-
Benefits of PQQ of new “energy factories” in your cells is ly get through, please be patient and call
The medical journal Biochemical Phar- called mitochondrial biogenesis. back.

THESE STATEMENTS HAVE NOT BEEN EVALUATED BY THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, TREAT, CURE OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE. RESULTS MAY VARY. 15.
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

DS OF
THE WORL SKY
NOAM CHOM BESSNE
R
DANIEL

BEYOND”
“RESIS TANCE
ELIE MYSTAL
S
JOHN NICHOL

constantly took the movement have been unable to destroy

JOAN WALSH
025
ARY 2
FEBRU

JA
865
E S T. 1

Renaissa
nc
e
M
an
:T
en
or saxopho

into account in making major the “decrepit piece of consti-

ZZ
nis
t

Jo
eH
derson. en

OFF T
HE
decisions about the war. One tutional machinery” known as

REC RD Letters
E T H
I V E R
A N
S O N
example: Nixon admitted in the Electoral College, citing
In the late
America’s
the Lower
1960s, the
greatest

playing the
East Side
recording
art form.
of Manhat
best music
industry
But in a
tan, jazz
you’ve never
lost interest
small, dark
legends
heard.
were
in
club on

cC
oy
Ty n
e r.
his memoirs that he backed the presidential elections it
tM
is

down on his threat to unleash

rophet: Pian

has muddied since the end of

e P
Th

.COM
THENATION

a major escalation on North the Civil War. However, the

Come Gather ’Round, People rights activists were hardly Vietnam, including the pos- role of that institution was
unqualified failures. It’s un- sible use of nuclear weapons, even more nefarious before
Thank you for Daniel Bess-
derstandable that one would because of the Moratorium the war’s outbreak. The con-
ner’s thoughtful review of
be tempted to give up on mass and Mobilization demonstra- cept and design of the Elec-
Noam Chomsky and Nathan
action just after the masses tions in the fall of 1969. This toral College established in
Robinson’s The Myth of Amer-
allowed themselves to be bam- story is told in the PBS doc- the Constitution of 1787 was
ican Idealism [“Empire’s Crit- boozled into voting for a char- umentary The Movement and directly responsible for the
ic,” February 2025]. Bessner’s latan. But ultimately there’s the “Madman.” stuffing of all three branches
main criticism is not analytical no alternative to keeping on Robert Levering of the new central govern-
but strategic: “The left needs trying to persuade the people. san francisco, ca
ment with planter/slaveholder
to spend less time disabusing George Scialabba The writer is the executive pro- representation. The Consti-
people of myths they no lon- cambridge, ma ducer of The Movement and tution created and blended
ger believe or organizing mass Daniel Bessner asserts that the “Madman.” two forms of government,
protests that go nowhere. the movement against the constitutional republicanism
Instead, we must formulate Vietnam War “had little
Constitutional Machinations
and constitutional slavery, the
a more effective strategy for policy influence.” On the I was pleased to read that latter of which used the tools
shaping state behavior.” contrary, numerous stud- The Nation was calling out of representative republican-
But is it premature to write ies, such as Carolyn Woods the Electoral College as far ism for the protection and
off mass action as a dead end? Eisenberg’s recent Fire and back as the 1870s [“A Popular expansion of the ownership of
The abolitionists, Populists, Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Opinion,” December 2024]. human beings.
Socialists, early union orga- Wars in Southeast Asia, detail In his article, Richard Kreit- Michael Smiddy
nizers, suffragists, and civil how the Nixon administration ner laments the fact that we plattsburgh, ny

O U R B AC K PAG E S / R I C H A R D K R E I T N E R at lunch; aged by drink, he was

Gatsby at 100 barely recognizable. They went

outside and Van Vechten took
some of the last known pictures
The classic as past and prologue.

a
of Fitzgerald.
century ago, on April 10, 1925, The Great Gatsby A century on, The Great Gatsby
was published by Scribner. One month later, has lost none of its bite as an in-
Carl Van Vechten, a novelist, photographer, dictment of the “vast carelessness”
and Zelig-like impresario, reviewed the novel of the rich, who live “safe and proud
for The Nation. above the hot struggles of the poor.”
Van Vechten was a friend of Gatsby’s author, F. Scott Fitz- One cannot help but see in its pages
gerald, whom he’d met several years earlier at a party that a preview of today’s MAGA moment.
ended in a scene that could have been taken from the novel: As Van Racist ex–football player Tom Buchan-
Vechten played the piano, the publisher Horace Liveright drunkenly an now seems a truer embodiment of contemporary America than
yanked him from his seat, fracturing the writer’s shoulder. Jay Gatsby. Unlike Gatsby’s longing for a vanished past, which was
In his review, Van Vechten called Gatsby “a fine yarn, exhilarat- born of an “extraordinary gift for hope,” Tom’s nostalgia had curdled
ingly spun,” and Fitzgerald “a born story-teller” whose “work is into something darker—an obsession with the superiority of the
imbued with that rare and beneficent essence we hail as charm.” “white race.”
In Gatsby, he wrote, Fitzgerald had moved beyond his earlier fas- “Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas,”
cination with “the flapper” to a new preoccupation: “the theme of a Fitzgerald wrote. One can easily imagine Tom these days hosting a
soiled or rather cheap personality transfigured and rendered pathet- popular manosphere podcast: “Flushed with his impassioned gibber-
ically appealing through the possession of a passionate idealism.” He ish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.”
noted that Fitzgerald’s own potential “depends to an embarrassing Ruled by our own posse of Internet-addled Toms, we live at the
extent on the nature of his own ambitions.” dawn of another age of “vast carelessness”—only now it’s not just
Tragically, the novelist fell prey to the very vices he lam- “things and creatures” being “smashed up,” as Fitzgerald wrote at
24 pooned in his work. In 1937, Van Vechten ran into Fitzgerald the end of Gatsby, but a country. N
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Robert L. Borosage, Bob Dreyfuss, Susan Faludi, Thomas

Ferguson, Melissa Harris-Perry, Doug Henwood, Anna Hiatt, Naomi Klein, Sarah
Leonard, Michael Moore, Eyal Press, Joel Rogers, Karen Rothmyer, Robert Scheer,
Herman Schwartz, Bruce Shapiro, Edward Sorel, Jon Wiener, Amy Wilentz
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Eric Alterman, David Bacon, James Bamford, Ross Barkan,
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER: Katrina vanden Heuvel James Carden, Zoë Carpenter, Wilfred Chan, Michelle Chen, Bryce Covert, Liza
EDITOR: D.D. Guttenplan PRESIDENT: Bhaskar Sunkara Featherstone, Laura Flanders, Julianne Hing, Joshua Holland, Greg Kaufmann,
Stephen Kearse, Richard Kreitner, Amy Littlefield, Dani McClain, Mohammed
DEPUTY EDITOR, PRINT: Lizzy Ratner DEPUTY EDITOR, WEB: Christopher Shay
Mhawish, Ben Moser, Ismail Muhammad, Vikram Murthi, Erin Schwartz, Scott
LITERARY EDITOR: David Marcus Sherman, Mychal Denzel Smith, Patricia J. Williams, Jennifer Wilson
MANAGING EDITOR: Rose D’Amora EDITORIAL BOARD: Emily Bell, Deepak Bhargava, Kai Bird, Frances FitzGerald, Bill
SENIOR EDITORS: Emily Douglas, Shuja Haider, Regina Mahone, Jack Mirkinson Fletcher Jr., Eric Foner, Bill Gallegos, Greg Grandin, Richard Kim, Tony Kushner, Elinor
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Robert Best Langer, Malia Lazu, Richard Lingeman, Deborah W. Meier, Walter Mosley, Khalil
COPY DIRECTOR: Clay Thurmond Gibran Muhammad, Victor Navasky, Pedro Antonio Noguera, Richard Parker, Elizabeth
RESEARCH DIRECTOR: Samantha Schuyler Pochoda, Albert Scardino, Rinku Sen, Waleed Shahid, Dorian T. Warren, Gary Younge
COPY EDITOR: Rick Szykowny DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS: Denise Heller
MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Ludwig Hurtado ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, SPECIAL PROJECTS: Peter Rothberg
ENGAGEMENT EDITOR: Alana Pockros VICE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATIONS: Caitlin Graf
ASSOCIATE LITERARY EDITOR: Kevin Lozano E-MAIL MARKETING MANAGER: Will Herman
ASSISTANT COPY EDITORS: Haesun Kim, Lisa Vandepaer ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, DEVELOPMENT: Guia Marie Del Prado
WEB COPY EDITOR/PRODUCER: Sandy McCroskey DEVELOPMENT MANAGER: Lisa Herforth-Hebbert
DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR: Evan Robins
ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR: Ricky D’Ambrose
FULFILLMENT MANAGER: Christine Muscat
DC BUREAU CHIEF: Chris Lehmann
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, ADVERTISING: Suzette Cabildo
INTERNS: Elsie Carson-Holt, Lazo Gitchos, Ophelia Jackson, Alexandra Adelina
ADVERTISING ASSISTANT: Eleanor Buchanan
Nita, Ivonne Ortiz · Phoebe Grandi (Business), McKenzie Annis (Design)
DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY AND PRODUCTION: John Myers
NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENTS: Jeet Heer, John Nichols, Joan Walsh
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR: Duane Stapp
JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Elie Mystal
HR DIRECTOR: Susan Bluberg
COLUMNISTS: John Ganz, Alexis Grenell, Kali Holloway, David Klion, Katha Pollitt,
ASSISTANT MANAGER, ACCOUNTING: Alexandra Climciuc
Zephyr Teachout, Adolph Reed Jr.
BUSINESS ADVISER: Teresa Stack
DEPARTMENTS: Abortion Access, Amy Littlefield; Architecture, Kate Wagner; Art,
Barry Schwabsky; Civil Rights, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II; Defense, Michael T. PUBLISHER EMERITUS: Victor Navasky (1932–2023)
Klare; Environment, Mark Hertsgaard; Left Coast, Sasha Abramsky; Legal Affairs, LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: E-mail to [email protected] with name and address
David Cole; Music, David Hajdu, Bijan Stephen; Palestine, Mohammed El-Kurd; (300-word limit). Please do not send attachments. Letters are subject to editing for
Poetry, Kaveh Akbar; Public Health, Gregg Gonsalves; Rethinking Rural, Erica reasons of space and clarity.
Etelson and Anthony Flaccavento; Sex, JoAnn Wypijewski; Sports, Dave Zirin; SUBMISSIONS: Go to TheNation.com/submission-guidelines for the query form.
United Nations, Barbara Crossette; Deadline Poet, Calvin Trillin Each issue is also made available at TheNation.com.

p r o n
Re t i o
Na

Our monthly e-mail newsletter meets

the urgency of this moment with stories,
analysis, and resources on the global
struggle for reproductive freedom.

Scan the QR code or visit TheNation.com/repro to sign up for free.

 Are
Men
According to Richard
V. Reeves, American
society is failing
to address the
specific needs of
men and boys. Are
his solutions the flip
side of the feminist
experiment, or just

OK?
another backlash?
EAMON WHALEN

o n november 21, 2024, richard v. reeves stood in a greenroom at THE WASHING-

ton Post’s third annual Global Women’s Summit. Reeves, the president of the
American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), was the only man in a lineup
that included former Democratic Party House leader Nancy Pelosi, historian
Doris Kearns Goodwin, and actress Kerry Washington. Leaning against a wall,
he made small talk with his copanelist Grace Bastidas, the editor in chief of Parents.com. The
target audience for his 2022 book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why
It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves told her, is a liberal mom worried about her son.
At one point, Reeves himself would have been skeptical of
his book’s premise. He’s described feminism as perhaps “the
greatest economic liberation in human history.” But in his
work studying economic inequality at the Brookings Institu-
tion, where he was formerly a senior fellow, he had run into
of the persistent wage gap between
men and women can be explained by
the stagnating wages for men.
Today, Reeves notes, women be-
what he has called the “side effects” of feminism’s “glorious tween the ages of 25 and 34 are en-
achievements.” The starkest data was in education, particularly tering the workforce at greater rates
in college. Since Title IX was passed in 1972, the gender gap in than they ever have, while the work-
bachelor’s degrees has widened, but in the opposite direction. force participation of men in the same
The biggest risk factor for dropping out of college, controlling age cohort hasn’t grown in a decade.
for everything else, is being a man. Those struggles have ex- Fatherhood has also been destabilized:
tended to the labor market. When adjusted for inflation, most
American men today earn around $3,000 less than men did in Eamon Whalen is a freelance journalist from
1979, which leads to a grim realization: Much of the narrowing Minneapolis covering culture and politics.
26 ILLUSTRATION BY ÀDRIA FRUITÓS
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Are More than one in four fathers with children 18 or younger Barack Obama’s summer reading list, and the
Men now live apart from their children. There is more bad news
in men’s health, both physical and mental; men fall victim
philanthropist Melinda French Gates awarded
Reeves a $20 million grant—$5 million for
OK? to alcohol or drug overdose or suicide—so-called deaths of
despair—at a rate three times higher than that of women.
AIBM and $15 million in a donor-advised fund
to give away. In the spirit of his vision of gender
The suicide rate for men between 25 and 34 has gone up by equality, Reeves named the fund Rise Together.
nearly a third since 2010. In its 2023 “State of American Men” Reeves’s critics, however, remain skeptical.
report, the Equimundo Center for They argue that his focus on men reproduces
Masculinities and Social Justice the very zero-sum thinking on gender equality
noted that almost half of the men he seeks to transcend, and that despite noble in-
it surveyed had thoughts of sui- tentions, by elevating the idea that men are fall-
The sUicide rate foR cide in the previous two weeks. ing behind women––an idea that most women,
When Reeves set out to write who on average earn nearly 20 percent less than
mEn Between 25 and 34 a book on these findings, friends men, would certainly find dubious––he will fur-
has gone Up by neaRly and colleagues advised him to
drop it as a matter of career pres-
ther inflame the backlash he wants to contain.
Though Reeves told me that his wife de-
a third siNce 2010. ervation. “What you’re saying is scribes him as a “thin-skinned polemicist,” he
true,” Reeves remembers hearing. seems to welcome the skepticism. His appear-
“But for God’s sake, don’t say it.” ance at an event like the Global Women’s Sum-
They warned that he’d end up sounding like Josh Hawley, mit, just two weeks after Donald Trump defeated
the Republican senator from Missouri whose 2023 book Kamala Harris in the US presidential election,
Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs advances the would be an opportunity to put his message—
issue from the right. Hawley represents the post-Trump, and his ability to convey it—to the test.
Surprise stardom:
Richard Reeves post–Me Too Republican Party’s awkward attempt to synthe-
size its church-based brand of social conservatism with the s reeves was whisked away fwr make-

A
initially struggled to
find a publisher for “manosphere,” a collection of online subcultures unified by up, I chatted with another panelist,
his tome on how men anti-feminism. Another product of this collaboration is Vice Emily Oster, an economics professor
are struggling.
President JD Vance, whose choice phrases like “childless at Brown focused on child-rearing,
cat ladies” were ripped from the manosphere podcasts he’d who became both a star and a light-
appeared on as he was burnishing his credentials within the ning rod by pushing for school re-
extremely online New Right. openings during the pandemic. Oster
Reeves felt a responsibility to take on the men question, because he thought recently launched a parenting podcast on Bari
ceding this ground to the manosphere and the New Right was wrongheaded. Weiss’s right-leaning media outlet The Free
But he shared his doubters’ reservations. The achievements of second-wave Press, making her no stranger to offending
feminism––the Equal Pay Act, Title IX, and Roe v. Wade––had been won with- liberals and leftists. Still, Oster had trouble
in living memory. In an era shaped by the
grievances of conservative men, those vic-
tories have proved tenuous. Writing a book
about the plight of American men seemed
self-pitying at best and reactionary at worst.
But Reeves noticed that even when people
tried to dissuade him, they’d share concerns
about the state of the men in their lives. And
it’s well within the feminist tradition to ana-
lyze the state of men. So Reeves set to work,
assembling a manuscript bursting with data
on how men and boys were falling behind. He
lambasted denialism from the left and atavism
from the right. Then it was rejected by every
publisher he sent it to.
Reeves recalibrated. He’d need to be less
polemical, lest he come off as a watered-down
men’s rights activist. He also didn’t think his message would travel if he branded initially accepting Reeves’s premise. “Oh, men
himself as an ally of feminism promoting healthy masculinity, even though that are struggling? It’s harder for some of us to get
wouldn’t necessarily be an incorrect way to describe him. He struck the right our head around it,” she said. “Because, at the
COURTESY OF RICHARD V. REEVES

balance, and in 2022 Brookings published Of Boys and Men on its own press. top, it’s just a bunch of penises.” Men make up
Almost three years later, the project Reeves was told would ruin his career has nearly three-quarters of the federal legislature
done the opposite: It launched the mild-mannered British policy wonk into pub- and two-thirds of state legislatures. The bil-
lic intellectual stardom. If you’ve read a magazine article, watched a TV news lionaire and Fortune 500 CEO class remains
segment, or listened to a podcast on the “crisis of masculinity” lately, you’ve an almost exclusively male domain. If you’re a
encountered an interview with or at least a reference to Reeves. His book was on woman navigating an elite professional milieu,
28
 as a generous slice of the attendees of this explained that dads used to matter mostly because they were the breadwinners,
Goldman Sachs–sponsored summit were, you and that’s changed, for a good reason. But “dads still matter, and we need to find
might wonder what the hell Reeves is talking policies and a culture and a way of talking about this that doesn’t somehow see
about. But Reeves never hesitates to point out them as second-class parents who are somehow less important,” he continued.
that he is chiefly concerned with men at the “We have to have a conversation about masculinity in a positive way. I understand
bottom of the economic and racial hierarchy. it’s a difficult time to make that argument. But honestly, you cannot ignore these
“There are still places for women to go at the issues. You cannot ignore these questions and then wonder why the people who
top, but there are parts of the distribution where are not ignoring them are getting all the attention.”
men are really struggling,” Oster said. “Richard The panel ended shortly after Reeves’s monologue. As the
has moved me on this a lot.” lights came up, Oster’s assistant turned to me and said, “Have
Thought leadership:
Reeves, Oster, and Bastidas took the stage you ever met someone who was so good at communicating?” Richard Reeves at
in a standing-room-only auditorium for their The Washington
panel, titled “Parenting 3.0.” I stood near the first met reeves the day before the global women’s

I
Post’s 2024 Global
back at a high-top table next to Oster’s assis- Summit, at a coffee shop near the Brookings offices in Women’s Summit.
tant. The panel’s moderator, the journalist Washington, DC. Reeves, 55, is tall and wiry, with a
Sally Quinn, asked Bastidas about the concept swoop of brown hair graying around the edges. He was
of the “mommune”—a group of single mothers dressed in business casual and would occasionally slip
who raise their kids together under one roof. his glasses on when he wanted to quote a statistic from
Bastidas explained that the nuclear family is not his phone or laptop. He was quick to crack a joke but
the norm in most of the world and shouldn’t would also pause and lean back against the wall for several
be in the United States, either. “Some of us beats, eyes closed and lips pursed as
have plans with our best girlfriends—like ‘OK, he considered a question.
when our husbands have gone wherever they Two weeks after Election Day, I
need to go, we will move in together,’” Bastidas wanted to learn why a man who has
said. The audience broke into laughter. Reeves described himself as “proudly bor- “Dads still matter,
raised his eyebrows. “I knew this was going to ing” had become the go-to expert
be brutal,” he muttered into his microphone, on American manhood and a Cas- and We nEed to fiNd
to more laughter. Quinn asked Reeves the next
question, about the role of fathers. As he spoke,
sandra to Democrats reeling from
a campaign season that saw male
policiEs and a cUl-
he turned to his right and addressed Bastidas: revanchism coincide with an exodus tUre and a way of
“Where are we going, by the way? When you of young men from the party. “Peo-
say ‘the fathers,’ is there something you want ple aren’t worried about the first
talKiNg aboUt this.”
—Richard Reeves
to tell me?” thing I say, whether it’s the gaps
THE WASHINGTON POST

“The big disco in the sky,” Bastidas respond- in education or the suicide rate,”
ed. The audience continued to laugh. Reeves said as he sipped his coffee. “They’re worried about
“It takes a village—I agree. Families come the fifth thing. They have a question in the back of their
in all shapes and sizes—I agree. But some of mind: ‘Where is he going with this?’ And that’s a reasonable
the villagers should be men,” Reeves said. He thing to be thinking!”
29
 That captures what Jill Filipovic, the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Reeves for her story, and he later asked her to
Pursuit of Happiness, first thought when she encountered Of Boys and Men. “For a join the board at AIBM. Emba herself felt the
lot of feminists, it raises our spidey senses when we see someone who’s arguing need for that permission space in liberal news-
‘but men and boys too,’” she said. “It’s like the ‘All Lives Matter’ of the feminist rooms. “There’d be a groan,” she recalled, “and
movement.” But she was pleasantly surprised. “He may not approach it the same people would say, ‘So you hate feminism? So
way that I do, but he is not someone who’s trying to take something away from you hate women?’”

i
feminism,” Filipovic concluded.
“Feminism has upended patriarchy, a specific social order that had the fatal f you are a man in this country
flaw of being grossly unequal,” Reeves writes in his book. He doesn’t think that
feminism has gone too far—he thinks it hasn’t gone far enough. “Women’s lives
have been recast. Men’s lives have not,” he writes. What is needed is a “positive

Ready to fight:
vision of masculinity for a postfeminist world.” Of Boys and
Men is a pop social science book with pithy aphorisms, plenty
“ and you don’t vote for Donald
Trump, you’re not a man,” the
31-year-old conservative media star
Charlie Kirk said last July as he
led the Trump campaign’s effort on
Trump’s 2024 of charts, and several signature policy proposals. For example: college campuses. In 2024, Trump
strategy leaned into
to address their struggles in education, hold all boys back a enlisted his sons as strategists, and he was in-
machismo, with the
UFC’s CEO, Dana year and invest in more technical schools. Start initiatives troduced at the Republican National Conven-
White, introducing to encourage men to join the female-dominated HEAL tion by Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO
him at the Republican professions (healthcare, education, administration, literacy), Dana White. (Reeves pointed out that in 2016
National Convention. mirroring the efforts to get women into STEM. To help dis- and 2020, Trump was introduced at the RNC
located dads, institute six months of fully paid parental leave. by his daughter Ivanka.) On election night,
Reeves’s role during the early days of AIBM, which he White thanked a list of podcasters who were
envisions becoming a DC policy shop, has been that of com- part of a new media strategy reportedly master-
municator. He or his writings have appeared in just about minded by an 18-year-old named Bo Loudon,
every outlet you’ve heard of and a friend of Barron Trump whose parents are
many you haven’t. The idea behind Mar-a-Lago members. This strategy appears
the media blitz, Reeves told me, is to have paid dividends: In 2020, 56 percent of
to create a “permission space” in men under 30 voted for Joe Biden. In 2024,
As yoUng mEn’s
EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

the mainstream and among liberals 56 percent of that cohort voted for Trump––a
to talk about men’s struggles in a nearly 15-point swing to the right, according
drift away from way that’s consistent with women’s to the AP Votecast Survey. “Democrats should
thE democraTs came equality. “It didn’t really seem like
anyone had the stomach to take it
be fighting for every constituency. And this is
one that we’ve really left on the table for a long
iNTo maiNstream on and champion it as an issue,” said time,” said Shauna Daly, a longtime Demo-
Christine Emba, a staff writer at The cratic campaign leader who credits Reeves for
viEw, someonE Needed Atlantic who wrote a viral article on inspiring her new project, called the Young Men
To explaiN why. the state of American men in 2023,
when she was a columnist at The
Research Initiative.
As the election results brought young men’s
Washington Post. Emba interviewed drift away from the Democrats into mainstream
30
 T H E N AT I O N

view, the media needed someone to explain why.

APRIL 2025

partly as a rebellion against the liberal dogma they had

Are
Reeves, who is a member of neither major party,
became an in-demand source, and his diagnosis
absorbed in their upper-middle-class home and school in
Bethesda, Maryland. While Reeves “disagreed strongly” with
Men
has been blunt. “What we had was performative
masculinity from the right and deafening silence
a lot of what Peterson said, he couldn’t help but think that the
connection between Peterson and his audience revealed “a
OK?
from the left: Democrats couldn’t expose the gigantic reservoir of unmet human need.”
lack of substance on the Republican side, be- I told Reeves that his description of Peterson as a “genu-
cause they wouldn’t even acknowledge that there ine intellectual wrestling with real
were problems that needed solving,” he told The issues” made me scoff when I read
Washingtonian in a postelection interview. it. In response, Reeves lamented
In an interview with The Guardian, Reeves that Peterson has since gone off the
said that since men delivered for Trump, “Trump rails, but he explained that the pas-
now needs to deliver for men.” I asked him what sage was part of a broader strategy “yes, tEchNically,
that would look like and how he’d engage with
the White House. The worst scenario, he said,
of triangulation. There are parts
of his book that trigger the same
MEn are sUffer-
would be “if the Republicans pick up some of reaction from conservatives. “Part ing. bUt woMEn
this pro-male policy and support it, but in a very of the challenge is, do you equalize
anti-feminist, anti-woman way. That they use it the scoffing?” he said.
are bEing crushed
to poke women in the eye.” But if the Republi-
cans are interested in an Office of Men’s Health,
As Reeves was finishing the
book, his sons told him he need-
and dragged bacK
or investments in apprenticeships and technical ed to look into Andrew Tate, the 50 years.”
schools, or a plan to increase the number of male brawny misogynist influencer with —Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic
school teachers, Reeves says he will be there a Bond-villain aesthetic currently
with his white papers. under investigation for rape and human trafficking, who
In these polarized times, Reeves has his share peddles a cruel brand of male self-help. Around the time
of critics across the spectrum. On the right, he’s Reeves’s book was published, Tate became a worldwide su-
Liberal sensibility:
portrayed as inauthentic and untrustworthy be- perstar. Reeves was often asked to explain the appeal of Tate, Reeves worked for
cause he doesn’t endorse a wholesale restoration Peterson, and a growing roster of copycats who were taking the Tony Blair ad-
of traditional gender roles. “His remedies are the message of the once-fringe manosphere to millions. ministration before
deeply unappealing,” wrote the young conser- His attempts to grapple with the question solidified a tenet writing a biography of
vatives Evan Myers and Howe Whitman III of Reeves’s thought: Look at the demand, not the supply. John Stuart Mill.
in American Compass, because he wants men to “The failure of mainstream institutions…to acknowledge and
become “junior partners in a world increasingly tackle the real problems facing many boys and men has creat-
shaped by women’s sensibilities.” ed a vacuum in our politics and in our culture,” he wrote in 2022.
Criticism on the left is more measured. One of Reeves’s forerunners is the Atlantic senior editor Hanna Rosin, whose
There is an uneasiness with Reeves’s populariz- 2012 book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women covered similar ground. “I was
ing the idea of the beleaguered man in a climate completely right and completely wrong at the same,” Rosin told me. She was
of rising anti-feminism. “I worry that some of right about how disaffected men could wreak havoc on American politics, but she
his rhetoric is inadvertently perpetuating a cul- was naïve to think that somehow women would escape that backlash. “If you look
ture of woman-blame that we have in the US, in around at the landscape now––yes, technically, men are suffering,” she said. “But
terms of fueling this perception that if men are women are being crushed and dragged back 50 years.”
struggling in our society, it’s
because of our society’s ef- eeveu wau born on july 4, 1969, in the

R
forts to support women and city of Peterborough, 70 miles north
girls at their expense,” said of London. His mother was a part-
Jessica Calarco, a professor time nurse originally from Wales, who
of sociology at the Univer- sent him to ballroom dancing classes
sity of Wisconsin–Madison on Saturdays. His father worked as a
and the author of Holding It manager at companies that sold ket-
Together: How Women Became tles and washing machines. “My dad was a bit
America’s Safety Net. of a class warrior,” Reeves told me. “He hated
For Reeves, the issue hits the aristocracy and the monarchy and any sense
close to home. Part of the of hereditary privilege.” After a stint working
journey began with his sons, for outlets like The Guardian, Reeves joined
who are now in their 20s. As Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “New Labour”
teens, they’d taken to Jor- government in 1997 and became a true believer
dan Peterson, the Canadian in Third Way ideology. Personified by Blair
psychologist who spoke em- in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US, it was
pathetically to young men an attempt to synthesize the social democratic
WIKI CC 2.0

while railing against femi- currents of the Labour and Democratic parties
nism. Reeves interpreted this and the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher
31
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Are and Ronald Reagan. Reeves worked for a year in the Blair class warfare.” Dream Hoarders sowed the seeds
Men administration before going on to get a PhD in philosophy,
for which he wrote a well-received biography in 2007 of the
of Reeves’s next project. “The gendered nature
of inequality just kept popping up,” he said.
OK? 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, a towering
figure of liberalism. An early supporter of women’s emancipa-
In writing Of Boys and Men, Reeves was
partly following in the footsteps of the feminist
tion, Mill is Reeves’s intellectual lodestar. writer Susan Faludi, whose 1999 book Stiffed:
Partly as a result of his study of Mill, Reeves joined The Betrayal of the American Man, the follow-up
the Liberal Democratic Party. The to her 1991 Pulitzer-winning Backlash: The Un-
height of his political career in En- declared War Against American Women, argued
gland came in 2010, when the Lib that as the New Deal order withered away, so
Dems and David Cameron’s Tory too did a model of manhood that “showed men
wHat ails worKiNg- Party unexpectedly formed a coali- how to be part of a larger social system,” one
tion government. Reeves was named defined by traits like loyalty and service. Even
class mEn today is director of strategy under Depu- before that, a study of heroic male archetypes
tHe dEciMation ty Prime Minister and Lib Dem
leader Nick Clegg. During Reeves’s
from the 1700s by the historian E. Anthony
Rotundo found that “public usefulness” was
of america’s indUs- tenure, his support cratered, part- among the most valued traits—a man of the
ly because of a betrayed campaign people, rather than the lone ranger traversing
trial workforce. promise to abolish college tuition the frontier or the lonely gamer traversing
fees. “It was stupid; I was a bloody Twitch streams. In his book, Reeves cited a
idiot,” Reeves said in 2012 after he study by Australian researchers who examined
stepped down from his post. the words that men who have attempted suicide
The end of Reeves’s career in British politics was a perfect used the most often to describe themselves.
time for a fresh start. He moved to the United States, where “Useless” was at the top of the list.
he was soon hired by Brookings to study economic inequality. By the end of the 20th century, American
Building on He’d left England partly because he found the class structure culture had “left men with little other territory
Backlash: Reeves stultifying, but he quickly realized, he said, that the relative on which to prove themselves besides vanity,”
is indebted to
Susan Faludi’s lack of class consciousness in America meant that “the rich Faludi wrote. She called the form of masculinity
landmark work on people here are just colossal jerks” who rigged the system that emerged to fill this vacuum “ornamental,”
gender and inequality. for their benefit, then absolved themselves by “putting the based in celebrity and mass consumerism, where
right sign in their front yard and voting the right way.” His manhood was “a performance game to be won
frustration with this class myopia led him in 2017 to write Dream Hoarders: How in the marketplace, not the workplace, and that
the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the male anger was now part of the show.” Though
Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It. In the MAGA conjures a hazy nostalgia and
wake of Trump’s ascension to the White House, here was a aims to turn back the clock on so-
polemic indicting a cloistered elite embodied by a Democratic cial progress, Faludi has written that
Party that had just suffered a crushing defeat propelled by the it is essential to understand Trump’s
hinterlands. That year, Politico named Reeves one of the most brand of manliness—vain, image-
important thinkers in the country “for explaining America’s obsessed, devoid of “old-school val-
ues” like integrity, honor, and
honesty—not as a relic of the past
but as thoroughly modern: the
apotheosis of the ornamental.
The simplest story to explain
what ails working-class men to-
day is that of the decimation of
America’s industrial workforce.
The Fordist wage—which en-
abled a single (male) worker to
support a family—withered away
at the same time that a new gen-
ANDREW MEARES / FAIRFAX MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES

eration of women entered into

higher education and the work-
force. As men lost the ability to
become breadwinners en masse,
the story goes, the breadwin-
ner role lost its relevance, and
then men lost themselves. These
changes hit Black men especial-
ly hard, because manufacturing
jobs were much more likely to be
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

their gateway to the mid-

dle class. The loss of stable
employment and the simul-
taneous rise of the prison
system combined to alien-
ate Black men from family
life and to create the racist
stereotype of the “deadbeat
dad.” Before “toxic mascu-
linity” became a ubiquitous
term to describe rich, pow-
erful white men like Donald
Trump, it was attached to
out-of-work Black men.
While Reeves described
Dream Hoarders as a “poke in the eye” to Reeves told me. “If you were with Blair, it was almost a badge of pride to be anti-
wealthy liberals, it was also a cheeky provo- union. Looking back, I was a total wanker about some of that stuff.”
cation aimed at the Occupy Wall Street and What also remains unexplored in Reeves’s work is the reason the United
Bernie Sanders generation. Instead of targeting States doesn’t have a European-style welfare state. As Calarco argues in Holding
billionaires, Reeves pointed the finger at the It Together, it’s because the long-standing premise of the American welfare state
upper middle class. For Calarco, the sociology is the uncompensated labor of women, who still do two more hours of household
professor, Reeves’s failure to indict the eco- work per day than men. While Calarco applauds Reeves for encouraging men to
nomic ruling class in Dream Hoarders is a weak- enter into care-work sectors, she said he could do more to highlight the fact that
ness that extends to his writing about gender. those HEAL jobs do not pay well precisely because they have been considered
“If men are struggling, it’s because billionaires women’s work.
and big corporations and their cronies have “So much of this manosphere culture is tapping into that desire to find a way
really forced us all to take care of ourselves to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,” Calarco added. While men may
without the kind of social safety net that oth- feel a specific sense of precarity, Calarco sees Reeves’s vision of male-focused poli-
er high-income countries are able to take for cies as taking us farther away from the kinds of universal programs that could help
granted,” she said. address the precarity that people of all gender identities experience. Focusing on
As a nominally nonpartisan wonk trying to men, Calarco said, “actually leads to more skepticism of those kinds of universal
build consensus on a hot-button issue while policies, and discourages men from seeing themselves as rep-
causing minimal offense, Reeves is not in the resented in those kinds of universal policies.” Toxic trailblazers:
business of naming the names of those prevent- When I asked Reeves why his focus wasn’t on those pol- From left to right,
ing human flourishing. But many working-class icies, at first he replied flatly, “Because we’re not going to Andrew Tate, Nick
Fuentes, and Jordan
men are angry, and they need a story about why get them.” Then he paused to regather his thoughts. “I’m Peterson typify the
their life sucks. The right can provide a list of trying to incrementally advocate for some policies, and some manosphere that
scapegoats: liberal elites, DEI administrators, changes in rhetoric, to help boys and men without really Reeves seeks
Marxist professors, women. “The male mal- challenging the broader political economy within which to counter.
aise is not the result of a mass psychological that is taking place. I think that’s a legitimate criticism. You
breakdown, but of deep structural challenges,” might say, ‘Well, in a different political economy, some of
Reeves writes in Of Boys and Men. There are no these issues would just be dealt
villains in this story, which leaves the field open with anyway.’”
for the right to assign blame. For Niobe Way, a developmen-
“If not women, then who?” Calarco asks. tal psychologist at New York Uni-
“Without actually telling people who’s really to versity who has studied boys and
blame, it’s very easy for people to dismiss that young men since the late 1980s, “MascUliniTy neEds
disclaimer and even assume that Reeves himself all of Reeves’s charts and graphs to be rEimagiNEd?
FROM LEFT: ANDREI PUNGOVSCHI / GETTY IMAGES; NICOLE HESTER /

might not believe it if he’s not willing to point obscure the absence of an import-
the finger somewhere else instead.” ant explanation of why men are What tHe hell?
ANN ARBOR NEWS VIA AP; JIM VONDRUSKA / GETTY IMAGES

struggling—culture. In her recent

n recent years, reeves has questioned book Rebels With a Cause: Reimag-
No, hUmaniTy neEds

I to be rEimagined.”
some of the premises of neoliberalism ining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Cul-
that he’d bought into earlier in his ca- ture, Way writes of “boy culture”: —Niobe Way, NYU developmental psychologist
reer; his proposed parental-leave program norms of masculinity that discour-
wouldn’t look out of place on a Sanders- age boys at an early age from de-
style policy platform. But for someone veloping the social and emotional skills that could help them
writing about men and economic inequal- navigate a society built with women’s full participation in
ity, Reeves has little to say about unions. “The mind. The “soft skills” that are needed to excel in school
issue of power in the labor market is one that and in a postindustrial labor market are the same skills that
Third Way people just massively understated,” (continued on page 41)
33
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

y ’ s

r e e n e r U r u g ua

G PoLwU T I O N
O re s
uel c dem
e
to
rves nd
a

EV
i l f i
ss st
h n o fo dome had to st

R Wit on and ountry roke ju .

n

tryi
c
get g to ke
n
H
c
rely g, the or go ights o

A
e
risi reativ p the

S
e
HA
KIM
b
l
I ZA
PA
n
TA

TA

M
NA

uch of the vast landscape of uru- only could a failure on this scale have
guay remains true to its historical sunk the newly elected left-leaning
image—down to the lone gaucho Frente Amplio party while continuing
roaming the pampas. But there have to plague Uruguay with periods of de-
been some notable additions. Tower- stabilizing blackouts; it could very well
ing white wind turbines and glistening solar panels are now as have set back the cause of green energy
much a part of the iconography of Uruguay as the grass itself, around the globe, vindicating those
though they began to pop up across the country only in recent who claimed that it was simply not pos-
years, and seemingly all at once. Not exactly tourist attractions, sible for this relatively new technology
they are the most visible evidence of a green energy transforma- to meet an entire nation’s energy needs.
tion that continues to turn heads the world over: Despite having Uruguay’s green energy revolution,
far fewer resources than the United States, Germany, and other which began in earnest in 2008, has its
wealthy nations that have been painfully slow to reduce their roots in the origins of the nation. Unlike
consumption of fossil fuels amid the deepening climate crisis— Argentina and Brazil, its much larger
as of 2023, only 21.4 percent of the US power supply comes and more famous neighbors, Uruguay
from renewables—Uruguay greened its grid in under a decade. has never had any naturally occurring
Once reliant on exorbitantly priced fossil fuel imports for fossil fuels. Founded in 1825 in the age
nearly half of its energy needs, Uruguay has gone from suf- of industrialization—a time when coun-
fering frequent blackouts and power cuts to relative energy tries would become increasingly depen-
sovereignty based almost entirely on electricity generated dent on coal, oil, and gas—Uruguay was
from a stable mix of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and bioenergy at an immediate energy disadvantage. It
sources. Although Uruguay’s radical experiment is now largely wasn’t until the advent of hydroelectric
viewed as an international success story, it was far from a given
that the Uruguayans would succeed when they set out in the Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-
early aughts to achieve what no other country in the world had winning journalist and university lecturer
yet managed. And the stakes couldn’t have been higher: Not based in London.
34 ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON
 uez zq
é Vá ar
Ta b
ldo
ata
éC
Jos
e p e” M u j i c a
José “P
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

power at the end of the 19th century that the country was Vázquez, an oncologist from a working-class
able to use its rivers to help meet its power needs. To this background, who became head of the left-wing
day, Uruguay continues to rely heavily on its dams, includ- political party Frente Amplio and the coun-
ing the imposing Salto Grande on the Río Uruguay, whose try’s first socialist president. Vázquez’s election
power is shared with Argentina, and several on the Río marked the end of 179 years of a two-party
Negro. For decades, electricity from those dams and from system—and the start of a radical experiment
generators running on gas and oil that would transform everything from the na-
imported largely from Argentina tion’s income distribution to its energy grid.
and Brazil met Uruguayans’ energy Previous Uruguayan governments had invested
needs. The whole system was run little in the country’s grid, and Vázquez was
Whenever there were by the National Administration of determined to take a different route. In 2006,
Power Plants and Electrical Trans- during power outages caused by a drought that
petroleum shortages, missions, or UTE, the state-owned was a harbinger of climate-change-driven crises
Uruguayans were electric utility that held a monopo- to come, his government put out calls for renew-
ly on the generation, transmission, able energy projects that could lead to energy
plunged into darkness,
darkness, and distribution of electricity since sovereignty down the road.
disrupting households, its founding in 1912. These first calls were largely unsuccess-
Unfortunately, that mix of hy- ful; major multinational wind and solar power
businesses, and droelectric and fossil fuel power had firms, busy with lucrative projects in wealthi-
public services. never been sufficient. The hydro- er nations, showed little interest in Uruguay.
electric generators could provide up Then, in 2008, as the global financial crisis was
to 80 percent of the country’s energy forcing governments around the world to slash
needs during any given year—depending on how much rain investments in social programs and infrastruc-
fell. Fossil fuels helped make up the shortfalls, but power cuts ture projects, Uruguay experienced a record-
Lights out: Electrical and blackouts were common. During petroleum shortages, breaking drought that dramatically shrank its
engineer Gonzalo Uruguayans were plunged into darkness, disrupting govern- rivers and reservoirs. UTE was forced to buy
Casaravilla (below ment functions, businesses, and households. Gonzalo Casar- oil and gas from Argentina and Brazil to meet
left) remembers
studying by candle- avilla, an electrical engineer and a professor at the University almost 70 percent of Uruguay’s energy needs,
light during blackouts of the Republic (UdelaR), remembers having to study by can- causing the cost of electricity to skyrocket. Even
in Montevideo. dlelight when power cuts dimmed his native Montevideo. in years with average rainfall, costs could often
It was one of the reasons he became interested in electrical skyrocket to $1.1 billion a year. According to
engineering, he told me. In 2000, he and the mechanical engineer José Cataldo led UTE, droughts and fluctuations in oil pricing
the team that installed the country’s first modern wind generator on Cerro de los threatened to more than double that, bringing
Caracoles, a hill in the southeastern department of Maldonado. Casaravilla would Uruguay’s annual energy bill to $2.5 billion.
later work with Ruben Chaer, another electrical engineer at UdelaR, to develop Recognizing the threat that the latest energy
innovative tools for the simulation and operation of Uruguay’s electrical system. crisis also posed to funding for broader social
As Casaravilla and his fellow academics gained expertise in renewable energy projects aimed at tackling poverty, Vázquez and
as a possible solution to their country’s chronic energy crises, political change be- his government turned to addressing it with
gan to sweep through Uruguay, culminating in 2004 with the election of Tabaré added urgency. One of their first steps was to
Nationwide
overhaul: Nuclear
physicist Ramón
Méndez (second from
left) and mechanical
engineer José Catal-
do (below) had their
work cut out as they KLEINMAN CENTER FOR ENERGY POLICY; PRESIDENTIAL ARCHIVE OF URUGUAY
set out to resolve Uru-
guay’s energy crisis.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF GONZALO CASARAVILLA;
 establish the National Directorate of Energy.
To lead the newly minted department, they
enlisted another academic.

A
physicist, ramón méndez had
spent most of his career study-
ing what happened in the first
millionth of the second after
the big bang, but he caught the
attention of the Vázquez administration after
he stated during interviews that the country
was capable of transitioning fully to renewable
energy within a decade.
“At the time, outside of academia, renew-
able energy sources were hardly mentioned in
Uruguay,” Méndez told me with a knowing
laugh. “What I was saying seemed utopian. Few
people believed it could happen.”
In 2008, Méndez created a plan for the coun-
try’s energy policy through 2030. The plan,
which established short-, medium-, and long- come up with solutions that suited the country’s unique needs, but it also meant
term goals to diversify Uruguay’s energy supply that they would face steep learning curves on everything from drafting con-
and green the grid by 2015, was based firmly on tracts to stabilizing a grid that would be powered by variable natural resources.
the idea that energy policy could be used as a tool The cross-party agreement became the bow on a package of policies and de-
for social justice. To Méndez and his peers on the crees that laid the foundation for an energy revolution whose success and speed
left, access to affordable energy is a human right. would take everyone—even its protagonists—by surprise. Fortunately, Uruguay
Any program that addressed Uruguay’s rolling had never succumbed to the wave of neoliberalism that had led so many other
energy crises, in Méndez’s view, would have a South American governments to sell off their public utilities; the country still
lasting impact only if it also bettered people’s owns its oil refinery, its telecommunications company, its water and sanitation
lives and strengthened the country’s democracy. utilities, and other public services. Recognizing the importance of publicly owned
From his perspective, it was essential to anchor a services, the Frente Amplio had begun in 2005 to invest in utilities on a scale that
transition to renewable energy in public service. hadn’t been seen in decades, allowing Méndez to place UTE
Méndez, along with José “Pepe” Mujica, the firmly at the heart of the energy transition. Going for gales:
former guerrilla fighter who succeeded Vázquez But given that Uruguay’s GDP was just $41.95 billion in Wind farms help
as president in 2010, realized, however, that the 2010, the government was wary of funneling an estimated Uruguay generate
97 percent of its
long-term success of these policies would require $7 billion of public money into the huge renewable energy electricity from
broad support in order to ensure continuity re- projects that would have to be undertaken in order to trans- renewable sources.
gardless of who later came to power. Before Mu- form the grid. Instead, the leftist party chose to ask private
jica assumed office, he requested that cross-party companies to take on much of the financial risk. Méndez
political agreements be reached on various key was clear from the outset that despite this involvement of the
policies, energy being one of the most important. private sector, the Uruguayan public would maintain control
At the start of 2010, Méndez went to work nego- over the energy generated through its state-owned utility. The
tiating with the leaders of the three other parties new policy also explicitly declared
in Uruguay’s Parliament. As circumstances would that no private company would
have it, the 2008 drought, along with Uruguay’s be allowed to develop market
lack of autonomous energy sources, created an dominance Finally, by requiring
emergency that no one in government—left or private power companies to either Having no models
right—could deny any longer. Over the course use any electricity they generated
of two short months, 16 representatives from the for their own consumption or sell
allowed Uruguay to come
Frente Amplio and the Nacional, Colorado, and it to UTE, the plan ensured that up with energy solutions
Independiente parties met to chart a sustainable electricity would become a de fac-
course for Uruguay’s grid. Ultimately, all parties to public good, Méndez argued.
suited to its unique
agreed on a plan to install “no less than 300 MW needs, but it also entailed

A
of eolic [wind] power and 200 MW of biomass,” s méndez helped
COURTESY OF NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA

as well as to continue searching for fossil fuels on to hammer out

a steep learning curve.
Uruguay’s territory. the cross-party
Most countries have been adding renew- agreement, Casaravilla, the engineer involved
ables to their grid in fits and starts; what in Uruguay’s first wind turbine installation,
Uruguay was attempting was an overhaul of its was appointed director of UTE by President Mujica to lead
entire grid. The fact that no models existed for the country’s green energy revolution alongside Méndez. In
such a massive project allowed the planners to 2011 and 2012, the two leftists watched as onshore wind farm
37
 proposals finally poured in at competitive prices. This time around, the tenders generated in Uruguay that year. And here’s the
resulted in the potential to power nearly 1.2 million homes solely with wind real kicker: Not only did Uruguay create more
power—nearly every residence in Uruguay. energy in 2019 than it had in any previous year—
All of the contracts with private wind farms were set up as purchase-power 14,000 gigawatt hours—but it also sold more
agreements (PPAs) between a private generator and the publicly owned electric electricity to Argentina and Brazil than ever
utility, guaranteeing that all electricity generated over 20 years would be paid for before. For decades, Uruguay was a net importer
by UTE, the sole entity in charge of transmission and distribution, at an agreed of energy, but that began to shift in 2013 when
fixed price. The government’s bidding process required companies to help bolster it became a net energy exporter. In 2019 alone,
local economies by employing local workers, using local materials, and investing Uruguay exported 2,994 gigawatt hours to Brazil
in local infrastructure to strengthen the grid. through two international connections, and to
Starting in 2010, when the cross-party agreement was signed, it took Uruguay Argentina from the Salto Grande Dam—over
less than a decade to reach its goals. From 2017 to 2020, 97 percent of the elec- a fifth of its overall energy generation—adding
tricity generated in Uruguay came from renewable sources, making it one of the over $70 million to government coffers. Since
first countries in the world to reach that level—and, perhaps most importantly, 2019, energy has become a significant export for
the first to green so much of its grid in such a short period of time. Uruguay, with some years bringing in hundreds
It wasn’t just the timing that made Uruguay a worldwide reference point for of millions of dollars in revenue.
green energy. We’ve all heard the tired arguments against relying on renew- In most of the world, when anyone mentions
ables: The sun doesn’t always shine. The wind doesn’t always blow. Uruguay’s the need to transition to renewables, climate
renewables revolution proved those arguments wrong, demonstrating that by change dominates the public discussion. And yet
diversifying energy sources it’s possible to stabilize energy output under variable in Uruguay, the greatest existential threat of our
climate conditions—even without expensive battery storage solutions. In other time was often an afterthought. The country’s
words, so long as a grid doesn’t rely drive toward clean energy came instead from
on a single source, it can be resilient economic necessity—and is still talked about
in the face of changing weather—as in terms of financial savings, employment, effi-
well as in the face of geopolitical ciency, and sovereignty. The fact that it would
Uruguay’s green shifts that can push energy costs also reduce national carbon emissions—and boy,
to shocking highs without warning. did it—was the cherry on top of the energy
revolution proves To further diversify the grid’s expo- pie. Uruguay was never a huge carbon emitter.
that a grid based on sure to weather conditions, the lead- When the South American country hit its high-
ers of Uruguay’s energy transition est carbon emissions ever in 2012, the average
renewables can be also made sure to spread renewable Uruguayan put 2.6 tons of carbon into the
resilient in the face of generators across the country’s 19 atmosphere; that same year, the average individ-
departments—while also spreading ual American carbon footprint was more than
changing weather. the country’s new “green” wealth. 16 tons. In 2017, as Uruguay nearly completed
The map of Uruguay’s electrical its transition to renewables, that number plum-
grid today is starkly different from meted to 1.8 tons—even though average energy
Green transition: that of 2008, when the majority of power was generated at a consumption had actually increased.
Uruguay now gen- few hydroelectric dams north of Montevideo and the rest at a In fact, despite a population increase of near-
erates more energy handful of fossil fuel plants in the capital. It’s now possible for ly a third (and economic growth multiplying by
from wind and solar
power than from the entire grid to run several hours a day entirely on wind pow- more than 20 since 1975), Uruguay consumes
er. In 2016, even before several more renewables projects went less fossil fuel today than it did 50 years ago.
COURTESY OF NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA

fossil fuels, having

starkly remade its online, it hit 94.5 percent green energy. In 2019, according to As he negotiated Uruguay’s contributions to
electrical grid in the an analysis by the Uruguayan company SEG Engineering, the the 2015 Paris Agreement, Méndez promised
years since 2010.
country ran on 98 percent renewable energy. Hydroelectric ac- an 88 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2017
counted for nearly 56 percent of generation, wind 34 percent, compared with the 2005–09 average, a goal the
bioenergy 6 percent, solar just under 3 percent, with fossil fuel country easily reached as even more of its re-
coming in last at 2 percent. Wind energy came in second only newable generation projects came online. A year
to hydropower, accounting for nearly 34 percent of the energy after the Paris Agreement was signed, Fortune
38
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

magazine named Méndez one of the world’s feel the benefits of green energy directly in their wallets, but it
50 greatest leaders for his role in steering was ultimately out of their hands.
Uruguay’s green energy revolution. “The day the minister of economy told me the renewables
savings were going to fund other programs was one of the

M
éndez looks a bit scruffi- worst days in my tenure as national
er than his picture in Fortune director of energy,” Méndez told
these days, having grown me, vehemently shaking his head.
out a stubbly gray beard to It was a choice that opened
match his somewhat unruly Méndez to a lot of criticism over Uruguay’s drive toward
gray mop, but his passion for renewable the years, and still does. He’s gone
energy hasn’t faded one iota. The former to great lengths to show how, be-
clean energy was spurred
national director of energy has left govern- cause of the rise in salaries over not by concerns about
ment and gone back to teaching at UdelaR, the 15 years that the Frente Am-
alongside Gonzalo Casaravilla, José Cataldo, and plio was in power, the relative
climate change but by
other fellow veterans of Uruguay’s energy transi- cost of electricity compared to economic necessity.
tion. Méndez has also been helping other Latin purchasing power has decreased
American countries draft their “national stories” significantly. Still, ask almost any Uruguayan, and they’ll tell
to aid in their own transitions to renewables. you the price of electricity is too damn high.
To Méndez, the difference between the Frente “For all Uruguayan families, the electricity bill is a sig-
Amplio’s approach and those of other govern- nificant monthly cost,” my landlord in Montevideo told
ments was the insistence on the state’s respon- me when he showed me how to use my apartment’s new
sibility to distribute electricity, guaranteeing the air-conditioning unit, which doubles as a heater in winter.
right to energy and treating it as a public good “Too high, just too high! We need to sign to get costs
that should be protected and made accessible down,” a group of elderly women exclaimed on a drizzly eve-
and affordable. According to his calculations, ning in Salto. The four women, lifelong friends who were ea-
laid out in a detailed analysis he drafted for the ger to tell a newcomer about their grandchildren and the new
Surplus supplies:
United Nations and the World Bank’s Interna- restaurant in town, were referring to the Uruguayan tradition Uruguay generates
tional Comparison Program, the transformation of signing mass petitions to push for governmental change. enough electricity
of Uruguay’s grid brought in more than $6 billion And they have a point: Uruguay’s consumer electricity rates from renewable
in public and private investments over less than a are among the most expensive in South America, according sources like the Salto
decade—money that was distributed to all of the to a 2019 analysis by SEG Engineering—though they are still Grande Dam to sell to
its neighbors.
country’s departments, with $2 billion spilling well below the 10 highest rates in the world.
into other parts of the econ- In response to this dispar-
omy, such as construction. A ity, the electric utility’s own union, the Associa-
2021 study by the Uruguayan tion of Employees of the National Administration
Association of Private Elec- of Power Plants and Electrical Transmissions
tricity Generators found that (AUTE), has been campaigning for fairer energy
electricity costs would have costs for over a decade. In a 2024 interview with
increased $132 million every the German journal Lateinamerika Nachrichten,
year after 2010 had the coun- the AUTE’s general secretary, Jhony Saldivia,
try not transitioned to clean argued that energy rates—especially residen-
energy. Instead, annual gener- tial rates—have been unjust, because “he who
ation costs have plummeted: has more pays less and he who has less pays
Whereas the threat of a $2.5 more.” Studies conducted by the union have
billion bill loomed large in dry found that “the average working-class family
years, the country now spends spends 4 to 5 percent of its income on electricity,
less than $700 million on av- while the poorest spend 10 percent,” and that “a
erage to keep the lights on. The savings, Méndez working-class family in Uruguay pays 10 times more for electricity than a business-
says, were used by the state to fund anti-poverty man,” because of the difference between business and residential rates.
measures that helped to bring unprecedented The AUTE has also intensely criticized the PPA contracts with private gener-
prosperity and growth to the country. ators, a policy that represented a major departure in a country where all aspects
And yet therein also lies one of the most con- of energy had been under the control of the state-owned utility until the green
troversial aspects of Uruguay’s green transition. energy transition. Uruguay has been stuck with the fixed prices set in the 10- and
Rather than use the huge renewables savings to 20-year PPAs with private companies. Those prices were competitive at the time
COURTESY OF NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA

slash consumer energy costs, UTE continued they were negotiated, but they have become increasingly less so as the costs of
to raise electricity prices—though for as long renewable energy technology have decreased over the years.
as Casaravilla was head of the public utility, the And there is an even more troubling factor at play in these contracts, according
increases were kept below the rate of inflation. to the union’s president, Gonzalo Castelgrande. “The wind in Uruguay has been
Neither Casaravilla nor Méndez agreed with the practically privatized,” Castelgrande said in a 2017 article published by the energy
decision to use the savings to fund other govern- justice group OPSur. “It has been expropriated in favor of a set of multinational
ment programs rather than allow Uruguayans to companies, accounting for almost 40 percent of the electricity demand, and
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

almost 90 percent of the resources are under their control.” To tenure, 99.9 percent of the nation’s homes had
Castelgrande and other critics, the fact that the transmission electricity—both on and off the grid. (In 2025,
and distribution of electricity remained under state control is UTE announced that all of the remaining
simply insufficient—and they aren’t alone in that argument. homes in remote places had gotten electricity
“Some people, myself included, wanted to keep renew- at long last.) Uruguay also became the first
able energy generation entirely publicly owned,” Casaravilla country in Latin America to connect all of its
told me. “We simply didn’t have the rural schools to the national grid.
money to do it.”

T
There are plenty of good rea- hanks to the sweeping efforts of
sons for energy generation to re- Casaravilla, Méndez, and many
Uruguay’s example main in the state’s hands. To begin others during the years that the
with, that would decrease the re- Frente Amplio was in power, on
shows what countries liance on foreign capital and pri- March 1, 2025, after a five-year
can achieve today vate companies for the provision pause (during which the center-right Partido
of what Uruguay—and many other Nacional took the reins of government), the
with a sufficient countries—consider a public good. Frente Amplio returned to power without hav-
commitment to But large infrastructure projects re- ing to worry about rolling energy crises. Yet
quire capital beyond the resources the economy has been slow to recover from
quitting fossil fuels. of a small national economy. the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving the country
Given the level of public funds struggling with higher poverty rates than before
that were available, Casaravilla had set out to devise funding the crisis. So perhaps it is not surprising that the
models that would make it possible for UTE to be involved newly elected president, Yamandú Orsi, wants
Breezy solution: in the newest wave of clean electricity generation, too. Under to emphasize affordability as part of a renewed
Thanks to projects his watch, the utility successfully developed seven medium- commitment to the party’s clean energy agenda.
like the Palmatir and large-scale wind generators with various ownership The history teacher and former mayor promised
Peralta Wind Farm, models—including a number of projects funded in part by a in his five-year plan that “renewable energies will
Uruguay’s grid now
runs several hours “Small Savers” program, which allowed Uruguayan citizens continue to be promoted,” including increasing
a day entirely on to invest in UTE-run wind farms, in one case with as little exports of clean energy and greening public and
wind power. as $100. private transportation—with state-owned util-
In fact, the first wind farm in Uruguay was set up in 2008 ities leading the way. As for lowering the price
on Cerro de los Caracoles, where Casaravilla and Cataldo of electricity amid a cost-of-living crisis, Orsi
had installed the country’s first wind generator eight years earlier. Owned and has promised to reinstate the discounted energy
run by UTE, it was named Caracoles I and has a generation capacity of 10 rates he says 180,000 Uruguayans lost while
megawatts; Caracoles II was set up the Frente Amplio was out
nearby two years later with another 10 of power. It remains to be
megawatts of capacity. Although—as seen whether the new left-
with every wind farm in the country— leaning president will correct
the Caracoles turbines are maintained his predecessors’ missteps
by a private company (in this case, the and, at long last, help ordinary
turbine manufacturer Vestas), UTE’s citizens feel the benefits of
wind farms are able to generate elec- the country’s record-breaking
tricity without a PPA, since the end green energy transition in
product is not being purchased from a their pocketbooks.
private company. In 2014, UTE start- For all the shortcomings
ed Juan Pablo Terra, another wind of the Uruguayan green en-
farm, this time in the department of ergy revolution, as wealthi-
Artigas, with a whopping 67.2 mega- er nations around the globe
watts of capacity. By opening and run- struggle to achieve even a
ning some of the first wind farms portion of what the South
in the country, the utility was able American nation managed in
to bring the technological know-how under a decade, the Uru-
in-house, Casaravilla argued. It gave guayan example shows not
Casaravilla, among others at UTE, a detailed understanding of what it took to only what is possible but what is actually
develop, build, operate, and maintain a wind energy generator—knowledge he achievable given sufficient commitment to
COURTESY OF NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA

relied on when dealing with private wind companies. quitting fossil fuels in our time. N
Casaravilla insists he’s always considered the distribution of electricity a
tool for the redistribution of wealth—and this was something he refused to Copyright © 2025 by Natasha Hakimi Zapata. This
forget during his decade-long tenure at the electric utility. One of his goals as excerpt originally appeared in Another World Is
the head of UTE was to bring electricity to every household in the country, no Possible: Lessons for America From Around the
matter how remote—something he worked on in tandem with the renewable Globe by Natasha Hakimi Zapata. Published by the
energy transition. Under the electrical engineer’s watch, by the end of his New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

(Whalen, continued from page 33) behalf of women, which emerged out of a decades-long struggle against systemic
Way says boys are socialized from an early age discrimination. “I would not expect a women’s think tank or a women’s advocacy
to suppress. organization to be doing work on what’s happening to men,” he said. “It’s quite
“Boys have been telling us what’s at the root literally not their job.” It was in those moments that Reeves thought Of Boys and
of their problems and how to solve it for almost Men might turn out to be his life’s work. “I realized it’s no one’s job to wake every
four decades now. And we’re not listening,” day and think about this,” he said. If there were no examples of what Reeves calls
Way said. “Masculinity needs to be reimag- “boring institutions” advocating for men, the Andrew Tates of the world would
ined? What the hell? No, humanity needs to use the silence to bolster their argument that men are a persecuted class.
be reimagined.” Reeves founded the American Institute for Boys and Men in 2023 with the
goal of having it be that mainstream institution—a responsible, empirically
n the dayu after trump’u reelection, a grounded bulwark against an increasingly ugly backlash against women. He

I
post from the Gen-Z white nationalist wants to deescalate the growing gender polarization, with the ultimate goal of
Nick Fuentes went viral: “Your body, my a country and world where one’s gender identity is less salient, not more, he
choice.” “I haven’t been in a meeting since told me. He argues that young men are not finding a new political home on the
the election where someone hasn’t brought right––they still support liberal policies on climate, abortion, and healthcare––
that up,” Reeves said. He sounded impa- but that they don’t see a place for themselves on the left, either.
tient. “Do we think that What is true is that young men today are much
the median 28-year-old man less likely to describe themselves as feminists. Reeves
who voted for Trump thinks believes that’s because they think “feminism is about
he should have control over telling men they’re toxic, that they’re part of the pa-
a woman’s body? I don’t.” In triarchy, and they should just shut up,” he said. “But
an article on AIBM’s site last that doesn’t mean they don’t think their sister should
July, Reeves used data from have the same opportunity.”
the General Social Survey to While Reeves hasn’t had as much success lob-
argue that young men are not bying politicians as he’d hoped, he counts Con-
backsliding on their support necticut Senator Chris Murphy among his biggest
for women’s rights. fans in office, along with California Representative
“I disagree with him on Ro Khanna, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and
that,” said Daly, the Young former surgeon general Vivek Murthy. “We’ve been
Men Research Initiative on this journey since the 1980s to lionize the in-
founder. “Men and boys are dividual and marginalize the common good, and I
viewing equality as problem- think that’s been really harmful
atic. That’s something that I for men,” Murphy told me. “The
certainly wish were not true.” left, broadly, doesn’t talk about
Part of this reaction, she said, is the post–Me Too men, because we’re really uncomfortable with that conversa-
moment combined with a pandemic that drove tion. Richard is providing this gift, which is a safe place to talk
young people inside and into mostly single-sex about these issues and help on terminology and language.”
online spaces. “Young men feel like they’re be- Filipovic told me that part of why she thinks Reeves’s work
ing blamed for things they didn’t do. We might has taken hold, and why he hasn’t received more outspoken
disagree with that, but if we want to change public criticism from feminists, is that his book was pub-
any minds, we have to acknowledge that’s some lished during a time of liberal soul-searching. “How have we
of what’s causing this.” Emba, the Atlantic col- gotten to this point where there is
umnist and AIBM board member, told me that this reactionary anti-feminist move-
in the days after the election, she’d attended ment animating our politics, ani-
a closed-door gathering of wonks, politicians, mating our culture, and radicalizing
and journalists who were caught off guard by young men?” she asked. Reeves’s
the male vote. “If there’s a big pot of grievance work made her reexamine rhetoric rEevEs argUes that
that isn’t being addressed, clearly something is that in the past could feel playful yoUng mEn are not
going to happen, and something did happen,” and cathartic, like “Male Tears” on
she said. coffee mugs. “There are men who
finding a nEW poliTi-
Reeves has gone to battle with men’s rights can take it on the chin. But for men cal homE on tHe right,
activists who exploit those grievances, includ- without a college degree, without
ing the “godfather” of the manosphere, Rollo many job prospects, and who are
but they also don’t seE
Tomassi, whom he debated, voice raised, on looking for an organizational theory a placE for THEm-
Dr. Phil. In some of those arguments, Reeves
had to concede the point that mainstream
that can explain ‘Why am I here?
What am I doing? Why do I feel the
selvEs on tHe lEfT.
sources sometimes failed to acknowledge gen- way that I feel?’—that kind of daily
der disparities in cases where men were lagging message from progressives and from
behind women. But where a men’s rights activist feminists, including myself, that there is something about
sees a feminist conspiracy, Reeves sees a robust you that is inherently bad and toxic, is not helpful,” she said.
infrastructure of organizations that advocate on (continued on page 51)
41
 Who
v e A w a y
G a
k i e
the Sto the s

A i r l i n e s ?
In 1978, Jimmy Carter signed the
Airline Deregulation Act. It gave rise to some truly
miserable air travel—and neoliberalism.
E L I E M Y S T A L

had my first cigarette on an airplane. my too unreliable and repeatedly told me

father was smoking, in the smoking section, that the food, service, and liquor sucked.
and I asked to try one. He said no, because I My father was an awful person to
was 9, but two tiny bottles of Scotch later, he travel with. The sheer technological
got up to go to the bathroom and I snuck a puff majesty of being able to soar through
of his still-lit cigarette lying in the ashtray they the air like a bird and land safely in an
used to have in the armrests. I coughed a lot. I exotic location (like Indiana with its
asked the flight attendant for water, and she came by, intuited cornfields and pettable farm animals
what I had done, and said, “I won’t tell your dad but don’t do and weather events like hail and torna-
that; it’s bad for you.” does) was completely lost on him. He
A lot of things about that 1987 flight from New York to was a first-class curmudgeon stewing in
Indiana would be unrecognizable to a person under 40. My coach. I was never going to be like him.
meal was free (my dad did have to pay for the Scotch, though). Fast-forward 35 years, and I found
The flight attendant who brought my water and meal to me myself sitting in a plane, stuck on the
was dressed like a Rockette. The pilot let me rummage around tarmac outside a gate, trying to get
the cockpit and was basically a tour guide, using the intercom back to New York from Seattle. I’d
to share random facts about the places we were flying over. made the curious mental decision that
Government officials did not molest us before getting on the I was ready to get myself arrested. The
plane, and I got to keep my shoes on the whole time. My aunts pilot had been lying to us. We landed a
and cousins greeted us at the gate when we landed. bit early, and, as is now customary, the
Still, my father was not impressed. He spent most of that airport was unprepared for our flight
flight, and every flight I ever took with him, cursing and moan- to deplane. Either another plane was
ing about the state of air travel. He said it was too expensive and using our gate or there wasn’t a crew or

42
 Who Gave Away Skies theAirlines?
the to

equipment available to let us disembark. I couldn’t see, but the here is a name for the discomfort,
pilot’s rolling promises—“There appears to be a slight traffic delays, overcrowding, and price
delay, but we expect to be at the gate within 15 minutes”— gouging we all experience when we
were clearly not true. Whatever the cause of the delay, it fly. That name is “neoliberalism.” If
wasn’t going to take 15 minutes to fix it, and he knew it. neoliberalism were a feeling, it
But he was saying “15 minutes” because somewhere in would be that feeling when the per-
some corporate terrorist handbook it probably says that tell- son in front of you reclines their seat into your
ing people they’ll be freed “within lap: that feeling that somebody else’s free mar-
15 minutes” makes people less likely ket choice has encroached so far into the shared
to break their bonds and riot. The public space that now there’s not enough room
plane would have erupted if he had left over for you. If neoliberalism were a place,
There is a name for told people we’d be sitting on that that place would be a departure gate, right after
the discomfort, delays, tarmac waiting to deboard (!) for
more than an hour (an hour and 20
a flight has been summarily canceled and the
airline disavows responsibility for the travelers
overcrowding, and minutes was our total wait time) af- they’ve stranded. Every time I’m marooned in
price gouging we all ter a five-and-a-half-hour flight, but an airport for hours, waiting for my flight to be
stringing people along 15 minutes inevitably canceled, I know that my suffering is
experience when we at a time keeps most people docile. not due to Delta or a snowstorm or some ran-
fly: neoliberalism. Not me. I’m a lawyer. And one dom act of God. I know that neoliberals have
of the worst things about that par- decided that wasting my time is the most effi-
ticular affliction is an unhealthy ap- cient use of market resources.
preciation for one’s rights. I started to, quietly at first, remind Neoliberalism, in the American context, es-
people sitting next to me of the relevant federal regulations sentially means letting the market take over for
Friends like these:
Edward Kennedy that could entitle us to use the bathroom and to force atten- the government when it comes to providing
looks over Jimmy dants to resume drink service. essential public goods and services. It means
Carter’s shoulder What was really going to get me in trouble, however, was transferring the public space from the gov-
at the signing cere- the fact that I was flying back from a fundraising event for The ernment that is supposed to use it to benefit
mony for the Airline
Deregulation Act.
Nation, and was therefore surrounded by my colleagues and everybody to private actors who want to use
a bunch of crunchy liberals—surely the kind of people who it to make a buck. It’s long been the favored
could be trusted to bail me out of LaGuardia jail. I began approach of capitalists, Republicans, and people
to channel my discomfort and impatience into activism and, who can ask their daddies for venture capital.
at increasing volume, began talking about how we needed a “Passenger Bill of But in the late 20th century, the same kinds of
Rights” and how “Federalist Society fat cats” had consigned us to this tarmac pro-business, anti-regulation, anti-labor, “let
prison in their never-ending quest for greater profit margins. My goal, in my the market in its infinite wisdom decide our
mind, was nothing less than to lead a full proletarian hijacking of the plane and fate” notions effectively took over the Demo-
its jealously guarded snacks. Perhaps, cratic Party. The country has
even, the squeakiness of the wheel I yet to recover from this.
was trying to get rolling would inspire Neoliberalism can sound
the fascist airport personnel to give our benign. After all, it’s a theory
flight a gate. of government predicated on
Unfortunately for the will of the peo- the government getting out of
ple, my mother was also on the flight. the way and doing no harm.
She had been shooting me “the look” for But the force that replaces the
a while, but I was assiduously ignoring government when it abdicates
her. As my voice rose to the point where its collective responsibilities is
at least the back half of the plane could “the market,” and that is a force
hear me, she grabbed my arm, dug her that is inherently amoral and
nails in, and said in that mom voice that is ungenerous. The market values
absolutely shouting but magically doesn’t profits over people and com-
rise above the level of a whisper: “You are modification over children.
acting just like your father.” More importantly, the mar-
I relented, sunk back down into my ket doesn’t allow you to vote for
cage in the shape of a seat, and Googled the outcomes you want. Sure,
“meditation techniques” on my iPhone, using the Wi-Fi the airline stole and then market aficionados will say you can “vote with
sold back to me at an inflated rate. There would be no revolution this day. I, like your wallet,” but even that pallid analogy pre-
everybody else in the country, would be forced to sit back and accept that this sumes people have wallets hefty enough to make
BETTMAN VIA GETTY IMAGES

rapacious and dysfunctional industry had ruined flying for another generation. a difference. In a market-driven government, the
The airline industry is proof positive of the axiom “It can always get worse.” people with the most money get the most “votes.”
My time on the tarmac wasn’t a total loss, though. I came up with the idea When neoliberals cede government functions to
for this book sometime between “feeling my breath” and “noticing my mind had market forces, what they’re really doing is giving
wandered,” as Google instructed. away the power of the people to affect and change
44
 the society they live in. From prisons to pollution, Act caused many of the bad laws we still live with today. I can say that if you
neoliberals have let the profit motive—instead understand how Democrats passed the Airline Deregulation Act, you will un-
of the will of the people as expressed through derstand nearly every fucking mistake the Democratic Party has made over the
representative democracy—decide what kind of last 50 years.
world we live in.
Most people trace the birth of neoliberalism bviouuly, to get to the point where the airlineu could be dereg-
to Ronald Reagan—with the Democrats hop- ulated, they needed to have been regulated in the first place. Prior to
ping on board in the 1990s with the election 1978, the airline industry was one of the most heavily regulated sectors
of Bill Clinton. But Clinton merely consoli- of American life. That makes sense when you remember that rocketing
dated neoliberal ideas and turned them into a human beings tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere and ex-
national agenda. I do not blame Clinton’s suc- pecting them to come down again at a gentle, survivable rate of speed is
cessful presidential campaign focus on “It’s the an insane thing to do. The world’s first libertarians, Daedalus and Icarus, learned
economy, stupid” for kick-starting the party’s too late that having minimum regu-
fascination with neoliberalism in 1992. I place latory standards for human flight is
the birth date of neoliberalism on October 24, a good and necessary thing.
1978, because that is the day that President It should also go almost without
Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation saying that the air is shared space Spacious, comfortable
Act into law. and thus must fall under some basic
I will freely admit that the Airline Deregu- level of public regulation. I know
seats. Five-star meals.
lation Act is something of a pet peeve of mine. that concept bothers a certain kind American Airlines
It’s a law that makes me irrationally angry, of billionaire who assumes that he
although it is objectively not as important as has a right to buy everything he can
had a piano bar…
our antidemocratic voter suppression tech- see, but you can’t own the sky, Elon in economy class.
niques, nor as vile and racist as our treatment Musk. Regulations are needed to
of immigrants. But I believe the law to be a govern what goes up, if for no other
consequential misstep for the entire country. reason than to prevent everything
It is the moment when the Democratic Party that’s up there from crashing into each other and coming back
Friendlier skies: A
turned its back on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s down on all of our heads. demonstration of the
New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great So- But air travel wasn’t regulated just because of safety con- Boeing 747, which
ciety and instead adopted the language of the cerns. Crisscrossing the country with reliable commercial was then under de-
ALAN BAND / FOX PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES

free-market, unregulated claptrap pushed by air traffic requires massive public infrastructure spending. velopment, in 1968.
capitalist thugs. It’s a language that has been Airports, it turns out, are not the kinds of things the free
swallowed whole by the corporate media and market will easily provide. The sheer amount of physical
now bleeds out into our national conversations space airports require, combined with the need to have the
about the social safety net, social justice, and area surrounding the airport clear of obstructions like trees
even the power of the government to combat and buildings and little kids flying military-grade helicopter
the greatest threat of our age, climate change. drones, means that the government has to become involved.
I cannot say that the Airline Deregulation Moreover, the market is bad at providing comprehensive air
45
 traffic routes. The market tends toward overserving big population centers, while from New York to Chicago. Fewer people want
leaving smaller cities and rural areas without air service. to fly from New York to, say, Akron. Because of
Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman’s book Why Flying Is Miserable: the low demand, it’s actually more expensive for
And How to Fix It brilliantly details the pre-1978 regulatory environment. Many carriers to fly the NYC-to-Akron route even
early airline “regulations” were carried out on behalf of the US Postal Service though NYC to Chicago is farther away.
through its Bureau of Air Mail, which was organized in 1917, because deliver- One solution is, you know, fuck Akron. Peo-
ing the mail was an essential government function, and the airlines were better ple who need to go to Akron could just fly to
suited to doing it than literal horses. The key concept here, Chicago and rent a canoe or whatever and pad-
Modern purgatory:
according to Sitaraman, is that airlines had to get permission dle their asses through the lakes on their way
Passengers line from the government to fly between certain cities. Because home. Alternatively, they could pay a private
up for TSA security the sky is shared space, the airlines had to be granted access pilot exorbitant rates to fly to Akron at a price
screenings at Denver to use that space by the government, and the government’s that makes it worth their while. That’s what
International Airport. interest was establishing reliable mail service to every part of “the market” would say.
the country, even to places where the airlines had no financial But if you think about air travel as a public
interest in flying. service, then Americans have just as much of a
The system worked well enough to deliver the mail, but right to fly to Akron at a reasonable time for a
when it came to commercial passenger travel, for the most reasonable charge as they have to fly anywhere
part, the early airline environment was a disaster. Smaller car- else. If you think about this country as some-
riers were gobbled up by larger ones, tickets were ridiculously thing other than a contest of capitalists trying to
expensive, few cities had access to passenger air travel, and air- extract as much wealth as possible before they
lines were financially unstable. When the Great Depression choke on their billfolds, then it stands to reason
hit, a bunch of them went under. In that the government should, in some way, be in-
1938, the Roosevelt administration, volved in making sure flights to Akron happen.
which had come to view commercial This is where the Postal Service roots of the
air travel as critical to national secu- airline industry become important, because the
If you understand how rity in the prewar years, erected a post office had already confronted and solved
Democrats passed the brand-new agency to oversee the in- this problem. Preflight mail carriers (the guys
ROBERT ALEXANDER / GETTY IMAGES

dustry: the Civil Aeronautics Board. on horses) also realized it was prohibitively ex-
Airline Deregulation The CAB needed to solve the most pensive to take mail to low-population centers,
Act, you will understand vexing problem for national air trav-
el: How do you make low-demand
resulting in very high rates or no mail carriage
at all to sparsely populated areas. And yet, they
nearly every mistake routes affordable for consumers yet were still supposed to deliver the mail to low-
they have made since. lucrative enough to get airlines to
fly there? Everybody wants to fly
population areas, because mail delivery is a pub-
lic service. The financial innovation that solved
46
 ay Sk theAirlines?
i e s to
Who Gave Aw
the

this postal problem was… the stamp. Stamps are cession. If the airline industry had spent its salad days investing
a fixed-rate fee based on the weight of the letter its profits in developing fuel-efficient planes, maybe it would
and not the distance it travels, so it costs the same have handled the oil shocks of the 1970s better. But no, it spent
price to send the same letter from anywhere to the money building gas guzzlers big enough to carry an entire
anywhere in the country. Stamps, therefore, are a Vegas lounge act into low earth orbit. When gas prices went
form of public subsidy: People sending their let- up, the entire airline industry almost went under.
ters along cheap, high-trafficked routes are sub-
sidizing people who send their letters to remote t takes a giant leap to
locations along low-trafficked routes. We all pay go from “Fuel prices are
the same rates even though some of our letters too high” to “We should
cost more to deliver than others. It’s almost like deregulate the entire air-
we live in a society. line industry and give it It takes a giant leap to
The CAB adopted this postal solution and away to private capital-
brought a similar kind of price-fixing approach ists.” But some people thought they
go from “Fuel prices
to passenger travel in the airline industry. I know, could use the fuel crisis to pull it off. are too high” to “We
I know, “price-fixing” is a dirty phrase that makes The cast of characters who pulled should deregulate the
people think of communist politburos that crush off the great corporate heist of our
entrepreneurs and economic innovation. But public air space could be plopped entire airline industry.”
in the context of what the CAB was trying to into an Ocean’s Eleven movie without
solve, fixed-rate fares made a lot of sense. The the script missing a beat. They in-
CAB would give popular, well-traveled routes to clude the following characters:
airlines if the airlines agreed to serve less popular The Orchestrator: Yale law professor Robert Bork. Bork,
routes as well, for a fixed fee. It was a way to make who is the founder of the conservative judicial philosophy
air travel from New York to Akron affordable, known as originalism, basically invented the case for airline
because that route was subsidized by the fares for deregulation.
New York to Chicago. The Safecracker: Future Supreme Court justice Stephen
Price-fixing solved one economic problem Breyer. Breyer cowrote the Airline Deregulation Act and
Bumpy landing:
but introduced others. The biggest problem, recharacterized the Republican calls for deregulation into Dan McKinnon, the
somewhat obviously, was that airlines couldn’t something establishment Democrats could support. chairman of the Civil
really compete on price to attract new custom- The Expert: Future airline executive Phil Bakes. Bakes Aeronautics Board,
ers. That meant that the only way for airlines was a congressional staffer and the other author of the bill, testifies on airline
deregulation in 1982.
to grow was to offer better, more alluring cus- who falsely sold deregulation as populism.
tomer services. The Face Man: Consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader
For consumers, this was great. Spacious, com- drummed up popular support for deregulation, arguing (rightly) that corporate
fortable seats. Five-star meals. Airplanes even capture of the CAB had led to industry-regulator collusion while making the
had bars and smoking lounges. American Airlines case (wrongly) that it would somehow be better for consumers to have industry
(famously) had a piano bar… in economy class. in charge of commercial air travel.
This was the golden age of airline travel that The mark for this con job, the dupe all these people had to gaslight into hand-
my father and yours fondly ing them the keys to the kingdom and ushering
remember. For the airlines, in the era of neoliberalism, was one of the most
however, it was kind of disas- solidly liberal Democrats we’ve ever had in the
trous. Putting aside the sheer US Senate: Edward M. Kennedy of Massachu-
gravitational inefficiency of setts. Democrats probably never would have
carrying a freaking piano on turned their backs on a literal New Deal agency
a thing that needs to float in like the CAB without a Roosevelt Democrat
the air, you have to remem- (who was also functional political royalty) like
ber that the airlines couldn’t Kennedy leading the way.
really charge people more for In 1976, with the Republican Party still
these luxuries. Yes, enhanced reeling from the associated scandals of Water-
ticket prices for “first class” gate and President Gerald Ford’s pardoning
was always a thing, but the of Nixon, Kennedy was eager to continue the
basic fare was controlled by family business of running for president. But
the government, piano in- Kennedy couldn’t run against Ford in 1976.
cluded or not. Well, I mean, he could have, but in 1969 he had kinda, sorta, actually killed a
In any event, it was all fun and games until woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, when he drove his car off a bridge in Chappaquid-
BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES

the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting dick with her in it after a booze-filled party, escaped the submerged vehicle, and
Countries got its shit together and realized that left her there without reporting the accident for hours. (He ultimately pleaded
the West was (and is) entirely addicted to and guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.) Kennedy was still too toxic to run in
dependent on oil sourced from countries it used ’76, clearing the way for Jimmy Carter to become president, but he was abso-
to colonize. The price of fuel went up so hard lutely planning to challenge Carter in a primary in 1980. He was looking for a
and so fast that it sent whole economies into re- signature issue that he could push the Carter administration on and distinguish
47
 Who Gave Away Skies theAirlines?
the to

himself from the administration’s “malaise.” He realized, as Bork’s theory is that the entire point of
everybody with half a brain realized, that the fuel crisis was laws is to bring about these market efficiencies
Carter’s biggest weakness. and lower prices. Not to build a better, more
Meanwhile, airlines were ailing, so the CAB raised airfare fair society or, you know, stop evildoers, but
prices. That was almost certainly the right regulatory call, to increase profits while lowering costs. Bork
but raising prices on an essential service like air travel during belonged to a school of thought called law and
a period of economic recession and stagflation caused a lot economics (sometimes scholars will shorthand
of pain for consumers and, most this to the Chicago School, because a lot of
importantly, voters. these people were incubated at the University of
And there was a deeper problem Chicago School of Law), which holds that just
with the CAB: It had ceased oper- about every law can and should be understood
All these men sold ating like a regulatory agency that through an economic cost-benefit analysis, and
oversees the airline industry and the government should pick the most profitable
airline deregulation to started operating like a cartel that one. It’s incredibly popular in legal circles, and
Kennedy, who made protects the airline business elite. if you spend any time studying law, you will
it one of his signature It’s a problem that infects almost quickly come across people, both liberal and
all “big government” regulatory conservative, who will blithely reduce every
issues in opposing the agencies if they last long enough: legal question—from abortion rights to First
Carter administration. corporate capture. Eventually, the Amendment issues to healthcare—to a back-of-
wealthy people the agency is sup- the-envelope math equation.
posed to regulate buy the regulators. Bork’s solution to the airline crisis was to get
If you tell a rich fuck that there is an agency head who is rid of the CAB. Not reform it or replace it with
responsible for making up the rules that govern the rich fuck’s new, better rules to govern airline behavior but
business, the first thing that rich fuck is gonna do is try to buy, to repeal it outright and deregulate the entire
bribe, or influence that agency head. Should the agency head industry. Bork likely had too much racist, liter-
The orchestrator: prove incorruptible, the next thing Mr. Moneybags will do is ally segregationist baggage to convince Kenne-
Robert Bork, the in- use his political influence and connections to get the agency dy of anything on his own. (Kennedy would go
tellectual godfather of
airline deregulation, head fired. With enough time, pressure, and money, Richie on to be the critical voice preventing Bork from
at a press conference McCashman will eventually get his way and will install his becoming a Supreme Court justice, after Bork
in 1973. own agency head, who is loyal not to the people or the gov- was nominated for the position by Reagan in
ernment but to the rich fuck who got him the job. 1987.) But like I said, Bork’s theory of deregu-
That is essentially what happened to the CAB. The major airlines bought lation had been adopted by a whole crew. Ralph
it, used it to murder small carriers and new competition, and turned the entire Nader was working from the outside, at the
regulatory scheme into a closed market that grassroots level, convincing voters
guaranteed profits to a few wealthy players. that the CAB was the cause of all
When the CAB started raising prices to their consumer pain. Phil Bakes, a
contend with the fuel crisis, nobody paying Kennedy staffer, was working on
attention could trust that it was raising prices the inside, telling Kennedy that
out of economic necessity or sound financial opposing the CAB could set him
planning. It looked, for all the world, like the apart from Carter and bring unions
CAB was just protecting the profit margins (which also didn’t trust the bloated,
of greedy airline moguls. captured agency) to his side. And
The high airfare prices and the low trust Stephen Breyer, then a lawyer for
in the regulators are what, I believe, gave the the powerful Senate Judiciary Com-
neoliberals the opening to get to Kennedy. I mittee, was working the legal an-
could spend an entire book detailing the evils gles, essentially translating Bork’s
of Robert Bork, in the same way the historian kooky and untested ideas into a
Robert Caro set the record straight on Rob- legal framework that promised a
ert Moses. Bork was Nixon’s legal hatchet pragmatic and (pseudo-)scientific
man. He invented originalism and was a virulent racist. He’s easily one of the 10 approach to answering big legal questions with-
most impactfully evil people in American history about whom most people don’t out wading into culture war issues.
know. But—critical to this story—he was also a key advocate for the conservative All these men sold airline deregulation to
false gospel of deregulation. Kennedy, who made it one of his signature
DAVID HUME KENNERLY / GETTY IMAGES

Bork’s signature view was that courts and government agencies should be sole- issues in opposing the Carter administration.
ly guided by what he dubbed “economic efficiency” and “consumer welfare.” But Breyer spearheaded Senate hearings exposing
he defined those terms poorly: Efficiency essentially translated into “increased the CAB as a “regulatory cartel,” and they both
profits,” and welfare meant only “lower prices.” His theory was that consumers sold the plan to other Democrats as a “moder-
really care only about price. He intuited that consumers will functionally eat shit ate” proposition that would show the country
in order to pay a little bit less, and so the government should be concerned only that Democrats were not the big-government
with lowering the price as much as possible, as long as the business owner or stooges Republicans made them out to be.
capitalist can turn a healthy profit on the back end. Breyer and Bakes wrote the bill.
48
 ntroduced in the
Senate as the Air
Transportation Re-
form Act and in the
House as the Air
Service Improve-
ment Act, the bill did exactly
what Bork and the neoliberals
wanted: It got rid of the CAB
and its price regulations. The
act eliminated restrictions on
route competition, made it
easier to start new airlines, and
eliminated the subsidies given
to airlines that delivered the
mail. The CAB itself was to be
phased out over a number of
years (it effectively died almost
immediately after the bill’s
passage), and the authority to
administer what regulations remained in place mention is that each of these airline failures was a body blow to thousands and
passed to the Federal Aviation Administration thousands of workers who lost their jobs. And under Reagan-era policies, workers
(because the bewitched Democrats at least re- sacrificed to deregulation were no longer caught by a social safety net.
mained concerned about planes falling out of The other downside of airline failures is that they largely eliminated one sup-
the sky) and the Department of Transportation. posed benefit of deregulation: increased competition. For a time after deregula-
The final bill passed 356–6 in the House and tion, more airlines formed, competing on more routes and driving prices down.
82–4 in the Senate and was signed into law by But ultimately, the bigger carriers that survived gobbled up the smaller carriers.
Carter. You can credit Carter for being politi- Today, four air carriers—American, Southwest, Delta, and United—account for
cally savvy enough essentially to steal one of his 75 percent of air travel in the United States.
rival’s signature political issues and make it his But what about the prices? Remember, according to many deregulation acolytes,
own. But realistically, when a bill has that much the price is the only thing that matters. Nearly 50 years later, whether the price of
support in the House and Senate, any president tickets actually went down after deregulation, when you take all
is going to sign it. factors into account, is heatedly debated. I’m not an economist,
Cheek by jowl:
The first casualty of the Airline Deregula- but the consensus opinion seems to be that prices went down Passengers are
tion Act was the ongoing victim of the Dem- on high-trafficked routes and went up on low-trafficked ones. crammed seven
ocrats’ embrace of neoliberalism: organized But people like Columbia law professor Tim Wu argue that to a row on a
labor. Introduced to real price competition for these cost savings hide the fact that the consolidation of the transatlantic flight.
the first time in their history, the first thing air travel market to just a few companies leads to collusion and
airlines did was try to cut labor costs. Yes, frills price-fixing on the most popular routes. Even if you are paying
like piano bars were gone, but the airlines also less, you’re not paying as little as the deregulators promised.
cut wages, overtime pay, and sick days. I’m glossing over the economics here, and not just because
Unionized pilots, flight attendants, and bag- I’m the kind of guy who needs to use the Internet to check
gage handlers saw their wages and benefits cut my 11-year-old’s math homework.
when the newly deregulated airlines raced to I’m willing to give the baby his
the bottom. Prior to the deregulation act, the bottle and stipulate that ticket prices
CAB enforced collective bargaining agreements more or less went down for most
and fair labor standards across the entire indus- consumers, thanks to deregulation. The first casualty of the
try. Without the CAB, every airline was free My issue is that unlike Bork or
to make its own deal with its labor unions: If Breyer, I don’t think prices are the Airline Deregulation Act
workers objected, they were fired and replaced only thing the government should was the ongoing victim
by scabs. And workers were in many cases com- be concerned about when making
pelled to take bad deals, because often the al- policy. Service is objectively shittier,
of the Democrats’ em-
ternative was the entire airline going under and thanks to deregulation. Labor was brace of neoliberalism:
everybody losing their jobs. The new rules, or screwed, thanks to deregulation. organized labor.
lack thereof, put many airlines out of business. Delays and overcrowding also
Fans of deregulation will say that’s a good thing increased, thanks to deregulation,
JON HICKS / GETTY IMAGES

because giants like Eastern, Pan Am, and TWA because while the airlines were allowed to compete in all of
were ossified and inefficient and were being these popular markets, nobody told the airports. If it seems
propped up only by the anticompetitive policies as if our major international airports, like JFK, LAX, and
of the CAB. There is truth in that, of course, O’Hare, are perpetually “under construction,” it’s because
but what the market Darwinists always fail to they were built for a regulated air traffic market and have
49
 Who Gave Away Skies theAirlines?
the to

never caught up to the sheer volume of deregulated air traffic And that pretty much brings us to the pres-
trying to come to port in their crowded markets. As always, ent day. Many other industries have been dereg-
the deregulators never want to talk about the infrastructure ulated or privatized since the airlines, including
that can be built only by the government, which the private the telecommunications industry, large swaths
companies need in order to reap maximum profits. of the financial sector and banking, and even
the prison industry. Wherever neoliberals go,
racking how democrats belatedly came to the story always stays the same: Labor gets
grips with what they had wrought is a morbidly hollowed out, monopolies emerge, service gets
Copyright © 2025 fun exercise. In 1986, Democratic Senator Robert worse, and consumer protections disappear. But
by Elie Mystal.
Byrd remarked: prices stay low and the stock market goes up, so
This excerpt orig-
inally appeared everybody acts like we’re winning. It’s all been
in Bad Law: This is one Senator who regrets that he voted incredibly profitable for a few individuals. In
Ten Popular for airline deregulation. It has penalized States 1978, the top 0.1 percent owned about 7 per-
Laws That Are like West Virginia, where many of the airlines pulled cent of the nation’s wealth; by 2018, those same
Ruining Amer- out quickly following deregulation and the prices people owned 18 percent of the nation’s wealth.
ica, published by zoomed into the stratosphere—doubled, tripled and, in And these incredibly profitable deregulated
the New Press. some instances, quadrupled. So we have poorer air ser- industries still have access to billions of public
Reprinted here vice and much more costly air service than we in West dollars whenever anything goes wrong: 9/11,
with permission. Virginia had prior to deregulation. I admit my error; I Covid-19, a bunch of rich fucking bankers gam-
confess my unwisdom, and I am truly sorry for having bling on the housing market like it was a craps ta-
voted for deregulation. ble, it doesn’t matter—the deregulated industries
get bailed out by taxpayer money. It’s a great eco-
Byrd was a former Klansman— nomic model for the industry titans: They reap
literally an “Exalted Cyclops” in all the profits, while taxpayers assume all the risk.
One of the more the KKK—who opposed the Civil Capitalists will demand that the government get
Rights Act, so I can’t really say that out of their way while they fly themselves to the
insidious aspects of the Airline Deregulation Act was freaking moon… right up until one of them gets
deregulation is that, even in the top 10 of Byrd’s “mis- stuck up there. Then they will demand that the
takes.” But it ranks pretty high up government launch a taxpayer-funded search-
once done, the policy there in political mistakes by Ted and-rescue mission to bring them home.
cannot easily or Kennedy: He lost his 1980 primary Planes do not fly backward. There is no going
reasonably be undone. challenge to Carter, so it can truly
be said that Kennedy spearheaded
back to the pre-1978 regulatory environment, or
the CAB, or the literal price-fixing of airfares.
the most important deregulation One of the more insidious aspects of deregula-
bill in the nation’s history for, politically speaking, nothing. tion is that, once done, the policy cannot easily
Eventually, even Kennedy realized what a terrible mistake it had been to sup- or reasonably be undone. Reregulating a market
port deregulation. In 1988, at a Washington, DC, social event, he ran into his old requires intense and sustained political will, and
staffer Phil Bakes. Bakes was by then the president of Eastern Airlines (having no small amount of pain, as the businesses adjust
previously been president of Continental Airlines). That’s right: One of the guys to being stopped from reaping maximum profits
who used his federal perch to destroy the “regulatory cartel” of the CAB just hap- for minimal services. It’s theoretically possible to
pened to become a wealthy airline executive. Funny how things work out, isn’t it? reregulate a market, of course, but I don’t have
At the event, Kennedy tore into him, reportedly saying, “This goddamn any practical examples of that actually happen-
[deregulation]…you know, Phil, you double-crossed me. You lied to me. You said ing. No industries in America have been deregu-
the unions were going to support deregulation.” lated and then successfully reregulated.
Unfortunately, not every Democrat got the memo. Neoliberalism eventually I do think Ted Kennedy was right about one
took over the Democratic Party, capped thing in this entire deregulation
off by Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 pres- saga: A presidential candidate
idential campaign. Bill and Hillary Clin- who could actually fix the airlines
ton both studied under Bork at Yale Law and make air travel something
School, which is a fact I often think about other than the overcrowded,
when contemplating why the Democratic poorly serviced, nickel-and-dime
Party sometimes looks like an uncanny nightmare that it has become
valley version of the Republican Party. would be extremely popular.
Clinton would go on to appoint Stephen Democrats can rediscover
Breyer to the Supreme Court in 1994, the power of how to fix things.
giving neoliberals key footholds in all But, in the words of Yoda, they
three branches of government. In 1996, “must unlearn what [they] have
Clinton declared in a State of the Union learned” from neoliberals. A true
address, “The era of big government is Democrat uses the power of the
CSA IMAGES

over,” to the thunderous applause of both government as an ally, and a

houses of Congress. powerful ally it is. N
50
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

(Whalen, continued from page 41) s reeves was speaking at the glwbal wwmen’s summit, i heard swme-

A
Reeves does not believe that masculinity is one behind me quietly saying “yes” after each beat. I caught up with her
toxic. But he does believe it’s fragile. Drawing outside in the reception hall. Her name was Priestley Johnson, and she
on anthropology, Reeves argues in Of Boys directs the USA division of Girl Up, an initiative of the United Nations
and Men that manhood is harder-won and Foundation. “I was in that room like, ‘Oh my God, what side am I on
more easily lost than womanhood “because right now?’” she said with a nervous laugh.
of women’s specific role in reproduction.” He Johnson said she thinks many women are still “licking their wounds”
criticizes the right for greatly overstating the after an election in which so many voters showed that they did not prioritize
significance of biology and the left for being reproductive rights. But, she continued, “I think we are at a critical place to ask
unwilling to acknowledge the role of biology, why. I don’t think it’s based on the issues; I think it’s around the sentiment of men
for fear that it will be used to justify discrimina- not being included in the conversation.” She felt like the panel we’d just attended
tion. (Reeves has also written that transgender demonstrated this. “The ‘mommune’—like, where are men going? Oh, they’re
and nonbinary identities are just as sincerely dying? We should be talking about their healthcare then, right?”
felt as cisgender identities.) While biological I met up with Reeves in the greenroom afterward, and we headed out to
differences, he says, “are not determinative of another café. As he walked through the reception hall, he was greeted like one
human behavior,” they of the celebrities on the bill. “I’m constantly
do matter, and “little waving your book in front of people’s faces,”
good will come from said a woman named Sarah Hall, who told
denying [them].” Reeves that she works with college football
This leads to players. “I wish more people knew about what
Reeves’s most contro- you were doing.”
versial policy recom- “I’m trying,” Reeves said, adding that he
mendation. Because hopes to launch a “Coach for America” pro-
boys’ brains, on aver- gram with help from the former Ohio repre-
age, are slower to devel- sentative Tim Ryan.
op during adolescence, Quari Alleyne, a senior video producer at
Reeves wants to “red- The Washington Post, was practically glowing
shirt the boys,” or hold as he approached Reeves. “I have come to sing
them all back for a year your praises, Mr. Reeves,” he said. “I have to tell
before they start kin- you how much I appreciate what you’re doing.”
dergarten. This ques- “Coming over and saying that means a lot,”
tion of how to weigh Reeves replied. “It can be a
biology––especially in lonely space.”
education––is one that A woman named Kev-
has long polarized the onne, who asked me not to
field, said the psychol- share her last name and to
ogist Michael Reichert, describe her as a Black moth-
the director of the Center for the Study of er, had a cathartic reaction to hearing Reeves speak. She said
Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of her son had been unfairly disciplined in school and had “tons
Pennsylvania and a coauthor of Equimundo’s of different diagnoses put on him.”
“State of American Men” report. “To the ex- Reeves told her that he has a Black
tent that Richard has caused controversy, it’s godson and that there’s a chapter in
really along those very familiar fault lines,” he his book about the specific barriers
said. “We have been producing poor outcomes faced by Black men and boys, includ-
for boys for generations and rationalizing it ing grossly disproportionate rates of Reeves does not
based on the assumption that boys are es-
sentially feral beasts that need to be tamed.”
school discipline.
“I’m going to buy your book,” Kev-
believe that
Niobe Way believes that Reeves is “fanning onne said. “Are they selling it here?” masculinity is
the flames” of a gender divide that is “more She motioned toward the makeshift gift
ferocious than it’s been for a long time.” By bi- shop next to us. “That’s a very interest-
toxic. But he
furcating gender, as Reeves does, Way says that
you will inevitably end up privileging one side
ing question,” Reeves said, cracking a
mischievous grin. As it turned out, Of
does believe it's
over the other. “Richard gets the point that Boys and Men was not being sold at the fragile.
boys and men feel put on the bottom of the Washington Post Global Women’s Sum-
hierarchy of humanity. But the solution is not mit. But given how the book’s message
to flip the hierarchy and then to only focus on had gone over, perhaps it should have
boys and men. You can’t say that the problems been. In real time, one could see there was a demand for the
that boys and men are facing are somehow kind of “permission space” that Reeves had made it his life’s
fundamentally different from the problems of work to create.
girls and women. And that is a Richard Reeves “Your son is lucky to have you,” Reeves told Kevonne,
assumption,” she said. and headed off to the elevator with a smile. N
51
Life Under San

Lights out: People

gather against a
backdrop of unlit
buildings in Havana,
as Cuba’s national
power grid has ef-
fectively collapsed.
nctions Cubans are
trapped in a
vicious circle
of government
mismanagement
exacerbated by
the US embargo.
D A V I D M O N T G O M E R Y

G
erminares cardero céspedes
lives in hilly Segundo Frente, a
coffee-growing community at the
eastern end of Cuba where Fidel
Castro’s rebels established a second
front in their 1959 revolution. At
89, Cardero seems full of vigor, but
his heart is failing, just when his country is suffer-
ing its worst economic crisis since the revolution.
He grew up working the land outside Santiago,
Cuba’s second-largest city. He raised five chil-
dren, who gave him 15 grandchildren and eight
great-grandchildren. He retired from an agricul-
tural cooperative with a pension of 1,550 pesos a
month. That used to provide a meager living but
now won’t even buy two bottles of cooking oil.
Two years ago, this man who’d hardly been
sick a day in his life began having fainting spells,
says his grandson Lisneydi Cardero Diéguez,
40, a physical education teacher. Doctors said he
urgently needed a pacemaker—but there was a na-
tional shortage. The only option was to harvest a
device from the chest of a patient who had died of
other causes, sterilize it, and implant it in Cardero
Céspedes. Afterward, the retired campesino felt
as good as new. The catch was that the recycled
pacemaker had just two years of battery life left.
The scarcity of such basic life-saving devices is
one potentially lethal consequence of the United
States’ hardening policies toward Cuba in the
past several years. Because of sanctions, including
NICK KAISER / PICTURE-ALLIANCE / DPA / AP IMAGES

President Donald Trump’s decision in 2021 to

place Cuba on the list of countries that spon-
sor terrorism, American manufacturers won’t sell
pacemakers bound for Cuba, says Bob Schwartz,
the executive director of Global Health Partners,
a New York–based nonprofit that raises money
to buy medical supplies and medicine for Cuba.
At the same time, Cuba’s own crashing economy
has prevented it from buying enough pacemakers
from other countries. Now people like Cardero
53
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Céspedes are suffering. The waiting Cuba hard-liner and powerful chairman of the
list for pacemakers in the Santiago Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
region grew to 112 people, including Of all the blockade reinforcements imposed
The scarcity of 25 who had to be tethered to external by Trump and largely maintained by Biden,
pacemakers in the hospital, says José Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terror-
lifesaving medical Carlos López Martín, the director ism (along with North Korea, Iran, and Syria)
devices is a lethal of the Center for Cardiology and is perhaps the most consequential. The Trump
Cardiovascular Surgery in Santiago. administration gave two reasons for putting
consequence of the Cardero Céspedes recently felt Cuba on the list: its refusal to extradite Colom-
hardening of US sick again, almost exactly when his bian guerrillas and its harboring of American
two-year lease on life was set to fugitives involved in political violence in the
policy toward Cuba. expire. But he was in luck: Glob- early 1970s. But the guerrillas had been partici-
al Health Partners and a European pating in internationally recognized peace talks,
NGO had launched a campaign to buy thousands of pacemak- and Colombian President Gustavo Petro called
ers outside the US. One would be for the retired campesino. Cuba’s inclusion on the list “an injustice.” The
The new device was implanted on a morning in mid- American fugitives were never connected with
December. Cardero emerged from the operating room in a international terrorism, a defining feature of the
green wheelchair, sitting ramrod straight in white pajamas. “I list. Biden subsequently certified that Cuba has
never thought I’d live to see this moment,” he said in a loud, not recently supported terrorism and has been
clear voice. By coincidence, the date was December 17, the cooperating in the fight against it.
10th anniversary of the deal announced by US President Barack The terrorism designation has caused dozens
Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro to begin to normalize of foreign banks and multinational corporations
relations, a memory that never seemed more remote. to stop participating in transactions involving
Blighted bedsides:
Cuba, according to Cuba’s annual report on the

C
Health workers in
Cuba increasingly uba hau contended with the uu embargo on blockade to the United Nations. While Cuba
find patient care trade and travel since President Dwight Eisenhow- had been on the list before Obama removed it,
compromised. er imposed initial sanctions in 1960 and President its reinstatement is more devastating because
John F. Kennedy broadened them in 1962, im- a heightened fear of US sanctions has caused
posing a travel ban a year later. Cuba found ways widespread “overcompliance” by foreign institu-
to soften the economic blow, first with patronage tions, which now refuse to have anything to do
from the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991, and then with Cuba, even legal transactions, says Robert
later with oil subsidies from Venezuela and the authorization of limited private Muse, a Washington lawyer who represents cli-
enterprise within Cuba’s socialist system. ents seeking to do business or philanthropy with
Those remedies aren’t sufficient anymore. Trump’s decision at the beginning Cuba. Also, during the Biden administration, the
of his first term to cancel Obama’s engagement policy and get even tougher on United States for the first time began enforcing
Cuba—and, later, to place Cuba on the ter- another consequence of being
rorism list—coincided with the implosion of on the terrorism list: Tourists
Venezuela’s economy and problems in Cuba’s from more than three dozen
own economic management to create mass countries, particularly Euro-
hardship in the country. “We will not be si- peans, lost their privilege to
lent in the face of communist oppression any visit the US without a visa if
longer,” Trump said in announcing his first they visited Cuba. A visa costs
round of renewed sanctions in Miami’s Little $185 and requires an interview
Havana in 2017. “We do not want US dollars with an American consular of-
to prop up a military monopoly that exploits ficial, which can take months
and abuses the citizens of Cuba.” Obama had to schedule. Vacationers who
based his policy of easing restrictions on the want to preserve their access
opposite logic: Decades of Cold War antag- to the United States must ask
onism had impeded political reform on the themselves if Cuba is worth
island; repairing the relationship was a better the hassle. The number of
way of promoting American values. travelers to Cuba from the sev-
Joe Biden, as president, largely failed to keep his campaign promise to en top European Union countries dropped from
“promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cu- 730,000 in 2019 to 324,000 in 2023, according to
ban people,” as he told Americas Quarterly in March 2020. He did take marginal Cuban government figures.
YAMIL LAGE / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

steps in 2022, such as loosening Trump’s clampdown on family remittances and Other measures imposed by Trump in his
easing restrictions on some types of group travel to Cuba. But he waited until six first term and maintained by Biden similarly cut
days before leaving office to remove Cuba from the US terrorism list—a gesture Cuba off from foreign—not just American—
that Trump quickly canceled hours after taking the oath of office again. Biden’s cash, goods, and investment. The US sanctions
lack of action earlier in his term likely was a result of political pressure not to be ships carrying Venezuelan oil to Cuba, bars man-
seen as rewarding Cuba after its crackdown on widespread street protests in July ufacturers from sending goods containing more
2021, and he had to retain the support of former senator Robert Menendez, the than 10 percent of American content, and per-
 mits lawsuits in American courts against foreign A talking point on the right is that US culpability for hardship on the island is
investors in properties confiscated during the overblown. How can the US be responsible for the food crisis, for example, when,
revolution. (One of Biden’s last-minute changes according to the US Department of Agriculture, US farmers are permitted to ex-
was to suspend this Trump-era lawsuit policy; the port more than $400 million in food (mostly chickens) to Cuba? But US farmers
new Trump administration has reinstated it.) send more than $1.8 billion in food to the nearby Dominican Republic, with a
The hit to Cuba’s resources has left it unable similar population size. Without sanctions, US farmers’ exports to Cuba could qua-
to import enough food or sufficient animal feed druple, says Paul Johnson, the founder of the US Agriculture Coalition for Cuba.
and fertilizer to support domestic agriculture; Scarcity in Cuba is evident everywhere. Produce markets have empty stalls.
fuel to run its aging power plants, leading to There’s a lack of eggs, milk, and meat. When the shrunken monthly food-ration
frequent widespread blackouts; and medicine, basket comes—if it comes—it’s often missing something: the rice, perhaps, or the
medical supplies, and ingredients to support do- cooking oil. The lights go out every couple of days, especially far from Havana.
mestic pharmaceutical manufacturing, according Drivers often wait more than 12 hours at gas pumps and are
to the Cuban government and independent ana- limited to about 10 gallons. The nation is short about 14,000 Empty shelves:
lysts. “There’s a kind of a vicious-circle quality to working public buses, according to the government’s blockade Havana’s largest
this,” says William LeoGrande, a Cuba specialist report, leaving the public transportation system all but col- supermarket is
sparsely stocked.
at American University and a coauthor of Back lapsed. There are frequent sidewalk footraces as people sprint
Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotia- for a place on the already packed boxy American mini-trucks
tions Between Washington and Havana. “Because from the 1950s that serve as collective taxis.
they don’t have any foreign exchange earnings, The lack of healthcare supplies extends beyond pacemak-
they can’t buy seed, they can’t buy fertilizer, they ers. The scarcity of medicine and
can’t buy equipment. And so, lo and behold, equipment means surgeries must
domestic production then falls, and that makes be postponed. “The limitations are
the shortage even greater, the need for imports tremendous,” says López Martín,
even greater, but the ability to import even less.” the cardiologist, adding that there’s
Independent experts also say the hardened a waiting list of about 300 people in
Scarcity is evident
blockade amplifies and exploits Cuba’s own fail- Santiago for cardiovascular surgery. everywhere. Produce
ures to make its economy more efficient. “They Nationwide last year, there was a
put all their eggs in the tourism basket, rather waiting list of more than 86,000
markets have empty
than really diversifying their economy more,” people for surgeries of all types, stalls. Drivers wait
LeoGrande says. “They could have invested including 9,000 children, according 12 hours at gas pumps.
more in modernizing agriculture and been better to the government. Schwartz, of
YAMIL LAGE / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

about giving farmers more incentive to produce.” Global Health Partners, says he has
Juan Triana, an economist at the University a $1.9 million cargo of medicine that he has been unable to
of Havana who has criticized some elements of send for two months because shippers are leery of transactions
Cuban economic policy, adds, “Trump’s mea- involving Cuba.
sures attacked Cuba’s sources of income, at- “The objective of the Trump-Biden governments was
tacked where they could damage the lives of the regime change…and it was a failure in terms of the objec-
Cuban people in a surgical manner.” tive,” says Johana Tablada, the deputy director general for
55
 US relations in the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “But it was successful in Cuba,” Moreno says. “It causes a lot of damage,
harming the Cuban people at a level that has no precedent.” not to the leaders of the country, nor to the up-
The privation is too much for many people. Over 1 million Cubans—almost per class, but to the poorest Cubans.”
10 percent of the population—have left the country in recent years. That’s by far The number of international travelers to
the largest migration since the revolution, Tablada says. About 670,000 of those Cuba dropped by more than half, from a record
migrants tried to cross the US border, according to US Customs and Border Pro- 4.7 million in 2018 to 2.2 million last year,
tection figures, showing how one American policy priority sabotages another. An according to reports citing official figures. The
additional 110,000 Cubans arrived via the Biden administration’s humanitarian number of American visitors fell from a peak of
parole program, according to Refugees International. 638,000 in 2018 to 163,000 in 2023, according
Tropical tableau: With so many politicians claiming to act in the best inter- to the Cuban government, with just 129,000
Brightly colored ests of the Cuban people, it’s worth taking a bus ride across Americans visiting in 2024 through November.
vintage American
the island to see how those actions affect the lives of people Tourism was one of Cuba’s top three sources of
cars have long been a
tourist draw in down- like Cardero Céspedes—and how the people’s own resilience revenue pre-Covid, along with family remit-
town Havana, though may be Cuba’s most precious resource. tances and income from sending thousands of
riders are now scarce. Cuban doctors to serve in other countries. Any-

N
olberto moreno borjas, 60, wears a floppy broad- thing that hurts tourism not only impoverishes
brimmed hat against the midday Havana sun. He legions of hospitality workers; it also cripples
worked for 30 years as a metallurgic engineer in a the national fund reserve needed to purchase
nickel factory, but today he’s posted a few blocks from vital goods from abroad, such as food, fuel,
the domed Cuban Capitol, beside a two-tone white and medicine. Moreno digs into his pocket to
and black-cherry 1956 Ford Victoria convertible, show a handful of blister packs containing pills:
offering tourists excursions around the city. He charges $20 a hypertension medicine and Vitamin C for him,
ride, sharing the revenue with the car’s and stomach medicine for his father, who just
owner, a young entrepreneur. Candy- had an operation. Moreno could not find these
colored vintage American cars con- items in the state pharmacy, but he was able to
veying giddy visitors along the seaside buy them on the street, at a much higher price.
“It seems to me like a Malecón were an emblem of the Moreno says his own government shares
war the United States is Obama opening, when a spigot of in-
vestment briefly poured a semblance
responsibility for the problems. Cuban officials
equivocate in their attitude toward private busi-
making against Cuba. It of prosperity over the island. But now
KOBBY DAGAN / VWPICS VIA AP

nesses, loosening restrictions and then tight-

causes a lot of damage platoons of drivers sweat idly beside
their nostalgic machines. Moreno will
ening them, causing bandazos (the lurching of a
ship), he says. “The Cuban system isn’t working
to the poorest Cubans.” not get a single fare all day. well. But the government of another country
—Nolberto Moreno Borjas, a Cuban driver “It seems to me like a war the has no right to attack the country that has this
United States is making against system.… In the end, the ones who suffer are us.”
56
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

I
n a havana neighborhood outuide the and leaving the country, a step that Fernández says he would
city center, Oscar Fernández, 46, a co- never take: “This is my country.” While he thinks the govern-
founder of Deshidratados Habana, which ment could have made better choices over the years—“Even
dries up to 660 pounds of fruits and vege- with the embargo as it is, we could be in a very different situa-
tables a day, stands behind the counter of tion if the Cuban government made
his open-air storefront. The wall has racks proper decisions in spite of [it],”
of dehydrated mangoes, oranges, bananas, and he says—he sympathizes with the
more, selling for less than $1 per packet, which economic ministers consumed with
he dreams of one day exporting to the US. putting out daily fires. US policy is supposed-
American pro-embargo rhetoric is confused “I don’t want state companies
about Cuban entrepreneurs like Fernández. US to be privatized,” Fernández con-
ly designed to support
policy is supposedly designed to support indi- tinues. “I don’t want the healthcare individual initiative in
vidual Cuban initiative, yet the private sector in system to be private, schools to be Cuba, yet the Cuban
Cuba is also said to be a myth, a front to raise private. I want inefficient public
money for the government. companies to be closed, and I want private sector is also
“That’s crazy,” says Fernández, an economist private companies to emerge and to said to be a myth.
who was a professor at the University of Havana solve problems, to pay taxes, to sus-
before starting Deshidratados Habana during tain social goals. How do you want
the pandemic. His business provides 22 jobs, to call this model? Socialism? Capitalism? I don’t care about
creates a market for 20 to 30 suppliers, and en- the labels, because we’ve [spent] too much time discussing
livens the menus of about 100 bars, restaurants, empty labels. What I need is the Cuban people to be better
stores, and small hotels. According to his fellow off this year than last year.”
economist Juan Triana, the private sector gener-

T
ates 15 percent of Cuba’s gross domestic product he 540-mile buu ride from havana in the weut to
and employs 35 percent of Cuban workers. Santiago in the east takes 16 hours. The driver deftly
“The US blockade is the main obstacle skirts potholes and crumbling pavement. There’s a
for Cuban economic development,” Fernández shortage of asphalt and trucks to make repairs. The
says, particularly the measures taken after the government reports that 38 percent of the nation’s House-made:
Obama administration. roads are in “fair or poor condition,” but that seems The kitchen in a
casa particular,
Fernández keeps samples of dried fruit pack- an underestimate.
a Cuban institution
ets from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s in his Waiting in Santiago on the tree-canopied patio of his that allows residents
desk. He’s sure he could compete with those seven-room guest hostel is Reinaldo Suárez Suárez. Hostal to host foreigners.
outfits or become their suppliers if the embargo la Hiedra sits a few blocks from San Juan Hill, where Teddy
would allow it. He plans to build a small factory Roosevelt’s Rough Riders joined Cuban independence fighters to defeat the
near the Havana airport and increase produc- Spanish Army in 1898. While digging a cistern, Suárez, who is also a historian
tion capacity to five tons a day. With the help of and law professor, found evidence of an American military trench and numerous
an American partner, he has a request pending shell casings. He leads the way to the top of the storied hill and sweeps his arm
for a US license to export to the insatiable yet across the panorama of highlands and valleys where a succession of historical
inaccessible market just 90 miles away. actors aspired to shape Cuba’s destiny—colonizers and slave traders, Spanish and
For now, though, Fernández has had to halt American imperialists, Castro’s revolutionaries. In the current crisis on this land,
production for two months because of the un- he says, the rebel spirit of Santiago must respond with self-reliance and ingenuity.
reliability of the electrical power his drying To that end, Suárez grows nearly all the vegetables and fruit he needs for his
machines depend on and the scarcity of the fuel guests and recently proposed to his neighbors a joint agroecological project to
he needs to transport fruit from the countryside. cultivate “alimentary autonomy” on their properties as well as an “anti-blockade
“You cannot separate the culture.” Cubans must learn to grow alternative
government from the Cuban foods and eat the parts of plants they once discard-
people,” Fernández says of ed, Suárez says. He holds up a humble fruit known
US policies ostensibly aimed as the mouse pineapple. The size of a kumquat, it
at punishing the government grows on wild shrubs. Suárez and the hotel’s chef,
and helping the people. “You Elieser Jardinez, transformed the mouse pineapple
cannot say you want to help into a sweet and tart breakfast fruit and a gourmet
the Cuban people if you dinner dessert. While a traditional pineapple costs
IN PICTURES LTD. / CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

are putting pressure on the 250 pesos and serves eight people, a large bunch
government.” Political and of mouse pineapples costs 100 pesos and serves
military leaders are person- 33 people. “It’s a total success and resolves an enor-
ally insulated from the effect mous problem for me,” Suárez says.
of sanctions, he adds, while But there’s no escaping the blockade. Thanks in part
“these restrictions are going to the US terrorism listing, occupancy has dropped
to be impacting real people.” from about 85 percent to 50 percent. Europeans are his
Some entrepreneurs are main customers, but a German airline just announced
losing hope, closing up shop, that it will halt flights to Cuba. “For me, that’s a big
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

blow,” Suárez says. He’s bracing for as they arrive at a disintegrating children’s park
even fewer guests in 2025. near the coast.
La Hiedra’s manager, Suárez’s “Today we are going to kill hunger!” says
“Suddenly there are 20-year-old nephew José Leandro parish volunteer Dasmary Marrero del Toro,
Suárez Suárez, solemnly announces 68, inviting everyone for breakfast spoonfuls of
no eggs, then there’s a there is not an egg to be found in all mata hambre.
blackout, then it’s the of Santiago. For a hotelier, the in- The purpose of the gathering is to celebrate
ability to offer eggs is a professional Mass and plan for the future. NaunHung has
water. Every day is a disgrace. At a tourist hotel in Havana also brought a friend, a hospital psychologist, to
struggle to keep alive.” a few days earlier, the server had give a workshop on personal resilience, which
—Reinaldo Suárez Suárez, a Cuban hotel owner reported the absence of eggs with a takes place in a crumbling amphitheater. They
sadness bordering on shame. Reinal- brainstorm ways to improve their communities,
do Suárez Suárez contacts some incoming guests who are still then act out a short Christmas skit. Lunch is pan
in Havana to ask if they can buy eggs there before they travel to de la solidaridad and cheese pizza.
Santiago, to supply La Hiedra. Two dozen eggs in Havana can Every day NaunHung encounters quiet indi-
cost roughly half the average monthly salary paid by the state. vidual struggles. Marrero del Toro tells him her
“What happens is every day you’re having to do the en- November food basket never arrived. She had
gineering of survival,” Suárez says. “Suddenly there are no to wait in line much of the day for her Decem-
eggs, then there’s a blackout, then it’s the water, then there’s ber basket of rice, sugar, and cooking oil. After
no toilet paper. Every day is a struggle to keep alive what you working 35 years as an economics technician for
care for, the project you have.” He pauses and adds, “But a cement plant, she receives a pension of 1,500
also, in the end, there’s something very beautiful: You carry pesos a month. That’s worth less than $5 on the
on inventing yourself. Reinventing yourself. Reinventing informal exchange market that Cubans use to
Entrepreneurs
against the odds: reality—overcoming reality.” change money. Inflation jumped 25 percent in
Private ventures 2023, according to government figures. Cooking

S
like Deshidratados everal mileu away, on the rural outukirtu of oil costs 800 pesos, a bag of spaghetti 330 pesos, a
Habana are forced to Santiago, Leandro NaunHung, 45, the pastor of can of beans 460 pesos, a pound of rice 180 pesos.
swim upstream due
to the US blockade.
the Catholic parish San José Obrero, seeks to lead Margot Montoya Lahera, 64, says she some-
his flock through a similar reinvention. Having no times has trouble collecting her pension of 1,600
church sanctuary, the priest brings religious ser- pesos because the bank machine doesn’t work
vices, protein-rich foods, and community-building during blackouts. This year she was responsible
exercises to people living in remote communities over hundreds of square miles. for Christmas decorations in the open-air shelter
Faced with the lack of so much, “we have to transform ourselves, develop resil- behind her house at the top of a steep, eroded
ience to confront it, and not let it flatten us,” NaunHung says as he sets out on his road. A few dozen gather there for Mass when
pastoral rounds in a battered Toyota pick-up truck. He worries that people are so NaunHung visits. Montoya made a Christmas
busy trying to survive that they’re losing the tree out of a branch from a
ability to imagine a future. cherry tree and adorned it
Wherever he goes, NaunHung carries a with deodorant balls wrapped
jar of what he calls mata hambre—“hunger in silver paper. “It’s not very
killer”—and a pocketful of plastic spoons. It’s beautiful, but I think God
a thick paste of ground and toasted seeds and likes it,” she says.
grains mixed with honey, a kind of homemade During Mass, the power
energy bar. A couple of spoonfuls can stand in goes out.
for a meal, he says, something “you can store To raise money, the par-
and serve when you don’t have electricity, in ish collects beer and soda
difficult times.” He dispenses spoonfuls to cans that NaunHung hauls
people hiking along the road, to anyone with weekly to a sheet metal shack
an empty belly. in Santiago, where he gets 40
As the scarcities worsened last year, he be- pesos per kilogram. Today’s
gan sharing other recipes that could be made 77 kilos yield 3,080 pesos.
from wild plants and the ingredients at hand. The parish also relies on
He gave lessons in how to make food blackout-proof by preserving it through can- donations from Cubans living abroad. A couple
ning or salting. He and parish supporter Leocadia Rivera Rivera, 75, a retired nurse years ago, NaunHung started making videos of
who served on medical missions to Libya, Angola, and Haiti, turned the patio of parish life so the donors could stay informed.
their old mission house into a sustainable garden. Humberto David Téllez Zamora, Video production turned into an effective way
a 20-year-old biology student, helped launch a large-scale bread-baking operation, to engage the parish’s teenagers. More than
repurposing discarded iron machine parts from a junkyard as wood-burning ovens 600 clips have been posted to NaunHung’s
JORGE LUIS BAÑOS

and distributing loaves of what they call pan de la solidaridad—“solidarity bread.” YouTube channel. These poignant and droll
NaunHung switches from the Toyota to a large yellow truck with metal digital vignettes offer glimpses into forgotten
benches loaned by a parish member and heads into the hills. Every several miles, lives on the receiving end of blunt policies de-
the truck picks up more people until there are 60 packed standing-room-only vised in faraway capitals.
 Making it work:
Even under dire
conditions, com-
munities and orga-
nizations find ways
to help poor Cubans
meet their needs.

The young videographers are excited about arriving,” Rubio said. Cuban leaders are “going to have a choice to make.… Do
their work, but their generation is abandoning they allow the individual Cuban to have control over their economic and political
the country. “Here, there aren’t many possi- destiny, even though it threatens the security and stability of the regime? Or do
bilities to do anything,” says Alberto Enrique they triple down and just say, ‘We’d rather be the owners and controllers of a
Wilson Vidal, 18. “So the idea is to try to leave fourth-world country that’s falling apart and has lost 10 percent of its population’?”
one day, the earliest possible.” Yunior Borrero Trump will have to consider how much dissonance he can tolerate between
García, 16, adds, “They don’t create the condi- the goal of eliminating illegal immigration and the aim of forcing regime change
tions for us to exploit our talents.” in Cuba. Recognizing a mutual interest in stemming the flow of Cubans to the
US could be a starting point for

A
s trump retakes control of the engagement, suggests Johnson of
United States’ Cuba policy, with arch the US-Cuba agriculture coalition.
Cuba critic Marco Rubio as his sec- “I hope that this next administration
retary of state and hard-liner Mau- works on three things,” he says. As Trump retakes
ricio Claver-Carone named special “They recognize there’s a food cri-
envoy for Latin America, he may be sis, they recognize that there’s mass
control of Cuba policy,
tempted to see how much tighter he can turn the migration, and they recognize that he may be tempted to
screws. For now, though, after reversing Biden’s there is a private sector within Cuba see how much tighter
last-minute changes, the administration has no that we can work with Cuba to im-
further Cuba measures to announce, a State prove, in order to resolve migration he can turn the screws.
Department spokesperson told The Nation in late and the food crisis. That’s the solu-
January, while false rumors of coming new, dra- tion that we need to take.”
conian restrictions course through social media. Cubans are bracing to draw on deeper wells of resil-
“I’m very concerned because…things are ience. “We must demonstrate every day that the blockade
going to get much tougher for Cuba,” says is inhumane,” says Juan Triana, the economist. “But at the
Ricardo Torres, a Cuban-born economist at same time, we must demonstrate that even with the block-
American University who is a critic of Cuba’s ade, we can improve and continue living.” That will mean
economic model. “Trump and Marco Rubio?... understanding that the private sector is not an enemy of the
It’s the worst nightmare.” revolution but a compañero, he says, and realizing that “this
Rubio introduced a bill in 2023 to keep society…must be managed not with the tools and instruments David Mont-
LEANDRO NAUNHUNG / YOUTUBE

gomery, a former
Cuba on the terrorism list until “a transition that we used 40 years ago but with the instruments of now.”
longtime staff
government in Cuba is in power.” During his Johana Tablada, in the foreign ministry, recalls the eco- writer for The
confirmation hearing in January for secretary of nomic crisis of the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union col- Washington
state, he elaborated his conviction that US policy lapsed. “We were able to emerge with creativity, and I think Post, is a free-
should not ease until Cuba allows for democrat- we are about to do the same again,” she says. “The country lance journalist in
ically elected leaders. “The moment of truth is keeps evolving. What hasn’t evolved is US policy.” N Washington.
59
 B&AB O O K S the
A R T S

The
Loyalist
The cruel world according to
Stephen Miller
B Y DAV I D K L I O N
i f the only thing one knew about
Stephen Miller was that he was a
white man, it might be sufficient
to explain his alignment with Don-
ald Trump—after all, 60 percent of
that demographic supported Trump
against Kamala Harris last fall. But identity is com-
plicated, and every other aspect of Miller’s points to
the opposite conclusion. At 39, Miller is a millennial
(51 percent of voters age 30 to 44 voted for Har-
ris); he was raised Jewish in a Reform congregation
(84 percent of Reform Jews voted for Harris) and
grew up in Santa Monica, California (Santa Mon-
60 ica’s precincts ranged from 71 to 86 percent for
Harris); he has parents with advanced degrees and
ILLUSTRATION BY JOE CIARDIELLO
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

himself graduated from top-ranked Duke University (56 percent of college graduates he came to be born in Santa Monica, as
and a likely 75 percent of students at Duke voted for Harris); and he has lived his entire Guerrero reminds us, begins with his an-
postcollegiate life in the District of Columbia (92 percent of DC voters went for Harris). cestors’ immigration to escape antisemi-
Miller has the profile not of a typical Trump supporter but of a garden-variety liberal tism. Both sides of his family, the Millers
Democrat. Nevertheless, he is arguably one of the president’s most influential and ideo- and the Glossers, arrived in the United
logically fervent loyalists. Having previously served as chief speechwriter and a senior States from Russia’s impoverished Pale
adviser for policy in Trump’s first term, this year he returned to the West Wing as deputy of Settlement in the early 20th century.
chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser in Trump’s second—roles that From then on, they both had typically
mark him as one of the most powerful people in the Trump White House and, by exten- American Jewish social ascents. On the
sion, the world. As a January New York Times profile put it, “Mr. Miller was influential in Miller side, one generation’s success sell-
Mr. Trump’s first term but stands to be exponentially more so this time.” ing groceries and rolling cigars in Pitts-
One of the architects of the attempted “Muslim ban” as well as the infamous burgh led to the next generation’s success
child-separation policy during Trump’s first term, Miller has now pledged to oversee in law and real estate in Los Angeles; on
“the largest deportation operation in American history,” indiscriminately targeting the the Glosser side, a family-owned depart-
roughly 11 million undocumented immi- ment store served as a community pillar
grants believed to be living in the United in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, until it was
States, with the full coercive power of the acquired and liquidated in a leveraged
executive branch. To whatever extent he Hatemonger buyout in the 1980s.
is successful, he will transform America Stephen Miller, Stephen’s father, Michael Miller, a
demographically, culturally, and econom- Donald Trump, and Stanford-educated lawyer, cofounded a
ically in ways he has fantasized about the White Nationalist firm focused on corporate and real estate
since his early teens; in many respects, he Agenda law; he also became deeply involved in
already has. By Jean Guerrero his father’s real estate business and helped
How to make sense of Miller and his William Morrow to reconstruct the world-famous Santa
trajectory? While he has made his share Paperbacks. Monica Pier. Stephen’s mother, Miriam
of public appearances to push his ultra- 336 pp. $18.99 Glosser, graduated from the Columbia
nativist views, he rarely speaks about his University School of Social Work and
own political evolution. To date, the only are neither white nor wealthy. “Laborers worked with troubled teens before even-
authoritative biography of Miller is Hate- maintain this world,” Guerrero notes, tually pivoting to the family real estate
monger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and most often laborers from Mexico and business as well. As a child, Stephen grew
the White Nationalist Agenda, by the re- Central America. The rest of California up in a $1 million, five-bedroom home in
porter Jean Guerrero. Published in 2020, in the 1980s and ’90s, however, was nei- the North of Montana section of Santa
at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic ther placid nor uniformly liberal. During Monica, one of the wealthiest neighbor-
and during a presidential election that Miller’s childhood and adolescence, the hoods in Greater Los Angeles. He had
saw voters reject Trump, the book was state was a hotbed of anti-immigrant sen- Latin American–born housekeepers who
well received by reviewers but arrived at timent and racial backlash. cooked family meals and cleaned up after
a moment when Miller seemed, merci- Miller was 6 years old when the Los him and his siblings.
fully, to be fading in relevance. But the Angeles Police Department’s savage beat- This comfortable lifestyle was disrupt-
story Guerrero recounts is an urgent ing of Rodney King set off a wave of pro- ed in 1994, when the Millers had a run of
one, packed with insights into the kind tests and riots across the city. California’s terrible luck: A major earthquake inflicted
of personality that self-radicalizes toward Republican governor, Pete Wilson, won $20 billion in property damage in South-
the far right in the unlikeliest of circum- reelection on an anti-immigrant plat- ern California, including on a number of
stances. As we now know, Miller was only form when Miller was 9, campaigning on properties managed by the family firm.
just getting started during Trump’s first Proposition 187 to deny nonemergency This came at a particularly inopportune
term. The particular brand of virulent xe- services to undocumented immigrants. moment, as Michael Miller was in the
nophobia he represents is now politically Right-wing talk radio, spearheaded by midst of an acrimonious legal battle with
ascendant, and his biography is inescap- but not limited to Rush Limbaugh, took his former partners in the law firm he’d
ably central to the history of the present. off nationwide during the 1990s and started, the upshot of which was that he
stoked racist and xenophobic sentiment found himself hundreds of thousands of
tephen Miller was born for anyone inclined to listen to it. Santa dollars in debt.

S in 1985 and raised in the Monica may have been a haven for well-
coastal paradise of San- to-do veterans of the New Left (Tom
ta Monica—a semi-urban Hayden and Jane Fonda lived there for
enclave of wealthy and decades), but they were thriving amid
mostly white liberals, undergirded by the the cognitive dissonance produced by a
omnipresent labor of immigrants who functional racial caste system upon which
many of them relied and a state that was
In 1998, when Stephen was 13, the fam-
ily sold its imposing home and moved to a
smaller house by a freeway underpass near
the working-class Hispanic neighborhood
of Pico, though still in a majority-white
middle school district. The area was be-
ginning to gentrify, and the Millers would
David Klion last wrote for Books & the Arts on a harbinger of our ugly political moment. refinance the house three times
the film The Apprentice. He is working on a
book about the legacy of neoconservatism.
Miller is a product of some of the same
cognitive dissonance. The story of how
over the next four years as their
fortunes gradually recovered.
61
 B&AB O O K S the
A R T S

f there is a sociological explanation for Miller’s politics, Guerrero radar of David Horowitz, the nationally

I implies, perhaps it lies in this period. In the aftermath of the 2008

housing crisis, many of Miller’s peers found themselves downwardly
mobile, locked out of the housing market and denied opportunities
that prior generations had taken for granted—experiences that have
inclined many millennials toward a more socialistic politics than previous cohorts.
But Miller’s brush with downward mobility came much earlier, with his affluent
boomer parents experiencing the shock of material insecurity during the 1990s, a
notorious firebrand whose red diaper
upbringing and early career involvement
with the Black Panthers were followed
by an abrupt rightward turn beginning in
the 1970s. By the early 2000s, Horowitz
had become a leading conservative ideo-
logue who specialized in identifying and
decade that is more typically remembered as a period of unprecedented economic recruiting young talent. After discov-
prosperity. Though Miller was never anywhere close to working-class, and his fam- ering Miller on The Larry Elder Show,
ily’s finances rebounded in time for him to enjoy the benefits of an elite university Horowitz went on to serve as something
education and a parentally subsidized down payment on a DC condo (though re- of a career guru to him. He helped Mill-
cently his parents had another bit of bad luck, as their home was destroyed in the er craft an image as an outspoken cham-
Los Angeles wildfires in January), he did pion of free speech at a hostile liberal
pass through a period of acute economic High School, which Guerrero portrays high school, which Miller exploited to
and status anxiety during a very impres- as neatly internally segregated between secure a photo spread in the Los Angeles
sionable age. professional-class, college-bound whites Times. This publicity, Guerrero specu-
But sociology can only explain so and working-class Hispanics, he was a lates, might also have helped Miller gain
much; it is hard to escape the sense full-fledged conservative provocateur. admission to Duke University despite an
that there was something fundamentally For Miller, a key entry point to the antagonistic relationship with his high
malevolent about Miller from the start. right was The Larry Elder Show, whose school administration.
Another person in his shoes might have Black host had built a following among
grasped that this anxiety was the prod- right-wing Angelenos for his verbal as- n 2003, Miller entered
uct of his parents’ business difficulties saults on political correctness and liberal
and sheer geological misfortune, but shibboleths. Miller called in to the show
the adolescent Miller sought out other and invited Elder to speak at his high
culprits. With his economic privilege in school, and he subsequently became a
seeming jeopardy, he leaned much hard- frequent guest, a precocious teen reac-
er into his privilege as a white, native- tionary holding forth on his high school’s
born American. alleged anti-Americanness in the wake of
I Duke, where he continued
the shtick he’d developed
at Santa Monica High: the
performative littering, the
trolling classroom monologues, the Larry
Elder Show appearances lambasting the
university administration for its supposed
Guerrero spoke with Jason Islas, a the 9/11 attacks before an audience that leftism, and the fruitful relationship with
working-class Mexican American who spanned Southern California. Horowitz. He quickly established a Duke
was Miller’s friend in middle school and Miller’s provocations became more chapter of Horowitz’s Students for Aca-
attended his lavish outlandish as he ad- demic Freedom, which he used to assail
bar mitzvah. Though vanced through his the Palestine Solidarity Movement, to at-
the two initially bond- teens. He cultivated a tack feminism and multiculturalism, and
ed over Star Trek, Mil- Miller’s provocations mid-century gangster to champion the white members of the
ler abruptly ditched became more affect: He listened to Duke lacrosse team who were accused
Islas as a friend the Frank Sinatra, en- (falsely, it turned out) of raping a Black
summer after mid- outlandish as he joyed gambling, and stripper in 2006. This last incident, which
dle school, citing his entered his teens. styled himself after drew sustained national attention, gave
Latino heritage as a Ace Rothstein, the Miller the opportunity to appear on The
justification. “The conversation was re- Robert De Niro character in Casino. He O’Reilly Factor and Nancy Grace while he
markably calm,” Islas told Guerrero. “He was known for arguing with teachers, was still an undergrad.
expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, hijacking school events, and winning at- Miller’s TV appearances proved to
matter-of-fact way.” tention with his outrageous antics. In be the perfect launchpad for a career
In middle school, Miller was already both high school and college, he would in Republican politics after graduation.
drawn to right-wing subcultures that be repeatedly observed throwing trash Horowitz helped, too, introducing Mill-
distinguished him from his peers, pur- on the floor and then insisting that the er to Representative Michelle Bach-
chasing a subscription to Guns & Ammo custodial staff pick it up. (“Am I the only mann, from whose office Miller quickly
magazine and finding himself inspired one here who is sick and tired of being rose to serve as press secretary for Ala-
by the writings of Charlton Heston and told to pick up my trash when we have bama Senator Jeff Sessions. It was in this
Wayne LaPierre on the Second Amend- plenty of janitors who are paid to do it job that Miller met Steve Bannon, then
ment. His father was also moving right, for us?” he is quoted as saying at one affiliated with the emerging right-wing
alienated by bad relationships and burned point.) A number of students and faculty tabloid site Breitbart; Bannon, a longtime
bridges with his liberal Santa Monica found this behavior appalling, but Mil- Los Angeles resident, recognized Mil-
cohort, and Stephen seems to have in- ler’s shameless transgressiveness at least ler from his Larry Elder spots. Breitbart
herited his father’s contrarian got him a lot of attention. and an increasingly extensive network
62 streak. By the time he enrolled His willingness to upset liberals and
in the public Santa Monica thrive on their outrage put Miller on the
of alternative right-wing media outlets
enabled Miller, working with Sessions,
CUBA: BUDGET HAVANA FROM SLAVERY TO CIVIL RIGHTS
June 7–11, 2025 New Orleans, Selma, Tuskegee,
Savannah, and Charleston
TURKEY: CONVERSATIONS AT October 5–12, 2025
THE CROSSROADS
August 15–26, 2025 JAPAN: TRADITION AND
INNOVATION
CROSSING THE CAUCASUS: October 6–20, 2025
ARMENIA AND GEORGIA
September 3–16, 2025 CUBA: HAVANA TO VIÑALES
November 11–22, 2025
WEST AFRICA AND THE ORIGINS
OF THE SLAVE TRADE Contact us for special offers or to be
September 4–17, 2025 added to our mailing list.

For more information on these and other destinations,

go to TheNation.com/TRAVELS, e-mail
[email protected], or call 212-209-5401.
 B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S

to play a central role in the successful the once-obscure Salvadoran gang MS-13 hacking the weaknesses of liberal elite
effort to kill the Obama administration’s an obsession of the Trump administra- culture itself. Miller is an extreme case,
effort at bipartisan immigration reform tion, and Miller who emerged as one of yet anyone who grew up in similar com-
in 2014. the top internal advocates for the family munities or attended similar schools can
By this point, Miller had become separation policy that became a national recognize him as a very particular type of
much more deeply immersed in the lit- scandal in 2018. guy. His hateful tirades weren’t popular at
erature and online forums of the extreme In addition to the president himself, Santa Monica High or at Duke, but they
right and was taking direct inspiration Miller built a close relationship with consistently drew attention; students and
from Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, ensur- faculty often pushed back hard against
Saints, with its dystopian vision of a horde ing a level of family trust that protected his constant trolling, but in doing so
of nonwhite migrants invading the West. him from the turnover for which the they played right into his hands. Teachers
Soon he also began to develop ties with Trump administration became infamous. who wanted to encourage open debate
leading right-wing media figures like If xenophobia was the policy through line and free speech gave him a platform
Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker for most of Miller’s efforts, competent regardless of whether he was arguing
Carlson, and the anti-immigration think bureaucratic maneuvering and absolute in good faith; mainstream and liberal
tanker Mark Krikorian. loyalty to Trump were what empowered media outlets continued to promote him
Perhaps the most vocal advocate him to execute his agenda. Miller’s fin- in the name of provocation and ideolog-
against immigration in that media space gerprints are likewise all over the early ical diversity. Like Trump himself, Mil-
was one Donald Trump, who had lever- initiatives of Trump’s second term, in- ler intuitively grasped that being hated
aged his celebrity to become the leading cluding turning legal refugees away from in elite liberal environments was better
exponent of the “birther” conspiracy the United States, suspending foreign aid, than being ignored, and that embracing
theory during the Obama years, impress- launching ICE raids on major cities, and the language and tactics of conservative
ing Miller greatly in the process. “Our leaning on the major tech companies to media offered a means for a strange and
whole country is rotting, like a third ban diversity initiatives. argumentative kid to stand out from a
world country,” Trump told Breitbart crowd of generic achievers and to fast-
in the wake of the Obama immigra- he world according to track his way to influence.
tion bill’s defeat, prompting Miller to
e-mail his friends that “Trump gets it….
I wish he’d run for president.” When
Trump began his long-shot campaign T Stephen Miller is a cru-
el and callous one, in
which America is strictly
for unhyphenated Amer-
the following year, Miller, barely 30, icans and those here “illegally” must be
joined up, and the two quickly hit it off. forcibly returned to the “failed states”
Where more traditional young Republi- where they were born. To Miller, the
This isn’t to say that Miller’s act is
entirely cynical. It’s clear that beneath
all the performative cruelty and amoral
careerism, there’s an authentic core of
seething, visceral, unquenchable hatred
that defies any easy explanation. It’s true,
as Guerrero documents, that such bigotry
cans might have spent their early careers crumbling American heartland is being circulated widely in Southern California
preparing to work for a more conven- preyed on not by rapacious capital but and elsewhere in the 1990s, and it’s true
tional Republican can- by an invading army of that far-right voices on talk radio and
didate like Jeb Bush or gangsters, thugs, and later on the Internet continually grew in
Chris Christie, Miller terrorists waved in by influence as Miller came of age, but none
had presciently spent The world according coastal liberal elites—in of that by itself explains why Miller is the
his preparing for a can- to Stephen Miller other words, by exactly way he is.
didate like Trump. And the kind of people he has Despite his obvious intelligence and
with Trump’s victory is a cruel and always lived among. his elite pedigree, Miller didn’t arrive at
came opportunities to callous one. Part of why Guer- his views via serious reading—his is not
do the kinds of things rero was able to speak the classical conservatism of Edmund
that his more seasoned peers might nev- with so many of Miller’s acquaintanc- Burke, the libertarianism of Friedrich
er have proposed. es—including his estranged uncle David Hayek, the neoconservatism of Irving
Literally from Day 1, Miller set the Glosser, who has compared his nephew Kristol, or the paleoconservatism of
tone for Trump’s first presidency: “This to the Nazis—is that Miller is so un- Samuel Francis—and he’s never pre-
American carnage stops right here and representative of the world he grew up sented himself as an intellectual in his
stops right now,” the most memorable in. Interviewees throughout Hatemonger own right in the manner of, say, his
line in Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, regularly express shame and horror rath- White House colleague Michael Anton.
came from Miller’s pen. A wave of execu- er than pride at Miller’s steady climb to His ideas are not just monstrous and
tive orders empowering Immigration and the heights of political power; one gets reactionary but banal and simplistic; he
Customs Enforcement, targeting sanc- the sense that speaking to the media is a lacks the imagination that is a prereq-
tuary cities, ordering the construction of form of penance for some of them. uisite for empathy. But in a way, this
a border wall, and suspending immigra- At the same time, Miller’s rise wasn’t makes him the ideal conservative for the
tion from seven Muslim-majority coun- exactly a fluke. It was facilitated not only Trump era: His ideology is not refined,
tries soon followed, all of them by his family’s baseline wealth and privi- abstracted, or euphemized away from its
64 pushed and heavily shaped by lege and the social capital they afforded,
Miller. It was Miller who made but by Miller’s demonstrated talent for
real object. He’s told us exactly what he
intends to do. N
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Across a Continent
Andrée Blouin’s revolutionary lives

t
BY BILL FLETCHER JR.

hroughout the course of reading MY COUNTRY, ment. In both form and content, it’s a
Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, I found book about far more than a single life—
myself stopping every so often to look at the picture even one as extraordinary as Blouin’s. It’s
on the cover. It’s the picture of a striking woman a book about a liberation struggle that
spanned an entire continent, as well as the
who is looking toward the camera with an expression limitations of that struggle. It is a story,
that seems to indicate she’s been caught in the mid- as Blouin puts it, that is “inextricably
dle of a sentence. That woman also happens to be the book’s author, entwined with Africa’s fate as a land of
Andrée Blouin, and I found myself returning to the picture and wondering what that black people colonized by whites. The
sentence might have been. What was contradictions within my life are those
Blouin in the midst of saying? European colonial rule in Africa, includ- from which Africa has suffered.”
Born in a region of what was then ing its impact on the consciousness of the
the French Congo and is today part of oppressed themselves, and an account of y Country, Africa reads
the Central African Republic, Blouin the factors that led to Blouin’s transfor-
emerged from a childhood of abuse to mation and that of the world she entered.
become a young, nomadic romantic and Originally published in 1983, it has now
ultimately a well-respected Pan-African been reissued by Verso, with a foreword
nationalist revolutionary. My Country, Af- by Adom Getachew and Thomas Meaney,
rica is her extraordinary memoir. It is both in an effort to advance our understanding
a dramatic look at the realities behind of the 20th-century anti-colonial move-
M at first like two differ-
ent books. The first is a
powerful look into the
author’s formative years.
Blouin was born to a Europe-
an man in his early 40s and a
14-year-old African girl, and the
65
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA
 B&A
B O O K S

saga of her early years is compelling and

the
A R T S

she finds that her future rests in the which many never recover. But when
painful, drawing the reader into what hands of men in general, and white men that death is easily preventable, it casts
at first seems a “no exit” from hell and in particular. even stronger and longer-lasting rever-
then later becomes an unusual journey. Although Blouin’s father married her berations. In the case of Blouin’s son, his
This second “book” tells a very different mother, this marriage had no validity for death could have been prevented had he
story: the remarkable transformation of Europeans. Thus her father could, at his received malaria medication. But he was
a young, unfocused woman into a rev- own discretion, also establish a so-called denied the medicine, and no amount of
olutionary Pan-Africanist deeply com- legitimate marriage with a European pleading by his anguished mother would
mitted to ending colonialism (and later, woman. Although polygamy was accepted convince the French authorities to re-
neocolonialism) but ultimately frustrated by Blouin’s tribal or ethnic group, it was lease it: As far as they were concerned,
by the limitations of actual African inde- not accepted, either legally or socially, by
this medicine was reserved for Europe-
pendence. Yet to separate these “books” Europeans, and when her father chose to ans. This incident, above all else, set in
would be a mistake, since together they leave the area where Blouin was born with motion the events that, combined with a
form part of a much larger story: the his European wife, he ordered Blouin second, near-mystical occurrence, would
story of European empire and coloniza- transform Blouin into an activist for Af-
tion and of African resistance and revo- rican liberation.
lution—and the eventual liberation of a Blouin’s second moment of radical-
continent that saw its people kidnapped My Country, Africa ization came a little later: In a store, she
by slavers and then was drawn and quar- Autobiography of the saw a picture of Sékou Touré, then the
tered by the various European powers in Black Pasionaria leader of the independence struggle for
the 19th century. By Andrée Blouin Guinea-Conakry (and later the president
The intertwined nature of Blouin’s Verso. of an independent Guinea). The picture,
story is revealed almost immediately. 288 pp. $26.95 she recalled, almost spoke to her—in
Reading the description of how her fa- fact, she thought she heard the words of
ther, a French businessman working in Touré, calling on her to fully embrace the
what was then a French colony, ended African freedom struggle and to reject
up having a child with a 14-year-old much of her former life.
girl—whom Blouin describes as having sent to an orphanage in Brazzaville, in And that is exactly what she did.
been very pretty and captivating—leaves another area of what was then known as Blouin joined and became very active
one screaming with rage, and not just at the French Congo. It was there, in the in the Rassemblement Démocratique
the criminality of the “marriage” of the orphanage, that she remained a de facto Africain, which was initially a region-
14-year-old to a much older European prisoner for 14 years under unbelievably al anti-colonial formation in so-called
man but also at the system of colonial inhumane conditions. French West Africa, and she also became
oppression and male supremacy that en- a fierce proponent of Africa’s freedom
abled it. ad My Country, Africa from European colonialism, traveling
Blouin describes the evolution of this
relationship between her parents in such
a way that it almost appears as sarcasm.
How, one asks, can Blouin profess any de-
gree of love for a father such as hers—or,
for that matter, for a mother who, during
most of her life, identified beauty, stature,
H ended here, it would still throughout West Africa promoting the
have been a powerful ex- cause of independence from France. In
amination of white su- addition, Blouin was a key intermediary
premacy, patriarchy, and in efforts to resolve disputes among the
child abuse, and how this was embedded advocates of independence, and her work
in the very culture and social organiza- would evolve in fascinating directions.
tion of European colonialism in Africa. In 1960, she was asked to organize the
and success with whiteness? But it would also have Feminine Movement
To the extent to which there is an joined the long list of for African Solidarity
answer, it can be found only through books about individ- in what was then the
reading the entirety of the book. It’s a uals who have man- Blouin eventually Belgian Congo. With
story about the confusion of a child born aged to survive such became very active in the recommendation
from such a relationship, of the denial, disasters more or less of Guinea-Conakry’s
the revelation, and the defiance—a pat- intact. Blouin’s story, anti-colonial politics Sékou Touré, Blouin
tern that, as Blouin points out, might however, is about what throughout West Africa. undertook this ma-
offer us an account of Africa in general, happens when those jor task. The orga-
a continent raped by the barbarities of individuals come to- nization’s platform
European colonialism. From the start, it gether, when they begin to do something included the following goals:
is both eye-opening and jaw-dropping. about the unfair facts of their lives.
As the child of this “union” between The beginning of her transformation To make all women, no matter
a European and an African, Blouin is comes in early adulthood. After two re- what age, literate.
designated by the French term metisse, lationships with European men, Blouin
meaning “mixed race.” Living is traumatized by the death of her son. Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade
66 in a colonial society of white
supremacy and male supremacy,
The death of a child is always an inde- unionist, international activist, and writer of
scribable agony for a parent, one from fiction and nonfiction.
Words
Matter
“S hortly after I came from Europe
to the US, a close friend gifted me
a subscription to The Nation. I’ve
been a faithful reader and, when I was
able to, supporter of the magazine.
We need The Nation now more than
ever; its voice needs to be heard. I like
to think I’ll help keep it up for the future.
It still reminds me of my old friend.

”
—Claudia Sole, Calif.

A few words can mean so much.

With just a few words in your will naming The Nation in your estate plan,
you can care for your loved ones now and support our mission to remain
a fierce voice for truth and resistance for years to come.

Such gifts are easy to arrange, simple to modify, and adaptable to your needs,
so it’s easy to understand why bequests are the most popular planned gift.
There are many types of bequests—let’s discuss the one that best fits your needs.

Visit legacy.thenation.com or scan the QR code to get started.

 B&A
B O O K S

Patrice Lumumba, the iconic freedom

the
A R T S

The simple—yet still incomplete—

fighter who would go on to become the answer would certainly be that history
first prime minister of an independent is frequently, if not generally, written by
Congo, only to be murdered by traitor- and about men. This includes even the
ous elements actively encouraged and progressive histories, which often focus
supported by the US Central Intelli- on the work of great men and their par-
WE HAVE gence Agency.
It is this section
ticular contributions.
But there are other

CEASED of My Country, Africa,

detailing a moment of For Blouin, and
reasons, too, one sus-
pects. Blouin’s story
triumph that would for countless other —compelling, painful,
TO SEE THE soon be undone and and heroic—is also a
lead to decades of trag- revolutionary women, story about a person
there was no going
PURPOSE edy, that is perhaps the
most engrossing and back, regardless of
caught between many
different worlds, and
heartbreaking part of it’s one that can’t be
ESSENTIAL SPEECHES OF the book. Blouin was defeats or tragedies. easily summarized or
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN there at the very cen- categorized. Her early
ter of this struggle, someone who became life as the child of a mixed-race relation-
a thorn in the side of the Belgians and ship between a man who was over 40 and
Available wherever their Congolese neocolonial servants— a girl who was just 14; her miseducation
for example, the notorious Joseph Mobu- and brutalization as a child; her romantic
books are sold tu, who would eventually become the relationships with European men and,
president of Congo after Lumumba’s as- separately, her intense political relation-
sassination (and change the name of the ships with African revolutionaries—all
country to the Republic of Zaire). point to the complicated and entangled
histories of European colonialism, Afri-
n these years, Blouin’s ac- can anti-colonialism, and patriarchy.

To promote an understanding
of health and hygiene.
To combat alcoholism.
I tivities ranged from what In this way, My Country, Africa is
was then the French not just an account of one individual.
Congo to French Guinea Blouin’s life is one that overlaps and is
and the Belgian Congo. intertwined with the larger story of em-
Few causes were unworthy of her atten- pire, oppression, resistance, and trans-
tion, and some of the greatest names in formation in Africa. Indeed, the book
the African freedom struggles—Gha- can be read as a near allegory for the
To work for the protection of na’s Kwame Nkrumah, Congo’s Patrice conditions that the continent faced while
the abandoned woman and child. Lumumba—became comrades. The colonized by Europe and its struggle for
To work for the social progress organizing of women, and the specif- liberation, a struggle that necessitated—
of the African. ic request for her assistance in Con- and still necessitates—awareness, re-
go, were particularly noteworthy. Both pudiation, progressive action, and the
The Feminine Movement for African Nkrumah and Touré were major pro- recognition of the constant possibility
Solidarity, which is rarely mentioned in ponents of Blouin’s work. And once in of failure.
discussions of African anti-colonialism, Congo, she became an important adviser Told through the eyes of a Black
organized thousands of women. As in- to Lumumba—so important that the woman, the story reveals the overde-
dicated by its platform, it was a forma- Belgians and their African allies wanted termined nature of colonialism and the
tion that addressed not just colonialism her out of the country. manner through which male supremacy
but also patriarchy; in that sense, it was I found Blouin’s story astounding, operated as a partner to European domi-
fighting on two fronts. This dual struggle and it was all the more remarkable to nation (including among the oppressed).
became critically important for Blouin, me because although she was seemingly And this story, despite not having a
who saw in the male supremacy practiced everywhere, I had never heard of her so-called happy ending, is one that will
in Africa not only a force for the contin- before. While I’m not claiming to be an resonate with all those who engage in
ued suppression of women but also one Africa specialist, I am quite familiar with emancipatory struggles.
that countered the potential contained in many of the major—as well as minor— For Blouin and for countless other
African liberation. names in the African freedom struggles revolutionary women, there was no go-
Blouin’s work in building this wom- of the 20th century. As I moved toward ing back, regardless of defeats or trag-
en’s formation also positioned her at the end of Blouin’s book, I kept asking edies. The course had been chosen; the
the heart of the struggle for the inde- myself: How could I have not known word had been given. Perhaps in that
pendence of the Belgian Congo, about her? Was it simply that I had picture on the cover, Blouin was not
68 and it was there that she met
and became a close confidant of
somehow overlooked the material on her caught in mid-sentence. Perhaps she had
life and work? just finished one. N
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

like Forrestal, would take his own life.

But it is remarkable how much he did
to destabilize the world before show-
ing any symptoms at all. As the CIA’s
chief of clandestine operations, Wis-
ner helped orchestrate the overthrow
of Iran’s democratically elected prime
minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in
1953, leaving power in the hands of the
shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The
shah’s increasingly harsh authoritarian
rule eventually provoked a massive pop-
ular uprising against his regime and its
American backers in 1979, whose rever-
berations we are still living with.
In Guatemala in 1954, Wisner staged
a coup to oust another elected official
who was too progressive for Washing-
ton’s taste, President Jacobo Árbenz.
The excuse was that his land and tax
reforms showed him to be communist. If
Árbenz “is not a communist,” Wisner’s
man in Guatemala cynically cabled him,
“he will certainly do until one comes
along.” The coup triggered a brutal, de-
cades-long civil war between rebels and
a string of US-backed military dictators
that left more than 200,000 Guatema-
lans dead and provoked still more to
emigrate to safety abroad, mostly in the
United States.
Wisner also arranged to parachute
or infiltrate hundreds of operatives into

Wisner’s Ghosts Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe as

well as overseeing the MK-Ultra pro-
gram, which experimented with giving
mind-altering drugs to unwitting sub-
The making of a Cold War spy
jects. He had a major hand in secretly

s
BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD subsidizing, on a huge scale, dozens of
supposedly private independent groups
ometimes it can be mostly harmless when the like the US National Student Associa-
powerful lose their minds. For no discernible tion, the Free Trade Union Committee,
purpose, the Roman emperor Caligula ordered a the American Society of African Culture,
floating bridge of ships stretched across the Bay the International Commission of Jurists,
and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
of Naples and reportedly planned to appoint his When investigative journalists at Ram-
horse as consul. King George III of England issued parts magazine and elsewhere revealed
orders to people who were dead, shook hands with an oak tree, and all this in the late 1960s, it was a major
believed he could see Germany through a telescope. He planted boon for Soviet propaganda, tarnished
beef in his garden, it was said, in hopes the various groups involved, and, among
of growing a herd of cattle. He had to told friends, “They’re after me.” When their employees and grantees, shattered
be tied to his bed at night and put in a a fire engine’s siren sounded, Forrestal hundreds of relationships between those
straitjacket by day. rushed out of his house screaming, “The in the know and those who had now dis-
In the nuclear age, however, madness Russians are attacking!” He was eased covered that a key secret had been kept
can be dangerous. One man who had in- out of his job in 1949 and, several months from them.
fluence over such weapons was President later, jumped out of a hospital window to Douglas Waller’s new biography, The
Harry Truman’s secretary of defense, his death. Determined Spy, is not the first study of
James Forrestal. Convinced that he was Frank Wisner, a longtime CIA of- Wisner—he is one of the central
being pursued by a mix of White House
officials, Zionists, and communists, he
ficial, suffered in his later years from
what we now call bipolar disorder and,
figures, for instance, in Scott
Anderson’s trenchant The Quiet
69
ILLUSTRATION BY GABBY BARUCCI
 B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S

Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—but it is certainly the most as the CIA’s station chief in London.
thorough. And through Wisner, Waller offers us a picture of a postwar America that Two years later, however, the para-
felt it had the power, and the right, to craft the rest of the world to its liking. That noia and mania returned. Wisner un-
power also included the ability to influence what people in the United States knew derwent more electroshock treatments
about the rest of the world. More on that in a moment. in London, then was recalled and given
a make-work job in Washington. After
rom an early age, Frank Wisner fit the mold of many of the CIA’s top being awarded the CIA’s Distinguished

F officials: He came from a wealthy family; he was a member of the elite

Council on Foreign Relations; he spent a few years at a Wall Street
law firm and, during World War II, in the cloak-and-dagger Office of
Strategic Services run by “Wild Bill” Donovan. (Donovan’s peacetime
law firm was even in the same building as Wisner’s.) The intense, high-living Wisner
took happily to wartime spy work, enjoying an extramarital affair with a young Ro-
manian princess while managing various OSS operations from a luxurious mansion
Intelligence Medal and a consulting con-
tract, he finally resigned in 1962, at the
age of 53. As the Vietnam War heated
up, he became a virulent hawk and devel-
oped a number of obsessions, including
the belief that Hitler’s deputy Martin
Bormann was hiding in South America.
in Bucharest. As the war ended, Wisner Old friends cut him off. Another round
managed to arrive in a newly conquered of shock treatments did not help. In
Berlin soon enough to grab some medals 1965, Wisner put a shotgun to his head
and a sketchbook as souvenirs from Hit- The Determined and pulled the trigger.
ler’s bunker. Spy
The Allied victory in World War The Turbulent Life ny of us can fall prey to
II gave OSS veterans like Wisner a
boundless confidence that they could
accomplish almost anything. This arro-
gance lasted for some two decades. The
hard-driving Wisner was the principal
drafter of a 1951 document known as
the Magnitude Paper. It proposed to
and Times of CIA
Pioneer Frank Wisner
By Douglas Waller
Dutton.
656 pp. $36
A mental illness, and there
were certainly fewer ef-
fective treatments and
drugs for it 65 years ago
than today. Luckily, Wisner’s family and
colleagues got him into the sanitarium
before he could act on his belief that
greatly increase the CIA’s budget in Guatemala (protecting United Fruit—a Soviet tanks were about to pour across
order to roll back communist advances client of CIA chief Allen Dulles’s former the Austrian border. But his life raises
in Eastern Europe—and China. Wisner law firm). a larger question: When it comes to
predicted a Soviet invasion of Western The CIA’s next major operation of the belligerence of the United States
Europe; the agency’s operations, he con- that kind was the sordid 1960–61 oust- during the Cold War, where do we draw
tended, must expand exponentially to ing and assassination of Congo Prime the line between sanity and madness?
meet the threat. Minister Patrice Lumumba, who was Is it more irrational to imagine those
That invasion, of course, never came, seen as a threat to Belgian and American invading tanks than to believe that you
and the hundreds of agents the CIA investments. This was one of the rare can replace the democratically elected
slipped into the Soviet satellite states bits of the era’s skulduggery in which government of Iran with an absolute
were almost all killed, captured, or took Wisner was not involved. The reason monarch and not suffer consequences
the money and ran. Even when oppo- is that his behavior had begun to worry for decades to come? Or to believe that
sition to the USSR emerged, it rarely those around him. He screamed at his you can covertly fund scores of suppos-
came from them. The Soviets were con- subordinates and tried to micromanage edly independent private organizations
vinced that the CIA had instigated the them; he went on manic shopping sprees. for years without undermining the faith
1956 Hungarian revolt against their rule, Shortly after the Soviets suppressed the in everything they stood for once that
but ironically that uprising took Wisner Hungarian uprising, at a restaurant in a secret leaks out?
and his colleagues totally by surprise. Vienna suburb, Waller writes, “Wisner We can ask the same question about
stood up and announced in a loud voice the man who now ultimately controls
isner’s comrades may to the other diners that Russian tanks had the CIA and so much else. Which is

W have been full of bravado assembled at the border and would storm
and ineffectual scheming into Austria at any time.” It was an eerie
where Europe was con- echo of Forrestal’s paranoia.
cerned, but it proved eas- Some months later, Wisner spent
ier for them to influence events in the nearly half a year receiving psychotherapy
Global South. There, in the eyes of and electroshock treatments in a private
Eisenhower-era Washington, any coun- mental institution in Maryland, the Shep-
the more demented—to suggest inject-
ing disinfectant as a cure for Covid or
to claim that we can pour unlimited
amounts of carbon into the atmosphere
without catastrophically overheating the
earth? That is a belief worthy of Caligula
or George III.
try that claimed to be neutral in the pard Pratt Hospital. It was a remarkably
Cold War was an enemy—as was any luxurious place with a greenhouse, a large Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is Amer-
that might threaten Western economic library, a swimming pool, tennis courts, ican Midnight: The Great War, a Violent
interests. Hence the CIA’s in- and a small golf course. After this, Wis- Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.
70 terventions in Iran (protecting ner returned to duty. He was no longer
a huge British oil company) and masterminding coups but was appointed
He is working on a book on American social
movements of the 1930s.
 Dear Nation Reader,
erated on the founding belief
Since 1865, The Nation has op
contribute to building a more
that independent journalism can en
r writers shift paradigms and op
democratic, equitable world. Ou on al
tive reporting sparks congressi
minds, and our deep investiga les.
and shapes news cyc
hearings, drives policy change,
s
rate media won’t touch. That’
We uncover the stories corpo . We nee d
t different, but essential
what makes The Nation not jus
your support.
s
committed, progressive reader
Our journalism is sustained by
tributions beyond the cost of
like you who make financial con
ay ensures we can continue to
a subscription. Your support tod has
-holds-barred journalism that
deliver fiercely independent, no aga in.
in this country time and
changed the course of history
ent
our legacy, but our commitm
Instigating progress isn’t just
earers.
to future generations of torchb
n.
sm and donate to The Natio
Please support our journali
Ever onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel

r
Editorial Director and Publishe

/ TheNation.com/Donation
, NY 10018 / (212) 209-5400
520 Eighth Avenue, New York

Learn more at TheNation.com/Donation

 B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S

The B-Sides of the Golden Record,

Track Eleven: “How Will You Begin?”
When morning comes, whenever I can, I lie for a great while in dread.
I don’t know how much more of it I can take, yet I confess I lure dread

with baits of what-if: if I make a decision that kills a man; if I become allergic
to skin; if I lose the use, but not the memory, of my tongue. To endure dread,

create bait, then bait, then abate. But what if there is no there there?
What if you, my extraterrestrial darling, don’t exist? I need you to cure dread.

It’s not fair, I know, but the truth is, like many of us, I live partially in my fantasy
of it: how, after decades, I find a trace of you in a bend of light; how your dread

never rises; how, instead, you turn to me with whatever part of you can see.
How my landing gear groans as I lower myself to you, cocksure. Dread—

in reality, you would feel it. It would not just be me coming, and your terror
would be justified. But this poem is about my fantasy, in which we abjure dread

at last together. I find you windswept on the equinoctial colure, nestled

on the first point of the constellation of the ram. I vulture dread.

I say, I am Sumita. Lure, a lure, allure. I have wanted you for so long.
My fears fall like dust. So do yours, like stardust. Transfigured, dread.

S U M I TA C H A K R A B O RT Y

72
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Finally, Waller’s biography makes one for him. “Colby assured her that no staff
other haunting aspect of Wisner’s life members were employed by the Agency
visible: An astonishing number of people but refused to discuss the question of
in his immediate circle were journalists. stringers,” Bernstein writes, adding that
Eric Sevareid of CBS was a bird-hunting “more than 400 American journalists…
comrade. The columnists Stewart and have secretly carried out assignments”
Joseph Alsop were constant companions, for the CIA.
and Wisner persuaded the latter several We will never know how many of those
times to produce columns backing the assignments were hatched in the corners
CIA’s preferred au- of the lavish parties at
tocrats in Southeast the Wisners’ George-
Asia. “By the mid- town home. Waller
1950s,” Waller writes, The CIA was watching does not speculate
“Joe Alsop considered us so closely that they about this, but he does
Wisner his closest
friend in Washing- did something even mention that Wisner
kept a wire-service
ton.” Wisner and his we never had the time teletype next to his
wife, Polly, were also to do: compile an office so he could
extremely close to monitor the news all
Philip Graham, pub- index, by subject and day. If it was not to
lisher of The Wash- author, of the articles his liking, he acted.
ington Post, and his we’d published. When British cor-
wife, Katharine. They respondents wrote
attended each other’s critically of what the
parties, and Polly and Katharine had a United States was doing in Guatemala,
daily morning phone call to keep each he had the State Department put pres-
other apprised of Washington gossip. sure on Winston Churchill. When the
In the case of the Iran coup, Waller Times reporter Sidney Gruson did the
says, “the Alsop brothers and a handful same, Wisner had the CIA gather in-
of other reporters in Washington had formation on him, and Allen Dulles got
known about the CIA plot ahead of time the Times to remove Gruson from the
but printed nothing on it.” This raises the Guatemala beat.
question: How many other coups or sup- The CIA’s hostility to all-too-rare
posedly independent front organizations critical journalism continued after
that Wisner was managing did journalists Wisner’s departure from the agency.
in the know keep silent about? Even the I worked at Ramparts at the time the
pathbreaking Church Committee probe magazine started to unravel the CIA’s
of the CIA in 1975–76 was largely stone- widespread secret funding of private
walled from investigating how the agency organizations. When, years later, I re-
used a compliant press. ceived my heavily redacted copies of
There was certainly much to uncover. CIA files under the Freedom of Infor-
When a CIA U-2 reconnaissance plane mation Act, there were dozens of pages
was shot down over the Soviet Union on me, even though I was an extreme-
in 1960, the reporter Erwin Knoll told ly junior and unimportant staff mem-
Carol Felsenthal, the author of Power, ber. The agency had a “Ramparts Task
Privilege and the Post, that he’d once Force” of 12 agents that, among other
found himself in an elevator with a Post work, prepared a briefing on the maga-
editor who told him, “We’ve known zine for the director. They were watch-
about those flights for several years, but ing us so closely that they did something
we were asked not to say anything.” Key that even we never had the time to do:
people at The New York Times also knew compile an index, by subject and author,
and kept quiet, David P. Hadley reported of the articles we’d published.
in The Rising Clamor: The American Press, Journalism like this was rare; the Al-
the Central Intelligence Agency, and the sops were more typical. I doubt if it was
Cold War. the author’s main intention in writing The
Carl Bernstein revealed in Rolling Determined Spy, but the book is a remind-
Stone that Katharine Graham, who had er of how easily the American media can
succeeded her late husband as the Post’s be cajoled into serving as another branch
publisher, once asked CIA chief William of government. On that score, the next
Colby if anyone on her staff was working four years will be a severe test. N
 B&AB O O K S the
A R T S

Sunbelt Ringstrasse
Atlanta’s Beltline and the effort to re-create pedestrian cities

t
BY KARRIE JACOBS

o me, atlanta has long been the invisible city. is a little weird that, until I visited Atlanta
Like anyone who flies with regularity (as I used to do again this past fall, my visual recall of
pre-Covid), I’ve changed planes too many times at the city was almost nonexistent. This is
Hartsfield-Jackson airport. My joke about it is that especially peculiar not just because I’ve
found reasons to respect and admire even
no one has ever seen the outside of its seemingly in- the most chronically unloved American
finite terminals—that, like certain freaks of topology
A RESTAURANT ON ATLANTA’S BELTLINE TRAIL (JOHN GREIM / GETTY IMAGES)

cities, but because the first work of archi-

(Google “Klein bottle”), it has no exterior. tecture that truly moved me was by a man
In truth, though, I have occasionally escaped the confines of the who was, for a considerable time, Atlan-
endless terminals and ventured into the ta’s one noteworthy homegrown architect
city itself. I once spoke at a conference I live and breathe cities. My memory and developer: John Portman.
at the AmericasMart (né the Merchan- is a vast trove of urban places, famous In the mid-1960s, Portman began
dise Mart) in downtown Atlanta, but I and obscure, large and small; I can go on the project of rebuilding a 2.5-million-
can’t recall a single thing about what the at length about the graffiti-filled tunnel square-foot chunk of downtown Atlanta
place looked like, inside or out. Prior to through which Little White Oak Bay- (which eventually mushroomed to almost
a weekend in Atlanta this past October, ou in Houston sneaks under a massive 19 million square feet) in what became his
my previous visit to the actual city was in highway interchange, or the water tower signature style: masonry towers that are
2003, and I can only reconstruct that’s also the world’s tallest free-standing inert on the outside and, seemingly, like
74 the details of that trip by reading
what I wrote about it at the time.
Corinthian column, found smack in the
middle of a St. Louis intersection. So it
the airport, all interior and no exterior.
Portman’s theory, circa 1967, was that
• TRUTH
• DEMOCRACY
• THE CONSTITUTION
• ABORTION RIGHTS CAN DEMOCRACY
SURVIVE?

Give a gift to a friend!

GIVE A GIFT AND SAVE UP TO 74% OFF THE COVER PRICE

To order please call 800-333-8536 and mention offer code

“Gift Now” or visit: TheNation.com/GiftNow
 B&AB O O K S the
A R T S

urban life as it once existed—the hustle and bustle of pedestrians visiting local shops High Line—which, because it’s elevated
and socializing on the pavement—was over. Streets were inherently dangerous and and painstakingly crafted, feels like some-
ugly, and what was needed instead were “total environments” in which “all of a person’s place very precious—the Beltline is at
needs are met,” preferably without ever leaving the building. street level and looks, in most respects,
As an 18-year-old college student on a summertime jaunt to San Francisco in the very ordinary. This elemental piece of
1970s, I wandered into Portman’s brand-new Embarcadero Hyatt, with its dramatically infrastructure, with some stretches paved
raked 17-story atrium. To me, it looked like an M.C. Escher drawing come to life, and and others not, mostly feels organic. If I
more than the other architecturally noteworthy buildings I’d previously visited—mostly didn’t know better, I would think it had
museums like the Guggenheim or the monuments in Washington, DC—it instilled in always been there.
me a sense of extraordinary possibility.
Of course, Atlanta isn’t John Portman’s city anymore—at least not entirely. One ot all of Atlanta is like
long, circular stretch of it is has been radically transformed by a very au courant piece
of urban design: A linear park known as the Beltline, built incrementally since 2008,
now encircles much of the city and has spawned new clusters of residential develop-
ment along its path. The concept would be familiar to Portman, who believed he was N this. On my first morn-
ing in the city, I’d set out
on a pilgrimage: I began
walking down Peachtree
building pedestrian-oriented villages—except his pedestrians were supposed to do their Street from the vicinity of Georgia Tech
walking indoors, in corridors and across to Portman’s Peachtree Center. But I was
sky bridges, while the Beltline is outdoors, ment of City Planning, a role he would spooked by the almost total absence, on
a long, narrow environment tracing the subsequently play in Chicago. Among a lovely Friday morning, of other human
path of an old freight rail line. When it is other things, Cox is remembered in De- beings. So I decided to ride MARTA, At-
completed, the main loop will be 22 miles troit for meeting with a group of activists lanta’s version of a subway, which wasn’t
long. And though it hasn’t yet inspired in 2016, soon after his arrival the year much more populated than the sidewalks.
Atlanta to make its ordinary streetscapes before, and declaring that he wanted to When I emerged from the train sta-
more hospitable to pedestrians, the Belt- make the Motor City “America’s best city tion, I felt like I was in a badly designed
line has become a magnet for walkers for bicycling.” video game surrounded by unmarked
and bicyclists (who often drive to get We rendezvoused outside a food hall buildings. This was the mid-20th-century
there). Like New York City’s High Line, called Krog Street Market, after which American city as envisioned by Portman.
Detroit’s Joe Louis Greenway, or Dallas’s Gravel walked us south, through the graf- I was in a sea of taupe concrete; Google
Katy Trail, the Beltline doesn’t just pro- fiti-filled Krog Street Tunnel and along- Maps was stumped, as was I. I finally
vide a recreational conduit; it changes the side the Hulsey railyard, a disused 70-acre asked a man on the street where the Mar-
way people live in the city around it. CSX facility that may someday be rede- riott Marquis was, and he told me that it
veloped as a walkable neighborhood and was right in front of me—that if I took a
y interest in the Beltline a major stop on the Beltline’s light rail few more steps, I’d bump into it.

M was sparked in 2017 when loop. Gravel no longer has any official
I interviewed Ryan Grav- ties to the project, but
el, whose graduate thesis he’s still concerned
at Georgia Tech proposed with its future, par-
repurposing the disused freight line that ticularly whether the
encircled downtown as the site of a linear light rail line he envi-
park and light rail line. After his grad- sioned will ever hap-
What impressed me most on this quick

The section of the

Beltline we walked
Portman field trip
wasn’t the vertigo-
inducing spectacle of
the Marriott atrium
(once I’d found it), but
the remarkable dead-
uation in 1999, he began the work of pen. He also pointed appeared to be an ness of the streets out-
making the concept a reality. With the out that there are very overwhelming success. side. While New York
initial support of a single Atlanta council- few spots along the City’s own Portman-
woman, Gravel and a growing number of Beltline’s path that have blossomed into developed hotel, the Times Square Mar-
planners and community activists gradu- full-fledged public places, with the land- riott, has been retrofitted in recent years
ally built momentum and found financial scaping and infrastructure you’d expect with enough signage and lights to make
support for the project in the form of a from a real park. it look like a good Times Square neigh-
Tax Allocation District, meaning that the Nonetheless, the section of the Belt- bor, this complex was still deeply mired
project is now supported by the develop- line we walked, on Atlanta’s affluent East- in the 1960s or ’70s. Though Portman
ment along its path. The TAD also funds side, appeared to be an overwhelming died in 2017, his disdain for street life
affordable housing along the Beltline. success. Everywhere there is new hous- lives on around Peachtree Center and
Invited to speak at a conference at ing, both market-rate and affordable. We on the pedestrian-free thoroughfares all
Georgia Tech this past fall, I finally got were also impressed by the intensity of over town.
a chance to see it. After getting my bear- the activity all around us: the sheer num- Meanwhile, the Beltline is signaling
ings, I arranged to meet Gravel at a spot ber of people taking pleasure in walking, that a very different city is possible. After
along the Beltline so we could explore it biking, riding scooters (Cox tells me that Cox and I said goodbye to Gravel, we
together. I also invited a fellow confer- his Atlanta relatives habitually head to
ence participant, Maurice Cox, the Beltline to get some exercise after big Karrie Jacobs writes frequently on architecture
76 whom I had last spoken to when holiday meals), or dining in, say, an open- and urban planning for Books & the Arts. Her
he was head of Detroit’s Depart- air taco shed. And unlike New York’s last article was on the “greening” of Broadway.
JAPAN: TRADITION AND INNOVATION
OCTOBER 6–20, 2025
Join us on a special journey to the Land of the Rising Sun as we explore the singular culture of Japan, a
true world apart from the West. Visit Tokyo, Kanazawa, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Koyasan, Nara, and Osaka.
With an expert guide by our side, we’ll learn about traditional Japanese crafts, experience unique cultural
ceremonies, and hear from journalists, politicians, and leaders in the arts, whose perspectives will help
us gain insight into both millennium-old traditions and current critical issues in this richly ancient and
yet extremely modern nation.

For more information, visit TheNation.com/travels/JAPAN2025, e-mail us at [email protected],

or call 212-209-5401.

100% of the proceeds from our travel programs support The Nation’s journalism.

The Nation purchases carbon offsets for all emissions generated by our tours.
 B&AB O O K S

stopped by a Kroger supermarket. This

the
A R T S

Bridge bus terminal in New York City is

might not sound like an architectural or an unexpectedly great example.)
urbanist landmark, but the Kroger had a The other major new building is an of-
shaded front patio where you could buy fice complex by Olson Kundig, a Seattle
a beer from a takeout window and drink firm best known for its idiosyncratic min-
it at an outdoor table. It was a genuine imalist houses. The 1.1-million-square-
A biweekly collection pleasure to linger outside; it was as if we foot office complex—clad in black glass
were dallying in Paris’s Tuileries Garden and covered with louvers—consists of
of The Nation’s top or Madrid’s Parque del Retiro. OK, it’s two mid-rise buildings linked by a sky
climate coverage, not quite so lovely or so formal, but the
supermarket’s front porch is a spot where
bridge (à la Portman) but also connected
at ground level by lush landscape (cour-
including interviews people take obvious pleasure in just be- tesy of Brooklyn’s Future Green) and a
ing in public. To me, it’s the clear antith- public stairway that joins the Beltline to
with leading environ- esis of Peachtree Center and Portman’s the nearby park. Like many staircases
Atlanta: It’s the Atlanta that Gravel and these days, this one also doubles as a sort
mental activists. the Beltline’s creators saw as the city’s of lounge: It is to the Beltline as the Red
Plus: Urgent climate future. It is precisely what 21st-century Steps are to Times Square.
urbanism is all about. During a panel discussion at the end
news as it happens. of the conference I was attending, Ir-
s it happens, the super- win said this about his development:

A market also offers a splen-

did view of the new Fourth
Ward project, an urban
place that owes its exis-
tence the Beltline. It was developed by a
man named Jim Irwin, who is as much a
product of this moment as Portman was
“I almost want to re-create the feeling
of looking at your phone in real life.”
Which struck me as brilliant, perverse,
and very revealing about the present
moment. I appreciate that the developer
sees the place that he’s willed into being
as a remedy for a society “fixated on this
of his and is now president of his own little eight-inch piece of glass.” It’s defi-
company, New City Properties. Initially, nitely a place worth looking at (and, in-
Irwin, an Atlanta native, working for a de- evitably, it’s become a popular backdrop
veloper called Jamestown, headed up the for TikTok videos).
conversion of a disused Sears warehouse
into a bustling destination called Ponce ike Portman, Irwin is using
City Market, a massive flea-market-cum-
food-hall. Irwin subsequently acquired a
nearby site of about 17 acres along the
Beltline from Georgia Power and, work-
ing with the planner Cassie Branum of
Perkins & Will (who was also involved
with the overall design of the Beltline),
L architectural razzle-dazzle
to address what he per-
ceives as the social malaise
of the moment. As Port-
man wrote in his 1976 book The Architect
as Developer: “I decided that if I learned to
weave elements of sensory appeal into the
corralled an idiosyncratic, international design, I would be reaching those innate
group of architects to landscape the site responses that govern how a human be-
and design its buildings. Neither starchi- ing reacts to the environment.” Similarly,
tects nor the kind of safe choices to which Irwin is trying to awaken a generation
many developers default, the firms Irwin of sleepwalkers.
selected have brought a finely honed ec- Portman’s Atlanta was built on the
centricity to the project, one that was in- assumption that street life was a blight,
spired by, and contributes to, the vitality that it undermined the value of the real
of the Beltline. estate itself. But the version of Atlanta
The most eye-catching new building that emerges from Irwin’s work and the
is the Forth Hotel, which opened in June Beltline is pure alchemy, transforming
of last year. It’s a 16-story glass tower street life into social and economic gold.
girdled with a dramatic concrete exo- After a couple of days spent exploring
skeleton known as a diagrid. Designed and discussing the Beltline effect, I left
by the New York–based architect Morris convinced that even a city as wedded to
Adjmi, the startling structure brings to the automobile as Atlanta could evolve
Scan code to sign up, mind a Buckminster Fuller dome or the and become walkable and (somewhat)
or go to: TheNation.com/ concrete frames designed by the Italian car-free. I plunged back into Hartsfield-
climate-update-signup architect Pier Luigi Nervi. (The exteri- Jackson carrying indelible images of the
or of Nervi’s 1963 George Washington city outside. N
 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Office Politics
The workplace nightmares of Severance

d
BY JORGE COTTE

o innies have rights? by “innies,” of course, i mean dangles the promise of a mystery that will
the severed employees of Lumon Industries, relegat- eventually explain everything.
ed to the severed floor of the company’s offices, who Despite the show’s stark sci-fi aesthet-
work on a project whose true nature is hidden even ic, however, the notion that some people
seek gain by dehumanizing others from
from them. The medical procedure of severance whose labor they benefit is not exactly
permanently splits a person into two beings: one who science fiction. When the show prompts
exists outside of Lumon and another whose consciousness exists en- us to ask why Lumon is doing this, it asks
tirely on that office floor from 9 to 5. Essentially, the “outies” rent out us to speculate on the company’s specific
their bodies, but the process of severance aims and not on the conditions of the
A SCENE FROM SEVERANCE (COURTESY OF APPLE TV+)

creates a whole other person with their Scout, who exists outside the company world that led to this. It’s a show that is
own memories and feelings and opinions, and is consumed by the death of his wife often more interested in the what than
whose entire existence belongs to Lumon. (who, it turns out, might not be dead after the why. But if the first season was about
This is the premise of Severance, an Ap- all). The appeal of severance for Mark is workers getting radicalized, the second
ple TV+ show whose acclaimed first sea- that it offers eight hours of unconscious- is much more personal. By dramatizing
son premiered three years ago, and which ness each day, a release from the grip that our alienation from labor, and therefore
has now returned to continue the story grief has on him since his wife’s fatal car from life itself, Severance cre-
of Mark S., the innie fomenting rebellion
within Lumon’s walls, and his outie, Mark
accident. The appeal of Severance is that,
toggling between these two worlds, it
ates the conditions that pit Mark
against Mark.
79
 B&A
B O O K S

rom its premiere, Severance

the
A R T S

then sort them into the bins that corre- season, such as a department that raises

F has been one of the most

boldly stylized shows on
television. We first meet
the innies in the only
world they know—an office that looks like
the hotel lobby from 2001: A Space Odys-
spond to those feelings. Despite the office’s
retro aesthetics, they are contemporary
workers and their attention belongs to
Lumon, like everything else.
Just as the showrunners curate every as-
pect of the series in order to control infor-
baby goats, will be explored in the next. Al-
though the show embraces the appearance
of strangeness, its overriding impulse is to
be as ordered as Lumon’s offices.

he first season began with

sey crossed with the dentist’s office from
your worst nightmares. Ben Stiller, who
established the show’s visual language and
directed many of its episodes, formalized
the innies’ oppressive conditions in images
that feel as overdetermined and airless
as their lives. The influence of Stanley
mation, Lumon carefully fills the innies’
need for meaning. The company provides
a god (Lumon’s founder, Kier Eagan) and a
sacred text (Kier’s aphorisms). It even has a
division that produces paintings depicting
its version of the stations of the cross (the
Kier Cycle)—Lumon ultimately resem-
T the introduction of a new
innie, Helly R. (Britt Low-
er), and her resistance to
the lot she’d been given.
Her refusal to accept innie life was the
engine that started Mark S. (Adam Scott),
Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), and Irving B.
Kubrick is clear too in how the visual fram- bles a religious cult more than a corpora- (John Turturro) down the path to ques-
ing conveys a hypnotic horror: One-point tion. This tendency mirrors how viewers tioning everything they’d been told. This
perspective and meticulous symmetrical have engaged the show, treating every eventually led to all four innies encounter-
framing create a deeply ordered world. absurd background detail as a clue that ing the outie world. The finale was explo-
The negative space and blank uniformity could lead to some meaningful revelation. sive, and it shifted things both inside and
are as withholding as the company that But the series is interested in explaining all outside Lumon.
runs the building. the wrong things. Season two begins with everyone re-
The innies are born as blank slates, so Severance is eerie, serious, and deadpan. coiling from that fissure. The innies try
the meaning they derive from their exis- Like Twin Peaks, it embraces both the to regroup, their bosses try to do damage
tence is based solely on what they are of- humor and the horror in its absurdity. Yet control, and the outies are forced to face
fered by the company. What do the innies unlike David Lynch’s classic, in which the what they do and do not know about what’s
actually do all day? They stare at computer unexplainable is at the core of what is truly
screens showing a matrix of numbers and unsettling, Severance holds to its promise Jorge Cotte writes frequently for Books & the
pore over the digits, looking for a combi- that everything you see will fit as part of Arts on film and TV. His last piece was on The
nation that evokes a certain feeling, and the puzzle. Something introduced in one Pitt and the gritty return of the medical drama.

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the

Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal—
an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

“Great poets are truth-tellers, and the truth hurts.

Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on
Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley
“Here’s a river of fire. Dive in, if you dare.
It will clear the fog.”
—Arundhati Roy
“In Perfect Victims, Mohammed El-Kurd recenters
the Palestinian gaze as compass and metric unit.”
—Noura Erakat

Now available from Haymarket Books

 T H E N AT I O N APRIL 2025

Kakakin
A bee caught in the rain
tries to sting its way through the glass window.

On the other side of the road,

a man erases murals from the brick wall.

Outside a king’s palace, women in matching buba

gathered around bottle gourds, placed inside buckets

of water. I watched the women recite names

written on the throne, I didn’t hear my name.

When my body has the right amount of sugar,

my heart pulsates only to love songs.

I have ruled over cities that are not on maps,

I have ruled over a kingdom of crickets

and woke up to the ticking songs of kettles,

and sometimes to the mimicry of fledglings.

How noble that I can still spin yards of threads

into a gift basket. I fixed my gaze on the giant glass wall

until the barrier thinned out. I sanitized my palms

and raised them in praise of the black stone in Makkah.

In this small town, seventeen death certificates are signed

every day, someone waits for an organ transplant,

it’ll be too late by sunset. I offer a song in exchange for this grief,
I know that with a song, I’ll set my brain fog ablaze.

The wind clocks our aspirations inside its cold hands,

until we are numb like a frozen ball of blood, on the tip of a knife.

HUSSAIN AHMED

81
 B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S

while, both Marks are distracted: Outie itself. Despite his verbosity and seeming
Mark, hoping to find his wife, is trying learnedness, Milchick outwits no one. And
to infiltrate the offices he goes to every in the show’s high-stakes moments, he is
INCREASE AFFECTION day, while innie Mark, realizing what it little more than a brute easily caged.
Created by means for the innies’ dignity and self- But there’s one point in the third
Winnifred Cutler, determination, is desperately trying to episode where Milchick and Natalie—
Ph.D. in biology from solve the disappearance of outie Mark’s another Black employee of Lumon—
U. of Penn, post-doc
Stanford. Co- wife, who is somewhere inside Lumon. share an inarticulate camaraderie. Even
discovered human In expanding the locations and char- though they’re not severed, the fake emo-
pheromones in 1986 acters for their second season, the show- tions plastered on their faces show how
Author of 8 books on runners loosen the reins on Severance’s the emotional labor they perform requires
wellness and 50+ claustrophobic insularity, but its visual a kind of self-imposed severance. This is
scientific papers.
6-Pak: Save $100 language becomes less distinctive. When not quite the racial ventriloquism of Get
you’re out in the Out, but it is about
PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 world dealing with two people trapped
DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES real-life locations, it’s inside their laboring
ATHENA PHEROMONEStm a lot harder to have In its second season, bodies. And though
increase your attractiveness. perfectly rigid and Severance breaks out they don’t act on it,
Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 manicured frames. As Milchick and Natalie
Unscented 10:13 tm For Women $98.50 the show’s core frac- of its claustrophobic still feel, just as Mark
Cosmetics 2+ vials ship free to US
♥ Liam (OH) “My wife wanted a divorce.
tures, and as the char- insularity. does, a sense of being
She hated me. I bought a bottle of 10X, acters spin off into trapped. That feeling,
mixed it in, and walked into the room she their own storylines, the seed of resistance,
was in. She looked at me kind of strange- Severance feels more is what Lumon wants
- tilted her head like a puppy --and like open and less con- to eradicate.
she liked me. We’re still together. This was trolled. But this also This is what’s at
more than 10 years ago. Thank you!” means that more time risk for the compa-
Not in stores tm 610-827-2200 is spent with large ny’s severed employ-
Athenainstitute.com swaths of the show ees, and possibly for
Athena Institute, Braefield Rd, Chester Spgs, PA 19425 NTN only tangentially re- Mark’s wife, Gemma
lated to one another, and it can all feel like (Dichen Lachman). Finding her means
delays and detours from where we know finding out what Lumon is really up to,
going on at Lumon. Dylan G. makes a this must end up. and maybe what Severance has to say
connection to his outie’s life that changes about work. Gemma is the closest to be-
his priorities. Helly R., having discovered hat is the point of all this coming a body without a self, an unfeel-
that her outie has close ties to Lumon,
keeps her identity a secret. But in a way
that is very television, season two first has
to gather back and redirect the energy
expelled in that earlier finale before finally
following up on the questions raised by
season one: What are the innies working
W sinister activity for Lu- ing, pliant worker. Does the show know
mon? What is the com- that she’s Asian? Gemma embodies the
pany making, and how is company’s ultimate intentions, and the
it profiting from what it efforts to save her connect the innie and
makes? Severance is about a plan for the to- outie worlds—but she also connects the
tal control of labor—a complete alienation series’ world to ours, throwing into stark
of workers from their lives in order to strip relief the impossibility of a deracinated,
on, and where is Mark’s wife? them of human feeling. Rather than losing degendered idea of labor. She’s the locus
A lot of that energy goes toward ex- their jobs to automation, the workers of of everything, but the show stops there.
panding the series’ world. Mark S.’s co- Lumon are themselves made into automa- After expanding and sprawling, Sev-
workers have their own relationships to tons. And so, whatever else it is, Severance erance narrows its focus to this damsel in
their outies, and comparatively more of is the story of a worker revolt. distress and her rescue. In the end, the
the story takes place outside the office, Because the show, like its world, is so series abandons its precise and manicured
though most of the world-building is still withholding and meticulous, everything style for the handheld viscerality of an ac-
limited to the minutiae of Lumon. We it brings into the frame is deliberate. De- tion sequence. There’s blood and fighting
follow the former supervisor of the sev- spite the centrality of labor to Severance, and a love triangle. It’s probably smart
ered floor as she sets off on her own jour- it’s a vision of labor that is deracinated storytelling to get so personal, to marry
ney; her deputy, Seth Milchick (Tramell and degendered. But in the second season, the mystery with everything that matters
Tillman), is now in charge. Milchick’s with the promotion of Milchick, who is to the main character. Still, I can’t help but
bosses are constantly pressuring him Black, the show brings race explicitly into feel a little dissatisfied: If the series’ cold,
about the work his floor is doing—Mark the picture. The superficially gregarious antiseptic style can be so easily superseded
S.’s sorting seems to be the company’s supervisor has a tough time, facing racist by the personal, then it was nothing more
top priority (although, of course, slights and micromanaging from his supe- than a visual tactic, not an indictment of a
82 no one ever mentions what the
numbers actually mean). Mean-
riors. But Severance struggles to integrate system. And, after all, don’t wait for them
any meaningful insights into the show to kidnap your wife to revolt. N
Classic November
2025
California
Coastal
Cruise

CRUISE
Dear Friend of The Nation,

Join me on the Nation Cruise along the California coast in November to debate and discuss the most
critical issues of our time. I’ll be there along with Nation president Bhaskar Sunkara and our most incisive
and groundbreaking political writers, including John Nichols, Elie Mystal, Sasha Abramsky, Joan Walsh,
and many others soon to be announced.

From spirited panels and lively roundtable debates to dinners and cocktail receptions, we’ll strategize,
analyze, and organize on the issues that matter to you most—such as questions of war and peace,
racial justice, the climate crisis, democracy vs. autocracy, the crisis of media, and much more.

We’ll do all of this against a breathtaking backdrop as we set sail from sunny San Diego en route to
Ensenada, Mexico, resplendent Santa Barbara, and historic San Francisco, where cruisers will have
exclusive access to a special event marking The Nation’s 160th anniversary.

Cabins will go fast. Reserve your spot now!

I hope to see you there,

Use the QR code to

Katrina vanden Heuvel
visit NationCruise.com
Editorial Director & Publisher, The Nation
 The Gold Rush of 2024
Impo
Was ssible Pric
$299
, Nowe
Glimmering 24k gold
99 in a tungsten setting
A h, my dear compatriots, allow me to share a tale of
intrigue and fortune. Picture this: a venture into
the heart of a South American goldmine, where the earth
yields its treasures to the daring and the cunning. With
every step as we follow Diego, our mining master, the air
thickens with anticipation, the scent of wealth mingling
with the thrill of the unknown.
There, amidst the darkness, lies the prize we seek — veins
of gold, glimmering like stars in the night sky.
Now picture this: a ring, not just any ring, mind you, but a
masterpiece crafted to adorn the fingers of the discerning.
Crafted with meticulous care, each piece encasing ribbons
of 24 karat gold in a Tungsten setting, whispering tales of
luxury and prestige.
Meticulously crafted and amazingly comfortable, you will
not find anything like this in a jewelry store. As gold prices
skyrocket, we have been able to craft this and hold the
price under $100 making it exclusively available with only
495 reserved for this ad. And of course we offer a 30 day
no questions asked guarantee.

S   ؏؏ 

N B I S
A symbol of power and sophistication. This isn’t just a
ring, it’s a statement. On any adventure, let this ring be
★★★★★ your companion, a silent witness to your every triumph.
“Been a Stauer customer for many
years. I’ve never been disappointed Ahhh… the rush of a gold rush.
in their products.”
Gold R —M.L. Port St. Lucie, FL
Jewelry Specifications:
• 24k gold embedded in black-finished tungsten
• Whole Size 8 -14
Men’s Gold Rush Ring
$299 $99* + S&P Save $200
*You must use Insider Offer Code GRR202-01 to get this price.

1-800-333-2045
Your Insider Offer Code: GRR202-01 Rating of A+
Yanacocha Gold Mine, located near Lima, Peru,
is the largest gold mine in South America and 14091 Southcross Drive W.
the fourth largest in the world. Dept. GRR202-01, Burnsville, MN 55337
www.stauer.com

AFFORD THE EXTRAORDINARY®