by Adam Serwer
This is also where the resistance to condemning Farrakhan or the Nation can come from: a sense that despite the Nation’s many flaws, it is present for black people in America’s most deprived and segregated enclaves when the state itself is not present, to say nothing of those who demand the Nation be condemned. Then there is the sense that while Farrakhan’s views are vile, he lacks the power or authority to enforce them. Denouncing the marginalized Farrakhan can seem ridiculous to those who feel like white people put their own Farrakhan in the White House.
“The NOI has kind of faded, because of Farrakhan’s virulent racism and sexism and bizarre crap; I don’t think he’s a leader anyone can follow,” said Alexander. “Some of these hardcore anti-Farrakhan people always want black people to denounce Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, which I reject. Their footprint has shrunk, but in a lot of communities, for a long time, they were helping people and families when nobody else would.”
But with the Women’s March, Mallory is no longer just doing anti-violence work. She’s become a leader of a diverse, national political movement, of which Farrakhan’s most frequent targets—Jews, women, LGBT people—are irreplaceable members.
“We would hope that public figures that aspire to be the leaders of social movements are truly equitable in the way that they tackle intolerance,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “We don’t think it should take very much to call out when somebody makes claims like, ‘The Jews control the government. The satanic Jews are behind all the world’s ills.’ I think the response for this is a layup.”
The more politically expedient path indeed seems obvious—but the stakes here for Mallory are personal and not simply political. I asked Mallory if she thought Farrakhan was anti-Semitic, or sexist, or homophobic. “I don’t agree with everything that Minister Farrakhan said about Jews or women or gay people,” said Mallory. “I study in a tradition, the Kingian nonviolent tradition. I go into prisons and group homes and I don’t come out saying, ‘I just left the criminals or the killers.’ That’s not my language. That’s not something I do. I don’t speak in that way. In the tradition that I come out of, we attack the forces of evil but not people.”
Trying to understand anti-Semitism has required something of a cultural adjustment for Mallory, who grew up in Harlem and didn’t know many Jewish people. She told me that once, in a conversation with colleagues, she remarked that Jewish people were good with money. “I’ve personally been checked on things like saying, ‘Well, you help us with the money, because I know that you guys know how to handle money,’ and one activist, she immediately followed up with me offline and said, ‘Listen, that’s anti-Semitic.’
“I asked her, ‘Could it possibly be ignorant language?…I know that it’s ignorant to say that, because it’s a negative stereotype and you reinforce that, but again when you say anti-Semitic it’s very dangerous for a person like me. It sounds really bad,’ ” Mallory said. “So she and I had a conversation. The two things that happened in that moment were one—she basically arrested my language and explained to me why that language was not good for the Jewish community, and at the same time I explained to her why using the terminology that she used was cause for me to feel attacked. And she understood that.”
Mallory said that she now understands why her original remarks were hurtful to her colleague. “Now when I have conversations with other people and they say those things to me, I explain to them, ‘Hey, this is what I’ve learned recently about this language,’ ” Mallory said. “It’s very similar to any person outside of the black community looking at us saying, ‘Get you some watermelon and fried chicken.’ It’s a negative stereotype that’s being reinforced, so this is the kind of unpacking we need to be doing.”
That fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, and the consequences of being a black leader associated with that term, was part of why she reacted so defensively on social media when CNN’s Jake Tapper began a tweetstorm on February 28, highlighting the anti-Semitic statements in Farrakhan’s speech and Mallory’s attendance at the event. One tweet, in which Mallory wrote, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader! Study the Bible and u will find the similarities. Ostracizing, ridicule and rejection is a painful part of the process…but faith is the substance of things!,” was interpreted by some of her critics as Mallory invoking the anti-Semitic canard that the Jews killed Jesus, a meaning Mallory said she did not intend.
“When you are labeled an anti-Semite, what follows can be very, very devastating for black leaders. To have someone say that about you, it almost immediately creates a feeling of defensiveness, because you know the outcome,” Mallory said. “The same photos that people have pulled up on the Internet that showed my relationship with the Nation of Islam have been there for years. And yet I was still able to build an intersectional movement that brought five million people together, and the work that I have done for over twenty years, and it’s very clear that I have worked across the lines with very different people.”
I asked Mallory what she would tell a Jewish activist who was disturbed by her associating with the Nation. “I would say that I hear and understand that, and I hope that as I’m able to understand how they feel, I hope that they will also take the time to understand why I have partnered with the Nation of Islam and been in that space for almost thirty years,” Mallory responded.
On Tuesday, the Women’s March released a statement saying, in part, “Minister Farrakhan’s statements about Jewish, queer, and trans people are not aligned with the Women’s March Unity Principles.” In her essay for NewsOne, Mallory wrote that “as historically oppressed people, Blacks, Jews, Muslims and all people must stand together to fight racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”
Neither statement explicitly condemned Farrakhan, and Greenblatt said he was unsatisfied with the responses of both the Women’s March and Mallory. “Even if they respect certain programs his organization runs, that in no way mitigates the malicious things he’s saying about Jews and the responsibility for people in leadership positions to recognize it for what it is and reject it in a clear and unambiguous manner,” Greenblatt said.
Therein lies the key conflict for Mallory, and her colleagues at the Women’s March, going forward. The Nation of Islam may be essential to anti-violence work in poor black neighborhoods. The Nation may be an invaluable source of help for formerly incarcerated black people whose country has written them off as irredeemable. The Nation may offer a path to vent anger at a system that continues to brutalize, plunder, and incarcerate human beings because they are black. And it may also be impossible to continue working with the Nation and at the same time lead a diverse, national, progressive coalition that includes many of the people Farrakhan and the Nation point to as the source of all evil in the world.
I asked Mallory if she intended to keep working with the Nation. “The brothers and sisters that I work with in the Nation of Islam are people too,” she said. “They are a part of the work that I’ve been doing for a long time, and they are very much so ingrained in my anti-violent work of saving the lives of young black men and women.
“So that’s the answer to that.”
From the perspective of her critics, Mallory’s refusal to denounce Farrakhan or the Nation appears as a condemnable silence in the face of bigotry. For her supporters, Mallory’s refusal to condemn the Nation shows an admirable loyalty toward people who guided her through an unfathomable loss.
But watching Farrakhan bask in the media attention, as yet another generation of black leadership faces public immolation on his behalf, it is impossible to see him as worthy of her loyalty.
9
THE CRUELTY OF
EXCLUSION
The conservative intelligentsia were helpless to stop Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary. They launched a half-hearted effort—most famously, National
Review launched its “Against Trump” issue, featuring many writers who have since settled comfortably into roles offering intellectualized after-the-fact justifications of whatever Trump does.
Why did Trump understand the Republican base better than the intellectuals who purport to define “conservatism” did? Partly it’s a consequence of Trump’s constant imbibing of Fox News, which is so influential in shaping the perceptions of the conservative rank and file. But the other part is that conservative writers misled themselves about what motivated the Republican base, what divergences they would consider heresies, and what they truly wanted. That self-deception arguably begins with the Tea Party, the anti-Obama movement that swept the GOP and the midterm elections in 2010.
After Barack Obama’s resounding victory over the late Arizona senator John McCain in 2008, the press was inundated with postmortems about the death of the Republican Party, which was becoming a “regional” institution. Those who assumed the imminent death of the GOP had no idea of the backlash to come or how broad it would be. Obama took office in what was at the time the worst recession since the Great Depression, and Republican intransigence and Democratic timidity foiled an adequate policy response. Democrats lost big in the 2010 midterms, and conservatives credited the rise of the Tea Party movement with helping secure the Republican victory. Obama’s personal popularity helped him overcome Mitt Romney to win a second term in 2012, but midterm losses for Democrats in both 2010 and 2014 were devastating.
But what was the Tea Party movement? To most conservative writers, it was the revival of small-government constitutionalism. Others discerned something more complex. In The Weekly Standard, a conservative outlet whose demise was a direct consequence of its criticism of Trump, Matthew Continetti wrote that the Tea Party had two faces. “One looks to the future. The other looks to the past. One wants to repair deformities in the American political structure and move on. The other is ready to scrap the whole thing and restore a lost Eden.”
Conservative intellectuals misunderstood that Eden and what it looked like. They projected their low-tax, federalist, small-government beliefs onto a Republican rank and file whose views were far more complex and far more motivated by identity than conservative commentators wanted to admit. So when an authoritarian reality-show star who insincerely vowed not to touch Medicare or Medicaid and to raise his own taxes appeared, promising to “Make America Great Again,” they believed the conservative base would reject him. But Republican voters embraced him, because the version of the electorate that conservative intellectuals imagined was a fantasy.
“Not a single grassroots Tea Party supporter we encountered argued for privatization of Social Security or Medicare along the lines being pushed by ultra-free-market politicians like Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity,” wrote the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson in their comprehensive 2013 study of the Tea Party, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. The Tea Party “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people signal a larger fear about generational social change in America….When Tea Partiers talk about ‘their rights,’ they are asserting a desire to live again in the country they think they recall from childhood or young adulthood.” A country that never would have elected someone like Obama.
Trump’s victory in the 2016 primary came from understanding that motivation better than the people paid to be professional conservatives. The “Against Trump” case was largely built around the idea that Trump’s heresies meant he wouldn’t be a “true” conservative, in the sense of being anti-abortion, protax cuts for the wealthy, and in favor of privatizing as much of the welfare state as possible. Most Republican voters, though, don’t actually care about “big government” in the sense that pious disciples of William F. Buckley do. Trump’s divergences from conservative orthodoxy—his overt prejudice against immigrants, his rhetorical support for popular programs like Medicare and Medicaid, his opposition to free trade—didn’t bother Republican voters, because they already agreed with Trump on those issues long before he showed up.
Just as conservative intellectuals were in denial about the motives of the Republican base, they were in denial about their own. After all, Trump’s attacks on multiracial democracy were no more of a deal breaker for many of them than his insincerely held positions on Medicare or Medicaid were to GOP primary voters. There are a handful of conservative intellectuals who resisted the social and economic pressure to turn MAGA—and I think liberals sometimes fail to appreciate the courage necessary to adhere to your principles despite the enmity of former friends and colleagues—but most ultimately accepted Trump’s hegemony over the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Trump is a tremendously dishonest person, but he’s forced an exceptional number of people to reveal their true selves.
This essay is about a key moment of conservative denial about the significance of Trumpism, and how Trump himself raised the stakes of his own defeat. I wrote this prior to Trump’s first impeachment, and in hindsight, the Democrats became much more aggressive once it was clear to them that Trump’s lawlessness was a threat to their party and not just to their constituents. I also believe the closing line was too strident. At the time, I was considering the international significance of a nation of America’s power and influence falling to authoritarian nationalism, and I overstated the possibility that other nations would be unable to resist that tide. Despite Trump’s loss, the resurgence of right-wing nationalism around the globe is hardly over. It would be a mistake to assume that its appeal in America has fully dissipated.
WHAT WE DO NOW WILL DEFINE US FOREVER
JULY 18, 2019
The conservative intelligentsia flocked to the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., this week for the National Conservatism Conference, an opportunity for people who may never have punched a time clock to declare their eternal enmity toward elites and to attempt to offer contemporary conservative nationalism the intellectual framework that has so far proved elusive.
Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar who organized the conference, explicitly rejected white nationalism, barring several well-known adherents from attending, my colleague Emma Green reported. But despite Hazony’s efforts, the insistence that “nationalism” is, at its core, about defending borders, eschewing military interventions, and promoting a shared American identity did not prevent attendees from explicitly declaring that American laws should favor white immigrants.
Some other attendees, such as National Review’s Rich Lowry, took pains to distance themselves from the president’s brand of nationalism. “We have to push back against Donald Trump when he does things to increase that breach between the right and African Americans,” Lowry said. But in the fall of 2017, when Trump attempted to silence black athletes protesting police brutality, Lowry praised his “gut-level political savvy,” writing, “This kind of thing is why he’s president.”
The conference stood solidly within the conservative intellectual tradition, as a retroactive attempt by the right-wing intelligentsia to provide cover for what the great mass of Republican voters actually want. Barry Goldwater did not break the solid South in 1964 because the once-Democratic voters of the Jim Crow states had suddenly become principled small-government libertarians; voters who backed Donald Trump in 2016 did not do so because they believed a nonracial civic nationalism had been eroded by liberal cosmopolitanism.
The consensus that American civic nationalism recognizes all citizens regardless of race, creed, color, or religion was already fragile before Trump took office. That principle has been lauded, with varying degrees of sincerity, by presidents from both parties, and in particular by the first black president, who reveled in reminding audiences that “in no other country in the world is my story even possible.” The nationalism that conservatives say they wish to build in fact already existed, but it was championed by a preside
nt whose persona was so deformed by right-wing caricature that they could not perceive it. Instead, they embraced the nationalism that emerged as a backlash to his very existence and all it represented.
Trump’s nationalist innovation is not taking pride in his country, supporting a principled noninterventionism, or even advocating strict enforcement of immigration laws. The only new thing Trump brings to the American nationalism of recent decades is a restoration of its old ethnic-chauvinist tradition. Conservative intellectuals cannot rescue nationalism from Trump, any more than they could rescue Goldwater from Jim Crow, because Trump’s explicit appeals to racial and religious traditionalism, and his authoritarian approach to enforcing those hierarchies, are the things that have bound conservative voters so closely to him. The failure of the conservative intelligentsia to recognize this is why it was caught so off-guard by Trump’s rise to begin with.
At a rally last night in North Carolina, Trump was reminding the country of this truth. Last week, the president told four Democratic congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—to “go back” to their countries, even though all of them are American citizens. This is literally textbook racism. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offers “Go back to where you came from” as its example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin.
Trump’s demand is less a factual assertion than a moral one, an affirmation of the president’s belief that American citizenship is conditional for people of color, who should be grateful we are even allowed to be here. Some elected Republicans offered gentle rebukes; others defended the president’s remarks. But at his rally in North Carolina, Trump showed them all that the base is with him. The crowd erupted into chants of “Send her back” when the president mentioned Omar, the Minnesota representative who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia.