Redburn Reads, March 1, 2024
Dark Ages edition
Friends,
When I went to Pomona College from 1968 to 1972, there were, of course, a number of people who were gay or lesbian. But I didn’t know who they were. I imagine they shared that aspect of their life with their closest friends, but I was oblivious. Only gradually, as they individually came out after graduation, did I learn the truth.
Earlier, when I was growing up, my parents, who were public school teachers, were friends with a colleague at my dad’s school who was gay. They invited him to dinner at our house, telling me he had to keep his secret – and that we did, too. Yet, even after meeting him, I continued to snigger along with my friends about “homos,” even though I knew very little about what that actually meant.
It’s not all that hard to remember that time, but it is shameful to look back at who I was and be thankful that it is now history. But Jonathan Rauch wants us to remember what it was like to be gay, not just in the late 1960s, but going back to much earlier in the 20th century, now that, as he put it in a remarkable essay for The Atlantic, America’s long campaign to erase gay people is itself being forgotten.
Courtesy of “The Lavender Scare”
You may be aware that for decades the U.S. government fired homosexuals, the military discharged them, and police arrested them. Some of these actions are well within the living memory of most adults. Yet if you are like most people—including me, when I began researching this article—you have not fully appreciated that these policies were not discrimination of any ordinary sort. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing for more than six decades, the United States waged a campaign of legal, social, and psychological obliteration against its homosexual population. (Because society targeted what it identified as “homosexuality,” I will primarily use that term throughout this essay, but make no mistake: People who today would identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or gender-nonconforming were all targeted.) The campaign was initiated by the federal government but recruited all of society. The pressure could be felt everywhere. It found you not only at work, where you could be fired, or in bars and clubs, where you could be arrested, but also on the street and in public spaces, where you could be harassed or assaulted; in a doctor’s care, where you might be deemed mentally ill; at home, where you saw gay people ridiculed and pathologized on TV.
The goal, as the historian and legal scholar William N. Eskridge Jr. writes in his 1999 book Gaylaw, was not merely to disadvantage homosexual people; it was to erase homosexuality from every corner of public life. . . . Some of what America did to its LGBTQ citizens would have been right at home in places such as prewar Germany, Communist East Germany, and any number of repressive states today. Eskridge shows that, on paper, the anti-homosexual laws, regulations, and police practices in the U.S. at the height of its war on homosexuals were “virtually identical” to the anti-homosexual rules of Germany in the 1930s. The campaign stands, at its peak, as America’s purest national experiment with totalitarianism. Although not the cruelest or deadliest of America’s historical oppressions—no populations were decimated or relocated; no people were enslaved—it stands apart in its use of every governmental and social channel to eliminate the very thought of “deviance.”
And yet, for a long time now, the United States has failed to confront its past. The names and stories and lessons have been buried and are steadily being lost. As a society, we have never counted the victims, acknowledged their suffering, or compensated them even symbolically—though some of them . . . are walking the streets among us right now.
In that respect, the campaign to erase homosexuality succeeded. And it continues today, as conservative activists crisscross the country seeking to wipe homosexuality and transgenderism from school libraries, from history classes, and from other curricula. Even as it is being forgotten, the campaign is being repeated.
And it will get even worse if Donald Trump is elected president again. Carlos Lozada, the astute critic and opinion columnist for The New York Times, has done all of us a favor by reading the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” detailing what is likely to be Trump’s far more ruthless agenda if he manages to win another term in office. The goal, if the Heritage Foundation experts have their way, would be to Make America Great Again by imposing a government-mandated religious order that elevates the traditional family and right-wing ideology over all other forms of behavior and belief.
There is plenty here that one would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and target the “administrative state,” which is depicted here as a powerful and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social engineering. Yet what is most striking about the book is not the specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are about law, power and public service. . .
And for all the book’s rhetoric about the need to “dismantle the administrative state,” it soon becomes clear that vanquishing the federal bureaucracy is not the document’s animating ambition. There may be plenty worth jettisoning from the executive branch, but “Mandate for Leadership” is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology. . .
If “Mandate for Leadership” has its way, the next conservative administration will also target the data gathering and analysis that undergirds public policy. Every U.S. state should be required by Health and Human Services to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence and by what method.” By contrast, the government should prohibit the collection of employment statistics based on race or ethnicity, and the Centers for Disease Control should discontinue gathering data on gender identity, on the grounds that such collection “encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.” (Why the executive branch might concern itself with the subjective identities of American citizens becomes clearer some 25 pages later, when the document affirms that the government should “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”) . . .
The notion that liberty entails the discipline to do the right thing, as opposed to the choice to do whatever things we want, has a long lineage in American political thought, dating back to the Puritans and the “city on a hill.” But in “Mandate for Leadership,” the answer to what we ought to do depends on the cultural and religious proclivities of the authors. “This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family — marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners and the like,” Roberts writes. It is also found in work, charity and, above all, in “religious devotion and spirituality.” Later, in a chapter on the Department of Labor, the book suggests that because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest,” American workers should be paid extra for working on that day. “A shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals,” it says.
Kevin Wurm/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Can it happen here? That’s been a question since the 1930s, when Fascism and Nazism rose to power in Europe.
Thomas E. Ricks, a fine military historian and former Washington Post reporter, grappled with this issue as a guest writer for Timothy Noah’s Backbencher newsletter on Substack. His conclusions are not reassuring.
I picked up Robert Paxton’s 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism hoping to gain some insights about our current political situation in the United States. To my surprise, I put it down believing that Donald Trump and his followers fit the fascist template quite well, following its playbook much more closely than I realized.
There are some major differences, thankfully, between our country today and Italy in the 1920s. But again and again, I was struck by the similarities. “Mussolini’s movement . . . boiled with readiness for violent action, anti-intellectualism, rejection of compromise, and contempt for established society,” Paxton writes. What current American group does that sound like?
Fascism was not so much a program or ideology as it was a “mood.” It was built on angry resentment, “a sense of overwhelming crisis” and “the belief that one’s group is a victim” that is justified in using violence “without legal or moral limits against its enemies both internal and external.”
How does fascism move from the fringe to gaining a toehold on power? As Mr. Rogers said in a very different context, Look for the helpers. The key for both Mussolini in the ‘20s and Hitler in the ‘30s was conservatives who held power but feared they would lose it to the left unless they made alliances with the fascists, giving them a place inside a governing coalition. In the United States, it has been conservative enablers such as Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and others. They are the necessary accomplices. “That was,” Paxton finds, “the final essential pre-condition of successful fascism: decision-makers ready to share power with fascist challengers.”
For all that, Paxton poses a problem that I still find myself pondering. “Fascism,” he says, ”is a phenomenon of failed democracies.” He explains that “Fascist interlopers cannot easily break into a system that is functioning tolerably well.” So I wonder: Do these parallels to European history indicate that American democracy failing? My interim answer is that it isn’t, but that a significant portion of Americans, about twenty percent, believe it has. That is, they have given up on American democracy as it is constituted nowadays. Some of them are simply white supremacists who dislike seeing minorities gain political power and positions of prestige. But others may be sensing, accurately, that the American middle class is getting screwed by oligarchs who are running American politics while maintaining the appearance of democracy, and these people are turning to Trumpism out of despair.
This book told me more about what is going on in America in 2024 than the headlines are doing. It provided a framework that I will use often as I watch events unfold. If Trump wins re-election, I think we will have to endure what Paxton calls “a mature fascist-conservative alliance.”
Such a world seems so far removed from what, as Jesse Green, the Times theater critic, wrote in a poignant personal essay, we have become so accustomed to today.
Here’s a list of every openly queer person I knew when I was 15:
That’s it. None. Not even myself.
Oh sure, Paul Lynde and Liberace were flouncing on television; closer to home, a boy I kept my distance from decoupaged his notebooks. But even if they really were what people whispered or snarled about them, it was not then an identity they would dare to acknowledge.
Nor would I. Unable to see through their closet doors to the truth of what their lives might be, I did not have the benefit of their stories, which meant not having the benefit of my own.
Cut to today, 50 years later. Another 15-year-old boy — like me intense, unathletic and bullied — is the lead character on “Heartstopper,” a hit teen romance. But this boy, Charlie, knows all about queerness. He is, after all, growing up in the 2020s and, more to the point, in 2020s pop culture. In that magical land, also known as Netflix, adolescence for people like him is not only survivable but often a lovefest, all closet doors blown off their hinges. . .
It’s all good information. One of the things “Sex Education” accomplishes for young people, beyond the normalization of any kind of consensual sex, is the normalization of any kind of respectful discussion about it. No one’s hang-up is any stranger than anyone else’s. And everyone has a hang-up.
In that context, the fact of queerness, as opposed to what you do with it, or how it intersects with another part of your identity, is barely worth comment. The unspeakable has become the unnecessary to be spoken. And though I find that idea Pollyannish as long as our world is still riddled with homophobia and hate crime, I also find it powerful — not just as an educational tool but also as an emotional retrofit.
I come from a community that, thinking itself progressive, thought nothing of sneering at people like me. Sex education in my high school featured a gym teacher telling us, before letting a representative of a local gay organization speak to our class as the curriculum required, that “these people” were clever but, in his opinion, sick.
It didn’t matter that I knew he was wrong. I could see nothing around me that reassured me I was right.
Would we really go back to that era? Can it happen here? I’m afraid anything is possible these days.
And it just got more likely with the Supreme Court’s decision to consider Trump’s ridiculous claim that he enjoys absolute immunity for any of his illegal actions as President.
SCOTUS Throws Trump a Lifeline is the headline on William Kristol and Andrew Egger’s column for the Never Trump outfit, Bulwark.
First the news: DONALD TRUMP HAS JUST SCORED ANOTHER BIG WIN in his legal strategy of delaying any accountability for his alleged crimes until after the 2024 election—which he gambles will return him to the White House and safely beyond the reach of justice.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted his request to consider overturning the unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit holding that he does not have complete immunity from criminal liability for acts taken as president. At least four justices voted to take this step. The Court has scheduled oral argument for April 22.
(What follows is by Kristol.)
Delay Is a Choice
To govern is to choose. Yesterday, in the case of Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court chose delay.
The justices of the Supreme Court didn’t have to make that choice. But they were able to, and they broke no laws or even rules in doing so. Judges necessarily have a fair amount of discretion in matters of timing and procedure. And the justices exercised their discretion, and chose delay.
The choice of delay was actually a series of choices.
In December, the Supreme Court chose to deny the Special Counsel’s request to take the case immediately. The D.C. Circuit then heard the appeal on the issue of presidential immunity, and issued a comprehensive and well-reasoned unanimous opinion.
The Supreme Court then spent two and a half weeks pondering whether to grant certiorari to hear a further appeal, rather than denying cert and simply allowing the decision of the D.C Circuit to stand. The Court then chose to grant cert, and chose to schedule the argument on the case in two months.
The Court will then take as long it chooses to arrive at a decision. Only then does the clock start ticking again towards an actual trial.
It’s very unlikely we’ll have a verdict in the case by November.
So those who hoped the legal system would stop Donald Trump are almost certain to be disappointed. As were those of us who hoped the United States Senate would stop Trump in February 2021. As were those who hoped the Department of Justice would move quickly to hold him accountable in 2021 and 2022. As were those who placed their faith in Republican elites in 2023 or Republican primary voters in 2024.
Where does that leave us, the American people? Relying on ourselves. Perhaps that’s as it should be.
After all, here the people rule. The question we face in 2024 is: How fares the spirit of liberty in America?
We’re about to find out.