A Comic-Book Why the

Chinese Love
Heroine for Our Time Trump p. 46
By Caitlin Flanagan

The
Plot Against
America
Paul Manafort and
the Fall of Washington
By Franklin Foer

Your Dog Feels

No Shame
Will We Have Enough
to Eat in 2050?
T H E AT L A N T I C .C O M

How Illicit Desire

Can Save Your Marriage
XXXX 2012

MARCH 2018
T H E AT L A N T I C .C O M The Pakistan Trap
 A DV E RT I S E M E N T

                ĕ            whole, with the goal of mitigating stress

        ĕ                        for patients and redefining what a medi-
        Ġ                        cal facility can be.
   
Ę
Every time Jennie Briend and her 6-year-
old son Tyler (bottom left) visit the new
building, for example, he runs straight to
hen you enter the lobby of the newly expand- a large bear sculpture on the first floor

W ed Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital on the

Stanford University campus, it may take a
and gives it a big hug. “He just thinks it’s
the best thing ever,” Briend says of her
moment to realize you are in a medical facility. son, who has spent the majority of his life
Natural light spills through unusually large windows. Undulat- in hospitals, having been born with an
ing walls recall ocean waves. And a series of metal birds hangs undiagnosed critical cyanotic congenital
elegantly from the ceiling. These aren’t the standard trappings heart defect.
of a hospital—and that’s the point. More than a decade in the
making, the new building has sought to synthesize nature, A member of the hospital’s family advisory
sustainability, and world-class technology into a cogent council, Briend gave no small amount of
input as the hospital was built. Input was
also solicited from countless medical
staffers and additional patient families,
who weighed in on everything from furni-
ture comfort to food services—and every
suggestion was carefully considered.
This patient-first, family-friendly approach
has placed the hospital at the forefront
of design and medicine. According to
Diane Flynn, another member of
Packard Children's Hospital advisory
council, “It was all about having empathy
for the patients and their families.”
 A DV E RT I S E M E N T

PHOTOS BY VITTORIA ZUPICICH

The patient
rooms at the
Lucile Packard
Children’s Hospital
are designed to
put kids and their
parents at ease.
Here’s how:

Medical staffers
wearing RTLS—or
real-time location
services—badges
2 3 4
are identified on a
smart-TV monitor Every patient has a Suites are equipped A pair of retractable For more about the
when they walk into view of the outdoors with a pullout couch curtains ensure people who influenced
a room, eliminating along with a planter and a second TV that patients and the design of Lucile
the confusion some box—one example to accommodate family members Packard Children’s
patients may feel of how nature is family members alike can have their Hospital, visit:
about who is com- prevalent through- who are staying with privacy, even in a TheAtlantic.com/
ing to see them. out the hospital. a patient. small space. stanfordchildrens
 OF NO PA RT Y OR C L IQU E

CONTENTS | MARCH 2018

VO L . 3 2 1 – N O. 2

Features

46 Why China
Loves Trump

62
BY BENJAMIN CARLSON
The people love a winner.
The leadership loves a dupe.
American Hustler
BY FRANKLIN FOER
Oligarchs, shady deals, foreign money—how
52 How Will We Feed the Paul Manafort helped contaminate Washington
80 America Is Not
New Global Middle Class? a Democracy
MARK PETERSON/REDUX

and corrupt U.S. politics

BY CHARLES C. MANN B Y YA S C H A M O U N K
In 2050 the world population will Paul Manafort, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign How the United States lost the faith
be 10 billion. Can everyone eat chairman, with the Trump adviser Stephen Miller of its citizens—and what it can do
without destroying the Earth? at a June 2016 campaign event in New York to win them back

T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 3
 CONTENTS VOL . 321–NO. 2 03 . 18

Dispatches Departments

13 POLITICS
8 The Conversation
Boycott the GOP
B Y J O N AT H A N R AU C H A N D B E N J A M I N W I T T E S 100 The Big Question
The party is now a threat to the constitutional order. Two What was the most influential
nonpartisans argue that people must vote against Republicans act of protest in history?
at every opportunity.

BUSINESS

22 Building a
Better Office
BY LAURA BLISS
WeWork thinks it’s optimized
the workplace for creativity
and productivity. Has it?

LEXICON

26 How to
Talk Trump
BY KURT ANDERSEN
A concise guide to speaking
the president’s dialect

SKETCH

28 The World’s Most

Body-Conscious Man
BY MARK BOWDEN
For years, Larry Smarr has
used a supercomputer to
monitor his health and peer
at his organs. Recently, he
used his knowledge to help
direct his own surgery.

CRIMINAL TENDENCIES

INTERVIEW 30 The Banana Trick

18 “Humorless BY RENE CHUN
On the Cover
Politicians Are the And other dark arts of self-
Most Dangerous” checkout theft
BY JULIA IOFFE
Armando Iannucci, the cre-
ator of Veep, on satire in the
ST U DY O F ST U D I E S time of Trump and his new
16 Funny How? film, The Death of Stalin
B Y B E N H E A LY
An anatomy of cracking up ANIMAL KINGDOM

21 Your Dog Feels

No Shame
BY WILLIAM BRENNAN
The myth of canine guilt

Photograph by
The Voorhes

4 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
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 CONTENTS VOL . 321–NO. 2 03 . 18

The Culture File Fiction

32 THE OMNIVORE

A Heroine for Our Time

BY CAITLIN FLANAGAN
The pulp-fiction superspy Modesty Blaise is a woman who is
always in control.

88 Rib Night
BY WILL MACKIN
A war story

Poetry
FILM BOOKS 61 Goat on a Pile
35 Thor and the Hulk 42 The Virtue of of Scrap Lumber
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After an ill-fated swerve Jamie Quatro’s new novel
into the serious, superhero explores how marriage
movies have at last rediscov- inspires sexual longing.
ered comedy.

BOOKS

38 The Pakistan Trap

BY MARK MAZZETTI
How Afghanistan’s neighbor
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America’s longest war

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• C O N V E R S AT I O N
Conservatism Without Bigotry
In December, Peter Beinart argued that conservatives would be more likely to
reckon with their policies’ discriminatory effects if liberals stopped carelessly
crying racist.
Peter Beinart, in leaning over
backwards to be evenhanded
to conservatives and liberals,
poses the wrong question.
Before the election of Donald
Trump, few liberals believed
that all Republicans were
racists. The right question is:
Are Trump supporters racist
themselves, or do they merely
condone racism?
Given the endless
demonstrations of Trump’s
own bigotry, I would argue
that it is impossible to deny
that he is a racist or claim to be
unaware that he is one. So if
the position of his supporters
8 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E
R E S P O N S E S & R E V E R B E R AT I O N S
and of Republicans in
Congress is, in effect, to wink
at that aspect of his personality
in order to advance a so-called
conservative agenda, what
does one call that posture
other than condoning racism?
For Beinart to call this
attitude merely “willfully
naive,” as if Republicans are
unaware of the racial impact of
their policies, is an insult to the
reader’s intelligence.
Steve Shabad
OSSINING, N.Y.
Peter Beinart’s recent piece
points out that conservatives
AT L A N T I C
are likely to get defensive about
the suggestion that their ideas
are racist, but misses the fact
that there is a correlation
between conservatism and
racist attitudes. More impor-
tant, by focusing on bigotry,
which connotes individual
bias, rather than on systemic
white supremacy, sexism, and
heterosexism, Beinart misses
the bigger picture. If bigotry
were wiped out tomorrow, these
inequitable power structures
would continue.
Throughout American
history the dominant classes
have been defensive about
being called biased, as a means
of deflecting criticism. Even
the white supremacists who
marched in Charlottesville,
Virginia, deny that they are
racist. Beinart suggests that
people can change if they get
“new information”—and this
can work on the individual
level. But history shows that
the larger structures of power
based on race, gender, and
sexual identity will change only
in response to direct and force-
ful demands for justice.
Billy Easton
ALBANY, N.Y.
We clearly need politics and
media with more critical think-
ing and less mindless name-
calling. While Beinart makes
some good points, his argu-
ment contains a problematic
assumption: that progressiv-
ism is an inherent force for
good that “seeks ever-greater
moral advance.” This very
logic lets liberals assume the
responsibility to determine
what morality means, and lets
them label conservatives who
disagree with their determi-
nation hateful and closed-
minded. It also assumes that
“moral advance” comes at
no cost, at least to those who
matter in liberals’ calculus.
When conservatives are
told that their religious beliefs
are wrong, that certain words
are unacceptable micro-
aggressions, and that college
campuses must have safe
spaces to protect liberal sensi-
tivities, they understandably
question the newly imposed
morality’s legitimacy. Contrary
to Beinart’s assertion, the
argument is not about right
and wrong, but about who
has the power to set society’s
moral compass. This power
belongs to all Americans,
not a self-selected group that
claims to know what’s right for
everyone else.
Ken Brown
VALRICO, FLA.

In the end, whether the
Republican Party is funda-
mentally racist boils down to a
few simple questions that have
little to do with the theoretical
salience of their ideas: Do the
policies they champion harm
communities of color more
than they help them—even if,
in theory, they appear to be
colorblind? Do the policies
they champion aid white
people disproportionately at
the expense of those same
communities of color? …
Despite Beinart’s claims
to the contrary, there’s little
evidence to suggest that
treading more gently when it
comes to confronting these
iterations of GOP racism will
actually erode GOP racism. In
his advocacy for this approach,
the author declines to name
a single time in history when
no longer using the “nuclear
epithet”—calling conservative
white people “racist”—has
actually made them less racist.
It’s one thing to make room
for nuance and avoid broad
strokes. It is another to ignore
proof when it’s sitting in front
of you. Beinart’s piece suggests
a fundamental Republican
innocence and naïveté where
the real fundamental element
is bigotry.
Zak Cheney Rice
EXCERPT FROM A MIC ARTICLE
What’s College
Good For?
In the January/February issue,
Bryan Caplan, an economics
professor at George Mason
University, wrote that students
don’t seem to be getting much out
of higher education.
Bryan Caplan argues that
higher education “is a big
waste of time and money”
and that “students spend
thousands of hours study-
ing subjects irrelevant to
the modern labor market.”
It seems to me that the
arguments he is making are
contradicted by their appear-
ance in the very magazine in
which they were published.
My years of college education
prepared me to function as a
registered nurse in multiple
health-care settings, but also
to read, comprehend, and
appreciate the articles that
appear in The Atlantic on
such wide-ranging topics as
economics, science, sociology,
politics, and the arts, just to
name a few. College is good
for building a foundation of
knowledge applicable to one’s
career, but is also valuable in
expanding one’s world beyond
that career.
Denise Jacob, R.N., Ph.D.
FRANKLIN, MICH.
Bryan Caplan is right on the
money when he suggests that
many students, and not inci-
dentally the economy, would
benefit if we put less emphasis
on bachelor’s degrees and
more emphasis on practical
vocational training. However,
I can think of no better argu-
ment for pursuing an academic
degree than the notion that an
economist has difficulty seeing
its value. The main benefits of
a degree are difficult to quan-
tify, but the point is certainly
not to prepare students for
some sort of economic activity
per se. The point of education
in the liberal arts is to increase
students’ ability to cope with
the new, the ambiguous, the
alien—that which challenges
our dearly held beliefs. I can
think of no greater skill that
a young person can acquire
through education, especially
at this political moment, than
the ability to argue without
becoming angry, to disagree
without rancor, and to find in
differences with others new
possibilities about how to live,
think, and approach life. This
is a crucial function of citizen-
ship not often on display in
the U.S. these days, and it is
BAROMETER
The most-read magazine stories from 2017 on TheAtlantic.com
1
Lola’s Story
Alex Tizon (June)
2
Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?
Jean M. Twenge (September)
3
The First White President
Ta-Nehisi Coates (October)
4
How to Build an Autocracy
David Frum (March)
5
When Your Child Is a Psychopath
Barbara Bradley Hagerty (June)
6
How America Lost Its Mind
Kurt Andersen (September)
7
A Death at Penn State
Caitlin Flanagan (November)
8
My President Was Black
Ta-Nehisi Coates (January/February)
9
The Worst Problem on Earth
Mark Bowden (July/August)
10
Power Causes Brain Damage
Jerry Useem (July/August)
understandably difficult to see forget it anyway, according to
if one reduces life to numbers Caplan.) Let those who are not
or commerce. gifted learn a trade or a skill
James K. Foster and be done with it.
CHICAGO, ILL. This kind of elitism is not
humanistic, and it is not just.
As a professor in the humani- For one thing, it does not allow
ties I have asked myself many for the discovery of late bloom-
times whether it makes sense ers, the intellectually talented
to educate everyone in the many in the “underclasses”
humanities and liberal arts. It’s who have been undereducated
easy to think that Shakespeare by our racist, classist society.
and Plato are for the few. Let Second, it denies to many the
those who are intellectually richness of experience that
gifted and ambitious learn comes from placing the present
literature, history, philosophy, in the context of the larger civi-
political science, and so on lization. Moreover, there is a
if they want. (They will soon commonality and bond among
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 9
 T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N

people who share these experi- McKay Coppins quotes me in been able to find them. He told McKay Coppins
ences. All people should have his article “God’s Plan for Mike Pence that things would go responds:
the opportunity to participate Pence.” This portion of the easier if we cooperated with This article, like all articles
in this shared discourse, not article contains some errors him. He also urged Pence to that appear in this magazine,
just the few. and omissions. My objections work with him in establishing a was carefully and exhaustively
We need more and better to these were ignored during better, more open relationship fact-checked, and we made
public education that includes the fact-checking process. between the administration numerous changes to address
large doses of the humani- Most significant is the account and the fraternity. This was the Daniel Murphy’s concerns. But
ties and social sciences. of the episode involving the context for Pence’s decision in the case of the fraternity party
Education has the potential “busting” of the Phi Gamma to take the official to the kegs, described in the story, he did tell
to bring us together through Delta fraternity for a party a decision that others in the me during our recorded, on-the-
our shared heritage(s) and our with alcohol, which gave the fraternity agreed with. He record interview last September
shared skills. It is a primary impression that Pence turned acted to protect the fraternity that Pence “caught some flack”
tool for turning our diversity on his fraternity to gain favor as best he could under unpropi- from some of his fraternity
into a democracy. with college administrators. tious circumstances. Unfortu- brothers, who were “mad” at him
Sharon Schwarze, Ph.D. Such parties were forbidden on nately, the promise of better for his handling of the situation.
PROFESSOR EMERITA AND CHAIR, Hanover College’s then-“dry” treatment for cooperation Specifically, Murphy said, they
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AND
LIBERAL STUDIES, campus. On this occasion, proved to be false. Administra- were upset that Pence had led the
CABRINI UNIVERSITY, WAYNE, PA. members of the fraternity were tors proceeded to mete out a administrator to the kegs, rather
caught holding a party with a severe punishment. There was than letting one of the members
couple of kegs of beer. As the indeed a lot of anger in the “take the hit” in an effort to
God’s Plan for president of the fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta house after spare the rest of the fraternity
Mike Pence Pence had to meet with the this—directed at the adminis- from discipline.
In the January/February issue, official who had broken up trators we believed had broken
McKay Coppins probed the the party, and who was going an agreement.
vice president’s past—and to search the fraternity house The article states that after Correction:
explored his role in an unortho- from top to bottom for the this Pence managed to stay on In “When the Presses Stop”
dox administration. kegs. He probably would have good terms with the adminis- (January/February), Molly
tration, implying that he had Ball wrote that Bernie Krisher
been currying favor when he failed to help her with a
SCAM WARNING turned over the kegs. This is health-insurance problem
We occasionally get reports of unauthorized third parties not true. Pence endured the when he was her employer.
posing as subscription resellers. We prize the relationship with same social probation as the The article noted that Krisher
our customers, and regret that you may have been targeted rest of us. Two years after the denied this, saying he had
and inconvenienced.
If you think you have been targeted by a scam, please let party incident, Pence was appealed to the insurance
us know by emailing FraudAlert@AtlanticMedia.com. We also selected to be the student company without success.
encourage you to report your experience to the FTC. speaker at commencement. After the article went to press,
Here are a few ways you can identify a fraud attempt:
We don’t do telemarketing. The Atlantic does not contact The selection process was Krisher found emails show-
subscribers by phone for promotional or financial purposes. The driven by students, and ing that he had offered to help
only time The Atlantic will call you is if you contact our customer- reflected a respect for and Ball, but that the problem
service team and explicitly give your permission for a return call.
We will never call you and ask for personal or billing information. a genuine liking of Pence. had by then been resolved.
We discourage all customers from sharing financial details over the Months after graduation, he The article also stated that
phone unless you initiated the phone call and are speaking directly was given a job in the admis- Sihanouk asked Krisher to give
with an Atlantic customer-service representative.
All of our mailed promotions will have a return address from sions office; it would have been Cambodia a newspaper; in
one of two locations: foolish not to hire someone fact, he asked Krisher to help
1. Our office: 600 New Hampshire Avenue, Washington, D.C. with Pence’s charisma and rehabilitate the country. Lastly,
2. Our fulfillment operations: 1901 Bell Avenue, Des Moines, IA
Any mailed packages or promotional pieces with a return communication skills. the article said that two alumni
address from another location are not from The Atlantic. My experience with The of The Cambodia Daily won
The best way to make sure you’re talking with The Atlantic Atlantic has forced me to doubt Pulitzer Prizes. Only one did.
is to initiate contact. You can reach us at 1-800-234-2411
(U.S. and Canada), 1-515-237-3670 (international), or at that this journal has any real
www.TheAtlantic.com/contact. To purchase a subscription, care for the truth. To contribute to The
please visit TheAtlantic.com/subscribe. Conversation, please email
Daniel Murphy letters@theatlantic.com. Include
HANOVER, IND. your full name, city, and state.

E D I T O R I A L O F F I C E S & C O R R E S P O N D E N C E The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Correspondence should be sent
to: Editorial Department, The Atlantic, 600 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20037. Receipt of unsolicited manuscripts will be acknowledged if accompanied by a
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10 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
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 CAN YOU
BELIEVE
WHAT YOU
READ? With fake news leaving most
Sources: 2016 Survey, Pew Research Center; GfK MRI, Spring 2016.

Americans confused about even

the basic facts, magazine media
keeps it real. Whether in print,

MAGAZINE online, on mobile or video, people

trust it to be expertly researched,
written and fact-checked. No

MEDIA wonder magazine readers are

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Better. Believe It. Being real matters. That’s a fact.

#BelieveMagMedia | BelieveMagMedia.com
 WeWork plans to sprinkle offices with data-harvesting sensors and facial-recognition software. This will allow WeWork to monitor how some members use its
spaces: how they adjust their desks, where in the office they spend their time, and maybe even how engaged they are in meetings.
— Laura Bliss, p. 22

D I S P A T C H E S
I D E AS & P R OVO CAT I O N S
M ARCH 2018

• POLITICS

BOYCOTT
THE GOP
The party is now a threat
to the constitutional order.
Even conservatives must vote
against Republicans at
every opportunity.
B Y J O N AT H A N R A U C H A N D
BENJAMIN WITTES

A F E W D AY S after the Democratic

electoral sweep this past November in
Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The
Washington Post asked a random Virginia
man to explain his vote. The man, a mar-
keting executive named Toren Beasley,
replied that his calculus was simply to
refuse to calculate. “It could have been
Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the
ballot and I would have voted for them if
they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might
do more analyses in other years. But in

Illustrations by EDMON DE HARO T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 13


this case, no. No one else gets any consid-
eration because what’s going on with the
Republicans—I’m talking about Trump
and his cast of characters—is stupid, stu-
pid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”
Count us in, Mr. Beasley. We’re with
you, though we tend to go with danger-
ous rather than stupid. And no one could
be more surprised that we’re saying this
than we are.
We have both spent our professional
careers strenuously avoiding partisan-
ship in our writing and thinking. We have
both done work that is, in different ways,
ideologically eclectic, and that has—over
a long period of time—cast us as not
merely nonpartisans but antipartisans.
Temperamentally, we agree with the
late Christopher Hitchens: Partisanship
makes you stupid. We are the kind of
voters who political scientists say barely
exist—true independents who scour can-
didates’ records in order to base our votes
on individual merit, not party brand.
This, then, is the article we thought we
would never write: a frank statement that
a certain form of partisanship is now a
moral necessity. The Republican Party, as
an institution, has become a danger to the
rule of law and the integrity of our democ-
racy. The problem is not just Donald
Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus
that made a conscious decision to enable
him. In a two-party system, nonpartisan-
ship works only if both parties are con-
sistent democratic actors. If one of them
is not predictably so, the space for non-
partisans evaporates. We’re thus driven
to believe that the best hope of defending
the country from Trump’s Republican
enablers, and of saving the Republican
Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley
did: vote mindlessly and mechanically
against Republicans at every opportu-
nity, until the party either rights itself or
implodes (very preferably the former).
Of course, lots of people vote a straight
ticket. Some do so because they are par-
tisan. Others do so because of a particu-
lar policy position: Many pro-lifers, for
example, will not vote for Democrats,
even pro-life Democrats, because they
see the Democratic Party as institution-
ally committed to the slaughter of babies.
We’re proposing something different.
We’re suggesting that in today’s situation,
people should vote a straight Democratic
ticket even if they are not partisan, and
despite their policy views. They should
14 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
D I S PAT C H E S
vote against Republicans in a spirit that
is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. ernors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, have
Their attitude should be: The rule of
law is a threshold value in American
politics, and a party that endangers this
value disqualifies itself, period. In other
words, under certain peculiar and deeply
regrettable circumstances, sophisticated,
independent-minded voters need to act
as if they were dumb-ass partisans.
For us, this represents a counsel of
desperation. So allow us to step back and
explain what drove us to what we call
oppositional partisanship.
To avoid misunderstanding, here
are some things we are not saying. First,
although we worry about extremism in the
GOP, that is not a reason to boycott the
party. We agree with political analysts who
say that the Republicans
veered off-center earlier
and more sharply than the
Democrats—but recently
the Democrats have made
up for lost time by moving
rapidly leftward. In any
case, under normal cir-
cumstances our response
to radicalization within
a party would be to sup-
port sane people within
that party.
Nor is our oppositional
partisanship motivated by the belief that
Republican policies are wrongheaded.
Republicans are a variegated bunch, and
we agree with many traditional GOP
positions. One of us has spent the past sev-
eral years arguing that counterterrorism
authorities should be granted robust pow-
ers, defending detentions at Guantánamo
Bay, and supporting the confirmations of
any number of conservative judges and
justices whose nominations enraged lib-
erals. The other is a Burkean conservative
with libertarian tendencies and a long
history of activism against left-wing intol-
erance. And even if we did consistently
reject Republican policy positions, that
would not be sufficient basis to boycott the
entire party—just to oppose the bad ideas
advanced by it.
One more nonreason for our stance:
that we are horrified by the president. To
be sure, we are horrified by much that
Trump has said and done. But many
members of his party are likewise horri-
fied. Republicans such as Senators John
McCain and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake
and Ben Sasse, as well as former Gov-
spoken out and conducted themselves
with integrity. Abandoning an entire
party means abandoning many brave and
honorable people. We would not do that
based simply on rot at the top.
S O WHY HAVE WE come to regard
the GOP as an institutional danger?
In a nutshell, it has proved unable or
unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block
assaults by Trump and his base on the rule
of law. Those assaults, were they to be nor-
malized, would pose existential, not inci-
dental, threats to American democracy.
Future generations of scholars will scru-
tinize the many weird ways that Trump
has twisted the GOP. For present purposes,
We are not motivated by
the belief that Republican
policies are wrongheaded.
We agree with many
traditional GOP positions.
however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to
restrain the president from two unforgiv-
able sins. The first is his attempt to erode
the independence of the justice system.
This includes Trump’s sinister interactions
with his law-enforcement apparatus: his
demands for criminal investigations of
his political opponents, his pressuring of
law-enforcement leaders on investigative
matters, his frank efforts to interfere with
investigations that implicate his personal
interests, and his threats against the indi-
viduals who run the Justice Department. It
also includes his attacks on federal judges,
his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying
a court’s order to enforce constitutional
rights, his belief that he gets to decide on
Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and
his view that the justice system exists to
effectuate his will. Some Republicans
have clucked disapprovingly at various of
Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other
Republicans have cheered, and the party,
as a party, has quickly moved on. A party
that behaves this way is not functioning as
a democratic actor.

The second unforgivable sin is Trump’s
encouragement of a foreign adversary’s
interference in U.S. electoral processes.
Leave aside the question of whether
Trump’s cooperation with the Russians
violated the law. He at least tacitly collab-
orated with a foreign-intelligence oper-
ation against his country— sometimes
in full public view. This started during
the campaign, when he called upon the
Russians to steal and release his oppo-
nent’s emails, and has continued dur-
ing his presidency, as he equivocates on
whether foreign intervention occurred
and smears intelligence professionals
who stand by the facts. Meanwhile, the
Republican Party has confirmed his nomi-
nees, doggedly pursued its agenda on tax
reform and health care, and attacked—of
course—Hillary Clinton.
We don’t mean to deny credit where it
is due: Some congressional Republicans
pushed back. Last year, pressure from
individual Republicans seemed to dis-
courage Trump from firing Attorney Gen-
eral Jeff Sessions and probably prevented
action against Special Counsel Robert
Mueller. Moreover, Republicans as a
group have constrained Trump on occa-
sion. Congress imposed tough sanctions
on Russia over the president’s objections.
The Senate Intelligence Committee con-
ducted a serious Russia investigation
under the leadership of Richard Burr. But
the broader response to Trump’s behav-
ior has been tolerant and, often, enabling.
• POLITICS
The reason is that Trump and his
forces have taken command of the party.
Anti-Trump Republicans can muster only
rearguard actions, which we doubt can
hold the line against a multiyear, multi-
front assault from Trump and his allies.
It is tempting to assume that this
assault will fail. After all, Trump is un-
popular, the Republican Party’s prospects
in this year’s midterm elections are dim,
and the president is under aggressive
investigation. What’s more, democratic
institutions held up pretty well in the first
year of the Trump administration. Won’t
they get us through the rest?
Perhaps. But we should not count on
the past year to provide the template for
the next three. Under the pressure of per-
sistent attacks, many of them seemingly
minor, democratic institutions can erode
gradually until they suddenly fail. That
the structures hold up for a while does not
mean they will hold up indefinitely—and
if they do, they may not hold up well.
Even now, erosion is visible. Republi-
can partisans and policy makers routinely
accept insults to constitutional norms that,
under Barack Obama, they would have
condemned as outrageous. When Trump
tweeted about taking “NBC and the Net-
works” off the air (“Network news has
become so partisan, distorted and fake
that licenses must be challenged and, if
appropriate, revoked”), congressional
Republicans were quick to repudiate …
left-wing media bias. In a poll by the Cato
Institute, almost two-thirds of Republi-
can respondents agreed with the presi-
dent that journalists are “an enemy of
the American people.” How much dam-
age can Trump do in the next three years?
We don’t know, but we see no grounds to
be complacent.
The optimistic outcome depends to
some degree on precisely the sort of oppo-
sitional partisanship we are prescribing.
For Trump to be restrained going forward,
key congressional enablers will need to
lose their seats in the midterm elections
to people who will use legislation and
oversight to push back against the admin-
istration. Without such electoral losses,
the picture looks decidedly grimmer.
Finally, we might not be talking about
just three more years. Trump could get re-
elected; incumbent presidents usually do.
In any event, he is likely, at a minimum, to
be renominated for the presidency.
That’s because Trump has won the
heart of the Republican base. He may be
unpopular with the public at large, but
among Republicans, nothing he and his
supporters said or did during his first year
in office drove his Gallup approval ratings
significantly below 80 percent. Forced to
choose between their support for Trump
and their suspicion of Russia, conserva-
tives went with Trump. Forced to choose
between their support for Trump and
their insistence that character matters,
evangelicals went with Trump.
It’s Trump’s party now; or, perhaps
more to the point, it’s Trumpism’s party,
because a portion of the base seems
eager to out-Trump Trump. In last
year’s special election to fill a vacant
U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Republi-
can primary voters defied the president
himself by nominating a candidate who
was openly contemptuous of the rule of
law—and many stuck with him when he
was credibly alleged to have been a child
molester. After initially balking, the Repub-
lican Party threw its institutional support
behind him too. In Virginia, pressure
from the base drove a previously sensible
Republican gubernatorial candidate into
the fever swamps. Faced with the choice
between soul-killing accommodation
and futile resistance, many Republican
politicians who renounce Trumpism are
fleeing the party or exiting politics alto-
gether. Of those who remain, many are
fighting for their political lives against a
nihilistic insurgency.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 15
 bestiality, disrespectful
D I S PAT C H E S
behaviors)”—all of which
have comic potential,
• ST U DY O F ST U DI E S provided they don’t seem
So we arrive at a syllogism:
threatening. [3]

(1) The GOP has become the party Funny How? Why does humor exist
in the first place? In “Sex,
of Trumpism.
(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic
An anatomy of cracking up Aggression, and Humour:
Responses to Unicycling”
values and the rule of law. B Y B E N H E A LY
(one of the greatest titles
(3) The Republican Party is a threat to ever to come out of aca-
democratic values and the rule of law. deme), a British researcher
proposed that humor
If the syllogism holds, then the most-

H
“ umor can be dis-
important tasks in U.S. politics right now sected, as a frog
are to change the Republicans’ trajec- can,” E. B. White
tory and to deprive them of power in the wrote, “but the thing dies
meantime. In our two-party system, the in the process and the
surest way to accomplish these things is innards are discourag-
to support the other party, in every race ing to any but the purely
from president to dogcatcher. The goal is scientific mind.” True
to make the Republican Party answerable to form, philosophers,
at every level, exacting a political price so scientists, and certain left-
stinging as to force the party back into the brained comedians have
democratic fold. been scrutinizing humor’s
The off-year elections in November innards for centuries,
showed that this is possible. Democrats seeking a serious under-
flooded polling places, desperate to standing of what makes
“resist.” Independents added their voice. things funny.
Even some Republicans abandoned According to one
their party. One Virginia Republican, scholarly definition,
explaining why he had just voted for something is humorous
Democrats in every race, told The Wash- if people cognitively ap-
ington Post, “I’ve been with the Republi- praise it as funny, if it cre-
cans my whole life, but what the party has ates “the positive emotion
been doing is appalling.” Trump’s base of amusement,” or if it pro-
stayed loyal but was overwhelmed by duces laughter. But while
other voters. A few more spankings like the average adult laughs
that will give anti-Trump Republicans a 18 times a day, [1] laughter
isn’t a reliable indicator.
fighting chance to regain influence within
Researchers found only 10
their party.
to 20 percent of remarks
We understand why Republicans,
that prompted laughter to
even moderate ones, are reluctant to
be remotely funny. [2]
cross party lines. Party, today, is identity.
One general theory,
But in the through-the-looking-glass era
put forth by a decidedly
of Donald Trump, the best thing Repub-
non-zany murderers’ row
licans can do for their party is vote
of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes,
against it. Descartes, and Baudelaire,
We understand, too, the many imper- holds that we are amused
fections of the Democratic Party. Its left when we are made to feel
is extreme, its center is confused, and superior to others. Freud,
it has its share of bad apples. But the for his part, suggested
Democratic Party is not a threat to our that forbidden things
democratic order. That is why we are ris- are hilarious (because
ing above our independent predilections humor is a pressure valve
and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. for repressive psychic
It’s why we hope many smart people will energy). Yet another
do the same. approach, pioneered by
Kant and Schopenhauer
Jonathan Rauch is a contributing editor
THE STUDIES:
at The Atlantic. Benjamin Wittes is
the editor in chief of Lawfare. Both are [1] Martin and Kuiper, “Daily
Occurrence of Laughter”
senior fellows at the Brookings Institution. (Humor, Jan. 1999)
and affirmed by Henny may be a by-product of
Youngman, sees humor as male hormonal aggression,
arising from incongruity: a hypothesis inspired
When conventions are by the overwhelming
undermined by an absurd percentage of men who
situation, we’re tickled. mocked him while he was
But these so-called out riding his unicycle.
incongruity, superiority, (Women were much more
and relief theories have supportive.) He conceded,
some holes. As Peter however, that further
McGraw and Caleb War- research was needed:
ren, of the University of “Direct endocrine confir-
mation would require
studies not available
to a unicyclist.” [4]
A more sweeping
theory posits that
humor is an evolution-
ary adaptation that
has promoted human
survival by rewarding
our relatively feeble
Colorado at Boulder’s Hu- minds for distinguishing
mor Research Lab (HURL), true from false, right from
note, “Unintentionally wrong, and harmless from
killing a loved one would dangerous over countless
be incongruous, assert harrowing and deeply
superiority, and release confusing centuries. [5]
repressed aggressive Where do things go
tension, but is unlikely to from here? Canadian and
be funny.” McGraw and Australian researchers are
Warren’s own “benign- working on a “quantum
violation theory” suggests theory of humor,” [6]
that to be funny, “a situa- computer scientists are
tion must be appraised as exploring whether artifi-
a violation” and also “as cial intelligence can rec-
benign.” They list a range ognize and create funny
of possibilities, “including images, [7] and an army
violations of personal dig- of Silicon Valley technolo-
nity (e.g., slapstick, physi- gists and moonlighting
cal deformities), linguistic comedy writers is striving
norms (e.g., unusual to build authentically
accents, malapropisms), funny chatbots. In the
social norms (e.g., eating meantime, we may as well
from a sterile bedpan, enjoy what we enjoy, and
strange behaviors), and dodge the flying frog guts
even moral norms (e.g., as best we can.
[2] Provine, Laughter: A Scien- [4] Shuster, “Sex, Aggression, a Quantum Theory of Humor”
tific Investigation (Viking, 2000) and Humour” (BMJ, Dec. 2007) (Frontiers in Physics, Jan. 2017)
[3] McGraw and Warren,
“Benign Violations” (Psycho-
[5] Hurley et al., Inside Jokes
(MIT, 2011)
[7] Chandrasekaran et al.,
“We Are Humor Beings” (arXiv,
logical Science, Aug. 2010) [6] Gabora and Kitto, “Toward May 2016)

16 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C Illustration by CHRISTOPHER DELORENZO

 “A heartbreaking, world-shaking,
revolutionary book… offers a new set of tools,
based in science, that can help each of us
heal ourselves, our children, and our world.”
—Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed

“A gripping book
that should convince everyone that we
have a serious problem, and that unless
we address it the losers will be our
nation’s children.”
—J.D. Vance,
author of Hillbilly Elegy

“Powerful…brilliantly
exposes and explores one
of the most critical health
issues we face today…
combines a scientist’s rigor with a
compassionate doctor’s heart .”
—Bryan Stevenson,
author of Just Mercy

“A rousing wake-up call,

challenging us to reimagine pressing
questions of racial and social justice as
matters of public health.“
—Michelle Alexander,
author of The New Jim Crow 

READ IT TODAY!

• INTERVIEW
“HUMORLESS POLITICIANS ARE
THE MOST DANGEROUS”
Armando Iannucci, the creator of Veep, on satire in the time
of Trump and his new film, The Death of Stalin
BY JULIA IOFFE
T
HE S C OT TISH-BORN television
and film director Armando Iannucci is
best known in the U.K. for the acclaimed
BBC series The Thick of It, a farce set in
the upper echelons of British govern-
ment. Its success inspired his HBO series,
Veep, which uses a similar approach—
foulmouthed, cringe- inducing, relent-
lessly funny—to skewer Washington. For
his new film, The Death of Stalin, Iannucci
turns his attention to the Kremlin, satiriz-
ing the political struggle that followed
Joseph Stalin’s demise. The movie opens
in the United States this month, 65 years
after the dictator died.
This interview has been shortened and
edited for clarity.
JULIA IOFFE: How did you decide to
make a movie about the death of Stalin?
ARMANDO IANNUCCI: I was thinking of
a fictional movie about a contemporary
dictator, fantasizing about what might
happen next in today’s world. But then
this French company called Quad came
with this graphic novel, The Death of Stalin,
18 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
D I S PAT C H E S
which was quite popular in France, based
on true incidents. And they said, “We want
to make this film, and we think it’d be right
for you—are you interested?” I read the
book and I instantly thought, Well, this is
it! Why bother with fiction when this true
story is bizarre and funny and scary at the
same time? I waited until I’d finished Veep
and then started making it. We shot it pre-
Trump, but when I started showing it to
people, they seemed to think it was some
commentary on contemporary events.
There’s a lot in it about new narra-
tives and old narratives, which seems to
chime with “fake news” and all that
busi ness. Stalin called
anyone who disagreed
with him an enemy of the
people. Trump calls them
unpatriotic and false. With
people like Berlusconi
and indeed Putin, and
Erdoğan in Turkey—these
“strongmen,” as it were—
it feels a little bit like
the 1930s again. Things
are being said now that
you wouldn’t have tolerated 10 years ago.
JI: For example?
AI: Well, Trump’s instinct is to call for
jailing of opponents. If Saturday Night
Live does an impression of him, he starts
calling for NBC’s license to be looked
into. For someone who is head of a party
that’s all about government backing off,
he’s very much for telling people what
to think, what to watch, who shouldn’t
be speaking out—he’s very authoritar-
ian. The rule of law is his law, which I find
quite menacing.
JI: So what role does satire play in an
environment like this?
AI: I have always said that if you’re
doing political comedy, don’t expect it to
change people’s opinion or how they vote.
To do that, you have to become a journal-
ist or an activist or a politician.
JI: But as a maker of satire, do you feel
more responsibility now?
AI: I’ve always been drawn toward film-
makers that take ambitious state-of-the-
nation approaches. Before I made The
Death of Stalin, I went back and I viewed
Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator—a
satire of Hitler made in 1941, with hilari-
ous scenes but also scenes about the Jew-
ish ghetto. There is a tradition.
JI: Do you think Veep has aged? Does it
feel too tame now?
AI: I’m relieved I stopped before Trump—
I’d find it very difficult to do fiction set in
the world of government while what’s
happening in reality is far more absurd.
JI: In the past year, have there been
moments in the political world that
if you’d seen them in the writers’
room, you would have said, “That’s
too overwritten”?
AI: The speech that Theresa May made to
her conference in October, where she had
“It feels a little bit like
the 1930s again. Things
are being said now that
you wouldn’t have
tolerated 10 years ago.”
a slogan behind her that said something
like MAKING BRITAIN STRONGER, and
the letters fell off. I would have dismissed
that as very much a first-draft idea: “That
wouldn’t happen, go come up with some-
thing else!”
JI: What about stateside?
AI: The thing I found most chilling was
Trump’s Cabinet meeting where he got
the cameras in and went around making
everyone say how good he was. That self-
absorption was very much a Mussolini
characteristic. Or the judicial nominee
Armando Iannucci,
photographed in London
on January 5, 2018
who hadn’t attended any kind of trial. If
we had proposed that in an episode, I
would have thought, No, surely they would
have researched that person!
JI: For The Death of Stalin, did you
rely on the French book, or did you do
other research?
AI: We went out to Moscow and had a
look at the places—I wanted to re-create
them as much as possible. Reassuringly,
when Russians see the film, they say,
“Where in Moscow did you film that?”
Photograph by NICK BALLON
And I say, “We filmed it in London.” We
went through a lot of trouble to re-create
the setting so it didn’t look like a glorified
Hollywood version of the time. Stalin’s
dacha is big, but it’s very empty. He wasn’t
into gold bathrooms and ornaments and
such. He was very, very functional. Power
is what he was interested in.
A lot of the events in there are true—
the dinner parties that he held in the
middle of the night, making people watch
American Westerns till three in the morn-
ing, Lavrentiy Beria [the chief of Stalin’s
secret police] thinking it hilarious to put a
tomato in someone’s pocket and smash it.
Stalin did lie for a whole day in a puddle
of his own urine [after he had a stroke]
because people were too afraid to go in.
Somebody told us that people used to
go to bed wearing layers of clothes so that
if they were dragged away in the night, they
would go with lots of clothes on. We discov-
ered that Vasily, his son, really did lose the
entire air-force ice-hockey team in a plane
crash and then tried to cover it up by putting
together a new team, which was terrible.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 19
 D I S PAT C H E S • INTERVIEW

JI: You captured the intense fear
and anxiety of the time, but also
the absurdity of it. How did you put
those together?
AI: That’s what I wanted—I wanted it to be
a comedy, but I said, “I want people to feel
uneasy.” I wanted to re-create the sense
of terror—terror that you lived with for 15
or 20 years, in your stomach. And that was
about knowing there were comic scenes,
but also other scenes that weren’t funny,
and trying to balance between the two so
that the comedy didn’t dilute the tragedy
and the tragedy didn’t snuff out the com-
edy. Comedy kind of adds to unease: If
you’re setting up a joke, there’s that sense
of heightened anticipation for a payoff.
Which is the same kind of unease as Who’s
going to come knocking on the door next?
JI: The Death of Stalin is in some ways a
very British comedy—I felt like all that
was missing was John Cleese.
AI: Well, we got Michael Palin. There’s an
element of farce, which is a British thing.
But Russian humor involves the little guy
getting caught up in the machinery of the
province or the inspector—which slightly
chimes with British comedy. It’s all about
the little person in the big apparatus.
JI: You haven’t said much about Putin.
AI: He’s one of the strongmen that I
was thinking of. Stalin is making a bit
of a comeback in Russia. There’s a huge
statue to Czar Nicholas II up in Moscow.
There’s an enormous statue to Peter the
Great. The idea is single, strong men—
that’s what Putin’s trying to reinforce.
Although, interestingly, I heard that when
they showed the film to the Russian press
a few days ago, the press cheered and
applauded when Stalin dies.
JI: The Russian director Kirill Serebren-
nikov, who’s under house arrest, just
had a show about Rudolf Nureyev go
up at the Bolshoi, with all the Russian
elite in attendance. They gave a stand-
ing ovation. What do you make of that?
AI: The Russian people give a high status to
the arts, don’t they? In the U.K., politicians
will be photographed going to a football
match or possibly a film, but they wouldn’t
be photographed going to an opera or a bal-
let or even a play. The idea of the intellec-
tual in Britain is a strange one; it’s seen as a
pejorative. “Too clever for your own good,”
“smart aleck,” that sort of thing. I admire
how in Europe and eastern Europe, parents
want children to aspire to the intelligentsia.
JI: But the arts are a much more dan-
gerous profession in Russia. In Stalin’s
gulags you had ballets put on and whole
symphonies, because of all the artists
there. Why has the Russian state—be
it czarist or Stalinist or Putinist—seen
artists as so threatening?
AI: One thing that was very popular in
Stalin’s time was “Stalin jokes”—jokes
about Stalin, jokes about Beria. You
could be killed if you were found in pos-
session of one of these. And yet people
felt the need to come up with them. It’s

• VERY SHORT BOOK EXCERPT

Moon Shot
• Adapted from The Planets: I N T H I S P H O T O G R A P H , taken by the Cassini spacecraft in June 2006, the brilliant
Photographs From silhouette of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is visually bisected by Saturn’s elongated rings.
the Archives of NASA , The moon Enceladus transits the scene at the bottom right. Enceladus was 2.4 million miles
by Nirmala Nataraj, with away from Cassini, and Titan was 3.3 million miles away. Astrobiologists believe that both
a preface by Bill Nye, moons may be habitable with the right supplies. Surviving on Titan would require only an
published by Chronicle oxygen mask and warm clothing, as well as the willingness to live through days that are
equivalent to 16 Earth days. In contrast, the icy, geyser-ridden moon Enceladus is so cold
NASA

Books in November 2017

that the warmest areas, at the south pole, reach only minus 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

20 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
 owners lashed out. Far
from signaling remorse,
one group of research-
ers wrote in a 2012 paper,
almost like they’re saying, “You can lock
the guilty look is likely a
me up, you can take my family away, but
submissive response that
if I can still make fun of you, you haven’t
has proved advantageous
changed my mind.” because it reduces conflict
I think that’s why politicians worry between dog and human.
about the arts—they can’t predict what art History reveals the
does to people, and therefore they can’t most-extreme conse-
control the effect it’s going to have. Always quences of that conflict.
beware of politicians who can’t take a joke. The Avesta, an ancient
Zoroastrian religious text,
JI: There was a satirical puppet show deemed dogs capable
on Russian TV called Kukly—“Puppets.” of “willful” offenses and
One of Putin’s first moves as president • ANIMAL KINGDOM ordered that transgressors
was to shut down the entire channel, be punished with mutila-
because he hated how he was portrayed.
AI: That’s it. The humorless politicians
Your Dog Feels No Shame tion. In medieval Europe,
misbehaving mutts were
are the most dangerous ones, I think. The myth of canine guilt routinely tried in court
on criminal charges such
BY WILLIAM BRENNAN
JI: If you were to make a film satiriz- as assault and murder;
ing the Trump era, what would you try punishments ranged from
to capture? jail to death.
AI: His frustration. The way he tries to By comparison, it’s easy

I 
dictate the laws of politics and some- N 2011, a Maryland
times the laws of physics. I think we’ll dog owner named
find, as things progress, that he has fewer Mali Vujanic uploaded
and fewer people around him—at some a video to YouTube
stage he will fire his daughter, and his confidently titled “Guilty!”
son-in-law. He will keep firing people He’d come home to find
until there’s no one left. And then the key his two retrievers near an
moment will come when he turns on the empty bag of cat treats.
electorate. Once he starts bad-mouthing The first dog, a golden
the people, he’ll be at his most dangerous. retriever, lounged calmly,
her conscience seemingly
JI: Does it end with Trump firing
clean. But the second dog,
a yellow Labrador named
himself?
Denver, sat quaking in a
AI: I think he’d rather fire America first.
corner, her eyes down-
He’d go to one of his golf courses, build
cast, making what Vujanic
a wall around it, call that America, and
called “her signature ‘I
everywhere else doesn’t get funding.
done it’ face.” Vujanic
Remember Sarah Palin—when she
gasped at the apparent
was campaigning, she went to the middle
admission of guilt: “You
states, saying, “I like to be here in what
did this!” Denver beat
I call ‘Real America.’ ” Anywhere the
her tail nervously and
Democrats are is not Real America. It’s grimaced. “You know
that—defining your opponent as false. the routine. In the ken-
nel.” Obediently, the dog
JI: That’s what the Bolsheviks did— impounded herself.
people they didn’t like were “former The video quickly gar-
people.” You captured that very well in nered a flood of comments.
the ending credits, where you scratched Since then, “dog shaming”
people out, the way the Soviets did. has become popular on
AI: I had been toying with that for a while; Twitter and Instagram, as
it seemed right at the end. owners around the world
post shots of their trem-
JI: Is there anything else you want to say bling pets beside notes
to our readers? in which the dogs seem
AI: God help us all! to cop to bad behav-
ior. “0 days since the last
Julia Ioffe is a staff writer at The Atlantic. toilet paper massacre,” a
Weimaraner confesses;
“I ate an extra large pep-
peroni pizza,” admits a
chocolate Lab. Human
enthusiasm for guilty dogs
seems boundless: A 2013
collection of dog-shaming
photos landed on the New
York Times best-seller list;
Denver’s video has been
viewed more than 50 mil-
lion times.
But according to
Alexandra Horowitz, a dog-
cognition expert at
Barnard College, what we
perceive as a dog’s guilty
look is no sign of guilt at all.
In a 2009 study, she had
owners forbid their dogs
to eat a tempting treat,
then asked the owners
to leave the room. While
each owner was gone, she
either removed the treat
or fed it to the dog. When
the owners returned, they
were told—regardless of
the truth—that their dog
either had or had not
eaten it. If owners thought
their dogs had indulged,
reprimands followed, and
guilty looks abounded. Yet
dogs who hadn’t eaten the
treat were more likely to
appear guilty than dogs
who had—so long as their
to see harsh words and
corny tweets as benign
responses to bad behavior.
But some experts worry
that our assumptions
of canine guilt may be
self-fulfilling. Julie Hecht,
a doctoral student who
studies animal behavior at
the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York,
cites research showing
that the more dogs are
punished, the more they
tend to act in ways that
drive their owners mad.
Scolding, Hecht believes,
may confuse dogs,
resulting in “an anxious
cycle of destruction and
appeasement” that could
ultimately “harm the dog–
human bond.”
To keep that bond
strong, Horowitz suggests
that dog owners “take
away the temptation”: Put
a lid on the trash can, keep
your shoes in the closet,
hide the kitty snacks.
And if you must blame
someone when your dog
misbehaves, look inward.
As one commenter put
it after watching Denver
shake in submission, “Let’s
face it, somebody left the
treats out.”

Illustration by ESTHER AARTS T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 21

 D I S PAT C H E S

The Atlantic told us this arrangement

would be temporary while our real office
was renovated. As of this writing, we’re
still here. If WeWork had its way, we’d
stay forever, along with much of the 21st-
century workforce.
WeWork is the world’s leading
co- working company and the sixth-
most-valuable start-up, according to
VentureSource. Last year it was valued at
$20 billion, a staggering sum for a com-
pany renting out short-term office space,
mostly to small businesses and freelancers.
But like Uber and Airbnb, WeWork posi-
tions itself grandly, as a disruptive revolu-
tionary. It promises to “humanize” work,
making the office a more creative place,
with the right lighting, the right snacks,
and, crucially, the right people.
WeWork would say it’s well on its way
to transforming white-collar labor: It seats
175,000 “members” in 207 locations
across 20 countries, with plans to double
in size this year. Its leaders describe it not
as a real-estate venture but as a “commu-
nity company.”
Whether that’s a $20 billion business,
however, is a matter of contention. Com-
panies specializing in shared office space
have come before. As The Wall Street
Journal noted this fall, the office-leasing
company IWG manages five times the
square footage but has about one-eighth
the market value. Even Adam Neumann,
a co-founder of WeWork and its CEO,
• BUSINESS
admits that his company is overvalued, if
you’re looking merely at desks leased or

BUILDING A BETTER OFFICE rents collected. “No one is investing in a

co-working company worth $20 billion.
That doesn’t exist,” he told Forbes in 2017.
WeWork thinks it’s optimized the workplace “Our valuation and size today are much
for creativity and productivity. Has it? more based on our energy and spirituality
than it is on a multiple of revenue.”
BY L AU R A B L I S S
That’s a striking statement. Shuffle-
board tables and free IPAs, however
enticing, surely can’t justify the recent
$4.4 billion round of venture capital pro-
pelling the company’s growth. But these
cramped quarters may hold more than
meets the eye. WeWork’s real value might
indeed be in the elbow-to-elbow “energy”
Neumann describes—just not for the
N MARCH 2017, the New York City–based editors and writers of The Atlantic community you might imagine.

I
moved to a WeWork office in Brooklyn. I remember our first morning vividly:
It was like entering the Millennial id. Craft beer and cucumber water poured H E O F F I C E S U B L E T is not an
from kitchen taps. Laptoppers in jeans and toques clacked along to MGMT in
the wood-paneled common area. A WeWork “community manager” showed
T innovation of the digital age. But
the idea of a co-working space—a collec-
us to a glass-walled office so small that my colleagues and I could clasp hands tion of like-minded renters committed to
while seated. We sat. Had we arrived in the future of work? forming a community—is a more recent

22 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
I l lu s t rat io n by G E O F F ROY DE C R É CY
There’s a reason people choose
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 D I S PAT C H E S
development. Its history might begin
with the European hacker spaces of the
1990s, where independent programmers
swapped coding skills in dark basements
with an air of techno-anarchism. Ameri-
cans caught on a few years later. The first
true co-working space, so-called, emerged
in 2005, renting square footage from a
feminist collective in San Francisco’s Mis-
sion District. This eventually became the
Hat Factory, an industrial loft in the Dog-
patch neighborhood, which described it-
self as a “community office space for geeks
and media hackers.” It was co-founded by
the guy who invented the hashtag.
The first wave of co-working served
a relatively small, scrappy set of inde-
pendent contractors and do- gooders.
The second wave has responded to an
economy in which independent work has
become more default than choice. The
2008 financial crash forced employers
to cut hours and jobs, and the emerging
gig economy swelled the ranks of the
self-employed. Thus WeWork’s eclectic
mix of freelance writers, labor organizers,
financial consultants, and app developers
hustling for investors.
Adam Neumann was himself a strug-
gling entrepreneur (he owned a company
that sold baby clothes) in recession-era
New York when he and a couple of friends
rented out space in a Brooklyn building to
make some additional income. Demand
proved stronger than expected. In 2010,
Neumann, who was raised in part on a
kibbutz in Israel, and Miguel McKelvey,
who grew up with five mothers in an Ore-
gon collective and studied architecture in
college, leased a few thousand square feet
in SoHo and opened the first WeWork: a
shared space where enterprising cre-
atives could work and play.
From the start, WeWork offered a
somewhat uneasy combination of its
founders’ ambitions and co-working’s
communal roots. Neumann describes
WeWork as a “capitalist kibbutz.” Mem-
bers are encouraged to mingle, network,
and leverage one another’s talents, fre-
quently under the auspices of a corporate
sponsor: Witness taco pop-ups promoting
internet phone service; talk-therapy cir-
cles sponsored by a women’s activewear
brand; cocktails served up by the payroll-
software giant ADP. Billed as commu-
nity-building programming, the events
can feel more like exercises in targeted
advertising, with members as the marks.
24 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
• BUSINESS
Genuine connections do occur—some- Investors have seen this movie before.
times at happy hours and often through IWG, itself a network of flexible office
WeWork’s online member network, where spaces, expanded rapidly in the 1990s
people share marketing tips, sell furniture, (it was known as Regus at the time) on a
organize cryptocurrency seminars. (The wave of high-hope investment, only to
variety of requests never ceases to amaze. seek bankruptcy protection after the dot-
Quickly fulfilled: “Any WeWork salted com bust. What distinguishes the younger
cured meat companies?” Apparently un- player, really, besides charismatic leader-
fulfilled: “Can anyone refer me to a good ship and lofty rhetoric? “WeWork is
venture capitalist in the NYC area?”) nothing but Regus with a paint job,” one
Despite the company’s occasional industry veteran told The Wall Street Jour-
excesses, WeWork offices are more pleas- nal. Many investors have placed their bets
ant than many a soulless cubicle farm, ac- because they’re dazzled by Neumann,
cording to people I spoke with at locations Konrad Putzier, a real-estate reporter at
in New York; Washington, D.C.; Boston; The Real Deal, told me.
and Los Angeles. “People are relaxed. No
one’s watching the clock,” says Liz Granda, E W O R K M AY B E positioning
who works for Brooklyn Paws, a concierge
service for pet owners, in a WeWork under
W itself more strategically than some
of its detractors allow. More and more of
the Manhattan Bridge. The relentlessly the people inside the glass-walled grids
cheerful vibe encourages members to be are not entrepreneurs or gig workers.
social, or at least forces them to be nice. They’re employees of Facebook, Amazon,
Nicole Shore, the principal of Zero to Sixty General Electric, IBM, Bank of America,
Communications, a boutique PR firm, has and hundreds of other large corporations.
rented desks in locations around the coun- Blue-chip companies are the fastest-
try. She told me she got to know her go-to growing segment of WeWork’s client base.
graphic designer at a WeWork Christmas Their employees now represent more
party. At its best, with its abundant conve- than 25 percent of WeWork members.
niences and event-directing community At WeWork, companies with more
managers, WeWork can feel like an all- than 1,000 employees globally are known
inclusive cruise. as “enterprise” members. Veresh Sita, an
Cruises, of course, aren’t for every- executive who oversees products for this
one. Many observers in the real-estate group, told me that many enterprise mem-
industry say WeWork is wildly overvalued, bers first looked to WeWork for temporary
and its aggressive expansion plans un- overflow space or as an outpost in a new
realistic. Although it
has reportedly begun
raising money for a
real-estate-investment
fund, the company “Our concept is ‘Come for
owns few physical a month, stay for life,’ ”
assets. Its practice one WeWork executive said.
has been to sign long-
term leases en masse,
striking multiproperty
agreements to get the
best deals with landlords, then renting market. Now WeWork is actively courting
spaces at a premium. (Many members told them. “Our concept is ‘Come for a month,
me that, per square foot, WeWork is con- stay for life,’ ” Sita said.
siderably pricier than a traditional rental, The benefit that big companies offer
but that they’re willing to pay extra for the WeWork seems clear: Salesforce, HSBC,
turnkey flexibility and sense of commu- and Facebook are presumably more reli-
nity.) It’s a classic lease-arbitrage model, able subtenants than a fluctuating mix
which business-school professors will tell of long-shot start-ups and quixotic non-
you carries significant risk: Whenever the profits. What do corporations get in the
next economic downturn hits, demand for deal? WeWork estimates that enterprise
office space may retreat, leaving WeWork members save 25 to 50 percent in operat-
with a lot of empty desks and multiyear ing expenses, compared with traditional
leases to pay. office build-outs. But members told me
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 D I S PAT C H E S
it’s less the cost, and more the conve-
nience and cool factor, that draws them
in. Big, buttoned-up companies aren’t
always good at providing the kinds of
perks and services many workers have
come to expect. “We’ve become a tal-
ent feeder for the rest of the company,”
says Adam L’Italien, the vice president of
global consumer markets innovation at
Liberty Mutual Insurance, which leases
space at a Boston WeWork. “We’re able
to show people we do things that are less
obvious when you think about Liberty
and insurance products.”
WeWork offers more than just a
chiller vibe. In a 2016 trial run, Microsoft
gave 300 salespeople in three U.S. cities
access to WeWork spaces as an alterna-
tive to their existing offices in those cities.
After a few months, more than 80 percent
of the workers reported that the access
made them more productive throughout
their day.
WeWork is selling enterprise members
on the idea that it can make their workers
more productive still. Sita told me that We-
Work plans to sprinkle offices with data-
harvesting sensors and facial-recognition
software as part of its “Powered by We”
suite of services. The program will allow
WeWork to monitor how employees use
its spaces: how they adjust their desks,
where in the office they spend their time,
and maybe even how engaged they are in
meetings. These data—which, according
to WeWork, would never be used to track
the movements of individual employees—
could allow companies to lease exactly
the right amount of space, and exactly the
right kind of space, too. Phil Kirschner, the
director of workplace strategy, describes
a future in which someone could check
into any WeWork in the world and sit at
a desk that automatically adjusted to the
right height.
Until that creepy, if ergonomically
correct, future comes to pass, the ben-
efits that WeWork confers on enterprise
members may come from a tried-and-
true real-estate verity: It’s all about loca-
tion. Microsoft employees noted that
WeWork’s scatter plot of primo sites
gave them more-convenient access to
clients. Other enterprise members have
benefited from new neighbors within
WeWork’s walls. The accounting giant
KPMG has a 50-desk space in a Man-
hattan WeWork. Leaders say one of the
greatest advantages has been access to
26 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
• BUSINESS
the entrepreneurial talent of WeWork • LEXICON
members. David Pessah, the director
HOW TO
of KPMG’s Innovation Labs, previously
worked at a Snapchat-esque start-up in
the same WeWork. Repeated run-ins and
informal chats with his now-boss led to
a job offer. “I’m not sure if I would have
applied to KPMG, or been interested in
TALK TRUMP
the same capacity, if not for the WeWork A concise guide
environment,” Pessah told me. “It was an to speaking the
easy transition.” president’s dialect
Sita said WeWork will soon begin offer-
ing some enterprise members the ability BY KURT ANDERSEN
to manipulate, to an extent, who works in
a given location. He offered an example:
Say a large pharmaceutical brand wants to S S O O N A S Donald
work with biomedical start-ups. WeWork
would seek out congenial neighbors by
A Trump announced his pres-
idential candidacy, people noted
tapping willing members or interested a few of his linguistic quirks,
recruits. “Every start-up wants to be such as the extended, super-
an enterprise, and every enterprise a vowel pronunciation of huge and
start-up,” Sita said. “We think we have a the references to himself in the
responsibility to curate some relationship third person. But beyond those,
between these two groups.” the version of English he speaks
The upshot of such an arrangement is amounts to its own patois, with
not just the stuff of WeWork’s corporate a special vocabulary and syntax
talking points. Prominent 20th- century and psychological substrate. A
urban theorists like Jane Jacobs and the year ago Alec Baldwin and I de-
economist Robert Lucas argued that cided to write a parody memoir,
dense packs of talented workers boost You Can’t Spell America Without
local economies and innovative thinking; Me: The Really Tremendous Inside
recent data-backed research supports the Story of My Fantastic First Year as
theory. In a way, WeWork is taking the President, entirely in that dialect.
“creative clustering” already happening in To prepare, I spent weeks study-
cosmopolitan centers and concentrating ing transcripts of his interviews
it even further, in a few thousand square and press conferences and depo-
feet of class-A office space. sitions, as well as thousands of
What does that mean for the average his tweets, to assemble a lexicon
co-worker? WeWork will try to “balance” I could consult as we wrote. This
the mix of members by location, Sita said. is an abridged version of that
He stressed that start-ups can benefit from Trump style guide.
proximity to blue chips, whether through
knowledge-sharing, contracting, or even
acquisition. That makes sense, at least
in some cases. But a future where co-
working is made entirely of big fish and
little fish content to swim in one transac-
tional bowl is a future that seems to leave
out a lot of other fish: the vegan-meal-kit
makers, the community bail fund, and
hey, the journalists. We, too, are working
here. What would Big Business want with
us? And what would we want with Big Busi-
ness? The day may soon come when we’re
forced to repair to our dark basements—
because the economy cools off, or because
WeWork has cooled on us.
Laura Bliss is a staff writer at CityLab.
 ADJECTIVES SPECIAL VAGUE SOURCE
PHRASES ATTRIBUTION
N E G AT I V E POSITIVE EXTREME GENERAL

boring amazing big • A lot of people are saying …

believe me
complete and beautiful huge • People think it’s going to happen.
total best major by the way • Everybody’s talking about it.
crooked big league many • They are saying …
disgusting brilliant massive doesn’t have • Everyone is now saying …
dishonest elegant numerous a clue
dopey fabulous staggering PERSONAL
dumb fantastic substantial getting away
with murder • That’s just what I had heard.
goofy fine tough
• I’ve heard that …
horrible good vast
hit a home run • What I’ve heard …
interesting* great
• I’ve been hearing …
not good happy Usage note: hit me harder • A lot of people tell me …
obsolete honest These may be
• “I’ve seen this, and I’ve sort of
out of control incredible spoken once, I have
witnessed it—in fact, in two cases
overrated nice twice (“major, many, many
I have actually witnessed it.”
pathetic outstanding major”), or friends
ridiculous phenomenal three times
rude powerful (“many, many, I must tell you NONSTANDARD
sad sophisticated many”). INCLUSION OF
I won THE DEFINITE ARTICLE
scary special
stupid strong I’m a believer in 
terrible successful • the African Americans
unfair top I’m doing very • the blacks
weak tremendous well with • the cyber
worst unbelievable • the Latinos
in all fairness • the women
*as a synonym
in the
for suspicious ADVERBS
whole world

laughing at us absolutely incredibly

QUICK REPETITION OF badly totally
WORDS AND PHRASES likes of which basically truly
certainly unbelievably
• “He’s a low-energy person, let’s face it. We don’t need never seen extremely very
low energy. We need lots of energy.” before, ever frankly viciously
greatly way
not gonna
• “I mean, we defend everybody. We defend everybody. highly
happen
No matter who it is, we defend everybody. We’re de-
fending the world.” … okay? NEGATIVE NOUNS
• “The children are aspiring to grow up to be terrorists. … right? candy* lowlife
They are taught to grow up to be terrorists … chaos moron
RICK WILKING; CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS

They have to stop the teaching of children to aspire that I can choker phonies
to grow up as terrorists.” tell you clown problem
disaster terror
they don’t
• “You cannot just have a standard. You cannot just dope weakness
respect us
say that we have a blanket standard all over the dummy
world … you can’t have a blanket standard. You may to be perfectly fool *as a synonym for
say … it sounds nice to say, ‘I have a blanket stan- honest hatred cheap or widely
dard; here’s what it is’ … But you know … it won’t be a idiocy distributed
blanket standard.” very much incompetence commodities,
involved joke such as illegal
• “We were the big bully, but we were not smartly led. lightweight drugs and leaked
And we were the big bully who was the big stupid bully.” zippo loser intelligence

T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 27
 D I S PAT C H E S

the jungle of bacteria that line the hu-

man intestines. We have at least as many
of these alien cells inside our bodies as we
• SKETCH
have cells that carry our DNA—Larry and
some other researchers believe they may

THE WORLD’S MOST actually outnumber our DNA-carrying

cells by a factor of 10 to 1.

BODY-CONSCIOUS MAN It is useful to adopt Larry’s way of

For years, Larry Smarr has used a supercomputer
to monitor his health and peer at his organs. Recently,
he used his knowledge to help direct his own surgery.
BY MARK BOWDEN
computer engineering. He founded,
and heads, the California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information
Technology, or Calit2, which is exploring
advanced digital technologies to rethink
the way medicine is practiced.
Larry is using his own body, and his on- speed made all that possible. Working
going struggle with Crohn’s, as an experi-
thinking about the body as a torus, a
donut-shaped structure with a tunnel
that runs through its center: our gastro-
intestinal tract. Food and drink are for-
eign objects we send through this tunnel
from mouth to anus, with various way
stations in between: esophagus, stom-
ach, small intestine, large intestine, and
so on. As the food or liquid progresses,
nutrients are extracted and waste is pro-
pelled downward. Much of this work is
performed for us by bacteria, a whole
ecosystem of microorganisms that were
uncountable, unclassified, and there-
fore essentially unexplored before the
declining cost of gene sequencing and
the exponential increase in computing
with UCSD’s Center for Microbiome

S
ONIA RAMAMOORTHY
has plenty of smart patients. A surgeon
at the University of California at San
Diego, she counts among her patients
members of that school’s faculty, many
of whom arrive at her clinic remarkably
well informed.
“They’ve been to the internet, and
they’ll come in with 50 questions,” she says.
But nothing prepared her for Larry
Smarr. During her consultation with him
about an intestinal affliction in Octo-
ber 2016, he interrupted her to ask, “Do
you have a quick minute? I have a Power-
Point presentation.”
I wrote about Larry in this magazine
five and a half years ago, documenting
his remarkable efforts with a super-
computer at UCSD to study his own body
in unprecedented detail—efforts that
had led to his self-diagnosis of Crohn’s
disease, long before definitive symptoms
had manifested. Although Larry’s aca-
demic background is in astrophysics and
astronomy, he has evolved into one of
the world’s foremost experts in applied
ment. He keeps precise measures of his Innovation, Larry has his biweekly stool
body’s input (what he eats and drinks) and samples genetically sequenced, and then
output (the energy he burns and what he transfers that information into a super-
excretes—and yes, that is precisely what computer, where it is correlated with
it sounds like). He undergoes periodic changes in his diet, weight, medications,
MRIs, has his blood and stool analyzed fre- and symptoms.
quently, submits to annual colonoscopies, This regimen is more than any nor-
and has had his DNA sequenced. Among mal person could, or would, undertake,
the things Calit2 does with all these data isbut Larry believes that portable sensors
create a stunning, reg-
ularly updated three-
dimensional image
of his insides, which
he calls “Transparent “You’re the doctor, not me,”
Larry.” His colleague Larry told her, pointing to a
Jürgen Schulze projects precise spot, “but I would
it inside “The Cave,” a
virtual- reality room
start cutting here.”
that literally places the
viewer inside the pic-
ture. Larry can not only
chart the changes taking place inside his and tracking software will soon make
body; he can actually see them. such monitoring simple enough that it
As a result, he arguably knows more will become commonplace. If and when
about his own inner workings than any- millions of people ultimately pool their
one else ever has. His goal, as he puts it, personal data on the internet, they will
is for each of us to become “the CEO of establish the first comprehensive, fact-
our own body.” based, real-time template for the human
In the years since I first met Larry, he body. This will enable physicians to de-
and Calit2 have produced a steady stream fine disease not as a theoretical grouping
of groundbreaking studies, most notably of symptoms but as a precise physical
work charting the body’s microbiome, anomaly in a specific patient. Treatment

28 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
of his own disease has given Larry an
opportunity to demonstrate exactly how
this might work.
R O H N’S , A N I N F L A M M AT O RY
C bowel disease, was an unpleasant
discovery during what began as an ef-
fort to simply lose weight. With the
help of Transparent Larry, he discov-
ered the affliction well before clinical
medicine could have diagnosed it. But
when I met him, in 2012, the effects were
clear: abdominal bloating, rectal bleed-
ing, intestinal discomfort, and other
problems. Looking at 3-D images of his
intestines, Larry could see a severely
inflamed portion of his colon, which was
the likely cause of his increasing distress,
and which, he suspected, at some point
would have to be removed. In the years
since, the disease—which is not fatal, but
can be quite painful—has progressed.
Three and a half years ago, when he
underwent an unrelated hernia surgery,
Larry asked that a colorectal surgeon
take, in effect, a “flyover” look at his
colon. At his request, Ramamoorthy, the
chief of the colorectal-surgery division at
Illustration by JOHN CUNEO
UC San Diego Health, was called in, and
after examining Larry’s colon closely, she
noted in his records that the afflicted seg-
ment looked inflamed, but that the condi-
tion was not serious.
It looked and felt serious to Larry,
however. In time, his symptoms became
indisputable. He was in his family’s hot
tub in March 2016 when his son noted
that his stomach looked very swollen. Al-
ready, the volume of stool he was produc-
ing had been getting smaller and smaller.
A full-body CT scan and a CT virtual
colonoscopy showed that the walls of
the affected six-to-nine-inch stretch of
colon were dramatically inflamed. In
essence, the contents of his intestines
were being forced through an opening
that had shrunk from the width of a fire
hose to that of a soda straw. His colon
was locked in a self-reinforcing cycle:
The distress worsened the inflammation,
which further narrowed the tube. Harvey
Eisenberg, the doctor who founded the
imaging center that performed Larry’s
scans, saw the changes and told him
in the summer of 2016, “This is get-
ting pretty bad. You know, I’m not your
doctor, but if I were … It’s time to get this
out. It can’t do anything but harm.”
Larry made an appointment with his
primary doctor, Bill Sandborn, an inter-
nationally known gastroenterologist, not
to ask him what should be done, but to tell
him what should be done: “I have come
to the conclusion that my future health
depends on removing six to nine inches
of my sigmoid colon,” Larry wrote in a
pre-appointment email. “This is NOT an
urgent issue, but I would like to get the
process beginning.”
Larry made a full presentation to
Sandborn in early September, complete
with a 3-D-printed plastic model of his
colon whose design was based on an
abdominal MRI. Sandborn concurred
with Larry’s diagnosis and referred him
back to Ramamoorthy.
Surgery is a conservative profession.
Regularly skating on the edge of life and
death demands a certain amount of ego;
experience—both good and bad—has a
way of hardening convictions about the
right way to proceed. “We’re stubborn,”
Ramamoorthy told me. “Surgery is a time
for people to focus, for people to be seri-
ous.” Experimenting with fancy
new technology is not always a sur-
geon’s top priority.
Ramamoorthy is from a family
of engineers, however, so she was
intrigued. She knew that Larry was
one of the stars at UCSD, so she
was more willing than she might
otherwise have been to work with
a patient who not only thought he
knew best but who wanted, in ef-
fect, to hijack her operating room.
“I mean, he’s obviously a genius,”
she said. “Why would I not look at
what he was interested in?”
“She was a dream doctor for
me,” Larry told me. “She knows
that more information is going to
make her a better surgeon, with a
better outcome for the patient.”
Larry told Ramamoorthy that
he felt like he was going to ex-
plode. His belly was severely dis-
tended. The rectal bleeding had
worsened, and the volume of his
stool was still in decline. Then
came the PowerPoint. Among the
data Larry presented were details
about his C-reactive-protein lev-
els, which measure inflammation,
and which had multiplied nearly
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 29
 D I S PAT C H E S

sixfold in the previous month. Last, he
invited Ramamoorthy across campus to
his Calit2 building, where he brought her
into the Cave.
Like everyone who sees the virtual-
reality room, Ramamoorthy was at first
amazed. Then she was struck by how
useful the images were. Inside our bel-
lies, the intestines are a jumble of coiled
tissue, resting among other organs and
vital blood vessels. The twists and turns
are not the same in everyone, so when a
surgeon peers in, she encounters a layout
that can differ from one person to the
next and that, considering the coils are
folded into such a small space, can be
hard to sort out. In the operating room,
the patient is placed on a reclining board
with his head down, so that gravity eases
compaction and makes the work a little
easier. The first step in the procedure, un-
der normal circumstances, is to insert a
scope into the belly for a look around.
“We see kind of the lay of the land,
and get a sense of what we have to do,”
Ramamoorthy explained. She performs
surgery with a state-of-the-art robot
called the da Vinci Xi, a four-armed de-
vice that nearly fills the operating room.
At the end of each arm is a narrow tube
that can be inserted into the patient’s
folds pressed against his bladder—both
areas of surgical risk. “You’re the doctor,
not me,” Larry told her, pointing to a pre-
cise spot, “but I would start cutting here.”
Pointing to another spot, he added, “And
cutting here makes a good deal of sense.”
“That’s about right,” she said.
She would later calculate that this vir-
tual inspection “probably saved us about
an hour’s worth of time during surgery.”
That’s a valuable advantage, she ex-
plained, because the longer a patient is
under anesthesia, the more likely he is to
suffer postoperative complications.
When it came time for Ramamoorthy
to review the necessary consent forms
• CRIMINAL TENDENCIES
The Banana Trick
And other dark arts of self-checkout theft
BY RENE CHUN
with Larry, both understood the surgi-
cal plan exactly, where the danger points
were, and when decisions might have to
be made in the moment—not in a generic
sense, as with most surgeries, but with
great specificity. Larry was functioning,
in a concrete sense, as his body’s CEO.
“I was really the learner and he was the
teacher,” Ramamoorthy said.
Before the surgery, Larry arranged
for Intuitive Surgical, which makes the
da Vinci, to work with Jürgen Schulze,
his colleague, to feed his 3-D images
directly into the robot. This would enable
Ramamoorthy to see 3-D virtual images
in her scope alongside the real images of
After auditing 1 million
self-checkout transac-
tions over the course of a
year, totaling $21 million
in sales, they found that
nearly $850,000 worth
of goods left the store
without being scanned
and paid for.
The Leicester
researchers concluded
that the ease of theft is

B
body; each insertion point is called a port. ENEATH THE
A small camera or the robot’s delicate fin- bland veneer of
gers can be threaded through the tubes supermarket auto-
at these ports. Placement of the ports is mation lurks an ugly
truth: There’s a lot of
crucial, because the camera and fingers
shoplifting going on in
that extend from them into the patient’s
the self-scanning check-
viscera must be set precisely in the area
out lane. But don’t call
where Ramamoorthy intends to cut.
it shoplifting. The guys
When using the da Vinci, Rama-
in loss prevention prefer
moorthy does not peer directly into the pa-
“external shrinkage.”
tient’s body, but instead views it through a
Self-checkout theft
scope at the da Vinci’s workstation, which
has become so wide-
has a screen to project what the robot’s spread that a whole lingo
cameras see, and hand controls with has sprung up to describe
which she can manipulate the robot’s fin- its tactics. Ringing up
gers. The first step in Larry’s procedure a T-bone ($13.99/lb)
would be to determine exactly where to with a code for a cheap
place the ports in his belly. ($0.49/lb) variety of pro-
Inside Transparent Larry, however, duce is “the banana trick.”
Ramamoorthy got a jump on the surgery If a can of Illy espresso
a week early. She could see which portion leaves the conveyor belt
of the colon would have to be removed, without being scanned,
where it was located, and how it was that’s called “the pass
shaped. All the peculiar twists and folds around.” “The switcheroo”
of Larry’s organs were displayed. She is more labor-intensive:
could see, near the upper-left end of his Peel the sticker off some-
colon, where it was attached to his spleen, thing inexpensive and
and where, in another spot, one of its place it over the bar code
of something pricey. Just
make sure both items are
about the same weight,
to avoid triggering that
pesky “unexpected item”
alert in the bagging area.
How common are
self-scanning scams?
If anonymous online
questionnaires are any
indication, very common.
When Voucher Codes Pro,
a company that offers cou-
pons to internet shoppers,
surveyed 2,634 people,
nearly 20 percent admit-
ted to having stolen at the
self-checkout in the past.
More than half of those
people said they gamed
the system because
detection by store security
was unlikely. A 2015
study of self-checkouts
with handheld scanners,
conducted by criminolo-
gists at the University of
Leicester, also found evi-
dence of widespread theft.
likely inspiring people
who might not otherwise
steal to do so. Rather than
walk into a store intend-
ing to take something, a
shopper might, at the
end of a trip, decide that
a discount is in order. As
one retail employee told
the researchers, “People
who traditionally don’t
intend to steal [might
realize that] … when I
buy 20, I can get five for
free.” The authors further
proposed that retailers
bore some blame for the
problem. In their zeal to
cut labor costs, the study
said, supermarkets could
be seen as having created
“a crime-generating envi-
ronment” that promotes
profit “above social
responsibility.”
Whether out of social
responsibility or frus-
tration with shrinkage,
some retailers, including

30 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
 • SKETCH

Larry’s colon from the da Vinci’s stereo nurses, and technicians. The university’s bladder from the right side,” she said at
high-definition camera. Days before the media-relations office had gotten wind one point.
surgery, she told Schulze that she wanted of the groundbreaking effort, so a video The virtual images were so helpful,
him to participate in the procedure. crew was present too. Schulze was there she said later, that she wishes she could
When Schulze initially demurred, citing with his laptop, manipulating the virtual have them every time she operates: “It
a discomfort with blood, Larry told him: version of Larry’s insides. Ramamoorthy, was wonderful. It was like the difference
“Man up.” after making the initial incisions and between driving around before and after
The scene in Larry’s operating room inserting the rods containing the robot’s Google Maps.”
on November 29, 2016, looked more like camera and fingers, sat in a corner at the The only overtly bloody moment came
a crowded booth at an engineering con- controls, orchestrating the procedure. “I when the portion of Larry’s colon was re-
vention than a surgical theater. Larry’s love it!” she exclaimed as they began. moved. It was hugely swollen, a mass of
supine body, completely draped in blue “This team is on!” inflamed tissue the size of a melon.
paper except for his swollen belly—tinted Explaining her moves as she worked, About four months later, presenting
orange with antibacterial swabbing—was the surgeon called out from time to time his case in a lecture to the medical staff
surrounded by a thicket of white, plastic- for Schulze to tinker with the virtual im- of UC San Diego Health’s Moores Can-
clad robotic arms and industrious doctors, age. “Maybe give me a lateral view of the cer Center, Larry quipped, “I myself had
a sort of a cameo. I played the belly in the
video, sort of a Quentin Tarantino thing.”
Larry proudly passed around a plastic
Albertsons, Big Y Super- calls for boosts amounting believes that self-check- model of his new, streamlined colon. His
market, Pavilions, and to less than $50. In 2015, outs tempt people who symptoms had abated, and he had gone
Vons, have scaled back or the threshold was raised are already predisposed back to walking 10,000 steps a day only
eliminated self-scanning, yet again, to $100. to shoplifting, by allow- two weeks after his five-hour surgery. And
at least in some stores. Perhaps it’s not sur- ing them to rationalize although his blood and stool biomarkers
But others continue prising that some people their behavior. “Most are now back in the normal range—one
to add it. Worldwide, steal from machines more shoplifters are in fact of them 2,000 times lower than it was at
self-checkout terminals readily than from human otherwise law-abiding his sickest—Larry is still on the case, try-
are expected to number cashiers. “Anyone who citizens. They would ing radical shifts in his diet and tracking
325,000 by next year, up pays for more than half of chase behind you to the effects on his microbiome. He will be
from 191,000 in 2013. their stuff in self checkout return the $20 bill you 70 this year, and he hopes to find a more
In some places, mean- is a total moron,” reads dropped, because you’re permanent solution to his affliction. He
while, the likelihood of one of the more militant a person and you would is still frustrated, he told me, echoing the
being punished for petty comments in a Reddit miss that $20.” A robot lament of scientists everywhere, “by
shoplifting is decreasing. discussion on the subject. cashier, though, changes what I don’t know.”
Even if a manager wants “There is NO MORAL ISSUE the equation: It “gives the Turning a two-dimensional MRI into
to press charges, many with stealing from a store false impression of ano-
three dimensions is not that hard, Larry
police departments can’t that forces you to use self nymity,” Staib says. “This
told the audience at his lecture. The
be bothered with super- checkout, period. THEY apparently empowers
remaining challenge is to get more doc-
market theft. In 2012, for ARE CHARGING YOU TO people to shoplift.”
tors to be like Ramamoorthy, and to get
example, the Dallas Police WORK AT THEIR STORE.” Which isn’t to say that
more engineers working in concert with
Department enacted Barbara Staib, the direc- all shoppers feel equally
them. Larry wants to build a hub on the
a new policy: Officers tor of communications of empowered. Frank Farley,
UCSD campus to meld the isolated disci-
would no longer routinely the National Association a psychologist at Temple
plines into a functioning whole. “We have
respond to shoplifting for Shoplifting Prevention, University, says that many
supermarket thieves have
the top-line medical people and facilities,
what he calls Type-T (as
and we have the researchers,” he said.
in “thrill”) personalities: “It’s just the social organization of getting
“Shopping can be quite out of the stovepipes long enough to put
boring because it’s such a these kind of teams together.”
routine, and this is a way When I first met Larry Smarr, he was
to make the routine more trying to chart a new future for the diag-
interesting. These can be nosis of illnesses. Today, he’s also chart-
risk-taking, stimulation- ing a future for the surgeries used to treat
seeking people.” Accord- them. And he’s demonstrating— quite
ing to this theory, some dramatically— what it’s like when the
Type Ts become BASE patient, not the doctor, is in charge.
jumpers or Mafia hit men,
while others settle for Mark Bowden is a national correspondent
swiping Brie and organic for The Atlantic. His most recent book is
tomatoes from Safeway. Huế 1968.

Illustration by JAMES GRAHAM T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 31

 T H E

C U L T U R E
F I L E
B O O K S , A R T S , A N D E N T E R TA I N M E N T

M O D E ST Y B L A I S E : T H E K I L L I N G G A M E ( T I TA N B O O KS ) , © A S S O C I AT E D N E W S PA P E R S LT D/ S O LO SY N D I C AT I O N
THE OMNIVORE

A Heroine
for Our Time
The pulp-fiction superspy
Modesty Blaise is a woman
who is always in control.
BY CAITLIN FLANAGAN
Modesty Blaise was my secret self the year I was 15, the subject of ardent
daydreams and the first female character I encountered who was truly in charge
of something other than a hospital ward, or a school, or a household. She ran
an organization full of dangerous men, and they all obeyed and revered her.
She would know exactly what to do with a Harvey Weinstein or a Matt Lauer,
and it would be a pleasure to see her do it. Half a century before Beyoncé,
Modesty wasn’t bossy; she was the boss.

T
H E E X C I T E M E N T I N the
Long Island theater where
I first saw Pulp Fiction was
unlike anything I’d previously
experienced at the movies:
Everything people were
saying about Quentin Taran-
tino, the boy-genius director, was true. But the
picture stirred me most profoundly—alerting me
that there was an intelligence behind it that was
in some small way in sync with my own—when I
caught sight of the book John Travolta reads on the
crapper, first at Butch’s apartment and then in the
diner bathroom: Modesty Blaise.
Modesty is the invention of an English comic-strip writer named Peter
O’Donnell. In the early 1960s, an editor asked him to create a new character,
and he decided that “it was about time that somebody woke up and produced
a female who would be able to do all the hero stuff as well as—or perhaps
better than—most men.” Modesty is a secret agent who works on special
assignments for British intelligence, so (to O’Donnell’s great frustration) she
is most often compared to James Bond. They’re really nothing alike. Bond’s
life begins and ends with each mission. Modesty, by contrast, exists in a fully
realized world, with homes—in particular, her sumptuous penthouse overlook-
ing Hyde Park—friends, lovers, and a range of interests. She enjoys attending
country fairs, going to the theater, dressing up, riding horses, cutting gems,
rescuing animals. She never enters a scene without an exact description of
what she’s wearing, right down to her shoes. O’Donnell maintained that the
key to her character is that while she is incredibly brave, capable, and—when

32 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C Illustration by WG600
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 the situation demands it—lethal, she is also exceed-
ingly feminine. “She doesn’t just kick people in the
head,” O’Donnell once said of Modesty. “She’s very
tender and vulnerable.”
The strip—which Titan Books finished reissuing
in book form late last year—debuted in 1963, and
it was so successful that O’Donnell soon sold the
movie rights. To coincide with the release of the
film—a massive bomb, alas—O’Donnell was asked
to write a novel about Modesty. It was through the
subsequent series that I came to fall in love with her.
Her origin story emanated from one of O’Donnell’s
experiences in World War II. Working in a small
radio detachment near the Caucasus, on the bor-
der of Iran and Iraq, he had come across a young
girl, 11 or 12 years old, walking along the banks of a
stream. She was completely alone, dressed in rags,
and carrying a small homemade weapon: a piece
of wood with a nail driven through it. O’Donnell
gave her tins of food, a can opener, and a cup of tea.
She smiled in gratitude and then resumed her solo,
dangerous wanderings. He remembered the young
girl when he created Modesty, because he realized
that the kind of character he wanted to invent could
not have sprung from any of the girl-shaping insti-
tutions of mid-century Britain. She couldn’t come
“from a shop or an office or school or nunnery,” he
said, and “be what I wanted this girl to be.”
He thought of the refugee child—a displaced
person, a girl like many millions of girls around the
world today—and wrote a story for her. Orphaned,
nameless, and stateless, she wandered for years
through the Middle East and North Africa, where
she would “steal in the city’s bazaars or live with
nomads.” She became the protector of a brilliant
but defenseless old man, Lob, a European who
knew five languages. He taught her, she defended
him, and they loved each other. After his death, she
wound up in Tangier, where, at 19 or 20, she took
over a crime syndicate, renaming it the Network
and becoming the unflinching boss of very hard
men, who called her “Mam’selle.” She excelled in
hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, criminal
strategy, general fearlessness, and a certain kind
of crime: jewel heists and bank robberies—never
drugs or vice, never anything that could hurt women.
N D S O — OUR STORU B E G I N S —we find
A Modesty retired from her life of crime in
her mid-20s, hugely wealthy, powerful, and
sexually liberated. (She has an erotic inclination
toward men she has rescued from danger.) She is
saved from a life of comfortable boredom by the
intercession of Sir Gerald Tarrant of British intel-
ligence, who regularly enlists her help in foiling
various types of espionage and plots against the
empire. Sometimes these duties require her to fight
crime while naked; other times she must temporar-
ily succumb to the sexual sadism of some villain or
34 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
another—something James Bond was never required
THE OMNIVORE
to do in the name of Queen and country—but she
always triumphs in the end. There isn’t a man in
the whole world who can take her down.
What has made the series so deeply loved by
so many different kinds of people (Kingsley Amis
called it “endlessly fascinating”) isn’t just Modesty’s
badass fighting capabilities; on their own, they
would make her no more appealing than Charlize
Theron’s character in Atomic Blonde—a beautiful
cyborg. At the heart of the series is a love story, the
best one I encountered as a girl. Modesty’s second
in command in the Network was a man named
Willie Garvin, a small-time cockney criminal she’d
discovered in a fighting pit in Saigon. He’d looked up
before the fight to see a “dark haired girl in a white
linen dress watching him.” Since that day, Willie—a
master brawler and knife-thrower, a man who can
sleep with any woman he wants—has devoted his
life to Modesty. She transformed him, offering him
an education, a career, and a purpose. He doesn’t
just join her on the secret missions, and he isn’t just
the one person in the world who knows everything
about her. Sometimes, after an especially dangerous
episode, Modesty will weep in Willie’s arms for a
For the few minutes before pulling herself together and
giving him his marching orders. Both have lovers,
first time, but they never, ever sleep together. I read book after
I imagined book, hoping that—at last—they would, but it never
what it would happens. Theirs is a partnership so romantic that
be like to be it would crumble if it became carnal. The delicate
balance between the deadly action sequences of
physically their many capers, their deep love for each other,
unafraid in and the infinite sexual restraint of their romance
the world. was heady stuff for a 15-year-old girl.
Modesty Blaise was merely a cartoon character
turned into a bit of pulp fiction, but in the midst of
my unhappy adolescence, she changed the way
I thought about myself and my future. I wasn’t
considering robbing banks. But for the first time,
I imagined what it would be like to be physically
unafraid in the world, to walk down any city street
T H E C U LT U R E F I L E I C O N S BY N E I G H B O R H O O D ST U D I O
I wanted, at any time of night, and not give a
second’s thought to the special care a girl has to
take. I thought about what it would be like to be
deeply loved by a man, deeply known, but still
be the main character in my life story, the only
one with her name in the title. Time passed, and
I learned in a hundred hard ways how careful you
have to be if you’re born female, how many places
hold dangers— even just an ordinary office with
a respected male boss. I have a couple of the old
paperbacks in my house, and when I see them,
they remind me of a time when I still thought it
was possible for a girl to do anything.
Caitlin Flanagan, the author of Girl Land and
To Hell With All That, is sharing the Omnivore
column with James Parker through the summer.

FILM
Thor and the Hulk
Walk Into a Bar …
After an ill-fated swerve into the serious, superhero
movies have at last rediscovered comedy.
BY CHRISTOPHER ORR
I
N 2008, the director Christopher Nolan released The Dark Knight,
the central installment of his Batman trilogy. It was a remarkably
good film in a genre not known for reliably producing “serious”
fare—and alas, it inevitably inspired imitators: moody, self-
important capes-and-tights movies that the Hollywood studios
seem only now, blessedly, to be leaving behind.
From the mid-20th century onward, screen portrayals of
superheroes—and Batman in particular—had generally been
tongue-in-cheek. In the 1960s, ABC’s Batman series, with its “bat Geiger
counter” and “alphabet-soup bat container,” favored overt silliness. In the
Illustration by JAMIE COE
’80s and ’90s, Tim Burton’s and Joel Schumacher’s
movies tended toward high camp, with Danny
DeVito cast as the Penguin, for example, and Jim
Carrey as the Riddler.
Early-21st-century works such as Bryan
Singer’s X-Men movies—in which the outcast
mutant protagonists were implicitly compared
to Holocaust survivors and victims of anti-gay
bias—treated their characters more soberly. But
Nolan’s pictures, especially The Dark Knight, were
something entirely new. Manohla Dargis of The
New York Times described the film as “pitched at
the divide between art and industry, poetry and
entertainment,” adding that “it goes darker and
deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-
book kind.” An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal
compared Batman’s “moral complexity” to that of
George W. Bush. Barack Obama later said that the
movie’s villain, the Joker, helped him comprehend
ISIS. The film became a staple of college courses;
Amazon currently offers book-length analyses
running the gamut from The Masculine Identity
Crisis in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Trilogy”
to The Gospel in Gotham: Parables of Christ’s Glory
From the Dark Knight Trilogy. That the movie
cracked $1 billion at the global box office only
increased its cachet.
As some Dark Knight naysayers—notably New
York magazine’s David Edelstein—observed at the
time, superheroes are not, by their nature, obvious
candidates for thoughtful drama. They tend to wear
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 35
ridiculous costumes and wield implausible pow-
ers. But Nolan set a high bar for the newly somber
enterprise, in part by wisely laying claim to the
least outlandish of the breed: Batman possesses no
superabilities and has frequently been portrayed as
a fearsome vigilante, from Bob Kane’s original ren-
dering, in 1939, to Frank Miller’s reimagining of the
character in the 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight
Returns, which served as an inspiration for Nolan.
Indeed, the bar set by the Dark Knight trilogy
turned out to be so high that almost no subsequent
films have managed to clear it. Warner Bros.—
which produced Nolan’s films and has continued
to deliver movies based on other DC-comic-book
heroes (Superman, Wonder Woman, etc.)—spent
years wearing the director’s grim legacy like a hair
shirt. Following the final Dark Knight installment,
in 2012, the studio turned its DC movies over to
Zack Snyder, who shares Nolan’s affinity for dark-
ness but little of his cinematic talent.
In Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel, Superman—
customarily portrayed as something of a mega–
Boy Scout—accidentally levels half the city of
Metropolis and ultimately decides to kill his
nemesis, General Zod. That is about the most
un-Superman-like move imaginable. Even Nolan’s
Batman didn’t intentionally kill anyone. Snyder
followed up with Batman v Superman: Dawn of
Justice, a laughably bleak fable in which the two
heroes decide to fight to the death for no plausible
reason whatsoever—and then abruptly make peace
when they discover that their mothers are both
named Martha. And while Snyder did not direct
Suicide Squad, the third entry in the DC Extended
Universe, the movie (about a group of supervillains
who are turned into a high-deniability hit squad by
the U.S. government) followed his gloomy moral
and aesthetic blueprint.
H
APPILY, WE APPEAR to be in the midst
of a new, and altogether different, shift
in the genre—you might even call it a
backlash—which may well provide a more sustain-
able model for superhero movies to come. As the
saying goes: first time tragedy, second time farce.
Experiments in supercomedy are taking place with
increasing frequency, and meeting with consider-
able success. The various studios currently churning
out stories of flying heroes and masked vigilantes
are at different points in their evolution from drama
to comedy. But in the steadily growing genre, they
are all trending in that direction.
Last year, six of the 10 top-grossing films at the
domestic box office were superhero movies, and
the comic shift is proving contagious. This is in part
because the ongoing boom has inspired studios to
think big, moving beyond mere franchises in favor
of vast cinematic “universes.” Heroes no longer just
star in their own movies. They also cross-pollinate
36 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
other heroes’ franchises and occasionally team up
en masse for an extra-big blockbuster. In addition
to Warner Bros., with its DC Comics cast of charac-
ters, two other studios have presided over their
own superhero realms. 20th Century Fox owns
the rights to the X-Men and related mutants from
Marvel Comics, and has only just begun exploring
the larger world-building possibilities this roster
may enable. Marvel Studios, which covers almost
all the rest of the Marvel characters—Iron Man,
Captain America, Thor, and so on—has proved the
gold standard, with a total of 17 Marvel Cinematic
Universe movies to its credit since 2008 and a
combined box-office haul of $13 billion. (Assuming
Disney—which owns Marvel Studios—completes
its acquisition of Fox, their two superhero universes
will be merged.)
At 20th Century Fox, it has taken a while for the
comedy bug to bite. After the earnest portrayals
in Singer’s first two X-Men films, the third, ineptly
directed in 2006 by the now infamous Brett Rat-
ner, was bleaker than its predecessors: Multiple
central characters got killed off, and critics were
underwhelmed. The franchise was rebooted
with the prequel X-Men: First Class, but this new
series got both darker and duller, too. In its third
Barack installment, X-Men: Apocalypse, the conflicted
sometime-hero, sometime-villain Magneto, in
Obama said a fit of pique, collaborates in a plan to destroy all
that the Joker of humankind.
in The Dark The solution? An iconoclastic leap into the
Knight helped post-Nolan era with Deadpool, 2016’s foray into
R-rated raunch featuring a potty-mouthed jokester
him compre- who just happened to be essentially unkillable.
hend ISIS. Although plenty of superhero movies had dabbled
with comedy up to this point, this was the first that
simply was a comedy. Yes, the titular hero fought a
few highly forgettable bad guys. But the real draws
were his profane banter, frequent demolitions of
the fourth wall, and meta-commentary on his own
movie. (Visiting the mansion where the X-Men live
and finding it nearly empty, he quips, “It’s almost
like the studio couldn’t afford another X-Man.”)
Among the most well reviewed of the X-Men mov-
ies, Deadpool also made the most money of any of
them, despite having had the smallest budget. The
superhero comedy had arrived. A highly anticipated
sequel is due out later this year.
M
A R V E L S T U D I O S , the undisputed
top dog of the superhero genre, never
succumbed to the Nolan effect. From
the start of its cinematic universe, in 2008, it opted
instead for light doses of humor—epitomized by
Robert Downey Jr.’s bravura turn as Iron Man’s alter
ego, the extravagantly self-loving billionaire inven-
tor Tony Stark. Since then, Marvel has continued
moving further toward outright comedy, turning
to comic performers such as Chris Pratt (who cut
his teeth on the sitcom Parks and Recreation) and
FILM
Paul Rudd to fill out its cast of heroes. It’s worth
noting that most of the studio’s recent directors
have a comedy background, an evolution that can
be seen in microcosm in the Thor movies: The
first was directed by the erstwhile Shakespearean
Kenneth Branagh, the second by the TV prestige-
drama veteran Alan Taylor, and the latest by a
quirky indie-comedy veteran from New Zealand,
Taika Waititi.
Little wonder that the Marvel movies have been
getting wittier—and in many cases wackier. By far
the best scene in the studio’s second Avengers movie,
Age of Ultron, took place before the villain even
showed up, at a party where the heroes engaged
in some macho yardsticking about who among
them could lift Thor’s hammer. That movie came
on the heels of 2014’s highly comic Guardians
of the Galaxy—which featured a talking raccoon
and an ambulatory tree—and right before 2015’s
comparably goofy Ant-Man, in which the amiably
awkward Rudd played a shrinking ex-con who
could converse with ants.
By now, a level of humor in Marvel movies that
once seemed experimental looks to be par for the
course. The three Marvel Studios releases of last
year—Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man:
Homecoming (produced in conjunction with Sony),
and Thor: Ragnarok—were all essentially comedies,
whether of the intergalactic-weirdo or heart-struck
high-schooler variety.
Thor: Ragnarok, directed by Waititi, is the most
self-consciously wacky Marvel offering to date.
Although the overarching plot involves the conquest
of Thor’s native Asgard by Hela, the goddess of
death, Thor actually spends the bulk of the film in
a comic subplot involving a gladiator planet ruled
by an alien overlord played by Jeff Goldblum at his
Goldblummiest: equal parts twitchy, smug, and
louche. Large portions of the movie’s dialogue were
ad-libbed on set, and on more than one occasion
you can see the actors break character and crack
up helplessly. Like Fox’s Deadpool, this venture
into overt comedy met with raves.
Even Warner Bros. finally cast off its long-
standing doldrums with Wonder Woman, which
offered a witty, upbeat, and heroic (as opposed
to antiheroic) vision—and became a critical and
box-office hit. Warner’s subsequent team-up movie,
Justice League, was a mess, but even so, the shift
toward a lighter, more humorous template was clear.
(One character, the Flash, essentially functioned
as comic relief: a bumbling young adult unsure
whether he was ready for the whole “do battle”
part of the job.)
T
H E N E W V O G U E in superhero films
isn’t likely to inspire college courses or
chin-stroking op-eds. These movies have
typically been escapist fare at their core, so ditching
the dour human dilemmas that briefly seemed like
a ticket into the ranks of higher-brow entertainment
has the feel of a genre coming home—and raising
a little hell. With vast universes now to play in, the
comic possibilities are newly outlandish.
In this sense, Thor: Ragnarok was an even bolder
gamble than Deadpool. Fox’s movie had been a
spin-off that featured none of the X-Men series’
customary heroes, so if it had been a disaster,
the brand-name damage would have been con-
tained. By contrast, Thor—a founding member
of the Avengers—is a central figure in Marvel’s
universe. Screwing around with his character
risked throwing the studio’s whole world out of
whack. But screw around with him Waititi went
ahead and did. As the director explained to New
York magazine’s Vulture site, “I’m having so much
fun subverting all of this, and like telling weird
jokes and making this the weirdest Marvel movie
ever.” Wreaking modest havoc on the studio’s
agenda was the whole point. “Marvel’s job really
is to look after their characters, look after their
source material, and make sure I don’t completely
break it.”
Make sure he didn’t completely break it: A little bit
of breaking was okay. This willingness to loosen the
reins and try new things—even, or especially, in the
midst of precisely engineered cinematic universes—
appears to be the new normal. Comedies such as
Deadpool and Thor: Ragnarok are the most obvious
examples of this renegade spirit at work, but they’re
not the only ones. Last year also saw Fox’s Logan, a
dark, lean X-Men spin-off featuring the franchise’s
best-loved character, Wolverine. It was, in fact,
the most successful “serious” superhero movie
since the Nolan days, though rather than take its
cues from urban noir, it offered a postapocalyptic
variation on a classic Western odyssey: The titular
hero protects a young mutant girl on their journey
to the Canadian border.
Other boundary-stretching endeavors are
already under way. Marvel Studios’ Black Pan-
ther, which was released after this issue closed,
is a superhero movie intended to foreground its
story’s African influences. Fox’s upcoming The
New Mutants is framed as a horror movie. Chan-
ning Tatum has described his planned Gambit film
as inspired by the “complete paradigm shifts” in
superhero movies as represented by Deadpool and
Logan. And James Franco is currently developing
yet another R-rated X-Men spin-off, which he prom-
ises will “take this superhero thing and really just
push it into a new”—and, given Franco’s history,
presumably quite weird—“genre.” Who would
have guessed that just stepping back and having
fun could be so liberating?
Christopher Orr is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 37

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The Pakistan Trap
How Afghanistan’s neighbor has subverted
U.S. policy in America’s longest war
BY MARK MAZZETTI
T
W O M O N T H S A F T E R the 2008 U.S. presidential election,
Vice President–elect Joe Biden sat with Afghanistan’s president,
Hamid Karzai, in the Arg Palace, an 83-acre compound in Kabul
that had become a gilded cage for the mercurial and isolated
leader. The discussion was already tense as Karzai urged Wash-
ington to help root out Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, implying that more
pressure needed to be exerted on Pakistani leaders. Biden’s answer stunned
Karzai into silence. Biden let Karzai know how Barack Obama’s incoming
administration saw its priorities. “Mr. President,” Biden said, “Pakistan is fifty
times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”
It was an undiplomatic moment for sure, but also a frank expression of the
devastating paradox at the heart of the longest war in American history. In 16
years, the United States has spent billions of dollars fighting a war that has
killed thousands of soldiers and an untold number of civilians in a country
that Washington considers insignificant to its strategic interests in the region.
38 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
Meanwhile, the country it has viewed as a linchpin,
Pakistan—a nuclear-armed cauldron of volatile
politics and long America’s closest military ally
in South Asia—has pursued a covert campaign in
Afghanistan designed to ensure that the money
and the lives have been spent in vain. The stakes in
Pakistan have been considered too high to break ties
with Islamabad or take other steps that would risk
destabilizing the country. The stakes in Afghanistan
have been deemed low enough that careening from
one failed strategy to another has been acceptable.
Even so, the post-9/11 years have seen the slow
dissolution of the shotgun marriage arranged
between the U.S. and Pakistan in the quest to
rout al-Qaeda. As Steve Coll recounts in Direc-
torate S—which picks up the narrative where his
Pulitzer Prize–winning 2004 volume, Ghost Wars,
left off—the seeds of mistrust were planted early,
and mutual recriminations steadily accumulated.
Weeks after the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin
Laden, a demoralized Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the
head of Pakistan’s army, likened his “helpless”
country to a mortgaged house, with the United
States playing the role of banker. For American
officials who dealt with Pakistan, another domestic
analogy might have seemed more apt: Pakistan
was the spouse who had drained the family bank
account and then slept with the sketchy neighbor.
The anger on the American side was fueled by
the gradual realization that Washington had, since
the very beginning of the war, allowed Pakistan
to wield too much influence over U.S. strategy. As
the Taliban retreated from Kabul and Kandahar
in late 2001, the CIA station chief in Islamabad
wrote cables channeling the Pakistani military’s
perspective. A Northern Alliance takeover of the
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country, the message went, could lead to a blood-
bath for Afghanistan’s Pashtuns (Pakistan’s tradi-
tional allies) and undermine Pakistan’s readiness to
broker a political settlement there. What Pakistan
wanted most of all, of course, was its own favored
groups, and not its rival India’s, in power.
George W. Bush’s war cabinet was already jittery
about the “nightmare scenario” of the new conflict:
violence spilling over into Pakistan, President
Pervez Musharraf ’s government collapsing, and
the country’s nuclear arsenal falling into the hands
of Pakistani generals with Taliban sympathies.
Musharraf himself spent years masterfully stoking
these fears. He often warned American officials that
the more he acceded to Washington’s demands, the
more his support inside the military would erode
and the better the chances would become of the
nightmare scenario playing out.
T
H E C O N U N D R U M M I G H T have been
resolved, Coll suggests, had the American
military’s tactical failures during the first
year not helped Musharraf’s argument that Pakistan
was too dangerous to ignore. Intelligence failures
and insufficient troops at the battles in Tora Bora
and the Shah-i-Kot Valley allowed al-Qaeda fight-
ers to slip over Afghanistan’s eastern border and
“Pakistan is
resettle in Pakistan’s tribal areas and cities. With fifty times
the arrival of the militants in his country, Mush- more impor-
arraf ordered his military intelligence service, the tant than
ISI, to work with the CIA to hunt down al-Qaeda’s
leaders in Pakistani cities. He also made the case
Afghanistan
to U.S. officials that, partly thanks to American for the
misadventures, Pakistan now deserved a huge United States.”
Illustration by TYLER COMRIE
influx of military aid. The arrests in 2002 and 2003
of Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and
others reinforced Bush’s view that Pakistan was
“with us,” an ally to be trusted.
Coll convincingly shows that those few al-Qaeda
scalps, delivered by the ISI at a time when the
Bush administration had already begun to ignore
Afghanistan and focus on the looming war in Iraq,
bought years of American inattention to the ISI’s
more secretive activities: arming and financing the
Taliban and other Afghan militant groups sympa-
thetic to Pakistan rather than India. The United
States had stumbled into an informal, unspoken
bargain, accepting help from Pakistan in the fight
against al-Qaeda in exchange for tacitly enabling,
while feebly contesting, Pakistan’s efforts to sabo-
tage the American-led campaign in Afghanistan.
Intermittent U.S. demands that the covert efforts
stop went unheeded.
The deal was stunningly lucrative for Islamabad.
Each year, the Pentagon transferred hundreds of
millions of dollars in cash to Pakistan, ostensibly to
reimburse its military for counterterrorism opera-
tions. In fact, Coalition Support Funds were a “kind
of legal bribery to Pakistan’s generals,” Coll argues.
The Pentagon would receive bills for air-defense
expenses, even though al-Qaeda had no air force.
One Special Forces colonel, Barry Shapiro, recalls
invoices from Pakistan’s navy listing per diem pay
for sailors “on duty fighting the Global War on
Terrorism.” Shapiro tried to question some of the
expenses: Was there any proof that the Pakistani
army had indeed shot off the missiles it was ask-
ing to be reimbursed for? But he was told by his
superiors to be quiet and pay up.
The arrangement was effectively on autopilot as
the Iraq War consumed the Bush administration’s
attention. Congress approved the funding with few
reservations, and years passed before lawmakers
seemed to comprehend their role in the farce. During
one congressional hearing in 2012, a top Democrat on
the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Gary Acker-
man, lamented that Pakistan had become “a black
hole for American aid.” “Our tax dollars go in. Our
diplomats go in, sometimes. Our aid professionals
go in, sometimes. Our hopes go in. Our prayers go
in,” he said. “Nothing good ever comes out.”
Members of Congress began calling for a strat-
egy to put pressure on Pakistan by cutting annual
aid to the country, but policy makers faced another
quandary: As the goals the United States set in
Afghanistan grew more ambitious, Washington’s
need of Pakistan’s help to achieve them grew too.
The swiftness with which the initial military cam-
paign fulfilled its comparatively modest aims—to
avenge the September 11 attacks by destroying
al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan, expel the Taliban
from cities, and install a more competent gov-
ernment in Kabul—led to hubris about what was
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 39
possible in a hopelessly poor country wracked by
decades of war.
The enterprise of nation building meant, in no
particularly consistent order, quixotic attempts to
root out corruption, lean on Karzai to sack unsavory
warlords, and reengineer Afghanistan’s opium
economy by getting farmers to plant crops far less
lucrative than poppies. In 2004, I traveled with a
team of Green Berets through gorgeous, flowering
poppy fields to meet with the elders of various vil-
lages in Kunar province. “The government in Kabul
wants you to plant wheat” was high on the list of the
soldiers’ talking points. During the meeting, one of
the elders duly declared, “Next year we will plant
wheat!” Many of the others sniggered.
T
H E M O R E T H E United States invested
in the Afghan War, the more it seemed as
if Washington was holding on to a steering
wheel detached from the rest of the car. The main
supply lines that kept the war machine humming—
bringing fuel, food, and equipment to the rising
numbers of troops in Afghanistan—ran through
Pakistan. The government in Islamabad could (and
did, for as long as seven months at one point) cut
off the supplies, leaving convoys of trucks sitting
idle between the port of Karachi and various
border crossings.
Many CIA officials were skeptical that the United
States should try to root out corruption, and advo-
cated that the agency focus on trying to decimate
al-Qaeda and its sympathizers with drone strikes.
During the Obama years, they clashed repeatedly
with generals and policy makers beguiled by a
counterinsurgency doctrine that put a premium on
anti-corruption efforts. Despite ample evidence of
America’s inconsistent approach, the notion that
the U.S. might have no grand policy whatsoever in
Afghanistan was difficult to accept for some of the
key players, notably Kayani and Karzai.
They chose to fill the void with conspiracy theo-
ries. Kayani and other top Pakistani military officials
believed that the United States was secretly working
with Karzai’s government to bolster India’s influ-
ence in Afghanistan as a counterweight to Pakistan.
Karzai subscribed to a more elaborate conspiracy:
Washington was sending ever more troops to his
country to gain a permanent foothold in Central Asia,
from which the United States could compete against
Russia and China for supremacy in the region—the
Great Game redux.
But this was fevered thinking, which was partly
what prompted Biden to deliver his blunt message
to Karzai in the Arg Palace in 2009. That meeting
came at an inflection point: A new administra-
tion was taking over, and Biden was skeptical that
the Afghanistan project was worth the candle.
The American economy was in crisis, and the
generals were about to present the inexperienced
40 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
president-elect with a costly new plan to send in
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thousands of additional troops.
Biden began openly proposing that Obama
chart a different course. If the real problems lay in
Pakistan, he asked, then why not instead use the
money to keep Pakistan from imploding? At the
same time, shouldn’t the U.S. think about working
directly with Saudi Arabia and China—traditional
allies of Pakistan—to pressure the ISI to finally end
its support of the Taliban and other radical groups?
Coll suggests that this thinking never gained much
traction. Obama went along with the generals’
troop increase, and approved an even larger one at
the end of 2009. The question of what to do about
Pakistan, the phantom enemy in a failing war, went
largely unanswered.
Coll’s majestic Ghost Wars tracked the CIA’s
adventures in Afghanistan from the Soviet inva-
sion, in 1979, through the eve of the September 11
attacks. Reading it was a gut-wrenching experience,
The Pentagon with momentum building toward a climactic,
would receive dreadful outcome. Reading Directorate S is more
like watching a slow-motion video of a truck
bills from going off a cliff, frame by agonizing frame. And
Pakistan for no semblance of closure ever comes. Coll may
air-defense have embarked on a full accounting of the war
expenses, to its end, but history didn’t cooperate. Obama
announced a plan in 2014 to conclude America’s
even though combat operations in Afghanistan. By the time
al-Qaeda had his tenure in the White House wound down, the
no air force. generals had persuaded him to leave thousands
of troops in the country indefinitely.
Within months of taking office, his successor—
who had campaigned on scaling back America’s
overseas adventures—accepted a Pentagon plan
to add thousands more U.S. troops. In a speech
announcing his strategy, Donald Trump ran through
a familiar litany of complaints about Pakistan,
capped by the demand that the country end its
support for the very groups America is fighting in
Afghanistan. He also called on India, Pakistan’s
archenemy, to take a greater role in Afghanistan’s
internal affairs—a threat evidently intended to
scare Pakistani officials into backing off. Frustra-
tion mounted as the year turned, and an outraged
presidential tweet denouncing years of “nothing
but lies & deceit” was followed by a suspension of
security assistance to Pakistan. What the repercus-
sions might be was anybody’s guess.
Coll sums up the war as a “humbling case study
in the limits of American power.” But a decade
and a half after the first shots were fired, the U.S.
DIRECTORATE S: president wasn’t exactly projecting humility, much
THE C.I.A. AND less a newly coherent American policy.
AMERICA’S
SECRET WARS IN
Mark Mazzetti, the Washington investigations
AFGHANISTAN
AND PAKISTAN
editor at The New York Times, is the author of
STEVE COLL The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army,
Penguin Press and a War at the Ends of the Earth.
 Weekly conversations with A weekly conversation
leading journalists and thinkers between Editor in Chief
to make sense of the history Jeffrey Goldberg and the
happening all around us figures shaping society

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The Virtue of Illicit Desire
Longing, Jamie Quatro insists in her new novel,
thrives most when sating it is a sin.
BY CLAIRE DEDERER
D
E S I R E G E T S A B A D R A P, and not just from prudes.
Buddhists, for instance, come out pretty firmly against it
(desire, they say, is the root of suffering), and even athe-
ists like me are susceptible to the wisdom of the Buddha.
But Jamie Quatro sees it differently. Maggie, the protago-
nist and intermittent narrator of Quatro’s new novel, Fire
Sermon, wants to want. Her desire is what makes her human and also what
connects her to something larger, something she insists on calling God.
42 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
Those who have read Quatro’s first book will rec-
ognize the theme of desire. I Want to Show You More,
a collection of stories, was handsomely blurbed and
ecstatically reviewed, and—perhaps most telling of
all—was one of those books that get fervently passed
from writer to writer. Among other enticements, it
featured a series of lambently honest, somewhat
otherworldly treatments of adultery. The stories
exerted an urgent tug as I read—they created a
beating, hot, weird heart at the center of the collec-
tion. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “The
stories about adultery make a book-within-a-book.”
In Fire Sermon, Quatro places all her chips on that
book-within-a-book. Maggie is a writer and a mother,
raised as a strict Christian, who falls in love with a
man who is not her husband. “This story begins
where others end,” Quatro writes. “A boy and a girl
in love, a wedding, a happily-ever-after.” And then
what? Two children, two careers, a few moves, and
a couple of decades later, the wife discovers that she
wants—well, what, exactly? Maybe she just wants.
Full disclosure: Quatro blurbed my recent memoir,
Love and Trouble. Fuller disclosure: Quatro and I
hoe the same occasionally dolorous row of female
midlife yearning. The wanting to want, the insistent
shoulder-tapping of desire—these things seized me
in my mid-40s, and so I expected to be a sitting duck
for Quatro’s all-in take on the theme.
D
E SIROU SNE SS MOVE S RE STLE SSLY
like a bird across the landscape of Maggie’s
life—she has flirtations with, or crushes
on, or inappropriate friendships with, a series of
people. An unattributed voice, presumably that of
her shrink, says to her: “So you’ve come to me, again,
because you keep falling in love with men who aren’t
your husband.” Her wanting finally settles on James,
a poet whose work she admires. The two become
correspondents, as do so many of the characters
in I Want to Show You More, which deals with love
at a distance, replete with torrid email exchanges
and phone sex—rituals of modern-day longing. In
Fire Sermon, too, Quatro is good on the mores of
this sort of courtship: the coyness, the posturing,
the elaborately casual self-presentation.
Eventually Maggie and James meet in person,
and I have to say that I don’t think they bring out the
best in each other. Here’s what flirtation looks like
between these two: They sit on a park bench and chat
about “St. John of the Cross, how he said we might
become sexually aroused in the middle of spiritual
acts, such as prayer, or communion, because when
the spirit is moved to pleasure it drags the body up
with it.” At this point I scrawled in my copy of the
book, “Can’t they just fuck and be done with it?”
We’re meant to understand why James makes
Maggie swoony, but to us nonpoets he sounds tire-
somely pretentious—so much so that I wondered
whether Quatro intended us to roll our eyes. When
the two first meet: “I shook his hand. Tattooed on
his wrist: the word sight. Later, at lunch, I’d notice
the other wrist: vision.” (On his third wrist: a draw-
ing of Camus smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and
wearing a beret.)
We know right from the start that they will end
up in bed, because the book skips around chrono-
logically. The middle of the novel is consumed with
Maggie and James’s letters, fragmented memories
of their single night together, and an accounting of
her life with her husband, a relationship drained of
whatever intensity it once might have harbored. By
contrast, when she imagines sex with the genteelly
tattooed poet, Maggie has this to say:
Actually it was otherworldly, ecstatic in a reli-
gious sense, at the deepest point of penetration
the room fell away and the sky tore open and
we were swept up into electric galaxies, our
bodies fused together in the presence of a God
who allowed us to reach up and run our fingers
through the down of his beard.
Prose as awful as this, from a writer of Quatro’s gifts,
again raises the question of whether she means us
to grow impatient with her protagonist.
I l l u s t r a t i o n by M A R G H E R I TA M O R OT T I
Quatro repeatedly returns to this kind of egre-
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giously full-throated religious language. The rest
of the book—the descriptions of marriage and
family—unfolds in a far less stagy register, allowing
the reader to slip into the nuances of the novel’s
emotional flow, only to be yanked out by this God
stuff. I was initially suspicious of and even hostile
to Quatro’s religious preoccupation. It felt like a
veneer, a spit shine, a way of elevating the down-
and-dirty nature of the material—as if Quatro were
thinking, Hmm, if I describe adultery or anal sex in
this high-flown language, then I can get away with it.
I
T H O U G H T I D E T E C T E D another, more
insidious impulse at work as well, a kind of
subconscious misogyny. The author seems at
times to be punishing her adulteress. Maggie must
be made to endure mortification, the way so many
of her fictional sisters pay for their transgressions,
from Anna Karenina to Emma Bovary to more-recent
examples such as the protagonist of Jill Alexander
Essbaum’s Hausfrau. Even the eternally independent
thinker Rachel Cusk is unable to resist punishing the
straying wife Tonie in her novel The Bradshaw Varia-
Quatro’s tions; faithless Tonie ends up imperiling her own child.
religious pre- In the case of Maggie, the chastisements are quieter
and certainly more interior—mostly taking the form
occupation of her own (rather histrionic) discomfort over her
felt like a affair: “Shall I pray, Let Christ always be dying for
spit shine, the pain that moment caused, and is still causing?”
a way of Worn down by Maggie’s breast-beating, I found
myself missing the kinetic oddness of I Want to Show
elevating the You More, a book that combines a charmingly flat,
down-and- demotic style with a taste for the surreal. Some of
dirty material. Quatro’s stories, which feel as though they have
been dredged from dreams, recall the painter
and writer Leonora Carrington’s short fiction. In
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement,” all the
runners in a marathon must carry personalized
statues, the majority of which are “half-human,
half-animal sculptures doing lewd things with their
bodies. Creatures with hideously sized phalluses.”
In “Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous House-
wives,” an ex-lover’s body lies decomposing in a
married woman’s bed, causing logistical problems
and also some very bad smells.
In Fire Sermon we get God instead of such playful,
parable-like turns. It’s not a trade-off I would’ve
chosen. And yet. Eventually Quatro brought me
around to her way of seeing things. The God stuff
isn’t there to polish or to punish her adulteress. It’s
essential to Maggie’s character and to what Quatro
wants to say. In the end, the book is a profound, and
profoundly strange, meditation on desire and how
it connects us to the “eternal” (a word Maggie is
fond of ). Maggie is someone who is never satis-
FIRE SERMON
fied by what she has—who is defined by what she
JAMIE QUATRO lacks. Her mother says of her: “She’ll go hard after
Grove something and once she gets it no longer care. A
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 43
hammered gold necklace she pestered me to buy
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for a year … she wore it twice and gave it away.”
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan devel-
oped the idea of the thing that you desire but will
always lack—the unattainability of the object being
essential to the desire. The concept will be familiar
to anyone who’s ever scribbled her crush’s name
on her Pee-Chee folder in seventh-grade math
class: You don’t really want the boy in the next
row—honestly you wouldn’t know what to do with
him if you got him. You just want to want.
Throughout Fire Sermon, Quatro weaves the
image of desire slipping away once its object is at
hand. “I read an interview with a poet yesterday,
someone you mentioned knowing,” Maggie writes in
an unsent letter to James. “He said that when he was
a boy he climbed the tree beside his house to gather
apples. Sitting in the top branches … his desire for
apples fell away. He forgot about them completely.”
intentional breeding ground for illicit desire? …
Hear: without the prohibitions against fornica-
tion and infidelity, we would sate and sate and
sate again, looking always for the next object in
which to find fulfillment, we would gratify our
longings until we had nothing left to long for,
and the ability to long itself died off.
She concludes: “So let me burn.”
This declamation wowed me with its derring-do.
We sometimes hear people say that an affair helped
their marriage, but I’ve never heard anyone promul-
gate the idea that her marriage helped her affair. It’s
just not a very comfortable thought. And yet that’s
what Maggie’s saying here. The state of marriage
makes yearning possible, and yearning makes us
burn, which Maggie (and perhaps Quatro) sees as a
good and essential and human thing. I was stunned
by the notion, and enchanted by the way the book
built to a crystallized idea rather than a scene or an

S
O P E R H A P S I shouldn’t have been as
surprised as I was when the book offered
a startling gift: a very serious, and deeply
against-the-grain, reconsideration of marriage.
The institution is valuable, Fire Sermon tells us,
because it creates an impediment to obtaining the
object of your desire. In the absence of real religious
proscriptions in the modern world, marriage itself
becomes an engine of longing. In other words,
Maggie is able to feel these desires not in spite of
the ramparts of marriage, but because of them. In a
climactic passage that Quatro titles “Fire Sermon,”
Maggie celebrates the role marriage plays as a
lifeline to eternity:
But what if (Brothers, Sisters, bear with me) the
institution of marriage was given to us as an
event—thinking as a dramatic gesture is a pleasure
found more commonly in nonfiction than in fiction.
Rereading with this idea of unsated desire
fresh in my head, I found that Quatro had seeded
the problem of wanting throughout. What had
seemed a lot of overblown palaver about God felt
illuminated, now that the “Fire Sermon” echoed
in my mind. Once I understood its creator’s design,
I’ve never the pattern of the book became beautiful to me.
heard anyone By the time she’s done bobbing and weaving her
promulgate way through her narrative, Quatro makes us feel
the idea the absolute necessity of desire, which she reveals
as something shining: a hammered-gold necklace,
that her mar- begged for, worn twice, given away.
riage helped
her affair. Claire Dederer is the author, most recently, of Love
and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning.

his family against the Neither came. Nor, deforming her.

COVER TO COVER
Educated:
A Memoir
TA R A W E S T OV E R
RANDOM HOUSE
TARA WESTOVER’S and six siblings, too.
one-of-a-kind memoir The youngest child
is about the shaping of in a fundamentalist
a mind, yet page after Mormon family living
page describes the in the foothills of
maiming of bodies— Buck’s Peak, in Idaho,
not just hers, but the she grew up with
heads, limbs, and a father fanatically
torsos of her parents determined to protect
“brainwashing” world. amazingly, did death Baffled, inspired, tena-
Defending his isolated or defeat, despite ciously patient with
tribe against the physi- grisly accidents. Ter- her ignorance, she
cal dangers—literally rified, impaled, set taught herself enough
brain-crushing in on fire, smashed—the to take the ACT and
some cases—of members of this clan enter Brigham Young
the survivalist life learned that pain University at 17. She
he imposed was was the rule, not the went on to Cambridge
another matter. exception. But suc- University for a doc-
Westover, who cumbing was not an torate in history.
didn’t set foot in option, a lesson that For Westover,
school until she left ultimately proved lib- now turning 32, the
home in adolescence, erating for Westover. mind-opening odys-
toiled at salvaging In briskly paced sey is still fresh. So is
scrap in his junkyard, prose, she evokes the soul-wrenching
awaiting the end days a childhood that ordeal—she hasn’t
and/or the invad- completely defined seen her parents in
ing feds her father her. Yet it was also, years—that isn’t over.
constantly warned of. she gradually sensed, — Ann Hulbert

44 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
Robert B. Reich ON WHY WE MUST
RESTORE THE IDEA OF THE COMMON GOOD TO
THE CENTER OF OUR ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

Powerful and urgent,

THE COMMON GOOD
is a heartfelt missive
from one of our foremost
political thinkers: a funda-
mental statement about
the purpose of society
and what truly matters.

“To work for the common

good is the greatest creed.”
—PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON

©Delaney Inamine

With a recommended reading ROBERTREICH.ORG

list and discussion guide to + + FB.COM/RBREICH
foster further conversation KNOPF TWITTER.COM/RBREICH
46 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
 WHY
CHINA
LOVES
TRUMP
THE PEOPLE LOVE A WINNER.
THE LEADERSHIP LOVES A DUPE.
BY BENJAMIN CARLSON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DIEGO PATINO

T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 47
 N JA N UA RY O F L A S T Y E A R , around the time of the
I presidential inauguration, as jitters about the relationship
members of the media would press officials on Trump’s latest
anti-China comment or Twitter blast—on tariffs, trade wars,
North Korea, or China’s “theft” of American jobs. Reporters
between Donald Trump and China mounted, I regularly “pivot to Asia,” and China-excluding Trans-Pacific Partnership—a
joined the mob of reporters at the Chinese foreign min-
istry’s daily briefings in Beijing. There, the assembled
expected righteous denunciations of the kind China routinely
unleashes against South Korea, the Philippines, and other coun-
tries perceived as even notionally affronting Chinese interests.
But they never came. Day after day, the spokespeople stubbornly,
and then impatiently, accentuated a positive view of the pros-
pects for U.S.–Chinese ties under Trump.
Likewise in the state media. While American pundits warned
that conflict between the world’s top two economies would lead to
meltdown, or speculated about China’s putatively enraged reac-
tion to Trump’s phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen,
Beijing’s state-sanctioned media outlets retained a strangely for-
bearing, at times vaguely optimistic, tone about the relationship.
From the very beginning, the Communist Party seems to
have understood that Trump’s threats were, for the most part,
merely for show. By refusing to be rattled, China has enjoyed a
series of rhetorical and strategic triumphs that have enhanced
its global image and increased its international influence. China
also appears to have assessed that Trump, the self-proclaimed
master deal maker, would rather have a
bad deal than no deal at all, and could
be persuaded to compromise on almost
anything in order to declare a “win.”
Take the $250 billion in deals Trump may
announced during Trump’s visit to make more
China in November. Many of the agree- sense in China
ments were nonbinding memorandums
of understanding, and some had already
than he does
been negotiated. And while they made in Washington.
a nice headline, they did nothing to
address the fundamental problems that
U.S. companies face in China: require-
ments to share technological trade
secrets with Chinese partners in exchange for access to Chinese
markets; restrictions on entering huge swathes of the economy;
industrial policies that explicitly aim to oust foreign firms in
fields ranging from information technology to electric vehicles.
Yet China won warm praise from Trump, who professed his
“very deep respect” for the country and the “noble traditions of its
people.” During an unprecedented “state visit–plus,” as China’s
foreign ministry put it, which included a 21-gun salute, a mili-
tary parade, and a dinner in the Forbidden City, Trump stunned
observers by saying he no longer faulted China for its trade policies. election, and the wave of political disorder it has unleashed
“I don’t blame China,” he said during a joint appearance with
President Xi Jinping, adding that he gives the country “great
credit” for taking advantage of the U.S. on trade. “American power is based on two legs, the hard power and soft
Such remarks support the view of Shen Dingli, a professor of
international relations at Fudan University. Trump, he told me,
is “an especially easy president for China to handle.”
“We are lucky,” he added.
Beijing seems to have concluded that the former casino mo-
gul, like a high-rolling gambler, can be made to keep playing the
house by showering him with VIP perks.
On the diplomatic front, China’s tactic of acting as a foil to
Trump has already paid off handsomely. From Europe to Africa to
48 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
Latin America, China is enjoying more prestige and respect than it
has in years. While Barack Obama vexed Beijing with his idealism,
massive trade pact that would have fused the major economies
of Asia with the United States—Trump has emphatically reversed
course, tearing up the TPP and driving allies to consider China-
backed plans instead.
This divergence was nowhere clearer than at the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation summit held in Da Nang, Vietnam, after
Trump’s visit in November. There, Xi Jinping outlined a vision of
China at the center of the region’s diplomatic, development, and
trade architecture, reiterating his country’s support for multi-
lateral free-trade schemes. Trump, meanwhile, struck a pugna-
cious tone, saying that America had gotten stuck with the bad
end of trade deals during previous administrations and warning
that “those days are over.”
Trump’s posture stands in marked contrast to China’s plans
for engagement of various kinds with countries throughout Asia.
The centerpiece of China’s efforts is the Belt and Road Initia-
tive (also known as the New Silk Road), an ambitious strategy to
fund infrastructure projects across Eurasia that would increase
foreign trade with China’s inland provinces and bolster its geo-
political clout. Often likened to the Marshall Plan, the Belt and
Road Initiative brought 29 heads of state to Beijing for a sum-
mit last May, where Xi declared it “the project of the century.”
Among the attendees was a delegation sent by Trump, a gesture
seen as offering a tacit endorsement of
Xi’s vision.
Trump’s decision to pull out of the
Paris climate agreement further bur-
nished China’s new image as the respon-
sible global power. Chancellor Angela
Merkel declared that Germany could no
longer rely on its long-standing ally, and
when China reiterated its pledge to limit
greenhouse-gas emissions, she said,
“China has become a more important
and strategic partner.” (It’s worth noting
that China’s promised carbon-emission
target under the Paris Agreement won’t
kick in until 2030, and that Beijing has a long history of finding
ways to circumvent international promises.)
In all these ways, China has positioned itself to be seen as step-
ping into America’s vacuum. Shen Dingli emphasized this point
to me, saying that Trump’s hostility to multilateral institutions
such as the WTO and NATO has given China “a huge opportunity.”
With Trump in the White House, Xu Guoqi, a professor at
the University of Hong Kong, told me, the Chinese are enjoying
a “golden field for their propaganda.” At the same time, Trump’s
within and beyond the United States, has provided ample fod-
der for China to attack democracy and extol the one-party state.
power,” Xu explained. “In terms of soft power, Trump really
undermined it substantially.” Trump’s election gave the People’s
Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, the occasion to run a
series of commentaries arguing that the “crisis in capitalist soci-
eties” was “proof of the truth of Marxism and the superiority of
the socialist system.”
Such messages continued to gain force during Trump’s first
year in office, boosting not only Beijing’s standing internationally,
but the Communist Party’s claim to legitimacy among the

Chinese population. Xu describes Trump’s presidency as “a gift
for the current regime in China. Because of Trump, Xi Jinping’s
Chinese dream”—the resurgence of China’s dominance in world
affairs—“could be achievable now.”
U T J U S T A S Trump is different things to different
B Americans— a conservative, a populist, a strongman, a
clown—so, too, is he different things to different Chinese.
Notably, even as Beijing delights in outwitting Trump on the
global stage, many Chinese look upon the American president
with sincere admiration. In recent months, I’ve heard from Chi-
nese Trump fans of diverse backgrounds: a journalist, a rural
neo-Maoist, an accomplished academic, a highly paid program-
mer. One pajama- clad pensioner accosted me on the street to
inform me that every night he saluted a portrait of Trump he had
on his wall, along with images of Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
and Einstein.
Especially visible among Trump’s Chinese fans are those who
pride themselves on being well versed in American politics. Take
A RT/ P H OTO G R A P H Y C R E D I T
the online platform Zhihu, a Quora-like forum, where the topic
“Donald J. Trump” has garnered some 75,000 followers, nearly
half the total following for “America.” One survey suggests that
a number of pro-Trump Zhihu users attended college in the
U.S. The survey was small, but my own reporting has tended to
corroborate this. Those I spoke with said they formed negative
impressions of liberalism that helped push them toward Trump.
Like many of Trump’s American
supporters, they appreciated his
hatred of the pieties and shibbo-
leths of the educated American left.
Zhihu users vigorously debate
questions that would fit in well on
any right-wing platform in the U.S.
One page viewed 3.2 million times
asks: “Why do many Chinese look
down on Western baizuo who con-
sider themselves well-educated?”
(The slur literally means “white
left,” but is likened to “libtard” on
Zhihu.) Forums feature pictures of
Pepe the Frog, a symbol of the alt-
right, and of a “Liberal Jack-Ass”
captioned “Everything I don’t like,
must be banned. Everything I do
like is a human right and must be
paid for by others.”
Contempt for America’s cur-
rent brand of political correctness
is a recurring fixation, as are illegal
immigration, Islamist terrorism,
affirmative action, transgender
activism, and Hillary Clinton. One
Zhihu user I spoke with said he
supported Trump not because he
particularly liked him, but because
the style of today’s Democratic
Party “reminds us a lot of the Cul-
tural Revolution.”
Many Westerners living in
China are surprised to learn that
while public discourse is heav-
ily policed, with taboo views on
democracy or Mao Zedong harshly punished, Chinese people
can be startlingly frank in private conversation, voicing opinions
that many Americans would be afraid to express to one another
for fear of giving offense. People remark casually and candidly
on everything from a person’s weight gain or disability to the sup-
posed collective merits or deficiencies of certain ethnic groups.
This custom makes Trump’s attacks on political correctness
appealing to some Chinese, according to Yan Gu, a University of
Washington doctoral candidate studying authoritarianism who
has researched Chinese online opinion about Trump. Chinese
netizens “dislike political correctness and neo-liberal rhetoric,”
she told me, noting that “a large portion of Chinese online re-
sponse” to Obama was “quite racist”; one common slur referred
to him as “O-Black.” Sentiment about LGBT issues is rather
conservative in much of China, where electroshock therapy is
sometimes used as a “cure” for homosexuality.
Trump’s nationalist rhetoric and “strongman style” resonate
in China’s political culture, Yan noted. The country’s founding
emperor, Qin Shi Huang, is revered for uniting the nation, de-
spite his infamy for burning books and burying scholars alive.
Mao, who styled himself as a new emperor, squashed dissent
and spurred traumatic and violent campaigns against intellec-
tuals, teachers, and writers, but was idolized by many Chinese
and remains, in some quarters, a legend. Xi Jinping has, despite
his stolid exterior, proved to be China’s most hard-line leader in
decades, and his campaigns to curb foreign influence and vault
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 49
 Chinese companies to dominance in the industries of the future must ‘improve himself, order his home, govern the country, and
have contributed to his popular appeal. bring peace.’ A happy, united family is an indicator of a talented
This helps explain why a portion of pro-Trump sentiment in politician.” Online, she noted, Chinese have praised Trump for
China comes from a surprising point on the political spectrum: raising successful sons and daughters, while Hillary Clinton is
the nationalist extreme left, an odd ally for the capitalist billion- mocked for her husband’s affair.
aire. Trump’s populist rhetoric and imprecations of the global Trump’s obsession with “winning” also comports with the
elite have crossover appeal for Mao nostalgists such as Zhang winner-take-all attitude of the elite in today’s China, which is
Hongliang, a firebrand writer known as the “Red Tank Driver.” less communist than ruthlessly Darwinian. Many successful Chi-
As he wrote on his Weibo social-media account, “In the history nese believe that “their own success is the result of their own ef-
of mankind, only two people have proposed that the masses forts and natural abilities, and those who fail in competition did
must overthrow the social establishment, one is Mao Zedong, so because of laziness or other defects,” a commentator named
the other is Trump.” Zhao Lingmin wrote just before the 2016 U.S. presidential elec-
A scholar who is politically moderate confided privately that tion in the Chinese edition of the Financial Times. Winners may
he “likes Trump very much,” in part because of his similarities be cruel, opportunistic, or corrupt, but they are winners, and
to Xi. “China’s proposed ‘national rejuvenation’ and Trump’s therefore they deserve respect. Even Trump’s initial inheritance
‘Make America great again’ are the same,” he said. In fact, one from his father doesn’t detract from his success, in this view.
could make the case that the slogan Xi embraced as the core Rather, it demonstrates his stewardship of the family name
of his Chinese dream anticipated Trump’s. Though its official and his skill in transforming it into a global brand. As Swallow
translation is “The great revival of the Chinese nation,” an X. Yan, a politically active entrepreneur who has advised Chinese
equally accurate rendition would be financiers on Trump, told me, “Chinese
“Make China great again.” people admire success. They look down
And so while the outward differ- on losers. If you choose the wrong guy,
ences between Trump and Xi are stark, that is stupid. You are losing face.”
there may be a reason the two leaders “In the history Finally, however overheated Trump’s
professed to feel personal warmth at of mankind, early China-bashing may have been, the
their meeting last spring at Mar-a-Lago, only two people Chinese seem to have long identified
in Florida, and again at their summit in him as someone they could do business
Beijing, where Trump boasted of their
have proposed with, much as they have done business
chemistry. Both are revanchist leaders, that the masses with other strongmen, such as Vladimir
denouncing the supposedly venal elite must overthrow Putin and Rodrigo Duterte, despite pur-
from which they sprang, and claiming the social suing divergent or conflicting interests.
to stand between their country and cer- Unlike previous U.S. presidents, Trump
tain disaster.
establishment, is relatively unconcerned with staking
“Trump’s Republican Party,” Shen one is Mao out a moral high ground, or criticizing
told me, “ought to change its name to Zedong, the other countries’ corruption or failings
the Communists.” other is Trump.” regarding human rights and democracy.
Instead, Trump is transactional.
H I S I S W H E R E these two very Hoping for cooperation on North

T different images of Trump—as

someone the Chinese feel they can
manipulate and as someone who genuinely appeals to them—
converge. Whether eliciting respect or scorn, Trump makes a
certain intuitive sense in China. In fact, he might make more
sense to the Chinese than he does to much of Washington: His
unabashed nationalism; rough-hewn arriviste manners; and un-
apologetic mingling of family, business, and politics make him
akin to some newly minted provincial tycoon. In this respect he
is less shocking or threatening than commonplace: He’s simply
what Chinese call a tuhao, another bumptious billionaire.
While Trump’s continued promotion of his business empire
and elevation of his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared
Kushner, to political power have raised alarm in the United States,
such blurring of lines is the norm in China. Even Xi, whom many
Chinese seem to regard as corruption-free, has relatives who
allegedly amassed huge fortunes while he rose through the ranks.
Likewise, family members of Wen Jiabao, known as the “people’s
premier” during his decade in power starting in the early 2000s, “Chinese characteristics.” Whether they consider him a global
reportedly piled up several billion dollars during his tenure.
Indeed, Trump’s ferocious loyalty to his clan contributes
to his appeal, as it resonates with traditional Chinese values
of good leadership, Yan Gu, the University of Washington
researcher, told me: “It is a Confucian belief that a great person
Korea, he gave Beijing a better deal on
trade. When Beijing didn’t seem to be
cooperating enough, he agreed to sell arms to Taiwan. This
brand of pragmatic diplomacy, in which relationships hinge
on calibrated, concrete bargains that can be altered as condi-
tions change, mirrors Beijing’s way of operating. Although such
a contingent approach to relationships entails risks—bilateral
cooperation could always collapse as soon as one side feels
cheated—it’s a game that China is comfortable playing. With
Hillary Clinton, who was, rightly or wrongly, believed to be
fundamentally inhospitable to Beijing, things could have been
very different. “If Hillary was president of the United States, I
can guarantee relations with China would be much worse,” said
Xu, the University of Hong Kong professor.
In other words, the “America first” president is in some re-
spects not only amenable to the People’s Republic of China; one
could go so far as to argue that he is the first American president
with (to borrow a favorite Chinese Communist Party phrase)
blunderer or a strong leader, a businessman or a family man, Chi-
nese look at Donald Trump and see someone they recognize—
and believe they can do business with.
Benjamin Carlson is a writer and consultant in Beijing.

50 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
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How Will We Feed the New Global Middle Class?

52 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
In 2050 the world population will be 10 billion.
Can everyone eat without destroying the Earth? BY CHARLE S C. MANN

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ULISES FARIÑAS

T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 53
 All parents remember the moment when they
first held their children—the tiny crumpled face,
an entire new person, emerging from the hos-
pital blanket. I extended my hands and took my
daughter in my arms. I was so overwhelmed
that I could hardly think. ¶ Afterward I wandered
outside so that mother and child could rest. It
was three in the morning, late February in New
England. There was ice on the sidewalk and
a cold drizzle in the air. As I stepped from the
curb, a thought popped into my head: When
my daughter is my age, almost 10 billion people
will be walking the Earth. I stopped midstride. I
thought, How is that going to work? ¶ In 1970,
when I was in high school, about one out of
every four people was hungry—“undernourished,”
to use the term preferred today by the United
Nations. Today the proportion has fallen to
roughly one out of 10. In those four-plus decades,
the global average life span has, astoundingly,
risen by more than 11 years; most of the increase
occurred in poor places. Hundreds of millions
of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have
lifted themselves from destitution into some-
thing like the middle class. This enrichment has
not occurred evenly or equitably: Millions upon
millions are not prosperous. Still, nothing like this
surge of well-being has ever happened before.
No one knows whether the rise can continue, or
whether our current affluence can be sustained.
Today the world has about 7.6 billion inhabitants. Most demog-
raphers believe that by about 2050, that number will reach 10 bil-
lion or a bit less. Around this time, our population will probably
begin to level off. As a species, we will be at about “replacement
level”: On average, each couple will have just enough children
to replace themselves. All the while, economists say, the world’s
development should continue, however unevenly. The implication
is that when my daughter is my age, a sizable percentage of the
world’s 10 billion people will be middle-class.
Like other parents, I want my children to be comfortable
in their adult lives. But in the hospital parking lot, this sud-
denly seemed unlikely. Ten billion mouths, I thought. Three
billion more middle-class appetites. How can they possibly
54 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
be satisfied? But that is only part of the
question. The full question is: How can
we provide for everyone without making
the planet uninhabitable?
Bitter Rivals
While my children were growing up, I took
advantage of journalistic assignments to
speak about these questions, from time
to time, with experts in Europe, Asia, and
the Americas. As the conversations accu-
mulated, the responses seemed to fall into
two broad categories, each associated (at
least in my mind) with one of two people,
both of them Americans who lived in the
20th century. The two people were barely
acquainted and had little regard for each
other’s work. But they were largely respon-
sible for the creation of the basic intellec-
tual blueprints that institutions around
the world use today for understanding our
environmental dilemmas. Unfortunately,
their blueprints offer radically different
answers to the question of survival.
The two people were William Vogt and
Norman Borlaug.
Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic
ideas for the modern environmental
movement. In particular, he founded
what the Hampshire College population
researcher Betsy Hartmann has called
“apocalyptic environmentalism”—the
belief that unless humankind drastically
reduces consumption and limits popula-
tion, it will ravage global ecosystems. In
best-selling books and powerful speeches,
Vogt argued that affluence is not our great-
est achievement but our biggest problem.
If we continue taking more than the Earth
can give, he said, the unavoidable result
will be devastation on a global scale. Cut
back! Cut back! was his mantra.
Borlaug, born 12 years after Vogt, has become the emblem of
“techno-optimism”—the view that science and technology, prop-
erly applied, will let us produce a way out of our predicament.
He was the best-known figure in the research that in the 1960s
created the Green Revolution, the combination of high-yielding
crop varieties and agronomic techniques that increased grain
harvests around the world, helping to avert tens of millions of
deaths from hunger. To Borlaug, affluence was not the problem
but the solution. Only by getting richer and more knowledgeable
can humankind create the science that will resolve our environ-
mental dilemmas. Innovate! Innovate! was his cry.
Both men thought of themselves as using new scientific knowl-
edge to face a planetary crisis. But that is where the similarity ends.
For Borlaug, human ingenuity was the solution
to our problems. One example: By using the
advanced methods of the Green Revolution
a bus racing through an impenetrable fog.
to increase per-acre yields, he argued, farmers
would not have to plant as many acres, an idea
researchers now call the “Borlaug hypothesis.” reversal of humanity’s fortunes.
Vogt’s views were the opposite: The solution,
he said, was to use ecological knowledge to
get smaller. Rather than grow more grain to
produce more meat, humankind should, as
his followers say, “eat lower on the food chain,”
to lighten the burden on Earth’s ecosystems. This is where Vogt
differed from his predecessor, Robert Malthus, who famously pre-
dicted that societies would inevitably run out of food because they
would always have too many children. Vogt, shifting the argument,
said that we may be able to grow enough food, but at the cost of
wrecking the world’s ecosystems.
I think of the adherents of these two perspectives as “Wizards”
and “Prophets.” Wizards, following Borlaug’s model, unveil
technological fixes; Prophets, looking to Vogt, decry the conse-
quences of our heedlessness.
Borlaug and Vogt traveled in the same orbit for decades, but
rarely acknowledged each other. Their first and only meeting, in
the mid-1940s, led to disagreement—immediately afterward,
Vogt tried to get Borlaug’s work shut down. So far as I know, they
never spoke afterward. Each referred to the other’s ideas in public
addresses, but never attached a name. Instead, Vogt rebuked the
anonymous “deluded” scientists who were actually aggravating
our problems. Borlaug branded his opponents “Luddites.”
Both men are dead now, but the dispute between their disci-
ples has only become more vehement. Wizards view the Prophets’
emphasis on cutting back as intellectually dishonest, indifferent to
the poor, even racist (because most of the world’s hungry are non-
Caucasian). Following Vogt, they say, is a path toward regression,
narrowness, poverty, and hunger—toward a world where billions
live in misery despite the scientific knowledge that could free them.
Prophets sneer that the Wizards’ faith in human resourcefulness
is unthinking, ignorant, even driven by greed (because refusing
to push beyond ecological limits will cut into corporate profits).
High-intensity, Borlaug-style industrial farming, Prophets say,
may pay off in the short run, but in the long run will make the day
of ecological reckoning hit harder. The ruination of soil and water
by heedless overuse will lead to environmental collapse, which will
in turn create worldwide social convulsion. Wizards reply: That’s
exactly the global humanitarian crisis we’re preventing! As the finger- for months on end. But he succeeded by the mid-’50s in breeding
pointing has escalated, conversations about the environment have
turned into dueling monologues, each side unwilling to engage
with the other.
Which might be all right, if we weren’t discussing the fate of
our children.
It is as if humankind were packed into
Somewhere ahead is a cliff: a calamitous
The Roads to Hell
Vogt entered history in 1948, when he published Road to Survival,
the first modern we’re-all-going-to-hell book. It contained the
foundational argument of today’s environmental movement:
carrying capacity. Often called by other names—“ecological
limits,” “planetary boundaries”—carrying capacity posits that
every ecosystem has a limit to what it can produce. Exceed that
limit for too long and the ecosystem will be ruined. As human
numbers increase, Road to Survival said, our demands for food
will exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity. The results will be
catastrophic: erosion, desertification, soil exhaustion, species
extinction, and water contamination that will, sooner or later,
lead to massive famines. Embraced by writers like Rachel Car-
son (the author of Silent Spring and one of Vogt’s friends) and Paul
Ehrlich (the author of The Population Bomb), Vogt’s arguments
about exceeding limits became the wellspring of today’s globe-
spanning environmental movement—the only enduring ideology
to emerge from the past century.
When Road to Survival appeared, Borlaug was a young plant
pathologist working in a faltering program to improve Mexican
agriculture. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the project
focused on helping the nation’s poor corn farmers. Borlaug was
in Mexico for a small side project that involved wheat—or rather,
black stem rust, a fungus that is wheat’s oldest and worst predator
(the Romans made sacrifices to propitiate the god of stem rust).
Cold usually killed stem rust in the United States, but it was con-
stantly present in warmer Mexico, and every spring winds drove
it across the border to reinfect U.S. wheat fields.
The sole Rockefeller researcher working on wheat, Borlaug
was given so little money that he had to sleep in sheds and fields
wheat that was resistant to many strains of rust. Not only that,
he then created wheat that was much shorter than usual—what
became known as “semi-dwarf ” wheat. In the past, when wheat
was heavily fertilized, it had grown so fast that its stalks became
spindly and fell over in the wind. The plants, unable to pull
themselves erect, had rotted and died. Borlaug’s shorter, stouter
wheat could absorb large doses of fertilizer and channel the extra
growth into grain rather than roots or stalk. In early tests, farmers
sometimes harvested literally 10 times as much grain from their
fields. Yields climbed at such a rate that in 1968 a USAID official
called the rise the Green Revolution, thus naming the phenom-
enon that would come to define the 20th century.
The Green Revolution had its most dramatic effects in
Asia, where in 1962 the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 55
 William Vogt

Foundation opened the International Rice Research Institute

(IRRI) in the Philippines. At the time, at least half of Asia lived in
hunger and want; farm yields in many places were stagnant or
falling. Governments that had only recently thrown off colonial-
ism were battling communist insurgencies, most notably in Viet-
nam. U.S. leaders believed the appeal of communism lay in its
promise of a better future. Washington wanted to demonstrate
that development occurred best under capitalism. IRRI’s hope
was that top research teams would transform Asia by rapidly
introducing modern rice agriculture—“a Manhattan Project for
food,” in the historian Nick Cullather’s phrase.
Following Borlaug’s lead, IRRI researchers developed new,
high-yielding rice varieties. These swept through Asia in the ’70s
and ’80s, nearly tripling rice harvests. More than 80 percent of the
rice grown in Asia today originated at IRRI. Even though the con-
tinent’s population has soared, Asian men, women, and children
consume an average of 30 percent more calories than they did
when IRRI was founded. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta;
shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-jammed streets ablaze
with neon—all were built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.
Were the Prophets disproved? Was carrying capacity a chi-
mera? No. As Vogt had predicted, the enormous jump in produc-
tivity led to enormous environmental damage: drained aquifers,
fertilizer runoff, aquatic dead zones, and
degraded and waterlogged soils. Worse in a
human sense, the rapid increase in productiv-
ity made rural land more valuable. Suddenly it
was worth stealing—and rural elites in many Affluence is not our greatest
places did just that, throwing poor farmers
off their land. The Prophets argued that the achievement but our biggest problem.
Green Revolution would merely postpone the
hunger crisis; it was a one-time lucky break,
rather than a permanent solution. And our
rising numbers and wealth mean that, just as
the Prophets said, our harvests will have to jump again—a second see that as a route to further overwhelming the planet’s carrying
Green Revolution, the Wizards add. capacity. We must go in the opposite direction, they say: use less
Even though the global population in 2050 will be just 25 per- land, waste less water, stop pouring chemicals into both.
cent higher than it is now, typical projections claim that farmers It is as if humankind were packed into a bus racing through an
will have to boost food output by 50 to 100 percent. The main rea- impenetrable fog. Somewhere ahead is a cliff: a calamitous rever-
son is that increased affluence has always multiplied the demand sal of humanity’s fortunes. Nobody can see exactly where it is,
for animal products such as cheese, dairy, fish, and especially but everyone knows that at some point the bus will have to turn.
meat—and growing feed for animals requires much more land, Problem is, Wizards and Prophets disagree about which way to
water, and energy than producing food simply by growing and yank the wheel. Each is certain that following the other’s ideas
eating plants. Exactly how much more meat tomorrow’s billions will send the bus over the cliff. As they squabble, the number of
will want to consume is unpredictable, but if they are anywhere passengers keeps rising.
near as carnivorous as today’s Westerners, the task will be huge.
And, Prophets warn, so will the planetary disasters that will come
of trying to satisfy the world’s desire for burgers and bacon: rav-
aged landscapes, struggles over water, and land grabs that leave The Story of Nitrogen
millions of farmers in poor countries with no means of survival.
What to do? Some of the strategies that were available during
the first Green Revolution aren’t anymore. Farmers can’t plant Almost everybody eats every day, but too few of us give any
much more land, because almost every accessible acre of arable thought to how that happens. If agricultural history were
soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased; required in schools, more people would know the name of Jus-
it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of tus von Liebig, who in the mid-19th century established that the
Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans. Irri- amount of nitrogen in the soil controls the rate of plant growth.
gation, too, cannot be greatly expanded—most land that can Historians of science have charged Liebig with faking his data
be irrigated already is. Wizards think the best course is to use and stealing others’ ideas—accurately, so far as I can tell. But
genetic modification to create more-productive crops. Prophets he was also a visionary who profoundly changed the human

56 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C

Norman Borlaug
species’ relationship with nature. Smarmy but farsighted, Liebig
imagined a new kind of agriculture: farming as a branch of chem-
istry and physics. Soil was just a base with the physical attributes
necessary to hold roots. Pour in nitrogen-containing compounds—
factory-made fertilizer—and gigantic harvests would automati-
cally follow. In today’s terms, Liebig was taking the first steps
toward chemically regulated industrial agriculture—an early
version of Wizardly thought.
But there was no obvious way to manufacture the nitrog-
D E N V E R P U B L I C L I B R A R Y, W E S T E R N H I S T O R Y P H O T O G R A P H I C C O L L E C T I O N S ;
enous substances that feed plants. That technology was pro-
vided before and during the First World War by two German
chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. Their subsequent Nobel
Prizes were richly deserved: The Haber-Bosch process, as it
is called, was arguably the most consequential technological
innovation of the 20th century. Today the Haber-Bosch process
is responsible for almost all of the world’s synthetic fertilizer.
A little more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is
devoted to it. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam has
noted, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can
COURTESY OF ROCKEFELLER ARCHIVE CENTER
grow.” The environmental scientist Vaclav Smil has estimated
that nitrogen fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process accounts
for “the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world’s popula-
tion.” More than 3 billion men, women, and children—an
incomprehensibly vast cloud of hopes, fears, memories, and
dreams—owe their existence to two obscure German chemists.
Hard on the heels of the gains came the losses. About 40 per-
cent of the fertilizer applied in the past 60 years was not absorbed
by plants. Instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the
air in the form of nitrous oxides. Fertilizer flushed into water still
fertilizes: It boosts the growth of algae, weeds, and other aquatic
organisms. When these die, they fall to the floor of the river, lake,
or ocean, where microbes consume their remains. So rapidly do
the microbes grow on the manna of dead algae and weeds that
their respiration drains oxygen from the lower depths, killing off
most other life. Nitrogen from Midwestern farms flows down
the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico every summer, creating an
oxygen desert that in 2016 covered almost 7,000 square miles.
The next year a still larger dead zone—23,000 square miles—was
mapped in the Bay of Bengal, off the east coast of India.
Rising into the air, nitrous oxides from fertilizers is a major
cause of pollution. High in the stratosphere, it combines with and
neutralizes the planet’s ozone, which guards life on the surface by
blocking cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. Were it not for climate
change, suggests the science writer Oliver Morton, the spread of
nitrogen’s empire would probably be our biggest ecological worry.
Passionate resistance to that empire sprang up even before
Haber and Bosch became Nobel laureates. Its leader was an
English farm boy named Albert Howard (1873–1947), who
spent most of his career as British India’s official imperial eco-
nomic botanist. Individually and together, Howard and his wife,
Gabrielle, a Cambridge-educated plant physiologist, spent their
time in India breeding new varieties of wheat and tobacco,
developing novel types of plows, and testing the results of pro-
viding oxen with a superhealthy diet. By the end of the First
World War, they were convinced that soil was not simply a base
for chemical additives. It was an intricate living system that
required a wildly complex mix of nutrients in plant and animal
waste: harvest leftovers, manure. The Howards summed up
their ideas in what they called the Law of Return: “the faithful
return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal, and human
wastes.” We depend on plants, plants depend on soil, and soil
depends on us. Howard’s 1943 Agricultural Testament became
the founding document of the organic movement.
Wizards attacked Howard and Jerome I. Rodale—a hard-
scrabble New York–born entrepreneur, publisher, playwright, gar-
dening theorist, and food experimenter who publicized Howard’s
ideas through books and magazines—as charlatans and crackpots.
It is true that their zeal was inspired by a near-religious faith in
a limit-bound natural order. But when Howard lauded the living
nature of the soil, he was referring to the community of soil organ-
isms, the dynamic relations between plant roots and the earth
around them, and the physical structure of humus, which stick-
ily binds together soil particles into airy crumbs that hold water
instead of letting it run through. All of this was very real, and all of
it was unknown when Liebig shaped the basic ideas behind chemi-
cal agriculture. The claim Howard made in his many books and
speeches that industrial farming was depopulating the country-
side and disrupting an older way of life was accurate, too, though
his opponents disagreed with him about whether this was a bad
thing. Nowadays the Prophets’ fears about industrial agriculture’s
exhausting the soil seem prescient: A landmark 2011 study from
the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization concluded
that up to a third of the world’s cropland is degraded.
At first, reconciling the two points of view might have been
possible. One can imagine Borlaugian Wizards considering
manure and other natural soil inputs, and Vogtian Prophets will-
ing to use chemicals as a supplement to good soil practice. But
that didn’t happen. Hurling insults, the two sides moved further
apart. They set in motion a battle that has continued into the
21st century—and become ever more intense with the ubiquity
of genetically modified crops. That battle is not just between
two philosophies, two approaches to technology, two ways of
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 57
thinking how best to increase the food supply for a growing pop- to form a compound that is then pumped into special, rubisco-
ulation. It is about whether the tools we choose will ensure the filled cells deep in the leaf. These cells have almost no oxygen,
survival of the planet or hasten its destruction. so rubisco can’t bumblingly grab the wrong molecule. The
end result is exactly the same sugars, starches, and cellulose
that ordinary photosynthesis produces, except much faster.
“Not One of Evolution’s C4 plants need less water and fertilizer than ordinary plants,
because they don’t waste water on rubisco’s mistakes. In the
Finest Efforts” sort of convergence that makes biologists snap to attention, C4
photosynthesis has arisen independently more than 60 times.
Corn, tumbleweed, crabgrass, sugarcane, and Bermuda grass—
All the while that Wizards were championing synthetic fertilizer all of these very different plants evolved C4 photosynthesis.
and Prophets were denouncing it, they were united in ignorance: In the botanical equivalent of a moonshot, scientists from
Nobody knew why plants were so dependent on nitrogen. Only around the world are trying to convert rice into a C4 plant—one that
after the Second World War did scientists discover that plants would grow faster, require less water and fertilizer, and produce
need nitrogen chiefly to make a protein called rubisco, a prima more grain. The scope and audacity of the project are hard to
donna in the dance of interactions that is photosynthesis. overstate. Rice is the world’s most important foodstuff, the staple
In photosynthesis, as children learn in school, plants use energy crop for more than half the global population, a food so embed-
from the sun to tear apart carbon dioxide and water, blending their ded in Asian culture that the words rice and meal are variants of
constituents into the compounds necessary to make roots, stems, each other in both Chinese and Japanese. Nobody can predict
leaves, and seeds. Rubisco is an enzyme that plays a key role in the with confidence how much more rice farmers will need to grow
process. Enzymes are biological catalysts. Like jaywalking pedes- by 2050, but estimates range up to a 40 percent rise, driven by
trians who cause automobile accidents but escape untouched, both increasing population numbers and increasing affluence,
enzymes cause biochemical reactions to
occur but are unchanged by those reac-
tions. Rubisco takes carbon dioxide from
the air, inserts it into the maelstrom of
photosynthesis, then goes back for more.
Because these movements are central
to the process, photosynthesis walks at Rather than tinker
the speed of rubisco. with individual genes,
Alas, rubisco is, by biological stan-
dards, a sluggard, a lazybones, a couch the scientists are trying
potato. Whereas typical enzyme mol- to refashion
ecules catalyze thousands of reactions
a second, rubisco molecules deign to photosynthesis.
involve themselves with just two or
three a second. Worse, rubisco is inept.
As many as two out of every five times,
rubisco fumblingly picks up oxygen
instead of carbon dioxide, causing the
chain of reactions in photosynthesis to break down and have to which permits formerly poor people to switch to rice from less
restart, wasting energy and water. Years ago I talked with biolo- prestigious staples such as millet and sweet potato. Meanwhile,
gists about photosynthesis for a magazine article. Not one had a the land available to plant rice is shrinking as cities expand into
good word to say about rubisco. “Nearly the world’s worst, most the countryside, thirsty people drain rivers, farmers switch to
incompetent enzyme,” said one researcher. “Not one of evolu- more-profitable crops, and climate change creates deserts from
tion’s finest efforts,” said another. To overcome rubisco’s lassitude farmland. Running short of rice would be a human catastrophe
and maladroitness, plants make a lot of it, requiring a lot of nitro- with consequences that would ripple around the world.
gen to do so. As much as half of the protein in many plant leaves, by The C4 Rice Consortium is an attempt to ensure that that
weight, is rubisco—it is often said to be the world’s most abundant never happens. Funded largely by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun-
protein. One estimate is that plants and microorganisms contain dation, the consortium is the world’s most ambitious genetic-
more than 11 pounds of rubisco for every person on Earth. engineering project. But the term genetic engineering does not
Evolution, one would think, should have improved rubisco. capture the project’s scope. The genetic engineering that appears
No such luck. But it did produce a work-around: C4 photo- in news reports typically involves big companies sticking individ-
synthesis (C4 refers to a four-carbon molecule involved in the ual packets of genetic material, usually from a foreign species, into
scheme). At once a biochemical kludge and a clever mechanism a crop. The paradigmatic example is Monsanto’s Roundup Ready
for turbocharging plant growth, C4 photosynthesis consists of a soybean, which contains a snippet of DNA from a bacterium that
wholesale reorganization of leaf anatomy. was found in a Louisiana waste pond. That snippet makes the plant
When carbon dioxide comes into a C4 leaf, it is initially assemble a chemical compound in its leaves and stems that blocks
grabbed not by rubisco but by a different enzyme that uses it the effects of Roundup, Monsanto’s widely used herbicide. The

58 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
foreign gene lets farmers spray Roundup on their soy fields, killing
weeds but leaving the crop unharmed. Except for making a single
tasteless, odorless, nontoxic protein, Roundup Ready soybeans
are otherwise identical to ordinary soybeans.
What the C4 Rice Consortium is trying to do with rice bears
the same resemblance to typical genetically modified crops as
a Boeing 787 does to a paper airplane. Rather than tinker with
individual genes in order to monetize seeds, the scientists are
trying to refashion photosynthesis, one of the most fundamental
processes of life. Because C4 has evolved in so many different
species, scientists believe that most plants must have precur-
sor C4 genes. The hope is that rice is one of these, and that the
consortium can identify and awaken its dormant C4 genes—
following a path evolution has taken many times before. Ideally,
researchers would switch on sleeping chunks of genetic material
already in rice (or use very similar genes from related species that
are close cousins but easier to work with) to create, in effect, a
new and more productive species. Common rice, Oryza sativa,
will become something else: Oryza nova, say. No company will
profit from the result; the International Rice Research Institute,
where much of the research takes place, will give away seeds for
the modified grain, as it did with Green Revolution rice.
When I visited IRRI, 35 miles southeast of downtown
Manila, scores of people were doing what science does best:
breaking a problem into individual pieces, then attacking the
pieces. Some were sprouting rice in petri dishes. Others were
trying to find chance variations in existing rice strains that
might be helpful. Still others were studying a model organ-
ism, a C4 species of grass called Setaria viridis. Fast-growing
and able to be grown in soil, not paddies, Setaria is easier to
work with in the lab than rice. There were experiments to
measure differences in photosynthetic chemicals, in the rates of
growth of different varieties, in the transmission of biochemical
markers. Half a dozen people in white coats were sorting seeds
on a big table, grain by grain. More were in fields outside, tending
experimental rice paddies. All of the appurtenances of contem-
porary biology were in evidence: flatscreen monitors, humming
refrigerators and freezers, tables full of beakers of recombinant
goo, Dilbert and XKCD cartoons taped to whiteboards, a United
Nations of graduate students a-gossip in the cafeteria, air condi-
tioners whooshing in a row outside the windows.
Directing the C4 Rice Consortium is Jane Langdale, a
molecular geneticist at Oxford’s Department of Plant Sci-
ences. Initial research, she told me, suggests that about a dozen
genes play a major part in leaf structure, and perhaps another
10 genes have an equivalent role in the biochemistry. All must
be activated in a way that does not affect the plant’s existing,
desirable qualities and that allows the genes to coordinate their
actions. The next, equally arduous step would be breeding rice
varieties that can channel the extra growth provided by C4
photosynthesis into additional grains, rather than roots or stalk.
All the while, varieties must be disease-resistant, easy to grow,
and palatable for their intended audience, in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America.
“I think it can all happen, but it might not,” Langdale said.
She was quick to point out that even if C4 rice runs into insur-
mountable obstacles, it is not the only biological moonshot. Self-
fertilizing maize, wheat that can grow in salt water, enhanced
soil-microbial ecosystems—all are being researched. The
odds that any one of these projects will succeed may be
small, the idea goes, but the odds that all of them will fail
are equally small. The Wizardly process begun by Borlaug
is, in Langdale’s view, still going strong.
The Luddites’ Moonshot
For as long as Wizards and Prophets have been arguing about
feeding the world, Wizards have charged that Prophet-style
agriculture simply cannot produce enough food for tomorrow.
In the past 20 years, scores of research teams have appraised
the relative contributions of industrial and organic agricul-
ture. These inquiries in turn have been gathered together and
assessed, a procedure that is fraught with difficulty: Research-
ers use different definitions of organic, compare different kinds
of farms, and include different costs in their analyses. Nonethe-
less, every attempt to combine and compare data that I know of
has shown that Prophet-style farms yield fewer calories per acre
than do Wizard-style farms—sometimes by a little, sometimes
by quite a lot. The implications are obvious, Wizards say. If farm-
ers must grow twice as much food to feed the 10 billion, follow-
ing the ecosystem-conserving rules of Sir Albert Howard ties
their hands.
Prophets smite their brows at this logic. To their minds, evalu-
ating farm systems wholly in terms of calories per acre is folly.
It doesn’t include the sort of costs identified by Vogt: fertilizer
runoff, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction,
and pesticide and antibiotic overuse. It doesn’t account for the
destruction of rural communities. It doesn’t consider whether
the food is tasty and nutritious.
Wizards respond that C4 rice will use less fertilizer and water
to produce every calorie—it will be better for the environment
than conventional crops. That’s like trying to put out fires you
started by dousing them with less gasoline! the Prophets say. Just eat
less meat! To Wizards, the idea of making farms diverse in a way
that mimics natural ecosystems is hooey: only hyperintensive,
industrial-scale agriculture using superproductive genetically
modified crops can feed tomorrow’s world.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 59
 Productivity? the Prophets reply. We have moonshots of our own!
And in fact, they do.
Wheat, rice, maize, oats, barley, rye, and the other common
cereals are annuals, which need to be planted anew every year.
By contrast, the wild grasses that used to fill the prairie are peren- I visited Stephen S. Jones of Washington State University, he
nials: plants that come back summer after summer, for as long
as a decade. Because perennial grasses build up root systems
that reach deep into the ground, they hold on to soil better and
are less dependent on surface rainwater and nutrients—that is,
irrigation and artificial fertilizer—than annual grasses. Many of
them are also more disease-resistant. Not needing to build up
new roots every spring, perennials emerge from the soil earlier
and faster than annuals. And because they don’t die in the win-
ter, they keep photosynthesizing in the fall, when annuals stop.
Effectively, they have a longer growing season. They produce
food year after year with much less plowing-caused erosion.
They could be just as productive as Green Revolution–style grain,
Prophets say, but without ruining land, sucking up scarce water,
or requiring heavy doses of polluting, energy-intensive fertilizer.
Echoing Borlaug’s program in Mexico, the Rodale Institute, the
country’s oldest organization that researches organic agriculture,
gathered 250 samples of intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrum
intermedium) in the late 1980s. A perennial cousin to bread wheat,
wheatgrass was introduced to the Western Hemisphere from Asia
in the 1930s as fodder for farm animals. Working with U.S. Depart-
ment of Agriculture researchers, the Rodale Institute’s Peggy
Wagoner, a pioneering plant breeder and agricultural researcher,
planted samples, measured their yields, and crossbred the best
performers in an attempt to make a commercially viable perennial.
Wagoner and the Rodale Institute passed the baton in 2002 to the
Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, a nonprofit agricultural-research
center dedicated to replacing conventional agriculture with pro-
cesses akin to those that occur in natural ecosystems. The Land
Institute, collaborating with other researchers, has been develop-
ing wheatgrass ever since. It has even given its new variety of inter- don’t know why this alternative is not considered,” Botoni said.
mediate wheatgrass a trade name: Kernza.
Like C4 rice, wheatgrass may not fulfill its originators’ hopes. “seems easier than breeding entirely new species.”
Wheatgrass kernels are one-quarter the size of wheat kernels,
sometimes smaller, and have a thicker layer of bran. Unlike wheat,
wheatgrass grows into a dark, dense mass of foliage that covers the
field; the thick layer of vegetation protects the soil and keeps out
weeds, but it also reduces the amount of grain that the plant pro-
duces. To make wheatgrass useful to farmers, breeders will have
to increase kernel size, alter the plant’s architecture, and improve
its bread-making qualities. The work has been slow.
Because wheatgrass is a perennial, it must be eval-
uated over years, rather than a single season. The
Land Institute hopes to have field-ready, bread-
worthy wheatgrass with kernels that are twice their
current size (if still half the size of wheat’s) in the Farming is a kind of useful drudgery
2020s, though nothing is guaranteed.
Domesticating wheatgrass is the long game.
Other plant breeders have been trying for a reduced as much as possible
shortcut: creating a hybrid of bread wheat and
wheatgrass, hoping to marry the former’s large,
plentiful grain and the latter’s disease resistance
and perennial life cycle. The two species produce
viable offspring just often enough that biolo-
gists in North America, Germany, and the Soviet
60 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
Union tried unsuccessfully for decades in the mid-1900s to
breed useful hybrids. Bolstered by developments in biology, the
Land Institute, together with researchers in the Pacific North-
west and Australia, began anew at the turn of this century. When
and his colleagues had just suggested a scientific name for the
newly developed and tested hybrid: Tritipyrum aaseae (the spe-
cies name honors the pioneering cereal geneticist Hannah Aase).
Much work remains; Jones told me that he hoped bread from
T. aaseae would be ready for my daughter’s children.
African and Latin American researchers scratch their heads
when they hear about these projects. Breeding perennial grains
is the hard way for Prophets to raise harvests, says Edwige Botoni,
a researcher at the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought
Control in the Sahel, in Burkina Faso. Botoni gave a lot of thought
to the problem of feeding people from low-quality land while
traveling along the edge of the Sahara. One part of the answer,
she told me, would be to emulate the farms that flourish in
tropical places such as Nigeria and Brazil. Whereas farmers in
the temperate zones focus on cereals, tropical growers focus on
tubers and trees, both of which are generally more productive
than cereals.
Consider cassava, a big tuber also known as manioc, mogo,
and yuca. The 11th-most-important crop in the world in terms
of production, it is grown in wide swathes of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. The edible part grows underground; no mat-
ter how big the tuber, the plant will never fall over. On a
per-acre basis, cassava harvests far outstrip those of wheat
and other cereals. The comparison is unfair, because cas-
sava tubers contain more water than wheat kernels. But even
when this is taken into account, cassava produces many more
calories per acre than wheat. (The potato is a northern equiva-
lent. The average 2016 U.S. potato yield was 43,700 pounds
per acre, more than 10 times the equivalent figure for wheat.) “I
Although cassava is unfamiliar to many cultures, introducing it
Much the same is true for tree crops. A mature McIntosh
apple tree might grow 350 to 550 pounds of apples a year. Orchard
growers commonly plant 200 to 250 trees per acre. In good years
this can work out to 35 to 65 tons of fruit per acre. The equivalent
figure for wheat, by contrast, is about a ton and a half. As with
cassava and potatoes, apples contain more water than wheat
does—but the caloric yield per acre is still higher. Even papayas
that should be eased and
to maximize individual liberty.
and bananas are more productive than wheat. So are some nuts,
like chestnuts. Apples, chestnuts, and papayas cannot make
crusty baguettes, crunchy tortillas, or cloud-light chiffon cakes,
but most grain today is destined for highly processed substances
like animal feed, breakfast cereal, sweet syrups, and ethanol—
and tree and tuber crops can be readily deployed for those.
Am I arguing that farmers around the world should replace their
plots of wheat, rice, and maize with fields of cassava, potato, and
sweet potato and orchards of bananas, apples, and chestnuts? No.
The argument is rather that Prophets have multiple ways to meet
tomorrow’s needs. These alternative paths are difficult, but so is
the Wizards’ path exemplified in C4 rice. The greatest obstacle for
Prophets is something else: labor.
The Right
Way to Live
Since the end of the Second World War, most national govern-
ments have intentionally directed labor away from agriculture
(Communist China was long an exception). The goal was to con-
solidate and mechanize farms, which would increase harvests
and reduce costs, especially for labor. Farmworkers, no longer
needed, would move to the cities, where they could get better-
paying jobs in factories. In the Borlaugian ideal, both the remain-
ing farm owners and the factory workers would earn more, the
former by growing more and better crops, the latter by obtaining
better-paying jobs in industry. The nation as a whole would ben-
efit: increased exports from industry and agriculture, cheaper
food in the cities, a plentiful labor supply.
There were downsides: Cities in developing nations acquired
entire slums full of displaced families. And in many areas, includ-
ing most of the developed world, the countryside was emptied—
exactly what Borlaugians intended, as part of the goal of freeing
agriculture workers to pursue their dreams. In the United States,
the proportion of the workforce employed in agriculture went
from 21.5 percent in 1930 to 1.9 percent in 2000; the number
of farms fell by almost two-thirds. The average size of the sur-
viving farms increased to compensate for the smaller number.
Meanwhile, states around the world established networks of tax
incentives, loan plans, training programs, and direct subsidies
to help big farmers acquire large-scale farm machinery, stock up
on chemicals, and grow certain government-favored crops for
export. Because these systems remain in effect, Vogtian farmers
are swimming against the tide.
To Vogtians, the best agriculture takes care of the soil first and
foremost, a goal that entails smaller patches of multiple crops—
difficult to accomplish when concentrating on the mass produc-
tion of a single crop. Truly extending agriculture that does this
would require bringing back at least some of the people whose
parents and grandparents left the countryside. Providing these
workers with a decent living would drive up costs. Some labor-
sparing mechanization is possible, but no small farmer I have
spoken with thinks that it would be possible to shrink the labor
force to the level seen in big industrial operations. The whole
system can grow only with a wall-to-wall rewrite of the legal
G O AT O N A P I L E O F S C R A P L U M B E R
The goat lowers his head like a fur-covered anvil,
as if he knows all things in the world change.
His eyes are bisected by a horizon line of yellow
light.
You’re wondering what might happen if you move
closer.
There’s a language we speak to ourselves and one
we use for others.
I told you, he’s lowered his head.
Nevertheless, you can see for yourself he’s
chewing.
What he swallows becomes his rumination.
I too was attracted to someone I did not
understand.
With each other we were bestial, that’s not too
strong a word.
Although at first, at first, when our foreheads
touched, we were curious.
— Michael Collier
Michael Collier’s seventh poetry collection, My Bishop
and Other Poems, will be published this year.
system that encourages the use of labor. Such large shifts in social
arrangements are not easily accomplished.
And here is the origin of the decades-long dispute between
Wizards and Prophets. Although the argument is couched in
terms of calories per acre and ecosystem conservation, the dis-
agreement at bottom is about the nature of agriculture—and,
with it, the best form of society. To Borlaugians, farming is a kind
of useful drudgery that should be eased and reduced as much
as possible to maximize individual liberty. To Vogtians, agricul-
ture is about maintaining a set of communities, ecological and
human, that have cradled life since the first agricultural revolu-
tion, 10,000-plus years ago. It can be drudgery, but it is also work
that reinforces the human connection to the Earth. The two argu-
ments are like skew lines, not on the same plane.
My daughter is 19 now, a sophomore in college. In 2050, she
will be middle-aged. It will be up to her generation to set up the
institutions, laws, and customs that will provide for basic human
needs in the world of 10 billion. Every generation decides the
future, but the choices made by my children’s generation will
resonate for as long as demographers can foresee. Wizard or
Prophet? The choice will be less about what this generation
thinks is feasible than what it thinks is good.
Charles C. Mann is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and the
author of 1491. This article is adapted from his most recent book,
The Wizard and the Prophet.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 61
AMERICAN

62 62T H E AMTAL RA CN HT I 2C0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C

 HUSTLER
OLIGARCHS, SHADY DEALS, FOREIGN MONEY—HOW
PAUL MANAFORT HELPED CORRUPT WASHINGTON AND LAID
THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE SUBVERSION OF AMERICAN POLITICS
By

FRANKLIN FOER
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 63

I.
The
WISDOM
of FRIENDS
THE CLINIC PERMITTED PAUL MANAFORT one 10-minute call
each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Ari-
zona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,”
his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring
of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few
months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica,
that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she
texted Andrea.
His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a
devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily
on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been
the chief political strategist to the man who became the presi-
dent of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed
a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with
his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of
course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally
serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his depu-
ties, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists,
“You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long
time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government struc-
ture … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of
Americans— oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim
to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The
power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his
recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in
havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.
Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make
a country ripe for revolution. And in the early months of 2014,
64 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square,
and swept his patron from power. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych
sought protective shelter in Russia. Manafort avoided any harm
by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. But in his
Kiev office, he’d left behind a safe filled with papers that he would
not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands.
Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and
which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. After
the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former
minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn’t needed to
run for their lives. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at
age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh
clients, hustling without any apparent luck. Andrea noted her
father’s “tight cash flow state,” texting Jessica, “He is suddenly
extremely cheap.” His change in spending habits was dampening
her wedding plans. For her “wedding weekend kick off ” party,
he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated
a line item for ice.
He seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to access his off-
shore accounts; an FBI investigation scrutinizing his work in
Ukraine had begun not long
after Yanukovych’s fall. Mean-
while, a Russian oligarch named
Oleg Deripaska had been after
Manafort to explain what had
happened to an $18.9 million
investment in a Ukrainian com-
pany that Manafort had claimed
to have made on his behalf.
Manafort had known Deri-
paska for years, so he surely
understood the oligarch’s history.
Deripaska had won his fortune by
prevailing in the so-called alumi-
num wars of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most
violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet
industry. In 2006, the U.S. State Department had revoked Deripas-
ka’s visa, reportedly out of concern over his ties to organized crime
(which he has denied). Despite Deripaska’s reputation, or perhaps
because of it, Manafort had been dodging the oligarch’s attempts
to contact him. As Deripaska’s lawyers informed a court in 2014
while attempting to claw back their client’s money, “It appears that
Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared.”
N
I N E M O N T H S A F T E R the Ukrainian revolution,
Manafort’s family life also went into crisis. The nature of his
home life can be observed in detail because Andrea’s text
messages were obtained last year by a “hacktivist collective”—
most likely Ukrainians furious with Manafort’s meddling in their
country—which posted the purloined material on the dark web.
The texts extend over four years (2012–16) and 6 million words.
Manafort has previously confirmed that his daughter’s phone
was hacked and acknowledged the authenticity of some texts
quoted by Politico and The New York Times. Manafort and Andrea
both declined to comment on this article. Jessica could not be
reached for comment.
Collectively, the texts show a sometimes fraught series of
relationships, by turns loving and manipulative. Manafort was
generous with his family financially—he’d invested millions
in Jessica’s film projects, and millions more in her now-ex-
husband’s real-estate ventures. But when he called home in
tears or threatened suicide in the spring of 2015, he was pleading
Previous spread photograph by MARK PETERSON/REDUX
for his marriage. The previous November, as the cache of texts
shows, his daughters had caught him in an affair with a woman
more than 30 years his junior. It was an expensive relationship.
According to the text messages, Manafort had rented his mistress
a $9,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan and a house in the
Hamptons, not far from his own. He had handed her an Ameri-
can Express card, which she’d used to good effect. “I only go to
luxury restaurants,” she once declared on a friend’s fledgling
podcast, speaking expansively about her photo posts on social
media: caviar, lobster, haute cuisine.
The affair had been an unexpected
revelation. Manafort had nursed his
wife after a horseback-riding acci-
dent had nearly killed her in 1997. “I
always marveled at how patient and MANAFORT
devoted he was with her during that
time,” an old friend of Manafort’s
HAD BEEN
told me. But after the exposure of his DODGING
infidelity, his wife had begun to con-
fess simmering marital issues to her
DERIPASKA.
daughters. Manafort had committed THE RUSSIAN
to couples therapy but, the texts reveal,
that hadn’t prevented him from con-
OLIGARCH
tinuing his affair. Because he clumsily WANTED
obscured his infidelity—and because
his mistress posted about their travels
TO KNOW
on Instagram—his family caught him WHAT HAD
again, six months later. He entered the BECOME OF
clinic in Arizona soon after, accord-
ing to Andrea’s texts. “My dad,” she HIS MONEY.
wrote, “is in the middle of a massive
emotional breakdown.”
Y T H E E A R LY M O N T H S of
B 2016, Manafort was back in greater Washington, his main
residence and the place where he’d begun his career
as a political consultant and lobbyist. But his attempts at
rehabilitation— of his family life, his career, his sense of self-
worth—continued. He began to make a different set of calls. As
he watched the U.S. presidential campaign take an unlikely turn,
he saw an opportunity, and he badly wanted in. He wrote Donald
Trump a crisp memo listing all the reasons he would be an ideal
campaign consigliere—and then implored mutual friends to tout
his skills to the ascendant candidate.
Shortly before the announcement of his job inside Trump’s
campaign, Manafort touched base with former colleagues to
let them know of his professional return. He exuded his char-
acteristic confidence, but they surprised him with doubts and
worries. Throughout his long career, Manafort had advised
powerful men—U.S. senators and foreign supreme command-
ers, imposing generals and presidents-for-life. He’d learned
how to soothe them, how to bend their intransigent wills with
his calmly delivered, diligently researched arguments. But
Manafort simply couldn’t accept the wisdom of his friends,
advice that he surely would have dispensed to anyone with a
history like his own—the imperative to shy away from unneces-
sary attention.
His friends, like all Republican political operatives of a certain
age, could recite the legend of Paul Manafort, which they did with
fascination, envy, and occasional disdain. When Manafort had
arrived in Washington in the 1970s, the place reveled in its shabby
glories, most notably a self-satisfied sense of high duty. Wealth
came in the form of Georgetown mansions, with their antique
imperfections and worn rugs projecting power so certain of itself,
it needn’t shout. But that old boarding-school establishment
wasn’t Manafort’s style. As he made a name for himself, he began
to dress differently than the Brooks Brothers crowd on K Street,
more European, with funky, colorful blazers and collarless shirts.
If he entertained the notion, say, of moving his backyard swim-
ming pool a few feet, nothing stopped him from the expense.
Colleagues, amused by his sartorial quirks and his cosmopolitan
lifestyle, referred to him as “the Count of Monte Cristo.”
His acts of rebellion were not merely aesthetic.
Manafort rewrote the rules of his adopted city. In the
early ’80s, he created a consulting firm that ignored
the conventions that had previously governed lobby-
ing. When it came to taking on new clients, he was
uninhibited by moral limits. In 2016, his friends might
not have known the specifics of his Cyprus accounts,
all the alleged off-the-books payments to him captured
in Cyrillic ledgers in Kiev. But they knew enough to
believe that he could never sustain the exposure that
comes with running a presidential campaign in the age
of opposition research and aggressive media. “The
risks couldn’t have been more obvious,” one friend
who attempted to dissuade him from the job told me.
But in his frayed state, these warnings failed to register.
When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump
campaign, on March 28, 2016, he represented a danger
not only to himself but to the political organization he
would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures
didn’t just contain scandalous stories, it evinced the
character of a man who would very likely commandeer
the campaign to serve his own interests, with little con-
cern for the collective consequences.
Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of for-
eign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail
into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of
the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment
in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Muel-
ler alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of
personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.)
But Manafort’s role in Mueller’s broader narrative remains care-
fully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal cor-
ruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a
corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of
helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting
coda to his life’s story.
I N T H E S P R I N G O F 1 9 7 7, a
II. The 28-year-old Paul Manafort sat
YOUNG MAN at a folding table in a hotel
suite in Memphis. Photos
and HIS from that time show him with
MACHINE a Tom Selleck mustache and
meaningful sideburns. He
was surrounded by phones
that he’d specially installed
for the weekend. The desk
held his copious binders, which he called “whip books.” Eight
hundred delegates had gathered to elect a new leader of the
Young Republicans organization, and Manafort, a budding king-
maker, had compiled a dossier on each one. Those whip books
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 65
provided the basis for deal making. To wheedle and cajole del- These ambitions left a trail of damage, including an Alabama
egates, it helped to have an idea of what job they wanted in return lawyer named Neal Acker. During the Memphis convention,
for their support. Acker had served as a loyal foot soldier on the Team, organizing
Control over the Young Republicans—a political and social the southern delegates on Stone’s behalf. In return, Manafort and
network for professionals ages 18 to 40—was a genuine prize in Stone had promised to throw the Team behind Acker’s campaign
those days. Presidential hopefuls sought to harness the group. to replace Stone as the head of the Young Republicans two years
This was still the era of brokered presidential conventions, and later, in 1979. Manafort would manage the campaign himself.
Young Republicans could descend in numbers sufficient to But as the moment of Acker’s coronation approached,
dominate the state meetings that selected delegates. In 1964, the Manafort suddenly conditioned his plan. If Acker wanted the
group’s efforts had arguably secured Barry Goldwater the GOP job, he had to swear loyalty to Reagan. When Acker ultimately
nomination; by the ’70s every Republican aspirant understood balked—he wanted to stay neutral—Manafort turned on him with
its potency. The attention paid by party elders yielded opportu- fury, “an unprecedented 11th-hour move,” the Associated Press
nities for Young Republican leaders. Patronage flowed in their reported. In the week leading up to the 1979 Young Republicans
direction. To seize the organization was to come into possession convention, Manafort and Stone set out to destroy Acker’s candi-
of a baby Tammany. dacy. At Manafort’s urging, the delegates who were pledged to
In Memphis, Manafort was working on behalf of his friend Acker bolted—and Manafort took over his opponent’s campaign.
Roger Stone, now best known as a pioneer in opposition research In a bravura projection of power that no one in the Reagan cam-
and a promiscuous purveyor of conspiracy theories. He man- paign could miss, Manafort swung the vote sharply against Acker,
aged Stone’s candidacy for chairman of the group. Stone, then 465 to 180. “It was one of the great fuck jobs,” a Manafort whip
24, reveled in the fact that he’d received his political education told me recently.
during Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972; he even Not long after that, Stone and Manafort won the crucial posi-
admitted to playing dirty tricks to benefit his idol. Stone and tions in the Reagan operation that they’d coveted. Stone directed
Manafort had met through College Republicans. They shared the campaign in the Northeast, Manafort in the South. The cam-
a home state, an affection for finely tailored power suits, and paign had its share of infighting; both men survived factional
a deeper love of power itself. Together, they campaigned with schisms and purges. “They were known as the Young Republican
gleeful ruthlessness. whizzes,” Jeff Bell told me. Their performance positioned them
Even at this early stage in his career, Manafort had acquired for inner-sanctum jobs in the Reagan administration, but they
a remarkable skill for managing a gathering of great size. He had even grander plans.
knew how to command an army of loyalists, who took his
orders via walkie-talkie. And he knew how to put on a show. In
Memphis that year, he rented a Mississippi River paddleboat for
a booze cruise and dispatched his whips to work over wavering Paul Manafort (left),
Roger Stone (center),
delegates within its floating confines. To the Young Republi- and Lee Atwater (right)
can elite, the faction Manafort controlled carried a name that in 1985. Their efforts
conveyed his expectation of unfailing loyalty: the Team. And in helped transform how
the face of the Team’s prowess, Stone’s rival eventually quit the Washington works.
race, mid- convention. “It’s all been scripted in the back room,”
he complained.
Manafort had been bred for politics. While he was in high
school, his father, Paul Manafort Sr., became the mayor of New
Britain, Connecticut, and Manafort Jr. gravitated toward the
action—joining a mock city council, campaigning for the guber-
natorial candidate Thomas Meskill as part of his Kiddie Corps.
For college and law school, he chose Georgetown University, a
taxi ride from the big time.
In the ’70s, the big time was embodied by James A. Baker III,
the shrewdest Republican insider of his generation. During the
epic Republican National Convention of 1976, Manafort holed
up with Baker in a trailer outside the Kemper Arena, in Kansas
City, Missouri. They attempted to protect Gerald Ford’s renomi-
nation bid in the face of Ronald Reagan’s energetic challenge;
Manafort wrangled delegates on Baker’s behalf. From Baker, he
learned the art of ostentatious humility, how to use the knife to
butter up and then stab in the back. “He was studying at the feet
of the master,” Jeff Bell, a Reagan campaign aide, remembers.
By the late ’70s, Manafort and Stone could foresee Ronald
Reagan’s ascendance, and both intended to become players in
his 1980 campaign. For Manafort, this was an audacious volte-
face. By flipping his allegiance from the former Ford faction, he
provoked suspicion among conservatives, who viewed him as a
rank opportunist. There was little denying that the Young Repub-
licans made an ideal vehicle for his ambitions.

66 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
 D U R I N G T H E Y E A R S that
III. The followed World War II,
FIRM Washington’s most effective
lobbyists transcended the
transactional nature of their
profession. Men such as Abe
Fortas, Clark Clifford, Bryce
Harlow, and Thomas Corcoran were known not as grubby
mercenaries but as elegant avatars of a permanent establish-
ment, lauded as “wise men.” Lobbying hardly carried a stigma,
because there was so little of it. When the legendary lawyer
Tommy Boggs registered himself as a lobbyist, in 1967, his
H A R RY N A LTC H AYA N / T H E WAS H I N GTO N P O ST /G E T T Y
name was only 64th on the active list. Businesses simply didn’t
consider lobbying a necessity. Three leading political scientists
had studied the profession in 1963 and concluded: “When we
look at the typical lobby, we find its opportunities to maneuver
are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, and its typical problem
not the influencing of Congressional votes but finding the cli-
ents and contributors to enable it to survive at all.”
On the cusp of the Reagan era, Republican lobbyists were
particularly enfeebled. Generations of Democratic majorities
in Congress had been terrible for business. The scant tribe of
Republican lobbyists working the cloakrooms included alumni
of the Nixon and Ford administrations; operating under the
shame-inducing cloud of Watergate, they were disinclined
toward either ambition or aggression.
This was the world that brash novices like Manafort and
Stone quickly came to dominate. The Reagan administration
“We’re getting into servicing what we sell,” Atwater told his
“ ‘They can’t lose. They have both sides.’ I kept saying, ‘How is it
A RT/ P H OTO G R A P H Y C R E D I T
represented a break with the old Republican establishment. After
the long expansion of the regulatory state, business finally had a
political partner eager to dismantle it—which generated unprece-
dented demand for lobbyists. Manafort could convincingly claim
to know the new administration better than anyone. During its
transition to power, he had run the Office of Personnel Manage-
ment, which meant that he’d stacked the incoming government
with his people. Along with Stone and Charlie Black, another
veteran of the Young Republican wars, he set up a firm, Black,
Manafort and Stone, which soon compiled an imposing client
list: Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute, Johnson & Johnson,
Trans World Airlines.
Whereas other firms had operated in specialized niches—
lobbying, consulting, public relations—Black, Manafort and
Stone bundled all those services under one roof, a deceptively
simple move that would eventually help transform Washington.
Time magazine deemed the operation “the ultimate supermarket
of influence peddling.” Fred Wertheimer, a good-government
advocate, described this expansive approach as “institutional-
ized conflict of interest.”
The linkage of lobbying to political consulting—the creation
of what’s now known as a double-breasted operation—was the
real breakthrough. Manafort’s was the first lobbying firm to also
house political consultants. (Legally, the two practices were
divided into different companies, but they shared the same
founding partners and the same office space.) One venture would
run campaigns; the other would turn around and lobby the poli-
ticians whom their colleagues had helped elect. The consulting
side hired the hard-edged operative Lee Atwater, notorious for
pioneering race-baiting tactics on behalf of Strom Thurmond.
friends. Just as imagined, the firm’s political clients (Jesse Helms,
Phil Gramm, Arlen Specter) became reliable warhorses when the
firm needed them to promote the agendas of its corporate clients.
With this evolution of the profession, the effectiveness and influ-
ence of lobbying grew in tandem.
In 1984, the firm reached across the aisle. It made a partner
of Peter Kelly, a former finance chairman of the Democratic
National Committee, who had earned the loyalty of lawmakers
by raising millions for their campaigns. Some members of the firm
worked for Democratic Senate candidates in Louisiana, Vermont,
and Florida, even as operatives down the hall worked for their
Republican foes. “People said, ‘It’s un-American,’ ” Kelly told me.
un-American to win?’ ” This sense of invincibility permeated the
lobbying operation too. When Congress passed tax-reform legisla-
tion in 1986, the firm managed to get one special rule inserted that
saved Chrysler-Mitsubishi $58 million; it wrangled another clause
that reaped Johnson & Johnson $38 million in savings. Newsweek
pronounced the firm “the hottest shop in town.”
Demand for its services rose to such heights that the firm
engineered a virtual lock on the 1988 Republican primary.
Atwater became the chief strategist for George H. W. Bush;
Black worked with Bob Dole; Stone advised Jack Kemp. A con-
gressional staffer joked to Time, “Why have primaries for the
nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black,
Manafort and Stone and argue it out?” Manafort cultivated
this perception. In response to a questionnaire in The Washing-
ton Times, he declared Machiavelli the person he would most
like to meet.
Despite his young age, Manafort projected the sort of confi-
dence that inspires others to have confidence, a demeanor often
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 67
 likened to that of a news anchor. “He is authoritative, and you
never see a chink in the armor,” one of his longtime deputies,
Philip Griffin, told me. Manafort wrote well, especially in pro-
posals to prospective clients, and excelled at thinking strate-
gically. Name-dropping never substituted for concrete steps
that would bolster a client. “If politics has done anything, it’s
taught us to treat everything as a campaign,” he once declared.
He toiled for clients with unflagging intensity. His wife once
quipped, according to the text messages, that Andrea was
conceived between conference calls. He “hung up the phone,
looked at his watch, and said, ‘Okay, we have 20 minutes until
the next one,’ ” Andrea wrote to her then-fiancé.
The firm exuded the decadent spirit of the 1980s. Each year,
it hosted a golf outing called Boodles, after the gin brand. “It
would have to move almost every year, because we weren’t
invited back,” John Donaldson, an old friend of Manafort’s
who worked at the firm, says. “A couple of women in the firm
complained that they weren’t ever invited. I told them they
didn’t want to be.” As the head of the firm’s “social committee,”
Manafort would supply a theme for the annual gatherings. His
masterwork was a three-year progression: “Excess,” followed
by “Exceed Excess,” capped by “Excess Is Best.”
Partners at the firm let it be known to The Washington Post that
they each intended to take home at
least $450,000 in 1986 (a little more
than $1 million today). “All of a sud-
den they came into a lot of money,
and I don’t think any of them were
used to earning the money that we MANAFORT’S
were earning,” Kelly said. Senior
partners were given luxury cars and
LOBBYING
a membership to the country club of FIRM EXUDED
their choosing. Manafort would fly
the Concorde to Europe and back
THE DECA-
as if it were the Acela to New York. DENT SPIRIT
“I must confess,” Atwater swooned
to The Washington Post, “after four
OF THE ’80S.
years on a government payroll, I’m “EXCESS
delighted with my new life style.” IS BEST”
The firm hired kids straight
out of college—“wheel men” in
WAS THE
the office vernacular—to drive the THEME OF
partners around town. When Roger
Stone’s old hero, Richard Nixon,
ONE ANNUAL
came to Washington, the wheel GATHERING.
men would shuttle him about.
Many of these young associates
would eventually climb the firm’s
ladder, and were often dispatched
to manage campaigns on the firm’s behalf. Climbing the ladder,
however, in most cases required passing what came to be known
as Manafort’s “loyalty tests”—challenging tasks that strayed out-
side the boundaries of standard professional commitment and
demonstrated the control that Manafort expected to exert over
the associates’ lives. At the last minute, he might ask a staffer to
entertain his visiting law-school buddies, never mind that the
staffer had never met them before. For one Saint Patrick’s Day
party, he gave two junior staffers 24 hours to track down a plausi-
ble impersonator of Billy Barty, the 3-foot-9-inch actor who made
movies with Mickey Rooney and Chevy Chase—which they did.
“This was in the days before the internet,” one of them told me.
“Can you imagine how hard that was?”
BY T H E 1 9 9 0 S , the double-
IV. digit list of registered lobbyists
MAN of the that Tommy Boggs had joined
back in 1967 had swelled to
WORLD more than 10,000. Black,
Manafort, Stone and Kelly
had greatly abetted that trans-
formation, and stood to profit
from the rising flood of corpo-
rate money into the capital. But by then, domestic politics had
begun to feel a little small, a bit too unexotic, for Paul Manafort,
whom Charlie Black described to me as a self-styled “adventurer.”
Manafort had long befriended ambitious young diplomats at
the trailhead to power, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud,
then the Saudi ambassador to Washington. When Bandar attended
the 1984 Republican National Convention, Manafort dedicated a
small group of advance men to smooth his way. Manafort arranged
for Bandar to arrive at the presidential entrance, then had him
whisked to seats in the vice-presidential box.
Foreign lobbying had certainly existed before the ’80s, but
it was limited in scale and operated under a penumbra of suspi-
cion. Just before World War II, Congress had passed the Foreign
Agents Registration Act, largely in response to the campaigns
orchestrated by Ivy Lee, an American publicist hired
by the German Dye Trust to soften the image of the
Third Reich. Congress hadn’t outlawed influence ped-
dling on behalf of foreign interests, but the practice sat
on the far fringes of K Street.
Paul Manafort helped change that. The Reagan
administration had remade the contours of the Cold
War, stepping up the fight against communism world-
wide by funding and training guerrilla armies and
right-wing military forces, such as the Nicaraguan
contras and the Afghan mujahideen. This strategy of
military outsourcing—the Reagan Doctrine—aimed to
overload the Soviet Union with confrontations that it
couldn’t sustain.
All of the money Congress began spending on anti-
communist proxies represented a vast opportunity.
Iron-fisted dictators and scruffy commandants around
the world hoped for a share of the largesse. To get it,
they needed help refining their image, so that Con-
gress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal
tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian
clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of
Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm would
arrange for image-buffing interviews on American
news programs; it would enlist allies in Congress to
unleash money. Back home, it would help regimes
acquire the whiff of democratic legitimacy that would bolster
their standing in Washington.
The firm won clients because it adeptly marketed its ties to the
Reagan administration, and then the George H. W. Bush adminis-
tration after that. In one proposal, reported in The New York Times
in 1988, the firm advertised its “personal relationships” with offi-
cials and promised to “upgrade” back channels “in the economic
and foreign policy spheres.” No doubt it helped to have a friend
in James Baker, especially after he became the secretary of state
under Bush. “Baker would send the firm clients,” Kelly remem-
bered. “He wanted us to help lead these guys in a better direction.”
But moral improvement never really figured into Manafort’s
calculus. “Generally speaking, I would focus on how to bring

68 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
 the general’s 1986 trip to New York
and Washington, Manafort and his
associates created what one maga-
zine called “Savimbi Chic.” Dressed
in a Nehru suit, Savimbi was driven
around in a stretch limousine and
housed in the Waldorf-Astoria and
the Grand Hotel, projecting an image
of refinement. The firm had assidu-
ously prepared him for the mission,
sending him monthly reports on the
poli tical climate in Washington.
According to The Washington Post,
“He was meticulously coached on
everything from how to answer his
critics to how to compliment his
Manafort with the
Republican patrons.” Savimbi emerged from his
presidential tour as a much-championed “free-
nominee Bob dom fighter.” When the neoconserva-
Dole at the 1996 tive icon Jeane Kirkpatrick introduced
GOP convention,
which Manafort
Savimbi at the American Enterprise
managed Institute, she declared that he was a
“linguist, philosopher, poet, politician,
warrior … one of the few authentic
heroes of our time.”
the client in sync with western European or American values,” This was a racket—Savimbi paid the firm $600,000 in 1985
Kelly told me. “Paul took the opposite approach.” (Kelly and alone—that Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly did its best to keep
Manafort have not spoken in recent years; the former sup- alive; the firm’s own business was tied to Savimbi’s continued
ported Hillary Clinton in the last presidential campaign.) In her rebellion against Angola’s leftist regime. As the country stood on
memoir, Riva Levinson, a managing director at the firm from the brink of peace talks in the late ’80s, after nearly 15 years of
1985 to 1995, wrote that when she protested to her boss that she bloody civil war, the firm helped secure fresh batches of arms
needed to believe in what she was doing, Manafort told her that for its client, emboldening Savimbi to push forward with his
it would “be my downfall in this business.” The firm’s client military campaign. Former Senator Bill Bradley wrote in his
base grew to include dictatorial governments in Nigeria, Kenya, memoir, “When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the
Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in
others. Manafort’s firm was a primary subject of scorn in a 1992 aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington
report issued by the Center for Public Integrity called “The lobbying firm.” The war continued for more than a decade, kill-
Torturers’ Lobby.” ing hundreds of thousands of Angolans.
The firm’s international business accelerated when the Phil-
ippines became a client, in 1985. President Ferdinand Marcos
desperately needed a patina of legitimacy: The 1983 assassi- “ PAU L’S N OT E S P EC I A L LY
nation of the chief opposition leader, Benigno Aquino Jr., had V. ideological,” his former
imperiled U.S. congressional support for his regime. Marcos
hired Manafort to lift his image; his wife, Imelda, personally
The FAMILY partner Charlie Black
told me recently. Many of
delivered an initial payment of $60,000 to the firm while on a
trip to the States. When Marcos called a snap election to prove
BUSINESS Manafort’s colleagues at
Black, Manafort, Stone and
his democratic bona fides in 1986, Manafort told Time, “What Kelly professed to believe in
we’ve tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and the conservative catechism.
ROBERT GAUTHIER/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY

not Mexico’s.” The quip was honest, if unintentionally so. In the
American political lexicon, Chicago-style elections were gener-
ally synonymous with mass voter fraud. The late pollster Warren
Mitofsky traveled to the Philippines with CBS News to set up and
conduct an exit poll for the election. When he returned, he told
the political scientist Sam Popkin the story of how a represen-
tative of Manafort’s firm had asked him, “What sort of margin
might make a Marcos victory legitimate?” The implication was
clear, Popkin told me: “How do we rig this thing and still satisfy
the Americans?”
The firm’s most successful right-wing makeover was of the
Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, a Maoist turned anti-
communist insurgent, whose army committed atrocities against
children and conscripted women into sexual slavery. During
Words like freedom and liberty flowed through their everyday mus-
ings. But Manafort seldom spoke of first principles or political ide-
als. He descends from a different kind of political lineage, and in
his formative experience one can see the makings of his worldview.
Back in the ’60s, Manafort’s hometown, New Britain, Con-
necticut, was known as Hardware City. It housed the factory that
turned out Stanley tools and was a tangle of ethnic enclaves—
Poles, Italians, Irish, Ukrainians. Nancy Johnson, who served
New Britain in Congress, told me that when she arrived in the city
during those years, she couldn’t believe how little it interacted
with the outside world. “It was a small city and very ingrown.
When my kids were in high school, the number of their class-
mates who hadn’t been to Hartford was stunning.” Hartford, the
state capital, is a 15-minute drive from New Britain.

T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 69
 THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BY

FORCES OF CHANGE:
What does the
future of mobility

The look like?

Four concurrent “future states”

Future
could emerge within a new mobility
ecosystem, emanating from the
intersection of who owns the vehicle and
who operates the vehicle (see figure 1).

of Fig. 1

Mobility
Four potential future states
Autonomous

3
The driverless
4
A new age of
revolution accessible autonomy
Vehicle Control

Low Asset efficiency High

THE ENTIRE WAY people and
goods travel from point A to
Assist

point B is changing, driven

by a series of converging
1
Incremental
2
A world of
technological and social trends. change car sharing
Driver

The result is the emergence of

Personal Shared
a new ecosystem of mobility Vehicle Ownership

that could offer faster, cheaper,

cleaner, safer, more efficient,
Extent to which vehicles are personally
and more customized travel. More on the future owned or shared:
While there is some uncertainty, states of mobility:
ż Depends upon personal preferences and economics
in particular about the speed of
Extent to which autonomous vehicle ż Higher degree of shared ownership increases
this transition, a fundamental technologies become pervasive: system-wide asset efficiency
shift is driving a move away ż Depends upon several key factors as catalysts
from personally owned, human- or deterrents—e.g., technology, regulation, Note: Fully autonomous drive means that
social acceptance the vehicle’s central processing unit has full
driven vehicles and toward a responsibility for controlling its operation and
future mobility system centered ż Vehicle technologies will increasingly become is inherently different from the most advanced
“smart”; the human-machine interface shifts form of driver assist. It is demarcated in the figure
around (but not exclusively toward greater machine control above with a clear dividing line (an “equator”).
composed of) driverless
vehicles and shared mobility.

Enabling seamless intermodal mobility

would require a future ecosystem that
is much more complex than today’s
For more, visit our extended automotive industry. Both
Future of Mobility collection: incumbents and disrupters are beginning
deloitte.com/insights/future-of-mobility to stake out positions, and in the process
providing the contours for how that
ecosystem might look (see figure 2).
 THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BY
Fig. 2
The future mobility ecosystem
Vehicle development
New products will likely emerge, from small
utilitarian autonomous “pods” to highly
customized, personally owned self-driving
cars. Self-driving technology will likely
infuse trains, buses, commercial trucks,
and other forms of transit, demanding
that developers and manufacturers
evolve their capabilities accordingly.
Enabling the in-vehicle
transit experience
“Experience enablers”—content providers,
in-vehicle service providers, data
and analytics companies, advertisers,
entertainment-equipment providers,
and social-media companies—will likely
clamor to make the in-transit experience
relaxing, productive, or entertaining.
Infrastructure enablers
Transit stations, roads, highways, waterways,
and public parking could become even more
interconnected as customers increasingly
expect multimodal transportation. A parallel
digital infrastructure could emerge that will
be every bit as crucial as roads and bridges.
Mobility management
The mobility adviser directly interfaces
with the customer, who would expect a
customized experience that relies on the
mobility assistant’s ability to execute trip
planning, adjust routes to allow for traffic
and disruptions, and handle payments.
Fleet operation is a second opportunity to
create value around mobility management.
Components
Digital
Infrastructure
Mobility adviser
In-transit vehicle
experience
Fleet operations
Facilitating
Ecosystems
Physical infrastructure
Energy infrastructure
Vehicles
What are the impacts of
the future of mobility?
The transition toward a new mobility ecosystem could have wide-
reaching impacts that span a host of industries and players:
1 4
Global automotive OEMs will likely need Cargo delivery and long-haul trucking
to expand their traditional capabilities, systems could become predominantly
collaborating with autonomous- driverless through daisy chains or
vehicle-technology suppliers, software remote operation.
developers, and others to provide a much
broader range of product choices. 5
Insurers, operating within a heavily
2 regulated environment, will likely have to
Automotive suppliers would have to continue supporting the classic insurance
adjust as OEMs transform. Selling parts, model, in which accidents are often the
components, and systems may result of driver error, while also adapting
be insufficient to deliver desired returns to an autonomous-drive world where
to shareholders. the risk is more technical, related to
systemic failure of a self-guided vehicle.
3
$A4A@=
ȃ
017 have shown to be adept 6
at building large, complex information The U.S. public sector will likely have
networks and operating systems, to figure out how to offset anticipated
introducing artificial intelligence to help declines in the more than $200 billion
minimize human error and randomness, annually generated from fuel taxes, public-
creating compelling environments that transportation fees, tolls, vehicle sales
drive consumer behavior, and creating taxes, municipal parking, and registration
digital communities. and licensing fees.1
As we saw, the future of mobility will likely affect far more than automakers—
industries from insurance and health care to energy and media should reconsider
how they create value in this emerging environment.
1Scott Corwin, Joe Vitale, Eamonn Kelly, and Elizabeth Cathles, The future of mobility: How
transportation technology and social trends are creating a new business ecosystem, Deloitte
University Press, September 24, 2015.
 In 1919, not long after the Manaforts emigrated from Naples,
the family founded a demolition company, New Britain House
Wrecking, which eventually became Manafort Brothers, a force
in local construction. When Manafort’s father, Paul Sr., ran for
mayor in 1965, he was a lonely Republican attempting to seize a
blue bastion. But he had the schmoozing gene, as well as an unmis-
takable fierceness. Paul Carver, a former New Britain City Council
member and a protégé of the old man, told me, “It was like going
to the bar with your grandfather. He would stick his hand out and
buy a round of drinks. He knew almost everybody in town.” Paul
Jr., known as P.J. to his friends, idolized his dad, plunging himself
into the campaign, whose success he would decades later describe
as “magic.” Over the years, he would remain a devoted son. All the
partners in his firm came to know his father, running into him at
parties that P.J. hosted in his Mount Vernon, Virginia, home. “He
was dedicated to him,” Nancy Johnson told me.
The elder Manafort’s outsize capacity for charm made
him the sort of figure whose blemishes tend to be wiped from
public memory. But in 1981, he was charged with perjury for tes-
timony that he had provided in a municipal corruption investi-
gation. New Britain police had been accused of casting a blind
eye toward illegal gambling in the city—and of tampering with
evidence to protect Joseph “Pippi” Guerriero, a member of the
DeCavalcante crime family.
Several investigations into the tampering drilled through New
Britain’s rotten government. The most devastating report came
from Palmer McGee, a Hartford lawyer hired by New Britain to
sort through its muck. In his findings, he pointed a finger straight
at Manafort Sr., calling him the person “most at fault.” Accord-
ing to the testimony of a whistle-blower,
Manafort had flatly announced that he
wanted to hire someone “flexible” to
manage his personnel office, a place
that would “not [be] 100 percent by the
rules.” The whistle-blower also testi-
fied that he had delivered an envelope
to Manafort’s home containing the
answers to the exam that aspiring police Manafort’s
officers had to pass—and that Manafort Hamptons estate
had given it to two candidates via a includes a putt-
relative. Manafort never denied receiv- ing green and a
basketball court.
ing the envelope but insisted that he’d He believed only
merely asked for “boning-up materials.” “suckers stay out
A statute of limitations precluded of debt,” a former
prosecutors from filing charges against colleague says.
Manafort for the alleged crime of
test-fixing—and ultimately he was never
convicted of perjury. But his arrest caused the Hartford Courant to
compile a list of dealings that reflected badly on him: “Throughout
his more than twenty years in public life, he has been the focus of
controversy, and several accusations of wrongdoing.” The litany
includes a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban
Development accusing him of steering contracts to Manafort
Brothers, whose stock he still owned while mayor. When investors
from Florida built a jai alai arena in Bridgeport—using the Team-
sters’ pension fund to finance the project—Manafort had “improp-
erly” finagled its environmental permit. His family business had
then inflated the fees for its work on the arena so that cash could
be kicked back to the Teamsters. (The business admitted to inflat-
ing its fees, but a grand jury declined to issue an indictment.) Even
before this scandal broke, a former mayor of New Britain blasted
Manafort for behavior that “violates the very essence of morality.”
72 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Wash-
ington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who
settle there. But what if that formulation gets the causation back-
wards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create
the so-called swamp? When Paul Manafort Jr. broke the rules,
when he operated outside of a moral code, he was really follow-
ing the example he knew best. As he later said of his work with
his father in an interview with a local Connecticut paper, “Some
of the skills that I learned there I still use today … That’s where
I cut my teeth.”
BY THE LATE 1980S, Manafort
VI. had a new friend from abroad,
AL ASSIR whom he mentioned to his
partners more than any other,
an arms dealer from Lebanon
named Abdul Rahman Al Assir.
“His name kept popping up,” Peter Kelly remembered. While Al
Assir never rated much attention in the American press, he had a
familial connection who did. He was, for a time, the brother-in-law
of the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the middleman used
in the arms-for-hostages scheme that became the Iran-Contra
scandal. In the early ’80s, Khashoggi was worth $4 billion; his biog-
raphy, published in 1986, was titled The Richest Man in the World.
GOOGLE MAPS
At the height of his wealth, Khashoggi spent $250,000 a day to
maintain his lifestyle—which reportedly included a dozen houses,
1,000 suits, a $70 million yacht, and a customized airplane, which
has been described as a “flying Las Vegas discotheque.”
Al Assir was the Khashoggi empire’s representative in Spain and
a broker of big weapons sales to African armies. He’d ensconced
himself among the rich and famous, the set that skied in Gstaad,
Switzerland, and summered in the south of France. The London-
based Arabic-language magazine Sourakia wrote, “The miracle of
Al Assir is that he will have lunch with Don Juan Carlos [the king of
Spain], dinner with Hassan II [the king of Morocco], and breakfast
the next day with Felipe González [the prime minister of Spain].”
Manafort suggested to his partners that Al Assir might
help connect the firm to clients around the world. He wanted
to increase the firm’s global reach. Manafort’s exploration of
the outermost moral frontiers of the influence business had
already exposed him to kleptocrats, thugs, and other dubious
characters. But none of these relationships imprinted them-
selves more deeply than his friendship and entrepreneurial
 partnership with Al Assir. By the ’90s, the two had begun to put
together big deals. One of the more noteworthy was an arms
sale they helped broker between France and Pakistan, lubri-
cated by bribes and kickbacks involving high-level officials in
both countries, that eventually led to murder allegations.
It all arguably began with a 1993 dinner hosted by Manafort in
his Virginia home and attended by Pakistan’s prime minister, Bena-
zir Bhutto. Bhutto had just returned to power after three years in
the opposition, and Manafort badly wanted her business. She knew
of him as a skilled manipulator of public opinion, and throughout
the meal, Manafort displayed his most strategic, most charming
self. One former Pakistani official who attended the dinner told
me that Bhutto came away determined to make use of his services.
She suggested that Manafort work with the Pakistani intelligence
service. Spooks in Islamabad had observed the international rush
to hire Washington lobbyists, and they had been clamoring for one
of their own.
At about that same time, Pakistan was looking to upgrade its
submarine fleet, and European arms contractors raced to hawk
their wares. In the end, France’s
state-owned manufacturer won the
contract—and Al Assir was added as
an intermediary at the last minute. An
ensuing scandal that is still unfolding,
some 20 years later, would entangle THE ARMS
both Al Assir and Manafort. It entailed
alleged kickbacks into the 1995 presi-
DEALER
dential campaign of Édouard Bal- AL ASSIR
ladur, apparently arranged by the
French defense minister. Al Assir
INTRODUCED
seems to have been a key conduit of MANAFORT
the kickbacks. Years later, in 2002, a
car bomb went off in Karachi, killing
TO AN ARIS-
11 French naval engineers in transit to TOCRATIC
the shipyard where the submarines
were being assembled, along with
WORLD THAT
three Pakistanis. One theory, fervently EXCEEDED
supported by some of the engineers’ ANYTHING
families, holds that the bombing was
orchestrated by Pakistani officials
HE HAD EVER
who were disgruntled that the bribes KNOWN.
promised to them as part of the deal
had never arrived.
Manafort was not a central fig-
ure in this scandal, and was never
charged with any wrongdoing. But as the former Pakistani offi-
cial told me, “He was an introducer—and he received a fee for his
part.” Documents show that Manafort earned at least $272,000
as a consultant to the Balladur campaign, although, as Manafort
later conceded to French investigators, it was Al Assir who actu-
ally paid him. (Balladur has denied any wrongdoing and doesn’t
recall Manafort working for him. Al Assir could not be reached
for comment on this story.)
Manafort and Al Assir were more than business partners.
“They were very brotherly,” one mutual acquaintance of theirs
told me. Manafort took Al Assir as his guest to George H. W. Bush’s
inauguration, in 1989. When Al Assir and his second wife had a
child, Manafort became the godfather. Their families vacationed
together near Cannes. Al Assir introduced Manafort to an aristo-
cratic world that exceeded anything he had ever known. “There’s
money, and there’s really big money,” a friend of Manafort’s
told me. “Paul became aware of the difference between making
$300,000 and $5 million. He discovered the south of France.
Al Assir would show him how to live that life.”
Colleagues at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly noticed
changes that accompanied the flowering of the friendship.
Manafort’s sartorial style began to pay homage to Al Assir, with
flourishes of the European dandy. Suddenly he started wearing
unconventional shirts and suede loafers without socks. In the
firm’s early years, Manafort had been a fixture of the office, a
general presiding over his headquarters. But now he frequently
flew off to France or Spain, collaborating with Al Assir on proj-
ects that remained a mystery to his subordinates, and even to his
partners. “Paul went off on different foreign things that none of
us knew about,” Peter Kelly told me.
Manafort’s lifestyle came to feature opulent touches that
stood out amid the relative fustiness of Washington. When
Andrea expressed an interest in horseback riding, Manafort
bought a farm near Palm Beach, then stocked it with specially
bred horses imported from Ireland, which required a full-time
staff to tend. John Donaldson, Manafort’s friend, recalls, “He
was competing with the Al Assirs of the world—and he
wanted to live in that lifestyle.”
There were always suspicions among Manafort’s
colleagues in the firm that he was making money for
himself without regard for his partners. Al Assir’s occa-
sional appearance in the international press lent these
suspicions weight. One deal brokered by Al Assir helped
crash a private bank in Lisbon. In 2002, he and Manafort
persuaded the bank to invest 57 million euros in a Puerto
Rican biometrics company. According to reporting by
the Portuguese newspaper Observador, Manafort was
the lead American investor in the company; his involve-
ment helped justify the bank’s investment, despite
evidence of the company’s faulty products and lax
accounting. Al Assir is alleged to have extracted bloated
commissions from the deal and to have pocketed some
of the bank’s loans. Manafort reportedly made $1.5 mil-
lion selling his shares of the biometrics firm before the
company eventually came tumbling down.
Stories about Manafort’s slipperiness have acquired
mythic status. In the summer of 2016, Politico’s Kenneth
Vogel, now with The New York Times, wrote a rigorous
exegesis of a long-standing rumor: Manafort was said
to have walked away with $10 million in cash from Fer-
dinand Marcos, money he promised he would deliver
to Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign (which itself
would have been illegal). Vogel relied in part on the 1996 memoir
of Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant and Reagan’s reelection-
campaign director. In the book, Rollins recounted a dinner-party
conversation with a member of the Filipino congress who claimed
to have personally given a suitcase of cash to a “well-known Wash-
ington power lobbyist” involved in the Marcos campaign. Rollins
would neither confirm nor deny that the lobbyist was Manafort,
though his description doesn’t leave much uncertainty, and he
conceded in an email that “it’s a pretty good guess.” Rollins admits
in his book to being “stunned” by what he heard—“not in a state of
total disbelief, though, because I knew the lobbyist well and I had
no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank.” This irked
Rollins greatly: “I ran the [Reagan] campaign for $75,000 a year,
and this guy got $10 million in cash.”
Manafort has always denied Rollins’s insinuation—“old stuff
that never had any legs,” he told Vogel. And as a practical matter,
it’s hard to imagine that anyone could stuff $10 million in a suitcase.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 73
 Still, Vogel found a raft of circumstantial evidence that suggested trailed that shift. His new firm found its way to a fresh set of titans,
the plausibility of the tale. When I asked Manafort’s former col- with the help of an heir to an ancient fortune.
leagues about the apocrypha, they couldn’t confirm the story. But In 2003, Rick Davis, a partner in Manafort’s new firm, was
some didn’t struggle to imagine it might be true, either. Even invited to the office of a hedge fund in Midtown Manhattan. The
though John Donaldson doubts the veracity of the tale, he told summons didn’t reveal the name of the man requesting his pres-
me that it persists because it reflects Manafort’s ethics. “I know ence. When Davis arrived, he found himself pumping the hand of
how Paul would view it. Paul would the Honorable Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild,
sit there and say, ‘These guys can’t the British-born financier known as Nat. Throughout his
get access to Reagan. I can get them young career, Nat had fascinated the London press with
access to Reagan. They want to give his love interests, his residences, and his shrewd invest-
$10 million to Reagan. Reagan can’t ments. For his 40th birthday, he threw himself a leg-
take $10 million. I’ll take the $10 mil- HAVING endary party in the Balkan state of Montenegro, which
lion. They think they’ll be getting their
influence. Everybody’s happy.’ ”
SPENT SO reportedly cost well over $1 million—a three-day festival
of hedonism, with palm trees imported from Uruguay.
Another alumnus of Manafort’s MUCH TIME Russian oligarchs were drawn to Rothschild, whose
firm answered my questions about
the Marcos money with an anec-
IN THE name connoted power—and he to them. “He likes this
wild world,” Anders Åslund, a friend of Rothschild’s,
dote. After the election of George COMPANY OF told me. Rothschild invested heavily in post-communist
H. W. Bush, Black, Manafort, Stone
and Kelly agreed to help organize
OLIGARCHS, economies and became a primary adviser (and a friend)
to the young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.
the inauguration festivities. The MANAFORT Rothschild and Deripaska fed off each other’s grand
firm commissioned a company from
Rhode Island to sell memorabilia on
DECIDED TO ambitions. Like a pair of old imperialists, they imagined
new, sympathetic governments across eastern Europe
the parade route—T-shirts, buttons, BECOME ONE that would accommodate and protect their invest-
and the like. After crews had taken HIMSELF. ments. Their project required the type of expertise
down the reviewing stand and swept that Manafort had spent years accumulating. In 2004,
up the debris, the alumnus recalled, a Rothschild hired Manafort’s new firm to resurrect the
vendor showed up in the office with a influence of an exiled Georgian politician, a former KGB
bag full of cash. To the disbelief of his operative and friend of Deripaska’s then living in Mos-
colleague, Manafort had arranged to take his own cut. “It was a cow. This made for a heavy lift because the operative had recently
Paul tax,” the former employee told me. “I guess he needed a new been accused in court as a central plotter in a conspiracy to assas-
deck. But this was classic: Somebody else does the work, and he sinate the country’s president, Eduard Shevardnadze. (He denied
walks away with the bag of cash.” involvement.) The rehabilitation scheme never fully developed,
Colleagues suspected the worst about Manafort because they but a few years later, Rick Davis triumphantly managed a referen-
had observed his growing mania for accumulating property, how dum campaign that resulted in the independence of Montenegro—
he’d bought second, third, and fourth homes. “He would buy a an effort that Deripaska funded with the hope of capturing the
house without ever seeing it,” one former colleague told me. His country’s aluminum industry.
Hamptons estate came with a putting green, a basketball court, Deripaska’s interests were not only financial. He was always
a pool, and gardens. “He believed that suckers stay out of debt,” looking to curry favor with the Russian state. An August 2007 email
the colleague told me. His unrestrained spending and pile of debt sent by Lauren Goodrich, an analyst for the global intelligence
required a perpetual search for bigger paydays and riskier ventures. firm Stratfor, and subsequently posted on WikiLeaks, described
In 1991, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly was purchased by Deripaska boasting to her about how he had set himself up “to be
the mega public-affairs firm Burson-Marsteller, the second-largest indispensable to Putin and the Kremlin.” This made good business
agency in the world. It was a moment of consolidation in the indus- sense, since he had witnessed the Kremlin expropriate the vast
try, where the biggest players came to understand how much empires of oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky who’d dared to
money could be made from the model that Manafort had created. challenge Putin. In fact, the Kremlin came to consider Deripaska
But nearly as soon as Burson acquired the firm, Tom Bell, the an essential proxy. When the United States denied Deripaska a
head of its Washington office, began to notice the ways in which visa, the Russians handed him a diplomatic passport, which per-
Manafort hadn’t played by the rules. He’d been operating as a free- mitted him to make his way to Washington and New York.
lancer, working on projects that never went to the bottom line. In Manafort understood how highly Deripaska valued his sym-
1995, Manafort left Burson. Taking a handful of colleagues with biotic relationship with the Kremlin. According to the Associated
him, he started a new firm—Davis, Manafort and Freedman—and a Press, he pitched a contract in 2005, proposing that Deripaska
new chapter, one that would see him enter the sphere of the Kremlin. finance an effort to “influence politics, business dealings and
news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet
Republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.”
D U R I N G T H E 1 9 8 0 s and (Deripaska says he never took Manafort up on this proposal.)
VII. ’90s, an arms dealer had The Kremlin’s grip on its old Soviet sphere was especially
The MASTER stood at the pinnacle of
global wealth. In the new
precarious in the early aughts. President George W. Bush’s
democratic agenda espoused an almost messianic sense of
of KIEV century, post-Soviet oligarchs how the United States could unleash a new age of freedom. The
climbed closer to that posi- grandiloquent American rhetoric posed an existential threat to
tion. Manafort’s ambitions entrenched rulers of the region who were friendly to Russia, and

74 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
 who had become rich by plundering state resources. Suddenly, After he hired Manafort, he invited U.S. Ambassador John Herbst
the threat of democratic revolution no longer felt theoretical. to his office, placed a binder containing Manafort’s strategy in
The risks of popular uprising were very much on Rothschild’s front of him, and announced, “I’m going with Washington.”
and Deripaska’s minds during the last months of 2004, when Manafort often justified his work in Ukraine by arguing that
they handed Manafort a specific task. Ukraine had descended he hoped to guide the country toward Europe and the West. But
into political crisis, one that jeopardized business interests his polling data suggested that Yanukovych should accentuate cul-
they’d already developed in the country (Rothschild had vari- tural divisions in the country, playing to the sense of victimization
ous private-equity investments; Deripaska had an aluminum felt by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. And sure enough, his
smelter). They sent Manafort to Kiev to understand how they clients railed against NATO expansion. When a U.S. diplomat dis-
might minimize the dangers. covered a rabidly anti-American speech on the Party of Regions’
Of all Paul Manafort’s foreign adventures, Ukraine most website, Manafort told him, “But it isn’t on the English version.”
sustained his attention, ultimately to the exclusion of his other Yanukovych’s party succeeded in the parliamentary elections
business. The country’s politics are hardly as simple as commonly beyond all expectations, and the oligarchs who’d funded it came
to regard Manafort with immense
respect. As a result, Manafort began
spending longer spans of time in
Ukraine. One of his greatest gifts
as a businessman was his audacity,
and his Ukrainian benefactors had
amassed enormous fortunes. The
outrageous amounts that Manafort
billed, sums far greater than any he
had previously received, seemed
perfectly normal. An associate of
Manafort’s described the system
this way: “Paul would ask for a big
sum,” Yanukovych would approve
it, and then his chief of staff “would
go to the other oligarchs and ask
them to kick in. ‘Hey, you need to
portrayed; corruption extends its tentacles into all the major par- pay a million.’ They would complain,
Ferdinand Marcos
ties. Still, the narrative of Manafort’s time in Ukraine isn’t terribly but Yanu kovych asked, so they
(left), Viktor Yanu-
complicated. He worked on behalf of a clique of former gangsters kovych (center), and would give.”
from the country’s east, oligarchs who felt linguistic and cultural Jonas Savimbi (right) When Yanukovych won the pres-
affinity to Russia, and who wanted political control of the entire are among the many idency in 2010, he gave Manafort
nation. When Manafort arrived, the candidate of this clique, Vik- strongmen whom “walk in” privileges, allowing him
Manafort has advised
tor Yanukovych, was facing allegations that he had tried to rig the and assisted.
to stroll into the inner sanctum of
2004 presidential election with fraud and intimidation, and pos- the presidential offices at any time.
sibly by poisoning his opponent with dioxin. He lost the election Yanukovych could be bullheaded,
anyway, despite having imported a slew of consultants from Mos- and as his presidency progressed,
cow. After that humiliating defeat, Yanukovych and the oligarchs he increasingly cut himself off from advisers. Manafort, how-
who’d supported him were desperate for a new guru. ever, knew how to change Yanukovych’s mind, using polling and
By the time Manafort first entertained the possibility of work- political arguments to make his case. Oleg Voloshyn, a former
AP; DMITRY AZAROV/KOMMERSANT PHOTO; SELW YN TAIT/GETT Y

ing with Yanukovych, the defeated candidate had just returned to spokesman in the foreign-affairs ministry, told me that his own
Kiev following a brief self-imposed exile at a Czech resort. They boss, the foreign minister, eventually turned to Manafort to
met at an old movie palace that had been converted into the carry messages and make arguments regarding foreign-policy
headquarters for his political organization, the Party of Regions. priorities on his behalf. “Yanu kovych would listen to him,”
When Manafort entered the grandiose building, the place was Voloshyn told me, “when our arguments were ignored.”
a mausoleum and Yanukovych a pariah. “People avoided him,”
Philip Griffin said. “He was radioactive.”
Manafort groomed Yanukovych to resemble, well, himself.
Åslund, who had advised the Ukrainian government on economic
VIII. BEFORE EVERYTHING
e x p l o d e d i n U k ra i n e ,
policy, told me, “Yanukovych and Manafort are almost exactly the
same size. So they are big, tall men. He got Yanukovych to wear
A REVERSAL Manafort saw the country as
his golden land, the greatest
the same suits as he did and to comb the hair backwards as he of FORTUNE of his opportunities. But his
does.” Yanukovych had been wooden in public and in private, but role as adviser, as powerful as
“Manafort taught him how to smile and how to do small talk.” And it was, never quite matched
he did it all quietly, “from a back seat. He did it very elegantly.” his own buccaneering sense
He also directed Yanukovych’s party to harp on a single theme of self. After spending so much time in the company of Rus-
each week—say, the sorry condition of pensioners. These were sian and Ukrainian oligarchs, he set out to become an oligarch
not the most-sophisticated techniques, but they had never been himself. Rick Davis declared their firm to be mostly “in the deal
deployed in Ukraine. Yanukovych was proud of his American turn. business,” according to James Harding’s 2008 book, Alpha Dogs:

T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 75
 The Americans Who Turned Political Spin Into a Global Business. explanation struck Deripaska’s lawyers as wildly implausible.
“The thing I love,” Davis said, “is that the political elites and the Deripaska began to publicly doubt whether Manafort had even
economic elites in every other country but the United States of bought the telecommunications company in the first place. “At
America are the same.” The elected officials and the people “run- present it seems that the Partnership never acquired any of the
ning the elections are the richest people in the country, who own Chorne More entities,” his lawyers argued.
all the assets.” All of the papers for the initial deal had included Rick Davis’s
In 2006, Rick Gates, who’d begun as a wheel man at the name. They suggested that he would serve as Manafort’s partner,
old firm, arrived in Kiev. (Gates did not respond to multiple and that shares would be divided evenly between the two. But
requests for comment on this article.) Manafort placed him at Davis knew nothing of the Chorne More deal. While Manafort
the helm of a new private-equity firm he’d created called Peri- had been putting together Pericles, Davis had been on leave
cles. He intended to raise $200 million to bankroll investments from Davis, Manafort and Freedman, running John McCain’s
in Ukraine and Russia. “It was a virgin market in virtually any 2008 presidential campaign. Because Davis’s connections to
industry you wanted to pick up,” Philip Griffin told me. Manafort and Deripaska had caused him a public-relations head-
Manafort had always intended to rely on financing from Oleg ache at the outset of the campaign, he’d kept a healthy distance
Deripaska to fund Pericles. In 2007, Manafort persuaded him to from both men. When Deripaska’s lawyers asked him about the
commit $100 million to the project, a sum that would have hardly money he supposedly owed their client, Davis was gobsmacked.
made a dent in the oligarch’s fortune. On the eve of the 2008 He soon discovered that Manafort had also registered a new
global financial crisis, he was worth $28 billion. company—Davis Manafort International—to continue trading
Deripaska handed his money to Paul Manafort because he on the old firm’s name, while cutting him out of consulting fees.
trusted him. Manafort repeatedly traveled to the oligarch’s Mos- Upon returning from the campaign, and witnessing the extent
cow office, where they would sit for hours and tour the business to which Manafort had abused his trust, Davis left the firm they
and political horizon of the former Eastern Bloc. Deripaska had had created together.
become a billionaire in his 30s, and acquired the noisy preten- Deripaska’s attorneys had leveled a serious allegation—and
sions of young wealth. He wanted to become the global face of true to his pattern, Manafort never filed a response. Those who
Russia, he said. But that would require overcoming the reputa- have known Manafort the longest suggest that this reflects his
tion that stalked him, and Manafort could help. In 2001, before tendency to run away from personal crises: “He’ll get on a jet
Manafort and Deripaska met, the World Economic Forum in and fly off to Hawaii—and will come back when everything
Davos had withdrawn its invitation to the oligarch, as a court blows over,” an old colleague told me, recalling Manafort’s
examined his alleged misdeeds in the course of erecting his response to a scandal in the late ’80s. But it was one thing to
empire. (The case was eventually dismissed.) Five years after the hide from reporters; it was another to hide from Oleg Deripaska.
Davos rejection, Rick Davis shepherded Deripaska around the Though no longer the ninth-richest man in the world, he was still
elite confab, taking him to a party brimming with U.S. senators, extremely powerful.
including John McCain.
For Pericles’s first deal, Manafort used Deripaska’s money
to buy a telecommunications firm in Odessa called Chorne
More (“Black Seas,” in English) at a cost of $18.9 million. He
Manafort (right)
also charged a staggering $7.35 million in management fees for at the 2016
overseeing the venture. Republican National
But months after the Chorne More purchase, the 2008 finan- Convention
cial crisis hit, gutting Deripaska’s net worth. It plummeted so far in Cleveland
that he needed a $4.5 billion bailout from the Russian state bank
to survive. The loan included an interest payment in the form of
abject humiliation: Putin traveled to one of Deripaska’s factories
and berated him on television.
As Deripaska’s world came crashing down, his representa-
tives asked Manafort to liquidate Pericles and give him back his
fair share. Manafort had little choice but to agree. But that prom-
ise never translated to action. An audit of Chorne More that Rick
Gates said was under way likewise never materialized. Then, in
2011, Manafort stopped responding to Deripaska’s investment
team altogether.
Deripaska wouldn’t let go of the notion that Manafort owed
him money. In 2015, his lawyers filed a motion in a Virginia court.
They wanted the authority to track down more information on
the deal, even though the initial papers for it had been filed in
the Cayman Islands. The lawyers had already managed to get
their hands on some of the documentation surrounding the deal,
and they had extracted a belated explanation of what had hap-
pened from Gates. According to a spokeswoman for Deripaska,
Gates said that Chorne More had defaulted on a $1 million loan
that it had taken out to pay for capital expenditures, allegedly
forfeiting the partnership’s entire investment in the process. This

76 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
 The fact is that by then, Manafort’s options were tightly
limited: Despite all the riches he had collected in Ukraine, it
is unlikely that he could have paid Deripaska back. For years,
according to his indictment, Manafort had found clever ways to
transfer money that he’d stashed in foreign havens to the U.S.
He’d used it to buy real estate, antique rugs, and fancy suits—all
relatively safe vehicles for repatriating cash without paying taxes
or declaring the manner in which it had been earned.
But in the summer of 2014, in the wake of the revolution that
deposed Viktor Yanukovych, the FBI began scrutinizing the
strongman’s finances. Manafort had stuck with Yanukovych as
the president had initiated criminal investigations of his politi-
cal opponents, opened the government’s coffers to his cronies,
and turned his country away from Europe and toward Russia.
He’d stuck with him to the gruesome end, amid growing popu-
lar unrest—right up to the slaughter of more than 100 protesters
by government forces on the Maidan. He’d remained faithful
to Yanukovych while large swathes of the strongman’s circle
abandoned him. Perhaps living so long in moral gray zones had
eroded Manafort’s capacity to appreciate the kind of ruler Yanu-
kovych was, or the lines he had crossed. (He is now being tried in
absentia in Ukraine for high treason, although he has denied any
culpability from his perch in Moscow.) The previous December,
as protesters had gathered on the Maidan, Manafort had texted
his daughter Andrea, “Obama’s approval ratings are lower than
MARK PETERSON/REDUX
[Yanukovych’s] and you don’t see him being ousted.”
The FBI investigation into Yanukovych’s finances came to
cover Manafort’s own dealings. Soon after the feds took an inter-
est, interviewing Manafort in July 2014, the repatriations ceased.
Meanwhile, Manafort struggled to collect the money owed him
by Yanukovych’s cronies. To finance his expensive life, he began
taking out loans against his real estate—some $15 million over
A RT/ P H OTO G R A P H Y C R E D I T
two years, his indictment says. This is not an uncommon tactic
among money launderers—a bank loan allows the launderer to
extract clean cash from property purchased with dirty money.
But according to the indictment, some of Manafort’s loans were
made on the basis of false information supplied to the bank in
order to inflate the sums available to him, suggesting the sever-
ity of his cash-flow problems. All of these loans would need to
be paid back, of course. And one way or another, he would need
to settle Deripaska’s bill.
“I REALLY NEED to get to”
IX. Trump, Manafort told an
The PRIZE old friend, the real-estate
magnate Tom Barrack, in
the early months of 2016.
Barrack, a confidante of
Trump for some 40 years,
had known Manafort even longer. When Manafort asked for Bar-
rack’s help grabbing Trump’s attention, he readily supplied it.
Manafort’s spell in the Arizona clinic had ended. It hadn’t
been a comfortable stay. After having acquired so many proper-
ties of his own, he had been forced to share a room with another
patient, according to Andrea’s texts. Despite his reticence about
his private life, he’d spent his days in group therapy—and he
claimed that it had changed him. “I have a real self awareness of
why I broke down,” he texted her.
Still, most of the proximate causes of his breakdown remained
in place. Once an indispensable man, he had not been missed
in professional circles. He was without a big-paying client, and
held heavy debts. His attempts to prove his entrepreneurial skills
had ended as expensive busts. Because of his biggest bust of all,
Deripaska was looking for him. “He has too many skel-
etons,” Andrea had written her sister soon after he had
entered the clinic, noting that his work in Ukraine was
legally dubious. “Don’t fool yourself,” she had texted
Jessica a few months before. “That money we have is
blood money.”
She had not forgiven him for his affair. She com-
plained to a cousin about her father’s treatment of her
mother. “We keep showing up and eating the lobster,”
she wrote. “Nothing changes.” But Manafort’s abil-
ity to provide lavishly for his family—a role he had
always played, whatever his other failings—had in fact
changed. The millions he’d invested in Jessica’s films
were gone; so, too, were the millions he’d blown on her
then-husband’s real-estate ventures.
With the arrival of Donald Trump, Manafort
smelled an opportunity to regain his losses, and to
return to relevance. It was, in some ways, perfect: The
campaign was a shambolic masterpiece of improvisa-
tion that required an infusion of technical knowledge
and establishment credibility.
Barrack forwarded to Trump’s team a memo
Manafort had written about why he was the ideal
match for the ascendant candidate. Old colleagues
describe Manafort as a master pitchman with a preter-
natural ability to read his audience. He told Trump that
he had “avoided the political establishment in Wash-
ington since 2005,” and described himself as a lifelong
enemy of Karl Rove, who represented the entrenched
party chieftains conspiring to dynamite Trump’s
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 77
nomination. In other words, to get back on the inside, Manafort
presented himself as the ultimate outsider—a strained case that
would strike Trump, and perhaps only Trump, as compelling.
Manafort could write such a calibrated pitch because he had
observed Trump over the decades. Back in the ’80s, his firm had
represented Trump when the mogul wanted to reroute planes
flying over Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach. Since 2006,
Manafort had kept a pied-à-terre in Trump Tower, where he
and Trump had occasionally seen each other and made small
talk. This exposure yielded perhaps another crucial insight:
Trump’s parsimony. When Manafort offered Trump his ser-
vices, he resisted his tendency to slap a big price tag on them; he
would provide his counsel, he said, free of charge. To his fam-
ily, Manafort described this decision as a matter of strategy: If
Trump viewed him as wealthy, then he would treat him as a near-
equal, not as a campaign parasite.
But Manafort must have also believed that money would
eventually come, just as it always had, from the influence he
would wield in the campaign, and exponentially more so if
Trump won. So might other favors and dispensations. These
notions were very likely what led him to reach out to Oleg Deri-
paska almost immediately upon securing a post within the cam-
paign, after having evaded him for
years. Through one of his old deputies,
a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilim-
nik, he sent along press clippings that
highlighted his new job. “How do we
use to get whole,” Manafort emailed MANAFORT
Kilimnik. “Has OVD operation seen?”
Manafort’s spokesman has acknowl-
REACHED
edged that the initials refer to Oleg OUT TO
Vladimirovich Deripaska. In the
course of the exchanges, Kilimnik
DERIPASKA
expressed optimism that “we will get ALMOST
back to the original relationship” with
the oligarch.
IMMEDIATELY
All of Manafort’s hopes, of course, UPON
proved to be pure fantasy. Instead SECURING
of becoming the biggest player in
Donald Trump’s Washington, he A POST
has emerged as a central villain in WITH
its central scandal. An ever-growing
pile of circumstantial evidence sug-
THE TRUMP
gests that the Trump campaign col- CAMPAIGN.
luded with Russian efforts to turn the
2016 presidential election in its favor.
Given Manafort’s long relationship
with close Kremlin allies including
Yanukovych and Deripaska, and in
particular his indebtedness to the latter, it is hard to imagine him
as either a naive or passive actor in such a scheme—although Deri-
paska denies knowledge of any plan by Manafort to get back into
his good graces. Manafort was in the room with Donald Trump Jr.
when a Russian lawyer and lobbyist descended on Trump Tower in
the summer of 2016, promising incriminating material on Hillary
Clinton. That same summer, the Trump campaign, with Manafort
as its manager, successfully changed the GOP’s platform, watering
down support for Ukraine’s pro-Western, post-Yanukovych gov-
ernment, a change welcomed by Russia and previously anathema
to Republicans. When the Department of Justice indicted Paul
Manafort in October—for failing to register as a foreign agent,
for hiding money abroad—its portrait of the man depicted both
78 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
avarice and desperation, someone who traffics in dark money and
dark causes. It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that Robert Muel-
ler, the special counsel, would treat Manafort’s banking practices
while in Ukraine as his first subject of public scrutiny, the obvious
starting point for his investigation. The sad truth is that all of the
damning information contained within the Mueller indictment
would have remained submerged if Manafort had withstood
the temptation to seek out a role in Trump’s campaign. Even if
his record had become known, it would have felt unexceptional:
Manafort’s misdeeds, in our current era, would not have seemed
so inconsistent with the run of global play.
From both the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, vast
disclosures illuminating previously hidden offshore accounts of
the rich and powerful worldwide, we can see the full extent to
which corruption has become the master narrative of our times.
We live in a world of smash-and-grab fortunes, amassed through
political connections and outright theft. Paul Manafort, over the
course of his career, was a great normalizer of corruption. The
firm he created in the 1980s obliterated traditional concerns
about conflicts of interest. It imported the ethos of the perma-
nent campaign into lobbying and, therefore, into the construc-
tion of public policy.
And while Manafort is alleged to have laundered
cash for his own benefit, his long history of launder-
ing reputations is what truly sets him apart. He helped
persuade the American political elite to look past the
atrocities and heists of kleptocrats and goons. He took
figures who should have never been permitted influ-
ence in Washington and softened their image just
enough to guide them past the moral barriers to entry.
He weakened the capital’s ethical immune system.
Helping elect Donald Trump, in so many ways,
represents the culmination of Paul Manafort’s work.
The president bears some likeness to the oligarchs
Manafort long served: a businessman with a portfolio
of shady deals, who benefited from a cozy relationship
to government; a man whose urge to dominate, and to
enrich himself, overwhelms any higher ideal. It wasn’t
so long ago that Trump would have been decisively
rejected as an alien incursion into the realm of public
service. And while the cynicism about government that
enabled Trump’s rise results from many causes, one of
them is the slow transformation of Washington, D.C.,
into something more like the New Britain, Connecticut,
of Paul Manafort’s youth.
Last year, a group of Manafort’s longtime friends,
led by an old Republican hand named Bill Greener,
tried to organize a cadre of surrogates to defend
Manafort from the allegations against him, including
the worst one: that he collaborated with a hostile foreign power
to subvert the American democratic process. Manafort’s old part-
ner Charlie Black even showed up for a meeting, though the two
had largely fallen out of touch. A few of the wheel men from the
old firm wanted to help too. Yet, when volunteers were needed to
go on TV as character witnesses, nobody raised his hand. “There
wasn’t a lot to work with,” one person contacted by this group
told me. “And nobody could be sure that Paul didn’t do it.” In
fact, everything about the man and the life he chose suggests that
he did.
Franklin Foer is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and
the author, most recently, of World Without Mind.
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DEMOC
80 MMAARRCCHH 2 2001 188 T THHE E AAT TL LAANNT TI ICC
Illustrations by Matt Dorfman
 How the United States lost the faith of its citizens—and what it can do to win them back

By Yascha Mounk
AMERICA
IS NOT A

CRACY TTHHEE AATTL LAANNTTI ICC MMAARRCCHH 22001 188 81

 mounted a last-ditch effort to take a sec-
ond vote, but before it could be organized,
a lobbyist for Aquarion pulled a fire alarm.
The building had to be evacuated, and the
meeting adjourned. Aquarion retains con-
trol of Oxford’s water system to this day.
The company denied that the lobbyist
was acting on its behalf when he pulled
the alarm; it also denies that its rates
were abnormally high or that it provides
poor service. Some Oxford residents sup-
theory predicts that business groups such
as the Independent Insurance Agents and
Brokers of America and the National Beer
Wholesalers Association carry the day. A
fourth theory holds that policy reflects
the views of the economic elite.
Gilens and Page tested those theories
by tracking how well the preferences of
various groups predicted the way that
Congress and the executive branch would
act on 1,779 policy issues over a span of

FOR ported Aquarion, and others opposed the

buyout because they feared the cost and
complication of the town running its own
water company. But many residents, lib-
YEARS, eral and conservative, were frustrated by
the process. The vote, they felt, hadn’t
taken place on a level playing field.
two decades. The results were shock-
ing. Economic elites and narrow interest
groups were very influential: They suc-
ceeded in getting their favored policies
adopted about half of the time, and in
stopping legislation to which they were
opposed nearly all of the time. Mass-

THE “It was a violation of the sanctity of

our local government by big money,” Jen
Caissie, a former chairman of the board
based interest groups, meanwhile, had lit-
tle effect on public policy. As for the views
of ordinary citizens, they had virtually
of selectmen in Oxford, told me. “Their

RESIDENTS messiah is their bottom line, not the

health of the local community. And I say
that as a Republican, someone who is in
favor of local business.”
OF A New England town meeting would

OXFORD, seem to be one of the oldest and purest

Massachusetts, seethed with anger at the
company that controlled the local water
supply. The company, locals complained,
charged inflated prices and provided ter-
rible service. But unless the town’s resi-
dents wanted to get by without running
water, they had to pay up, again and again.
The people of Oxford resolved to
buy the company out. At a town meet-
ing in the local high-school auditorium,
an overwhelming majority of residents
voted to raise the millions of dollars that
would be required for the purchase. It
took years, but in May 2014, the deal was
nearly done: One last vote stood between
the small town and its long-awaited goal.
The company, however, was not going
down without a fight. It mounted a cam-
paign against the buyout. On the day of
the crucial vote, the high-school audi-
torium swelled to capacity. Locals who
had toiled on the issue for years noticed
many newcomers—residents who hadn’t
showed up to previous town meetings
about the buyout. When the vote was
called, the measure failed—the company,
called Aquarion, would remain the town’s
water supplier. Supporters of the buyout
expressions of the American style of
government. Yet even in this bastion of
deliberation and direct democracy, a nasty
suspicion had taken hold: that the levers of
power are not controlled by the people.
It’s a suspicion stoked by the fact that,
across a range of issues, public policy does “The preferences
not reflect the preferences of the majority
of Americans. If it did, the country would
of the average
look radically different: Marijuana would American appear
be legal and campaign contributions
more tightly regulated; paid parental to have only
leave would be the law of the land and
public colleges free; the minimum wage
a minuscule,
would be higher and gun control much near-zero,
stricter; abortions would be more acces-
sible in the early stages of pregnancy and statistically
illegal in the third trimester. non-significant
The subversion of the people’s pref-
erences in our supposedly democratic impact upon
system was explored in a 2014 study by
the political scientists Martin Gilens of
public policy.”
Princeton and Benjamin I. Page of North-
western. Four broad theories have long
sought to answer a fundamental question
about our government: Who rules? One
theory, the one we teach our children in
civics classes, holds that the views of aver-
age people are decisive. Another theory
suggests that mass-based interest groups
such as the AARP have the power. A third

82 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
no independent effect at all. “When the
preferences of economic elites and the
stands of organized interest groups are
controlled for, the preferences of the
average American appear to have only a
minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-
significant impact upon public policy,”
Gilens and Page wrote.
Outlets from The Washington Post to
Breitbart News cited this explosive find-
ing as evidence of what overeager head-
line writers called American oligarchy.
Subsequent studies critiqued some of
the authors’ assumptions and questioned
whether the political system is quite as
insulated from the views of ordinary peo-
ple as Gilens and Page found. The most
breathless claims made on the basis of
their study were clearly exaggerations.
Yet their work is another serious indica-
tion of a creeping democratic deficit in
the land of liberty.
To some degree, of course, the unre-
sponsiveness of America’s political
system is by design. The United States
was founded as a republic, not a democ-
racy. As Alexander Hamilton and James
Madison made clear in the Federal-
ist Papers, the essence of this republic
would consist— their emphasis—“IN
THE TOTAL EXCLU SION OF THE
PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE
CAPACITY, from any share” in the gov-
ernment. Instead, popular views would
be translated into public policy through
the election of representatives “whose
wisdom may,” in Madison’s words, “best
discern the true interest of their country.”
That this radically curtailed the degree to
which the people could directly influence
the government was no accident.
Only over the course of the 19th
century did a set of entrepreneurial
thinkers begin to dress an ideologically
self-conscious republic up in the unaccus-
tomed robes of a democracy. Throughout
America, the old social hierarchies were
being upended by rapid industrialization,
mass immigration, westward expansion,
and civil war. Egalitarian sentiment was
rising. The idea that the people should
rule came to seem appealing and even
natural. The same institutions that had
once been designed to exclude the people
from government were now commended
for facilitating government “of the people,
by the people, for the people.”
The shifting justification for our polit-
ical system inspired important reforms.
In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment
stipulated that senators had to be elected
directly by the people, not by state legis-
latures. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amend-
ment gave women the vote. In 1965, the
Voting Rights Act, drawing on the Fif-
teenth Amendment, set out to protect
the vote of black Americans. The once-
peculiar claim that the United States was
a democracy slowly came to have some
basis in reality.
That basis is now crumbling, and the
people have taken notice. In no small part
that’s because the long era during which
average Americans grew more wealthy
has come to a sputtering stop. People who
are asked how well they are doing eco-
nomically frequently compare their own
standard of living with that of their par-
ents. Until recently, this comparison was
heartening. At the age of 30, more than
nine in 10 Americans born in 1940 were
earning more than their parents had at
the same stage of their lives. But accord-
ing to eye-popping research led by the
economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors,
many Millennials do not share in this age-
old American experience of improving
fortunes. Among those Americans born
in the early 1980s, only half earn more
than their parents did at a similar age.
Americans have never loved their
politicians or thought of Washington as
a repository of moral virtue. But so long
as the system worked for them—so long
as they were wealthier than their parents
had been and could expect that their kids
would be better off than them—people
trusted that politicians were ultimately
on their side. Not anymore.
The rise of digital media, meanwhile,
has given ordinary Americans, especially
younger ones, an instinctive feel for direct
democracy. Whether they’re stuffing the
electronic ballot boxes of The Voice and
Dancing With the Stars, liking a post on
Facebook, or up-voting a comment on
Reddit, they are seeing what it looks like
when their vote makes an immediate
difference. Compared with these digital
plebiscites, the work of the United States
government seems sluggish, outmoded,
and shockingly unresponsive.
As a result, average voters feel more
alienated from traditional political insti-
tutions than perhaps ever before. When
they look at decisions made by politicians,
they don’t see their preferences reflected
in them. For good reason, they are growing
as disenchanted with democracy as the
people of Oxford, Massachusetts, did.
The politician who best intuited this
discontent—and most loudly promised to
remedy it—is Donald Trump. The claim
that he would channel the voice of the peo-
ple to combat a corrupt and unresponsive
elite was at the very core of his candidacy.
“I am your voice,” Trump promised as he
accepted his party’s nomination at the
Republican National Convention. “Today,
we are not merely transferring power from
one administration to another or from one
party to another,” he proclaimed in his
inaugural address, “but we are transfer-
ring power from Washington, D.C., and
giving it back to you, the people.”
Donald Trump won the presidency for
many reasons, including racial animus,
concerns over immigration, and a widen-
ing divide between urban and rural areas.
But public- opinion data suggest that a
deep feeling of powerlessness among vot-
ers was also important. I analyzed 2016
data from the American National Elec-
tion Studies. Those who voted for Trump
in the Republican primaries, more than
those who supported his competition,
said that they “don’t have any say about
what the government does,” that “pub-
lic officials don’t care much what people
like me think,” and that “most politicians
care only about the interests of the rich
and powerful.”
Trump has no real intention of devolv-
ing power back to the people. He’s filled
his administration with members of the
same elite he disparaged on the campaign
trail. His biggest legislative success, the
tax bill, has handed gifts to corporations
and the donor class. A little more than a
year after America rebelled against politi-
cal elites by electing a self-proclaimed
champion of the people, its government
is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists
and billionaires than ever before.
It would be easy to draw the wrong
lesson from this: If the American elector-
ate can be duped by a figure like Trump,
it can’t be trusted with whatever power it
does retain. To avoid further damage to
the rule of law and the rights of the most-
vulnerable Americans, traditional elites
should appropriate even more power for
themselves. But that response plays into
the populist narrative: The political class
dislikes Trump because he threatens to
take its power away. It also refuses to rec-
ognize that the people have a point.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 83
 America does have a democracy prob-
lem. If we want to address the root causes
of populism, we need to start by taking an
honest accounting of the ways in which
power has slipped out of the people’s
hands, and think more honestly about the
ways in which we can—and cannot—put
the people back in control.
AT
which people might seek to sway polit-
ical decisions for their own personal gain.
Many forms of lobbying were banned
throughout the 19th century. In Georgia,
the state constitution at one time read
that “lobbying is declared to be a crime.”
In California, it was a felony.
Over the course of the 20th century,
lobbying gradually lost the stench of the
illicit. But even once the activity became
normalized, businesses remained reluc-
tant to exert their influence. As late as the
1960s, major corporations did not lobby
expand their power on Capitol Hill. At
first, their activities were mostly defen-
sive: The goal was to stop legislation that
might harm their interests. But as the
political influence of big corporations
grew, and their profits soared, a new class
of professional lobbyists managed to con-
vince the nation’s CEOs that, in the words
of Lee Drutman, the author of the 2015
book The Business of America Is Lobbying,
their activity “was not just about keeping
the government far away—it could also be
about drawing government close.”

THE directly on their own behalf. Instead,

they relied on collectives such as the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which had
a weaker voice in Washington than labor
Today, corporations wield immense
power in Washington: “For every dollar
spent on lobbying by labor unions and
public-interest groups,” Drutman shows,

HEIGHT unions or public- interest groups. “As

every business executive knows,” the
“large corporations and their associations
now spend $34. Of the 100 organiza-
future Supreme Court Justice Lewis tions that spend the most on lobbying, 95
F. Powell Jr. complained in 1971, “few consistently represent business.” (Read
of the Mexican–American War, Nicholas elements of American society today have about a principal architect of the lobbying
Trist traveled to Mexico and negotiated the as little influence in government as the industry—Paul Manafort—on page 62.)
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended American businessman.” The work of K Street lobbyists, and the
the hostilities between the two nations and All of this began to change in the early violation of our government by big money,
helped delineate America’s southern bor- 1970s. Determined to fight rising wages has fundamentally transformed the work—
der. Two decades later, the U.S. govern- and stricter labor and environmental and the lives—of the people’s supposed
ment still hadn’t paid him for his services. standards, which would bring higher costs, representatives. Steve Israel, a Demo-
Too old and weak to travel to Washington CEOs of companies like General Electric cratic congressman from Long Island,
to collect the money himself, Trist hired and General Motors banded together to was a consummate moneyman. Over the
a prominent lawyer by the name of Linus
Child to act on his behalf, promising him
25 percent of his recovered earnings.
Congress finally appropriated the
money to settle its debt. But now it was
Trist who refused to pay up, even after
his lawyer sued for his share. Though the
contract between Trist and Child hardly
seems untoward by today’s standards,
the Supreme Court refused to uphold it
out of fear that it might provide a legal
basis for the activities of lobbyists:

If any of the great corporations of the

country were to hire adventurers who
make market of themselves in this way,
to procure the passage of a general law
with a view to the promotion of their pri-
vate interests, the moral sense of every
right-minded man would instinctively
denounce the employer and employed
as steeped in corruption.

Extreme as this case may appear, it

was far from idiosyncratic. In her book
Corruption in America, the legal scholar
Zephyr Teachout notes that the institu-
tions of the United States were explicitly
designed to counter the myriad ways in

84 M A RC H 20 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
course of his 16 years on Capitol Hill, he
arranged 1,600 fund-raisers for himself,
averaging one every four days. Israel cited
fund-raising as one of the main reasons
he decided to retire from Congress, in
2016: “I don’t think I can spend another
day in another call room making another
call begging for money,” he told The New
York Times. “I always knew the system was
dysfunctional. Now it is beyond broken.”
A model schedule for freshman mem-
bers of Congress prepared a few years ago
by the Democratic Congressional Cam-
paign Committee instructs them to spend
about four hours every day cold-calling
donors for cash. The party encourages so
many phone calls because the phone calls
work. Total spending on American elec-
tions has grown to unprecedented levels.
From 2000 to 2012, reported federal cam-
paign spending doubled. It’s no surprise,
then, that a majority of Americans now
believe Congress to be corrupt, according
to a 2015 Gallup poll. As Israel memora-
bly put it to HBO’s John Oliver, the hours
he had spent raising money had been “a
form of torture—and the real victims of
this torture have become the American
people, because they believe that they
don’t have a voice in this system.”
“I always knew
the system was
dysfunctional,”
said Congressman
Steve Israel.
“Now it is
beyond broken.”
Big donors and large corporations use
their largesse to sway political decisions.
But their influence goes far beyond those
instances in which legislators knowingly
sacrifice their constituents’ interests to
stay on the right side of their financial
backers. The people we spend time with
day in and day out shape our tastes, our
assumptions, and our values. The impera-
tive to raise so much money means that
members of Congress log more time
with donors and lobbyists and less time
with their constituents. Often, when
faced with a vote on a bill of concern to
their well-heeled backers, legislators
don’t have to compromise their ideals—
because they spend so much of their lives
around donors and lobbyists, they have
long ago come to share their views.
The problem goes even deeper than
that. In America’s imagined past, mem-
bers of Congress had a strong sense
of place. Democrats might have risen
through the ranks of local trade unions
or schoolhouses. Repub licans might
have been local business or community
leaders. Members of both parties lived
lives intertwined with those of their con-
stituents. But spend some time reading
the biographies of your representatives
in Congress, and you’ll notice, as I did,
that by the time they reach office, many
politicians have already been social-
ized into a cultural, educational, and
financial elite that sets them apart from
average Americans. While some repre-
sentatives do have strong roots in their
district, for many others the connection
is tenuous at best. Even for those mem-
bers who were born and raised in the part
of the country they represent, that place
is for many of them not their true home.
Educated at expensive colleges, likely
on the coasts, they spend their 20s and
30s in the nation’s great metropolitan
centers. After stints in law, business, or
finance, or on Capitol Hill, they move to
the hinterlands out of political ambition.
Once they retire from Congress, even if
they retain some kind of home in their
district, few make it the center of their
lives: They seem much more likely than
their predecessors to pursue lucrative
opportunities in cities such as New York,
San Francisco, and, of course, Washing-
ton. By just about every metric—from life
experience to education to net worth—
these politicians are thoroughly discon-
nected from the rest of the population.
THE
MASSIVE
INFLUENCE
that money yields in Washington is hardly
a secret. But another, equally important
development has largely gone ignored:
More and more issues have simply been
taken out of democratic contestation.
In many policy areas, the job of legis-
lating has been supplanted by so-called
independent agencies such as the Fed-
eral Communications Commission, the
Securities and Exchange Commission,
the Environmental Protection Agency,
and the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau. Once they are founded by Con-
gress, these organizations can formulate
policy on their own. In fact, they are free
from legislative oversight to a remark-
able degree, even though they are often
charged with settling issues that are not
just technically complicated but politi-
cally controversial.
The range of crucial issues that these
agencies have taken on testifies to their
importance. From banning the use of the
insecticide DDT to ensuring the quality of
drinking water, for example, the EPA has
been a key player in fights about environ-
mental policy for almost 50 years; more
recently, it has also made itself central to
the American response to climate change,
regulating pollutants and proposing lim-
its on carbon-dioxide emissions from new
power plants.
While independent agencies occa-
sionally generate big headlines, they
often wield their real power in more
obscure policy areas. They are now
responsible for the vast majority of new
federal regulations. A 2008 article in the
California Law Review noted that, during
the previous year, Congress had enacted
138 public laws. In the same year, federal
agencies had finalized 2,926 rules. Such
rules run the gamut from technical stipu-
lations that affect only a few specialized
businesses to substantial reforms that
have a direct impact on the lives of mil-
lions. In October 2017, for example, the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 85
 passed a rule that would require provid-
ers of payday loans to determine whether
customers would actually be able to pay
them back—potentially saving millions
of people from exploitative fees, but
also making it more difficult for them to
access cash in an emergency.
The rise of independent agencies
such as the EPA is only a small piece of
a larger trend in which government has
grown less accountable to the people. In
the latter half of the 20th century, the
Federal Reserve won much greater inde-
pendence from elected politicians and
began to deploy far more powerful mon-
etary tools. Trade treaties, from NAFTA to
more-recent agreements with countries
such as Australia, Morocco, and South
Korea, have restricted Congress’s ability
to set tariffs, subsidize domestic indus-
tries, and halt the inflow of certain cate-
gories of migrant workers. At one point I
planned to count the number of treaties
to which the United States is subject; I
gave up when I realized that the State
Department’s “List of Treaties and Other
International Agreements of the United
States” runs to 551 pages.
Most of these treaties and agreements
offer real benefits or help us confront
urgent challenges. Whatever your view of
their merit, however, there is no denying
that they curtail the power of Congress
in ways that also disempower Ameri-
can voters. Trade treaties, for example,
can include obscure provisions about
“investor– state dispute settlements,”
which give international arbitration courts
the right to award huge sums of money to
corporations if they are harmed by labor
or environmental standards—potentially
making it riskier for Congress to pass
such measures.
This same tension between popular
sovereignty and good governance is also
evident in the debates over the power
of the nine unelected justices of the
Supreme Court. Since the early 1950s,
the Supreme Court has ended legal seg-
regation in schools and universities. It
has ended and then reintroduced the
death penalty. It has legalized abortion. It
has limited censorship on television and
the radio. It has decriminalized homo-
sexuality and allowed same-sex marriage.
It has struck down campaign-finance
regulations and gun-control measures.
It has determined whether millions of
people get health insurance and whether
86 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
millions of undocumented immigrants
need to live in fear of being deported.
Whether you see judicial review as
interpreting the law or usurping the peo-
ple’s power probably depends on your
view of the outcome. The American right
has long railed against “activist judges”
while the American left, which enjoyed a
majority on the Court for a long stretch
during the postwar era, has claimed that
justices were merely doing their job. Now
that the Court has started to lean further
right, these views are rapidly reversing.
But regardless of your politics, there’s no
question that the justices frequently play
an outsize role in settling major political
conflicts—and that many of their deci-
sions serve to amplify undemocratic ele-
ments of the system.
Take Citizens United. By overturn-
ing legislation that restricted campaign
spending by corporations and other pri-
vate groups, the Supreme Court issued a
decision that was unpopular at the time
and has remained unpopular since. (In
a 2015 poll by Bloomberg, 78 percent of
respondents disapproved of the ruling.)
It also massively amplified the voice of
moneyed interest groups, making it easier
for the economic elite to override the pref-
erences of the population for years to come.
DONALD
TRUMP
is the first president in the history of the
United States to have served in no pub-
lic capacity before entering to the White
House. He belittles experts, seems to lack
the most basic grasp of public policy, and
loves to indulge the worst whims of his
supporters. In all things, personal and
political, Plato’s disdainful description
of the “democratic man” fits the 45th
president like a glove: Given to “false and
braggart words and opinions,” he consid-
ers “insolence ‘good breeding,’ license
‘liberty,’ prodigality ‘magnificence,’ and
shamelessness ‘manly spirit.’ ”
It is little wonder, then, that Plato’s
haughty complaint about democracy—
its primary ill, he claimed, consists in
“assigning a kind of equality indiscrimi-
nately to equals and unequals alike”—has
made a remarkable comeback. As early
as 2003, the journalist Fareed Zakaria
argued, “There can be such a thing as
too much democracy.” In the years since,
many scholars have built this case: The
political scientist Larry Bartels pain-
stakingly demonstrated just how irra-
tional ordinary voters are; the political
philosopher Jason Brennan turned the
premise that irrational or partisan vot-
ers are terrible decision makers into a
book titled Against Democracy; and Parag
Khanna, an inveterate defender of glo-
balization, argued for a technocracy in
which many decisions are made by “com-
mittees of accountable experts.” Writing
near the end of the 2016 primary season,
when Trump’s ascent to the Republican
nomination already looked unstoppable,
Andrew Sullivan offered the most forceful
distillation of this line of antidemocratic
laments: “Democracies end when they
are too democratic,” the headline of his
essay announced. “And right now, Amer-
ica is a breeding ground for tyranny.”
The antidemocratic view gets at
something real. What makes our politi-
cal system uniquely legitimate, at least
when it functions well, is that it manages
to deliver on two key values at once: lib-
eralism (the rule of law) and democracy
(the rule of the people). With liberal-
ism now under concerted attack from
the Trump administration, which has
declared war on independent institu-
tions such as the FBI and has used the
president’s pulpit to bully ethnic and
religious minorities, it’s perhaps under-
standable that many thinkers are willing
to give up a modicum of democracy to
protect the rule of law and the country’s
most vulnerable groups.
If only it were that easy. As we saw in
2016, the feeling that power is slipping
out of their hands makes citizens more,
not less, likely to entrust their fate to a
strongman leader who promises to smash
the system. And as the examples of Egypt,
Thailand, and other countries have dem-
onstrated again and again, a political elite
with less and less backing from the people
ultimately has to resort to more and more
repressive steps to hold on to its power; in
the end, any serious attempt to sacrifice
democracy in order to safeguard liberty is
likely to culminate in an end to the rule of
law as well as the rule of the people.
 The easy alternative is to lean in the
other direction, to call for as much direct
democracy as possible. The origins of the
people’s displacement, the thinking goes,
lie in a cynical power grab by financial
and political elites. Large corporations
and the superrich advocated independent
central banks and business-friendly trade
treaties to score big windfalls. Politicians,
academics, and journalists favor a tech-
nocratic mode of governance because
they think they know what’s best and
don’t want the people to meddle. All of
this selfishness is effectively cloaked in a
pro-market ideology propagated by think
tanks and research outfits that are funded
by rich donors. Since the roots of the cur-
rent situation are straightforwardly sinis-
ter, the solutions to it are equally simple:
The people need to reclaim their power—
and abolish technocratic institutions.
This antitechnocratic view has cur-
rency on both ends of the political spec-
trum. On the far left, the late political
scientist Peter Mair, writing about Europe,
lamented the decline in “popular” democ-
racy, which he contrasted with a more
top-down “constitutional” democracy.
The English sociologist Colin Crouch has
argued that even anarchy and violence
can serve a useful purpose if they seek to
vanquish what he calls “post-democracy.”
The far right puts more emphasis on
nationalism, but otherwise agrees with
this basic analysis. In the inaugural issue of
the journal American Affairs, the self-styled
intellectual home of the Trump move-
ment, its founder Julius Krein decried “the
existence of a transpartisan elite,” which
sustains a pernicious “managerial con-
sensus.” Steve Bannon, the former White
House chief strategist, said his chief politi-
cal objective was to return power to the
people and advocated for the “deconstruc-
tion of the administrative state.”
Mair and Crouch, Krein and Bannon
are right to recognize that the people have
less and less hold over the political system,
an insight that can point the way to genu-
ine reforms that would make our political
system both more democratic and better
functioning. One of the reasons well-
intentioned politicians are so easily swayed
by lobbyists, for example, is that their staffs
lack the skills and experience to draft leg-
islation or to understand highly complex
policy issues. This could be addressed by
boosting the woefully inadequate fund-
ing of Congress: If representatives and
In 2007, Congress
enacted 138
public laws.
In the same year,
independent
federal agencies
finalized
2,926 rules.
senators were able to attract—and retain—
more knowledgeable and experienced
staffers, they might be less tempted to let
K Street lobbyists write their bills for them.
Similarly, the rules that currently gov-
ern conflicts of interest are far too weak.
There is no reason members of Congress
should be allowed to lobby for the com-
panies they were supposed to regulate so
soon after they step down from office. It
is time to jam the revolving door between
politics and industry.
Real change will also require an
ambitious reform of campaign finance.
Because of Citizens United, this is going to
be extremely difficult. But the Supreme
Court has had a change of heart in the
past. As evidence that the current system
threatens American democracy keeps
piling up, the Court might finally rec-
ognize that stricter limits on campaign
spending are desperately needed.
For all that the enemies of technocracy
get right, though, their view is ultimately
as simplistic as the antidemocratic one.
The world we now inhabit is extremely
complex. We need to monitor hurricanes
and inspect power plants, reduce global
carbon emissions and contain the spread
of nuclear weapons, regulate banks and
enforce consumer-safety standards. All of
these tasks require a tremendous amount
of expertise and a great degree of coordi-
nation. It’s unrealistic to think that ordi-
nary voters or even their representatives
in Congress might become experts in
what makes for a safe power plant, or that
the world could find an effective response
to climate change without entering
cumbersome international agreements.
If we simply abolish technocratic institu-
tions, the future for most Americans will
look more rather than less dangerous,
and less rather than more affluent.
It is true that to recover its citizens’
loyalty, our democracy needs to curb the
power of unelected elites who seek only to
pad their influence and line their pockets.
But it is also true that to protect its citizens’
lives and promote their prosperity, our
democracy needs institutions that are,
by their nature, deeply elitist. This, to my
mind, is the great dilemma that the United
States—and other democracies around the
world—will have to resolve if they wish to
survive in the coming decades.
We don’t need to abolish all techno-
cratic institutions or merely save the ones
that exist. We need to build a new set of
political institutions that are both more
responsive to the views and interests of
ordinary people, and better able to solve
the immense problems that our society
will face in the decades to come.
Writing about the dawn of democ-
racy in his native Italy, the great novelist
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has Tan-
credi, a young aristocrat, recognize that
he will have to let go of some of his most
cherished habits to rescue what is most
valuable in the old order: “If everything is
to stay the same,” Tancredi says, “every-
thing has to change.” The United States is
now at an inflection point of its own. If we
rigidly hold on to the status quo, we will
lose what is most valuable in the world we
know, and find ourselves cast as bit play-
ers in the fading age of liberal democracy.
Only by embarking on bold and imagina-
tive reform can we recover a democracy
worthy of the name.
Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government
at Harvard and the author of The People
vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in
Danger and How to Save It, from which
this essay is adapted.
T H E AT L A N T I C M A RC H 20 1 8 87
Forward Operating Base
Sharana, Afghanistan
FICTION

A FIGHT BROKE OU T on the far side of the dining facility, over

by the milk. A fridge door slapped shut, followed by sounds of
shoving and punches being thrown. Soldiers dodged out of the
way before a few brave souls went in to break it up. There were
noises of slipped holds and flail, of tables and chairs scraping
across the concrete floor. Then Digger’s voice rang out—I’ll kill
you!—and for a moment it seemed like this night, a Friday, was
about to transcend all its false promises.
Every Friday was rib night at this D-FAC. Soldiers spent all
day making the sauce, marinating the ribs, and stoking mesquite
embers in split oil drums. They baked a cake the size of a garage
door. They decorated the D-FAC—a giant white tent—with bal-
loons and streamers. They went to all this trouble, I knew, with
good intentions. They wanted us to feel appreciated, and to give
us a taste of home. They wanted us to enjoy, at least, the illusion
of a party—as if this were a real Friday night, with an actual week-
end to follow, and we might find it within ourselves to break a few
weekday rules. Fighting, however, was prohibited.
Tables and chairs were being moved back to where they
belonged, and a new line was forming for the milk. Digger
walked over to where Hal and I sat, where we always sat, by the
Jell-O cart.
“No one waits their goddamn turn anymore,” Digger said. The
collar of his T-shirt appeared to have been balled up and jerked

Rib
By W I L L M AC K I N
Illustrations by Tomer Hanuka

88 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E
Night
AT L A N T I C
T HTEH A
E T AL TA LNAT N
I C
TIC MM
AARR
CCH H2 20 01 18 2 89
89
around. Bright-pink scratches swelled on eyes wild with heat exhaustion. Their shifted as he began to dream. I watched
his neck. His eyes were red and bleary laughter bounced off the tent’s taut skin, them draw triangles under their lids.
because he hadn’t slept. reverberated in its aluminum frame, and

“You all right?,” Hal, our troop chief,
asked.
“I’m fine,” Digger said.
Digger set a partially crushed carton
of chocolate milk on the table. He laid
down his cardboard tray, scattered with a
few ribs he must’ve salvaged off the floor.
He sat across from me, and flies settled on
his salvaged ribs.
“I can’t eat this,” Digger said.
I’d tripled up on trays to prevent rib
grease from soaking through. I separated
the bottom tray and loaded it with half my
ribs. Hal gave half his ribs, too. Digger—
on the backside of the adrenaline rush
that had fueled his fistfight—was staring
off into nowhere, so I reached across the
table and slid his old tray aside. The flies
lifted off those ribs and spun their little
orbits. Digger tilted a bit in his seat. As I
pushed the new tray in front of him, his
mouth dropped open and his eyes closed.
The D-fac was packed with soldiers
who’d spent all day in the summer sun.
Their faces were shiny with sweat, their
rattled the turnbuckles, S-hooks, and gal-
vanized wire that held the whole thing
together. Hal dropped one clean bone
after another on the center of the table.
Flies walked across Digger’s face to drink
from the corners of his mouth. He’d been
The dining facility was
packed with soldiers
who’d spent all day in
the summer sun. Their
faces were shiny with
sweat, their eyes wild
with heat exhaustion.
up all night, on that mission out in War-
dak, then up all day wrestling demons in
the heat. Tired as he was, he’d fought that
poor guy over by the milk.
Digger appeared to skip the early
stages of sleep—in which his body
would’ve cooled, his heart rate slowed—
and plunged directly into REM. His eyes
A
round 2 o’clock that morn-
ing, during the raid on a com-
pound out in Wardak, Digger
had killed three men in a room. They were
sleeping in three corners, with an AK-47
resting on the floor in the center of the
room, when Digger crept in. The man in
the first corner woke and reached for the
AK, and Digger shot him. The man in the
next corner reached, and Digger shot him,
too. The third man’s fingers were almost
touching the weapon when he died.
I heard the shots from where I stood,
outside the walls of that compound, with
Hal. Each shot sounded like when you
walk into a dark room and flip a switch,
and the filament in the bulb pops. I went
into the room after the fact. Seeing the
men reaching out for that AK in death,
I figured there had to have been some
sort of conversation among them. Like,
who would sleep in which corner, and
where would they put their only weapon,
the muzzle of which had been wrapped
in orange wire, in what seemed to me a

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superstitious way. As though the wire
had transformed the AK into a good-
luck charm, and the men had seen fit to
leave it in the center of the room, beyond
arm’s length of any one of them, so that
the good luck might extend to them
equally. Yet they’d all reached for the AK
when Digger had snuck into the room.
We searched the compound and
found nothing. We took digital finger-
prints of the dead men and beamed them
back to Higher, which ran them through
the database. The results were inconclu-
sive. From the compound, we walked a
mile through tall grass to where the heli-
copters would pick us up. An owl circled
overhead in the twilight, until the heli-
copters dropped out of the sky and scared
it away. Digger and I climbed into the
same helo and sat across from each other
in the cargo bay. The sunrise through the
window behind me lit Digger’s stoic face
as we flew back to Sharana.
It was already hot by the time we
arrived at our compound, on the north
end of the runway, where we lived in old
shipping containers. Mine smelled as if
it had been used to transport pepper. I
stood my rifle in a corner and propped

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My dream went like this: We walked
uphill into a village at night. A woman ran
downhill, into our ranks, and searched
the troop for me. I was the one wearing all
the antennas. I was the one who’d talked
to the plane that had shot up her house.
I could see smoke rising from her house
on the hill. Inside, in a corner of a room, a
See the big picture
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been bleeding from an artery in his shat-
tered leg. I could’ve done nothing, and he
would’ve died soon enough. Rather, I’d
brought the A-10 back for another strafe.
Rounds had drifted into the house. They’d
found the boy and his grandfather hiding
in the corner. The woman had run out of
the house to find me.
I didn’t want to go into the house,
because I knew it wouldn’t do anyone
any good, and I was right. But the wom-
an’s grief was so profound, it resembled
joy. I couldn’t ignore her, and I didn’t
want to push her away. Nor did I want to
threaten her, then be in a position where
I might have to carry out those threats. So
I followed her up the hill, through a dis-
integrated wall of her house, and into a
clouded room. I walked over broken tiles
toward the corner, where she pointed.
There, I discovered the grandfather and
and the woman was running downhill to
meet us halfway.
Somewhere in there, Digger entered
my shipping container, which woke me
up. Light and heat streamed through the
open door.
“What?,” I asked.
“I need a pill,” Digger said.
My duffel bag lay against the wall
opposite my armor. From it, Digger
removed my flannel shirt. He searched
the pocket where I kept my sleeping pills.
“I don’t have any more,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Digger said. “Hal says he
gave you, like, 20.”
Digger dumped the contents of my
duffel bag onto the floor. Car keys clinked
against the plywood. My wallet flopped
open. Live 5.56- and 9-mm rounds rolled
out the door and into the sun.
long trip to Afghanistan. They eased our
transition to the nocturnal schedule on
which the success of our mission relied.
And they rendered us comatose and
dreamless when, for whatever reason,
we couldn’t sleep.
Every time we deployed, a medic
would issue these pills, in little plastic
bags, as we boarded the cargo jet that
would deliver us from our home base, in
Virginia, to the war. We always left home
around midnight. This last time, my
fourth, it was March. Frost hung in the air.
Stars tangled in the bare branches of the
tallest oaks. Hal received his pills from the
medic and stuffed them in his backpack.
Digger tucked his plastic bag of pills into
the front pocket of his jeans. I buttoned
mine into the pocket of my flannel shirt,
and when I looked up, there was Digger,
looking back at me. “Here we go again,”

grandson alive.
The grandfather brushed dust off his
grandson’s shoulders. Can I help you?
he asked, like stray 30 mike-mike blew
through his house all the time. Then—
bzzt!—the dream short-circuited, and we
were walking uphill into the village again,
S
OME CALLED THE PILLS “time
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coated in shine. Standard-issue was 10
pills per man, and no more, because
they were addictive. But the pills helped
us get over the jet lag resulting from our
he said, smiling. Together we climbed the
stairs into the dimly lit cargo bay.
We took off, refueled high over the
continental shelf, then drilled eastbound
through the stratosphere. Halfway across
the black Atlantic, as others slept on the
cold metal floor, I stood at the starboard

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thing, believing that if only I wished
hard enough, it might happen. The A-10
was still in the sky. We were still walking
uphill. Although I knew better, I followed
the woman into her house.
Returning to my shipping container
after sunrise that morning, I didn’t care
about the ramifications. I intended to take
a pill. I opened my duffel bag, dug out my
flannel shirt, and discovered the pocket
empty. Ditto for the other pocket of that
shirt, and all the pockets of my other
shirts. I thought that maybe, in a blind fit
of self-preservation, I might’ve hidden
the pills somewhere so perfect that even
I couldn’t find them. Then I remembered
Digger, in line to board the cargo jet back
in Virginia, turning around.
I walked over to Digger’s shipping
container and banged on its big orange
door. He answered in his underwear.
“Did you take my pills?,” I asked.
“Your what?”
Looking into Digger’s eyes, I saw sea-
horse tails spinning clockwise.
“You know what,” I said.
Digger blinked, and those tails spun
the other way.
“I get all I need from Hal,” Digger
riding his elephant down from the moun-
tains into battle. I considered what the
next morning would be like, trying to
fall asleep without a pill, and I wondered
where I might find more. Tearing a piece
of duct tape from a roll, I stuck the pill to
the ceiling over my cot. The little blue
capsule was perfectly hidden between the
gray tape and the gray steel. As I drifted
off to sleep, only I knew it was there.
The steel walls of my shipping
container turned to glass in my dream. I
found myself alone on the barren steppe
where Sharana once stood. The sun rolled
backwards across the sky. Night fell, frost
formed on the glass, and it began to snow.
A glacier descended from the mountains
to bury me in ice for an eon before the
thaw delivered a millennium of floods
and driving rain. Then, one day, the
clouds broke and the sun shined down
on a forest of petrified mulberries. That
night, the harvest moon crashed into
the Earth, smashing it to smithereens. I
drifted in my glass box through space and
time toward a tiny, oval-shaped star that
shined blue in the distance.
And that was the pill Digger wanted,
on that hot morning in June, after he’d
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We’d passed three colonels smoking cigars,
and a gaggle of majors playing horseshoes.
Sergeants, silhouetted by flame, had been
grilling the ribs on the oil drums. Clouds of
bittersweet smoke had flavored the night
air. Before entering the D-fac, we’d each
cleared our pistols into a barrel full of sand.
We’d dropped our magazines, pulled back
our slides, and caught the rounds that
flipped out of the chambers. Hal and I had
pushed our rounds back in our magazines,
but Digger had thrown his out over the
T-walls and into tent city, where all the
daywalkers slept.
Inside the D-fac, at the steam table,
Digger had just pointed at what he
wanted. No please or thank you to the
privates in their hairnets and aprons,
holding their tongs and serving forks.
No wishing them happy hunting, as was
customary. From the steam table, Digger
had set off for the milk.
A row of industrial-size refrigerators,
each packed with hundreds of those grade-
school boxes of milk, stood adjacent to the
steam table. A muddled line of soldiers
formed in front of each. Digger, I guessed,
had picked his box of chocolate milk out
from a distance. Maybe it had looked
colder than the rest, or fresher. Maybe
Digger had thought that, as a killer, he was
entitled to whichever box he wanted. After
all, he hadn’t spent his day making bar-
becue sauce, or stoking fires, or baking a
The noise arrived after
the rounds hit. The
woman ran downhill
into our ranks, her
screams no different
from laughter.
fucking cake. He hadn’t blown up balloons
or hung streamers. Someone must’ve cut
in front of Digger and taken his box of milk.
Digger had probably drilled the guy in
the jaw. That was his signature move, any-
way, the jaw drill. I’d seen him do it under
a streetlight in Virginia Beach, at a gas
station in Salt Lake City, and on a bridge
in Milwaukee. When Digger put his back
into it, it was devastating. So whoever had
taken Digger’s milk had probably hit the
fridge door unconscious. And his tray of
ribs had probably gone flying. Then had
come the brave souls to break up the fight.
At that point, it must’ve looked to Digger
like the entire population of the D-fac
was closing in, which might’ve made it
seem like he was squaring off against the
world. When he’d shouted I’ll kill you!, I
figured that he’d meant everybody.
Hal returned to our table with an extra
tray of ribs for Digger and me to share. I
took all the burned ones, and Digger took
all the rare. The three of us ate, and made
a big mess of bones on the table.
A gray-haired master sergeant carry-
ing a walkie-talkie appeared. He was fol-
lowed by a skinny PFC with a widow’s
peak and sleeves too long for his arms.
The master sergeant pointed at Digger
with the antenna of his walkie-talkie.
“This the guy?” he asked the PFC.
“Yeah,” the PFC said.
“You need to come with me,” the mas-
ter sergeant said to Digger.
“I don’t need to do shit,” Digger said.
“That’s how you want to handle this?”
the master sergeant asked.
“Yup,” Digger said.
The master sergeant radioed for secu-
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his camouflaged blouse. The PFC looked
at us like he didn’t know who we were or
where we came from, but he wanted in.
“This guy’s mine,” Hal said to Grimes,
while pointing at Digger. “How about you
and me figure this out at our level.”
“How about you eat, and let me handle
this,” Grimes said.
“I’m just trying to save us both some
ass pain,” Hal said. “Incident reports, and
all that bullshit.”
“Assault is not bullshit,” Grimes said.
This made Digger laugh, which made
Hal laugh, too.
“You’re not helping,” Hal said.
Double doors swung open behind the
steam table. Two soldiers backed into the
tent, each supporting one corner of the
gigantic cake that had been decorated
to look like the American flag. Knowing
the routine, birthday girls and boys stood
up from their tables and made their way
toward the stage.
“Go tell them to wait,” Grimes said to
the PFC with the long sleeves, who walked
off while shaking his head. Grimes turned
to Digger. “You think you can just come
in here and tune up one of my soldiers?”
“He started it,” Digger said.
“That’s not what I’m hearing,” Grimes
said. He held his walkie-talkie up to his
ear and fiddled with the volume.
“Whatever’s gonna happen, can you
make it quick?,” Digger said. “I got shit
to do.”
“Oh, it’ll be quick, all right,” Grimes said.
“How long you been doing this?,” Hal
asked.
At that, Grimes smiled. He almost
laughed. As a master sergeant, he had to
have been in long enough to understand
that nothing ever happened quick. Army,
Navy—it didn’t matter which service.
Try as you might, there was always that
unbeatable thing pushing back. Grimes
had to know. So when I saw him smile, I
thought he was going to sit down with us,
and he and Hal were going to work things
out. Then we’d all shake our heads over
how fucked up everything was, and how
we’d almost gotten caught up in it, there,
for a second.
A lieutenant with his own walkie-
talkie appeared. He asked Grimes, “Are
you ready for the cake, Master Sergeant?”
The cake, by then, was up onstage.
Soldiers were sticking candles into it. A
dozen birthday girls and boys, all way too
young, stood around, waiting for those
candles to be lit and for the lights to go out
and for all of us to sing “Happy Birthday,”
which happened every rib night.
“Does it look like I’m ready for the god-
damn cake?,” Grimes said.
“I’m just asking,” the lieutenant said.
“If I was ready for the fucking cake,
do you think I’d be down here and not
up there?”
“Sorry, Master Sergeant,” the lieuten-
ant said. “I didn’t know.”
The D-fac’s aluminum frame creaked
gently against the wind, as if it were being
held down by ropes. As if, absent those
ropes, we’d float to a new and faraway place,
where we might live by our own rules.
“Your attention please!” the lieutenant
yelled from the stage. No one paid atten-
tion. Then Grimes whistled, and every-
body shut up.
“We’re going to postpone the birthday
celebration for a few minutes,” the lieu-
tenant announced, “due to a problem that
we need to take care of first.”
“That’s me!,” Digger shouted, climbing
on top of our table. “I’m the problem!”
Soldiers booed and cheered. Digger
held his arms open to them while turning
in a slow circle. Soldiers beat their tables
with their fists.
“Fuck you if you’re here to eat cake,
and not to fight!,” Digger yelled.
There were more cheers than boos this
time, as Digger climbed down from the
table and returned to his seat.
“See, now, that’s where you and I
agree,” Grimes said to Digger. “You think
they had birthday cakes in ’Nam?”
“Exactly,” Digger said.
Grimes’s walkie-talkie squawked. He
put the speaker to his ear while looking
at the D-fac’s entrance, on the far side
of the steam table. Finding no security
there, Grimes turned to check the fire exit
next to the stage. “I’m in the middle, by
the Jell-O cart,” Grimes said into the mic.
“Where are you?”
They could’ve been on the ground,
surrounded by cut ropes, watching us
float away. They could’ve been asking
themselves where the hell we thought we
were going.
I couldn’t speak for anybody else in
the D-fac on rib night. But Digger, it
was safe to say, had joined to fight. Hal
had joined because if he hadn’t, the war
would’ve never been the same. And as for
me, I’d joined to see the world.
Will Mackin, a U.S. Navy veteran, served
in Iraq and Afghanistan. This story
appears in his debut collection, Bring Out
the Dog, out this month.

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98 M A RC H 20 1 8 T H E AT L A N T I C
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Q:
What was the
most influential act of
protest in history?
Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer
Prize–winning historian
and author
The protests against the
Stamp Act in 1765, which
inevitably led to the cre-
ation of the United States a
decade later.
Harry Leslie Smith, World
War II veteran, activist, and
author, Harry’s Last Stand
Like in our own era, corrup-
tion and nepotism were ubiq-
uitous in the 16th century.
They stifled social and scien-
tific progress. Were it not for
Martin Luther’s 95 theses,
reportedly hammered to the
door of Wittenberg Castle
Church, which instigated
the Reformation, our mod-
ern democratic world might
never have germinated.
Kit Miller, director, Gandhi
Institute for Nonviolence
In the 1930s, 80,000
Muslim men and women
formed an “army of peace”
to protest England’s oppres-
sive occupation of what is
now Pakistan. Led by Abdul
Ghaffar Khan, whose non-
violent leadership prefig-
ured Martin Luther King Jr.’s
and Nelson Mandela’s, they
endured severe maltreatment
100 M A RC H 2 0 1 8 T H E
THE BIG QUESTION
prior to and during the parti-
tion of India and Pakistan.
David S. Meyer, author,
The Politics of Protest
The conscientious objec-
tor Randy Kehler went to
jail for nearly two years to
protest against the Viet-
nam War. Years later, Dan-
iel Ellsberg said that Kehler’s
sacrifice persuaded him to
share the Pentagon Papers.
T. V. Reed, author,
The Art of Protest
Rosa Parks’s refusal,
in 1955, to move to the
back of a segregated bus
in Alabama.
Michael C. Quinn, president
and CEO, Museum of the
American Revolution
The Newburgh Conspir-
acy, on March 15, 1783—a
protest that failed! By
facing down the apparent
beginnings of a coup d’état
AT L A N T I C
by his officers in Newburgh,
New York, General George
Washington ensured the U.S.
military’s subordination to
civilian authority.
Steve Ignorant, singer,
Crass
The U.K. miners’ strike
in the 1980s: Although the
miners ultimately lost, they
showed the British public
just how far the government
would go to achieve its aims,
even if it meant destroying
whole communities.
READER RESPONSES
Charles Lerable, Monterey,
Calif.
On June 5, 1989, on
Tiananmen Square, one
man stood against the
entire Chinese govern-
ment to protest the oppres-
sion of more than 1 billion
people. Using only his body,
he managed to stop an
armored tank column and,
even if for a moment, a bru-
tal crackdown on freedom
and democracy.
Erin Lisser, Mount Vernon,
Wash.
The Silent Sentinels’ pro-
test outside the White
House, which in 1919 helped
finally grant half of Amer-
ica’s citizens the right to
vote. Their patriotic quoting
of the president and abid-
ing by gender expectations
Illustrations by GRAHAM ROUMIEU
for silence were a deafening
and decorum-shattering roar
that brought a centuries-old
oppression to an end.
Mark Roberts, Lisbon, N.H.
Mahatma Gandhi’s 241-
mile Salt March in 1930
peacefully defied British
colonial tax policy in India.
Gandhi’s example of civil
disobedience inspired mil-
lions worldwide.
Lucia Perri, Guthrie, Okla.
The Beatles’ refusal
to play for segregated
audiences in Jackson-
ville, Florida, in Sep-
tember 1964. The band’s
contracts, signed by its man-
ager, Brian Epstein, stated
that it would not play to seg-
regated audiences. Since
then, we’ve come together.
Want to see your name on this page?
Email bigquestion@theatlantic.com
with your response to the question
for our May issue: What item would
you put in a time capsule to help
the next century understand our
current moment?
A new mattress with curves
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