Photo: Trump pretending to work at McDonald's Win McNamee/Getty Images...Trust us—you don’t want more of this guy in your life.

Fascism Is a Kitchen Table Issue Too

Yes, Kamala Harris, of course Trump is a threat to American democracy. But voters need to know how it affects them.

By Alex Shephard

The New Republic

As she delivers her closing argument in the final week-plus of the presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is increasingly centering her pitch around a warning: Donald Trump is not just a danger to the country, but a “fascist.”

The shift in tone comes as a reaction to two alarming recent stories. In three interviews with The New York Times published Tuesday, former Trump chief of staff John Kelly said that the former president “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.” The same day, The Atlantic revealed that Trump had said that he needed “the kinds of generals Hitler had” to unquestionably follow his orders.

Harris picked up what Kelly put down. On Wednesday, she said these reports were “further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is.… We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power.” Later that day, when asked if she thought Trump was a “fascist” during a CNN town hall, Harris said that she did. On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee announced it had paid for a billboard with Trump’s quote about Nazi generals to go up outside the location of one of his upcoming rallies.

The tonal shift is not surprising. For one thing, it mirrors closing arguments made by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020, respectively, about the risk Trump posed to democracy. For another, a former chief of staff calling their ex-boss a “fascist” is a big deal, and speaking admiringly of Hitler—as Trump reportedly has on several occasions—is generally something most people disapprove of. Most important, Trump really is a threat to democracy, and he makes no secret of what he hopes to do if he returns to the White House: deport millions, politicize and weaponize the federal bureaucracy against his “enemies within,” and trample over every guardrail that could check his power.

As closing arguments go, it’s … fine. It worked in 2020, and may well again. But it also feels oddly thin. While Trump is truly an authoritarian, the threat he poses isn’t just to democracy. His fascism will have a material and destructive effect on people’s lives. It’s not enough to just call him a “fascist”—or even to just point to his praise for Hitler and other dictators. It’s incumbent on Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, to explain what that would mean for voters themselves.

Writing in his newsletter earlier this month, veteran Democratic strategist and pollster Michael Podhorzer argued that Harris’s campaign was struggling in part because voters were underrating the threat of Trump’s reelection. Four years ago, Podhorzer wrote, “Biden won the key Electoral College states because enough of those who were not enthusiastic about voting for Biden were sufficiently motivated by the prospects of a second Trump term to vote against Trump.” Currently, however, “evidence suggests that many of these same voters are less alarmed than they could be about the consequences of a second Trump term.”

Harris’s argument that Trump is a fascist is aimed at reaching these voters. Her embrace of Trump’s Republican critics, notably her many appearances with former GOP Representative Liz Cheney, is best understood as a way of legitimating it. Voters might shrug off Democratic warnings as electioneering, but, according to this line of reasoning, they are more genuine coming from Republicans.

It is not clear that this approach has actually worked. The race has barely moved since Harris started barnstorming with the deeply unpopular Cheney—indeed, it seems to have moved toward Trump during that period. And there are few Republican surrogates left. Kelly’s comments are alarming, but he is not expected to appear at campaign rallies. George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are not expected to endorse Harris, let alone stump for her. (Bush’s endorsement, particularly given Harris’s ongoing struggles with Arab Americans, could even do more harm than good.)

Harris’s problem isn’t just that voters are underrating the risk of a second Trump presidency, but that many view his disastrous first term with rose-tinted glasses. Trump has paid little to no price for his horrific mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, and high inflation has made voters look back fondly on the comparable prosperity of 2017–19. Trump and his surrogates, particularly running mate JD Vance, have made the same case again and again: The Biden era has been one of high prices, global conflict, and unease; the Trump era wasn’t; and reelecting Trump will stabilize the world and the economy.

This is wrong. Trump inherited a strong economy—and did everything he could to sabotage it, both by passing a ridiculous, unnecessary tax cut for corporations and the wealthy and by very nearly stumbling into conflicts in Iran and North Korea that, unlike the ongoing ones in Ukraine and the Middle East, would have directly involved the United States. The day-to-day life of the Trump presidency was one of grinding anxiety and chaos—not stability and economic growth.

Harris is right to stress the larger, existential risks of Trump’s return to office, as she does when she says that a second term in office “would be worse” because “there would be no one to stop his worst instincts. No guardrails.” But that message can and should be extended further. Trump’s fascism would have direct material consequences for Americans. His tirades, whether on social media or on the world stage, move markets; they destroy faith in the country as an economic power. His return to office would empower craven billionaires like Elon Musk to run and remake large sections of the economy in their own interest. Harris can undercut Trump’s populism by reminding voters that he is, in fact, a plutocrat running in service of other plutocrats. His threat to democracy isn’t just constitutional. It would involve handing the reins of government over to a small cabal of terrible people... ...Read More

Photo: ‘The movement persuaded … Democratic primary voters to write in “uncommitted” or leave their ballots blank … ’ Composite: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Progressives Must Walk A Fine Line:

End The War In Gaza And Elect Harris

By Judith Levine

The Guardian

Oct. 2, 2024 - It’s sounds like an impossible dilemma for activists and organizers, but it isn’t. Progressives can and must do both

The war in Gaza is not high among most voters’ concerns. But for many Arab Americans and protesters of the war, it is. As election day nears and the margins tighten – and with the critical swing state of Michigan, home to the largest Arab American community in the nation, up for grabs – these people are among the small, scattered constituencies that could determine the results. This makes their political strategies crucial to the US’s – and, by extension, Palestine’s – future.

Some activists working to end the genocide are putting that urgent cause ahead of the other urgent cause: electing a Democrat, if only to prevent a Trump presidency. “If I’m going to be a one-issue voter and that issue is genocide, I’m okay with that,” a Dearborn, Michigan, woman told NPR’s Code Switch.

For these people, Harris’s repeated assertions that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” – spoken in the passive voice and always accompanied by even louder assertions of commitment to Israel’s “self-defense” – no longer cut it. A progressive activist who is stumping for Trump in Michigan said there’s nothing the Democrat can do to change her mind. The administration’s collaboration in genocide is unforgivable; she wants the party punished. Her eyes are on the 2028 election, she said – apparently sanguine that there will be an election after the ascension of King Donald the First.

In Mondoweiss this month, journalist and activist Saleema Gul interviewed a dozen members of the Uncommitted movement in a post-mortem of its campaign and failure to secure a speaking slot at the DNC this summer. The movement persuaded three-quarters of a million Democratic primary voters to write in “uncommitted” or leave their ballots blank to signal that their support for Biden, now Harris, depends on a pledge to end unconditional military support to Israel.

Some of the people interviewed in the piece felt that the movement should have tried to influence the party platform in the primary process and quit there. Others believed that pushing for a speaker at the DNC distracted from organizing anti-war delegates inside the convention. After much debate, the leadership decided to endorse no one. Instead, it is urging supporters to “register anti-Trump votes” and not vote for a third-party presidential candidate. That move, wrote Gul, “has led many to believe the Uncommitted movement has prioritized shielding the Democratic Party over forcefully pushing for an end to the Gaza genocide”.

The debate within the uncommitted movement encapsulates the perennial tensions in all political organizing: radical change v incremental reform; grassroots activism v establishment engagement; insider work v outsider disruption; movement-building v election-cycle campaigns. But to put “versus” between any of the above is to misunderstand political strategy: that is, to presume that organizing is either/or.

In fact, you can do more than one thing at a time: organize for an arms embargo; get Harris elected; move the Democrats leftward; and build a radical pro-liberation movement.

That these tactics don’t always overlap does not mean they contradict each other. Grassroots movements move politicians, not the other way around. But grassroots movements labor for decades far from the centers of influence before policy makers code their ideas and demands – watered down, of course – into bills and statutes. The more local the politician, the more open their ears are to those demands.

For instance, in New York City’s safely Democratic congressional districts nine and 10, antiwar groups are asking voters to write in the name of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli tank, instead of voting for the pro-Israel Democrats or any of the other parties’ candidates. The activists want to remind the Dems that their antiwar constituents are watching, without jeopardizing the party’s chances of winning back the House of Representatives. But presidential candidates are as far from the ground as candidates get – and this year a no vote for the Democrat holds potentially catastrophic consequences.

You could argue that electing a woman of color as president would be a radical step forward for the US. But Harris is no radical. In fact, presidential elections rarely lead to radical change. The big difference this time is that Trump’s election would.

The anti-war movement should not cease to pressure the Harris campaign to win their votes. Her supporters should not cease persuading anti-war voters to vote for her. Right now, a door is opening for both to happen.

Harris herself pushed the door ajar. In her interview with Fox News last week, she suggested for the first time that she might break with the Biden administration. “Let me be very clear,” she said. “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.” She pledged to bring “fresh new ideas” to the Oval Office.

One idea – not so fresh, but good anyway – would be to call for the US simply to abide by its own law: the Leahy Law, enacted in 1997, requires the state department to vet military forces receiving US aid for violations of international human rights law. If there’s credible evidence of such violations, the aid must be withheld.

Since 2000, former US senator Patrick Leahy has been pressing the state department to apply such scrutiny to Israel, which has remained practically exempt. In May, in the Washington Post, he reasserted the necessity of doing so now, citing violations in Gaza and the West Bank. A former associate general counsel at the Department of Defense told Al Jazeera that the president has no discretion in the matter. “It’s not up for negotiation. It is a binding domestic law on the executive branch,” she said.

The confirmed killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah this week opens the door even wider. The US can declare that Israel has decapitated its enemy. Although the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never specified what would constitute victory, candidate Harris can credibly assert that Israel has achieved it. The US has fulfilled its responsibility to its ally. If Bibi wants to keep bombing Gaza, he’s on his own... ...Read More

Kamala Weighs In on John Kelly Warnings about Trump ...7 min

House in 1836 bans any discussion of anti-slavery petitions Image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

Many Wealthy Members Of Congress Are Descendants Of Rich Slaveholders

Written by The Conversation 

Oct 25, 2024 - The legacy of slavery in America remains a divisive issue, with sharp political divides.

Some argue that slavery still contributes to modern economic inequalities. Others believe its effects have largely faded.

One way to measure the legacy of slavery is to determine whether the disproportionate riches of slaveholders have been passed down to their present-day descendants.

Connecting the wealth of a slaveholder in the 1860s to today’s economic conditions is not easy. Doing so requires unearthing data for a large number of people on slaveholder ancestry, current wealth and other factors such as age and education.

But in a new study, we tackled this challenge by focusing on one of the few groups of Americans for whom such information exists: members of Congress. We found that legislators who are descendants of slaveholders are significantly wealthier than members of Congress without slaveholder ancestry.

How slavery made the South rich

In 1860, one year before the Civil War, the market value of U.S. slaves was larger than that of all American railroads and factories.

At the time of emancipation in 1863, the estimated value of all enslaved people was roughly US$13 trillion in today’s dollars. The lower Mississippi Valley had more millionaires, all of them slaveholders, than anywhere else in the country.

Some post-Civil War historians have argued that emancipation permanently devastated slave-owning families.

More recently, however, historians discovered that, while the South fell behind the North economically immediately following emancipation, many elite slaveholders recovered financially within one or two generations.

They accomplished this by replacing slavery with sharecropping – a kind of indentured servitude that trapped Black farm workers in debt to white landowners – and enacting discriminatory Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation.

100 descendants of slaveholders

Using genealogist-verified historical data and financial data from annual congressional disclosures, we examined members of the 117th Congress, which was in session from January 2021 to January 2023.

Of its 535 members, 100 were descendants of slaveholders, including Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Legislators whose ancestors were large slaveholders – defined in our study as owning 16 or more slaves– have a current median net worth five times larger than their peers whose ancestors were not slaveholders: $5.6 million vs. $1.1 million. These results remained largely the same after accounting for age, race and education.

Wealth creates many privileges – the means to start a business or pursue higher education. And intergenerational wealth transfers can allow these advantages to persist across generations.

Because members of Congress are a highly select group, our results may not apply to all Americans. However, the findings align with other studies on the transfers of wealth and privilege across generations in the U.S. and Europe.

Wealth, these studies find, often stays within rich families across multiple generations. Mechanisms for holding onto wealth include low estate taxes and access to elite social networks and schools. Easy entry into powerful jobs and political influence also play a part.

Privilege with power

But members of Congress do not just inherit wealth and advantages.

They shape the lives of all Americans. They decide how to allocate federal funds, set tax rates and create regulations.

This power is significant. And for those whose families benefited from slavery, it can perpetuate economic policies that maintain wealth inequality.

Beyond inherited wealth, the legacy of slavery endures in policies enacted by those in power – by legislators who may be less likely to prioritize reforms that challenge the status quo.

COVID-19 relief legislation, for example, helped reduce child poverty by more than 70% while bringing racial inequalities in child poverty to historic lows. Congress failed to renew the program in 2022, plunging 5 million more children into poverty, most of them Black and Latino.

The economic deprivation still experienced by Black Americans is the flip side of the privilege enjoyed by slaveowners’ descendants. The median household wealth of white Americans today is six times higher than that of Black Americans – $285,000 versus $45,000.

Meanwhile, federal agencies that enforce antidiscrimination laws remain underfunded. This limits their ability to address racial disparities.

The path forward

As the enduring economic disparities rooted in slavery become clearer, a growing number of states and municipalities are weighing some form of practical and financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people.

Yet surveys show that most Americans oppose such reparations for slavery. Similarly, Congress has debated slavery reparations many times but never passed a bill.

There are, however, other ways to improve opportunities for historically disadvantaged populations that could gain bipartisan backing.

A majority of Americans, both conservatives and liberal, support increased funding for environmental hazard screening, which assesses the potential impact of a proposed project. They also favor limits on rent increases, better public school funding and raising taxes on the wealthy.

These measures would help dismantle the structural barriers that perpetuate economic disparities. And the role of Congress here is central.

Members of Congress do not bear personal responsibility for their ancestors’ actions. But they have an opportunity to address both the legacies of past injustices and today’s inequalities.

By doing so, they can help create a future where ancestral history does not determine economic destiny. ...Read More

Photo: Spanish peacekeepers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) coordinate their patrol with the Lebanese Military Police, in Marjayoun in south Lebanon on October 8, 2024.

AFP via Getty Images

Israel Injured UN Peacekeepers in Lebanon

With White Phosphorus, Report Finds

Fifteen UN peacekeepers were wounded when Israeli forces shot white phosphorus rounds by their base.

By Sharon Zhang 

Truthout

Oct 22, 2024 - Israeli forces have attacked UN peacekeepers in Lebanon at least a dozen times in recent weeks, including one attack in which 15 peacekeepers were injured by white phosphorus, according to a new report.

The Financial Times says there have been a dozen Israeli attacks on UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers, damaging bases and wounding peacekeepers, according to a leaked report by a country that contributes troops to the peacekeeping force seen by the publication.

In one of these attacks, on October 13, Israeli tanks broke into one of UNIFIL’s bases. The tanks left after peacekeepers protested their presence, but shortly after, Israeli forces fired several rounds of white phosphorus 100 meters away from the base.

The attack wounded 15 peacekeepers, according to the report. UNIFIL similarly reported on Telegram last week that peacekeepers had been wounded by the attack, suffering from skin irritation and gastrointestinal symptoms. Israeli forces claimed they had deployed the white phosphorus as a smokescreen.

It is illegal to use white phosphorus in populated areas, as the caustic chemical can cause extreme harm in the short and long term. The chemical can burn through clothes, skin and bone, and causes severe damage to the eyes and respiratory system when inhaled. It can also damage the liver, heart and kidney through skin contact and exposure.

Israeli forces have used white phosphorus on southern Lebanon multiple times in the last year. In June, Human Rights Watch documented at least 17 incidents in which Israeli forces used white phosphorus on municipalities, including residential areas, injuring at least 173 people. In at least one incident, Israeli forces used white phosphorus shells manufactured in the U.S.

UNIFIL has said that Israel’s persistent attacks on its peacekeepers are “a flagrant violation of international law.” The peacekeeping force was established in response to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1978, with troop contributions from 50 countries, and analysts have said that Israeli forces are attacking them now in order to limit outside documentation of Israel’s massacres in the region.

Israeli forces have directly hit UNIFIL infrastructure, indicating intent to attack the peacekeepers despite Israel’s insistence that it is not deliberately targeting the group. Israel’s repeated threats against UNIFIL and insistence that peacekeepers evacuate their bases are also evidence of intent.

Multiple peacekeepers have been injured in other attacks, including one on October 10, in which an Israeli tank fired at an observation tower and injured two peacekeepers.

Most recently, on Sunday, UNIFIL reported that an Israeli bulldozer destroyed an observation tower and perimeter fence of another UN position. The attack was deliberate, the group said. Just the day before, UNIFIL reported that peacekeepers at one camp, in Meiss ej Jebel in south Lebanon, ran out of water as Israeli military activities had blocked roads for weeks.

Troop contributing countries have criticized the Israeli military’s aggression against the peacekeepers. In one statement earlier this month, 40 countries said that they “strongly condemn” the attacks and that UNIFIL’s mission of protecting civilians in south Lebanon is “particularly crucial in light of the escalating situation in the region.”

Some U.S. officials, however, have waved away the concerns. In response to a question about the white phosphorus attack at a news briefing on Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said nothing of the injuries to the peacekeepers, saying only that white phosphorus has “a legitimate use in combat.”

The Financial Times report has spurred fresh condemnation of Israel’s attacks on peacekeepers, which, if deliberate, are war crimes.

“Israel is behaving like a rogue state, attacking UN facilities and injuring peacekeepers,” said Center for International Policy Vice President for Government Affairs Dylan Williams. “These are serious violations of international law that UN member states must ensure they’re not enabling. It’s yet another reason why Biden must halt offensive weapons shipments to Israel.” ...Read More

The Great Migration: How 6 Million

African-Americans Escaped Jim Crow...46 min

From Upton

Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University

Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education

By Daniel Morris

and Harry Targ

Paperback USD 17.00

This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.

Click HERE to Purchase

New Studies

on the Left

Paperback $19.95

...is a journal of socialist theory and practice. It is the successor to ‘Dialogue and Initiative, published as an annual journal of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism in book form from 2012 to 2022. It will continue the CCDS policy of left unity, including articles with a variety of left perspectives, including debates.

This issue contains over 30 articles grouped under the headings of Analysis and Global Reach, Debate and Controversy, Labor, Socialism, and Book Reviews. Some are reprinted from other sources, but many appear here for the first time.

Among the authors are David Bacon, Joan Braune, Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jerry Harris, Jay Jurie, Paul Krehbiel, Sun Liping, Adewale A. Maye, Duncan McFarland, Jasmine Payne-Patterson, Vijay Prashad, Nikhil Pal Singh, Harry Targ, and Janet Tucker.

Table of Contents

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Click here for a free copy of Paul Krebiel's article 'Union Stewards Councils: the Next Step Forward'

History Lesson of the Week: When the Cheyenne Acquired Horses in the 18th Century, the Connection Transformed the Tribe

Its riders have used horses to hunt, do battle and, more recently, win rodeo buckles.

By David McCormick

HistoryNet

The Cheyenne hunter’s horse kicked clods of earth skyward as the warrior drove hard alongside the buffalo. Within seconds the experienced hunter let fly several well-placed arrows into the flanks of the charging beast. The shafts sank deep, piercing vital organs and sending the buffalo crashing to the ground. By the time the warrior circled back, his quarry’s labored breathing had ceased.

Such a scenario played out repeatedly on the Great Plains following the introduction of the horse into Cheyenne society, a happenstance that dramatically changed the tribe’s way of life.

When most people think of Plains Indians, what comes to mind are 19th century Cheyenne and Lakota warriors riding hard across open grasslands to bring down their enemies, either bluecoats or rival warriors. But for centuries prior neither tribe lived on the plains, nor were they particularly migratory. The Cheyennes originally hailed from the region between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River headwaters in what today is Minnesota. In the late 1700s, while Anglos in the 13 colonies back East were immersed in a revolution to free themselves from British rule, the Cheyennes were experiencing an upheaval of their own. Theirs was not a martial revolution, however, but one of transportation, sparked by the arrival of the horse on the northern Plains. The Cheyennes in turn are thought to have introduced the horse culture to Lakota bands, perhaps as early as 1730. The horses themselves traced their lineage to those brought to North America by 16th century Spanish explorers.

It isn’t exactly known how the sedentary Cheyenne first acquired horses—perhaps by roping free-roaming animals, in trade with other tribes or when fending off mounted enemies (for more on that subject see “Riding Toward a Blue Vision,” Indian Life, by Lance Nixon, in the February 2019 issue of Wild West). Whatever the scenario, it came as a godsend to the Cheyennes, who had begun to migrate west under pressure from other tribes. ...Read More

Adelante #4 is out! A special on immigration for the closing days of the election. Use it everywhere!

Get it here: http://ouleft.org/Adelante-4.pdf

By Bill Gallegos, excerpted from our new fall issue of “¡Adelante!”

U.S. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump demonized Mexicans and immigrants as a central part of his 2016 presidential campaign. In 2024, he has doubled down. If elected, he promises to unleash an ethnic cleansing campaign to deport the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. This is horrible enough as a complete violation of human rights. But this pogrom is only one piece of the larger anti-democratic ‘Project 2025’ of the Heritage Foundation. They are coming for all of us. While singling out Mexican immigrants, Trump aims at all immigrant communities, including growing communities in the South, Midwest, and East.

Thankfully the political energy has shifted since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic Party candidate, and the polls show a significant shift in her direction. More than a million new volunteers have signed up for Harris, and hundreds of millions of new dollars have been contributed to her campaign.

The Biden-Harris Administration has been mixed on immigration: on one hand, it continues to support the legalization of Dreamers (DACA) and pushes for a path to legalization for the spouses of immigrants with legal residency. On the other hand, it has denied asylum protections for refugees crossing the southern border and supported legislation for increased militarization as well as new administrative hurdles. While our most important fight is against the MAGA right, the fight for full rights and protections for immigrants is a long-term struggle beyond the November elections.

The Biden dropout also creates significant opportunities for the left and progressives to advance the fight against the fascist threat, to advance a progressive platform, and to put new pressure on both Biden and the Harris campaign to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. It enables us to push back strongly against Trump’s racist threats against immigrants while advancing a positive program for immigrant rights.

This week's topic:

UN FORCES REPRESENTING SEVERAL NATIONAL ARMIES ENTERED THE KOREAN WAR IN 1950; WHY NOT A UN FORCE TO STOP ISRAELI AGGRESSION?

Click the picture to access the blog.

Tune of the Week: Lucinda Williams - Righteously (live 2007) ...4:51 min.

Book Review: Is the United States A Prisoner Of Its Own Mythology? 

Tom Zoellner looks at “A Great Disorder” by Richard Slotkin

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin. Belknap Press, 2024. 528 pages.

.

By Tom Zoellner

LA Review of Books

October 4, 2024 - THE STORIES THAT a country tells itself are just as critical to its functioning as its army, its laws, its borders, and its flag. Where did the country emerge from, and where might it be heading?

Such questions of national mythology are especially fraught in the United States, still relatively young in the world, big, rich, powerful, multiethnic, and operating on a set of profoundly contradictory ideas. That it might be possible to make sense of American political division by naming those myths and interpreting the news of the day through their filter is the guiding ambition of Richard Slotkin’s exciting and detailed new decoder ring of a book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America.

The title is an homage to the Wallace Stevens poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” which declares that “a great disorder is an order”—not just as a metaphysical statement but also as a tidy description of the contested historiography of the United States. Can we look into our past to find the white, Christian, hierarchical, free-market society of red America’s imagining? Or do we see the imperfect but ever-striving egalitarian and multiethnic vision of blue America? Both sides have told selective stories, which are neither completely true nor exactly false.

“Each has a different understanding of who counts as American,” writes Slotkin, “a different reading of American history, and a different vision of what our future ought to be.” His goal in the first part of the book is to describe and unpack “America’s foundational myths to expose the deep structures of thought and belief that underlie today’s culture wars.” In the second part of the book, Slotkin directly applies those collective stories to make sense of the tumultuous last eight years.

It is difficult to imagine a more qualified author for this freighted task. Slotkin has made a career out of dissecting grand national myths. He is an emeritus endowed chair of English and American studies at Wesleyan University and the author of a trilogy of books on what he calls the “Myth of the Frontier.” Two of them were National Book Award finalists, and his argument in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973)—that European settlers learned the ways of Indigenous Americans only to convert them into tools of repression and genocide—has influenced the historiography of colonial America enormously.

Every nation does it, of course. Their leaders and poets construct “semifictional or wholly imaginary histories of the origins of their people and territories, which would enable Provençals, Bretons, and Franks to see themselves as French, or Bavarians, Prussians, and Swabians as German,” writes Slotkin. He makes a parallel case that the United States relies on these rich historical stories especially heavily, considering the multiplicity of its ethnicities, its sheer geographic reach, and its own self-proclaimed status as the first country in the world founded on an idea.

Those stories that Americans tell about themselves in the name of the “imagined community,” in the words of the theorist Benedict Anderson, manifest through public rituals like fireworks shows, public school curricula, the discourse of politicians, and the touchstones reinforced by constant references in the press and pop culture: the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand, the showdown at the O.K. Corral, Valley Forge, “I Have a Dream.”

What are the specific meta-stories that drive today’s United States? Though he had a potential banquet before him and the possibility of a very messy plate, Slotkin keeps his scope narrowed to five. This number feels right: broad enough to avoid the trap of binaristic red-versus-blue stories yet tight enough to keep a useful focus. Each one is rooted in a specific historical process, though one with disputed meanings.

There’s Slotkin’s specialty, of course, the Myth of the Frontier: the romance of westward expansion and the individual Turnerian grit that helped subdue the unruly Indigenous inhabitants of a land that was meant to be American.

There’s the Myth of the Founding, in which wise gentlemen—albeit with slaveholders included among them—enshrined a set of moral principles into the documents that established a government dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There are the Myths of the Civil War, which fall into two basic categories: the Southern Lost Cause, which rails against federal interference, especially when it comes to racial matters, and the Liberation Myth, which sees the federal government as the swift sword of racial justice.

There’s the Myth of the Good War, the idea that the United States is a multiethnic platoon out of a Hollywood film, striking a blow for democracy against totalitarianism and ascending into its rightful place at the top of the free world, with an omnipotent military and supercharged technological economy.

And finally, though Slotkin doesn’t group them among the “four myths [that] have historically been the most crucial,” there’s the myth of the New Deal, and the associated myth of the Civil Rights Movement, in which activist government policy rides to the rescue against the depredations of capitalism and racism.

Running contemporary headlines through this five-part interpretative machine yields pragmatic and useful results that will keep working after the narrative ends. Once you accept Slotkin’s premise that myths are hidden scripts for present-day actors (a proposition hard to deny), you begin to see them at work everywhere. While it is usually hyperbolic to claim that a book will change your life, this one may well have a permanent effect on how you consume and think about American political news.

When George W. Bush announced the country’s invasion of Iraq after 9/11, he purposely invoked Good War imagery in the nation’s associative mind by likening the jet attacks to Pearl Harbor, and the crusade against Saddam Hussein to one against Nazism. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign tapped into Civil Rights Movement iconography, and the Tea Party backlash was undoubtedly rooted in atavistic Lost Cause urges of reclaiming a white beau ideal of the past.

Slotkin’s analysis is especially strong on guns, which should be no surprise from the author of Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992). He sees the 1990s debacles of Ruby Ridge and Waco as especially damaging because they reinforced Reconstruction-era paranoia among those who jealously guard their view of the Second Amendment. (It always seems to come back to the South.) The manly Hollywood actor Charlton Heston, also an NRA president in his later years, invoked the Myth of the Founding and the Myth of the Frontier when it came to his promotion of extreme positions in firearm rights discourse.

Though wracked and weakened by corruption scandals, the NRA still promotes the bogus claim that the Second Amendment was written to allow states to rise up against an oppressive federal government. In fact, it was somewhat the opposite: the founders worried that big standing armies posed a danger to the government and wanted to decentralize the stockpiling of rifles. The “originalist” doctrine of constitutional interpretation embraced by the right-wing judiciary claims to divine the founders’ real intent, but it is more about making a historical myth fit into a contemporary partisan choice.

Our addiction to national mythologies—and our inability to create a common meaning for them—has brought us to an unhappy stalemate. It’s hard to bargain and compromise with an opposition that you believe has fundamentally misunderstood its own country––to the point that they cannot even be considered good citizens. And with their mythologies as war clubs, both sides want to run an Antonio Gramsci–style takeover of institutions, making their reality the only acceptable paradigm. Slotkin writes an elegant, if depressing, diagnosis of the current mythological crisis. “The result is a deadly feedback loop: government failure to alleviate these problems leads to deep mistrust of democratic institutions, and the substitution of culture war for rational policy debate,” he argues. “[C]ulture-war hyperpartisanship then prevents government from acting effectively, which intensifies mistrust of institutions and ratchets up the intensity of culture war.” ...Read More

Film Review: ‘On Falling’ Reveals An Episode in the Life of a Warehouse Picker, Told With Grace and Urgency

Co-winner of the Best Director prize at San Sebastián, Laura Carreira's impressive debut puts faces and lives to the purchases we so impersonally make online.

By Guy Lodge

Variety

It’s easy to divorce the online purchases that arrive so swiftly and conveniently on your doorstep from the individual labor that got them there: The packaging is so uniform, the buying process so entirely impersonal, that it’s tempting to believe they were somehow selected and delivered by robotic magic.

But in many cases, someone hand-picked the item from an intricately coded shelf in a vast, airless warehouse, just as someone else had the unrewarding zero-hours job of driving it to your home, or carrying out how many intermediate menial stages in between. Where Ken Loach’s recent “Sorry We Missed You” shed light on the loneliness of the long-suffering delivery driver, Laura Carreira‘s remarkable “On Falling” turns warehouse-picking from an ignorable abstract process into a human routine of vivid, slowly erosive despair.

Any comparison to Loach is backed by the film’s DNA, as Jack Thomas-O’Brien, son of Loach’s longtime producer Rebecca O’Brien, shepherded the production through his elders’ Sixteen Films banner. Portuguese-born, Scottish-based writer-director Carreira reveals herself to be, like Loach in his finest hours, a socially conscious filmmaker as invested in idiosyncratic character as in more universal polemic. Her debut feature following several well-received shorts, “On Falling” is first and foremost an intimate, granular portrait of an immigrant worker gradually drowning in solitude and systemic indifference. Through that portraiture, however, the film delivers an excoriating verdict on a modern Britain characterized by compassionless labor politics, stagnant opportunity and shrugging acceptance of a stifling status quo

That’s a lot to pin on a largely solo character study, though a performance of extraordinary composure and layering by Joana Santos shoulders the task. As Aurora, a thirtysomething Portuguese woman forging a new life in a drably unspecified Scottish town, she returns the camera’s steady gaze with a hollowed-out stare of her own, her intense inner quiet only sporadically stirred by rare, fleeting grasps at social connection. Aurora’s days, spent blankly plucking and carting products around an eternally gray-lit warehouse for an Amazon-like retailer, are scarcely alleviated by her evenings, largely spent holed up in her room in a crammed apartment shared with other migrant workers. They find common conversational ground in banal discussions of streaming shows, or passive-aggressive sniping over shared utilities and kitchen storage. Tenderness is in short supply. ...Read More