The Nation

Peter Beinart (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Peter Beinart is out with a major new argument in The Daily Beast about what the political future might hold in store for us. The headline writer calls it “The Rise of the New New Left,” and it begins by citing the recent victory of liberal populist Bill de Blasio in New York’s mayoral primary. “The deeper you look,” Beinart writes, “the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may be the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left.”

The argument is generational: that the class of politicians who govern us now take for granted that our ideological debates take place between the goalposts of Reaganism and Clintonism—as manifested not least in the case of Barack Hussein Obama. He notes how Obama established himself in The Audacity of Hope as a child of Reaganism (“In arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview”) with a distaste for Reaganism’s left-wing opponents—who enforced a tyranny of “either/or thinking” that only leads to “ideological deadlock.” Obama emerged as a true avatar of Third Way politics. But the Third Way was at its heart about embracing the dynamism of the market and denying the necessity of activist government to protect people from its ravages—and for kids today, the experience of being ravaged by the free market is their dominant impression of the world. Ravaged by usurious student debt. Ravaged by subprime mortgage scams. Ravaged by structural unemployment. Ravaged by the arrogance of unaccountable plutocrats. And on and on. So much for today’s kids embracing the Third Way.

They are also, he continues, less susceptible” to “right-wing populist appeals”: they are less white and less religious than the populations these appeals are designed for, and also “more dovish on foreign policy.” And above all, they are far to the left of their parents economically: “In 2010, Pew found that two-thirds of Millennials favored bigger government with more services over a cheaper one with fewer services, a margin of 25 points above the rest of the population. While large majorities of older and middle-aged Americans favored repealing Obamacare in late 2012, Millennials favored expanding it, by 17 points.” And “unlike older Americans, who favor capitalism over socialism by roughly 25 points, Millennials, narrowly favor socialism.”

Most fascinatingly, he finds evidence that young Republicans consider the GOP’s Generation X superstars creeps: “According to a 2012 Harvard survey, young Americans were more than twice as likely to say Mitt Romney’s selection of Ryan made them feel more negative about the ticket than more positive. In his 2010 Senate race, Rubio fared worse among young voters than any other age group. The same goes for Rand Paul in his Senate race that year in Kentucky, and Scott Walker in his 2010 race for governor of Wisconsin and his recall battle in 2012,” as well as Ted Cruz’s 2012 Texas Senate race.

Occupy, he says, is an omen—and its children, members of what Chris Hayes has called the “newly radicalized upper-middle class,” are now making their long march through the institutions, with de Blasio’s victory against an (admittedly divided) field of Clintonian Democrats as the harbinger of things to come. He concludes that “Hillary”—a Clintonite Democrat if there ever was one—“is vulnerable to a candidate who can inspire passion and embody fundamental change, especially on the subject of economic inequality and corporate power, a subject with deep resonances among Millennial Democrats. And the candidate who best fits that description is Elizabeth Warren.”

What do I think of the argument?

Well, I’m a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event—and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am. (I sketched out my objections to the demographic arguments for Democratic inevitability here, here and here.) I also have never much dug “generational” arguments, finding them rigidly deterministic and reductionist, betraying a style of thinking more appropriate to ad industry hustlers than serious political analysts.

But Beinart’s arguments are smarter than those. For one, he explicitly rejects what is most offensively schematic about generational arguments: that “generations” are identities that emerge automatically, like clockwork, every twenty or thirty years or whatever—Depression/World War II, Baby Boom, Generation X, Millennial—like the unfolding of the seasons. He deploys instead the conception of the early-twentieth-century German social thinker Karl Mannheim, for whom, he notes, “generations were born from historical disruption.” He argued that people are disproportionately influenced by events that occur between their late teens and mid-twenties,” and that, as such, “a generation has no set length. A new one could emerge ‘every year, every thirty, every hundred.’ What mattered was whether the events people experienced while at their most malleable were sufficiently different from those experienced by people older or younger than themselves.” That is correct: this is how a generational identity is stamped—by a sense of everyday difference from the elders who do not understand them.

But Beinart downplays, even while he acknowledges, another crucial argument of Mannheim’s classic The Problem of Generations: that political generations are not defined by a common ideology but a common ideological argument. For example, the German political generation of the Weimar era was defined by an argument over the meaning of Germany’s loss in World War I and the traumas of the punitive Peace of Versailles. For that era’s left, the solution was proletarian revolution; for the right, the revanchism of Nazism—“socialism or barbarism,” as the left laid out the alternatives. For the Baby Boomers in America, the political argument, in an age when prosperity seemed self-evident and scarcity no longer seemed an issue, was over “freedom.” Theodore White sketched out a Mannheimian observation in a memorable footnote in Making of the President 1964:

I have attended as many civil-rights rallies as Goldwater rallies. The dominant word of these two groups, which loathe each other, is “freedom.” Both demand either Freedom Now or Freedom for All. The word has such emotional power behind it in argument, either with civil rights extremists or Goldwater extremists, a reporter is instantly denounced for questioning what they mean by the word “freedom.” It is quite possible that these two groups may kill each other in cold blood, both waving banners bearing the same word.

But Beinart’s generational argument is deterministic. It’s not about what the defining argument of the future will be. Young people’s ideological outlook seems to him already settled—leftward. That’s far too simple and optimistic.

For one thing it assumes that political dynamics are linear—since the trends tend this way now, they will only tend that way more so in the future. It thus leaves out an awful set of variables that complicates any narrative of progress.

For one thing, he assumes that America has a democracy.

But consider the counter-evidence against that, of which many of you are aware. Thanks to partisan gerrymandering by power-hungry Republicans (remember the counsel to a Texas representative who bragged in a 2003 e-mail to colleagues that they’d fixed it for Republicans to “assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood”), our House of Representatives is, in fact, far from representative. You can’t repeat it often enough: when Barack Obama wins the state of Pennsylvania by five points but the delegation Pennsylvania returns to the House of Representatives contains thirteen Republicans and only five Democrats—well, poll numbers aren’t counting for very much, are they?

Then there’s the “dark money” problem: for instance, the recent news that “a single nonprofit group with ties to Charles G. and David H. Koch provided grants of $236 million to conservative organizations before the 2012 election, according to tax returns the group is expected to file Monday…. Freedom Partners established itself in November 2011 as a 501(c)6 ‘business league,’ typically a trade association of corporations, like the Chamber of Commerce, organized to promote a common business interest. Instead of donors, it has more than 200 ‘members,’ each making a minimum $100,000 contribution, which Freedom Partners classifies as member dues. The approach gives it many of the same advantages social welfare groups have, with one significant addition: Some contributions to the group may be tax deductible as a business expense.”

So let’s assume Beinart is right in his generational diagnosis: kids who came to their maturity during the “Age of Fail,” whose formative experience of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally crappy, are pissed, and are willing to work hard for politicians who are willing to do something about it.

If that is so, another scenario looks like this: young citizens motivated by left-leaning passions run into a brick wall again and again and again trying to turn their convictions into power. The defining story of our next political era becomes not a New New Left but a corrosive disillusionment that drives the country into ever deeper sloughs of apathy.

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What if, in other words, the harbinger election didn’t take place in New York but in Colorado—where a hyper-ideological, insurrectionist, corporate-money-soaked minority, as I pointed out the other day, recalled two progressive legislatures for daring to favor background checks for gun purchases even though Coloradans want background checks by a margin of 68 to 27 percent.

Beinart wants to think big. So let’s think big. Given a precedent like that, the result of our current trends might not be more socialism, but once more a stark showdown between socialism and barbarism. Apathy and social misery might make fertile ground for some charismatic demagogue, preaching scapegoating and a narrative of violent redemption…

But that’s a big, big prediction—and again, as a historian, I don’t like big predictions. Let’s stay close to the ground, and the near-term, instead. Beinart has amassed some very convincing poll numbers about the mood of young voters. He has written, “If Hillary Clinton is shrewd, she will embrace it, and thus narrow the path for a populist challenger.” Hillary Clinton surely reads Peter Beinart. Let’s hope she reads and heeds this. That would be a very nice start. What will come next, frankly, nobody knows.

(Reuters/John Kolesidis)

The images play on in an interminable loop: the helmeted riot police, the young men poised to run, the burning rubbish skips and skittering Molotovs, the tear-gas smoke and glint of metal against the night. Athens in flames again. A video that’s gone viral clearly shows gangs of men throwing stones beside the police, far-right irregulars fighting under the state’s protection. There are other images too, less hot on the Internet, of the thousands who gathered to protest and mourn the murder of leftist rapper Pavlos Fyssas Tuesday night by a member of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, and to stand against the fascist poison that seeps out everywhere: on the streets and on TV, in parliament and police stations, in odd things the neighbours say.

This is not the first time Golden Dawn has killed, but it is their first known murder of a white Greek national—and their first clearly political assassination. Fyssas was a well-known anti-fascist; he was ambushed by a group of about thirty men (some in the familiar black shirts and camouflage pants) outside a cafe in the working-class suburb of Amfiali and stabbed twice in the chest, allegedly by a man who later told the police that he is a member of Golden Dawn. (As ever, the official police statement tiptoed around the issue, coyly stating that material from “a particular political tendency” was found in his apartment.)

The murder feels like part of a deliberate escalation: it comes at the end of a week of political (as opposed to merely racist) shows of force by the neo-Nazis. Last Thursday, some fifty blackshirts armed with clubs and crowbars set on thirty Communist Party supporters leafletting in Perama, one of Athens’s poorest neighbourhoods; nine communists were taken to hospital with serious injuries. Over the weekend, leftists protested a wreath-laying by a Golden Dawn MP on the memorial to victims of the Nazis in a northern village; a member of the MP’s entourage responded with a fascist salute. On Sunday Golden Dawn supporters disrupted a memorial at Meligalas for the hundreds of collaborators and their suspected supporters killed by the wartime left resistance as the Nazis withdrew; two Golden Dawn MPs seized the microphone from the mayor and lambasted the “traitor” government, while their acolytes skirmished with members of less “pure” nationalist groups.

In Greece, history is a powerful symbolic battleground. Having drawn the government onto its territory on immigration, Golden Dawn is raising the stakes and moving more explicitly against fascism’s deepest enemy, which has always been the left (or, in the neo-Nazis’ term “Judeo-Bolshevism”). Most of the 15 percent of Greeks who recently told pollsters they would vote for Golden Dawn have no interest in such ideological niceties; indeed, some are former left voters who’ve bought the populist, anti-immigrant and anti-elitist packaging in which the party has wrapped its neo-Nazi core. Without the aid and comfort of successive governments—especially Antonis Samaras’ New-Democracy led coalition—there is no way Golden Dawn would have the support it now enjoys.

New Democracy has played a dangerous game with the neo-Nazis, trying to win back votes by adopting some of its rhetoric and policies while using it as a vigilante force against immigrants and leftists—with help from Golden Dawn supporters inside the police. Samaras and some of his close advisers, have long-established links with the old Greek far right; a few days ago a well-known TV journalist floated the notion of a coalition between New Democracy and a “more serious” Golden Dawn.

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But Golden Dawn’s success depends on its being seen as an anti-systemic force. There are indications of tensions within the movement: some members apparently want to clean up the party’s image and recruit more “respectable” candidates, while others want to expand the stormtroopers on the streets. With Fyssas’s murder, the radical wing has reared its head to snap at those who nurtured it—and at a critical moment for the government. The Troika’s representatives are knocking at the door to measure Greece’s progress before releasing the next loan; there’s a forty-eight hour strike on against cuts and layoffs. Some of the balance sheets may be looking a bit less bad, but more people are going hungry. The Greek “success story” promoted in the European press is now painfully thin; and in Germany Angela Merkel is up for re-election.

Prime Minister Samaras has gone on television today to condemn the neo-Nazis, for once playing down the rhetoric of “extremes of left and right” which usually accompanies these soul-searching moments. Public Order Minister Nikos Dendias has vowed to defend democracy and to discuss changing the law that defines criminal organizations and armed gangs. Neither of these men are fascists by conviction (though some in Greece call them that), but they have made common cause with a dark force they can’t and never could contain. What they have to offer now is too little and too late.

What comes next is almost anybody’s guess. Pavlos Fyssas’s murder has brought Greece’s little problem to the world’s attention; there are calls inside and outside the country for Golden Dawn to be banned. I don’t foresee this happening in a hurry. The party’s more radical elements—and its leadership—would like nothing better; they have repeatedly challenged the government to do just that. And, with a paper-thin majority and more reforms to push through at the point of the Troika’s gun, I doubt the government will risk the elections that would follow, even in the eighteen seats that Golden Dawn now holds.

Unless, that is, the snake decides to slough off its rougher skin, changes its name, learns manners, worms its way still deeper into Greece’s heart.

Washington Redskins helmets displaying the emblematic colors and team mascot.  Recent debate over the racist connotations of the team name have lead to several sports reporters weighing in. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

“Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it”   —A Fish Called Wanda

Living in the Washington, D.C., area. I have many friends who defend the name of our local football team, the Redskins. Even though I disagree with them vehemently, I actually feel bad that their chief advocate in the sports world is now ESPN’s Rick Reilly. Once a brilliant boy-wonder columnist for Sports Illustrated, Reilly has, to be kind, not aged well. He has become the sports writing equivalent of the safety information packet on an airplane: the thing you do not read. But alas, after much prompting, I have much to my regret read his latest. Reilly has written a column in defense of the Redskins name that is so myopic, so insulting and, frankly, so stupid, it makes the piece on Fox Sports comparing Johnny Manziel to Rosa Parks look like the work of Frank Deford. By all means check it out and make up your own mind, or take comfort that I read it so you wouldn’t have to. No one would blame you.

Let’s start with the first sentence. Reilly writes, “I guess this is where I’m supposed to fall in line and do what every other American sports writer is doing. I’m supposed to swear I won’t ever write the words ‘Washington Redskins’ anymore because it’s racist and offensive and a slap in the face to all Native Americans who ever lived.”

“Every other sportswriter”? Try three. Three mainstream media sportswriters have taken this step. They are Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, USA Today’s Christine Brennan and, in a serious but satirical way, ESPN’s Bill Simmons. Later in the column, Reilly will trash King and Brennan by name, but lacks the sand to call out Simmons. If nothing else, he knows where his maize is buttered.

Reilly then talks about his family, writing, “I just don’t quite know how to tell my father-in-law, a Blackfeet Indian [that the name is racist]. He owns a steak restaurant on the reservation near Browning, Mont. He has a hard time seeing the slap-in-the-face part.”

Some of his best friends—and family—are Native American. Your father-in-law who owns a steakhouse on the res loves the name? Good for him. The Oneida Nation wants it changed. So we can stand with the Oneida Nation, or Reilly’s father-in-law. That’s a tough one.

Later, in an aside, Reilly quotes his father-in-law voicing strong opposition to the Kansas City Chiefs’ name, but Reilly doesn’t dwell on this because it interrupts his central thesis. And oh my, what a thesis it is.

“White America has spoken,” he pens with what I’m sure he imagines is sardonic relish. “You [Native Americans] aren’t offended, so we’ll be offended for you.”

You read correctly. In Reilly’s world, Redskins is loved—as he underlines repeatedly—by Native Americans and hated by “white America”. Is this true? If “white America has spoken” it’s been loudly and proudly to keep the Redskins name. The mood, judging from my Twitter feed, is probably best described as “You will pry my Redskins foam finger and matching headdress from my cold, dead hands!”

Every poll shows overwhelming support for preserving the name as is. But saying “white America” is imposing this name change on the Native American community is not only ass-backward. It is incredibly insulting to every Native American—people like the original activists of the American Indian Movement, Suzan Harjo and Vern Bellecourt—who have organized to change it in the face of constant abuse by high-profile, invariably white sportswriters like Rick Reilly. By not giving even token mention to the long history of Native American organizing or agency, Reilly makes them invisible or implies that they are just pawns of this PC liberal elite just looking to be offended for the sake of being offended.

But the contention of people like Harjo and the Oneida Nation, unmentioned by Reilly, is not that mascots are “bad” in a vacuum. Their argument is that we have created a connective tissue between mascots and the dehumanization of their culture, which enables us to look the other way as Native Americans consistently have the lowest life expectancy, highest child mortality rate, and lowest standard of living of any ethnicity in the country. We can debate whether this connective tissue truly exists—I believe it does—but for Reilly to not even acknowledge the issue smacks of the worst kind of blinkered white privilege that people like Suzan Harjo have argued “mascoting” creates.

Reilly then goes on to write of all the Native American school districts that “wear the [Redskins] name with honor” (he names three). Reilly ignores, however, the students in Cooperstown, New York, who organized a successful grassroots campaign to throw the name Redskins in the garbage over the summer. He also ignores that the last forty years are actually a constant history of schools and teams disavowing Native American mascots. Did you know that St. Bonaventure, to use just one example, was once known as the Brown Indians and the Brown Squaws until they changed their names in 1992? Reilly doesn’t either.

But Rick Reilly is not done. He points out that Redskins existed for eighty-two years, so why change now? As mentioned, this is ignorant of the forty years Native Americans have agitated to change it. But forget that. Imagine someone saying to Claudette Colvin, “You people have been on the back of this bus for forty years. Why is this now an issue?” Or to the suffragettes, “Sweetie, you couldn’t cast a vote for a century. Now it’s a problem?” Actually we don’t have to imagine it. That’s exactly what people, the Rick Reillys of their day, have always said to oppressed groups to make them sit down and shut up. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an entire book, Why We Can’t Wait, to answer this. I’d suggest Reilly read some King, but I fear he’d say, “Peter King wrote a book?”

But oh, there’s more. So much more. Every tired argument —“PC!” “New Orleans Saints offends atheists!” “There are people who think Wizards promotes paganism!” “Forty-niners offends crusty old prospectors searchin’ for gold!” (sorry, that one was mine)—is exhumed. The problem with these arguments—hell, with this whole column—is that it ignores this pesky thing that happened called history. Reilly likes numbers so here are some more. The percentage of Native Americans in the United States is roughly 0.8 percent of the population. Before Europeans landed on these shores, it was—shocker—100 percent. Without massacres, displacement and depopulation, there would be no way a team could think of getting away with the name “Redskins.” And here’s a handy rule of thumb: if your team name exists only because there was a genocide, then you might need a new team name.

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Reilly then ends his column with something so disgusting, so absent of any historical perspective, it renders everything before it a mere aperitif. Writing as if a member of this white PC media horde trying to change the name, he exclaims, “Trust us. We know what’s best. We’ll take this away for your own good, and put up barriers that protect you from ever being harmed again. Kind of like a reservation.”

Like a poop in the pool, I think I’m just going to let that sit there and speak for itself.

I almost feel sorry for team owner Dan Snyder that Rick Reilly is now his loudest media advocate. Almost. When you defend the indefensible, you get the bedfellows you deserve, and more often than not, you hate yourself in the morning. A simple test for Rick Reilly: answer the challenge of Ray Halbritter of the Oneida Nation. Go to his house, look at his grandchildren and say, “My goodness these are some cute little Redskins.” If it is really a name of honor, you will make the trip and say it to the Halbritters. If you won’t, then you are completely full of it. News flash: he won’t.

Dave Zirin talks about indigenous voices in the Redskins name change debate.

(Stoneflower Pottery)

Writing Contest Co-Winner

We’re delighted to announce the winners of The Nation’s eighth annual Student Writing Contest. This year we asked students to answer this question in 800 words: It’s clear that the political system in the US isn’t working for many. If you had to pick one root cause underlying our broken politics, what would it be and why? We received close to 700 submissions from high school and college students in forty-two states. We chose one college and one high school winner and ten finalists total. The winners are Jim Nichols (no relation to The Nation’s John Nichols), an undergraduate at Georgia State University; and Julia Di, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Darnestown, Maryland, and Bryn Grunwald, a recent graduate of the Peak to Peak Charter in Boulder, Colorado, who were co-winners in the high school category. The three winners receive cash awards of $1,000 and the finalists $200 each. All receive Nation subscriptions. Read all the winning essays here.   —The Editors

Yes, I admit I have a dirty little secret: I do not follow politics whatsoever. Who ran during the 2012 elections—Obama and Biden, Romney and who? Paul Ryan, you say? Yeah, I’ve totally heard of him. You can ask me about anything else. Show me any high school math exercise and I will slap a QED on it within the hour. Give me any piece of figurative language and I will polish off an analytical essay in less than twenty-five minutes. But ask me about politics, and you might as well ask me to fly using my teeth. I ignored television for the months leading up to the election. During the debates I was busy falling asleep.

I am part of the underlying problem behind our broken politics: political apathy, especially among the youth. Unfortunately, I am not alone. Out of my 291 Facebook friends, only one actively campaigned for a candidate during the 2012 election. During the 2012 elections, 93 million eligible Americans did not vote, resulting in a turnout rate lower than the past two elections—continuing a nearly consistent plummet in participation since 1964. Even the Youtube versions of President Obama’s speeches fail to reach their targeted youth audiences: Baracksdubs, a channel that features President Obama “singng” pop tunes, receives millions more page views per video than the official White House Youtube channel.

What dominoes fall as a result of our political indifference? The first domino that falls is information accuracy. The only way politics captures public attention is by shocking us: we listen attentively to provocative soundbites, radical declarations and chant-worthy catchphrases. In our busy, busy world, worker bees have neither the time nor energy to keep an ear open for hour-long speeches. Instead, we catch up on politics—if at all—through the snippets served on the news, resulting in an ill-informed or even misinformed public. The 2012 election deluged viewers with catchphrases (“You didn’t build that” and “47 percent.”) For those many who do not fact-check political rhetoric, damning catchphrases without context become entire campaign policies, gaining undue leverage in a potential voter’s rationale.

The second domino to fall is financial morality. Because of an apathetic public, politicians must spend increasingly more money to reach their viewers through a variety of means, ranging from televised ads to Twitter. The 2012 election was the most expensive in American history, surpassing $6 billion and continuing a long trend of money in politics. The need for large campaign funds both during and after races results in two devastating outcomes: politicians splitting their focus between fixing America and fundraising, and “big money” influencing politicians and calling legislative shots. Both corrode our political system, wasting time and corrupting the legislature. Yet we are to blame for the lack of financial morality in today’s politics. The founding fathers meant for the American public to elect our government. Corruption ultimately occurs because we, the apathetic people, fail to police our government properly.

The final domino to fall is camaraderie. Washington is polarized, more so than “any time in the last century.” Editorialization and corruption have fueled congressional gridlock, but the root is the dearth of moderates necessary for cooperation between the two parties. Because apathetic Americans have no voting power, many politicians must tailor their campaigns to the extremes to raise money and to secure support from the most engaged voters. Yet doing so further divides the political atmosphere, to the point where compromise becomes a dirty word and the other party becomes “the opposition.” Bring back the moderates and we bring back the camaraderie to fix our political system.

Dominoes pack a punch: a single ideal domino can topple another that is 200 percent larger, as calculated this year by physicist Hans van Leeuwen. The same physics applies to our political atmosphere. Something as seemingly insignificant as an apathetic American can cause the paralysis of our entire nation. We need to address and redress the unhelpful belief that politics are boring, inaccessible and even unimportant. Backwards thinking results in backwards doing, and if we want to change our political system we must first start with a national attitude adjustment.

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The first to adjust must be our youth demographic—starting with me. I live just an hour’s drive from the White House and cannot explain any of President Obama’s bills. I have not heard a single presidential speech. I cannot even name the speaker of the House. But I still have eyes for learning and ears for listening, and as my final year of high school looms, I have realized that the gridlock today jeopardizes the health of my future. Luckily, we are the architects of our own story. We can choose to let the dominoes fall.

Or we can choose to stop them all.

Student Writing Contest co-winner Jim Nichols discusses the rise of market liberalism in the U.S.