Portrait of our intellectual elite in the midst of crisis

I have subscribed to The New York Review of Books for more than 50  years. I still get a lift when a new issue arrives on my doorstep, but that is more of a habit than anything else.  The giants who filled its pages for so long, such as Stanley Hoffmann, Theodore Draper, Mary McCarthy, I. F. Stone, Frances Fitzgerald, are mostly dead, and subsequent generations have not produced anyone who compares with them.  The original editors--Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers--have proven equally irreplaceable since their deaths, and in 2018 one successor, Ian Buruma, was forced out after he allowed a Canadian broadcaster to describe his experience of being accused by several women of sexual assault--charges of which he was acquitted in court.  The current issue features a slew of articles on the current election--none of them written by anyone who can analyze it with much electoral sophistication.  Instead, a miscellaneous collection of intellectuals mostly tells us what the election means to them.  On this they seem to agree: one after another they let  us know that the American people obviously don't live up to their ideas of how people should think, act, and vote, mostly because of their incorrigible racism and sexism.  There are a few exceptions, but in general, the issue suggests that the NYRB is now mired in an intellectual swamp, turning out articles that only a small minority of Americans could appreciate, and with good reason.  

I will focus on certain common themes rather than analyze the articles one by one.  Condescension and towards Trump voters is perhaps the leading one.  Here is the Irish novelist Anne Enright:  "These good people sound small and lost and poorer than they used to be. None of them mentions the fact that Trump is deranged, and this, in its turn, seems crazy to me. I am hypnotized by their denial, blinded by their inability to see. What is the secret, maddening wound that sets their minds spinning away from the obvious problem here? And why are American men so huffy? Sometimes, when a Republican voter is interviewed, I catch the cold glint of racism—it seems to keep them smug—but the undecideds come across as helpless and well intentioned."   Here is Pomona College writing professor Jonathan Lethem:  "It has become common to understand the current Republican Party as the full optimization of Nixon’s “southern strategy.”. . .Yet what if Nixon’s real triumph wasn’t the production of Trump’s presidency? What if instead it was the seeming permanent necessity of a neoliberal technocratic bulwark against the dispossessed, vengeful, and, yes, in many cases undeniably racist hordes—an Overton window that slides in only one direction? By this logic we find ourselves in a world where Kamala Harris is endorsed by none other than Dick Cheney, the personal conveyor of Nixon’s global dream into the twenty-first century. . ."

Misandry may actually beat accusations of racism as the leading prevailing theme.  Here is the Indian author Pankaj Misrah:  "Whether crowing about her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a torchbearer for torture; promising to shoot intruders in her home; or vowing to make the US military 'the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,' the first Indian American presidential candidate from the Democratic Party shows few signs of defying the steadily dominant far-right ideals of violent hypermasculinity." British literary critic Jacqueline Rose goes further:  "The image of Trump tearing off his surgical mask before the 2020 election is still eloquent of a form of masculinity that will do pretty much anything, including place itself and others at mortal risk, to affirm the limitless mastery that one man’s ego can exert over the world and over itself. . . .It then falls to women to secure the future and keep human misery out of sight. Reproducing in the teeth of inequality and hopelessness is meant both to camouflage the world’s cruelty and to make it a better place. The misogyny against Harris is undoubtedly fueled by that silent demand and the precise form of gendered hatred it promotes. " Susan Faludi devotes her piece to the reaction to Harris's tendency to laugh and what it shows to her: "Harris’s lightheartedness runs afoul of a seemingly bedrock political principle that women in the spotlight have fun at their peril and should under no circumstances laugh. France is banning hijabs, the Taliban is forbidding singing by women, and MAGA Republicans are coming up with a female comportment restriction of their own: Thou shalt not laugh in public while politicking." 

The lead article of the issue and the longest of the series by law professor Patricia Williams combines these two themes.  Williams won a MacArthur Grant in 2000 after publishing her magnum opus, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, which introduced postmodern thinking and intersectionalism to a wide audience.  For her Harris's candidacy--like any major event involving a black American--is another chance to enumerate the ordeals that have traumatized black people for centuries, starting with slavery, which, she argues, must have stamped Kamala Harris as well, even though her Jamaican father came from a very well-to-do Jamaican family and her mother was an Indian Brahmin.  The Alchemy of Race and Rights was largely autobiographical, trying to show how even a black Ivy League law professor continually had to cope with racism and sexism at the end of the twentieth century, and Harris turns herself and into the two embattled  heroines of the piece, along with Harris.  And Harris can speak Williams's language, too, as Williams shows in this quote from a 2019 interview: "Look. All of us who have become the first, part of the challenge is that people have their boxes…. They have this set of boxes, and they’re trying to figure out which one you fit into. But the number of boxes they have is limited to whatever they’ve seen before…. And we’re asking them to see something that they’ve not seen before."  Harris was already a U.S. Senator from the US's most populous state, and a year later she was elected Vice President, but for Williams this problem never goes away for either of them.  She also insists, as commentators so often do, that no man ever suffers the kind of attacks that women running for office do--a statement that would come as a surprise to men like Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and George W. Bush, to name only a few.  American politics was no love fest when it was reserved for white males, and to quote one of them, no person who can't stand the heat should decide to enter its particular kitchen.

Harvard law professor emeritus Lawrence Tribe, a long-time NYRB contributor, is no postmodernist, but his contribution shows how far Trump opponents (of which I certainly am one) will stretch logic to make a point.  His piece analyzes the legal dangers of a new Trump administration, which would be poised to unleash the Justice Department against his political opponents.  The bulk of it, however, takes a new (to me) approach to the abortion issue.  Tribe, it turns out, won a case in the Supreme Court in the early 1980s that allowed Grendel's Den, a Harvard Square restaurant, to get a liquor license.  It had been denied one until then under a Massachusetts law that allowed churches to veto liquor licenses for any establishment within a short distance of the church.  Tribe argued successfully that this law constituted an establishment of religion, and that the Constitution does not allow religion to influence law.  He now extends that argument to the abortion issue, claiming that since opposition to abortion is mainly based upon religion, outlawing it at any level is also an establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment.  This strikes me has a desperate attempt by a secular intellectual to find an excuse to enshrine his personal values in the law.  It also seems to me a very slippery slope.  Our opposition to murder, theft, testifying and testifying falsely is also based in large part upon religion and specifically upon the ten commandments, but I can't believe that Tribe would want to argue that that would invalidate our laws against those practices.  To be clear, I favor abortion rights and always have, but I also believe that they cannot be found in the text of the constitution.  The Dobbs decision didn't outlaw abortion, it put the issue in the hands of the voters.  They have already endorsed abortion rights in many states and it looks like there's a good chance that eventually they will do so in all of them.

Other contributors take different tacks.  The political scientist Mark Lilla, a long-time critic of identity politics,  is eminently sensible, blaming the elite for failing to teach the nation how politics really works and for  lacking any commitment to the process.  Elaine Blair, regular contributor, wants Harris to mobilize a coalition of moderates and poorer people against corporate power, but that battle has been lost.  The sociologist Matthew Desmond, who has written an impressive book about evictions, lists a great many measures to help the housing market that he hopes a new president might undertake, but much of them would require housing legislation. He includes a federal right to overturn local zoning laws. Both candidates, of course, constantly imply that they can make anything happen if they just reach 270 electoral votes, but we all know that life is more complicated than that.  The Indian Pankaj Mishra contributes a scathing indictment of US foreign policy since George W. Bush, emphasizing how the Gaza war has undermined US claims to lead a "rules-based order" and Biden's longstanding links to the pro-Israel lobby in the US.  Nathaniel Rich, focusing on environmental issues, notes Harris's and Walz's complete failure to make them an issue--and her new embrace of fracking.  Younger activists have to tell their acolytes that we can depend on them anyway.  Marilynne Robinson, a scholar of the Bible, bemoans our falling victim to a con man but was inspired by the Democratic convention.

I have written many times that Donald Trump would never have become a major party candidate and president had not the elite of both parties lost touch with too much of the population.  Despite his increasingly bizarre behavior, half the country accepts him as a potential president, and there is a slightly better than even chance that an unhappy population will vote the in party out and return him to office, just as they have done in four of the last six elections.  Four other sitting vice presidents have run for president in  my lifetime--Nixon, Humphrey, Bush I and Gore--and only one of them won.  In one sense the election is a win-win for Williams, Mishrah, Lethem and Enright:  they will be delighted by a Harris victory, while her defeat will confirm that the United States is irretrievably racist and sexist, as they have long suspected.  Their sensibility dominates our major media and academia, while alternative views are spreading on alternative websites like Quellette and various podcasts.  That may be the hope of the future.