Kavanaugh and our rotten ruling class.
.. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be... According to The New Yorker, Judge confided in an ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Rasor, about an incident where he and other boys took turns having sex with a drunken woman. (Judge denies this.).. From Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh went to Yale. There he joined the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, or DKE, which was, according to The Yale Daily News, “notorious for disrespecting women.” (Long after Kavanaugh graduated, the fraternity, once headed by George W. Bush, was banned from campus after video emerged of pledges chanting, “No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!”).. Kavanaugh was also a member of an all-male secret society called Truth and Courage, which had an obscene nickname affirming its dedication to womanizing... It may not be fair to judge Kavanaugh by the company he kept. But it’s telling that these were the crucibles in which he and other members of our ostensible meritocracy forged their identities and connections... “Is it believable that she was alone with a wolfy group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie? Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes.”.. There’s no equivalent culture in which girls reap social capital for misbehaving. You rarely see women in politics or law who flaunt college reputations as party girls; the women who make it are expected to show steely self-control. In the rarefied social world that produces so many of our putative leaders, a young man who frequently gets blackout drunk, as Kavanaugh reportedly did, is a fun guy. A young woman who does so is a mess.
.. Kavanaugh went on to become a protégé of appeals court judge Alex Kozinski, for whom he clerked in the early 1990s. Last year, Kozinski resigned after multiple accusations of sexual harassment by former female clerks and junior staffers; two said he showed them porn in his office. The judge’s lewd behavior was, by many accounts, an open secret.
.. “All the clerks and former clerks in Kozinski’s ambit knew and understood that you assumed the risk and accepted the responsibilities of secrecy,”
.. both of whom had a reputation as gatekeepers for students who hoped to land coveted clerkships with Kavanaugh. Sources told The Guardian that Chua instructed female applicants to exude a “model-like” femininity, a claim Chua denies. One prospective clerk said Rubenfeld advised her, “You should know that Judge Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look.”
.. As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.
The Coming War on Business
In a series of essays for conservative magazines like Chronicles, Francis hammered home three key insights.
The first was that globalization was screwing Middle America. The Cold War had just ended, capitalism seemed triumphant and the Clinton years seemed to be an era of broad prosperity. But Francis stressed that the service economy was ruining small farms and taking jobs from the working class.
- His second insight was that the Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening. He railed against the pro-business “Economic Men” who thought G.D.P. growth could solve the nation’s problems, and the Washington Republicans, who he thought were infected with the values of the educated elites.
- Francis told Buchanan. “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
- .. His third insight was that politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.
“Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts —
- economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing;
- culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and
- politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.”
appalled by pro-corporate Republican economic policies on the one hand and liberal cultural radicalism on the other. They swung to whichever party seemed most likely to resist the ruling class, but neither party really provided a solution.
The Buchanan campaign was the first run at what we now know as Trumpian populism.
.. “The ‘culture war’ for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the ruling class.”
.. Francis was a racist. His friends and allies counseled him not to express his racist views openly
.. in 1994 Francis told a conference, “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”
.. When you look at today’s world through the prism of Francis’ work, a few things seem clear: Trump is not a one-time phenomenon; the populist tide has been rising for years. His base sticks with him through scandal because it’s not just about him; it’s a movement defined against the so-called ruling class.
.. Trump may not be the culmination, but merely a way station toward an even purer populism.
.. Trump is nominally pro-business. The next populism will probably take his ethnic nationalism and add an anti-corporate, anti-tech layer. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple stand for everything Francis hated — economically, culturally, demographically and nationalistically.
.. As the tech behemoths intrude more deeply into daily life and our very minds, they will become a defining issue in American politics. It wouldn’t surprise me if a new demagogue emerged, one that is even more pure Francis.
Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp
Between 1789 and 1850, the United States had twelve presidents. Ten of them owned slaves; the only two that didn’t were both named “John Adams.” The United States was a pioneering democracy, but its democracy was shaped by the demands of a slaveholding elite that had immense—and often decisive—authority over its government. Princeton historian Matthew Karp explores the consequences of this arrangement in This Vast Southern Empire. He focuses on the influence Southerners wielded over foreign policy, but Karp’s inquiry opens up new perspectives on much more, including the dynamics of proslavery ideology, the world-making ambitions of Southern elites, and the origins of a Civil War that broke American democracy in two.
..What John C. Calhoun really wanted, as Richard Hofstadter wrote long ago, was not for Southerners to leave the Union but to dominate it, which they more or less did in the thirty years before the Civil War.
.. It’s true that in many antebellum political arguments, Southern leaders emphasized the limited powers of the federal government. But when slavery and states’ rights came into conflict, the abstract commitment to limited government vanished pretty quickly. The outstanding example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which overrode personal liberty laws in the northern states and required federal marshals to assist slaveholders in capturing runaway slaves.
.. On many important questions of foreign relations—the annexation of Texas, for instance—supposed small-government ideologues suddenly morphed into bold advocates of federal power. Proslavery Southerners also served as by far the most aggressive champions of U.S. military and naval expansion.
.. John C. Calhoun. He was the most incisive thinker the plantation elite had—Richard Hofstadter called him “the Marx of the master class”
.. But Calhoun was also a bold proslavery internationalist. He paid close attention to the politics of slavery and abolition in Europe and in Latin America, and he was very assiduous about directing U.S. power to sustain slavery in Cuba and Brazil.
.. Southern elites saw Britain as both a vital commercial partner and a potentially dangerous strategic enemy.
.. John Tyler believed that defending slavery against British abolitionism should be a top strategic priority for the United States. There were many dimensions to this effort, from naval expansion to Cuba diplomacy, but in some sense it culminated with the U.S. annexation of the Republic of Texas, which was in 1845 the fourth largest slaveholding society in the world.
.. the book is less about whether slavery was or was not “modern,” and more about the fact that leading slaveholders believed it was.
.. What slaveholders said, over and over again, was that “modern civilization” and African slavery were fundamentally compatible. Economically, they argued, slave labor was necessary to produce vital agricultural staples. And ideologically, slave labor fit in very well in a world increasingly dominated by free trade, expanding European empires, and hardening racist science.
.. In the book I look at two of the most famous Southern documents from early 1861—the Mississippi declaration of secession and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’s “cornerstone address.” Both are very candid about the central importance of slavery, and in contemporary discussions they are often brandished as clear evidence that slavery, not state rights, drove Southerners to secede
.. Historians are so accustomed—as we should be—to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society, that for a long time, we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites. Done right, I think, these approaches don’t contradict each other—they complement each other.
.. when we look back at Davis and his ilk, we should not regard them as antiquarian curiosities, but as ambitious contenders for power in an uncertain mid-nineteenth century world.
.. in the very general sense that slaveholders were a small and self-conscious class, nationally powerful, internationally sophisticated, and totally confident in the future of their system—despite various warning signs all around the globe—their outlook is, in some ways, comparable to the outlook of today’s big capitalist class. And control of the American national state was—as it remains today—absolutely fundamental to the operation of ruling class power.
.. The key, though, is not only to isolate and weaken the gun lobby or fossil fuel industry, for instance, but to develop a popular and more comprehensive critique of the political-economic system—a twenty-first century version of the “Slave Power” argument. Slaveholders, after all, didn’t just represent a sector of the economy; they controlled the government. For all its weaknesses, I do think the Sanders campaign represented a major step forward in this larger project, and I’m probably unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities going forward.