politics – Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

The motive for speaking out

I think the best books of history are those plucked when the matter is ripe—when archives have accumulated and have been opened, and witnesses survive, though enough time has passed to loosen their tongues. A historian with the energy and methodicalness to fossick through the archives and interview the witnesses at that point will strike gold, if, in addition, he has a writerly gift.

In To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton, 2024), Benjamin Nathans has written such a book. It’s the tale of the dissident movement in the USSR, which was sparked, in the early 1960s, by a mathematician named Alexander Volpin, who, after four bouts of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, read the Soviet Code of Criminal Procedure and realized that his government had not followed its own rules in its handling of him. A decade earlier, following Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin’s wrongdoing, the Soviet criminal code had been revised to strengthen legal protections around defendants and witnesses. Volpin, who does, alas, seem to have been not altogether sane, and was very literal-minded, hit on the idea of insisting that the Soviet government follow these rules—a civil-disobedience strategy sometimes referred to as legalism and sometimes as “civil obedience.”

I happened to pick up Nathans’s book at a moment when I was ready, for a variety of reasons, for it to speak to me. Nathans makes clear that the Soviet Union’s dissident movement was able to sprout only because the country’s rulers had made a collective decision, following the mass deaths and bloody internecine feuds of the Lenin and Stalin eras, to move away from brutality. Khrushchev repudiated Stalin’s tyrannies, and Brezhnev brought about “stability of cadres,” an end to the cycles of purges and show trials. The new dispensation saved wear and tear on the rulers’ own skins but also propagated a general social peace—a “respite from history” [495]. Once the reign of the proletariat had been safely achieved, the Soviet state, Brezhnev and his successors felt, no longer needed violence as a political weapon. Also, and perhaps more crucially, rulers in later generations no longer had the same appetite for torture and terror as the founders. They just couldn’t stomach any more, which imparts to Nathans’s story a certain fairy-tale-like quality, at least for a reader in contemporary America, where the rulers have recently tasted blood and have become excited by the discovery that they relish its savor.

By the middle of the 20th century, the supremacy of Communism as an ideology had indeed been achieved in the Soviet Union—the country’s leaders weren’t mistaken about that. The Soviet nonconformists disliked the term dissident and preferred to call themselves inakomysliashchie (“other-thinkers”) [13], but few if any of them thought so otherly that they hoped to overturn the regime or aspired to call Communism into doubt. “They did not seek to capture the state,” Nathans writes; “theirs was a mission of containment by law” [197]. Yuli Daniel’s defense was typical, when he was interrogated nineteen times, in 1965, about a pessimistic novel he had written: he maintained that “I wrote my works not against the Soviet system, but against violations of the Soviet system” [61]. Having left the bloodshed of Stalin’s era behind, Nathans explains, the country declined into what he calls a “lip-service state,” a hypocritical truce between rulers and ruled. A famous piece of black humor captured the cynicism of this truce in economic matters: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” [18]. Dissidents were disturbers of this quiescent peace. They were people who believed the political fables they had been told a little too earnestly, and when they ran into an injustice, couldn’t keep their disillusionment to themselves. “Every orthodoxy houses the seeds of its own potential disruption,” Nathans observes [277]. In the case of the Soviet Union, the most dangerous seed was sincerity.

Nathans’s book also spoke to me for personal reasons. I’ve been reading about the dissident movement in the former Czechoslovakia ever since Disturbing the Peace, Karel Hvížďala’s book-length interview with Václav Havel, came out in English in 1990. After a visit to Czechoslovakia, I translated the first biography of Havel, by Eda Kriseová, published in English in 1993, and I’ve continued to read and write about the place. The Soviet movement looms large in histories of the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, but it looms from off-stage, and I’ve long wished I knew more about it. The Soviet Union famously crushed Czechoslovakia’s experiment with “socialism with a human face” in 1968, by means of a military invasion, and I’ve often wondered, for example, whether the invasion, and the Czechoslovak experiment generally, figures as largely in Soviet as it does in Czechoslovak accounts. (Losing the thirteen colonies, after all, is not quite as big a deal in British historiography as it is in American.)

In fact, at least according to Nathans, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia seems to have been a very big deal to Soviet dissidents. “Nobody took the Soviet side,” a Soviet physicist-turned-dissident later recalled [244], though the regime tried mightily, through the media and by means of staged demonstrations, to create the impression that popular support for the invasion was total. When Soviet dissidents decided to crack this facade by holding a public protest in Moscow’s Red Square, it “became the most celebrated fifteen minutes in the history of the Soviet dissident movement,” Nathans writes [253]. One participant, Larisa Bogoraz, tried to explain her motivations at her trial:

I found myself facing a choice: to protest or to keep silent. For me, keeping silent meant associating myself with the approval of actions of which I do not approve. To keep silent meant to lie. . . . It was precisely the demonstrations, the radio, the reports in the press about universal support [for the invasion] that aroused me to say: I am against this, I do not agree. [262]

Only eight people took part in the demonstration. For the most part, Nathans reports, “they barely knew each other” [252]. That’s very different from the Czechoslovak milieu, where personal connections, often established in the cultural sphere, linked many dissidents together before they became dissidents. As time passed, the Soviet and the Czechoslovak social maps seem to have grown more similar; Nathans reports that in Sacred Paths to Willful Freedom, a 1972 satiric novel about the Soviet dissident community, which circulated in samizdat, “Almost everyone is sleeping with someone other than their spouse” [533]—an endemic state of affairs (as it were) in Czechoslovakia. The other major difference between the two countries’ movements is that a plurality of Czech and Slovak dissidents came from the humanities and the arts—they were playwrights, actors, novelists, musicians, philosophers, and essayists—and a plurality of Soviet ones were scientists or mathematicians. The two movements had, as a result, distinctive flavors. The Soviet movement, even in its late, everybody-is-in-bed-with-one-another phase, seems to have had a certain abstract character, which caused it to keep being reinvented after repeated quashings, as if it were a crystal that couldn’t help but be re-precipitated from the general solution of Soviet political culture. In its early days, its main engine was what Nathans refers to as a “chain reaction”: dissidents would insist on making transparent the processes of the Soviet judiciary, which would get them arrested, which would lead to more trials, and more opportunities for difficult transparency. Via samizdat—texts that were retyped by hand, with as many carbon copies as feasible, and personally distributed—the trial transcripts reached a wide audience, and scientists, even though they were often sheltered and even pampered by the Soviet government, seem to have been more likely to be activated by reading them, perhaps because they were predisposed by their training to feel the need to set right inconsistencies between received opinion and the actual state of the world.

Here, too, there was convergence; eventually the Czechs and Slovaks also adopted the Soviet strategy of civil obedience. Czechoslovakia’s famous Charter 77 movement borrowed its central concept from Moscow’s Public Group to Assist in Implementing the Helsinki Accords: hold Communist leaders accountable for respecting human rights, as the leaders had sworn to do when they signed the 1975 Helsinki Accords, in exchange for which promise they had been granted formal international recognition of their nations’ borders for the first time since World War II. Kissinger and the diplomatic community pooh-poohed the human-rights language in the treaty as mere boilerplate; George F. Kennan, Nathans reports, dismissed it as “high-minded but innocuous” [599]. The dissidents took the promises seriously. (Even during this campaign of pretending to believe the government meant what it said, however, the predominant style in Czechoslovakia was ironic. “I know you’ll put all this into one of your articles,” an interrogator told the Moravian dissident Ludvík Vaculík during an interrogation, soon after Charter 77 was announced. “It was no use—they know everything,” Vaculík concluded, jestingly, in an essay about deciding not to share with his interrogator any of the nice apples he’d recently picked in the countryside.)

Another major difference between the movements is that in Czechoslovakia, as in other Soviet satellites, dissidence was buttressed by at least a tinge of nationalism, which in those countries had never been fully dissolved in the international fraternity of socialism. I think it made a difference, too, that Communism took hold in Russia at the end of World War I, and in Czechoslovakia not until a few years after the end of World War II. Russia never had all that much of a bourgeoisie in need of crushing in the first place, and by mid 20th century, it was more or less extinct. Socialism had brought millions out of poverty, but the country’s intelligentsia was a thin, artificially created layer of the population, less a “middle” class than a “between” class, for the most part gray and anemic because “we all have the psychology of government workers,” the dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote in Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (1969), a samizdat analysis of the social composition of his movement and of the USSR more generally [304–10]. Key to the “chain reaction” of difficult transparency in the Soviet Union were open letters, to which dissidents often added their professions beneath their signatures. Analyzing this dataset, Amalrik found that among dissidents “the single largest contingent,” Nathans writes, “worked at institutions of higher education” [305]. For a class of thinkers sustained by a single universal employer to oppose the power of that single universal employer is a tricky balancing act. Officially, by the mid 1960s, there was no middle class in Czechoslovakia, either, but the Havel family, to take a crucial example, had been among the grandest of the great bourgeois families of the First Republic, the democratic and capitalist interregnum in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars. The Havels were real estate developers who pioneered the country’s nascent film industry. All but two rooms of their six-story Prague townhouse had been nationalized by the time Havel started writing plays, but it would have taken at least one more generation of class struggle to prevent any social and intellectual capital from being passed on to him. Dissidents in Czechoslovakia may have stood on economic ground no sturdier than what dissidents in the Soviet Union stood on, but the displaced social order was still a living memory for them, and they were able to speak with a cultural authority that hadn’t quite dissipated.

By relaying Nathans’s insight that Soviet leaders in the late 20th century were trying to move past violence, I hope I’m not giving the impression that the country’s dissidents had it easy. The Soviet authorities remained relentless, even if they were no longer quite as ruthless. Nathans devotes chapters to the “dissident repertoire” and to the repertoire of the secret police assigned to crush them, and the disparity is extreme. In a psychological rebound from the formality of Soviet life, dissidents seem to have been allergic to formally organizing themselves, and to have preferred for each person involved to be acting on the promptings of his individual conscience. Their weapon of choice was the open letter, circulated in samizdat. Even their dissident newspaper, the Chronicle of Current Events, was decentralized and intermittent. At first the authorities arrested and tried dissidents, hoping to repeat the pedagogical effects of the show trials of the early Soviet Union, in which bludgeoned defendants publicly confessed to everything and more, but the authorities soon learned that absent the bludgeonings, trials accelerated the dissidents’ “chain reaction,” because even though the judgments went as foreordained, defendants got a chance to speak for themselves. Authorities came to rely instead on extrajudicial means of suppression: involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations, “prophylactic” conversations (intimidating visits from KGB officers), and internal and external exile.

These were efficacious. By the early 1980s, the free-ranging Soviet dissident was an endangered species. Andrei Sakharov was banished in 1980, and after the Chronicle of Current Events ceased publication in 1982, the dissident movement all but shut down [609]. And then, a decade later, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev started echoing dissident catchwords like transparency and reform, and shortly after Gorbachev loosened the stays, the straitjacket unraveled. Whether the dissident movement had anything to do with the end of the Soviet Union remains a debated question. Nathans argues, hopefully, that “the dissident movement sparked by Volpin helped drain the Soviet system of legitimacy inside them,” [614] and maybe that is how the spirit of history did its work, in this case. Unfortunately, the current state of politics in Russia does not grace the story with a happy ending. In his 1969 samizdat essay, Amalrik had guessed that if the Communist regime collapsed, dissidents, and the middle class they came from, would be too weak to lead Russia, and the likely result would be “the rise of virulent Russian nationalism ‘with its characteristic cult of strength and expansionist ambitions'” [309]. In a 1967 essay, Sakharov had predicted that the Soviets and the West would someday converge, combining the best of both worlds [285], but his fellow dissident Leonid Plyushch thought the convergence more likely to be a dark one, with the USSR descending into “state capitalism in its most inhuman form” while the West became “less democratic, [with] greater concentrations of capital, and merging monopolies with the state” [292]. Ah well. Being right about the future doesn’t necessarily mean it turns out any better.

And maybe one doesn’t become a dissident because one thinks it likely one will prevail. Discussing the source of Larisa Bogoraz’s radical drive for transparency, Nathans quotes an essay by Hannah Arendt, “Moral Responsibility under Totalitarian Dictatorships,” about what motivated resistance to Nazi rule. Protesters, Arendt maintained, acted

not because the world would be better (not because of political responsibility) and not because they were worried about the salvation of their soul, but because they wanted to go on living with themselves. [292]

An unseemly rhyme

My mind has rebelled against the cascade of bad things the Trump regime has done lately by insisting that I pay attention for a little while to just one of them.

The week before last, the United States effected the spectacular rendition, fascist in manner and deed, of several hundred Venezuelan refugees to a forced-labor prison in El Salvador. U.S. immigration officials began laying the groundwork for the rendition well before Trump came to power for the second time.

As early as June 2024, American immigration officials began detaining Venezuelan refugees for their tattoos—a form of personal expression that, ironically, has been bound up with American national identity since the early republic, when sailors marked their bodies permanently as American in an effort to keep from being impressed into the British navy, which, long after America’s independence, was slow to distinguish American citizens from British subjects (see Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution).

In June 2024, for example, an aspiring Venezuelan streetwear entrepreneur named Frizgeralth de Jesús Cornejo Pulgar, who had been targeted by paramilitary groups associated with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, met U.S. border patrol agents for an asylum interview that he had requested through the agency’s official app and was detained by them because of his tattoos. Not even a declaration from his tattoo artist, confirming that the designs were innocuous, could get him released. In November, Daniel Alberto Lozano Camargo, a Venezuelan asylum seeker working at a carwash in Houston, was detained because of his tattoos, which included the names of his father, his niece, and his partner’s daughter. In December, Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player who had been arrested and tortured by the Maduro regime in Venezuela after taking part in peaceful political demonstrations, also made an appointment through U.S. immigration’s official app to apply for asylum, only for U.S. officials to argue that his tattoos—a soccer ball and a rosary—marked him as a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He, too, was detained.

E.M., a young Venezuelan food vendor and delivery person who has so far only been identified in the press by his initials, fled to Colombia with his girlfriend in 2021, after paramilitaries in Venezuela targeted the two of them for their political activity. In 2023, E.M. and his girlfriend applied from Colombia for asylum in the United States. U.S. immigration agents in that country asked E.M. about his tattoos but, seemingly unconcerned, granted the couple official refugee status in late 2024. When the couple arrived in Houston on 8 January 2025, however, immigration officials designated E.M. a member of the same gang, also on the basis of his tattoos—a crown, a soccer ball, and a palm tree. He, too, was detained. All of these refugees denied gang affiliation, as did their families; none had criminal records.

The day of his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order declaring Tren de Aragua to be a terrorist organization. It seems likely to me, given the timing of the early detentions and of Trump’s first-day proclamation, that a plan was in place, and that officials inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been cooperating with it quietly even before Trump took office. After the inauguration, the collection of refugees accelerated. A Venezuelan barber named Franco José Caraballo Tiapa was detained because of his tattoos on 3 February 2025. When Frengel Reyes Mota, a house painter who fled Venezuela in 2023, checked in with U.S. immigration officials on 4 February 2025, he, too, was detained as a suspected gang member, even though he has no tattoos at all, as well as no criminal record, and even though, in the documents filed against him, “the government . . . uses someone else’s last name in several parts . . . , identifies him with female pronouns, and uses two different unique identification numbers that immigration authorities use to keep track of individuals.” A Venezuelan named Neri Alvarado Borges was also detained in early February; one of his tattoos was an autism awareness ribbon with his brother’s name. On February 8, an aspiring musician named Arturo Suárez Trejo was arrested by immigration officials at his home in Raleigh, North Carolina; his tattoos include a hummingbird, which his wife says symbolizes “harmony and good energy,” and a palm tree, a reference to a Venezuelan expression about God’s greatness that his mother likes to quote. The tattoos that got Andry Hernandez, a gay makeup artist, detained “are flowers and are dedicated to his parents,” one of his lawyers has told NBC News; Hernandez, too, was detained when he showed up for his appointment to request asylum.

In early March, these detained Venezuelan asylum seekers and others were moved to South Texas or Louisiana from detention centers elsewhere, vanishing from courtrooms around the country where their cases were still being heard. The government seems to have made tracking the location of the detained refugees difficult even for their lawyers, but Josh Kovensky, reporting for Talking Points Memo, has uncovered records of detainees being moved on March 5, between March 7 and March 9, and on either March 10 or 11.

On the night of Friday, March 14, the detainees were “told they would be deported the next day to an unknown destination,” and lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, representing five of these detainees, somehow “caught wind of these movements,” according to a narrative of the facts compiled by Judge James E. Boasberg. In the early hours of Saturday, March 15, the lawyers filed for a temporary restraining order, asking Boasberg’s court to prevent the U.S. government from sending the detainees out of the country before their cases could be heard. The lawyers suspected—correctly, it turns out—that the Trump regime was planning to deport the Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the only law to survive from the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts that schoolchildren are taught to deplore, a law that hadn’t been used in seventy-five years. Immigration officials were boarding detainees onto airplanes as early as 7am that Saturday morning. At 9:40am, Judge Boasberg gave a verbal order forbidding the government to send the five plaintiffs named in the case out of the United States. Immigration officials delayed the deportation of those five, but continued to deport the other Venezuelans in custody. At 4pm, the Trump regime revealed that Trump had indeed signed a proclamation targeting Tren de Aragua under the Alien Enemies Act, and at 5pm, Boasberg began hearing the civil rights lawyers’ request for a restraining order. The Trump regime’s representatives in court repeatedly refused to answer when Boasberg asked if detainees were at that very moment being deported, but in fact, the first plane left Harlingen, Texas, at 5:26pm. At 6:47pm, Boasberg enjoined the government from removing from the country anyone detained under the Alien Enemies Act—not just the five named in the lawsuit—and told the government that “any plane containing [members of the class] that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. . . . This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.” When he spoke those words, two planes were still in the air, and a third had yet to depart Texas. Boasberg’s order was entered into the court’s docket at 7:26pm Saturday evening.

The order was not complied with. The first of the U.S. government’s three planes landed in El Salvador at 12:10am Sunday morning—hours after both the oral and the written versions of Boasberg’s order. Boasberg wrote that “the most reasonable inference is that [the Government] hustled people onto those planes in the hopes of evading an injunction or perhaps preventing them from requesting the habeas hearing to which the Government now acknowledges they are entitled.” He was being almost polite. The Trump regime’s defiance of his court’s authority was flagrant.

The government’s planes landed at a “mega-prison” in El Salvador called the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). Soon after they arrived, the president of that country, Nayib Bukele, who has ruled as a dictator since 2022, tweeted, “Oopsie… Too late,” a message that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted. El Salvador, an authoritarian country, currently has “the highest incarceration rate in the world.” Its vice president has told the New York Times, “To these people who say democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes—we are not dismantling it, we are eliminating it, we are replacing it with something new.” Bukele himself has boasted, “Let all the ‘human rights’ NGOs know that we are going to wipe out these damned murderers and their collaborators, we will put them in prison, and they will never get out. We don’t care about your pathetic reports, your paid journalists, your puppet politicians, or your famous ‘international community,’ which has never cared about our people.” The human rights NGOs that Bukele scorns have concluded that “torture has become a state policy” in El Salvador, and report that in its prisons, dead bodies have been left in cells until they stink, hungry prisoners have been made to lick food off the floor, and overcrowded cells are sometimes flooded and then an electric current passed through the water. Incarceration at CECOT, which is a forced-labor camp, seems to be permanent. “The Salvadoran government has described people held in CECOT as ‘terrorists,’ ” the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch notes, “and has said that they ‘will never leave.’ Human Rights Watch is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.”

That the United States government had anything to do with Bukele’s regime at all is in itself a five-alarm fire. And sending refugees to a country with a human rights record like El Salvador’s is not only morally reprehensible—it is against U.S. law. As Boasberg notes in his decision, the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act stipulates that the United States may not “expel . . . any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

What brought the evil done by the Trump regime home to me, though, is the account that Philip Holsinger, a photographer for Time magazine, gave of the refugees’ arrival at CECOT:

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.

On Bluesky, I saw speculation that this gay barber was Andry Hernandez, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. Hernandez is a makeup artist, and the two barbers among the deportees that I’m aware of seem to be straight. It hardly matters. The anguish of the prisoner, whoever he is, rings clear as a bell. And Holsinger’s photographs fill out the picture alarmingly. After arriving in the intake yard, in the middle of the night, the prisoners, shackled at their wrists and ankles, were slapped, kicked, and shoved. As the prisoners’ heads were shaved,

The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

To recapitulate: Two weeks ago, my country, the one I was born in and that I’m a citizen of, sent hundreds of men, many with no criminal record, to a forced-labor camp in a totalitarian country that almost none of these men had probably ever been to. Upon their arrival, they were assaulted, their clothes were confiscated, and their heads were shaved. Those running the camp promise they will never leave. How is this not complicity in sending people to the modern equivalent of Auschwitz? How is this not the moral nightmare that every decent person alive today with any knowledge of history has been dreading his whole life? Whole news cycles of malfeasance by the Trump regime have coursed over us since these men were deported. But Andry Hernandez is still locked in CECOT, where, the Financial Times has written, if it ever reaches full capacity, each prisoner would have “less than half the minimum [space] required under EU law to transport midsized cattle by road.”

As if to prove the Trump regime’s immorality, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, flew to El Salvador the other day to tour CECOT, and had herself filmed in front of a cell where the bunks are four tiers high. That’s how high the bunks were at Buchenwald, as it happens. To anyone who has ever read books about or watched documentaries about the Holocaust, Noem’s video selfie, which she posted to her Instagram account, makes an unseemly rhyme.

Psephocracy, beleaguered

An 18th-century comic print, in color, of a skeleton seated on a cannon, facing Napoleon, seated on a drum, as soldiers fight and die behind them — Thomas Rowlandson, “The Two Kings of Terror” (1813)

In 2016, I wrote an article for the New Yorker about whether voters are well informed enough for democracy to succeed. It was published a week before the presidential election that year, so the situational irony was kinda heavy.

It’s a complex problem. Voters are remarkably ignorant, and crowds of them are not wiser than they are as individuals, because their ignorance has a shape—errors in one direction aren’t balanced out by errors in another. Nonetheless, democracy doesn’t fail all that often, and has some incontrovertible up-sides; democratic countries almost never have famines, for instance, and get into wars with one another infrequently.

So how does democracy manage to work, when it does? No theorist thinks it’s infallible, I hasten to say. The only question is why it isn’t even worse. One theory: retrospective voting. Maybe it’s enough if voters react according to whether they’re happier than the last time they went to the ballot box.

It’s not hard to see how retrospective voting could fail. Thoughtless voters might punish an incumbent for misfortunes that are coincidences, beyond his control, such as hurricanes or plagues. In fact, researchers have found that voters punish incumbents when their hometown sports team has a bad season. Timing might also interfere. Voters could punish an incumbent for a slow-to-bloom unhappiness the seeds of which were planted by his predecessor. And they could fail to reward an incumbent whose policies wouldn’t yield happiness until after the next election. Such a timing error, in my opinion, is part of what happened to Biden and the Democrats in 2024. Biden stood up for unions as no President of either party had done for decades, but four years of solidarity, after five decades of backsliding, neglect, and even sabotage, weren’t enough to bring about a change in economic potency that a considerable number of workers could yet feel. And while some of the economic stimulus from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act may have begun to register, most of it was yet to come (the overwhelming majority, by the way, will be in red states), and the mitigation of climate change that it was designed to induce was even farther off in the future. Of course, even when that mitigation does arrive (if it arrives, that is—Trump looks likely to sabotage it), it’s going to arrive as an absence of harm, which by definition will be hard for anyone to have a vivid perception of. The world needs to be saved, but no one has yet figured out how a politician can win points for keeping it from ending.

In America, retrospective voting is buttressed by the federal government’s cumulative structure. The federal government’s operations are largely stable from one administration to the next, and when change happens—when Congress passes a law creating a new agency, or zeroes out an existing agency’s budget—voters notice the alteration in their well-being, and vote for or against. If a new President adds something to the federal government that no one wants, or is ready for, it is likely to get discarded by the next administration. And contrariwise, if a new President takes away something many people need and appreciate, it gets put back. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) didn’t become a success the moment it was signed into law; it was proved a success when, a few years later, it turned out to be too popular for Republicans to dare dismantle it. Like Social Security, like Medicare, it became part of the core collection of legislative decisions that the institution of federal government perpetuates. Bureaucratic inertia has a bad reputation, but it’s the memory of democracy. This is the part of Edmund Burke’s conservative political philosophy that even liberals are tempted to agree with: muddling through, over the course of years, brings about progress when it’s done incrementally rather than radically, and although the result may look like a Rube Goldberg machine, assembled piecemeal and without foresight, it’s the result of experiment, and bears pragmatism’s warrant. Reformers should be cautious about renovating it wholesale.

Which is why it’s more than a little terrifying that an unelected Elon Musk is boasting that in the past few weeks, he has fed whole agencies of the federal government into the wood chipper. He’s yanking memory cartridges out of a benevolent HAL-9000; he’s banjaxing the institutional memory that is democracy’s mechanism for self-improvement. Trump, unusually for a Republican, didn’t run on a platform of destroying the social safety net. He ran on a platform of deporting immigrants on a massive scale and ratcheting up tariffs—both sufficiently horrible policies, in my opinion—as if in quiet recognition of the fact that many of his constituents relied on and valued federal aid. By destroying programs like America’s charitable efforts at disease prevention abroad, and its funding of biological research at home, Musk is dismantling systems whose social ramifications, and subsequent political effects, he is highly unlikely to understand. And by doing it at such a scale, so quickly, there’s a risk that he will overwhelm the capacity of retrospective voting, which works best when policy changes are incremental, to respond to him meaningfully. He’s wiping the hard drive of democracy.

Speed and irreversibility are no doubt exactly Musk’s intention. But it’s nonetheless very bad news! Before the election, I thought the worst of the second Trump administration would be concentration camps for immigrants. But recently I’ve become worried as well about the acceleration of disease and global warming. Last week Kennedy cancelled the annual meeting where the nation’s health leaders were to choose which strains of influenza next fall’s flu vaccine should protect against, and he has been cavalier about the outbreak of measles spreading in West Texas. Meanwhile, it looks like Trump is going to zero out as many as he can of Biden’s efforts to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, including by bringing to a sudden halt almost all wind-power developments in America. A few paragraphs above, I worried that voters might unfairly punish a leader who happened to preside over hurricanes or plagues. But voters would be perfectly justified in punishing politicians who bring about conditions that make hurricanes and plagues more likely and more deleterious by abetting global warming and quack medicine.

Musk’s dismantlings have happened too recently for most people to have yet felt the effects. Scientists have lost grant funding, and scholars of public health are terrified, but mass deaths haven’t yet occurred. In my Instagram feed, park ranger after park ranger is posting about having his dream of national service shattered, but most people visit national parks in the summer, which is still a few months off. It won’t be that long, however, and maybe sooner than we expect, before people do feel effects vividly. It’s entirely possible that the economic consequences of Trump’s mismanagement will hit first, which I think would be a blessing—I would much rather live through a recession at the hands of disbelievers in Keynesianism than through a bird-flu pandemic under a public-health system run by disbelievers in vaccines. When people do feel the consequences, however—when they perceive their prosperity, their health, their well-being, and even their lives to be endangered—the political reaction may be beyond current calculations. Think of what happened to George W. Bush’s administration after the political and social order broke down in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The seeds for the Occupy movement, and for mutual care efforts during the Covid pandemic and even for subsequent protest waves such as Black Lives Matter, were planted then, I suspect. Now imagine facing a pandemic with the knowledge that no vaccine is on the way, or days of orange wildfire smoke, and the washing away of a city in Florida, under a President whose actions guarantee that the temperature of the world will continue to rise steadily. I’m not sure anyone in politics today is ready for that lion to awaken.

Some personal news

On an incongruously lighter note: I’m the member of the month at my gym, Cross Fit South Brooklyn. You can read a Q&A with me about it here.

The Ordinary course of law

On 1 July 2024, the Supreme Court awarded former and current Presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution—protecting them from criminal liability for almost any act performed while in office, so long as the act was performed in the President’s capacity as President.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that a President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for any exercise of his “core constitutional powers,” such as issuing pardons, nominating ambassadors, and firing heads of department [Roberts 9], and must be presumed immune from criminal prosecution for any other official act, unless it can be shown that prosecution won’t in any way conflict with the “authority and functions of the Executive Branch” [Roberts 14]. The Roberts court also ruled that a President may not be subjected in court to any examination of his motives [Roberts 18], which implies, according to Roberts, that even in a trial of a President for his unofficial acts, a prosecutor may not introduce any of a President’s official acts as evidence [Roberts 30].

The three liberal justices on the court wrote strong dissents, which so irritated Roberts that, toward the end of his opinion, he accused them of adopting “a tone of chilling doom” and relying on “cherry-picked sources” [Roberts 37–38]. Why so emotional? he seemed to be asking. He himself had raised his eyes toward legal eternity (“we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies,” he wrote [41]), and if he had made the effort of rising to the dispassionate, slightly inhumane plane where eternity may be duly thought through, why couldn’t they? It’s a mistake to pay too much attention to the messy, distracting corporeality of Donald J. Trump, was his implication. Instead of the mere case at hand, focus on its abstract and perpetual ramifications.

There is something to the empyrean angle, of course. Supreme Court decisions often get turned inside-out like gloves by the justices of later generations, so there’s virtue in thinking beyond the case at hand. Speaking just for myself, a part of me is always ready to worry that I’m listening to my heart when I should be listening to my head. So let’s consider; let’s be cool. Is Roberts’s reasoning sound? Has Sotomayor, who wrote the stronger of the two dissents, misread the historical evidence of the intent of the Constitution’s Framers, or failed to take into account the implications of intervening rulings and case law?

One of the things that seems to have most annoyed Roberts is that Sotomayor quoted scripture at him, scripture in this case being The Federalist Papers, the preeminent source, especially among originalists and other legal conservatives, for documenting the Framers’ own rationale for the Constitution. Sotomayor noted that in Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton wrote that Presidents, in addition to being subject to impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors,” are “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law” [Sotomayor 6, quoting Federalist 69]. What a lovely phrase that is, by the way: “the ordinary course of law.” There’s another off-handed reference by Hamilton to the President’s vulnerability to plain-old criminal prosecution in Federalist No. 65, where it is again seen as a punishment supplementary to impeachment: “After having been sentenced to a perpetual ostracism from the esteem and confidence, and honors and emoluments of his country; he [the President] will still be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” And Hamilton refers to the liability yet again in Federalist No. 77, where he suggests that the Constitution makes the Presidency safe “in the republican sense” (i.e., arranges the Presidency so that it will not easily turn into dictatorship) by subjecting Presidents to election every four years, by making them vulnerable to impeachment by Congress, and by keeping them vulnerable to “the forfeiture of life and estate by subsequent prosecution in the common course of law.” Life! In the good old days, take note, a politician as unradical as Hamilton seems to have believed that a President who committed treason might have to pay with his head.

Roberts complains that in the quotes that Sotomayor takes from Hamilton, Hamilton doesn’t specify whether the President could be prosecuted “for his official conduct” as opposed to his private conduct [Roberts 39]. Roberts’s implication is that the verses of scripture aren’t therefore all that pertinent. But as Sotomayor points out, Hamilton doesn’t specify because Hamilton doesn’t seem to have seen the need to make any such distinction. He seems to have believed Presidents were responsible for all their crimes.

As did other Framers of the Constitution. Sotomayor quotes a speech that Charles Pinckney, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, gave in the U.S. Senate on 5 March 1800. Pinckney recalled that

No privilege of this kind was intended for your Executive, . . . . The Convention which formed the Constitution well knew that this was an important point, and no subject had been more abused than privilege. They therefore determined to set the example, in merely limiting privilege to what was necessary, and no more. [Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3: 385, quoted in abridged form by Sotomayor at 7]

Roberts considers Pinckney’s testimony to be “the principal dissent’s most compelling piece of evidence” [Roberts 39], and he rebuts it in two ways. First, by writing that Pinckney is merely stating an argument that has long since been discredited, namely, “that any immunity not expressly mentioned in the Constitution must not exist” [Roberts 39].

In this sentence of Roberts’s, the word “any” is doing a lot of work. In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, decided in 1982, the Supreme Court did rule that Presidents are immune from civil suits for damages even though no such immunity is spelled out in the Constitution. The 1982 court reasoned that the separation of powers implied by the Constitution was meaningless unless the President’s time and attention were protected from interference; the court judged that having a “vigorous” (Hamilton’s word) executive branch was more important than redressing the injuries that a President’s actions might happen to cause to individual private citizens. So yes, there now exists a Presidential immunity from civil lawsuits, not expressly mentioned in the Constitution. Moreover, courts have long been chary of forcing the executive branch to make public its internal deliberations, even when such disclosures might be of use in a trial, because courts have judged it important for the President to have access to candid advice, which might not be forthcoming if advisers worried that their words could appear as trial exhibits some day.

There is no evidence, however, that the particular immunity at stake here—a Presidential immunity to criminal prosecution—existed before 1 July 2024, certainly not in any explicit form. Perhaps sensing that he hasn’t altogether put paid to Pinckney, Roberts moves on to a second line of attack against Pinckney—a rather strange one. “Pinckney,” Roberts writes, “is not exactly a reliable authority on the separation of powers: He went on to state on the same day that ‘it was wrong to give the nomination of Judges to the President’—an opinion expressly rejected by the Framers” [Roberts 39].

The first thing to say about this attack is that Roberts seems to be engaging in a forensic method no more searching than the one I’m deploying in this blog post—namely, looking up Sotomayor’s footnotes. He doesn’t seem to have at his disposal any historical resources he has discovered for himself. The second thing to say is that even just on the face of it, Roberts’s comment doesn’t seem likely to be true. When I first read it—before I had even read Sotomayor’s dissent, let alone looked up the relevant page in the Records of the Federal Convention of 1787—I scribbled in the margin, “But why would Pinckney’s having an opinion not later considered canonical make him an unreliable reporter of the consensus at the Convention?” And indeed, if you go look at the source that records Pinckney’s comments, you’ll see that in his remarks in the Senate in 1800, Pinckney is clearly distinguishing (a) his longstanding personal opinion that it was wrong to have the President nominate judges, from (b) his recollection that it was the sense of the Convention that the executive branch should not be shielded by any privilege. How could Roberts have looked at the page in question without seeing this? Is he that sloppy a reader? Or that tendentious a one? One begins to suspect he may not be operating on a plane quite as empyrean as he would like his readers to believe.

Furthermore, Hamilton’s and Pinckney’s belief seems to have been widely shared in early America, as Sotomayor documents by quoting a speech that James Iredell, later one of the Supreme Court’s first justices, gave on 28 July 1788, when North Carolina was debating whether to ratify the Constitution: “If he [the President] commits any crime, he is punishable by the laws of his country, and in capital cases may be deprived of his life” [Debates on the Constitution4:109, quoted in abridged form by Sotomayor at 7 n 2]. Life again! One gets the impression that the possibility of hanging the President was rather dear to the hearts of the first generation of Americans.

Even more telling, the same belief is also present in the text of the Constitution itself, Sotomayor argues. The Impeachment Judgment Clause limits Congress’s potential punishment of the President to removal from office and the stripping away of honors and pay, but then adds that “the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law”“[U.S. Constitution 1.3.7]. Sotomayor puts the word “nevertheless” in italics, to emphasize that the Framers did not intend for impeachment to preclude or preempt criminal prosecution, and points out that bribery, one of the “high crimes” explicitly named as a matter for impeachment elsewhere in the Constitution, involves a President’s official acts almost by definition. If anything, Sotomayor may be underselling her case here. It’s also hard to imagine how a President could commit treason—the other “high crime” called out by the Constitution for impeachment—without deploying his official powers as President. How could a President commit treason if not by taking advantage of his command of the military, or by mounting the bully pulpit and calling for insurrection or civil war? It’s unimaginable that the Framers of the Constitution would have wanted to immunize from criminal prosecution a traitor who turned the armed forces, or a segment of the public, against the Constitution he had sworn to uphold. Indeed, what else could the Framers have been thinking of when they referenced the potential hanging of Presidents so often and so cherishingly? When the Impeachment Judgment Clause is read in the context of the quotes from Hamilton, Pinckney, and Iredell, all of which follow the same semantic pattern—stating that the Constitution provides for impeachment of the President by Congress, and then clarifying that this punishment is in addition to criminal prosecution in the ordinary course of law—it becomes irrefutable that the Constitution states that Presidents are notimmune from criminal prosecution. A Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution is literally, explicitly unconstitutional.

Roberts makes the same retort to the Constitution that he makes to Hamilton, namely, that the Impeachment Judgment Clause “does not indicate whether a former President may, consistent with the separation of powers, be prosecuted for his official conduct in particular” [Roberts 38]. This is weak, since Roberts doesn’t provide any evidence that Hamilton, or any other Framer, thought any such distinction should or could be made. But I’m not an originalist, nor, for that matter, is Roberts, though most of his conservative allies on the Supreme Court are. Let’s go ahead and admit that a criminal immunity for the President’s official acts is being established by decision in Trump v. United States—is being made up. Or, to speak more politely, is being inferred. And let’s take a look at this new construction.

Once you admit it’s new—once you strip away the gilding of historical inevitability and admit that the Roberts majority is working a change in America’s political economy—the change becomes easier to see. Sotomayor for her part insists on the novelty of the Roberts majority’s creation. “Every sitting President has so far believed himself under the threat of criminal liability,” she writes; the threat “has been shaping Presidential decision-making since the earliest days of the Republic” [Sotomayor 17]. If Ford hadn’t pardoned Nixon, she writes, Nixon would likely have been found guilty of deploying the FBI to obstruct justice in the Watergate case—an official act and therefore immune, under the new Roberts dispensation. Indeed, Ford’s pardon of Nixon was only meaningful because Nixon was understood to be liable to criminal prosecution [Sotomayor 9]. Reagan was investigated for the Iran/Contra program because if he had been found to have been aware of and to have directed it, he would have been prosecuted for it even though that illegal operation, too, would as of this week be considered an immune exercise of the President’s official powers [Sotomayor 10].

Sotomayor is biting about the clumsiness of the new construction. In the case before the court, she points out, Trump isn’t charged with any crime that involves what Roberts labels a “core” power of the Presidency, so there was no need, juridically speaking, for Roberts to isolate the President’s “core” powers and bestow on them absolute immunity [Sotomayor 23]. Moreover, since Roberts is willing to include in his “core” exemption any discussion between the President and the Department of Justice, the boundaries around the created category are so extensive as to be almost indistinguishable from the official acts to which Roberts claims to be granting only presumptive immunity [Sotomayor 24]. That presumptive immunity, by the way, Sotomayor considers to be a hollow game. The conditions that Roberts sets for overcoming presumptive immunity, after all, are a near impossibility, just by inspection. How could a risk of criminal prosecution fail to hem in the power of the executive branch? “It is hard to imagine a criminal prosecution for a President’s official acts,” Sotomayor writes, “that would pose no dangers of intrusion on Presidential authority in the [Roberts] majority’s eyes” [Sotomayor 11]. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, similarly, calls Roberts’s claimed distinction between absolute and presumptive immunity “illusory” [Jackson 14].

Roberts’s whole edifice, Sotomayor shows, turns out to be sucked not from between the lines of the Constitution but from between those of the Supreme Court’s 1982 Nixon v. Fitzgerald ruling, which she calls the “one arrow in its [the Roberts majority’s] quiver” [Sotomayor 12]. An arrow shot far beyond its target, she argues. To insulate the President from civil lawsuits is to grant him a significant privilege, but to immunize him from criminal liability is to place him almost entirely above the law (even Roberts, it should be said, preserves a President’s liability for private crimes like theft or sexual assault). In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the court weighed the vigor of the executive branch against the value of remedying private civil torts, and chose executive vigor, but even in that decision, the justices wrote that “there is a lesser public interest in actions for civil damages than, for example, in criminal prosecutions” [Sotomayor 14]. Indeed, the more powerful a public official is, the greater the public’s interest in keeping him accountable. “When Presidents use the powers of their office or personal gain or as part of a criminal scheme,” Sotomayor writes, “every person in the country has an interest in that criminal prosecution” [20]. The amount of interference to be fended off, meanwhile, is radically different. Anyone can file a civil lawsuit, however frivolous, but justice departments are constrained in issuing criminal charges by department policy and by grand juries [15]. It’s a little weird, moreover, that Roberts considers it “a great burden” for the President to have to obey laws; the Constitution already requires him to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” so presumably he’s already paying a fair amount of attention to them [18].

And it’s absurd to treat executive vigor as if it were the only governmental virtue. Jackson, in her dissent, quotes a 1926 dissent by Louis Brandeis, explaining that the separation of powers—the crux of America’s political economy—was adopted by the Framers in spite of its obvious inefficiency. “The purpose was, not to avoid friction,” Brandeis writes, “but . . . to save the people from autocracy” [Jackson 19]. If the Roberts majority genuinely valued governmental efficiency more highly than civil damages, there would have been no reason for them to rule last week, in Loper Bright, that experts in federal regulatory agencies are no longer entitled to deference in the courts when challenged by private business interests.

The list of flaws in Roberts’s reasoning goes on. Even one of the justices who concurs with him, Amy Coney Barrett, finds his willingness to exclude a President’s official acts from evidence unwarranted [Barrett5–6]—an exclusion that Sotomayor, for her part, calls “nonsensical” [Sotomayor 26n5]. Sotomayor further points out that the risk that jurors in the criminal trial of a President might be politically biased isn’t “unique” to a case like Trump v. United States, as Roberts claims, but is inextricable from any effort to hold a politician accountable in the American justice system [Sotomayor 27].

The Roberts majority doesn’t seem to want the American justice system to try. Its ruling in Trump v. United States is remarkable for the paucity of the historical evidence behind it, its slipshod construction, and its failure to balance the concerns of democracy and justice against those of executive efficiency. It is opposed in spirit to the distinction Hamilton tries to make, in Federalist No. 69, between President and king:

The President of the United States would be an officer elected by the people for four years. The King of Great-Britain is a perpetual and hereditary prince. The one would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace: The person of the other is sacred and inviolable. . . . What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? [Federalist 69, quoted in abridged form by Sotomayor at 6–7]

In the country Hamilton helped found and frame, his question can no longer be answered.

Laughing at fascists

“I will have free speech at my meetings,” the statuesque teenage heiress Eugenia Malmains insists, in Nancy Mitford’s 1935 novel Wigs on the Green. Eugenia, a fascist, has been interrupted mid-harangue by her nanny, who thinks Eugenia is disgracing herself. Eugenia proceeds to threaten her nanny with violence: “Now will you go of your own accord or must I tell the Comrades to fling you out?”

From time immemorial, the rage of fascists has styled itself as more-grown-up-than-thou, but in feeling-tone it in fact more closely resembles that of teenagers—grandiose, spirally, counterdependent. If only we lived in a world where it was safe to believe that it was just as harmless! And if only the right little old lady could be found to tug every fascist down from her washtub. Further deflating fascism’s pretensions in this particular case: In Mitford’s novel, Eugenia is seen largely through the eyes of two gold-digging cads, Jasper Aspect and Noel Foster, who don’t take her politics very seriously (“batty” is the word one of them uses) because they regard her not as a person but as an opportunity to marry into the moneyed aristocracy.

“Oh! I think that’s all a joke,” a middle-class woman in the novel protests, when her left-wing bohemian-artist friends upbraid her for being swept up in the fascist excitement. But what kind of a joke is it, exactly? Some of the novel’s humor takes advantage of fascism’s abrupt rhetorical extremes. On several occasions, Eugenia calls for “jackshirt justice,” i.e., beatings or worse, but when a flapper heiress wants to ditch a husband who has grown tiresome, Eugenia insists on the sanctity of marriage. “Well, well, what a governessy little thing it is,” Jasper observes. Even from the distance of nearly a century, Mitford makes clear how hackneyed and familiar fascist language was, much as it has become to us in the past few years. “Let me see, where had I got to—oh! yes,” Eugenia resumes, once she has surmounted her nanny’s interruption:

Patriotism is one of the primitive virtues of mankind. Allow it to atrophy and much that is valuable in human nature must perish. This is being proved today, alas, in our unhappy island as well as in those other countries, which, like ourselves, still languish ‘neath the deadening sway of a putrescent democracy. Respect for parents, love of the home, veneration of the marriage tie, are all at a discount in England today, society is rotten with vice, selfishness, and indolence.

Viktor Orban could do no better. An idealized past? Check. A hearkening back to patriarchal morals? Check. A jeremiad against sexual sophistication? Check. Scorn for democracy? Check. Fetishization of patriotism and strength? Check. Not to mention indignant cries of “free speech” at even the mildest interruption.

Even the great replacement theory, as it is now called (aka racial purity, as it was known then), puts in an appearance, a few scenes later. When Jasper makes a casual reference to beautiful women and their lovers, Eugenia reproves him: “Under our régime, women will not have lovers. They will have husbands and great quantities of healthy Aryan children.” Also familiar is Eugenia’s persistent dunning of her audience. Fundraising may be done to MAGA followers by text message today but in the early 20th century, it had to be inflicted in person. “You are asked to pay ninepence a month, the Union Jack shirt costs five shillings and the little emblem sixpence,” Eugenia says, to almost everyone she meets, in almost every scene in which she appears.

Is it okay to laugh at all this? Humor has become suspect lately, because of rightwingers’ strategy of using it to normalize racist and misogynist ideas—dodging them past the moral censors under cover of unseriousness. It is true that Mitford plays Eugenia’s calls for violence, for example, for laughs only. Eugenia is always talked out of her momentary enthusiasms—her nanny is not actually ever beaten up—so her talk never has consequences, and the danger remains hazy.

Confusingly, if one turns to Mitford’s letters, one finds her claiming that her mockery of fascism was meant, of all things, fondly. The inspiration for the book, it turns out, was the avid fascism of two of her sisters, Unity and Diana. Unity signed letters, “Heil Hitler,” and wrote home swoonily from Munich about conversations with the Fuhrer, and Diana was to marry Oswald Mosley, the leader (or “Leader,” as he was styled by his followers) of the British Union of Fascists—a political party that Nancy, too, for a while joined, as Charlotte Mosley explains in her introduction to the 2010 (pre-Brexit, pre-Trump) Vintage paperback edition. Having written a novel satirizing her sisters’ fervor, Nancy faced some tricky family diplomacy. She boldly told Unity that the novel was “about you” and assured her that the portrait was so attractive that “everyone who has read my book longs to meet you.” At the end of another letter to Unity, however, she took the opposite tack and drew a caricature in which Unity’s head is labeled “bone” and her heart “stone,” while one of Unity’s hand holds an object labeled “rubber truncheon,” and a foot is shod in what is described as a “hobnail boot for trampling on jews.” Yikes. There’s nothing so openly anti-Semitic in Wigs on the Green, but the ugliness of the caricature reveals that in 1935, at least, Nancy either didn’t understand that the brutality in fascist rhetoric was eventually going to be realized, or didn’t much care so long as it looked as though the violence was going to be inflicted on people outside her family’s social circle.

By means of flattery and kidding, Nancy seem to have succeeded in jollying Unity out of being offended by the novel’s satirical portrait. Diana, however, was not so easy to placate. In an effort to appease her, Nancy removed nearly three chapters about “Captain Jack,” a character modeled on Oswald Mosley. (In the novel as published, the character appears only off-stage.) Far from arguing that her humor cuts fascism down to size, as a modern antifascist reader might hope, Nancy tried to convince Diana, in a letter written on 18 June 1935, that humor like hers couldn’t possibly do fascism any harm:

Honestly, if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half an hour I would have scrapped it, or indeed never written it in the first place. The 2 or 3 thousand people who read my books, are, to begin with, just the kind of people the Leader admittedly doesn’t want in his movement. . . . I still maintain that it is far more in favour of Fascism than otherwise. Far the nicest character in the book is a Fascist, the others all become much nicer as soon as they have joined up. But I also know your point of view, that Fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all. Surely that is a little unreasonable?

Appeasement seems not to have worked. After the novel’s publication, Diana kept Nancy at a distance for years.

The awkward truth seems to be that Nancy was to some extent complicit with fascism when she wrote Wigs on the Green, thanks to family ties, personal history, and, to put it politely, thoughtlessness. But she went on appreciate fascism’s threat more keenly. In 1940 she wrote to the Foreign Office that Diana, though a British citizen, should be imprisoned as a Nazi sympathizer, and Diana was in fact imprisoned. In 1943, Nancy wrote again, to urge the government not to release her sister yet—she was still too dangerous. Half a dozen years after the war, she told Evelyn Waugh she was ruling out a reprint of Wigs because humor about Nazis, including her own, couldn’t at that point be in “anything but the worst of taste.”

Is it tacky that I enjoyed her disowned novel anyway, even though (because?) we’re currently living through a resurgence of fascism? Much of the book’s humor is Waughian: comely young heroes and heroines, some of them sickeningly rich, have spines too weak to resist louche and alcoholic pleasures; practically the only devoir they can manage with rigor or regularity is the application of face cream. The fascism in the novel could almost be incidental, if the contrast between the Jazz Age demoralized irony and fascism’s grotesque earnestness weren’t so perfect. As Nancy suggested in her 1935 letter to Diana, her crowd is what fascism defined itself against: dissipated, cosmopolitan, promiscuous. Despite Nancy’s attempts to butter up her sisters in private, it’s clear who she sides with in the novel: the hopeless sophisticates are us, and the fascists, them.

Maybe what I enjoyed was that the novel allowed me to visit a time before fascism was world-historical—before it had murdered so many people that it had to be taken seriously. In the world of Wigs, it still seems as if, were you to point out with sufficient perspicuity how laughable fascism is, its devotees might blink a few times and walk away, wondering what they had been thinking.

The worst possibility is that humor about fascism is a sort of sundial of history. A big question weighing on me lately is where we are in the cycle—toward the end or still only at the beginning? What if I’m able to laugh at Mitford’s novel now because we’re only at the dawn of the current outbreak, and some day, when its shadow has lengthened, I, like the author, won’t be able to find it funny any more?

Readings

“. . . to live like a soldier but not as a soldier, figuratively but not literally, to be allowed in short to live symbolically, spells true freedom.” —Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence-Man

“The art of life, of a poet’s life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.” —Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, 29 April 1852

“I think she regarded my career as akin to a religion she didn’t understand but would of course respect.” —Siobhan Phillips, Benefit, describing how a scholar of English literature feels she is perceived by a former classmate who has gone into consulting

A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave
Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea.
—George Meredith, Modern Love

“She neither embroidered nor wrote—only read and talked.” —Henry James, “A London Life”

“And so for me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them. And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations.” —Thom Gunn, “Writing a Poem,” Occasions of Poetry

“. . . so I went on leisurely, as a trifling man does, sometimes writing a sentence—then taking a turn or two—and then looking how the world went, out of the window . . .” —Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

“You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.” —Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“. . . for beauty with sorrow / Is a burden hard to be borne . . .” —Walter de la Mare, “The Old Summerhouse,” in Reading Walter de la Mare, ed. William Wootten