The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series delves into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy cinematic moment from 2018. Next up is Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. (Read our previous entries here.)
“My father has an anger disorder. He has rage bottled up inside of him. It goes off like a bomb. Once it goes off, everything is destroyed.” So begins a confession of sorts from Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), an introverted, pent-up writer living on his father’s farm, trying vainly to write. It’s a confession he makes to the poised, handsome Ben (Steven Yeun), an enigmatic businessman who’s dating Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), the girl Jong-su has a lingering crush on. And it’s quickly followed by a much stranger revelation from Ben, one that’s at the center (literally and figuratively) of Burning, Lee Chang-dong’s woozy, beguiling mystery thriller.
In talking about his now-imprisoned father’s nasty temper, Jong-su recalls the day his mother abandoned the family, fleeing her abusive husband. “I burned all her clothes,” Jong-su says, laughing. “Sometimes I burn down greenhouses,” Ben replies, looking absentmindedly into the horizon. “It’s a crime, so to speak.” The two of them are sitting on a porch, stoned, and Hae-mi, the joint object of their affection, is sleeping in the house behind them. Jong-su’s memory suggests a lifetime of buried anger and deep-seated issues planted by his parents’ relationship, things the viewer might have guessed already. Ben’s admission is far, far more inscrutable.
But then, that’s the dynamic between the pair. Jong-su is a simmering cauldron of resentment, class envy, and sexual frustration; Ben is a blank canvas, a suave charmer who seems like a catch one moment and a creep the next. What he tells Jong-su is borderline nonsensical: He scouts out abandoned greenhouses in rural areas such as this one, sprays some kerosene, and lights a match, delighting in the wanton destruction. “You can make it disappear as if it never existed,” he tells a disbelieving Jong-su. “It’s like they’re all waiting for me to burn them down.”
An adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, Burning is a narrative about the male ego’s many forms, and Ben’s destructive impulses suggest that he takes a childlike thrill in the freedom he possesses. But the way he describes his hobby—carefully selecting a greenhouse and burning it every couple of months—sounds almost like a metaphor for the work of a serial killer, hunting and stalking his prey. Jong-su eventually convinces himself that’s exactly what Ben was talking about after Hae-mi disappears. But the only real evidence the viewer has is this conversation; it is, without question, the most arresting exchange of dialogue in a movie this year.
Lee and his cinematographer, Hong Kyung-pyo, shoot the sequence like a fading dream; as the two chat, the sun dims in the sky, and the entire scene is bathed in blue twilight. Yeun plays Ben as so calm and collected that his story feels extremely mundane, like he’s talking about the weather or what to have for breakfast tomorrow. It only makes the confession seem that much stranger. In talking about his father, Jong-su was baring his soul; in offering this reply, Ben seems to be exposing the lack of one. “As I watch them burn to the ground, I feel great joy,” he says, with a hint of a smile.
Maybe Ben really does just like to burn greenhouses (though Jong-su finds no evidence of such). But even then, there’s something deeply unsettling about a wealthy, charismatic man engaging in needless destruction just to feel alive. Though Jong-su is no saint, he is at least an artist trying to engage in the act of creativity, whereas Ben is seemingly thrilled by nothing at all. But his blunt nihilism does reflect the blank heartlessness that, in Jong-su’s eyes, comes with being rich and powerful. It gives the entire conversation the feel of a fantasy, as though Ben is suddenly animated with an evil that only Jong-su can perceive. Their cryptic exchange is enough to lead the latter half of Lee’s film down a violent and corrosive path. But it’s just as easy to imagine that Ben’s confession never happened at all.
Previously: A Star Is Born
Next up: Widows
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2SsiFVk
Imagine a place on the internet where a post that begins with “I’m not a feminist” is met with comments quoting Virginia Woolf and asking serious, clarifying questions. A place where a conversation about gun-control legislation unfurls into a thread of analogies, statistics, and self-reflection; where a discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of immigration is carried out in a series of building logical arguments. A place where users with radically different political opinions interact productively and politely, where a willingness to participate thoughtfully is the rule rather than the exception, and where people readily admit when their views on a subject have been altered.
This vision seems like the stuff of technology fantasy; spend five minutes on the platforms that host most of the web’s political arguments, and you’re likely to find name-calling, bigotry, sarcasm, and stubborn assumption. It’s a rare thing to stumble on an online dispute about politics that hasn’t devolved into a furious and chaotic shouting match, where no one can make out what is being said for the noise.
[Read: Is Reddit the world’s best advice column?]
But civil discourse does exist, at least in a small pocket of the internet. Reddit’s Change My View forum, founded in 2013 by Kal Turnbull, then a teenage musician in Scotland, is an online space that promotes respectful conversation between people who disagree with each other. Its mission statement says that the subreddit is “built around the idea that in order to resolve our differences, we must first understand them.” Turnbull says that he created Change My View because of what he saw as a lack of places to turn to if you wanted to discuss an issue with people who took the opposite perspective. There was social media, but the goal on those platforms was largely not to listen and engage in search of insight. He wanted the forum to be conversational—a way of learning about an issue that wasn’t limited to self-directed research. Because of the unique oasis that Change My View represents from the troll-stalked depths of the rest of the internet, a number of academic studies have used its data to analyze how persuasion and civility work online. It has also spawned a blog and a podcast.
What might be more startling than the forum’s general tone of calm, reasonable disagreement is the fact that so many of its contributors seem to change their minds, even on flash-point subjects such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and gun control. (There are also lighthearted posts: A recent debate took on the intractable question of whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich.) While most users’ opinions aren’t turned 180 degrees, shifts in thinking and perspective occur regularly; “deltas” are awarded to commenters who manage to convince, persuade, or teach in some way. The forum’s rules system states that rudeness and hostility are banned, as are comments that don’t “contribute meaningfully” or challenge the original post’s view in some way, whether that means asking a question, offering an emotional appeal, or providing evidence for a claim. The result is that Change My View is the opposite of an echo chamber, where users reinforce the ideas that the group already holds and police anyone who tries to dissent. Instead, dissent is the point.
[Read: Reddit’s case for anonymity on the internet]
Change My View’s success largely rests on its strict rules and the dedicated team of moderators who enforce them. Elizabeth Weeks, one of the forum’s moderators and a 32-year-old attorney who works in Seattle, said that she was surprised at first by how much users wanted and depended on the rules. Weeks first heard about Change My View in 2013, when she was in law school, and thought that the forum presented an interesting premise, as well as a good place to practice formulating arguments. She enjoyed her conversations there because the rules “set up guardrails, so you could expect to have a quality experience each time.” The rules are one of the main things that users like about the forum, both because they mean that anyone who is behaving in a disruptive way is removed and because they set expectations about the environment that mean that users can operate under an assumption of good faith. Change My View’s rules system works because it is consistent, intuitive, and transparent. The moderation is predictable, and users modify their behavior accordingly.
[Read: Donald Glover fans have taken over a pro-Trump Reddit page]
Larger platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, have struggled with swiftly and fairly moderating posts, with the result that users have little sense of which posts will be deleted for violating the platform’s terms of service and which won’t. That kind of confusion isn’t conducive to the patient and painstaking process of untangling a stranger’s presumptions and prejudices. If Twitter and Facebook are vast wildernesses, overgrown in some places and manicured in others, Change My View is more like a carefully tended garden. Weeks says that Turnbull’s leadership is a big part of why Change My View has been so successful. “Heads of companies often don’t understand the consequences of what they have built,” she says. “But he thinks about that quite a lot. Kal leads by example.”
Change My View’s most important lesson is one that applies beyond its moderated walls, one that anyone who has tried to engage in a productive political argument likely already knows. If you want to convince, meet people where they are rather than where you want them to be. “People respond better if you don’t start out guns blazing, accusing them of being dumb or nefarious,” Weeks says. “The most important thing you can do is listen to people,” says another moderator, Brett Johnson, a project manager in Houston who is 36. “If people feel heard and understood, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.”
Some of the arguments on Change My View make use of a strategy called moral reframing, a concept studied by the Stanford sociologist Robb Willer that relies on a person’s ability to empathize and understand the point of view of someone who holds different values. Moral reframing means appealing to the morality of the person you are trying to convince rather than your own. Most people have a hard time doing this without being coached, even though it can be an effective means of shifting deeply held beliefs. This “moral empathy gap” is why it is difficult for those with differing political views to understand each other.
Willer says that two factors contribute to the moral empathy gap: information and inclination. Increasingly, Americans don’t have access to or don’t seek enough information to fully understand the opposite side’s positions. Their news sources may represent only one slice of the political spectrum, or they live and work in communities that are overwhelmingly red or blue. The second factor is inclination. How motivated are we to try to bridge the divides between us? What really widens the moral empathy gap is not attitudinal polarization—that is, how the public generally feels about policy—but affective polarization, which measures how much political groups dislike one another. While both types of polarization are getting worse, and have been for some time, affective polarization is getting worse faster, Willer says.
This is why places such as Change My View are so important; the forum is proof that some people are still willing to engage in good faith with “the other side.” Willer says he thought Change My View was an interesting thing to study because it showed that normal people could reach their political counterparts if they wanted to. “It’s not just political strategists … a motivated or clever or empathic person can change somebody else’s mind on something. It’s a reassuring thought,” he says.
Turnbull, Change My View’s founder, says that one of his goals with the forum is to encourage people to change the way they look at admitting that they’ve encountered a perspective or a fact that they didn’t know about before, one that has the potential to alter their opinion about an issue. “People feel that changing their view is somehow losing … that it’s this embarrassing thing,” he says. “We are trying to change that perspective.” To an impressive extent, he has succeeded. Johnson says that this attitude is what initially intrigued him about Change My View when he came across it three years ago. “I found it to be a unique place,” he says. “Most places on the internet, most places in the world, they reward you for being right. But this was a community that celebrates being wrong.”
As a moderator, Weeks worries about the role the forum plays in giving a platform to problematic ideologies. Change My View’s rules don’t ban any specific topic—users may post on just about anything as long as they are willing to truly engage with challenges (that means no soapboxing or propaganda). She says that she came across a number of posts in the forum that disturbed her in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista killings, a series of murders near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara committed by a college student named Elliot Rodger, who said that he wanted to “punish” women for not being attracted to him. For his misogynistic crimes, Rodger was eventually held up as a “hero” in some of the internet’s darkest corners.
“If we assume that these people want their views changed, then it’s probably a good thing that these conversations are being had, because hopefully they will change their views,” Weeks says. “But at the same time, the more people see those views being surfaced, they become normal. Are we contributing to an atmosphere where really terrible views that previously would have had no place to go are given a little bit of sunlight?” Those extreme views can and do find expression elsewhere on the internet, and in spaces where there is no one to counter or challenge them, but it’s a question that Weeks says she and the other moderators continue to wrestle with.
Change My View’s model has other limitations. Its users represent a self-selected pool of people who have already declared themselves interested in open-mindedness as a principle. Some of them view the conversations they have there as a game; these users tend to be law students practicing for the bar exam, or former high-school debate stars who think of argument as a sport. Amy Bruckman, a professor and an associate chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, worked on a study of Change My View in 2017. “It’s not clear to me that many people on Change My View really change their views,” she says. “But I think our data suggests that everyone walks away with a broadened perspective, and that’s absolutely of value.”
Johnson believes that the forum offers something else that is increasingly hard to find in the polarized political landscape of 2018: the chance to forge compromise. “Even if we come away and our minds haven’t changed, we understand why the opposition feels the way that they do,” he says. “Most of the time we agree about more than we disagree about, and if we were willing to come to the table and have a conversation, we would discover that most of the time, we are after the same ultimate goal. We just disagree on the best path to get there.”
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2Tg1yWE
Nothing in the presidency of Donald Trump combines tragedy and farce so perfectly as his decision to withdraw the 2,000 American troops in Syria.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he tweeted on the morning of December 19. The claim was false on its face. The Islamic State has lost most of its territory, but it retains thousands of fighters in the desert where the Euphrates River crosses from Syria to Iraq. Those fighters could be more dangerous as insurgents and terrorists than as the territorial army of a self-proclaimed caliphate.
Trump’s announcement was so ill-considered and rushed that it blindsided his most important advisers, prompting the resignations of Defense Secretary James Mattis and Brett McGurk, special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition. Diplomats and aid workers involved in rebuilding liberated Syrian towns were given 24 hours to evacuate the country. U.S. Special Forces now have to abandon the training of the American-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, a job that General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently said was only 20 percent finished. For American troops dedicated to the ethic of leaving no friend behind on the battlefield, Trump’s order has to be particularly bitter.
The Syrian Democratic Forces were the only local army capable of beating the Islamic State, and in pushing ISIS out of its strongholds—including the caliphate’s capital, Raqqa—the Syrian Kurds paid a heavy price. America will now leave them to their fate. Turkey considers the People’s Protection Force, or YPG, to be terrorists indistinguishable from the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Turkey, and nothing now prevents the Turkish army from a murderous attack on the Syrian Kurds. In a phone call four days before Trump’s decision, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s autocratic president, played him perfectly, flattering Trump by telling him that, with ISIS defeated, Turkey could take it from here—so why would America stick around for the Kurds? “You know what?” Trump reportedly said. “It’s yours. I’m leaving.” It’s yours—do what you want with it. Now that he’s rid himself of every U.S. official willing to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, Trump can turn for policy advice to foreign dictators.
[Read: The Kurds are betrayed again by Washington]
The American troops in Syria were never easy to explain. Since a final victory over the Islamic State isn’t possible, what was our goal? Not to end the Syrian civil war—that has never been a serious American aim, since it would require a military and diplomatic commitment that American voters and their elected leaders have no interest in making. The most that Americans have tried to achieve in Syria is to mitigate the worst—to deter Bashar al-Assad from gassing his own people, to stabilize areas occupied by the Syrian Democratic Forces, to counteract Russian and Iranian influence, to keep the Islamic State on the run, to prevent Turkey from slaughtering the Kurds. Those goals suggested an American presence, however small, without end.
Trump looked out across this unsatisfying landscape and saw another way, one more in tune with his own psychic needs, and perhaps with the real desires of most Americans: Declare victory and get out. Claim credit for both the win and the withdrawal. When our enemies return and our friends are wiped out—for not even Trump can believe that this is unlikely—find someone else to blame.
There’s a history behind Trump’s sudden decision. In the face of a war that offers no prospect of complete victory, or any victory, the temptation to betray an ally and call it success has seduced far more serious presidents than Trump. The historical pattern is instructive, and so is the fact that, this time, there’s a difference.
By 1969, the Vietnam War was lost. Instead of telling the American people this hard truth, the new president, Richard Nixon, and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, spent four more years in pursuit of what Nixon called “peace with honor.” He wanted to find a way out of Vietnam that wouldn’t hurt his reelection chances or his broader foreign policy. He wanted to be able to say that 58,000 Americans did not die in vain.
At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger were well aware that peace with honor wasn’t possible—an American withdrawal would mean the end of South Vietnam.
[Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz: Trump delivers a victory to Iran]
Kissinger’s solution was a deal that would leave the Saigon government in place long enough for the world to blame the South Vietnamese for their own inevitable downfall. “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence,” Kissinger told Nixon in August 1972, during peace talks with the North Vietnamese. “So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together for a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.” Kissinger called this scheme “a decent interval.”
On January 23, 1973, after 12 years of Americans fighting and dying in Vietnam, Nixon announced the end of the war in a nationally televised speech that was full of lies. He said that the peace to be signed in Paris “has the full support of President Thieu and the government of the Republic of Vietnam”—our South Vietnamese ally. In fact, Thieu had to be coerced and deceived into accepting the deal with threats and false promises. Nixon told the country, “Let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina.” The people of Indochina enjoyed barely a day of peace before the fighting resumed, as both North and South Vietnam predictably broke the cease-fire. By keeping North Vietnamese troops in the South and Nguyen Van Thieu in power, the Paris Peace Accords guaranteed that the war would go on, without the Americans.
The cynicism of the decent interval—the deception and self-deception—ensured that the denouement in Vietnam would be cataclysmic. In April 1975, the Ford administration was unprepared to evacuate those Vietnamese partners of America whose lives were directly threatened by a communist takeover. But Kissinger was right: When the end came, not many Americans gave a damn. Congressional Democrats, who viewed any appropriations for Vietnam as wasteful efforts to prolong the war, refused to authorize money to save desperate people. The public, wanting to be rid of the nightmarish memory of the war, paid little attention. Only the heroic actions of individual Americans in South Vietnam, often working against official orders, rescued thousands of Vietnamese men, women, and children. Far more were left behind. (This story is the subject of a powerful new book, Honorable Exit, by Thurston Clarke.)
[Daniel Shapiro: Trump leaves Israel in the lurch]
Barack Obama, born the year the American war in Vietnam began, became the next president faced with the elusive search for peace with honor. He opposed the war in Iraq as an Illinois state senator, and he was vindicated when the occupation produced a lethal insurgency, a civil war, thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and a terrorist group called al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In 2008, Obama campaigned on a promise to withdraw American troops. At the beginning of his presidency, he announced that the combat mission in Iraq would end on August 31, 2010. And when that day arrived, he declared success:
Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest—it’s in our own. The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people—a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now it’s time to turn the page.
It would have been beyond any president’s capacity for bitter candor to say instead: “Iraq has no functioning government. The political class is incapable of compromise. Our chosen partner, Prime Minister Maliki, is thoroughly corrupt and sectarian. After seven years of this war, ordinary Iraqis still live without reliable services or security. We will leave behind a power vacuum that will be filled by Shiite pawns of Iran and Sunni extremists. At some point, Iraqi cities that our troops fought to clear will probably fall again to our enemies. Iraqis being hunted down for their association with us are on their own. We haven’t come close to meeting our responsibilities. But we’re tired, we have our own problems, and so this artificial date I set 18 months ago will have to do as an ending.”
In both Vietnam and Iraq, ending the war wasn’t the wrong policy. The wrong lay in Nixon’s cynically prolonging a lost war for four years, and in Obama’s failure to anticipate the return of chaos in Iraq. The wrong was to pretend that those wars were something other than historic disasters that could never be made right, and to shift our blame to others. If peace with honor is impossible, better to be honest about that fact than to allow an illusion to drift into a catastrophe.
Syria is neither Vietnam nor Iraq. Those 2,000 American troops weren’t an expression of imperial arrogance or blind doctrine. Obama sent them in 2014 with great reluctance, despite his long-standing fear of being drawn into a complex, multisided quagmire. The precipitating event was the threatened genocide of Iraqi Yazidis by murderers from the Islamic State, who killed and enslaved enough to make the threat credible. The Yazidis who survived as refugees—many of whom were later able to return to their homes—owe their lives at least in part to Obama’s intervention. Anyone who opposed it would have been answerable for a great crime against humanity, just as those who supported it are answerable for the thousands of civilians killed by American bombs in the push to free Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State. None of us gets off.
There were reasonable arguments for staying out of Syria, including the lack of any congressional or public debate. It would have been much better for Congress to have authorized the use of force—but the Republican majority washed its hands of the matter. In our hyper-partisan time, foreign policy itself would be just about impossible if it depended on Congress. Nor did congressional authorizations in Vietnam and Iraq ensure either a wise policy or public support.
In four years, four Americans have been killed in Operation Inherent Resolve. The lightness of American casualties has partly contributed to heavy civilian deaths—at least 1,400 in Raqqa—because keeping fewer boots on the ground means greater reliance on air power, which is less discriminating. On the whole, though, U.S. support for the Syrian Democratic Forces—made up of Arabs as well as Kurds—has gained a significant, if slow and painful, return on a small investment. For the first time, there’s a decent fighting force in Syria, a margin of hope between Assad’s barrel bombs and the Islamic State’s bloodlust. Any theory of international relations that looks with indifference on its elimination, and prefers a three-way fight among Erdogan, Assad, and ISIS, shouldn’t be called realist.
This time, an American withdrawal will not have been preceded by years of sunk blood and treasure—just by the president’s lust for bragging rights and his indifference to any cause greater than some chimerical “win.” Trump’s version of peace with honor—like so much about his presidency—is notable for its blatant stupidity, its needless cruelty. Everyone, even the Trump mouthpieces on Fox News, knows that the Islamic State isn’t “defeated.” The betrayal of our Kurdish and Arab allies is entirely gratuitous. They will pay the price; we will soon forget. There will be no peace for them and no honor for us.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2TfYQjW
As New Year’s Day approaches, I’ve been looking back and pondering the almost constant expressions of outrage that characterized another year. “The same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable,” the former Slate editor Julia Turner declared. “The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect … It’s fascinating to look at how our collective responses skipped from the serious to the picayune without much modulation in pitch.”
In America’s digital culture, outrage is packaged to almost every niche in the citizenry. People feel a “duty” to be outraged by the offenses being trotted out, Choire Sicha argued in the same Slate story. “Maybe you were guided by fury. Maybe even as you cried out your emotion was moving on,” he observed. “Maybe you were exhausted and ironic. Maybe you were playing to the cheap seats, broadcasting a simulacrum of a human response because you, without realizing it, have become a strange magazine of one, a media brand of yourself.”
And then things turned:
You are speaking, first, into the echo chamber of your friends. But not everyone is in your silo. And so then some stranger is mad at you; then some friend is noticeably silent. You are blocked or you are yelled at. Spiraling conversations come from realms unexpected and unwanted. You are embarrassed, or you are angrier, defensive or passive-aggressive, or laughing at them all. It is a rush of emotion that stretches long but is only an instant. Then, with a slithery zip, the moment is sealed shut. That cycle is replicating itself now all around you …
All those words describe 2018.
Yet they were all written in 2014, when Slate published a year-end package that it called “The Year of Outrage.” It included an interactive calendar noting what Americans had been outraged about every day of that year.
[Charles Duhigg: The real roots of American rage]
Remember when NBC was under fire for broadcasting a comedian’s light mockery of Pearl Harbor survivors? And when a costume that the recording artist Macklemore performed in struck some as anti-Semitic? And when Jennifer Lawrence made a rape joke? And Ira Glass’s dig at Shakespeare? And a Washington Post contributor’s remark on marriage and gender violence? And Raven-Symoné’s comment about her racial identity?
Yeah, me neither.
As I perused the Slate calendar, I started to suspect that most of the items of outrage are forgotten even by many of the people who expressed outrage at the time. Yet four years on, outrage is still regularly pegged to matters as trivial as an aquarium’s tweet about an overweight otter, to cite a recent example.
“All of this raises a question: If nothing comes from the outrage, what was the point?” Jamelle Bouie asked in 2014. “It feels good to express disgust, of course, and when that comes with social affirmation—favorites, retweets, followers, blog posts—there’s an incentive to show more anger. But I think there’s more to it than that. In a world where prejudice and privilege still rule the day, it’s cathartic for a lot of lefties—even straight white dudes—to show outrage, even if it leads to nothing in particular.”
He went on to characterize the costs and benefits of that mode:
By raging against something … you can voice your anger at the status quo, which, in the past year especially, seems to have frozen in place. And with a simple retweet, you can signify just what camp you’re in. In a sense, for the social-media left, cultural outrage is a substitute for politics.
You may not be able to move the Democratic Party toward a more populist agenda or stop the Republican takeover of state governments across the country or protect abortion rights or even make media more inclusive. But you can punish social transgressions and in doing so, affirm the values that are missing from so much of the digital and analog worlds. The problem, unfortunately, is that this doesn’t give you a material win. It doesn’t ameliorate any actual injustice. And it might, in the end, harm efforts to make change. If outrage stands in for activism, if we’re focused on the moral temperature of Internet individuals, then we’re distracted from the collective action—and collective institution building—that makes real reform possible.
There are other costs, too. Some of the “guilty” are over-punished for some social transgressions; even many innocents live in fear of online mobs.
And when so much is treated as outrageous, a culture loses the ability to focus on the ills that matter or even to easily describe why they are truly outrageous. For example, I’ve argued for many years that more outrage is warranted in response to U.S. drone strikes that kill innocent civilians. Circa 2009, one could convey the horrors that affected certain villages in Yemen or Pakistan by talking about the awfulness of “feeling unsafe in one’s home,” or “the erasure of a marginalized community.”
Now language like that signifies very little. Its power has been sapped by all the people who say they’re unsafe when they mean they’re uncomfortable, and by those who talk as if verbal criticism can literally erase its targets.
On the populist right, too, there are commentators aplenty who treat outrage as though it is an inexhaustible resource—“What kind of man,” a pandering Laura Ingraham once asked, “orders a cheeseburger without ketchup, but Dijon mustard?”—depleting it of its power instead of reserving it for the definitionally anomalous moments when it is both warranted and useful. Their counterfeiting does real harm.
In that same Slate package, Amanda Hess offered a characteristically astute defense of some digital outrage, describing its value to some people:
Social media allows people who have been boxed out of journalistic, academic, and political spaces to speak out about their lived experiences (#ICantBreathe) and call on the elites to address their own unexamined entitlements … Disrupting the rigid structures of language and standards of argumentation enforced by the elites is part of the point. As New Inquiry editor Ayesha Siddiqi said of social media in an interview with the Guardian this month: “Work that’s meant to liberate all people cannot be presented in a language available to very few.” The structures of racism, sexism, and homophobia are too powerful and ubiquitous to topple in a single blow, so online activists grab hold of millions of little examples and start chipping away.
Done right, chipping away can and does improve the world.
But she also warned about pitfalls of this mode: “This new subindustry of identity-based outrage has created its own rigid conventions, and thinkers who don’t play by the rules will themselves be made the target,” she wrote. “A new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness.”
[Read: Bari Weiss and the left-wing infatuation with taking offense]
So how to find the sweet spot? How is someone who wants to deploy outrage constructively, ethically, and effectively to proceed in the year ahead?
One answer is to study recent history and stay cognizant of its lessons. While “The Year of Outrage” was worth reading back when it was published, the package is even more valuable to today’s thoughtful reader. This is partly because the rise of Donald Trump (has any other president ever expressed outrage so promiscuously?), fueled partly by populist-right outrage and a backlash to political correctness, illustrates a consequence of outrage culture as it was described in 2014 that few anticipated.
But more than that, Slate’s daily chronicle of mostly forgotten outrages affords a chance to look back and reflect on a few specific instances when good was achieved—and lots more where nothing was gained at some cost.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2CHMYBR
A four-hour wait is nothing in the face of nostalgia. When Matt Fligiel learned in 2013 that the future of Blimpyburger was in jeopardy, he knew he had to savor one last meal at the local institution before it closed. “They said they were going to reopen, but nobody actually believed them,” said the 24-year-old native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who now lives in Chicago. “I waited with two of my friends … on the third-to-last night to get some. We got there at 6, and we got our food at 10:30.” To his surprise, Blimpyburger did later reopen. But Fligiel, who had eaten at the spot since childhood, speaks of his quest for a final feast with a sense of duty and no regret.
Such dedication to a haunt frequented since grade school is hardly unique, particularly among those who’ve moved away from where they grew up. Despite the countless food blogs, ratings websites, and Instagram posts at diners’ fingertips, there’s not much incentive to be an adventurous eater when traveling back home for the holidays. While this season’s most elaborate rituals tend to revolve around lovingly prepared meals shared with family and friends, a trip home also offers a much-anticipated chance to visit treasured local establishments. Nostalgia and regional pride—not to mention the nature of memory itself—can make these outings feel both magical and obligatory.
For many, the ritual of heading to a cherished hometown spot after time away is akin to a pilgrimage; consistency is key. “I don’t go home enough now to try anything new or switch it up,” said Maylin Meisenheimer, a 25-year-old New York City resident who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, which she visits once or twice a year. “I’m only [there] for four days, [so] if I’m going to eat out, I only want to go to my favorite places, and I get the same thing,” she added, singling out a restaurant called Taqueria Acapulco.
Earlier this month, AAA forecast that 112.5 million Americans would travel this holiday season, from December 22 to January 1. For those who sojourn home, the trips mark an opportunity to enjoy meals they once took for granted—especially if they’ve moved somewhere that lacks a signature food or cuisine they were raised with. When Ryan Harrington, an adjunct professor of food studies at New York University, returns home to Santa Barbara, California, there’s no question that his first stop will be the fast-casual Mexican spot Freebirds.
“My plane could land at 2 a.m., and I would still go, get in line, and get my arm-size burrito, and just devour that thing,” said Harrington, who has lived in New York for more than a decade. “Mexican food had always been something I was really partial to … Freebirds especially was a place that my friends and I—from middle school riding bikes to high school when we would cut class to go get a longer lunch—this was a place that we often went to.”
While traditional holiday fare such as Christmas hams and Hanukkah latkes tend to dominate the discussion about festive eating, subtler food-related customs can reveal a lot about a place’s culture and history. If you grew up in the northern Chicago suburbs like I did, for instance, you might know to call the Chinese restaurant Yen Yen in Buffalo Grove at 5 p.m. on Christmas Day just to have a shot at eating by 7 p.m. Local favorites might become fixtures because they showcase what makes a place unique, such as its migratory history or its economic underpinnings. The decadent Oberweis milkshakes I gladly slurp in the dead of a Chicago winter are made possible by the rich dairy industry in Illinois and Wisconsin. Sometimes the adage holds true: You really are what you eat.
“Food has long been a reflection of who we are and what we believe,” Harrington said. “Because eating is such a central part of our everyday lives, even the small greasy-spoon diner you have in your hometown and the hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurant … are strong indicators of what people in the town hold dear to themselves and how not only they think about food, but how they think about themselves.”
For those who traveled home this season, local pride, more than actual flavor, might dictate restaurant decisions, and standby spots become the natural settings for annual reunions. It’s common to see fans of regional chains such as Whataburger and In-N-Out posting tributes on social media after finally getting their hands on their beloved grub. “As a California native, one of the best moments of the year is when I visit home for Christmas, and take that first bite of In N Out,” reads one tweet. Fittingly, these smaller franchises also have intense fandoms that are convinced that their favorite reigns supreme. (David Silberberg, who grew up in Westlake Village, California, and now lives in Washington, D.C., told me In-N-Out was the clear winner and Whataburger “doesn’t even come close”; Meisenheimer, who declared those “fighting words,” said, “A Texan will choose Whataburger over In-N-Out every time.”)
Best part about coming home for the holidays = @Whataburger
— Miss Thang (@cierraramirez) December 26, 2016
To be sure, regular old nostalgia—a force that is as commonplace as it is amorphous and deeply personal—shapes people’s connections to the food they grew up eating. Sometimes specific meals hark back to the first exuberant moments of adulthood, so that a plate of nachos tastes less like cheese and more like teenage independence. For Katy Wahl—who is from Mount Juliet, Tennessee, but went to college in Indiana—the Nashville taco joint Taqueria del Sol is indelibly tied to her adolescence. “There was one five minutes from my high school, so that would be our Friday after-school ritual,” Wahl recalled. “They have outstanding queso and guacamole, and we would get tons for the big table.” While Nashville’s food scene has exploded in recent years, Wahl finds herself returning again and again to her old stomping grounds, as if pulled by an invisible line.
While this sort of affection makes intuitive sense, there’s also research to help explain it. In 2014, scientists at the University of Haifa found a link between the part of the brain that stores memories of new tastes (the cortex) and the area that records memories of where and when an eating experience happens (the hippocampus). They concluded that where people eat something has implications for how much they’ll enjoy the food itself—so just because they hated the rib eye at one restaurant doesn’t mean they actually dislike steak. It’s reasonable to conclude, then, that forming positive early memories in connection with a restaurant might make someone more inclined to fall in love with the food there.
As for Harrington, he thinks that people return to, and extol the virtues of, their hometown favorites partly because they’re stuck in a dance between their past and present selves, and because they subconsciously want to reaffirm the conclusions they came to as children. “Childhood is really an important time in forming your own identity,” Harrington said. “If I go back and eat [food I loved when I was 14], it’s going to be a lot harder for me to say, ‘This isn’t that good,’ because in some ways, that’s saying who I was and who I am is mistaken or incorrect.”
As the holidays come to an end and travelers return to their regular routines, social media can help ease the pain of separation while offering a reminder that the love we feel for any restaurant goes beyond the food itself. For me, scrolling through photos of Homer’s Ice Cream—the shop in Wilmette, Illinois, that is so special I wrote my college-admissions essays about it—is like getting an intimate look at all the casual moments of joy that sustain a community. By sharing photos of meals or tweeting at establishments, people can take a little piece of their favorite spots back with them. And whether or not an order of animal-style fries or a thick chocolate shake is actually as delicious as one might remember, the comfort of a familiar meal can serve as a much-needed salve for the less sweet memories of life.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2EVzAM7
Over the next week, The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy cinematic moment from 2018. Next up is Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born. (Read our previous entries here.)
By the time Ally (played by Lady Gaga) and Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) are sitting together in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night, they’ve already been through an odyssey. Jackson, a famous musician, crossed paths with Ally when she performed “La Vie en Rose” at a local watering hole. Enchanted by her charismatic stage presence, he takes her to another bar, interrogates her about her passions, and then, after she starts a fight with a drunken patron and hurts her hand, whisks her away to a supermarket to get a field dressing of frozen peas and gauze. All this happens within the first 30 minutes of A Star Is Born.
During this whirlwind meet-cute, Ally opens up about her thwarted efforts as a songwriter and her insecurity about her prominent nose. “Everybody’s talented … but having something to say, and a way to say it so that people listen to it, that’s a whole other bag,” Jackson tells her, as Ally looks on with a mixture of interest and incredulity. But it’s only when they’re sitting side by side on a concrete curb, with Ally nursing her hand, that Jackson starts to open up in return.
“Nobody ever asks you about you, huh?” Ally asks, as Jackson tells her about growing up on a pecan ranch, his screw-up dad having him late in life, and being raised by his brother. She sings her next line. “Tell me something, boy: Aren’t you tired trying to fill that void? Or do you need more? Ain’t it hard keeping it so hard-core?” It’s the scene the whole movie hinges on, whether or not the audience realizes it. If Ally’s sudden creative outburst seems ridiculous, or disrupts the realism of the encounter, the rest of the film won’t really be able to take flight. But Lady Gaga somehow makes the moment feel genuine, and Cooper helps sell it by looking at her dumbstruck.
Jackson has been peppering Ally with questions all night, nudging her about her ambitions, dismissing her perceived shortcomings, and flirting with abandon (including a particularly charged stroke of her nose). But Ally’s been taking stock of his character, too, and after their short time together, she’s emboldened enough to sing about it. “I’m falling, in all the good times, I find myself longing for change,” she adds, finally standing to belt out the chorus of “Shallow,” the film’s signature song. “Holy shit,” Jackson says, temporarily standing in for the audience.
The kind of tenderness on display here is hard to pull off in a totally naturalistic film, but A Star Is Born is also a musical of sorts, where characters can articulate their emotions far better through song. Cooper, who co-wrote and directed, manages to merge the two storytelling styles without sacrificing the distinct power of either. The parking lot is hardly a romantic spot, Ally’s hand is awkwardly wrapped in a bandage, and Jackson’s driver (Greg Grunberg) is leaning against the car and eating Cheetos 20 feet away. Still, the entire scene is imbued with a mystical air, as though these two characters have been struck with divine inspiration.
That’s exactly the magic of creativity—of “having something to say”—that Jackson has been monologuing about, and it’s mesmerizing enough to spur the two to fall in love, both with each other and with the songs they make together. A Star Is Born is one of the oldest Hollywood stories, and it takes a notoriously dark turn in its final act; but the film’s bigger ideas about the price of fame would feel hollow if they weren’t threaded through a relationship that the audience is sincerely invested in. The parking-lot scene—at once understated and soaring—is what seals the bargain for Jackson, Ally, and the viewer, and it could have just as easily been where the movie lost hold of all three.
Previously: Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Next Up: Burning
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2EW1Wqo
At his confirmation hearings for the position of U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, the nation’s chief trade negotiator, promised to fight for all of America’s great industries. Yes, he acknowledged, he had built his three-decade career by lobbying for the steel industry. But he was ready, he said, to make the world safe again for good old-fashioned American capitalism, in all its forms. He recalled a caution he’d received from a senator: “As you go through doing your job, remember that you do not eat steel.”
The senator wanted Lighthizer to concede that, despite its hold on the national imagination, steel’s contribution to the American economy has waned. Even back in 2003, when Lighthizer made his first major bid to control the rules of global trade, neither of the two leading American steel companies was worth more in the stock market than the nascent Amazon, despite employing a dozen times as many employees. Today, the two shiny new headquarters Amazon plans to build could house the majority of the 81,000-odd workers who work in America’s remaining iron and steel mills, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As America’s steel workforce has shrunk, the industry has maintained and even tightened its hold on Washington. Lighthizer has played no small part in steel’s political endurance; he has been working for years to yoke steel’s interests with the nation’s. Through a spokesperson, Lighthizer declined to comment for this story. But more than two decades of his writing, speeches, and interviews give a sense of how he has come to view the global economy, and the perils he believes America faces as China grows more dominant.
[Read: The elusive ‘better deal’ with China]
Lighthizer believes that the shrinking of the American steel industry isn’t a mere by-product of technological shifts, but the result of a war China has been waging for decades. He and his allies think the growing superpower will now take the fight to other U.S. interests, threatening the nation’s economic hegemony. Now he’s preparing his own battle plan, refined over a career of lobbying. He plans to bend the rules of the global economy in America’s favor—even if that means breaking the system America itself created.
It’s easy to forget how new our global economic system is.
In the early 1980s, when Lighthizer first got the call to join the executive branch, there was no nafta, no European Union, no World Trade Organization. Within America’s cozy trade community, Lighthizer was already established. When he was nominated to serve as President Ronald Reagan’s deputy trade representative in 1983, the Senate Finance Committee that was to vet him greeted his introduction with knowing laughter, according to The New York Times. The inside joke was that he was an inside man—he was already a staffer on the committee.
Under Reagan, Lighthizer’s key assignment was to use American leverage in one-on-one talks to persuade trading partners like Japan to accept terms that favored U.S. firms. He came away with a reputation as a blunt, effective negotiator, and a nickname to match: “missile man.” Japanese negotiators slapped him with the moniker, according to The Wall Street Journal, after he folded one of their proposals into a paper airplane and threw it back at them.
In 1985, Lighthizer joined an elite law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he would stay until his formal return to government under Donald Trump. He quickly settled down into the client work that would define his career: representing the American steel industry in its trade disputes. Technically, that made him a lobbyist, but any aspersion implied in that label misses the point. “He enjoys being part of the exercise of power,” his brother James Lighthizer, a Maryland Democrat, told The Washington Post in 1987. “Like me, that’s his passion. This lobbying stuff pays great, but it’s secondary. He didn’t get involved in government to do lobbying, he got involved in lobbying to get back in government.”
Lighthizer’s methods of waging war were vicious, but not strictly underhanded. “Honest isn’t quite the right word,” the trade lawyer Donald Cameron told me, searching for an adjective to describe the Skadden team he had worked against over the years. “I found that their representation was actually stronger and just more reasonable in the way that they approached it than some of the other firms that represent U.S. steel interests.” Their gift was knowing where the money was and going after it with verve. In 1992, Lighthizer and Alan Wolff, a frequent collaborator from another law firm, planned a gluttonous feast for the creatures of Washington’s swamp. Together, they sent the Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission “two million pages of documents in 650 boxes” according to The New York Times. The filings documented allegations of unfair trading practices, which, if upheld, would lead to tariffs against American firms’ overseas competitors. To save their business, foreign steelmakers would have to join in the legal feeding frenzy, making Washington’s trade lawyers the one guaranteed winner. “This is a fat pig, and they all want a slice of it,” Lighthizer told the Times. “Every single person in town will be working on this, every single one.”
When the World Trade Organization was established in 1995, its objective was partly to tame the wild capitalism that Lighthizer and his allies so expertly practiced. It built on an edifice of trade negotiations hammered out since World War II, and the result resembles a monument to a certain ideal of capitalism. The vision holds that trade is best when goods and services can move across borders unhindered by tariffs or other government meddling. Companies that do business internationally are expected to operate free from most government aid and to avoid anticompetitive tactics such as dumping, or selling below cost to capture market share. If they don’t, other governments can retaliate within the law.
The WTO provides a venue for negotiations among its members but, crucially, it also established a judicial system that can issue binding rulings. The genius of that judiciary, with the seven-person Appellate Body as its final arbiter, is that it lets rival powers see their ambitions reflected back in it. The small countries of the world could envision themselves, like the Lilliputians, tying down America’s outsize strength. And Gulliver, why would he sign up to be ensnared? To give America’s expert trade negotiators the force of law. Pre-WTO, Lighthizer recalled in a speech at the New America Foundation, America’s lawyers would fight out a trade agreement, only to find they had no way to hold the other side to it. But here was a fix, he said. “The best way to do it was just to say we will use sort of a U.S. system. We will have kind of a court. And in everybody’s mind was, well, we will create international panelists who will be basically like American judges.” The United States was a creating a weapon it could wield best. What was there to lose?
Left unanswered on the occasion of the WTO’s creation was the question of whether China would join it. Then-President Bill Clinton was a proponent of welcoming the fast-growing economy into the new global trading regime, if its leaders would agree to a handful of concessions. Lighthizer, a staunch opponent of China’s entry into the organization, campaigned for Senator Robert Dole against Clinton’s reelection. (In 1996, The Baltimore Sun found Lighthizer with a pair of binoculars, gazing out at Clinton’s golf game on the South Lawn of the White House.) After Clinton’s reelection victory, Lighthizer took to the Times’ op-ed page to warn of disaster: “If China is allowed to join the W.T.O. on the lenient terms that it has long been demanding, virtually no manufacturing job in this country will be safe,” he said. China’s “leaders view economics the same way they view defense, foreign policy or human rights. It is a means of expanding the power of the state and maintaining control of its population,” he wrote in another Times op-ed.
But Lighthizer’s dire warnings about global government and threats to U.S. sovereignty were no match for Clinton’s sunny paeans to the American ideal of capitalism. “By joining the W.T.O.,” Clinton said in a speech, “China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people.” Over Lighthizer’s objections, China sped toward full-fledged membership in the WTO. But as Clinton’s presidency neared its end, Lighthizer and his clients readied new ways to ensure their success in the new economic order.
While Lighthizer and his fellow lobbyists feasted in the late 1990s, the American steel industry was going lean. U.S. Steel had become the world’s first billion-dollar company within a year of its creation, in 1901. A century later, its steel shares were worth virtually the same in total, a significant decline in value after decades of inflation. Its pension obligations had combined with aging technology—like other old-line producers, it made steel from raw materials—to weaken its place in the market. New-line producers such as Nucor Corporation were making steel from scrap, at lower costs. And steelmakers of all kinds were producing more than ever.
By 1998, all that supply was chasing a smaller global market. The bottom fell out of Russia’s post-Soviet economy. Fast-growing Asian markets tumbled into financial crisis. American companies suddenly faced stiff competition. In response, the industry, led by its union workers, opted for the most patriotic of American business traditions: Create a slick marketing campaign and pressure Washington to step in.
The national campaign was called Stand Up for Steel. Lighthizer and other industry lawyers filed case after case in U.S. trade courts. Lobbyists pushed to get the president to launch a so-called Section 201 investigation, a defensive action known as “safeguards,” which would raise tariffs on competing imports. With a Democrat in the White House—and another aiming to keep it—the unions hoped for a favorable hearing, but the Clinton administration resisted. A union lobbyist recalled making a Hail Mary visit to the White House six hours before George W. Bush’s inauguration. But in the Clinton administration, Susan Rosegrant recounts in a study of the protection campaign, economic policy trumped politics. “Our hearts bled for the steel industry, but we didn’t think they were being damaged by imports,” Robert Lawrence, an economic adviser to Clinton, said, according to the study. William Klinefelter, a union lobbyist, believed that decision might have doomed Al Gore’s presidential run. “It would have gone a long way if he could have walked into West Virginia saying that this administration has initiated a 201 to save the basic steel industry,” he said in the study. Instead, Bush took the state, and the White House.
For Bush’s new administration, the steel industry’s plight created a political opportunity that was too good to miss. Republicans had been the party of WTO-style free trade: law-bound and globally minded. But the political incentives to favor protectionism were enticing. Klinefelter explained in the study: “In 2004, Bush could go into Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and West Virginia and say, ‘I’m the president who saved your job.’ Now it doesn’t make any difference what the leadership of the steelworkers union says about the next Democratic presidential candidate. If Bush comes through on this 201, he’s going to get our guys.” And that’s exactly what the president did, setting in motion a long-term realignment in the politics of trade.
Bush directed the International Trade Commission to start an investigation. The government’s intervention, he said, was “designed to restore market forces to world steel markets.” The safeguards required formal review, but Bush’s declaration put the president’s imprimatur on the industry’s cause. Even opposing lobbyists had to hand it to American steel. Lewis Leibowitz, an adversary, told The Washington Post in 2001, “This is an industry that has something like 160,000 workers, and the market [value] of all the companies is smaller than that of Amazon.com, and they’ve turned this town upside down. So my hat is off to them.” Leibowitz understated steel’s position. Because of the dot-com collapse, a few firms, including Nucor, briefly outpaced Amazon. But protecting steel’s market cap meant throwing some nasty elbows.
At the time, Christine McDaniel was putting her freshly minted economics doctorate to good use in the Office of Economics at the International Trade Commission. Despite its somewhat misleading name, the commission is a domestic American agency. Its commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to nine-year, nonrenewable terms, removed from the heat of trade politics. For that reason, the commission is frequently described as a “quasi-independent” agency. It sorts through allegations of unfair trade practices and says which ones really did damage. The commission sided with Bush in his 201 investigation, and sometimes sided with Lighthizer and his colleagues on cases filed on behalf of U.S. Steel and others. Some cases, however, got a little more complicated. For McDaniel, what should have been an anodyne research assignment became a political shouting match that threatened her entire agency.
One of several claims of unfair foreign competition the steel industry filed with the ITC concerned cold-rolled steel, the kind of material used to make products such as lockers or car roofs. An ITC commissioner on the case asked McDaniel to look into an economic model supplied by one of the foreign companies involved—just the type of service to her country a young economist might relish. But before the case was even decided, McDaniel received an alarming phone call. A lawyer for the steel industry was on the line, yelling at her to back off the research. “ITC is an independent agency, and I knew that this lawyer should not have been calling me directly,” she told me. “For him to do that suggested that he felt that he could circumvent the process, which—it just didn’t seem right. And I never forgot that.” Then the American steel companies lost the case. And with the president in their corner, they didn’t take kindly to being stopped by a clutch of no-name trade technocrats. Members of Congress with close connections to the industry—including, according to National Journal, the chair of the Congressional Steel Caucus, Representative Ralph Regula of Ohio—issued a report that recommended identifying McDaniel publicly. Congress also considered cutting the entire budget of the department where she worked.
“They’re for their bottom line, just like everyone else,” McDaniel said. “But they just don’t seem to respect the checks and balances of the system. They’re not transparent in how they operate.” And attacking her agency’s budget wasn’t playing fair. “I think that was a new low. A very sneaky thing to do. And threatening, too.” It sent a warning to the commission to play by steel’s rules. “The steel folks, they’ve really succeeded in trying to limit any economic analysis in these cases,” she said. (The trade lawyer William Barringer documented the episode in his book, Paying the Price for Big Steel, but this is the first time McDaniel has spoken publicly about it.) It’s not clear whether any one individual was responsible for the decision to accost a civil servant. But it was Lighthizer’s case. And according to lobbying disclosures, people and PACs associated with his law firm, Skadden, and his client, U.S. Steel, gave tens of thousands of dollars in sum in political donations toward the reelection of Senator Jay Rockefeller, whose state of West Virginia was home to an ailing corner of the steel industry, and who paid an in-person visit to the commission, declaring, “I find this deeply disturbing.”
(Skadden did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for U.S. Steel wrote in an email after this story was published, “U.S. Steel has long supported the comprehensive and effective enforcement of our country’s fair trade laws and supports the actions taken by the president and the U.S. Department of Commerce to use all of the tools in existing U.S. trade law authority to limit steel imports to ensure our national and economic security.” Skadden does not currently represent the firm on trade matters, she said.)
All these years later, what the participants in this episode took away is a sense that they were misused in service of narrow ends. “The bad guy in this story is the steel industry,” McDaniel said.
By 2003, the Bush administration’s Section 201 safeguards for the steel industry had survived domestic review, but in the American-made global order, they now had to pass muster with the WTO as well. The Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and others had all complained that Bush’s protectionism was an illegal handout to American steel. And they won, in a headline case. America was Gulliver after all.
Robert Lighthizer had cemented his reputation as one of the most vocal critics of WTO law and the lawyers who practiced it. That an international body, unanswerable to the people of any nation, should have the ability to veto a democratic nation’s policies was a dangerous incursion on U.S. sovereignty, he argued. The WTO’s ruling against the Bush administration’s safeguards helped to reinforce the case.
The administration made an audacious move. In 2003, it nominated Lighthizer to the WTO’s high court, the Appellate Body. Lighthizer spoke of the opportunity to join the institution he often delighted in tearing down as a turning point—the chance to pivot from years of outsider criticism into a public-spirited role. “Do you criticize the system and hope to kill it,” he told the journalist Gregory Rushford, “or do you think it is worthwhile to go to Geneva and apply a strict constructionist’s perspective, and add a certain credibility?”
There was no question of Lighthizer’s legal talent—indeed, to this day, few are more skillful practitioners of the dark arts of trade law. But others who have served on the Appellate Body saw him as far outside the mainstream of globally oriented trade lawyers. James Bacchus, a former American congressman who was the outgoing occupant of the job Lighthizer was nominated for, recalled briefing him on what to expect from the nomination process. Lighthizer is sincere in his beliefs, Bacchus told me, but doesn’t seem to believe in the very existence of international law: “I was in favor of establishing an understanding about what is right in international trade, and then upholding it. Mr. Lighthizer was in favor of reserving our right to use our might to make right in international trade.” Jennifer Hillman, a former ITC commissioner and Appellate Body member, had trouble imagining a man so committed to the pursuit of a particular set of interests serving on the judicial body. “In Geneva, when you’re on the Appellate Body, you’ve checked your nationality at the door. And your job is not in fact to protect the United States; your job is to render fair decisions,” Hillman told me.
The WTO denied Lighthizer’s nomination, choosing instead his fellow Skadden alum and trade lawyer Merit Janow, who embodied an opposite set of ideals. While Lighthizer was the consummate lobbyist, Janow took pains to shun even the faintest impression of a conflict of interest. “In my years on the Appellate Body,” Janow wrote in a reflection on her time at the WTO, “I had no contact with the U.S. government and, in fact, U.S. officials would avoid even extended pleasantries at the occasional cocktail party lest even such idle conversation generate any misimpression.” Lighthizer’s quest to become the Antonin Scalia of international trade law had ended, for the moment, in rejection.
Yet now, 15 years later, Lighthizer has leapfrogged the position he was denied. He can nominate Bacchus, Janow, and Hillman’s successor—or deny one entirely.
In office, Lighthizer’s goal is simple to state, if somewhat more complicated to achieve. He wants to roll back China’s advances on the global economy. His zeal for that mission comes directly from his years working on behalf of American steel interests. According to Dan DiMicco, the former CEO of Nucor Corporation and a trade adviser to President Trump, steel jobs were the first casualties of a quiet war China has been waging on the American worker. “We’ve been in a trade war for 25 years. We haven’t engaged; it’s been waged on us. They’ve done it by sleight of hand, by lying, by using short-term greed to undermine long-term success. And Trump knows all of that, and he’s put Bob in charge,” DiMicco told me.
America’s economists will tell you that bilateral trade deficits are nothing to worry about. They’re certainly not fixable by measures like tariffs. But for Lighthizer, America’s trade deficits are the symptom of a growing problem. Trade deficits “raise serious concerns about America’s global leadership role,” he has argued. Imbalanced trade was behind the decline of American manufacturing, he told the Senate Finance Committee in 2007. “U.S. policies are effectively propping up manufacturers in the rest of the world, while placing our own manufacturers at a major disadvantage,” he said. America’s “massive trade deficit,” he continued, results from “the fact that U.S. manufacturers find it more and more difficult to compete with their international rivals.”
[Read: Does Trump even understand how tariffs work?]
Lighthizer sees China, more than any other country, as the heart of America’s misguided global strategy. “It seems clear that the U.S. manufacturing crisis is related to our trade with China,” he testified to a congressional commission in 2010. “U.S. policymakers also underestimated China’s ability to manipulate the WTO system to its advantage.” American officials believed companies would sell to newly affluent Chinese consumers. “This assumption failed to account for the many incentives Western companies had to bet on the other side, and use China as a manufacturing platform to serve the U.S. market,” he continued. Americans should be concerned, he wrote, that “our enormous trade imbalances — which require us to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in assets each year — will leave our children dependent on foreign decision makers.”
In 2016, DiMicco urged Trump to take Lighthizer into the fold. “I will say this about Bob Lighthizer: He’s no spring chicken,” he said. Lighthizer has come out of a comfortable semiretirement to take the fight to China, DiMicco said. “It’s no different than a Marine charging up Pork Chop Hill. He’s committed, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is.” The metaphor is telling. Hundreds of U.S. Army infantrymen (not Marines, granted) died in a pair of battles on Pork Chop Hill in 1953 in Korea—in direct combat with Chinese troops. At his confirmation hearings in 2017, Lighthizer bantered with a senator about his ability to push the U.S.-China conflict to the top of the political agenda: "I will bet you, you and I will sit down in your office between now and the time I leave, and you will say, ‘Bob, you were right; he really is going to change the paradigm on China. I believe he is going to change the paradigm on China.’ If you look at our problems, China is right up there.”
Lighthizer, like Trump, believes in the politics of grievance. The two men are close, according to The New York Times. When Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, tried to broker a deal with China early in the administration, Lighthizer talked the president out of it. “People who know me know I’m a bit of a contrarian myself,” Lighthizer joked shortly after his confirmation. But he has allies, including Peter Navarro, a stridently anti-China economist who also has long-standing ties to the steel industry. “In my judgment, we have the finest U.S. trade representative we have had in our history,” Navarro told an audience at a recent speech. Navarro also denounced “Wall Street bankers and globalist elites” who have been trying to head off conflict with China, aiming a shot at individuals like Gary Cohn, the former head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.
In a scene in Bob Woodward’s Fear, Cohn tries to convince Trump that the WTO isn’t biased against the United States, because, he argues, the U.S. wins most of its cases in the WTO’s Appellate Body. “This is bullshit,” says Trump. It’s not, says Cohn: “This is data from the United States trade representative. Call Lighthizer and see if he agrees.” Cohn was right on the data, but wrong on Lighthizer’s interpretation of it. As far back as 2000, Lighthizer has insisted that America found itself on the wrong side of the institution it built in its own image. “I think now we are largely defendants,” Lighthizer said at the time. “We find ourselves with our, in my judgment at least, democratic process under attack wherein we make certain decisions through a democratic process, and we find a non-democratic body now overturning those decisions. And to me that is very troubling.” What matters isn’t the cases America wins; it’s the cases America loses.
In the trade community, few actions under the Trump administration have been more controversial than the decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. After the Commerce Department initiated the tariffs, Lighthizer put them to good use as a foil in his negotiations with Canada and Mexico. Section 232 is a special legal provision that allows the United States to take defensive trade actions on national-security grounds. Before Trump, presidents were careful to avoid letting courts test the precedent the exemption would set. Once the U.S. plays the national-security card, there’s nothing stopping any other country from doing the same. And that’s not to mention the absurdity of claiming that countries like Canada and Mexico—America’s trading partners in nafta—are threats to national security. “There’s a difference between safeguarding an industry, and saying America’s national security is at risk,” Carla Hills, who negotiated nafta as one of Lighthizer’s U.S. trade representative predecessors, told me. “It puts us in the category of, ‘We are going to be bombed if we don’t fix this.’ And who are we going to hit, our closest allies?”
Lighthizer has pushed the World Trade Organization to the limit in his attempt to regain American primacy. As of October, the WTO Appellate Body no longer has enough members to hear all possible cases. The United States has vetoed all appointments to the body, citing what Lighthizer and his office have described as judicial overreach, and is resisting efforts by American allies to resolve the impasse. “This poses a grave systemic risk which could affect all areas of our work,” Roberto Azevêdo, the director-general of the WTO, said in September. American officials have long seen squeezing the Appellate Body as a way to gain power over the WTO. Barack Obama’s administration blocked one appointment entirely and refused to renominate Hillman. But, according to Bacchus, who served on the Appellate Body for eight years, including as its chief, the current administration has crossed a line. ”Trump has taken a long-standing issue and turned it into a crisis,” he said.
The United States has raised a number of procedural concerns in its complaints about WTO Appellate Body members. But Hillman said she suspects that Lighthizer “wants to return to the old days in which the dispute-settlement system was fundamentally not binding.” (Lighthizer has been circumspect about the issue in public lately, but said as much in his 2000 New America Foundation speech: “I guess my prescription, really, is to move back to more of a negotiating kind of a settlement. Return to WTO and what it really was meant to be. Something where you have somebody make a decision but have it not be binding.”) For Lighthizer, a WTO judiciary that is more amenable to American pressure is likely a good thing. The U.S. is facing two major cases now that could have adverse effects. One deals with the Section 232 national-security tariffs. The other is about China, and whether the United States can force it to follow special rules. If the top court can’t rule on those questions, then they’ll be settled the traditional way, through raw power.
At the moment, Lighthizer is still riding a nafta high within the administration. The still-unratified U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement would produce largely cosmetic changes to the underlying economic relationship among the three countries. (“I would describe it as a face lift and a boob job,” Susan Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University, told me) But the deal has two particular provisions that stand out. One threatens automotive manufacturers with higher costs if they don’t return manufacturing jobs to the United States. The other makes it difficult for the negotiating partners to strike new trade deals with China. By implication, the overarching strategy of American trade policy is to start bringing back the manufacturing jobs that have migrated from the U.S. to China since the latter joined the WTO—whether businesses like it or not.
[Read: Donald Trump’s real endgame with China]
Lighthizer’s campaign against China relies on an illicit trade weapon: Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. It allows unilateral action by the American president against trade policies he deems unfair or overly burdensome. For that reason, the WTO has limited its use, a stricture Lighthizer sees as yet another way China has undercut America’s power to defend its interests, which he told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2010.
Although the WTO’s limits on Section 301 remain, Lighthizer quickly reclaimed its power upon taking office, ordering an investigation into China’s trade practices. In March, his office issued a 200-page document known as the Section 301 report, something akin to a charge sheet of allegations of economic crimes by China. It documents systematic efforts by Chinese companies and officials, often acting on the mandates of the Communist Party, to force unfair terms onto American companies, to steal their technologies, and to spy on their corporate secrets. The incidents in the report are difficult to verify, but experts who have read it say the alleged actions appear consistent with recent Chinese behavior.
Among the claims Lighthizer’s office has leveled against China are charges that it has engaged in outright attacks on American interests. A November update to the 301 report features two alleged Chinese intelligence officers who discuss targeting American aerospace technology by planting a Trojan horse in a French company’s network. “I’ll bring the horse … to you tonight,” one officer reportedly says. “Can you take the Frenchmen out to dinner tonight? I’ll pretend I bump [sic] into you at the restaurant to say hello. This way we don’t need to meet in Shanghai.” According to DiMicco, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president who recently had the constitution changed to remove his term limits, has been explicit about his overall goal: “He came out and said, as dictator-in-chief for life, that China was going to dominate all the industries of the future, not be a competitor, not be a partner, but to dominate the global industries—semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and aerospace, you name it. They were going to use all the tactics and economic aggression and trade mercantilism and predatory pricing that they had used against the steel industry for all these other industries.”
Based on the 301 report, Trump has issued a series of escalating tariffs against Chinese imports. As of December, $200 billion worth of goods from China face 10 percent tariffs at the U.S. border; Trump has threatened more. The tariffs appear to have been designed to target not just the Chinese government, but also American and other firms that manufacture in China, according to the researchers Mary E. Lovely and Yang Liang. A list from Bloomberg features 62 companies that reported higher costs due to the tariffs, including General Electric, which has said they will cost it as much as $400 million.
China has challenged the use of Section 301 at the WTO, marking yet another case that would be impossible for a diminished Appellate Body to decide. Of the body’s three members, one is from China, and another is from the U.S. If either recused themselves, the case could not proceed.
American tech firms with global supply chains are in a difficult position. In the sweeping view of history held by Lighthizer and his allies, it’s no accident that manufacturing jobs can’t return to America. This view holds that the Communist Party has used China’s membership in the WTO to draw companies in, making them unwitting accomplices to the pillaging of the American economy. Trump has singled out Apple, which makes iPhones that carry the label “designed in California” and are assembled in China. “Make your products in the United States instead of China,” he tweeted in September. In a submission to Lighthizer’s office, Apple made the case that it does assemble products in China, but “every Apple product contains parts or materials from the United States and is made with equipment from U.S.-based suppliers.” Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has said the firm wants to help support more jobs in the United States, but is limited by the nation’s lack of high-skilled workers. Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, was more blunt, according to The New York Times. Asked by President Barack Obama if Apple could ever bring its overseas facilities back to the U.S., Jobs replied, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” (Laurene Powell Jobs, Jobs’s widow, is the founder of the Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic.) After the spat with Trump, Lighthizer’s office announced that some Apple products like the Apple Watch would be exempt from tariffs, and Trump later praised Cook for hiring more Americans. Apple did not respond on the record to a request for comment.
The WTO risks irreparable damage from Lighthizer’s battles with China. In an influential article, Mark Wu, a Harvard Law professor who negotiated intellectual-property deals for the U.S. government, made the case that China’s accession to the WTO was premised on a mistaken assumption that the organization could accommodate the country’s authoritarian system. China’s path, the WTO’s creators assumed, would resemble other countries’. “Instead, Chinese leaders have developed a unique economic model ... which WTO rules are not adequately equipped to address,” Wu told me. The WTO has rules for South Korea’s family-run conglomerates, but not for Chinese banks that answer to unwritten orders from the Communist Party. Correcting such an omission wouldn’t necessarily be fatal for the WTO, but would require both the U.S. and China—among others—to make concessions, and little in the United States’ negotiating posture suggests a willingness to do so. “Another option is to resort to power politics to try to force these changes, and possibly risk breaking the system while trying to save it,” Wu said. “If we do neither, then the reality is that the WTO's relevance will gradually diminish as China rises, because China’s size and trade impact are just too large for others to wait patiently for market reforms to play out.”
Lighthizer has said he doesn’t want to kill the WTO. But it stands in the way of his objectives with China, and his history suggests he won’t be gentle with anything that gets in his way.
“Law is good if legal rules are what you want,” the UC Irvine law professor Gregory Shaffer said to me, discussing Lighthizer’s approach to the WTO. “And that’s basically the way the U.S. viewed it when it created the institution. But once other countries learn how to use the law against the powerful, then the powerful start thinking maybe the law isn’t such a great thing.” Of course, the less powerful haven’t always been thrilled with the WTO even as it’s currently constituted. Winning a case doesn’t entitle a country that’s been wronged to enact punishment; it only allows them to put up retaliatory tariffs worth as much as the original damage. That lawful pain is intended to persuade the other party to back off. The system advantages vast economies such as the United States, which can afford the costs of issuing retaliatory tariffs. But for small economies, retaliating can do as much harm as good. In 2004, Antigua and Barbuda won a case over online gambling against the U.S., but it’s never been willing to swallow the $21-million-a-year cost of retaliating against the the country. “The small nation of Antigua and Barbuda, has good reason to join Mr Lighthizer in questioning [the WTO],” Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the U.S., wrote last year. “But for different reasons.”
Lighthizer’s criticisms have crystallized the divisions among supporters and critics of the WTO. Even if the bulk of the 301 report is accurate, what matters is how the United States responds to it. “We had better think about what it is we’re really trying to accomplish. Are we trying to deal with some very real and very irritating trade concerns, or are we trying to contain the rise of China?” asked Bacchus, the former Appellate Body chief. “China’s rise is not our decline.” Hillman believes that the United States should employ a never-before-used legal strategy and argue that China’s efforts violate the spirit of international trade law, if not always the letter. She wants the U.S. to take the issues outlined in the report to its allies, and go together to Geneva to force China to defend itself. “You should at least give the WTO a serious try before saying it can’t handle this kind of a case,” she said.
When Donald Trump met with Xi Jinping in Argentina in December, the two presidents tried to reduce the tensions. Lighthizer will lead the U.S. side in 90 days of talks that were widely described as a kind of truce. But he has cautioned that he will quickly return to arms when the clock runs out on March 1 if China doesn’t restructure its economic relationship with the U.S. and stop stealing American technology. “We will protect that technology and get additional market access from China,” he said on a recent Face the Nation. “If that can be done, the president wants us to do it. If not, we'll have tariffs.” Lighthizer intends to take the fight to China. With James Mattis’s resignation, he has become one of the most influential figures in American foreign policy. Unlike Mattis, there was never any doubt that Lighthizer sees his role as furthering the president’s ambitions rather than checking them. But can a lobbyist whose career was devoted to fighting for protectionism be trusted to fight for national interests bigger than any one man?
The trade lawyer and Cato Institute scholar Scott Lincicome recently reviewed surveys of Americans’ attitudes on free trade and protectionism, which he found to be wide but shallow. “Most Americans generally support freer trade, globalization, and even oft-maligned trade agreements,” he wrote. But that support is vulnerable to being influenced by organized campaigns on specific issues, such as Trump’s steel tariffs: “As a result, protectionist policies emanating from the United States government today are most likely a response not to a groundswell of popular support for protectionism but instead to discrete interest group lobbying (e.g., the U.S. steel industry) or influential segments of the U.S. voting population (e.g., steelworkers in Pennsylvania).” That lines up with a recent paper by the economist Dani Rodrik. Economists tend to reflexively support anything described as a “free trade agreement,” Rodrik argued, but modern trade deals have little to do with reducing barriers to trade. After all, the negotiations that created the WTO resulted in the biggest trading countries ending the vast majority of their tariffs and quotas. What’s left is a fight to change local rules and regulations. “Rather than reining in protectionists, trade agreements empower another set of special interests and politically well-connected firms, such as international banks, pharmaceutical companies, and multinational corporations,” Rodrik wrote.
In a sense, that makes Robert Lighthizer the most honest man in Washington. He doesn’t believe in unregulated free trade, but the very idea of free trade is a chimera. America’s trade laws have always served America first—at least for those lawyers who know exactly whom to lobby and how. Generations of American trade negotiators have voiced lofty ideals at the same time as America’s global power and prestige swelled, but they rarely had to prove that their principles wouldn’t bend when pressed. The law serves the weak, they could say, while never having to contemplate the experience of real weakness. Now, as America is eclipsed by China, Lighthizer has arrived to say the law should favor those who make it. Who is to tell him he’s wrong? China? If you’d rather China’s laws, he might well say, go ahead and live under them. In the meantime, the rest of us will go on living in Lighthizer’s world. And if you don’t like its laws, at least you know who made them.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2ERvbtA