Strange Species: The Boomer University Intellectual

Posted on by Matt Bokovoy

Henri Lefebvre

*** I had the opportunity to first publish this review essay in Reviews in American History toward the tail end of the Bush II administration, and right as the 2008 financial crisis ruined the country. I brushed it up a bit for presenting it below***

Strange Species: The Boomer University Intellectual

Matt Bokovoy

Eric Lott. The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual. New York: Basic Books, 2006. xi + 260 pp. $26.00.

      “As historians, we do take opposing positions, but we seem to be united on one thing: a reluctance to debate” controversial topics in American history. So says Richard White recently, president of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Worried about scholarly timidity and “a prickly over-professionalization,” White notices there has been “a culture of caution – that has begun to influence all of us. We have become each other’s hostages” in a university system that exists to minimize controversy, and where a new genteel ethic rewards cautious historical interpretations and scholarly demeanor. “Politics” has been shorn from informed historical critique, and academics hide behind the authority of credentials. On the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the OAH, White believes, “In a profession where we should wear our wounds proudly and confront our critics gladly, we prefer to be safe and guarded and fear that we have enemies who can cost us our reputations – We should celebrate scholars who draw strong reactions,” he worries. “Instead, we shy away from them.” Certainly, this development is not new regarding the place of intellectuals within both the American university system and society-at-large. The critical writings and political stances of academics have consistently elicited internal and external pressures since the post-Civil War emergence of the modern university, especially during times of conservatism, social upheaval, war, or anti-intellectualism. Writing more than forty years ago, Laurence Veysey explained how university administrators worked to maintain the integrity of their institutions, where dignity “was a jealous master. It required, first of all, a certain solemnity of countenance; it frowned upon the humor born of irreverence – Still more importantly,” noted Veysey, “dignity urged that the institution, no matter how torn with dissent, appear united and harmonious to all who look upon it from the outside. – If unfavorable publicity prevented such a posture, then dignity insisted that the leadership take visibly stern measures against the threat to its authority.” Much like the recent past, the early modern university “had little room for trouble-makers in its midst.” Provocative historical writing today, notes one scholar of the profession, usually leads to undue scrutiny by special interest groups, dismissal from the university, or both. Whether this is a problem of “quality” of product in public intellectual work or not, historical criticism can become relevant only when present questions of political concern lend understanding to the past.[1]

Eric Lott’s The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual examines the generational gap in the American academy during the last fifteen years with fighting words and bold claims, revealing an impaired radicalism on the academic Left he calls “boomeritis.” Lott charges university-affiliated and independent, boomer scholars with wimpy progressive and reformist thinking in his construction of recent intellectual history, such as Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, Michael Lind, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Berman, Stanley Crouch, Greil Marcus, Sean Wilentz, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others. Boomer intellectuals write and speak “in the service of a new ideal of social democratic reform” and “lament the rise of ‘divisive’ new social movements – often described as ‘identity politics’ or the ‘cultural left’ – and the decline of a liberal Americanism that is in most of its versions explicitly nationalist, racially revanchist, and at best Clintonian in its address to social class” (pg. 2). The author finds the radical spirit of university intellectuals reared during the 1960s and 1970s lacking in critical vision, defining the condition as “little more than political complacency with a relatively youthful face” where one can “see boomer liberalism in all its aspects as a kind of ‘progressive osteoarthritis’ of the mind – a boneheaded degeneration of the radical spirit and one of the chief obstacles to a reconstruction of social and political life in the twenty-first century” (pg. 2). Even though Lott finds himself a cohort of the baby boom generation, scholarly circles under age forty will likely respond with quiet enthusiasm to the author’s accusations disguised as informed criticism. This may be true because the book speaks to the transformation of scholarly imperatives in the university system and a younger generation’s distance from – and direct inheritance of – the legacies of 1960s radical intellectuals.

     The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual resembles a manic, scholarly lament rather than well-wrought criticism of the Clinton and Bush Era intellectual scene. The author proposes to critique the boomer intellectual retreat on African American social justice movements, liberalized radicalism, the perils of cosmopolitan nationalism, and liberal support for the Iraq War and economic globalization. Lott lays out a three-part topology to group boomer intellectuals, following “an organizational commitment: to identify these apparently various minds as a front in order to better combat them.” For Lott, argument about the role of the intellectual left could take a lifetime, so he finds his efforts “as a warrant to take out bourgeois thinkers in the relatively autonomous realm of debate and polemic” (pg. 17). He calls these tendencies neoliberal historicism, neoliberal Marxism, and neoliberal culturalism that stand as so many modest proposals of boomer liberalism shorn from the history of radicalism. With fists raised, Lott proclaims with a lack of seriousness, “I smell boomer blood” (pg. 22). What the author actually unravels in The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual is a generational shift within the academy, where the history of social and economic class has been subsumed by younger scholars of race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and the relationship of “culture” to political and economic power. And this development worries the New Left, boomer intellectuals and has become the basis of their public criticism: a type of intellectual cannibalism where Zeus eats his young so that no heirs would contest his power.

The author examines the legacies and transformation of New Left intellectuals, and their move away from formerly radical positions in public intellectual debate. His main purpose aims to “help clear the air of certain false prophesies and propose some ideas for a fresh conception of radical democracy in the United States” (pg. 3). Products of a lifetime spent in the American university first as students and finally as professors, it is no wonder some New Leftist’s radical and youthful activism changed to reformist institutionally-based proposals. This is the problem of generations and age, a tempering of vision due to experience and the rewards of success within university bureaucracies. Lott portrays Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998) as little more than a contentious reform tract more prone to attacking the academic Left than proposing radical, social and political change. The author believes Rorty “conveniently presents himself as a liberal martyr drowned out by noisy know-nothing leftists who just don’t get that intellectuals, boosted by the kind of national pride found in Lincoln or Whitman, should focus on policy rather than speculative debate, on economic inequality rather than what Rorty calls ‘stigma’ (race, for example), and on practical reform rather than radicalism” (pg. 30). Rorty offers little more than the plans devised by Clinton’s centrist, Democratic Leadership Council during the 1990s.

Lott finds a “similar political Cassandrism dressed up as tough-minded intellectual responsibility” as he turns to Paul Berman and Todd Gitlin, arguably two high-profile New Left intellectuals (pg. 31). The author brings the social critic Berman to task for his belittling historical revisionism focused on the excesses of the New Left and ethnic-based social movements in his book A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (1996), as well as Gitlin’s The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars ( 1995) that blames scholars of racial and ethnic identity, and its politics, for destroying the legacy of the New Left with unrealistic academic radicalism. Lott uncovers the mea culpa of an aging intellectual generation, noting that Berman merely thinks “such radicalism lives today in a variety of new social struggles around race, sex, class, disability, and many others,” and that Berman “finds these too mere ‘revolutions of self,’” therefore, there are no intellectual heirs to the New Left (pg. 32). Similar to Berman, Lott examines how Gitlin denigrates the scholarship of political autonomy found within multiculturalism, identity politics, and new social movements rather than “demonstrate how that autonomy cripples the left, which would at least necessitate taking new social struggles seriously” (pp. 38-39). Berman and Gitlin share a special disdain for the Black Power Movement, blaming the Black Panthers’ militant rhetoric and racial separatism for the destruction of the New Left. As with so much selective memory and lack of scholarly insight, Peniel Joseph has recently shown the legacy of Black Power to be quite the opposite despite the movement’s problems, steeped squarely within the American radical tradition of the 1930s civil rights movement, and connected to women’s and gay rights movements at its demise.[2]

Incapable of believing that new social movements after 1968 embraced radical humanism, New Left public intellectuals like Gitlin and Berman view new social movements project as abandoning a “univeralist left” for smaller prizes. One wonders where to lay the blame, on the assimilation of university-based New Left intellectuals into the comforts ofo institutional life or on new research trajectories in the modern university. Historian Robin Kelley argues the failure of Gitlin’s generation to “conceive of these social movements as essential to the emancipation of the whole remains the fundamental stumbling block to building a deep and lasting class-based politics.” In a similar vein, literary critic Timothy Brennan alleges leftist intellectual debate from 1975 to 1980 shifted from a commitment to social democratic politics to a commitment to political identities. He believes both tendencies require integration for effective leftist politics. The shift from a universalist left to a separatist left, however, had little to do with debates among university-based Left intellectuals. The new legal climate in the United States after civil rights created the legal infrastructure and federal programs needed to ensure economic and racial equality. Agencies of the federal government defined individuals and social groups by markers of race. The terms of debate on the intellectual Left became shaped by society’s acknowledgment that historic recompense for racial discrimination and inequality required delving into questions of identity and culture. And there was nothing necessarily disingenuous, as scholars like Gitlin and Berman have claimed, about this turn of events.[3]

The roles of cosmopolitanism, liberal nationalism, black intellectuals, neoliberalism, radical social movements, and anti-Americanism preoccupy Lott in later chapters of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual. Regarding David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995), Lott charges “it’s frankly a bourgeois fantasy to suppose an affirmation of cultural diversity could proceed in any meaningful sense beyond the reach of the disadvantage in and through which many U.S. cultural fractions have been formed” (pg. 51). Rather than offer evidence to counter Hollinger’s argument to move beyond political and biological racial categories, Lott ridicules him without knowledge of recent historical scholarship on race and politics, identity and community, to bolster his claims.[4] The author positions minor works in American and literary studies as evidence of “public intellectual work,” like Walter Benn Michael’s Our Country: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) and Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature (1993) that garnered limited, academic audiences only. Lott accuses Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. with tailoring their criticism to assuage white guilt over racial discrimination. The author thinks Dyson’s work “speaks without tooth to power” (pg. 102), implicates Gates for speaking out against “black anti-Semitism” in the op-ed pages of the New York Times (pg. 105), and excoriates Cornel West for his Christian-Marxist emphasis to oppose the “loss of hope and absence of meaning” and the “culture of nihilism” among black youth in America. West’s argument is “not only wrongheaded but purely ideological. It is difficult to overstate the danger of this virtually neoconservative perspective,” (pg. 114). Lott misses West’s concerns that beyond socio-structural limitations to black equality, the psychological effects of poverty and a life of diminished expectations immobilizes individuals. To explain political apathy in the United States, the author suggests fascination with Bill Clinton’s body “became the chief way of coming to grips with our relation to the state apparatus” (pg. 133). The argument that certain boomer intellectuals lack radical vision to transform society is alluring and likely true, yet Lott mobilizes little evidence or rhetorical skill to persuade the reader otherwise.

In the last two chapters, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual proves more convincing in its evaluation of the work of Robin Kelley and the agony of accusations against the “cultural Left” found in the pages of Dissent Magazine and other liberal review venues before and after the invasion of Iraq in March 2002. Lott wonders whether holding “fast to their ‘60s beliefs did they [boomer intellectuals] ensure their own obsolescence in an age of queer, feminist, and other new(er) social movements?” (pg. 5). The author praises Kelley’s willingness to see local political resistance in the workplace and everyday life as forms of class politics based on racial identity and economic inequality. In works like Hammer and Hoe (1990) and Race Rebels (1994) “Kelley produces an array of skirmishes between black workers and whites’ overseers,” explains the author, “to indicate not only the untold ways in which workers fought back but what they fought about” (178). Kelley’s work resonates with the Post-War projects of independent French Marxists like Cornelius Castoriadis, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau, all of whom wrote extensively about the working class, political autonomy outside of traditional trade union structures, consumer movements, and within the everyday life of worker leisure. Particularly striking here is the similarity to Castoriadis’ theory of worker autonomy during the wildcat auto strikes against the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy when he visited Detroit during the 1950s and fully developed this theory as a staple of working class organization under bureaucratic capitalisms. Lott rightly shows the social democratic possibilities of Kelley’s work against the dismissiveness of boomer intellectuals. The boomer intellectuals find no activist inspiration in this well-articulated tradition, likely due to the parochialism of boomer intellectuals locked in unaware, nationalist intellectual traditions. They would rather berate the “political fantasies” of the cultural Left for drawing on other national traditions despite the empirical basis of this work. Boomer intellectuals see little value in the home-grown writings of radical, social democratic critics like Carey McWilliams, who was venomously red-baited by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other New York intellectuals during the 1950s and 1960s, or the writings in Common Ground (1940-1949), the publication of the Common Council for American Unity during World War Two.[5] For boomer intellectuals, followers of various internationalist traditions such as that of Castoriadis, Lefebvre, and others must reflect “academic radicalism,” despite the fact both philosophers’ theories derive from social action and political experience when they fought against German, Italian, and fascism in the underground resistance during World War Two. The experience influenced their critiques of Cold War bureaucratic capitalisms profoundly.[6]

The polarization of the American Left preoccupies Lott in the final chapter, where he details the verbal broadsides of Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, Michael Kazin, and Christopher Hitchens against the anti-imperialist and activist far Left. Commenting on an opinion page feature Gitlin wrote for the New York Times in September 2002, where he criticized some on the far Left for standing behind anti-imperialism and not supporting humanitarian imperialism, Lott charges “any sense of hesitancy about a war on ‘terror’ is ascribed to a loony left; U.S. imperialism, if it isn’t seen as some left fabrication, seems peculiarly untroubling” (pg. 184). The author believes Paul Berman’s much discussed Terror and Liberalism (2004) “is downy soft on U.S. imperial ambitions – and he continues to defend the anti-totalitarian language of Cold War liberalism, now in the context of fundamentalist Islam” (pg. 199). Boomer intellectual criticism of the lunatic left conjures the diatribes of Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado and Richard Berthold of University of New Mexico, but it hardly characterizes the position of the American Left. Some leftist scholars questioned why Islamic fundamentalists would attack America; others embraced pacifism and calls for diplomacy as a principle for lack of military retaliation; while others saw the erosion and potential revocation of civil liberties on the horizon. In this respect, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual has uncovered a tendency among boomer intellectuals to crowd the stage of public debate and pave over their previously held political positions in one fell swoop when their proposals become unpopular or simply wrong-headed.

The righteousness of conscience on the boomer left, found prominently within the pages of Dissent, likely had luminaries such as Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Jane Addams, and Merle Curti rolling in their graves. Jeffrey Isaac likened the stance of anti-imperialists and pacifists on the far Left as “a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice – pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand.” Michael Walzer castigated in disingenuous fashion the supposed unsympathetic response of the far Left to 9/11. “Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics,” he said, “Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power” without naming or critiquing the position of one, single writer. Michael Wreszin, the biographer of Dwight Macdonald, argued against this agony of the boomer intellectuals, noting “Walzer, among others, decries the ‘indecent’ left’s lack of sympathy for the victims of terrorist attacks. There is something drastically wrong with a political analysis that judges whether one has shown enough concern for the victims.” With Dissent writers’ strong on polemic but short on insight, Wreszin lamented, “From the offices of the White House to the chambers of Congress, we now hear demands that Americans speak with one voice. If that should happen, all is lost.” Michael Kazin responded: “A left that followed Wreszin’s lead would continue to be essentially what it was in the months right after the minions of Osama Bin Laden smashed into our lives: a movement of bitter iconoclasts and moral cynics.” History has proven Dissent wrong, of course. No matter, they will rewrite their former positions in future issues of the magazine to disguise their inabilities to offer insight on the pertinent issues. During World War Two, Louis Adamic, the Slovenian-American socialist, preferred the term “inclusive defense” for love of country. It was “a wide-flung and deep-reaching offensive for democracy within our own borders and our own individual makeups.” He believed the left should not advance an “against program – mere ‘anti-fascism,’ mere ‘anti-totalitarianism’ is insufficient” and “may itself result in fascism and totalitarianism.” Adamic knew well his Eighteenth Brumaire. To Dissent, Wreszin the World War Two veteran is wrong. The old adage, “beware those who have not known war” still holds true.[7]

      The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual follows in the long tradition of the American jeremiad in many respects. The historian Russell Jacoby had previously riled the academy with his 1987 book The Last Intellectuals: Politics and Culture in the Age of Academe. Jacoby equated the professionalism and scholarly antiquarianism of the university with the gentrification of the American city, the decline of urban bohemia that cultivated independent critics and scholars, and the uneasiness of institutional censorship during the Reagan years. Nearing the twentieth anniversary of publication, Jacoby’s durable book called for a more open, daring, and independent engagement of scholarship with public life. He argued the free-thinking intellectual had “been supplanted by high-tech intellectuals, consultants and professors – anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life.”[8] The book caused a major stir because his argument rang true. It rankled professional historians who sensed a Trojan horse among their ranks. In Intellect and Public Life, Thomas Bender charged Jacoby’s book was “a careless, ill-conceived, and perhaps even irresponsible book,” but noted that scholarly irrelevance and careerism constituted worrisome trends for university-based intellectuals.[9]

Jacoby documented a quiet censorship and uneasy comfort behind the university barricade during the 1980s. Lott reveals similar trends, finding behind the barricade uninspired criticism, plum commercial publishing contracts for mostly vapid trade books, a bully pulpit in the mass media where scholars are experts of everything, and increasing institutional rewards for contributing nothing of real value to the public debate. Jacoby pinpointed correctly the demise of public intellectuals with changes in the modern university, especially the structure of incentive regarding compensation and promotion. He explained, “New Left intellectuals acquired the benefits” of university employment such as “regular salaries, long vacations, and the freedom to write, and sometimes teach, what they wanted.” But this steady arrangement came with a price: “Vast insecurities beset the academic enterprise. One’s future depended on a complex set of judgements made by colleagues and administrators. Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored.” Lott merely berates boomer intellectuals for reaping the structures of reward and status in the new corporate university. Nor does the author engage the ideas of boomer intellectuals well, and embarks upon an intellectual project largely of his own making. Lott does usefully suggest, however, why baby boom intellectuals did a “political about-face” and came “home to centrism tail between the legs” (pg. 5).

But are boomer intellectuals really more influential than the cultural Left they bemoan? Perhaps not. Laurence Veysey explained the “price of structure” for intellectuals during the early years of the modern university. As a product of institutional prestige and incentive, “only a handful of American professors in this period were as influential as they liked to think. Most faculty researches stand unopened on the shelves of university libraries a half-century later, since in the interim nearly every field has turned its attention to newer problems of inquiry.” Peter Novick has explained well the plight of radicalism in the historical profession and university, for the “very acceptance of radical historians as legitimate participants in a pluralistic professional discourse carried with it the likelihood that particular aspects of their work would be assimilated in a way which defused its bite” due to the relationship between institutional acceptance and the structure of scholarly incentives. The majority of authors who publish timely and selling public intellectual work reside outside the main confines of academe, writers like Mike Davis, Liza Featherstone, Thomas Frank, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti among others.[10]

Perhaps the aging conservatism among select New Left, public intellectuals signals their move off the historical stage and the twilight of their ideals. Or maybe the Old Left and new social movement intellectuals, like the bond of grandparents and grandchildren, have one common enemy: the child-parent. Russell Jacoby notices how the “utopian spirit – a sense that the future could transcend the present – has vanished” from the work produced by academics today. Finding importance in new work on race and ethnicity, gender, disability, and LGBT in the U.S. academy, Jacoby also reveals a lack of a larger, political vision driving such work, where “politics becomes simply a series of slogans about marginalization, power, discourse and representation. These terms address real problems, but they fail to specify any particular politics. Marginal groups want power or representation, but how or why does this reflect cultural differences or an alternative vision?” Jacoby notes the very reformist and mainstream basis of political proposals in this work, akin to an inclusive bureaucratic capitalism within a broader neoliberal order. Richard White admitted recently that “Public intellectuals are certainly public; it is the intellectual part that worries me” regarding a screed written by Todd Gitlin in Raritan Review. White believes the “best public interventions by scholars are when the stars align and a matter of urgent public interest corresponds to topics to which we have been giving considerable thought and research.” “Then we have a responsibility to speak out no matter how unpopular our positions might be,” counsels White. “The worst moments are when we become pundits – experts on everything, masters of the superficial, purveyors of opinion for opinion’s sake.” Jacoby finds among university intellectuals “collapsing intellectual visions and ambitions – radicals have lost their bite and liberals their backbone.” In our recent climate of war and national conservatism, young professors have little incentive to speak to the public, and feel the quiet censure by their tenure committees and Deans, neoconservative special-interest groups, and university administrators and donors. Most scholarship stays safely within the parameters of professional peer review of publications, subfield discursive communities, institutional incentives, and scholarly “objectivity.”[11]

     The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual although provocative in argument is poor overall in execution and clarity. Should scholars take the book seriously under these circumstances? Perhaps so, even if the combative tone is not one’s style. Lott’s book received sharp rebukes similar to reviews of Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals almost twenty years ago. Nonetheless, the generational shift and intellectual odyssey within the New Left proves an irresistible and promising topic for further investigation and debate to understand the neoliberal intellectual mind.

NOTES

[1] Richard White, “What Are We Afraid Of?,” OAH Newsletter 34, no. 3 (August 2006): 3; Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 381-382; On investigations of controversial scholars, left and right, in the recent past, see Jon Weiner, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower, (New York: The New Press, 2005). Historians on the left, argues Weiner, attract more scrutiny than conservatives; On the issue of “quality” in the public intellectual marketplace, see Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 83-127.

[2] Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006).

[3] Robin Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 110: Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: Cultural Politics Left and Right, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), ix, 147-169.

[4] The list could be exhaustive, see Nancy Shoemaker, American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Matthew Whitaker, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[5] Peter Richardson, American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 198-200; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, (London: Verso, 1996), 445-454.

[6] See Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, David Ames Curtis, trans. and ed., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1975); See also C.L.R. James, Grace Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis), Facing Reality, (1958; reprint, Detroit: Berwick/ed, 1974); Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. by John Moore, (1947; London: Verso, 1991) and Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, vol. 2, trans. by John Moore, (1961; London: Verso, 2002); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Certeau was influenced by Lefebvre’s work, and brought the volumes of the Critique towards social science through structural linguistics.

[7] Jeffrey Isaac, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” and Michael Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left,” Dissent (Spring 2002): 19-20, 35-36; Michael Wreszin, “Confessions of an Anti-American” and Michael Kazin, “Response,” Dissent (Spring 2003): 85, 87; Louis Adamic, “This Crisis is an Opportunity,” Common Ground 1.1 (Autumn 1940): 62-63.

[8] Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: Politics and Culture in the Age of Academe, (New York: Basic Books, 1987), x.

[9] Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 172n1.

[10] Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 118; Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 335; Novick, That Noble Dream, 459: Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, (London: Verso, 2006) and The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, (New York: The New Press, 2005); Liza Featherstone, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart, (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Doug Henwood, After the New Economy, (New York: The New Press, 2003); Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Christian Parenti, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, (New York: The New Press, 2004).

[11] Richard White, “Are Public History and Public Intellectuals in Danger of Becoming Oxymorons?,” OAH Newsletter 34, no. 4 (November 2006): 3; Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xi-xii, 40-41.

 

Autonomy, the State, and Authoritarianism in the United States Presidential Election of 2016

Posted on by Matt Bokovoy

castoriadis-in-paris

     After the first week of the Trump administration and its rapid succession of executive orders to overturn the Obama legacy and set a right-wing, demagogic tone for the next four years, liberal Democrats, leftists of various stripes, moderate Republicans, and even some neoconservatives are currently speaking loudly and publicly about the new administration’s prerogatives on the domestic and international fronts. The political forces and party faithful on the liberal-democratic and traditional American Left currently engage in the best traditions of democracy and the project of autonomy in responding to the rightward trend of political events. They have organized mass protests such as the country-wide Women’s March and instantaneous mobilizations at our nation’s airports to support detained foreign visa and green card holders against the Muslim immigration ban. These radically democratic mobilizations show what Cornelius Castoriadis called “magmatic social imaginary significations.” This is a political praxis or social action that crystallizes the thoughts and democratic, political principles of a mass of citizens into direct social action, and both safeguards and realizes democracy from incursions on autonomy (in Greek, meaning “self-law,” one who gives oneself one’s own law in relation to common life) by authoritarianism. Magmatic social imaginary significations, where the psyche and the social-historical creatively birth democratic social action, cannot emerge among conservative or right-wing citizens and social movements, since the content and basis of their social and political principles aim to restrict democracy, freedom, and liberty to deprive it from other citizens, rather than promote its expansion and growth to cultivate an open society where autonomy can flourish. The term for right-wing and conservative social and political mobilizations is thus known as “false consciousness” that falls under “mass persuasion,” or the manipulation of citizens by political demagoguery. The Trump campaign has told its supporters that things must get worse before they become better, that the need for restricting freedoms and the lack of governmental transparency will lead to its growth. Their political message lacks serious thought and belies ethics. Or in the words of political theorist John Homer Schaar, “Giving thought to what we are doing might reduce damage and confusion. Remember that US officer in Vietnam who said ‘We had to destroy Ben Tu in order to save it.’ When standard ways of thinking and acting reach such depths of bewilderment and destruction as that, then it is time for rethinking.” The United States currently has a new Republican administration that is promising the American people that they must suffer worsening conditions before those conditions become better. This is nothing less than demagoguery and deceit.[i]

As heartening as these political mobilizations appear, they are the same political strategies employed by the liberal social movements of the 1930s and 1960s, which in the last 60 years have been a history of key victories but also a “semi-failure” to create a rights-based social welfare state. Perhaps this is simply a brief socio-historical period of an open society in a longer history of human autonomy. Liberals and Leftists must hope this current mobilization of mass protest does not result, again, in the lack of political imagination to move beyond a postmodern political conformism that has governed the two-party system in the US since the 1960s. It has allowed a non-GOP party candidate to win the 2016 presidential election, backed by a shadow party of extreme and radical Libertarianism supported by the funds of Koch Enterprises, the DeVos family network in western Michigan, among others. Neoconservative fellow-travelers and their SuperPacs, and the motely factions of the far right-wing White Power movement also fed into the revolution within the GOP. The political operators from the fascist “Alt-Right” have infiltrated the GOP, and is actually a fascist, political and social formation. John Boehner, the former Republican Speaker of the House, refers to them as “cannibals.” For liberals and the Left, this has been an adherence to the fundamental precepts of globalized, free-market capitalism in either its liberal-democratic or conservative-traditional form. The embrace of unrestrained and lightly-regulated capitalism is the main problem of the Democratic Party and the liberals and leftists that constitute its party faithful and leadership. However, it is true that Obama’s democratic legislative agenda from 2011 to 2016 was blocked by the GOP majorities in Congress, and Democrats cannot blame the administration or the Democratic Party for this unhappy fact. Liberals and the Left must translate current Liberal-Left political action into Social Democracy rather than a variant of the reigning Liberal-Democratic order that emerged from the New Deal in the post-World War Two Era; a corporatist, semi-welfare State governed by Labor, Business, and the State predicated on a permanent, war economy.[ii] The Democratic Party must prioritize “economic security” policies as the primary-core party principles, replacing its emphasis on “social mobility” policies since the Party mid-term convention in 1978, which saw the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council that moved the party to the center of the political spectrum. In the “liberal-democratic international order” the United States is at the very bottom of the social mobility-economic inequality index, followed upwards by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and then the social democracies of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway at the very top where both social mobility is high, and income inequality is low. Despite the gains of the rights revolution of the 1950s to the 1970s, the United States has the lowest rate of social mobility and the highest economic inequality in the liberal-democratic order.[iii]

In 1989, Castoriadis wrote that of liberal-reformist political and social movements “none of them have been able to propose a new vision of society and to face the overall political problem as such. After the movements of the 1960s, the project of autonomy seems totally eclipsed” and might seem only a short-term, conjunctural development socio-historically. This has been exacerbated and grown worse since Castoriadis first formulated the problem, particularly the economically unstable and authoritarian political systems that emerged in some countries of the former Soviet Bloc during the new era of free-market capitalist globalization after 1989. This is likely due to the current neoliberal consensus around multinational capitalism that supports a global “race-to-bottom,” where corporate enterprises and the very wealthiest citizens drive a global economy predicated on declining wages, pressure on suppliers and manufacturers for highest net margins, evasion of corporate taxation, and seeking the greatest influence for their interests in the political process of respective nation-states that inhibits the project of autonomy. “But the growing weight, in contemporary societies, of privatization, depoliticization, and ‘individualism’ makes such an interpretation [for autonomy] most unlikely,” and Castoriadis noted this was due to the intellectual pauperization of the liberal-democratic and socialist left, as well as conservatives in the embrace of economic liberalism. The corrosive shift to liberal-democratic ideas of social mobility as core political principles is described as well by Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher: “The transition from traditional class cultures to modern culture was destined to give birth to the most violent generational conflict modern men and women had ever known, and this dramatic process repeats itself wherever there are still traditional class cultures.” With social mobility embraced as the core party principles of both the Democratic and Republican parties, it is no wonder that voter discontent is high, voter participation is low, and the electorate is susceptible to demagogic and polarizing political rhetoric in the face of great income inequality and elusive social mobility. The Democratic Party’s central message was one, albeit minor, problem in an election of multiple, detrimental factors that led to electoral defeat. These key factors were Russian hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign, and email and document disclosures on Wikileaks; interference by FBI probes into Clinton’s private email server and announcements of new email revelations (of Anthony Weiner’s) one week before November 8, 2016; the spread of fake news and allegations against the Clinton campaign by non-credible news organizations and individual fake-news trolls; and potentially by uncorroborated reports of assistance and coordination of a misinformation campaign against Clinton between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services. Taken together, these contingent developments in the last six months of the 2016 election disallowed the Democrats to position their message effectively with voters and kept its voters from the polls on election day.[iv]

The essential transformation of liberal and leftist political strategy must radically move beyond its nostalgia for its reformist, liberal-democratic, and New Deal past given its historic defeat by a non-establishment Republican political campaign. The Trump campaign defied both the GOP “shadow parties” and RNC party discipline by its own shadow party of fascist political operatives coming from the fascist “Alt-Right” and its right-wing racist, Neo-Nazi, and isolationist-nationalist core constituency.[v] This is crucial given that Stephen Bannon, the chief political advisor to the Trump Administration, is a far-right-wing political extremist with fascistic strategies and misinformed social and political philosophies. His overblown claims that the Trump presidency involved a “populist” political resurgence around patriotism, jobs, security, and traditional values was a ruse and belies the reasons for its actual triumph. Rather, the Trump victory was solely a case of political demagoguery that entailed the myths and mysteries of a “corrupt Establishment” that spread fears among the electorate that the amorphous “Establishment” (read Congress and the federal government) would ship jobs overseas, close U.S. factories and mines, promote an immorally open-society, and allow immigrants and political refugees into the country that posed internal security threats as well as job competition for white workers.[vi] The Trump campaign pitted its supporters against the very institutions that sustain and cultivate their fundamental well-being through the variety of government services at the municipal, state, and federal level. In the most general of terms, the primary message was that the “Establishment” had sold out the interests of the “American people” across the political spectrum. With the spread of non-credible news organizations and individuals that produce journalistically sub-standard “alt-news” or “fake news” without the standards of truth, and Russian cyber-interference through trolls littering the internet with precisely-directed fake news misinformation about the Clinton campaign, the 2016 presidential election met the criteria for a phenomenon of “mass persuasion” towards both conservative and liberal voters that echoes the conclusions of earlier studies of authoritarianism and political demagoguery by scholars in the Frankfurt School for Social Research after World War Two.[vii]

Bannon is currently consolidating his power and driving policy formation in the Trump Administration aimed at going to war with the federal bureaucracy, the entire Democratic and Republican political “Establishment,” and civil society, particularly the nation’s free press and credentialed media. With much ignorance, he has described himself a “Leninist”[viii] who, in his poor understanding of Lenin, hopes to “destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” He also recently told the media in a New York Times interview, “You’re the opposition party…Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.” He also said “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and listen for a while,” deriding the media and liberals as having “no power.”[ix] He now sits on the National Security Council with the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, since a Trump executive order recently removed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from the NSC. There is every indication that his misinformed views in domestic policy formation, international trade, and foreign relations will prove to be destabilizing, illegal, and dangerous to US interests. He is a disturbing figure with an astonishing contempt for the political institutions of the United States, however, it shows him to be a master, political strategist that must not be underestimated by any means and given no more power. This entails an entirely new, Democratic political strategy based around core principles of economic security and the growth of a social democratic and fully-developed social welfare state that provides basic entitlements such as full employment policies, free higher education, and free health care. Such policies will give successive generations of young, adult Americans a sense of well-being and financial security as they embark for employment in the occupations and professions of the 21st Century.[x]

The Trump Administration, under Bannon, has devised prerogatives ranging from anti-immigrant and political-refugee sentiment and restrictions; the assault on multiculturalism and racial equality; wresting reproduction rights from American women to control their bodies; and state-levels bills to restrict peaceful protest and the right to assembly, free association, and free speech. On the international front, the Trump administration is re-evaluating its long-standing alliance with NATO; realigning trade policy towards bilateral rather than multilateral free trade agreements; stepping up efforts on the “war on terror” through new military alliances and nativist immigration restrictions on Muslim countries and Mexico; and sending warm signals to right-wing and right-leaning governments like Britain, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, and Pakistan. The Trump administration admires these countries for their racial-nationalist political agendas, and a return to a political and cultural traditionalism that runs counter to the current liberal-democratic international order and are hostile to open societies and the individual rights revolution across the West.[xi] With so many actions and messages coming from the White House, this is nothing less than a “divide and conquer” strategy devised to confuse American liberals and the Left around the various aspects of the “legal and individual rights” revolution with each executive order, to inflame the Democrats’ many diverse constituencies and cause infighting and chaos in its ranks. The Trump administration has also been under the pall of a U.S. five-agency counterintelligence investigation looking into Trump campaign-Russian diplomatic and intelligence coordination against the Democratic National Committee and the presidential campaign of Hilary Rodham Clinton, as well as  Senate and House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian meddling in the election, and also Russia-Trump campaign communications, with early calls spearheaded by Republican senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham.[xii]

The five-agency counterintelligence investigation definitively found that the Russians engaged in a covert misinformation campaign against the Clinton campaign and hacked DNC headquarters. The Russian intelligence services hired internet trolls to spread misinformation and fake news about Hilary Rodham Clinton in order to damage her credibility as a presidential candidate and to favor the Trump campaign. The hacked DNC and Clinton campaign emails revealed internal communications from John Podesta, HRC’s campaign manager, and the DNC, released on Wikileaks. More alarmingly, a day after the Director of National Intelligence’s report, a 35-page campaign intelligence dossier surfaced publicly through Buzzfeed, which alarmingly detailed alleged kompromat (compromising information) against Trump by Russia’s FSB (its federal security bureau) indicating sexual blackmail through video tapes of sexually-perverted escapades. The dossier recounts uncorroborated allegations of secret meetings between key Trump campaign advisers and Russian officials that guarantee close diplomatic and economic relations between the countries by lifting sanctions imposed by the Obama administration after Russia’s unlawful invasion of the Ukraine, and its support for the repressive Assad regime in Syria. The assessment findings were issued by the DNI’s task force and the dossier was compiled by a well-respected and credible US intelligence asset, a former senior MI6 intelligence officer working first for anti-Trump Republicans, then anti-Trump Democrats, and then by himself after October 2016 because the intelligence he received was both astonishing and disturbing in its treasonable implications. The former MI6 officer went underground after his identity was revealed because he feared for the safety of himself and his family, given the FSB’s penchant for assassinating its opponents abroad, similar to the KGB from the 1930s to the 1980s.[xiii]

Unfortunately, this turn of events has manifested in intense political polarization initiated by the Trump administration towards both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, sowing political discord within both parties. For Democrats and the American Left, unfortunately, this has devolved into intra-party strife and finger-pointing on the election loss, and credible allegations about Trump campaign-Russian collusion in determining the election, which could be seen as succumbing to mass persuasion, but subsequent unbiased reporting in the mainstream media seems to corroborate. Such infighting deters Democrats from the critical need for realigning party priorities in the face of the fascist, far-right political operation in the White House under Stephen Bannon. Democrats have engaged in party in-fighting by claiming the DNC and the Clinton campaign was corrupt, the DNC “Establishment” sold out the party faithful, or that Clinton was not a viable candidate for the Democrats. The appalling amount of Democratic “anti-Establishment” rhetoric and perceptions of “corruption” within the party resembles the same bogeyman typology of “anti-Establishment” rhetoric espoused by the likes of Bannon and other far-right extremists. In fact, there is no indication that campaign strategy, campaign planks and public speeches, or overall  Democratic National Committee campaign strategy revealed a corrupt “shadow party of money” existing outside the DNC during the campaign to sever the demands of the Democratic Party faithful from the Clinton campaign’s message.[xiv] Democrats blame Clinton’s campaign strategy nationally for being weak or ineffective in reaching white, working class and lower middle class voters, the voters that emerged as the so-called “populist” resurgence allied behind Trump through mass persuasion. The Clinton campaign spoke very directly to America’s working people and how the Democrats planned to attend to their grievances and expectations. Clinton immolated Trump in every single, televised debate on all political issues. Some commentators have erroneously termed this a “working-class political movement,” when in fact those voters existed primarily in the $50,000 to $99,000 income bracket and signals that the lower middle class (petty bourgeoisie) overwhelmingly voted for Trump in those rural counties. The Trump campaign also spent less on voter communications than the Clinton campaign, but hired the “big data” company Cambridge Analytica to precisely target both GOP voters and Democratic voters with psychometrically-designed internet and social media campaigns to either mobilize voters, or deter them from the polls. Cambridge Analytica was subsequently revealed to have approached Wikileaks several times about the Clinton emails as subsequent news reporting has shown. Russian trolls and their cyber-interference of misinformation also did the same on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as the comments sections of major urban dailies as subsequent news reports have shown through analysis of fake social media accounts. This strategy signals a shift of the use of voter demographics as a campaign tool by internet social profiling on social media platforms. It is this strategy of targeting that caused a phenomenon of mass persuasion to confuse swing voters and spread doubts about Clinton’s candidacy among Democrats. The Trump campaign also took all income brackets above $99,000 in the election, indicating that the Democratic Leadership Council’s “suburban strategy” also did not work in swing or contested states as well. This class of voters turned out in significantly higher numbers in rural counties in swing states such as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida to tip the electoral vote to Trump. The Trump campaign also took Pennsylvania and North Carolina, traditional Democratic strongholds, with this out-sized rural, Republican vote. Hilary Rodham Clinton took the popular vote by close to 3,000,000 votes, but the demographic distribution nationally of Democratic voters could not stanch the losses in swing and contested states, losing the electoral vote to Donald Trump and thus the presidency. Given the reliability of our political polling institutions and their social scientific methodologies for forecasting both the popular and electoral vote, the Clinton campaign led by 6% to 11% in the most well-respected polls into late October 2016, until the FBI claimed it had additional Clinton emails one week before the election, and then called the investigation off shortly thereafter. This kept Democratic voters away from the polls due to the perception of a Democratic Party win, fanned polarizing intra-party rhetoric of corruption by the elusive “Democratic Party Establishment,” and revealed the susceptibility of Democratic voters to intentional foreign-directed misinformation against the Clinton campaign through the phenomenon of mass persuasion.[xv]

In the end, the Democrats lost the election due to multiple factors that had less to do with the strategies and message of the Clinton campaign or the DNC, and more to do with the realpolitik actions of the FBI and its director James Comey, the massive proliferation of non-credible news organizations and individual “fake news” trolls, the untruthful claims against Clinton from the Trump campaign, and Russian interference in the presidential election in the form of a campaign of propaganda and misinformation. The Democratic Party’s core platform of a suburban and big labor strategy around social mobility rather than economic security could not cut through the multiple factors to mobilize the party faithful effectively to the polls on election day in key swing states and Democratic strongholds. With the encouraging mass mobilizations of Democratic voters in the past week, now is the time for a realignment of party strategy against a wholly new political animal and fascist shadow party that controls the White House.

[i] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (MIT Press, 1987), 340-373; Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (Harper Brothers, 1949); Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (WW Norton, 1978), 594-617; John Homer Schaar, Legitimacy in the Modern State (Transaction Books, 1981), 9.

[ii] The New Deal initiated the Democratic Party’s embrace of the international financialization of the US economy, leading to its post-WW2 hegemony of international monetary policy and global trade. See Thomas Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser, ed., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton University Press, 1989), 3-31; Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (Verso, 1986), 231-313; Mike Davis, “What’s Wrong With America?,” in In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2007), 42-60

[iii] Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, 256-261; Tony Judt, Ill Fare the Land, (Penguin, 2010), 14-21; Angela Monaghan, “US Wealth Inequality – Top 0.1% Worth as much as the Bottom 90%,” The Guardian UK, 13 November 2014..

[iv] Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalized Conformism,” in David Ames Curtis, ed., World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (Stanford University Press, 1997), 36-38; Oxfam International, An Economy for the 99% (January 2017); Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher, The Postmodern Political Condition (Columbia University Press, 1988), 136-137. Heller and Feher note that modern cultural movements are embedded within three modes of generational political praxis, existentialist, alienation, and postmodern in the post World War Two era, giving rise to a weak sense of political identity and praxis in liberal-democratic systems.

[v] Heather Gerken, “The Real Problem with Citizens United: Campaign Finance, Dark Money, and Shadow Parties,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 159.1 (March 2015): 5-16.

[vi] See Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, revised edition (Cornell University Press, 1998); Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, ed., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

[vii] Lowenthal and Guterman, Prophets of Deceit; For an earlier period of anti-Communist demagoguery that shows continuity with the 1930s, see Ellen Schrekcer, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University Press, 1998), 42-153; David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 41-110)

[viii] Bannon’s ridiculous remarks about Lenin and Leninism show his ignorance of Russian and Soviet history. See Stephen Cohen, Buhkarin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (Oxford University Press, 1980); see also the highly-biased biography of Lenin by Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin (Simon & Schuster, 1964). Lenin’s NEP and Buhkarin’s basic continuation of NEP through the “market road to socialism” expanded rather than destroyed the State. Payne notes the rapid expansion of the Soviet bureaucracy through centralized planning and state industry working within the private sector; see also Tamas Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography (Monthly Review Press, 2015).

[ix] Ken Stern, “Stephen Bannon: Trump’s New CEO, Hints at Master Plan,” Vanity Fair, 17 August 2016; Ronald Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘A Leninist’ Who “Wants to Destroy the State,’” The Daily Beast, 22 August 2016; Michael Grynbaum, “Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media ‘Should Shut its Mouth,’” New York Times, 26 January 2017.

[x] Perry Anderson, “American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers,” New Left Review 83 (Sept/Oct 2013).

[xi] In particular with Russia, Bannon and Trump are enamored of their nationalist “Eurasianism.” See Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 185-296; Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans, ed., Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945  (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 1-34.

[xii] Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, “US Counterintelligence Officials are Examining Possible Ties between Russia and Trump Associates,” Washington Post, 19 January 2017; Abigail Tracy, “The Trump Presidency Begins Under the Pall of Russian Intrigues,” Vanity Fair, 20 January 2017; Jordain Carney, “Senate Committee Moving Forward with Russian Hacking Probe,” The Hill, 24 January 2017; Gareth Davies, “Ex-KGB Chief Who Helped Compile Trump Dossier is Found Dead in Car, Daily Mail UK, 28 January 2017.

[xiii] The Office of the Director of Intelligence, Background to ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution, 6 January 2017; Orbis Business Intelligence, 35 page intelligence dossier, at Buzzfeed.com.

[xiv] Gerken, “The Real Problem with Citizens United; Heather Gerken, “Slipping the Bonds of Federalism,” Harvard Law Review 128, no. 85, 85-123; “2016 Democratic Party Platform,” 21 July 2016, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, available in PDF online.

[xv] John Huang, Samuel Jacoby, Michael Strickland, and K.K. Rebecca Lai, “Election 2016: Exit Polls,” New York Times, 8 November 2016; Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Grogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down,” Motherboard/Vice Magazine, 28 January 2017.