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We joined the U.S. Foreign Service nearly 40 years ago in the same entering class, but we took very different paths to get there. One of us grew up amid hardship and segregation in the Deep South, the first in her family to graduate from high school, a Black woman joining a profession that was still very male and very pale. The other was the product of an itinerant military childhood that took his family from one end of the United States to the other, with a dozen moves and three high schools by the time he was 17.

There were 32 of us in the Foreign Services class of January 1982. It was an eclectic group that included former Peace Corps volunteers, military veterans, a failed rock musician, and an exCatholic priest. None of us retained much from the procession of enervating speakers describing their particular islands in the great archipelago of U.S. foreign policy. What we did learn early on, and what stayed true throughout our careers, is that smart and sustained investment in people is the key to good diplomacy. Well-intentioned reform efforts over the years were crippled by faddishness, budgetary pressures, the over-militarization of foreign policy, the State Departments lumbering bureaucracy, a fixation on structure, andmost of allinattention to people.

The Trump administration also learned early on that people matter, and so it made them the primary target of what the White House aide Steve Bannon termed the deconstruction of the administrative state. That is what has made the administrations demolition of the State Department and so many other government institutions so effective and ruinous. Tapping into popular distrust of expertise and public institutions, President Donald Trump has made career public servantsgovernment meteorologists, public health specialists, law enforcement professionals, career diplomatsconvenient targets in the culture wars. Taking aim at an imaginary deep state, he has instead created a weak state, an existential threat to the countrys democracy and the interests of its citizens.

The wreckage at the State Department runs deep. Career diplomats have been systematically sidelined and excluded from senior Washington jobs on an unprecedented scale. The picture overseas is just as grim, with the record quantity of political appointees serving as ambassadors matched by their often dismal quality. The most recent ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell, seemed intent on antagonizing as many Germans as he couldnot only with ornery lectures but also through his support for far-right political parties. The ambassador in Budapest, David Cornstein, has developed a terminal case of clientitis, calling Hungarys authoritarian, civil-liberties-bashing leader the perfect partner. And the U.S. ambassador to Iceland, Jeffrey Ross Gunter, has churned through career deputies at a stunning pace, going through no fewer than seven in less than two years at his post.

In Washington, career public servants who worked on controversial issues during the Obama administration, such as the Iran nuclear negotiations, have been smeared and attacked, their careers derailed. Colleagues who upheld their constitutional oaths during the Ukraine impeachment saga were maligned and abandoned by their own leadership. In May, the State Departments independent inspector general, Steve Linick, was fired after doing what his job required him to do: opening an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeos alleged personal use of government resources. Battered and belittled, too many career officials have been tempted to go along to get along. That undercuts not only morale but also a policy process that depends on apolitical experts airing contrary views, however inconvenient they may be to the politically appointed leadership.

Pompeo in Washington, D.C., December 2019

Not surprisingly, the Foreign Service has experienced the biggest drop in applications in more than a decade. Painfully slow progress on recruiting a more diverse workforce has slid into reverse. It is a depressing fact that today only four of the 189 U.S. ambassadors abroad are Blackhardly a convincing recruiting pitch for woefully underrepresented communities.

No amount of empty rhetoric about ethos and swagger can conceal the institutional damage. After four years of relentless attacks by the Trump administration and decades of neglect, political paralysis, and organizational drift, U.S. diplomacy is badly broken. But it is not beyond repair, at least not yet. What is needed now is a great renewal of diplomatic capacity, an effort that balances ambition with the limits of the possible at a moment of growing difficulties at home and abroad. The aim should be not to restore the power and purpose of U.S. diplomacy as it once was but to reinvent it for a new era. Accomplishing that transformation demands a focused, disciplined reform effortone that is rooted in the people who animate U.S. diplomacy.

The State Department is capable of reform. The challenge has always been to link that reform to wise statecraft and adequate funding. After 9/11, with uncommon speed and few additional resources, the department managed to retrofit itself to help prosecute the war on terrorism and take on the new imperatives of stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with smaller but still complex missions from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia. New training and incentives were put into play, and a generation of career Foreign Service officers was shaped by tours in conflict zones. Diplomats quickly became secondary players to the military, preoccupied with the kind of nation-building activities that were beyond the capacity of Americans to accomplish. It was easy to lose sight of the distinctive role of the U.S. Foreign Servicethe classic, head-banging work of persuading senior national leaders to bridge sectarian divides and pursue a more inclusive political order while standing up for human rights.

Although the transformation of the State Department into a more expeditionary and agile institution was healthy in many respects, it was also distorting. It was tethered to a fundamentally flawed strategyone that was too narrowly focused on terrorism and too wrapped up in magical thinking about the United States supposed power to transform regions and societies. It paid too little attention to a rapidly changing international landscape in which geopolitical competition with a rising China and a resurgent Russia was accelerating and mammoth global challenges, such as climate change, were looming. It also neglected what was happening at homethe powerful storms of globalization that had left many communities and parts of the economy underwater and would soon overwhelm the United States political levees.

The contours of a new agenda for diplomatic reform have to flow from a sensible reinvention of the United States role in the world. The restoration of American hegemony is not in the cards, given Chinas rise and the diffusion of global power. Retrenchment is similarly illusory, since the United States cannot insulate itself from outside challenges that matter enormously to its domestic health and security.

Instead, U.S. diplomacy has to accept the countrys diminished, but still pivotal, role in global affairs. It has to apply greater restraint and discipline; it must develop a greater awareness of the United States position and more humility about the wilting power of the American example. It has to reflect the overriding priority of accelerating domestic renewal and strengthening the American middle class, at a time of heightened focus on racial injustice and economic inequality. And it has to take aim at other crucial priorities. One is to mobilize coalitions to deal with transnational challenges and ensure greater resilience in American society to the inevitable shocks of climate change, cyberthreats, and pandemics. Another is to organize wisely for geopolitical competition with China.

The ultimate measure of any reform effort is whether it attracts, unlocks, retains, and invests in talent. The last thing the State Department needs is another armada of consultants descending on Foggy Bottom with fancy slide decks full of new ideas about how the department should look. Its time to focus onand listen tothe people who drive U.S. diplomacy: the Foreign Service professionals who rotate through posts around the world, the civil service employees whose expertise anchors the department at home, and the foreign-national staff who drive so much of the work of U.S. embassies and consulates.

To start, the United States needs a top-to-bottom diplomatic surge. The Trump administrations unilateral diplomatic disarmament is a reminder that it is much easier to break than to build. The country doesnt have the luxury of waiting for a generational replenishment, marking time as new recruits slowly work their way up the ranks. Since 2017, nearly a quarter of the senior Foreign Service has left. That includes the departure of 60 percent of career ambassadors, the equivalent of four-star generals in the military. In the junior and midcareer ranks, the picture is also bleak. According to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, as many as a third of current employees in some parts of the State Department are considering leavingmore than double the share in 2016.

A diplomatic surge will have to incorporate ideas that in the past have seemed heretical to the department and its career staff but that today are inescapable. These include bringing back select personnel with critical expertise who were forced out over the past four years; creating midcareer pathways into the Foreign Service, including lateral entry from the civil service; and offering opportunities for Americans with unique skills (in new technologies or global health, for example) to serve their country through fixed-term appointments. Another useful initiative would be to create a diplomatic reserve corps made up of former Foreign Service and civil service midlevel officers and spouses with professional experience who could take on shorter or fixed-term assignments abroad and in Washington. Still another idea would be to create an ROTC-like program for college students, an initiative that would broaden understanding of the diplomatic profession across society and provide financial support to those preparing for diplomatic careers.

All these ideas would have landed in the too hard pile when we were serving. But the reality today is that the State Department simply cannot afford to continue its bad habits of offering inflexible career tracks, imposing self-defeating hiring constraints, and encouraging tribal inbreeding among its cloistered ranks.

Another major priority is the need to treat the lack of diversity in the diplomatic corps as a national security crisis. It not only undermines the power of the United States example; it also suffocates the potential of the countrys diplomacy. Study after study has shown that more diverse organizations are more effective and innovative organizations. At the very moment when American diplomacy could benefit most from fresh perspectives and a closer connection to the American people, the diplomatic corps is becoming increasingly homogeneous and detached, undercutting the promotion of American interests and values.

The top four ranks of the Foreign Service are whiter today than they were two decades ago; only ten percent are people of color. Just seven percent of the overall Foreign Service is made up of Black people, and just seven percent are Hispanicwell below each groups representation in the U.S. labor force. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has reversed a more than quarter-century-long push to appoint more female ambassadors. Overall female representation in the Foreign Service remains roughly the same today as it was in 2000still 25 percent below female representation in the wider U.S. labor force. These trends have effectively undone much of the progress made following the settlement of two class-action discrimination suits shortly after we entered the Foreign Service.

The State Department should make an unambiguous commitment that by 2030, Americas diplomats will, at long last, resemble the country they represent. Achieving this goal will require making diversity a key feature of the diplomatic surge at every point along the career pipeline. It will demand an unshakable commitment to diverse candidates and gender parity in senior appointments. And it will require the State Departments leadership to hold itself accountable by not only getting departmental data in order and making the information accessible to the public but acting on it, as well, with clear annual benchmarks for progress. Lower promotion rates for racial and ethnic minorities and the precipitous drop-off in the number of women and minorities in the senior ranks are flashing red warning lights of structural discrimination.

The State Department ought to invest much more in mentorship, coaching, and diversity and inclusion training. It has to make its career track more responsive to the expectations of todays workforce for a work-life balance rather than perpetuate the imbalance that has prevented too many talented Americansdisproportionally those from underrepresented groupsfrom serving their country. The department has to pay more attention to the particular hazards facing minorities serving overseas, including LGBTQ employees. And it has to revise its promotion criteria to require personnel to foster diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplaces.

To succeed in both a serious diplomatic surge and a historic new campaign for diversity and inclusion, the department must commit to winning the war for talent. The entrance exams to the Foreign Service are designed to weed out candidates rather than recruit the most talented ones. Too much of a premium is placed on written and oral examinations and too little on a candidates rsum, academic performance, skills, expertise, and life experiences. The whole process can seem interminabletaking as long as two years from start to finish and inadvertently benefiting candidates who have the means to hold out. After hiring their diplomats, the most effective diplomatic services spend up to three years training them. The Foreign Service Institute still spends only six weeks testing the mettle of its recruits; the only real difference from our experience many years ago is that the tedious lectures now feature PowerPoint presentations.

Once on assignment, there is no rigorous, doctrinal approach to the art of diplomacy and no system for after-action reviews. The personnel evaluation process consumes three months of an officers time, with no commensurate accountability for, let alone improvement in, individual or collective performance. Opportunities for midcareer graduate or professional education are scarce and carry little weight with promotion panels. The effect is often to penalize employees who receive extra training or undertake assignments to other agencies or to Congress. They should be rewarded instead.

Senior leadership positions are increasingly out of reach for career personnel. Over the past few decades, the proportion of political appointees to career appointees at the State Department, reaching down to the deputy assistant secretary level, has grown far higher than at any other national security agency. That worrisome trendlike so many others during the Trump erahas worsened dramatically. Today, only one of the 28 positions at the assistant secretary level at the State Department is filled by an active-duty career officer confirmed by the U.S. Senatethe lowest number ever. A record share of ambassadors are also political appointees as opposed to professional diplomats, a significant blow to morale and to diplomatic effectiveness. In a reformed State Department, at least half the assistant secretary jobs and three-quarters of the ambassadorial appointments should be held by well-qualified career officers. The remaining political appointments should be driven by substantive qualifications and diversity considerations, not campaign donations.

To unlock its potential, the State Department must increase its staffing pipelines to deepen its officers command of core diplomatic skills and fluency in areas of growing importance, such as climate change, technology, public health, and humanitarian diplomacy. In the traditional area of economics, the State Department must strengthen its capabilities significantlyworking closely with the Commerce and Treasury Departmentsand promote the interests of American workers with the same zeal with which it has promoted the interests of corporate America.

The State Department also needs to rethink how and where it invests in language studies. One out of every four positions designated as requiring foreign-language skills is filled by an officer who does not in fact meet the minimum language requirements. The State Department trains nearly twice as many Portuguese speakers as it does Arabic or Chinese speakers. It should expand opportunities for midcareer graduate studies and incentivize continuous learning as a requirement for promotion. It should also streamline the evaluation process by determining personnel assignments on the basis of performance, expertise, and leadership development rather than through a process of competitive, careerist bidding built on connections and corridor, or word-of-mouth, reputations.

Part of investing in people means investing in the technology that allows them to realize their full potential. A more digital, agile, collaborative, and data-centric diplomatic corps depends on more robust and secure communications tools. Today, too many diplomats lack access to classified systems and technology, especially on the road. That leaves them more vulnerable to foreign intelligence and unable to keep up with other U.S. national security agencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the need to reimagine how to conduct diplomacy remotely or virtually.

Technology can no longer be seen as a luxury good for diplomacy. The last big technological push at the State Department came during Colin Powells tenure as secretary of state, nearly two decades ago, when the department began to set aside its mini-fridge-sized desktop computers and move cautiously into the modern age. It is long past time for another major effort. To enhance the departments technological platforms, the State Department should appoint a chief technology officer reporting directly to the secretary of state. That official should work with the U.S. Digital Servicean information technology consulting group within the executive branch that was created in 2014to make internal systems, foreign aid, and public diplomacy more effective. Just as the departments chief economist helps diplomats understand the impact of global economic trends on U.S. interests, the chief technology officer should help diplomats grapple with disruptive technologies and leverage private-sector talent.

But technology is not the onlyor the most importantaspect of the State Departments culture that must change. A systemic reluctance to tolerate physical risk has led to the proliferation of fortress-style embassies that can trap personnel behind chancery walls and isolate them from the people they should be meeting, not only foreign officials but also members of civil society. This has also led to an ever-growing number of posts where officers cant be joined by family members, shorter tours, misaligned assignment incentives, lower morale, and less effective diplomacy.

A torpid bureaucratic culture is no less significant. Policy information and recommendations often amass 15 or more sign-offs before reaching the secretary of states office, suffocating initiative and stifling debate. Unstaffed Foreign Service positions create an imbalance between Washington and the field that prevents decentralized decision-making. And a rigid promotion structure incentivizes careerism over political or moral bravery.

A seismic cultural shift is needed to create a more upstanding, courageous, and agile institution, with greater tolerance for risk and a simplified, decentralized decision-making process. The State Department must get out of its own waydelegating responsibility downward in Washington and outward to qualified chiefs of mission overseas and reducing the number of undersecretaries and top-level staff members to avoid duplicative authority and inefficiencies. Initiative should be prized, and the passive-aggressive habit of waiting for guidance from above should be discouraged.

The department ought to discard the current cumbersome process for clearing papers and policy recommendations and start from scratch. A new, more flexible framework would allow expertise in Washington and in the field to be quickly distilled into cogent policy proposals and would grant embassies in the field more autonomy to implement the resulting decisions. The State Departments leaders must also offer political top cover for constructive dissent, supplanting the corrosive keep your head down culture with an I have your back mentalityin other words, the exact opposite of how the State Department treated its diplomats during the 2019 impeachment hearings.

Any effort to reform the State Department should start from within. It should focus in the first year of a new administration or a new term on what can be accomplished under existing authorities and without significant new appropriations. That is the moment of greatest opportunity to set a new directionand the moment of greatest vulnerability to the habitual traps of bureaucratic inertia, overly elaborate and time-consuming restructuring plans, partisan bickering, and distracting forays into the capillaries of reform rather than its arteries.

If the department can take the initiative and demonstrate progress on its own, that would be the best advertisement for sustained congressional support and White House backing for a new emphasis on diplomacy. It would be the best way to show that U.S. diplomats are ready to earn their way back to a more central role. It could help generate momentum for a rebalancing of national security budget priorities at a moment when U.S. rivals are not standing still; in recent years, the Chinese have doubled their spending on diplomacy and greatly expanded their presence overseas.

With a sturdy foundation of reforms laid, the next step would be to codify them in the first major congressional legislation on U.S. diplomacy in 40 years. The last Foreign Service Act, passed in 1980, modernized the mission and structure of the State Department, building on acts from 1924 and 1946. A new act would be crucial to making reforms durable. It would also help shape a style of diplomacy that is fit for an increasingly competitive international landscape and better equipped to serve the priority of domestic renewal. Serious, lasting transformation of U.S. diplomacy will be very hard. But it matters enormously to the future of American democracy in an unforgiving world.

We both bear the professional scars, and have enjoyed the rewards, of many eventful years as career diplomats. We saw plenty of examples of skill and bravery among our colleagues in hard situations around the worldfrom the horrific genocidal violence of Rwanda and the epic turmoil of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s to the later challenges of ambassadorial postings in Liberia after its civil war and in Jordan in the midst of a once-in-a-half-century royal succession. We saw how U.S. diplomats can produce tangible results, whether by holding secret talks with adversaries, mobilizing other countries to ease the plight of refugees, or promoting American jobs and economic opportunities.

Through it all, however, we still remember vividly the sense of possibility and shared commitment to public service that drew the two of us and 30 other proud Americans to our Foreign Service entering class all those years ago. Today, there is a new generation of diplomats capable of taking up that challengeif only they are given a State Department and a mission worthy of their ambitions and of the country they will represent.

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The Transformation of Diplomacy - Foreign Affairs Magazine

By Tom Mackaman and David North 22 September 2020

The New York Times, without announcement or explanation, has abandoned the central claim of the 1619 Project: that 1619, the year the first slaves were brought to Colonial Virginiaand not 1776was the true founding of the United States.

The initial introduction to the Project, when it was rolled out in August 2019, stated that

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from the New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the countrys history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

The revised text now reads:

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the countrys history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

A similar change was made from the print version of the 1619 Project, which has been sent out to millions of school children in all 50 states. The original version read:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.

The website version has deleted the key claim. It now reads:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.

It is not entirely clear when the Times deleted its true founding claim, but an examination of old cached versions of the 1619 Project text indicates that it probably took place on December 18, 2019.

These deletions are not mere wording changes. The true founding claim was the core element of the Projects assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones from declaring that the historical identification of 1776 with the creation of a new nation is a myth, as is the claim that the Civil War was a progressive struggle aimed at the destruction of slavery. According to the New York Times and Hannah-Jones, the fight against slavery and all forms of oppression were struggles that black Americans always waged alone.

The Times disappearing, with a few secret keystrokes, of its central argument, without any explanation or announcement, is a stunning act of intellectual dishonesty and outright fraud. When it launched the 1619 Project in August 2019, the Times proclaimed that its aim was to radically change what and how students were taught about American history. With the aim of creating a new syllabus based on the 1619 Project, hundreds of thousands of copies of the original version of the narrative, as published in the New York Times Magazine, were printed and distributed to schools, museums and libraries all across the United States. A very large number of schools declared that they would align their curricula in accordance with the narrative supplied by the Times.

The deletion of the claim that 1619 was the true founding came to light this past Friday, September 18. Ms. Hannah-Jones was interviewed on CNN and asked to respond to Donald Trumps denunciation, from the standpoint of a fascist, of the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones declared that the true founding contention was of course not true. She went further, making the astonishing, and demonstrably false, claim that the Times had never made such an argument.

The exchange went as follows:

CNN: Trumps Executive order speaks to a misconception that I know that you have tried to address about what the 1619 Project is, that it is not an effort to rewrite history about when this nation was founded.

Hannah-Jones: Of course, we know that 1776 was the founding of this country. The Project does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country.

This is, of course, an outright lie. Hannah-Jones has repeatedly made the true founding claim in innumerable Tweets, interviews and lectures. These are attested to in news articles and video clips readily available on the Internet. Her own Twitter account included her image against a backdrop consisting of the year 1619, with the year 1776 crossed out next to it.

Ms. Hannah-Jones, caught in one lie, doubles down with new and even bigger lies. The Times journalist-celebrity not only denies her projects central argument. In self-contradictory fashion, she also says that the true founding claim was just a bit of a rhetorical flourish. She told CNN that the 1619 Project was merely an effort to move the study of slavery to the forefront of American history.

If, as Hannah-Jones now claims, all the Times had sought to do was draw more attention to the history of chattel slavery in the years it existed in British North America (1619-1776) and the United States (1776-1865), there would never have been a controversy. Neither the World Socialist Web Site, nor the scholars it interviewedJames McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Richard Carwardine, Dolores Janiewski, and Adolph Reed, Jr.ever disputed the importance of slavery in the historical development of the United States. Tens of thousands of books and scholarly articles have been devoted to the study of slavery and its impact on the historical development of the United States.

In its initial reply to the 1619 Project, published in early September 2019, the WSWS explained:

American slavery is a monumental subject with vast and enduring historical and political significance. The events of 1619 are part of that history. But what occurred at Port Comfort is one episode in the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world, and of the origins and development of the world capitalist system.

The WSWS rebuttal of the Times provided an account of the emergence of chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere, its central role in the formation of capitalism, and its revolutionary destruction in the Civil War. Hannah-Jones responded to the WSWS intervention by denouncing its writers as anti-black racists on Twitter.

When Wood, McPherson, Bynum, and Oakes, joined by Sean Wilentz of Princeton, wrote an open letter to the Times last December requesting specific corrections to clear errors of fact, they stressed that their objection was not over whether or not slavery was important. The five historians expressed their dismay at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.

New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein published a haughty and dismissive reply, in which he flatly rejected their criticisms:

Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nations past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding. While we welcome criticism, we dont believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.

Silversteins disgraceful letter appeared on December 20. At that point, he knew that the Times 1619 Project was fatally flawed and that the newspaper had surreptitiously made a fundamental change in the online text of the article to which the distinguished historians had objected. Silversteins behavior demonstrated a complete lack of professional ethics and intellectual integrity.

The Times is now obligated to issue a public statement acknowledging its distortion of history and the dishonest attempt to cover up its error. It should issue a public apology to Professors Gordon Woods, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes and all other scholars it sought to discredit for having criticized the 1619 Project. To be perfectly blunt, Mr. Silverstein and his confederates in the editorial board of the Times should be dismissed from their posts.

Furthermore, the Pulitzer Prize given to Hannah-Jones this spring in the field of commentary for her lead essay, in which the false claims about the true founding and the American Revolution were made, should be rescinded.

The 1619 Project was never about historical clarification. As the WSWS warned in September 2019, the 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. As revealed in a leaked meeting with Times staff, Executive Editor Dean Baquet believed that it would be helpful to the Democratic Party to shift focus after the failed anti-Russia campaign. Baquet said:

[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next yearand I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion withrace in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.

The fraud perpetrated by the Times has already had serious political consequences. As the WSWS warned, the 1619 Project has been an enormous gift to Donald Trump. On September 17, Constitution Day, Trump delivered a speech at the National Archives Museum in which he obscenely postured as a defender of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution against the radical left, specifically naming the 1619 Project. In his typically menacing fashion, Trump warned that he would restore patriotic education and that our youth will be taught to love America.

It was in response to Trumps attacks that Hannah-Jones appeared on CNN. She noted that Trump is trying to bring the 1619 Project into the culture wars. She went on, He clearly is running on a nationalistic campaign thats trying to stoke racial divisions, and he sees it as a tool in that arsenal.

True enough. But Hannah-Jones is one of the key stokers of racial divisions; and it was the New York Times that brought the 1619 Project into the culture wars, viciously attacking all critics of a historical narrative that makes racial hatred the driving force of American history.

The falsification of history always serves the interests of reactionary political forces. By repudiating and denigrating the American Revolution and Civil War, the New York Times has provided an opportunity for Trump to fraudulently posture as a defender of the great democratic legacy of Americas revolutions in the interests of his neo-fascist politics.

The author also recommends:

The New York Timess 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history [6 September 2019]

The cancellation of professor Adolph Reed, Jr.s speech and the DSAs promotion of race politics [18 August 2020]

A reply to the American Historical Reviews defense of the 1619 Project [31 January 2020]

The 1619 Project and the falsification of history: An analysis of the New York Times reply to five historians [28 December 2019]

The two American Revolutions in world history [4 July 2020]

Originally posted here:
The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones abandon key claims of the 1619 Project - WSWS

Gone Girl: The Musical would be darkthats a given. It would be violent, bleak, and blood-splattered, with the apex of the night occurring when the voice of cool, calculating Amy Dunne soars all the way to the cheap seats during a bring-down-the-house eleven oclock number. Adapted from Gillian Flynns runaway bestseller, it would undoubtedly pack seats for months, with legions of Flynn fanatics turning out to watch their favorite anti-heroine belt her way through the novels familiar twists and turns. Theres just one problem: Gone Girl: The Musical isnt happening anytime soon, even if Flynn has thought about it.

I think it would be a rock operaa deep, dark rock opera, Flynn said. Id love it. Im the biggest musical lover in the world.

Flynn had a chance to contemplate Gone Girl: The Musical during the making of Utopia, her new Amazon Studios series (and her first outing as a television showrunner), in which eagle-eyed fans can catch a glimpse of the would-be musical on a Chicago marquee. Adapted from a 2013 British television series by the same name, Utopia centers on a tightly-knit group of uber-knowledgeable superfans, who are shocked to learn that their favorite comic isnt just real, but it holds the secrets to the public health conspiracy of the century. In an early episode of the series, Flynn had an empty marquee to fill, with The Chicago Theaters landmark lights gleaming in the background of a scene where two characters stumble down North State Street. Flynn hoped to fill the space with an easter egg, maybe even a cheeky nod to her beloved city of Chicago, but landing the rights to other pop culture properties proved challenginguntil she had a breakthrough.

As it turns out, getting rights is so complicated, Flynn said, of her quest to get the name of an existing musical on the marquee. I threw out about twenty possibilities, and I got rejected over and over. Eventually we were getting down to the wire, and I finally said, Hey, I know who will give us rights. I will.

There you have it: Ms. Flynn said she would give the rights herself, and Gone Girl: The Musical landed on the marquee. What may seem on its surface like winky, self-referential fan service is in fact a fitting grace note for Utopia, a conspiracy thriller about a band of comic book superfans tasked with saving the world. For Flynn, a self-described professional fan whose career has taken her from beat journalism at toilet seat conventions to the highest echelons of literary Hollywood, Utopia is something of a creative homecoming. After all, Flynns enduring love for fan culture is a family affair. Flynns father, a professor of film studies, made part of his living by finding and selling rare comic books, meaning that Flynn was steeped in fandom from a young age.

That was what we did on weekendspile into the family station wagon, then go to flea markets and comic conventions, Flynn said. In Kansas City, theres a great convention called Fool Con. That was always the highlight of my year.

Flynn first came aboard Utopia in 2014, when David Fincher, who directed the film adaptation of Gone Girl, tapped her to write the scripts. Budget disputes tanked Utopias future at HBO, with Fincher departing from the project, but Flynn salvaged the bones for a second life at Amazon Studios, stepping in to carry her writing over the finish line as showrunner and executive producer. Flynn, who ate, slept, and breathed fandom as Entertainment Weeklys television critic during the early aughts, came to the project deeply fluent in the language of fans.

Elizabeth Morris

Having literally made my living as a fan for awhile, I love fans, because I love people who have passion for anything, whether it's comic books or model trains, Flynn said. I love people who love their stuff, because I don't think there's a lot of unbridled and genuine passion in the world.

Flynn herself is a woman of unbridled and genuine passionfor musical theater, for feminist literature, for comic books (she wrote one, called Masks, in 2015), and, believe it or not, for dressing up in Renaissance-era garb.

Im a big Renaissance fair person, Flynn said. I get dressed up every year. Even my kids have outfits, and every once in awhile, my husband will be a good sport and wear his Henry VIII outfit. We go to a great Ren Fest outside of Chicago every year. Theres another one in Kansas City that I grew up going to, so Im very much steeped in that.

But fandom, for all its dizzying highs, has staggering lows. Much ink has been spilled about toxic fandom, while the dismal precedents established during Gamergate still continue to animate todays online culture wars. In Utopia, Flynn doesnt shy away from the dark side of fandom, highlighting the tendency of her unlikely heroes to devolve into uncritical hero worship, as well as a dangerous myopia. Jessica Hyde, the comic book heroine who proves to exist as a real person rather than just a fiction, criticizes Utopias band of geeks for living what she perceives as meaningless lives, characterized by small jobs and tiny apartments and phone screens with texts always chirping. She goes on to shout, Your only passion is sitting in your bedrooms, talking about a world I was actually living in. For Flynn, this narrow-minded tunnel vision is fandoms chief danger.

Elizabeth Morris

As much intellectual power and passion as you can put into things that you love, theres still a really big world out there, Flynn said. There are a lot of things to learn and explore and expose yourself to. You can get overly focused on certain things and make judgments about people who love one thing and not the other, to a degree where its exclusionary. Its about finding that moderation. Enjoy the stuff you enjoy, but leave that room in your life to find new things to love, too.

Though inhabiting fan culture was treading familiar ground for Flynn, stepping into the drivers seat on Utopia was a bold new adventure. Credited as the showrunner and executive producer of Utopia, as well as the scribe behind all eight episodes, Flynn was tasked with an unprecedented amount of ownership over this project.

It felt very big and challenging, Flynn said. I didn't entirely know what running a show entailed, having never done it before. I didnt get into TV in the usual manner that most people do, where youre used to being in the writers room and on set, seeing a showrunner in action. For me, it was trial by fire.

Despite the challenge of learning on the job, Flynn took to one element of showrunning right away: the visuals. Flynn, who has written three novels (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, and Dark Places) brought her novelists toolkit to location scouting and prop selection, so much so that, in her next life, she believes shell come back as a prop master. Her painterly touch is evident throughout the series, with each set constructed from a colorful phantasmagoria of telling details.

In my writing, each character will notice certain things, whether its something in the room behind a person or a certain visual aesthetic, Flynn said. I realized that this was exactly what Id be doing on screentelling the story through more than just dialogue and action, but through visuals, which really further a characters personality. Do they have family photos behind them? What kind of art do they like? What kind of house do they live in?

Yet one thing Flynn couldnt prepare for was the shock of releasing Utopia, a show about a comic book that predicts global epidemics, into a world ravaged by COVID-19.

I remember when I was selling the show, and everyone was trying to wrap their brains around the idea of this world-shaking virus, Flynn said. "They kept asking, Will people believe it? And, Is this pure science fiction?

Elizabeth Morris

Filming on Utopia wrapped in October 2019. In the five months to follow, Flynn regularly commuted from Chicago to Los Angeles to work through the editing process. In January, with COVID-19 beginning to make international headlines, the editing bay was often filled with what Flynn describes as uncomfortable, uneasy laughter. Come March, with cities across the nation shutting down and life as we knew it grinding to a halt, Flynn finished the show from her laptop in Chicago, where life was mired in a miasma of confusion and misinformation.

We had the news on 24/7, trying to see if we had to microwave our children or whatever it was we were supposed to be doing, Flynn said. I would look away from the scene I was editing, over at the TV screen, and see something disturbingly similar on the screen. I remember telling my husband, Its strange that we now have to differentiate between the real pandemic and the show pandemic. It got so confusing.

Flynn insists that Utopias harrowing themes arent the stuff of fiction, but rather, the inevitable consequences of global sins that have come home to roost. In fact, Flynn argues, the conspiracy-riddled, truth-muddled world of Utopia has been long in the making.

Elizabeth Morris

I cant believe that we live in this time period where truth has become debatable, or where your opinion is as good as fact, Flynn said. Were getting into very unsettled ground, because if we believe that you can have an opinion on whether or not theres gravity, and leave it at You cant prove it, or, I dont believe in it, thats so dangerous. Unless theres some basic reality we can all agree on, we put ourselves as a global society in a very vulnerable place, where we can be manipulated by politics, by money, by bad actors.

With Utopia launching into this tormented world after a long, circuitous path to the finish line, Flynn can at last return to her next project: her unfinished fourth novel. She, like everyone in the United States, is struggling to stitch her professional and creative life together with the challenging realities of living at a socially distant remove.

For me, the challenge of writing hasnt been the lack of creativity, but the lack of time, Flynn said. Rather than working downstairs in my office, plotting the remainder of my book, Ive been trying to remember long division and teach my daughter how to read.

Conventional COVID-19 wisdom has been to take this new way of life day by day. As for Flynn, shes taking it night by night.

Ive always been a night owl, so the best time for me to write tends to be when everyone else is asleep, because Im usually still awake, Flynn said. Email gets quiet, the world gets quiet, and I can get a couple hours there when my brains working well. I get on my treadmill desk and get going.

Yet even as Flynn charts a new creative course, she remains as bound to this new reality as any of us, with the hotly-anticipated Utopia tethering her to our present nightmare. Owing at least in part to its shocking verisimilitude and its sociopolitical ambitions, Utopia will enter into the zeitgeist as a subject of heated discussion, with fans drawing startling connections between reality and fiction, not unlike the tinfoil hat-wearing characters of Utopia diagramming conspiracies with red string. Longtime Flynn fans and science-fiction fanatics alike will discuss Utopia as passionately as they always discuss Flynns charged, arresting stories of crime, punishment, and women on the brink, which never land without inciting conversation. In fact, Flynn, ever the professional fan, is counting on it.

I'd rather have someone actively dislike what I wrote, but have a good conversation about it, than shrug their shoulders and say, I liked it, but never think about it again, Flynn said. That, to me, is the absolute worst. I just hope that this show enables people to have interesting conversations about what we value.

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In 'Utopia,' Gillian Flynn's New Show, Being a Fan Could Save the World - Esquire

President Trump has declared himself the "president of law and order." Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

President Trump has declared himself the "president of law and order."

Nearly a month after the killing of George Floyd while in police custody and the launch of massive protests against police brutality across the country, President Trump was asked what part of his response would he have handled differently.

"I think that tone is a very important thing and I try to have a very good tone, a very moderate tone, a very sympathetic in some cases tone, but it's a very important tone," Trump said.

Though when pressed on what he would change, the president said, "I would say if I could, I would do tone."

No modern president has been as aggressive a culture warrior as Donald Trump.

He announced his candidacy by accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists. He criticized Black athletes who knelt during the national anthem. He championed police officers but promoted rough policing, telling law enforcement officers in a 2017 speech, "please don't be too nice" when making an arrest. Recently, he announced over Twitter that he would never consider removing the name of Confederate generals from military bases.

Trump has also fixated on the historic phrase "law and order."

"I will fight to protect you I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters," Trump said in the Rose Garden on June 1, as law enforcement began firing pepper spray on peaceful protesters in nearby Lafayette Park.

"Our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa and others," Trump said.

Culture wars have been part of American politics for decades. Hot-button issues like immigration, family values and respect for the American flag can get a more powerful reaction from voters than dry debates over taxes or Medicare.

But at a time when the country continues to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, an economic recession and, above all, heightened levels of racial unrest, the culture wars are changing, and Trump, who has always relished a fight over white identity and culture is struggling to adjust.

Many of Trump's culture war allies are defecting NASCAR decided to ban the Confederate flag and the NFL apologized for punishing its athletes who knelt to protest police brutality.

According to David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, the most notable rift came when military leaders, whom Trump likes to call " my generals," broke with him. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said they would not only consider renaming military bases but also rejected Trump's threat to use the U.S. military against protesters.

"That was a seminal, I think, development in this story," Axelrod said, who is also a CNN senior political commentator and host of the Axe Files and Hacks on Tap podcasts.

Axelrod added that Trump also faced opposition from retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, his former defense secretary, and several prominent military leaders who criticized his decision to take a photo in front of St. John's Church following the removal of protesters on June 1.

"Trump has so tried to cleave himself to the military and claim the military as his own. And what the military was saying there is that 'No. We're not yours. We belong to the Constitution. We have principles and rules and norms and laws that we're going to follow.' And that was an incredible rebuke for him." Axelrod said.

Despite a visible push away from Trump on many of the culture war issues, not every part of the conservative coalition is ready to call a truce. There has even been a backlash to the new positions of institutions like the NFL.

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich says kneeling athletes will still be a cultural flashpoint and disagrees with the NFL's decision.

"Refusing to stand for the national anthem is an insult to America. It's not protesting racism. It's protesting the United States of America, and that's what the divide is going to become. If you want to be anti-American, you've got a party eager to be with you," Gingrich said.

"I can tell you I probably won't watch the NFL this year, and I'm a big Green Bay fan," he said.

Gingrich, an experienced culture warrior in his own right, argues that Trump will be able to find new issues to push as his Democratic opponents find new ways to overreach. And that's why he believes the culture wars are not over.

"The nice thing in my entire career about dealing with the left is they can't contain themselves," Gingrich said, adding, "so they go from very legitimate demand to reform the police, to defund the police because they just can't help themselves."

Specific culture war issues can also come and go. In 2004, Republican strategist Karl Rove harnessed the backlash to gay marriage during President George W. Bush's 2004 campaign to help get him reelected. Although, less than a decade later, the same issue faded following the Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage in 2015.

Now, Rove says the same thing is happening, especially following the recent Supreme Court ruling that protects LGBTQ people against workplace discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"They'll be some concern in some quarters about the latest decision by the court. But, yeah, that's the interesting thing about Supreme Court decisions. Not always, but many times, they tend to sort of diminish the controversy," Rove said.

Another more fundamental reason why culture wars are shifting is that most modern cultural battles are racial.

Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons says that white voters have started to think differently in the wake of George Floyd's killing.

"The video of Black men being killed on television is much like the 1950s and '60s when Martin Luther King had even children marching in Alabama, and being attacked by fire hoses and dogs. That kind of thing really does speak to the morality that I think most Americans hold," Simmons said.

Simmons, who also hosts #ThisisFYI on Instagram, says the events of the past month have changed how many Americans respond to and deal with acts of racism and, adding, "They can't just sit by quietly and let it happen."

"It's raised the stakes on these questions of racial harmony and our ability to get past our history," Simmons said, adding, "and what it seems like as afraid as people may be of rioters and looters they may be more afraid of a president who is not against racism and who's not trying to bring the country together."

Trump was originally set to hold his first campaign rally since the COVID-19 pandemic on June 19 in Tulsa, Okla. After receiving criticism for scheduling the event on the holiday Juneteenth, in a city that experienced a racist massacre of black people in June 1921, Trump changed the date to June 20.

"Certainly in the television era, it's the first time that we've had a president who's been so willing to embrace a racially exclusive perspective on American politics, and that may be turning the tide against him," Simmons added.

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As The Culture Wars Shift, President Trump Struggles To ...

Prime minister Boris Johnson stirs culture war over Churchill statue. So ran a recent New York Times headline. The Washington Post agreed. As counter protesters took to the streets to protect statues and as controversy erupted over foreign secretary Dominic Raabs comments on taking the knee, many British commentators, too, saw a nation divided and a prime minister stoking the flames of a culture war.

Yet an Ipsos Mori poll, published last week, paints a different picture. Nine out of 10 Britons, it showed, would be happy for their child to marry someone of another ethnic group. Just 3% thought someone had to be white to be truly British. The British public, the pollsters observed, have become avowedly more open minded in their attitudes towards race.

There is a similar puzzle in America. Two months ago, had you asked academics or commentators about the consequences of American cities burning in the wake of protests over the killing of a black man by a white policeman, most would probably have agreed that polarisation would be exacerbated and Donald Trump strengthened. The opposite has happened. The president seems more politically isolated and even demographic groups seen as significant to the Trump base, those without higher education, for instance, show sympathy towards Black Lives Matter.

How do we explain this paradox? Why are societies both fractured by culture wars and yet, Britain certainly more than America, united, and unitedly liberal, over some of the most fractious aspects of those wars?

From one perspective, liberals have already won the culture wars. Attitudes on race, gender and sexuality have changed so much over the past 40 years that weve almost become blind to that transformation. Between 1989 and 2019, the proportion of the population that thought that gay relationships were wrong fell from 40% to 13%; the numbers opposed to abortions halved, as did those who thought it wrong to have a child outside of marriage. When the first British Social Attitudes Survey was published in 1983, more than 50% of whites would not countenance a spouse of a difference race, a figure that barely declined throughout that decade.

Britain in the 1980s was another country. Racism was vicious and visceral and woven into the fabric of British society in a way difficult to imagine now.

Racism has not disappeared, but the context is very different. Racist attacks or workplace discrimination today take place in a society in which virtually no one, unlike 40 years ago, views them as acceptable. (The major caveat is that attitudes to Muslims remain illiberal.)

At the same time, though, the traditional left/right divide has eroded, so the ways in which we view ourselves and our social affiliations has changed and not necessarily for the better. Culture and identity play a bigger role in how we define ourselves politically. The frameworks through which we make sense of the world are as often white or Muslim or European as they are liberal or conservative or socialist. And when people talk of liberal or conservative or Remain or Leave these are seen as cultural identities as much as political viewpoints.

The coincidence of these two trends has created societies more liberal and yet more fractious. Consider attitudes towards immigration. Most polls show that Britain has become more relaxed about the issue, leading some commentators to suggest that Brexit has made people less worried about immigration. The reality is more complicated. The shift in attitudes began well before the Brexit debate. And polls show that almost half of Leave voters think immigration has a negative impact compared with 12% of Remain voters; fewer than a third of Leave voters think immigration has a positive impact. A majority of the public still wants numbers reduced.

The complexity of the response is not surprising. The public has become more liberal and less racist. Immigration has, however, also become symbolic of unacceptable change. Working-class lives have in recent decades been made more precarious through the stagnation of wages, the rise of the gig economy and the imposition of austerity. The power of labour movement organisations has eroded, the Labour party has drifted away from its traditional constituencies.

Immigrants are not responsible for these changes. But the very decline of the economic and political power of the working class has helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. As the language of culture has become an important means through which to understand ones place in society, so many in the working class have come to see their marginalisation as a cultural loss. Immigration, viewed as a key reason for cultural change, has come to bear responsibility for that loss.

Those challenging racism similarly often view their problems through the lens of identity politics and their targets, too, are frequently symbolic. Debates about racism in recent years have often revolved around issues such as language and cultural appropriation. What began as protests about police brutality has, for some, morphed into a campaign against racist statues and controversy over an English rugby anthem.

The cultural turn of recent years has encouraged people to repose political problems as issues of culture or identity. Rather than ask What are the policy reasons for the lack of housing and stagnating wages? or What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?, we look to blame the Other, demand recognition for our particular identity and tussle over symbols.

Many white working-class people accuse immigrants of stealing jobs and scamming the benefits system, while anti-racists often deride Karens and gammons and finger working-class people as bigots. The growth of liberal social attitudes, far from being a base from which to build a movement to tackle both racism and the marginalisation of the working class, itself becomes lost in the social fractures. We should beware that we dont get trapped in our own blindness.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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