Category Archives: The Atlantic

Justin Trudeau Falls From Grace

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April 11, 2019

Chris Wattie / Reuters

The depressing squalor of the Trump era has created in liberal Americans a gnawing hunger for leaders to admire. Foreign leaders are especially likely to set liberal hearts aflutter, because they are farther away and their flaws less visible. Of all these alternative “leaders of the free world,” it is perhaps Canada’s Justin Trudeau who has enjoyed the most attention. He proclaims himself a feminist, he hugs Syrian refugees as they arrive at Canadian airports, he performs yoga, he is impossibly handsome—what could go wrong?

But there were always two cracks visible in the face Trudeau presented to the world, and over the past three weeks, those lines have widened.

The first flaw: When frustrated or disappointed, he loses his cool. As one person on the receiving end of his ill temper put it to me, “He yells when he does not get his way, then gloats when he does.” The second? Trudeau does not always accurately think through the ultimate consequences of his actions.

Together, those two fault lines create a dangerous formula for bad decision making in times of crisis.

Over the four years since he came to power in November 2015, Trudeau has offset his personal weaknesses by relying heavily on shrewder advisers. But since February, a serious and growing scandal has cost him the service of trusted aides. The head of the civil service has been forced to resign. Trudeau has been left more and more to his own judgment. This past weekend, that judgment tinged the scandal with a new note of farce.

On April 3, in the Canadian House of Commons, Trudeau was forced, under tightly focused questioning by Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, to acknowledge that one of his first important statements about the scandal had been a falsehood.

On April 7, the leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Scheer, revealed that a week earlier, a lawyer for Trudeau had threatened him with a libel lawsuit, a rare step in Canadian politics. One basis of the threat? Scheer had, on March 29, accused Trudeau of lying about the very thing that, on April 3, Trudeau admitted to lying about.

Could the situation get more absurd? Yes! On the evening of April 7, Trudeau’s spinners issued a statement denouncing Scheer for wasting the public’s time talking about issues irrelevant to Canadians’ real concerns—that is, by talking about the lawsuit Trudeau himself had initiated.

Trudeau just failed Kipling’s challenge: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”

The scandal convulsing Canadian politics began with a corruption case involving a large engineering firm, SNC-Lavalin. To secure contracts in Libya a decade ago, SNC-Lavalin paid bribes to the son of the former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Those bribes violated Canadian law. SNC-Lavalin was caught and prosecuted, and faced tough penalties.

Hoping to avert or mitigate the penalties, SNC-Lavalin commenced a lobbying campaign within Trudeau’s Liberal Party almost as soon as it came to power in November 2015. SNC-Lavalin has long been an important Liberal campaign contributor. Its chairman is a supremely well-connected former head of the Canadian civil service.

The trouble for SNC-Lavalin was that the then-federal attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, refused to play ball. JWR, as she’s become known, was the first indigenous Canadian to hold Canada’s top law-enforcement job. She had her own agenda, one that often put her at variance with the rest of the Trudeau government. When the party began to pressure her to help SNC-Lavalin, she refused to yield.

In January 2019, Wilson-Raybould was removed as attorney general and demoted to the lesser job of minister of veterans’ affairs. On February 8, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail published the first story about the pressure campaign on Wilson-Raybould. Four days later, Wilson-Raybould resigned from the cabinet, followed on March 4 by another cabinet official, Jane Philpott.

Trudeau has forcefully denied allegations that he sought to tamper with justice. But again and again, the specifics of those denials have been contradicted—culminating in the explosive revelation on March 29 that Wilson-Raybould recorded a phone call back in December with Michael Wernick, then head of the civil service, in which Wernick intimated to Wilson-Raybould that by refusing to relent on SNC-Lavalin, she was putting her job as attorney general at risk. That’s the core allegation of the scandal, and it now stands as fact.

You can read a transcript of that call. A week before the release of the recording, Wernick announced his early retirement from the civil service.

At each stage of the scandal, Trudeau has defended his actions. But his specific statements of self-defense have again and again proved false.

On February 12, Trudeau told the media that no person had ever suggested to him that his actions on behalf of SNC-Lavalin over the previous months, before the issue came into public view, were in any way inappropriate. This is the falsehood that Poilievre exposed in debate on April 3. Trudeau was compelled under Poilievre’s questioning to admit that Wilson-Raybould had directly told him in September 2018 that she felt the pressure was inappropriate. “Once she said that …” and here the House erupted in shouts, but Trudeau continued: “I responded, ‘No, I am not … It is her decision to make …’ And she then committed to revisit and look into the decision again …”

The trouble was that, when Wilson-Raybould made the decision that was supposedly hers to make, and made it in a way different from the way Trudeau wanted her to make it, she got sacked.

It was for saying these things outside Parliament that Trudeau threatened litigation on March 31. The abrupt collapse of the factual predicate for that lawsuit in the following week led to the unusual outcome that by April 7, the target of the lawsuit eagerly invited the prospective plaintiff to proceed: “If Mr. Trudeau intends to pursue this course of legal action, if he believes he has a case against me, I urge him to do so immediately,” Scheer said. That same day, a spokesperson for the prospective plaintiff dismissed his own threat of a lawsuit as a petty distraction from the important concerns of voters: “Andrew Scheer’s press conference today is yet another attempt at talking about anything other than his own damaging plans for the economy.”

The tabloid Toronto Sun’s headline Monday morning expressed the public reaction of incredulity and mockery: “COURT JESTER.”

The SNC-Lavalin story is the kind of process story that political cynics dismiss as irrelevant to voters’ deepest concerns. Indeed, that has been the Trudeau government’s last line of defense in parliamentary debate. But polls suggest that the story has done enormous damage, with Trudeau now lagging Scheer’s Conservatives by double digits. Canada’s next election is scheduled for October 2019. If it were held today, the Conservatives would probably form a majority government.

Why has the scandal done so much damage?

One reason is economic. SNC-Lavalin is based in Quebec, where it employs 3,400 people. The largest investor in SNC-Lavalin is the Quebec public employees’ pension fund, with a 20 percent stake. That fund has taken a beating on SNC-Lavalin’s share price—and would hugely benefit from an easy punishment of the company for its Libyan bribery.

But at the same time the Trudeau government was bending the law to protect 3,400 Quebec jobs, it was shrugging off a jobs debacle in the western province of Alberta.

Since January 2015, the province of Alberta has lost more than 130,000 jobs off payrolls—and uncounted thousands more among the self-employed. The oil-dependent province’s unemployment rate reached 7.3 percent last month.

You might have expected that the Alberta economy would revive with the improvement in the price of oil over the past two years. But that expectation has bumped into contrary government policy. Alberta is landlocked; its oil must come to market via pipeline. Pipeline capacity is utterly inadequate. The Trudeau government has professed willingness to help, but it has consistently paid more attention to the preferences of environmentalists and the economic demands of indigenous groups. The result: Alberta oil sells at an enormous discount to the world price. In November 2018, at a time when West Texas crude was selling for more than $50 a barrel, Alberta oil fetched only $11 a barrel.

In Canada, the Trudeau brand is deeply associated with the crassest favoritism of Quebec economic interests. The SNC-Lavalin affair confirms every apprehension that a Trudeau in power means second-class citizenship for western Canadians.

Yet the polls indicate that it’s not only in the West that Trudeau’s support is collapsing. And this points to a deeper problem.

Canada’s politics are perhaps the least polarized in the Western world. The Liberals successfully appeal to business-minded voters; the Conservatives effectively compete for ethnic minorities. In an unpolarized polity, personality hugely matters. Justin Trudeau marketed himself as a radically different kind of politician: artless, open, transparent, feminist.

For him to be seen browbeating an indigenous woman to protect politically wired insiders from facing the legal consequences of their wrongdoing—the reaction to that, in the words of a cover story in Maclean’s by the high eminence of Canadian political commentary, Paul Wells, is to emblazon him as “The Imposter.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

The New Science of How to Argue—Constructively

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April 11, 2019

A crack in a white wall
Simon McGill / Getty

In the early days of the internet, way back in the 1990s, tech utopians envisioned a glittering digital future in which people from very different backgrounds could come together online and, if not reach consensus, at least learn something from one another. In the actual future we inhabit, things didn’t work out this way. The internet, especially social media, looks less like a dinner party and more like a riot. People talk past one another, and the discussion spirals down accordingly.

 

Image result for how to argue and win every time

Some of this has to do with, well, people from very different backgrounds coming together online. A common trigger is when specialized terms once restricted to certain corners of academia—think neoliberal or intersectional—leak out into the broader public discourse without everyone agreeing on their precise definitions. If an academic uses the term white privilege on Twitter in an exchange with a nonacademic, for example, some level of animosity might arise simply through a lack of shared understanding over what the term does mean—that white people, on average, enjoy certain benefits relative to other Americans—and what it does not: that all white people are “privileged” in some absolute sense. If you Google no such thing as white privilege, you’ll see a lot of people responding not to what the term actually means, but to a misunderstanding of it. To take one of countless examples, the conservative commentator Brigitte Gabriel once racked up 5,000 retweets by tweeting “I’m an Arab Lebanese born American immigrant with 3 best selling books and a national organization that I founded. There is no such thing as ‘White Privilege.’” She was met, of course, with plenty of repliers who explained angrily that she was misinterpreting the term.

To the Swedish blogger John Nerst, online flame wars like those reveal a fundamental shift in how people debate public issues. Nerst and a nascent movement of other commentators online believe that the dynamics of today’s debates—especially the misunderstandings and bad-faith arguments that lead to the online flame wars—deserve to be studied on their own terms. “More and less sophisticated arguments and argumenters are mixed and with plenty of idea exchange between them,” Nerst explained in an email. “Add anonymity, and knowing people’s intentions becomes harder, knowing what they mean becomes harder.” Treating other people’s views with charity becomes harder, too, he said.

Inspired a few years ago by this rapid disruption to the way disagreement usually works, Nerst, who describes himself as a “thirty-something sociotechnical systems engineer with math, philosophy, history, computer science, economics, law, psychology, geography and social science under a shapeless academic belt,” first laid out what he calls “erisology,” or the study of disagreement itself. Here’s how he defines it:

Erisology is the study of disagreement, specifically the study of unsuccessful disagreement. An unsuccessful disagreement is an exchange where people are no closer in understanding at the end than they were at the beginning, meaning the exchange has been mostly about talking past each other and/or hurling insults. A really unsuccessful one is where people actually push each other apart, and this seems disturbingly common.

The word erisology comes from Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, who proved in antiquity that you could get people into fights by giving them ambiguous messages and letting them interpret them self-servingly and according to their own biases.

As the lore around Eris shows—she who touched off the Trojan War—arguments are hardly a recent development. Neither is the study of argumentation itself. Yet when the ancient Greeks devoted thousands of pages’ worth of text to understanding rhetoric and dialectic—persuasion and logic, to oversimplify a bit—disagreement was a rule-bound endeavor. To persuade someone, you should follow certain rules, both with regard to how your argument is structured and phrased, or you should appeal to this sort of emotion. The goal of all this effort was to make more effective writers or orators, and to gain higher insight through controlled disagreement.

In the intervening millennia, countless young people—in most societies, the wealthy, educated ones—have been instructed in these arts. Then, they write arguments meant to be read by their ideological adversaries, like opinion columns, or engage in speaking events, like debate competitions, meant to be heard and rebutted by them. The system works because, in theory at least, everyone agrees with certain rules, handed down over the years in musty classrooms, about what constitutes an effective argument or a broken one. Even when there isn’t much convincing going on, everyone is more or less playing the same game.

The welcome rise of near-universal literacy and democratic values more generally, as well as the partial dissolution of an entrenched aristocratic class, has put some cracks in this system, and the rise of the internet has blown it up entirely. This has, on balance, been a good thing: More people than ever before have a platform from which to advocate for their positions. But the shift has also brought complications. Just as a space race inevitably yields advances in aeronautics, the online-argument boom promises to keep aspiring erisologists very busy.

Nerst hopes that scholars can learn more about how the divergence in people’s fundamental beliefs and assumptions makes them react to the world in different ways. Better understanding of this, he said, would “make us more humble when facing the task of interacting with other minds in a non-straightforward way.” It could also offer insights about how very specific triggers can cause a disagreement to become out of control. Nerst said that he would “like to know more about how the process of interpreting ambiguous yet loaded-sounding phrases works in the mind.”

As if to subvert the hyperkinetic, screamy, rage-tweet-a-minute culture of today’s online discourse, Nerst rolls out his views on erisology in the form of long, carefully constructed blog posts, borrowing liberally from and building on the ideas of other people.

The concept of decoupling is erisology at its best. Expanding on the writing of the mathematician and blogger Sarah Constantin, who was herself drawing on the work of the psychologist Keith Stanovich, Nerst describes decoupling as simply the idea of removing extraneous context from a given claim and debating that claim on its own, rather than the fog of associations, ideologies, and potentials swirling around it.

When I first heard of decoupling, I immediately thought about the nervous way in which liberals discuss intelligence research. There is overwhelming evidence that intelligence, as social scientists define and measure it, has a strong hereditary component; according to some estimates, genetic factors account for about half the variation in intelligence among individuals. None of that has anything to do with race, because races do not map neatly onto genetic difference. But because the link between intelligence and genetics is so steeped in oppression and ugly history—that is, because charlatans have so eagerly cited nonsense “research” purporting to demonstrate Europeans’ natural superiority—discussions even of well-founded studies about intelligence often end in acrimony over their potential misuse.

Once you know a term like decoupling, you can identify instances in which a disagreement isn’t really about X anymore, but about Y and Z. When some readers first raised doubts about a now-discredited Rolling Stone story describing a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia, they noted inconsistencies in the narrative. Others insisted that such commentary fit into destructive tropes about women fabricating rape claims, and therefore should be rejected on its face. The two sides weren’t really talking; one was debating whether the story was a hoax, while the other was responding to the broader issue of whether rape allegations are taken seriously. Likewise, when scientists bring forth solid evidence that sexual orientation is innate, or close to it, conservatives have lashed out against findings that would “normalize” homosexuality. But the dispute over which sexual acts, if any, society should discourage is totally separate from the question of whether sexual orientation is, in fact, inborn. Because of a failure to decouple, people respond indignantly to factual claims when they’re actually upset about how those claims might be interpreted.

Nerst believes that the world can be divided roughly into “high decouplers,” for whom decoupling comes easy, and “low decouplers,” for whom it does not. This is the sort of area where erisology could produce empirical insights: What characterizes people’s ability to decouple? Nerst believes that hard-science types are better at it, on average, while artistic types are worse. After all, part of being an artist is seeing connections where other people don’t—so maybe it’s harder for them to not see connections in some cases. Nerst might be wrong. Either way, it’s the sort of claim that could be fairly easily tested if the discipline caught on.

Another potential avenue for erisology is to produce interventions to promote more healthy ways of arguing. “If it would become a proper field, it would be interesting to see whether training people to identify common pitfalls of disagreement would make them argue better and be less responsive to bad argumentation,” Nerst explained. Again, only experimental studies can answer the question.

Nerst is nothing if not prolific, and at first glance this field can appear a bit sprawling and impregnable. Nerst explains in “What is Erisology?” that, “off the top of [his] head,” he thinks the new field should draw on the insights of more than a dozen disciplines ranging from traditional philosophy, to anthropology, to post-structuralist theory. And as he explained to me, the details thus far “are portioned out among 70 blog posts and 170,000 words.” That’s almost two books’ worth of theorizing. But once you learn about erisology, you see its potential applications everywhere.

When I ran the concept of erisology by a couple of political scientists who study disagreement, I got some unexpected pushback. Though Nerst has claimed that “no one needs to be convinced” of the needlessly adversarial quality of online discourse, the Syracuse University political scientist Emily Thorson isn’t buying it. “I actually do need to be convinced about this,” she said in an email, “or at least about the larger implication that ‘uncivil online discourse’ is a problem so critical that we need to invent a new discipline to solve it. I’d argue that much of the dysfunction we see in online interactions is just a symptom of much larger and older social problems, including but not limited to racism and misogyny. Our time would be better spent addressing those issues.”

Thorson argued that disagreements on Twitter or comment threads do not usually entail people “trying to understand each other but failing due to ‘pitfalls.’ Rather, their goal is to affirm their identity, and often that involves aggressively demeaning someone who has a different identity from them. And so these conversations aren’t ‘dysfunctional’; they’re functioning exactly how the participants intend them to—as defenses of their identity, not as deliberative forums.”

Samara Klar, an associate political-science professor at the University of Arizona and the co-author of Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction, points out that for all the talk of online hostility, in the real world, there’s a lot less evidence that people with political disagreements are at one another’s throats as frequently as a blood-splattered Twitter feed might indicate. If anything, there’s some evidence of the opposite—a growing number of Americans are sick of politically overheated disagreement and are retreating from it. Klar cites research that shows that people think they’ll dislike engaging in political debate with those across the aisle from them, but that when they actually do (in a real-world experimental setting), they often end up enjoying the experience. “The truth is, a growing percentage of Americans are more angry about politics in general than they are toward members of the other party specifically.”

Still … I’m on Team Erisology, especially if political fatigue is what’s grinding Americans down. Even before I spoke with the political scientists, Nerst contended that a better understanding of today’s online argumentation would help people cope with its excesses. “Most people really are tired of shouting matches and want more nuance (according to surveys etc.),” he wrote to me, “and I hope we will develop some cultural immunity towards ragebait and hyperzealotry soon. They are quite recent phenomena at this potency, and I’m cautiously optimistic. If and when we get to that future, we might appreciate having tools on hand to make sense of what’s happened and how to get away from it.”

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Jesse Singal is a contributing writer at New York magazine.

The Mueller-Industrial Complex Collapses

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March 28,2019

A man beats a drum in a Mueller T-shirt
Alex Wong / Getty

In a letter to Congress on Sunday, Attorney General William Barr declared that while Robert Mueller’s report found evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and did not exonerate President Donald Trump, it also did “not conclude that the president committed a crime.” And so the special counsel’s months-long investigation into Trump’s dealings with Russia ended with an inconclusive conclusion: No smoking gun would result in Trump’s hasty removal from office.

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Not just Democratic lawmakers had been banking on a final blow to the Trump administration. Pundits, commentators, and opportunistic entrepreneurs had all held up Mueller as a hero for their cause—and, in the process, constructed a cottage industry of Mueller-pegged media content and accessories.

The University of New Hampshire assistant professor Seth Abramson built a small media empire anticipating the report. He even wrote a book, not yet published, ambitiously titled Proof of Conspiracy, about Trump’s alleged “international collusion.” The Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe also found literary potential in the investigation, co-authoring the book To End a Presidency last year.

On Saturday Night Live, Robert De Niro played Mueller in a series of sketches about the special counsel. Stephen Colbert styled him as a Voltron-like superhero, single-handedly forming the “Obstruction of Justice League.” At The New Yorker, Troy Patterson covered Mueller as a “style icon” last year, including a detailed meditation on the special counsel’s Casio DW-290 sport watch; Patterson argued that it projected “an incorruptible constancy.” Redditors and watch enthusiasts took out their wallets.

More exotic Mueller-themed wares appeared. An Austin, Texas, company sold a Robert Mueller prayer candle, one of many such accessories, from T-shirts to mugs to throw pillows, that looked to cash in on Mueller fever. Etsy was (and still is) flooded with mugs and pins and baseball caps and Christmas ornaments emblazoned with the special counsel’s impassive face; art enthusiasts can buy an unframed print of Mueller’s neatly coiffed hair for $10. Booksellers started taking preorders for The Mueller Report—with an introduction by Alan Dershowitz, no less—marketing it as an inevitable best seller.

With the report in and seemingly impotent, the Mueller-industrial complex is quickly collapsing. Abramson has been posting feverishly on Twitter since Friday, in long numbered threads in between national media appearances, attempting to recuperate his miscalculation. On Sunday, Tribe pinned a last-ditch tweet to his Twitter timeline reminding readers that “the ‘no obstruction’ conclusion was Barr’s, not Mueller’s.” Saturday Night Live didn’t even get to weigh in this week; the show is on spring break. And it’s hard to imagine anyone lighting a Mueller votive candle at bedtime or donning their It’s Mueller Time T-shirt while drinking down some cold ones on the deck. The special counsel’s cottage industry quietly burned down when its namesake completed his job without fanfare.

As my colleague Megan Garber wrote on Friday, Americans had taken the liberty of inferring what the report would contain, and what impact it would have. Absent knowledge, Garber wrote, we filled in the blanks, interpreting the secretive actions of Mueller and his team in the manner most favorable to our own desires.

That’s not a phenomenon unique to the special counsel. The Mueller-industrial complex is just the latest example of a hyper-mediated world turned in on itself. CNN came on the air in 1980, but not until the Gulf War, in 1990, did the 24-hour news cycle coalesce. A war halfway around the world, filmed and commented upon incessantly, became the model for news of all stripes. It transformed the concept itself, filling the void of airtime and attention space accordingly. Talk radio’s shock jocks thrived during this period. Fox News took off in 1996. Then the internet arrived, and soon after that, blogs, and then social networks, where everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Seth Abramson to you and your grandmother was able to create and spread messages, images, and ideas that capitalized on whatever event currently felt current.

But there’s something different about Mueller industrialism. It’s more than yet another fusion of 24-hour information, meme culture, and internet opportunism. It also speaks to Americans’ strong desire to anticipate the future, and to live in the present as if that future has already arrived, and in the way they’d planned it to besides.

The media theorist Richard Grusin has a name for this practice: premediation. News analysts, pundits, product designers, influencers, and all the rest now create media in the present whose content anticipates future events or actions. The nonstop coverage of the 2020 Democratic primary offers an effective if humdrum example. That the left perceives the Trump presidency as odious partly explains why his opponents are coming out earlier, but the media landscape also demands and rewards this kind of anticipation. Are Kamala Harris’s policies suitable for the Democratic ticket? Is Beto O’Rourke’s hacker youth a benefit or a liability? Will Joe Biden run or won’t he? These and other stories seem like news about the present, but they are really speculations on information from the future.

The public eats this stuff up. Yesterday on Twitter, I happened across a long thread about whether supporters of Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, might be sexist because they would support a man with such modest credentials over a woman senator with experience and policy proposals, such as Harris. The thread was electric, bedazzled with hearts and replies, most frenzied in support or detraction. But exchanges like it are so common and so fleeting, I can’t even find the posts anymore. Those who weighed in were not really making arguments about the reality of the political moment; instead, they were anticipating, and practicing, the kinds of claims someone—a news commentator as much as a social-media everyperson—might make before a debate, or after one, or in the run-up to the Iowa caucus, or a local primary. So much media is premediated now, it’s almost impossible to find something whose payload isn’t partly composed of practice for future events.

Most of the time, nobody even notices this phenomenon. Premediation works because it homes in on natural anxieties or desires amplified by the hyper-mediated ecosystem in which television, smartphones, social media, and all the rest rot and reanimate. Whom should I consider voting for in the next election? Am I going to die if I board a plane? Those are questions whose future answers seem to demand consideration today.

In Mueller’s case, so many people anticipating the investigation’s end also banked on the specific conclusions that might accompany it. Certainly none of the Mueller industrialists thought it would burn out as a dud. But certainty is the enemy of forecasting. The future inspires drama because of the cloud of doubt that obscures it, not because it withholds a certainty until a later date. When SNL, Colbert, Abramson, and others began placing bets on the result of the Mueller investigation, they also sterilized their own relevance in the “no collusion” timeline that Americans now appear to occupy.

The investigation’s actual result now also casts a dour shadow over the Mueller-industrial complex’s wares and messages. The work came at a great cost: It cannibalized the future for the benefit of the present. Like taking out a loan on news to come in the hopes that its benefit will pay out enough to cover its costs, the Mueller disciples traded their own anticipatory media on margin, assuming that their winnings would more than pay off their debts. That bet turned out to be a bad one, and now the payment has come due.

And for boring reasons, too: Because it was high risk. Anticipating the future possibility of the Democratic nomination is a sure thing: Someone will get the party nod. But taking for granted the outcome of a charged and historic special-counsel investigation is like betting on a single chamber of the roulette wheel. If you win, you’re a hero. If not, you’re just a sucker.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Ian Bogost is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His latest book is Play Anything.

 

The Critical Part of Mueller’s Report That Barr Didn’t Mention

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March 26, 2019

Cliff Owen / Associated Press

On Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr presented a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that contained a few sentences from Mueller’s final report, one of which directly addressed the question of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In a footnote, Barr explained that Mueller had defined “coordination” as an “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

Mueller’s full report has not been made available to the public yet, so it’s not clear whether it sets forth everything the special counsel’s office learned over the course of its nearly two-year investigation—including findings about conduct that was perhaps objectionable but not criminal—or whether it is more tailored and explains only Mueller’s prosecution and declination decisions. But national-security and intelligence experts tell me that Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump or his campaign team with a conspiracy is far from dispositive, and that the underlying evidence the special counsel amassed over two years could prove as useful as a conspiracy charge to understanding the full scope of Russia’s election interference in 2016.

“As described by Barr, at least, Mueller’s report was very focused on criminal-law standards and processes,” said David Kris, a founder of Culper Partners, who served as the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division under former President Barack Obama. “We won’t know for sure if that is the case, and if it is the case, why Mueller confined himself in that way, until we see the full report.” Kris noted, however, that “there is no question that a counterintelligence investigation would have a wider aperture than a strict criminal inquiry as applied here, and would be concerned, for example, with the motivations and any sub-criminal misconduct of the principal actors.”

A counterintelligence probe, he added, would ask more than whether the evidence collected is sufficient to obtain a criminal conviction—it could provide necessary information to the public about why the president is making certain policy decisions. “The American people rightly should expect more from their public servants than merely avoiding criminal liability,” Kris said.

A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee said in a statement on Monday that in light of Barr’s memo “and our need to understand Special Counsel Mueller’s areas of inquiry and evidence his office uncovered, we are working in parallel with other Committees to bring in senior officials from the DOJ, FBI and SCO to ensure that our Committee is fully and currently informed about the SCO’s investigation, including all counterintelligence information.”

In May 2017, just after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, the FBI launched a full counterintelligence investigation into the president to determine whether he was acting as a Russian agent. “We were concerned, and we felt like we had credible, articulable facts to indicate that a threat to national security may exist,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe explained to me last month. It’s still not clear what became of that counterintelligence probe after Mueller was appointed, and Barr did not indicate in his four-page summary how far the special counsel pursued it.

Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff at the Defense Department and the CIA under Obama, said he believes Mueller’s “core focus” was to determine whether or not federal criminal laws were violated. “If Mueller interpreted his mandate as a criminal one, the decision to pursue the investigation as such is something he will have to explain to Congress,” Bash said.

Mueller’s mandate, given to him by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, empowered him to investigate not only any “coordination” between the campaign and Russia, but any “links” between them as well. Barr’s summary does not describe how Mueller investigated or came to explain the many interactions the campaign had with various Russians during the election.

Even so, Bash said, it’s an “immense challenge” to envision how a counterintelligence investigation targeting the president himself would have played out. “Normally, the bureau would investigate, and if criminal matters were involved, they’d ask prosecutors to get involved,” he said. “But if it is just a matter of there being a national-security threat, the FBI would report to the director of national intelligence, who would then report to the president. But what if the president is the threat? We don’t have a playbook for this.”

Generally speaking, the wide aperture afforded by a counterintelligence investigation might be key to understanding some of the biggest lingering mysteries of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians in 2016—mysteries that, if solved, could explain the president’s continued deference toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and skepticism about his conduct on the part of the U.S. intelligence community.

For example, was the fact that Trump pursued a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow during the election—and failed to disclose the deal to the public—enough for the Russians to compromise him? Why did the administration attempt to lift the sanctions on Russia early on in Trump’s tenure, even after it had been revealed that Russia had attacked the 2016 election? And what about the internal campaign polling data that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, gave to the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016—an episode that, according to one of the top prosecutors on Mueller’s team, went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating”?

Mueller apparently determined that none of that evidence was enough to establish that a criminal conspiracy had occurred, which is fairly unsurprising if you know Bob Mueller, said John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the CIA who served under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime.

Mueller “always noted that the term evidence meant something different to intelligence analysts who had to work with a variety of sources of varying reliability, whereas an FBI officer needed something so unassailable as to work in a court prosecution,” McLaughlin told me, referring to the conversations he had with Mueller while he was FBI director. But as former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who now hosts the Intelligence Matters podcast, told me, “We still do not understand why President Trump has this affinity for Putin. What happened yesterday is Mueller took one possibility off the table—that there was a criminal conspiracy. But we still don’t know what is going on between these two leaders, and what is driving this relationship.”

It would once have been unthinkable to even contemplate that a sitting president was putting the interests of a hostile foreign power above those of the United States. But Trump’s consistent praise of Putin, his pursuit of a massive real-estate deal in Moscow while Russia was waging a hacking and disinformation campaign against the United States in 2016, and the secrecy that continues to surround his conversations with his Russian counterpart have given some in the national-security community, including many leading Democrats, pause.

Trump took the extraordinary step of confiscating his interpreter’s notes after his first private meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, according to The Washington Post, and demanded that the interpreter refrain from discussing the meeting with members of his own administration. In Helsinki, Finland, one year later, Trump insisted on meeting with Putin with no American advisers or aides present.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, said he “never envisioned” that Mueller would bring a conspiracy charge—and that focusing on the absence of criminal indictments for conspiracy is unproductive. “If all we do is apply criminal standards to investigative findings, we are missing the point,” Figliuzzi told me. He noted that the vast majority of counterintelligence cases never result in criminal prosecution. Instead, he said, “they’re about determining the degree to which a foreign power has targeted, compromised, or recruited” the subject. “This thing started as a counterintelligence investigation,” Figliuzzi said, “and it needs to end as a counterintelligence investigation.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Natasha Bertrand is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers national security and the intelligence community.

The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing

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March 23, 2019

francois schnell / Flickr
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“Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs,” says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language. Cheek, an anthropologist by training who left academia in the early 1980s to work for the Federal Aviation Commission, is responsible for something few people realize exists: the 2010 Plain Writing Act. In fact, Cheek was among the first government employees to champion the use of clear, concise language. Once she retired in 2007 from the FAA and gained the freedom to lobby, she leveraged her hatred for gobbledygook to create an actual law. Take a look at recent information put out by many government agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—if it lacks needlessly complex sentences or bizarre bureaucratic jargon, it’s largely because of Cheek and her colleagues.

The idea that writing should be clear, concise, and low-jargon isn’t a new one—and it isn’t limited to government agencies, of course. The problem of needlessly complex writing—sometimes referred to as an “opaque writing style”—has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition. Take this example:

The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization. A Sentimental Education does little more than elaborate the progressive literalization of the Annunciation.

That little doozy appears in Barbara Vinken’s Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out, published by Stanford University Press, and was recently posted to a listserv used by clear-language zealots—many of whom are highly qualified academics who are willing to call their colleagues out for being habitual offenders of opaque writing. Yet the battle to make clear and elegant prose the new status quo is far from won.

Last year, Harvard’s Steven Pinker (who’s also written about his grammar peeves for The Atlantic) authored an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education in which he used adjectives like “turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand” to describe academic writing. In an email, Pinker told me that the reaction to his article “has been completely positive, which is not the typical reaction to articles I write, and particularly surprising given my deliberately impolite tone.” (He didn’t, however, read all of the 360-plus comments, many of which were anything but warm and fuzzy.) A couple of weeks later, The Chronicle had a little fun with with a follow-up to Pinker’s article, inviting researchers to tweet an explanation of their research using only emoji:

I 🔬new 🐰acting and 🐢acting 💉 for diabetes. They are tested on 🐭🐷🐶 and 👨👩 to make them 🎯 and ✅ before we ship 🌍 to help🙍be 🙆.

I used 💎ography to 🔍 at the molecular 🔪🔫💣 of a 🌱 pathogen, which destroys 💷💵💶 of 🍟 and 🍅 around the 🌍.

In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer, then a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, published research arguing that the use of clear, simple words over needlessly complex ones can actually make authors appear more intelligent. The research garnered him the Ig Nobel Prize in literature—a parody of the Nobel Prize that, according to a Slate article by the awards’ creator, Marc Abrahams, and several academics I consulted, is always given to improbable research and sometimes serves as a de facto criticism or satire in the academic world. (Oppenheimer for his part believes he got the award because of the paper’s title: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.” The title made readers laugh, he told me—and then think.) Ultimately, Oppenheimer says the attention the Ig Nobel brought to his research means it’s now being used to improve the work of students in academic writing centers around the country.

A disconnect between researchers and their audiences fuels the problem, according to Deborah S. Bosley, a clear-writing consultant and former University of North Carolina English professor. “Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don’t think about the average person, and they don’t even think about their students when they write,” she says. “Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.” But Bosley, who has a doctorate in rhetoric and writing, says that academic prose is often so riddled with professional jargon and needlessly complex syntax that even someone with a Ph.D. can’t understand a fellow Ph.D.’s work unless he or she comes from the very same discipline.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/?fbclid=IwAR0e9fWaZUa1XCypfXTWDLCN_sHlw6MHh-sqp5WrSHXgYTJFKCPZqhDVl9U

A nonacademic might think the campaign against opaque writing is a no-brainer; of course, researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work. Cynics charge, however, that academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers. Others say that academics have traditionally been forced to write in an opaque style to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers—academic journal editors, for example. The main reason, though, may not be as sinister or calculated. Pinker, a cognitive scientist, says it boils down to “brain training”: the years of deep study required of academics to become specialists in their chosen fields actually work against them being able to unpack their complicated ideas in a coherent, concrete manner suitable for average folks. Translation: Experts find it really hard to be simple and straightforward when writing about their expertise. He calls this the “curse of knowledge” and says academics aren’t aware they’re doing it or properly trained to identify their blindspots—when they know too much and struggle to ascertain what others don’t know. In other words, sometimes it’s simply more intellectually challenging to write clearly. “It’s easy to be complex, it’s harder to be simple,” Bosley said. “It would make academics better researchers and better writers, though, if they had to translate their thinking into plain language.” It would probably also mean more people, including colleagues, would read their work.

Some research funders, such as National Institutes of Health and The Wellcome Trust, have mandated in recent years that studies they finance be published in open-access journals, but they’ve given little attention to ensuring those studies include accessible writing. “NIH has no policies for grantees that dictate the style of writing they use in their research publications,” a spokesperson told me in an emailed statement. “We do advise applicants about the importance of using plain language in sections of the application that, if funded, will become public on the RePORT website.”

Bosley is ever so slightly optimistic for a future of clear academic writing, though. “Professors hate rules for themselves,” she says. “They become academics because it’s almost like being an entrepreneur. So academia isn’t like government or private business where laws or mandates work. But if we get more people like Pinker taking a stand on this, the culture could change.”

Indeed, there are an increasing number of academics taking it upon themselves to blog, tweet or try other means to convey their research to wider audiences. The news site The Conversation.com, for example, sources authors and stories from the academic and research communities. Academics get the byline but are edited by journalists adept at making complex research clear and writing palatable, according to the outlet’s managing editor, Maria Balinska. “We see a real interest among academics across the board in what we’re doing,” Balinska says. “Our editing process is rigorous, but they still want to learn how to communicate their research and reach more people.” She says The Conversation, which is being piloted in the U.S. and currently features articles by 1,500 academics from 300 institutions, is already getting hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month mostly through word of mouth and social media.

Will this kind of interest in communicating about research by some academics help change status-quo academic writing? “Believe it or not,” when compared to their peers in other parts of the world, “U.S. academics are probably the most open to the idea of accessible language,” says Bosley. “I gave a presentation in France and academics there flat out told me that academics shouldn’t write to express, they should write to impress.” Bosley says bucking tradition and championing the clear-writing cause would be to an academic’s advantage, to a university’s advantage, and certainly to the public’s advantage. “Here in the U.S. at least we’re seeing some academics acknowledge this reality.”

But don’t look for the clear-writing pitbull Cheek to solve this problem. She’s working on one more bill that calls for government regulations—not just info put out by agencies—to be written in clear language. Another try at getting that legislation passed and she’s truly retiring.“I think the government is easier to change than academics,” says Cheek. “I’m not going to get into a battle with academia.”

The Threat of Tribalism

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September 23, 2018

The Threat of Tribalism

The Constitution once united a diverse country under a banner of ideas. But partisanship has turned Americans against one another—and against the principles enshrined in our founding document.

 by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld

  • October 2018 Issue
  • Is Democracy Dying?

 

 

 

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying?

The U.S. Constitution was and is imperfect. It took a civil war to establish that the principles enumerated in its Bill of Rights extended to all Americans, and the struggle to live up to those principles continues today. But focusing on the Constitution’s flaws can overshadow what it did achieve. Its revolutionary ambition was to forge, out of a diverse population, a new national identity, uniting Americans under a banner of ideas. To a remarkable extent, it succeeded.

Even at the country’s founding, Americans were a multiethnic, polyglot mix of English, Dutch, Scots, Irish, French, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Greeks, and others. They tended to identify far more strongly as Virginians or New Yorkers than as Americans, complicating any effort to bind the new nation together with common beliefs. Early America was also an unprecedented amalgam of religious denominations, including a variety of dissenters who had been hounded from their Old World homes.

The Constitution managed to overcome these divisions. The way it dealt with religion is illustrative. Colonial America had not embraced tolerance; on the contrary, the dissenters had become persecutors. Virginia imprisoned Quakers. Massachusetts whipped Baptists. Government-established churches were common, and nonbelievers were denied basic civil and political rights. But in a radical act, the Constitution not only guaranteed religious freedom; it also declared that the United States would have no national church and no religious tests for national office. These foundational guarantees helped America avoid the religious wars that for centuries had torn apart the nations of Europe.

“Living in a society that was already diverse and pluralistic,” Gordon Wood wrote in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, the founding generation realized that the attachments uniting Americans “could not be the traditional ethnic, religious, and tribal loyalties of the Old World.” Instead, as Abraham Lincoln put it, reverence for the “Constitution and Laws” was to be America’s “political religion.” Americans were to be united through a new kind of patriotism—constitutional patriotism—based on ideals enshrined in their founding document.

“Americans have come to view the Constitution not as a statement of shared principles but as a cudgel with which to attack their enemies.”

The dark underside of that document, of course, was racism. Alone among modern Western democracies, the United States maintained extensive race-based slavery within its borders, and the Constitution protected that institution. Only after the cataclysm of the Civil War was the Constitution amended to establish that America’s national identity was as neutral racially and ethnically as it was religiously. With the postwar amendments, the Constitution abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship, guaranteed equal protection under the law, and barred racial discrimination in voting.

The significance of birthright citizenship cannot be overstated. We forget how rare it is: No European or Asian country grants this right. It means that being American is not the preserve of any particular racial, ethnic, or religious subgroup. The United States took another century to begin dismantling the legalized racism that continued unabated after the Civil War. Nonetheless, the core constitutional aspiration—in the 1780s, the 1860s, the 1960s, and the present—has been to create a tribe-transcending national identity.

When we think of tribalism, we tend to focus on the primal pull of race, religion, or ethnicity. But partisan political loyalties can become tribal too. When they do, they can be as destructive as any other allegiance. The Founders understood this. In 1780, John Adams wrote that the “greatest political evil” to be feared under a democratic constitution was the emergence of “two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other.” George Washington, in his farewell address, described the “spirit of party” as democracy’s “worst enemy.” It “agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

For all their fears of partisanship, the Founders failed to prevent the rise of parties, and indeed, it’s hard to imagine modern representative democracy without multiparty electoral competition. They were right to be apprehensive, as is all too clear when you look at the current state of America’s political institutions, which are breaking down under the strain of partisan divisions.

The causes of America’s resurgent tribalism are many. They include seismic demographic change, which has led to predictions that whites will lose their majority status within a few decades; declining social mobility and a growing class divide; and media that reward expressions of outrage. All of this has contributed to a climate in which every group in America—minorities and whites; conservatives and liberals; the working class and elites—feels under attack, pitted against the others not just for jobs and spoils, but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into a zero-sum competition, one in which parties succeed by stoking voters’ fears and appealing to their ugliest us-versus-them instincts.

Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished. And they have come to view the Constitution not as an aspirational statement of shared principles and a bulwark against tribalism, but as a cudgel with which to attack those enemies.

Of course, Americans throughout history have criticized the Constitution. Progressives have tarred it as plutocratic and antidemocratic for more than a century. In 1913, in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Charles A. Beard argued that the “direct, impelling motive” behind the Constitution was not “some abstraction known as ‘justice,’ ” but the “economic advantages” of the propertied elite.

In recent years, however, the American left has become more and more influenced by identity politics, a force that has changed the way many progressives view the Constitution. For some on the left, the document is irredeemably stained by the sins of the Founding Fathers, who preached liberty while holding people in chains. Days after the 2016 election, the president of the University of Virginia quoted Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder, in an email to students. In response, 469 students and faculty signed an open letter declaring that they were “deeply offended” at the use of Jefferson as a “moral compass.” Speaking to students at the University of Missouri in 2016, a Black Lives Matter co-founder went further: “The people vowing to protect the Constitution are vowing to protect white supremacy and genocide.”

Just a few decades ago, the cause of racial justice in America was articulated in constitutional language. “Black activists from Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Black Panthers,” wrote the law professor Dorothy E. Roberts in 1997, “framed their demands in terms of constitutional rights.” Today, the Constitution itself is in the crosshairs.

Many progressives, particularly young ones, have turned against what were once sacrosanct American principles. Freedom of speech is an instrument of the dehumanization of women and minorities. Religious liberty is an engine of discrimination. Property rights are a shield for structural injustice and white supremacy. In a recent poll, two-thirds of college-age Democrats said that “a diverse and inclusive society” is more important than “protecting free speech rights.” Only 30 percent of Americans born in the 1980s believe that living in a democracy is “essential,” compared with 72 percent of Americans born in the 1930s.

Several progressive organizations, including the ACLU, remain staunch defenders of the Constitution. At Yale Law School, where we teach, students working in our clinics have won important courtroom victories vindicating constitutional rights. But a significant generational shift appears to be in progress. One of our students told us: “I don’t know any lefty people my age who aren’t seriously questioning whether the First Amendment is still on balance a good thing.

On the right, open hostility to the Constitution is less common; most mainstream conservatives see themselves as proud defenders of the document. But majorities on the right today are nonetheless beginning to reject core constitutional principles.

Image result for Trump--The Godfather of Tribalism

President Donald Trump routinely calls the media “the enemy of the American people,” and his view seems to have currency in his party. In a 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center, less than half of Republicans said that the freedom of the press “to criticize politicians” was “very important” to maintaining a strong democracy in the United States. In other 2017 surveys, more than half of Trump supporters said the president “should be able to overturn decisions by judges that he disagrees with,” and more than half of Republicans said they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election if Trump proposed delaying it “until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote.” If these views became became reality, that would be the end of constitutional democracy as we know it.

The problem runs deeper still. Since the 2004 publication of Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We?—which argued that America’s “Anglo-Protestant” identity and culture are threatened by large-scale Hispanic immigration—there have been calls on the mainstream right to define America’s national identity in racial, ethnic, or religious terms, whether as white, European, or Judeo-Christian. According to a 2016 survey commissioned by the bipartisan Democracy Fund, 30 percent of Trump voters think European ancestry is “important” to “being American”; 56 percent of Republicans and a full 63 percent of Trump supporters said the same of being Christian. This trend runs counter to the Constitution’s foundational ideal: an America where citizens are citizens, regardless of race or religion; an America whose national identity belongs to no one tribe.

As professors specializing in constitutional law and comparative politics, we’re often asked whether there’s another country that could serve as a model for the United States as it attempts to overcome its divisions. We always respond no—America is the best model.

For all its flaws, the United States is uniquely equipped to unite a diverse and divided society. Alone among the world powers, America has succeeded in forging a strong group-transcending national identity without requiring its citizens to shed or suppress their subgroup identities. In the United States, you can be Irish American, Syrian American, or Japanese American, and be intensely patriotic at the same time. We take this for granted, but consider how strange it would be to call someone “Irish French” or “Japanese Chinese.”

Most European and all East Asian countries originated as, and continue to be, ethnic nations, whose citizens are overwhelmingly composed of a particular ethnic group supplying the country’s name as well as its national language and dominant culture. Strongly ethnic nations, such as China and Hungary, tend to be less embracing of minority cultures. But even a diverse, multiethnic democracy like France differs markedly from the United States. France has a powerful national identity but insists that its ethnic and religious minorities thoroughly assimilate, at least publicly. (Many believe that France’s attempts to force assimilation, including its infamous “burkini” ban, have backfired with the country’s Muslims, contributing to social unrest and radicalization.) As former French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it in 2016, “If you want to become French, you speak French, you live like the French, and you don’t try and change a way of life that has been ours for so many years.”

America is not an ethnic nation. Its citizens don’t have to choose between a national identity and multiculturalism. Americans can have both. But the key is constitutional patriotism. We have to remain united by and through the Constitution, regardless of our ideological disagreements.

There are lessons here for both the left and the right. The right needs to recognize that making good on the Constitution’s promises requires much more than flag-waving. If millions of people believe that, because of their skin color or religion, they are not treated equally, how can they be expected to see the Constitution’s resounding principles as anything but hollow?

For its part, the left needs to rethink its scorched-earth approach to American history and ideals. Exposing injustice, past and present, is important, but there’s a world of difference between saying that America has repeatedly failed to live up to its constitutional principles and saying that those principles are lies or smoke screens for oppression. Washington and Jefferson were slave owners. They were also political visionaries who helped give birth to what would become the most inclusive form of governance in world history.

This article appears in the October 2018 print edition with the headline “The Threat of Tribalism.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/the-threat-of-tribalism/568342/