Note: In 1988, I wrote this article, and it appeared as a cover story in the Washington Monthly. There have been myriad changes in public policy toward poverty in the intervening 35 years, including the enactment of welfare reform and the short-lived expansion of the child tax credit during the pandemic. Republicans have decimated SNAP, widely known as food stamps, and Medicaid. But I wanted to republish it on Christmas last year and this because it remains, I think, relevant. We have had great works of art that focus on the poor in the years since. HBO’s The Wire is often and rightly called Dickensian. Its societal indictments, moral complexity, attention to personal agency, and riveting installments over the years echo Dickens, whose novels were serialized. But with due respect to David Simon, the show’s creator, I’d argue that we still need a new Dickens, an artist who commands global fame and unalloyed praise and whose work helps those who need help the most. That’s a lot to ask for this troubled and war-torn Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, but we can hope as 2026 approaches.

Matthew Cooper
Christmas Day, 2025

Christmas is always the busy season for Charles Dickens, but this year there’s more going on than usual. There’s a Bill Murray remake of A Christmas Carol (playing the perfect ’80s Scrooge—a TV exec too busy to do lunch with his ghost) and, for the truly sturdy, a two-part, six-hour film of Little Dorrit. Coming soon: Disney’s Oliver Twist. And a new biography of Dickens is getting prominent reviews, including front-page billing in The Washington Post Book World.

But what’s been missing from the articles I’ve read about these works is the recognition of Dickens’s central accomplishment: He prodded (and entertained) millions of readers into caring about the poor. Instead of seeing the poor, as Malthus did, as some abstract, seething mass of “surplus population,” Dickens saw them as individuals, engaging enough to merit novels of 700, 800, and 900 pages. He made his readers see them that way too. And that was a revolutionary accomplishment.

One indication of his influence lies in numbers. He was the best-selling author in Victorian England, writing novels that became standard household items, as common as candles and brooms. In the 12 years after he died, nearly 4 million copies of his books sold in Britain alone—an amazing feat even by Stephen King standards. When it came to influence, Daniel Webster argued that Dickens had “done more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into Parliament.” Even the conservative Economist conceded that Dickens fueled “the age’s passion—we call it so designedly—which prevails to improve the condition of the working classes.” Queen Victoria hailed his humanizing influence on the nation and his “strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.”

As for the poor themselves, they not only saw Dickens as their champion, they read him. Journals of the period are filled with accounts of chimney sweeps and factory hands captured by his work. And when they couldn’t make out all the words, there were plenty of illustrations to help them along. The working classes responded by deluging Dickens with invitations to speak before their guilds. “Ah! Mr. Dickens!” shouted a carriage driver to Dickens’s son, on the day of the novelist’s funeral. “Your father’s death was a great loss to all of us—and we cabbies were in hopes that he would be doing something to help us.”

It was not without reason, then, that Dostoevsky called Dickens “the great Christian.’” Characters like Oliver Twist and Mr. Bumble, who ran the infamous workhouse, carry lessons as old as the New Testament. When Mr. Bumble terrorized Oliver for asking for a second helping of gruel, even affluent Englishmen knew how the orphan felt. They knew, too, that they had an obligation to help. That kind of empathy stoked the era’s major reform movements. The resulting bouquet of triumphs included everything from fewer working hours to free education and universal suffrage.

There’s more to Dickens, though, than misty-eyed sentiment. His was a subtle and muscular vision that recognized (and condemned) the sins of impoverished individuals as well as the collective guilt of society. Dickens gives us not only Oliver Twist but also Fagin, the criminal ringleader who press-gangs Oliver into service. He’s no victim of society. Fagin’s problem is Fagin.

Is there any relevance in this today? After all, the sprawling squalor of Victorian Britain has gone the way of the workhouse. The laissez-faire liberalism that Dickens deplored is light-years away from today’s social welfare state. (No food stamps had Oliver. No caseworker.) But America today is in at least one way like the England of the 1830s: Most of us see the underclass as a seething, abstract mob. Of course, it’s not just our artists who’ve failed us, but our politicians, too. And it’s too much to expect all art to serve as social glue, binding each of us to the concerns of the less fortunate. But today, when so much fiction is either mired in minimalist ennui or panting with the lifestyles of the rich and promiscuous, we need someone who can animate our social concern. We need a new Dickens.

A street-walking man

Where to find one? My guess is that it can only be someone who has seen poverty up close; perhaps a journalist. Dickens himself became acquainted with the poor as what today’s social scientists would call a “participant observer.” He was one of them.

His father, John Dickens, tried to give his children a life of parlors and singing lessons on the paycheck of a Navy clerk. As a result, like so many working people of the time, the Dickens family floated in and out of debtors’ prison (bringing their servant with them, as was the custom of the day). By 1822, when Charles was 10, debt’s constant tug forced his family to yank him out of school and place him in a factory pasting labels on pots of shoe polish. When not at work, he spent long days wandering the alleys of work-weary London. With his parents often imprisoned, describing what he saw became a way of mastering a hostile world. He’d jot down dozens of “sketches,” detailed descriptions of just about anything he’d run into. They captured not only turmoil and toil but character, as well. Typical was the one about his uncle’s Soho barber, a man who, playing Monday-morning quarterback, recounted how he would have guided Napoleon’s troops at Waterloo.

Eventually, his family earned its freedom, and Dickens became a law clerk, allowing him to tame “the savagery of stenography,” as he put it, and later become a reporter. At the time, reporting mostly meant taking shorthand, but Dickens was so talented one editor called him “the most rapid, the most accurate, and the most trustworthy reporter then engaged on the London press.”

With his star rising, Dickens didn’t leave the poor behind. Instead, he sketched them. Under the pseudonym “Boz,” he churned out copy about vulgar vendors, ragged children, and raging arguments. In “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” Dickens presented his comfortable readers with a prostitute: “The lowest of the low; dirty, unbonneted, flaunting and slovenly.” In his “Visit to Newgate,” he took them inside a prison that housed children. “Fourteen terrible little faces we never beheld. There was not one redeeming feature among them—not a glance of honesty—not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection.”

This kind of firsthand experience became central to Dickens’s fiction. To write Hard Times, for instance, he traveled to the north to cover a workers’ strike. He was no sit-in-the-study author. After writing in the mornings, Dickens would take afternoon walks of 10 miles or more that returned him to the streets that powered his prose.

Obviously, it wasn’t just the reporting that made Dickens Dickens. It takes a little more than stenography, and a lot of something called imagination, to spin a 900-page novel. But Dickens’s immersion in street life made his novels richer. When a barrister picked up Dickens’s work, he saw his servants and his slums. He saw his London.

The stenographer’s eye and the novelist’s mind gave Dickens the ability—virtually unprecedented—to make the poor seem real. As Gertrude Himmelfarb explains in The Idea of Poverty, this was a time when servants were invisible, even to their masters. When a contemporary critic hailed Dickens’s talent for making a “washerwoman as interesting as a duchess,” it was a tribute not only to Dickens’s wonderful prose, but also to his new vision.

After all, one of the main characters in his first lengthy work of fiction, the serial Pickwick Papers, is Sam Weller, a servant. He not only fails to remain invisible; more often than not he seems a good deal wiser than his master. When he first signs on as Pickwick’s valet, the negotiations turn into a “Who’s-on-first?” routine that sounds like Weller is hiring Pickwick. Weller still seems in control when Pickwick checks into an inn. After Pickwick stumbles into the wrong bedroom, only to be kicked out by a very unhappy woman, it’s Weller who rescues him and guides him to his room. “You rayther want somebody to look arter you, Sir, when your judgment goes out a wisitin’,” Weller chirps. The servant’s introduction in the serial’s fourth issue sent sales surging.

In his next book, Oliver Twist, and throughout the other novels he was to write until his death in 1870, Dickens stuck to the simple proposition that no class had a monopoly on smarts or morality or decency or humor. This was a revolutionary creed at a time when the affluent saw the poor as a mob—to be feared or appeased, perhaps, but definitely not to be considered as individuals. And the rich were scarcely alone in their class-bound vision. As Dickens was spinning novels, the history of the working class in Manchester was being written by a German emigré named Friedrich Engels.

The idea of Jacobin-style revolution haunted Dickens, who poured his fears into prose in A Tale of Two Cities. In our century of failed revolutions, there’s no more haunting or timely image than Dickens’s Madame Defarge, knitting by the guillotine. He recognized that, just as the poor weren’t all good, the rich weren’t all bad. His pages brim with venal landlords, nasty bankers, and callous captains of industry; but good-guy capitalists pop up too. A product of the streets himself, Dickens saw no romance in revolution. It’s not the proletariat who overthrew Scrooge, but his conscience.

If Dickens feared revolution, he didn’t fall into the opposite trap of forgetting why mobs charged the barricades. He understood that the capitalist society was rife with institutions that kept the poor down. The villains of Hard Times aren’t just bad apples but overlords of a cruel factory system, dehumanizing in the monotony of its work. The tragedies of Bleak House, one of his last and gloomiest books, are found in the systematic injustice of the courts. By challenging these institutions, he made the lawyer or factory owner see that they shared responsibility.

The idea of poverty

And when Dickens trained his guns, liberals weren’t exempt. The workhouse that Dickens took on in Oliver Twist was one of the most prominent liberal programs of his day. Today it’s hard to think of the book’s cruel overseers as being progressive. But the Poor Law of 1834 was considered a great liberal victory, one that would segregate the indebted poor and prevent them from dragging their fiscally responsible neighbors into the red. (Talk about the unintended consequences of liberal reform.) When Oliver meekly seeks a double dose of gruel, we see unbridled cruelty. “Enlightened” Victorians saw themselves.

And what they saw was folly. Consider the way that Mr. Bumble—who runs the “progressive” workhouse—understands Oliver’s revolt.

“It’s meat.”

“What?” exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

“Meat, ma’am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “You’ve over-fed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am, unbecoming a person in his condition.”

The humor of the scene helps carry its meaning. Had Dickens’s criticisms been heavy-handed, as [the late scholar of the Victorian Era] Steven Marcus points out, middle-class readers wouldn’t have touched his works. Instead of promoting a specific alternative to the workhouse, he satirized it, appealing to his readers’ Christian charity. A second key to Dickens’s success is his choice of the symbol of the good child, in Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit or David Copperfield. He tapped the wellsprings of protectiveness that cultures can be made to feel for the young. Martin Luther King Jr. put that same insight into action when Birmingham schoolchildren stared down firehoses and police dogs, leaving us with one of the most arresting images of the civil rights movement.

But even as he skewered institutions, Dickens understood that the poor were often in the wrong themselves. If anything, there’s a schism in his writing, dividing what you might call, for lack of better terms, the worthy poor from the unworthy—between those who merit our admiration and those who don’t.

Winning hands down in the Worthy Category, family division, are the Christmas Carol’s Cratchits. It’s not just their “conditions” that make them sympathetic—the fact that they’re poor or that Bob Cratchit has a boss like Scrooge or that Tiny Tim needs crutches. It’s the family’s own nobility that lends the story such power, remake after remake. One clear signal to Victorian readers was the Cratchits’ white-glove cleanliness—a paramount virtue at a time when filth was almost always followed by disease. The Cratchits were “darned and brushed” before the Christmas feast. After supper, “the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept.” In the Cratchits, like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Little Dorrit, respectable British middle-class readers found an ideal of themselves.

Meanwhile, a first in Unworthiness might go to the brickmakers of Bleak House, who seem like something out of a documentary on battered wives. We spy them when Mrs. Piggle happens by. “An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome,” boasts the father. “And we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them … And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I giv’ it her; and if she says I didn’t she’s a Lie!” Today, when many liberals still romanticize the poor, Dickens’s ability to distinguish poverty from nobility is well worth remembering.

Dickens understood that there were good and bad individuals within every class. But he rarely saw the individuals who were a mixture of good and bad. His heroes and heroines don’t whine, don’t curse, and even though they’re raised in the company of foul-mouthed, cockney villains, they speak the King’s English. To be sure, his supporting cast could include people like the Peggottys in David Copperfield, who were not so well-spoken. But they, too, were practically flawless. This strict division between the worthy and the unworthy poor is more than an aesthetic flaw. It limits Dickens’s relevance today.

Dickens makes his readers want to help the deserving poor. And, indeed, the Victorian (and New Deal) reforms that were, in part, inspired by Dickens focused on these able-to-help-themselves characters. Kids who’d be okay if child labor was abolished; workers who’d prosper with a union. This is the story of America through the 1950s: The New Deal and rising prosperity catapult the “worthy” poor into the middle class. Oliver goes to Levittown.

This left behind an underclass that seemed short on lovable Cratchits and long on pregnant teens, drug addicts, and gang members. What we don’t have is the popular literature that will jar the affluent into caring about these less savory characters. We don’t have the literature that will condemn their faults and recognize that these are people who can be helped. When I worked in a Big Brothers program in New York City, I remember noticing that there was no novel or film that got at the downright weird complexities of those tenements I visited on 102nd Street. I couldn’t point to any book that explained how those kids could be such utter failures in school, unable at age 15 to write a single sentence, and still be as sharp and savvy and as alert as any kids I had known growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. There was no film that I could tell my friends about that captured the complexity of those mothers I would meet who’d blow much of their money on VCRs and HBO but who were also selfless when it came to helping their kids. There was—and still is—no writer who combines great talent and great popularity and who captures that bizarre marriage of sin and decency I saw in those tenement families.

The Dickens character who most reflects our dilemma is the Artful Dodger, the young pickpocket who befriends Oliver Twist. He’s engaging, to be sure. The first thing we see him do is take Oliver drinking; by the end, he’s in court, trying to sweet-talk a magistrate into pardoning him. But he’s a side dish. We never understand or care about him the way we care about Oliver. The next Dickens needs to put us not in our Olivers’ shoes but in those of our own Artful Dodgers.

While a new Dickens couldn’t cure poverty, he could inspire personal commitment from the middle class. I don’t mean the anesthesia of paying for yet another government program, but involvement. And that takes understanding. Public health care won’t improve unless talented doctors and nurses want to choose Harlems over Humanas, at least for a few years. We won’t really become a kinder, gentler nation unless our leaders know something that’s true about those on the bottom. But working with or for the poor requires inspiration; it doesn’t come naturally. Individuals disappoint. Projects collapse. Easier lives beckon. Great art, as opposed to Brookings reports, can be the spur we need.

In 1945, Lionel Trilling lamented that no writer in his day had done what many of the leading Victorian writers had done—combine great literature and social concern. “In three-four decades, the liberal progressive has not produced a single writer that itself respects and reads with interest. A list of writers in our time shows that liberal progressivism was a matter of indifference to every writer of large mind—Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann, Kafka, Yeats.” The absence of such a writer may have been a marginal loss in the middle of this century, when the politics of the time were liberal even if the great novelists were not or when poverty seemed like it could be erased simply through economic expansion and a few social reforms. Today when politicians are retreating from helping the poor and growth offers no panacea, we need another Dickens to inspire each of us to help.

I don’t know if there will be a single figure—be it a novelist filmmaker, or journalist—who can animate a nation’s imagination the way Dickens did or whether it may take a disparate group or even an artistic movement. But I’m certain those Dickens-like qualities will not be had by some writer-in-residence strolling the hallowed halls of Haverford. The Dickens mantle demands a life outside the academy, exposed to the real world. It belongs to the writer who can make us care not only about our Tiny Tims but about our Artful Dodgers, too.

The post Why We Need a New Dickens appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Before government shutdowns end, political blame games begin. And as politicians from both parties try to blame each other, party operatives and pundits scour the poll data to see who wins the game. Often, they look at poll questions that directly ask which party deserves blame or gauge party favorability.  

But to my eye, only one poll number really matters in determining whether a government shutdown is having any political impact: the generic congressional ballot test. 

The generic congressional ballot test involves some form of the question: if the congressional election were today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your House district? 

In this polarized era, party favorability is low, with blame for most things falling along party lines and a healthy chunk of the electorate quick to cast a pox on both sides. But the generic congressional ballot test forces poll respondents to choose one party over the other. 

Take the 17-day shutdown of October 2013, when Republicans, prodded by Senator Ted Cruz, refused to fund the government unless President Barack Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was defunded. Over the summer of 2013, the Democratic lead in the Real Clear Politics generic congressional ballot average had disappeared, from 6.3 percentage points in April to zero in August. As the threat of a shutdown grew in September, the Democratic lead increased by 2.4 points. By the end of the shutdown on October 17, the Democratic lead was up to 5.5 points and peaked at 6.6 by early November. The public opinion cratering was impossible to deny, so Republicans caved without nicking Obamacare. 

Today marks the 17th day of the 2025 shutdown, with Democrats demanding renewals of expiring Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies. Yet the Democrats’ electoral standing is essentially unchanged. The average Democratic lead in all generic congressional ballot test polls sampled in September was 3.1 points, and for those taken in October, 2.7 points.  

Does this mean the shutdown will help Democrats in November 2026? An argument made after the fact by Republican proponents of the 2013 shutdown (and Democratic advocates for adopting similar smashmouth tactics) was that Republicans had a great 2014 midterm, holding the House and taking the Senate. But Republican improvement in the generic congressional ballot test only improved after they abandoned the shutdown without any policy concessions to show for it. Republicans didn’t win in 2014 because of the 2013 shutdown; they won because they gave up on it and gave the public plenty of time to forget that it happened. 

Unless the current shutdown continues for months (which it could!), voters a year from now probably won’t factor it into their Election Day decision-making. But Democratic leaders today must constantly assess whether their highwire tactics are putting their swing district and swing state candidates at risk. So far, the answer is clearly: nope. 

Should Democrats be sanguine about a 3-point generic congressional ballot lead in the polling average? Not quite. The aggregate Republican House popular vote margin has beaten the RCP generic congressional ballot average eight out of 12 times, including the last three elections (albeit only by 0.3 points in 2022). But Democrats have beaten the spread before, most recently in 2018—the previous midterm when Donald Trump was president, when Democrats flipped the House. They were already cruising with a poll average lead of 7.3, then outperformed in the popular vote by 1.1 points. 

Would a three-point lead in the popular vote be sufficient for Democrats to win, after considering gerrymandering? We don’t know yet what the final lines for 2026 will be, or whether aggressive Republican gerrymandering will help them add seats or backfire by spreading their votes out thinly and failing to account for swing voters, particularly Latinos. But despite past gerrymandering concerns, the winning party’s share of the House popular vote in the last four House elections closely tracked its share of the House seats. Three points may be enough, but Democrats won’t feel comfortable without more of a cushion in the polls. 

So congressional Democrats can’t presume the shutdown will seal the Election Day deal, though I doubt they ever held such an assumption. But considering that the existing Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot test has held up after more than two weeks of a shutdown, with other polls asking about blame showing Republicans are shouldering the most, Democrats appear to keep their base energized without sacrificing swing votes. Without weakening their midterm prospects, Democrats have zero incentive to surrender. 

The post Democrats Are Winning the Survey Question That Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The longest federal government shutdown in American history is 35 days, spanning December 2018 and January 2019. Technically, it was a partial shutdown because appropriations for some agencies were approved before the beginning of Fiscal Year 2019. It is also the only government shutdown directly instigated by a President of the United States, one Donald J. Trump, who wanted to hold the government hostage until Congress agreed to give him billions for building a border wall.  

Since then, America has had 2,440 days of fully operating federal governance. (Joe Biden pitched a perfect game.) Trump is back, and the streak has ended. With zero Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations bills passed by Congress, this shutdown is total, save for essential employees. 

My bet is that this shutdown will break the 35-day record, with no partial shutdown asterisks. 

Why? Because Trump doesn’t care if the government shuts down. He has no interest in what most of the federal government does, beyond what it can do for him. Through the Office of Management and Budget, he has the power to deem certain government workers essential, which fulfills his desire to exert unilateral power. 

Democrats, all things being equal, do care about what the federal government does. But Trump is already stripping the civil service down to the studs while asserting unlimited executive powers. Democrats, for the most part, do not want to abet Trump’s agenda with passive votes for Republican spending bills, nor are they afraid of taking blame for any of the consequences of a shutdown.  

Perhaps they should be. I have already expressed my disagreements with the tactical choices by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. But Trump begins this standoff with much of the public aghast at his chaotic authoritarianism; a new New York Times poll shows majorities believe Trump has “gone too far” by pressuring media outlets, sending the National Guard into cities, and with immigration enforcement generally. Trump has been such a colossal chaos agent and has been so dismissive of bipartisan negotiations that Democrats have reason to believe he won’t escape blame for one more act of chaos, even though Democrats have complicated their preferred narrative by making their own demands regarding renewal of expiring health coverage subsidies. 

Moreover, Democratic Party favorability is already pretty low, just 33 percent in the Real Clear Politics average. A shutdown probably can’t make it go much lower and could give it a slight boost if frustrated rank-and-file Democrats are energized. Having said that, the poll number Democrats will want to keep a closer eye on is the generic congressional ballot, where they now hold a slight edge. Slippage there in reaction to a shutdown may prompt calls for surrender. Short of that, Democrats should have no problem allowing the federal government to stay closed and pinning the resulting chaos on the person tagged as the “Chaos President” before he even held the office.  

Might Schumer wobble? Some Democrats were frustrated when he shied away from the shutdown standoff in March. And Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio reported on Monday that “Schumer has approached a small group of Senate Dems to see if they’re OK with short-term [spending bill] (10 days, for example), but with a caveat—assuming Trump agrees to a negotiation on [Affordable Care Act] subsidies.” Punchbowl subsequently reported that the small olive branch “drew the ire of House Democrats.” Schumer didn’t propose it when he met with Trump.  

Just as rank-and-file Democrats are pressuring Schumer to walk away from the negotiating table, Trump is doing everything possible to push him away. Following that meeting, Trump posted on his social media page a deepfake video of Schumer telling a sombrero-clad Jeffries, over a track of mariachi music, “we have no voters anymore because of our woke trans bullshit” so “if we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.” Republicans had some ground to stand on in arguing Democrats were instigating the shutdown by insisting on renewing expiring health coverage subsidies. Still, they sacrificed that ground by lying about what Democrats were demanding. Beyond the substantive dishonesty, attempting to humiliate Schumer only gives him a political incentive to stand his ground.  

And so does Trump, spending precious time, as the shutdown clock ticks, telling military leaders to expect deployment to American cities to fight a “war from within” in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.  

Furthermore, Democrats have an available response to Republican attempts to shift all the blame onto them: Republicans don’t need us to open the government. They can change Senate rules and suspend or eliminate the filibuster on a party-line vote. And Republicans can’t argue that they think changing the rules on a party-line vote—the so-called “nuclear option”—is a terrible violation of Senate norms because Republicans literally changed the rules on a party-line vote three weeks ago to speed confirmation of judicial nominees. If they don’t go nuclear and kill the filibuster to keep the government open, that shows how little they care about keeping it open, and how much they care about creating excuses for vilifying Democrats.

(Longtime readers of my work know I like the filibuster, so I have no ulterior motive in goading Republicans into abolishing it. But let’s get real: Senators in both parties have gone “nuclear” enough that the filibuster rule is already hanging by a thread.) 

All this is to say that we shouldn’t expect a shutdown to end anytime soon, primarily because Trump is a reckless authoritarian with no obvious interest in negotiations or in maintaining the bulk of what the federal government does, and far more interested in scurrilous political combat. 

The post Republicans Can End the Government Shutdown Today appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans were so wedded to the free market that they believed the federal government shouldn’t criticize industries, let alone individual companies, for unsafe products and practices. When Democrats made arguments for environmental or health regulations based on rigorous science, Republicans went to enormous lengths to challenge the science and resist government action.  

But now we’re living in the upside-down. Republicans apparently believe that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Health and Human Services should use the power of their offices to kneecap individual companies based on science that’s half-baked at best.  

Republicans have filed for divorce with the free market, in favor of a threesome with authoritarianism and quackery. 

Earlier this September, I reviewed how Donald Trump has erased the traditional conservatism that once defined the GOP: 

In the past month alone, the Trump administration has unilaterally imposed severe global tariffs despite court rulings challenging his authority to do so … pressured two American microchip companies to cough up 15 percent of revenue from sales to China which may amount to an unconstitutional export tax, took a 10 percent ownership share in another microchip company, militarized policing in the District of Columbia and threated to do the same in other cities, decimated the leadership of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and put the nation’s vaccination system at risk based on New Age-y vibes not scientific data, fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing employment data that didn’t serve Trump’s political purposes, and moved to fire a member of the Federal Reserve board on the grounds she committed a crime despite not being charged let alone convicted for a crime. 

Part of that record involves Trump directing the federal government to effectively control some companies. On Monday, Trump directed the federal government to tar the pain reliever acetaminophen, more commonly known by the brand name Tylenol, as the cause of autism. In doing so, Trump drove the stock price of Tylenol’s manufacturer, Kenvue, to a record low. 

Why is Trump doing this? It’s not because Kenvue—spun off three years ago from the Johnson & Johnson healthcare conglomerate—is an avatar for wokeness. It’s because Trump appears to believe the survival of his MAGA coalition requires accommodating all of America’s strains of conspiracy theorists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s like-minded left-ish skeptics of the health care industry, dubbed Make America Healthy Again or MAHA.  

Moreover, Trump loves ribbon-cuttings, literally and figuratively. He loves declaring he did something—from opening a new factory to ending a foreign war—even if he didn’t really do it yet. Given the opportunity to declare victory over autism, however illusory, Trump took it. At the Charlie Kirk memorial service, he oversold, “I think we found an answer to autism.” 

Trump and Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services quickly glommed onto a scientific review of epidemiological research into the effects of acetaminophen use by pregnant women that was only released last month. Slightly more than half of the studies reviewed showed a connection between acetaminophen use and risk of autism in offspring, but the lead researcher told The Washington Post, “We show that acetaminophen is associated with a higher risk, but not causing it. Those are very different things.” Far more study is needed to prove causation, but waiting doesn’t serve Trump’s ribbon-cutting impulses. “Taking Tylenol is not good. I’ll say it,” Trump said at yesterday’s press conference (perhaps unwittingly courting a lawsuit), “Don’t take Tylenol.”  

Trump is also pouncing on early research showing promise for leucovorin—a form of folate—by fast-tracking the relabeling of the drug for autism treatment. But as the Post reports, “Most of the leucovorin studies involved only a few dozen participants each, and numerous compounds appear promising early on but fail when subjected to large-scale trials.”  

It’s hard to come up with a cruder example of the federal government “picking winners and losers” on flimsy grounds. Trump is single-handedly boosting the fortunes of leucovorin manufacturers and wrecking the value of Kenvue so he can bask in personal political glory and maintain his MAGA/MAHA alliance. 

Republicans of the past—the very recent past—routinely slammed Democrats for “picking winners and losers” when pursuing government subsidies, tax incentives, or regulations designed to promote renewable energy. But Democrats were driven by an overwhelming scientific consensus that the world needs to slash carbon emissions, and government action was needed so low-carbon and zero-carbon energy sources could compete with long-standing (and often, government-supported) fossil fuel industries.  

A principled economic conservative could still argue that the government shouldn’t prop up any industry and that, regardless of climate science, consumers should still have the choice between energy sources. But to adhere to that principle would require applying it to the health care industry, including when a Republican controls the White House. If there are any principled conservative Republicans left, here’s your chance to prove it.  

The post Republicans Should Be Apoplectic Over What Trump and Kennedy Are Doing to Tylenol  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Gore Vidal took a British television interviewer by surprise in 2012 when he remarked, “When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative,’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not. They’re fascists.”

That might have seemed like hyperbole during the year Mitt Romney became the Republican presidential nominee. But it rings truer as we pass the six-month mark of Donald Trump’s second term in office. Now, the American media is running into the limits of its vocabulary. Despite the inadequacies of the term, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and all the many outlets that follow their lead continue to describe the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans as “conservative,” a word that seems wholly inadequate to a moment when the president in a single week demands a private business, the Washington Commanders football team, change its name back to the Redskins or face some unnamed punishment, when the president’s FCC uses its regulatory power to coerce conformity from a publicly traded corporation, and when Trump uses unilateral tariff powers to promote his planned resort in communist Vietnam.

The failures of “conservative” to accurately convey the ideology and actions of today’s Republican Party are many. First, there is the lexical use, that is, by default, complimentary when it means restraint. One might praise a neighbor for his “conservative lifestyle” or advise a couple that they would benefit from a “conservative household budget.” Given that most Americans are largely apolitical, “conservative” hits the average ear in such a way that bolsters false Republican bromides about “getting our fiscal house in order” and “encouraging personal responsibility.”

Second, it is painfully apparent that Republicans have become anything but conservative in the traditional sense of the word. In his tome, The Conservative Sensibility, George F. Will, who left the Republican Party, struggles to define “conservative,” but he identifies two strains of the political philosophy: American and European. He argues that the latter “emphasizes the traditional and dutiful, with duties defined by obligations to a settled collectivity, the community.” American conservatism, by contrast, “seeks […] to conserve or establish institutions and practices conducive to a social dynamism that dissolves impediments to social mobility and fluidity.”

Setting aside that Will’s description of American conservatism might be elastic enough to imply support for universal health care, childcare programs, and tuition-free (or, at least, low tuition) universities, it is a valuable tool for measuring the Grand Canyon-sized gap between the Trump personality cult and what has, traditionally, passed for “conservative.” Republicans and their so-called “thought leaders” aim to overturn and subvert institutions and norms, rather than “conserve” them in the European sense. They are also consolidating executive power rather than maintaining distrust of too much power vested in any branch of government, let alone one man. The view of human nature as deeply fallible and immune to romantic Jacobin or Marxist visions of a new man is at the heart of conservatism. But MAGA is built on a different premise, that one ruler should be given broad authority and not held back by the Lilliputians of the Deep State. No wonder we find ourselves living in an increasingly autocratic form of government that commits vandalism against the concept that Will most closely associates with conservatism—“individual autonomy.” To his credit, Will recently denounced Trump as the “most statist president in US history” whose repressive policies and erratic actions constitute a “Putinesque” form of governance.

Will, like MSNBC host and former communications director for George W. Bush, Nicole Wallace, the editorial crew at the Bulwark, and Liz Cheney, would insist that the Republican Party is violating “true conservatism.” They often conceal their roles in pulling American politics to the far right with assessments that sound suspiciously like self-pity. “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me,” they will say.

Stuart Stevens, a former political campaign manager in the Republican Party, adopts a more honest approach in his aptly titled memoir, It Was All a Lie. The virtuous and philosophical precepts of Republican politics, from “personal responsibility” to “limited government,” were nothing more than a cover for a power grab that would eventually lead to the ongoing violation of democracy, the rule of law, and the social compact.

A more charitable view would consider that, perhaps, there were always two versions of “conservatism” duking it out within the GOP and its attendant media culture. There was the moderate, pro-business wing, represented by Stevens’s former client, Mitt Romney, and the anti-democratic militancy of Joseph McCarthy, Jesse Helms, and now, Donald Trump. To quote an old rock and roll song, for the sane side, “it’s all over but the crying.”

Mike Lofgren, a former Republican staffer and budget analyst in the US Senate, who often writes for the Washington Monthly, argues that the “dark turn of American conservatism” isn’t much of a turn. When I spoke to Lofgren over the phone about the political history and applicability of the term “conservative,” he said, “Ever since the French Revolution, there’s always been a revolutionary, reactionary countermovement aspect to conservatism that’s very radical.”

Lofgren, the author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, the Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, then proposed that “there needs to be some label that can encompass” that element of conservatism to communicate the threat to societal stability that, ironically enough, something most people call “conservative” now presents. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former “chief counselor,” calls himself a “Leninist.” Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned political philosopher who is a prominent influence on JD Vance, identifies as a “neo-monarchist.” These appellations are self-damaging, but unlikely to resonate with most Americans. Gore Vidal wasn’t the only person to see the contemporary American right as “fascist.” Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, has applied that term to the current president. The problem with “fascist” as a descriptor is that it is too loaded. Personally, I think the term is accurate in describing much of what the Trump administration is doing. Still, when many people hear the word, they immediately think of Hitler, or something vaguely nefarious that has no precise political meaning.

During our conversation, Lofgren and I agreed that “radical” is accurate and politically potent. Typically associated with the left, “radical” is synonymous with “extreme.” It signals an agenda threatening societal stability, sabotaging American life, and invading people’s lives. Trump and the Republican Party that he controls are radical–undermining the democratic process, undercutting democratic institutions, and undergirding an autocracy. They’ve attempted to overturn an election, established a Supreme Court that has wildly expanded executive power, while granting the president legal immunity for any action he takes in or even after office, and stretched their repressive influence into commerce, academia, and media.

“Radical is never seen by the public as good,” Lofgren said before adding, “It’s familiar and has a pejorative context.” The word also has the added benefit of tacitly noting who is subverting what generations of Americans have taken for granted, relating to personal freedom, separation of powers, and the rule of law. Here’s a hint: It isn’t Black Lives Matter activists who haven’t held a rally in years, librarians stocking novels with gay protagonists, or college professors with grey ponytails. It is the political party that celebrates the president deporting immigrants without due process, detaining people without criminal records in facilities guarded by alligators, and usurping congressional authority to allocate taxpayer dollars.

The mainstream media should adopt radical because it communicates an extreme break from sociopolitical norms, and the Democrats should not shy away from the pejorative context that Lofgren describes. “Extreme” is not a good substitute because it seems to imply that Trump is a stronger variant of traditional conservatism, 150 proof versus 80, when in fact he’s an entirely different breed. True, Newt Gingrich advised congressional Republicans in the 1990s to use words like “anti-American” and “traitor” to ridicule Democrats. President Trump has referred to his political opposition as “perverts,” “the enemy within,” and the Nazi-borrowed, “vermin.” By those standards, “radical” is pretty tame.

The bizarre, unforced error that Democrats must stop making is to refrain from using the word “Republican.” In recent years, they tend to adopt too-clever-by-half nicknames for Republicans, like “MAGA extremists,” zero in, with laser-like precision, on an individual, like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, allowing the word “Republican” to remain untarnished.

The alliterative, “Radical Republican Party,” should become a stain that its leaders cannot scrub clean. Middle Americans who pay closer attention to the manufactured drama of reality television than to the endangerment of their society should come to understand that the Republican governor or senator smiling down at them from a billboard next election season is not a “conservative” church usher or VFW captain, but a radical planning to disrupt their quiet lives.

The post Conservatism or Radicalism: Unpacking Today’s GOP appeared first on Washington Monthly.

My generation seems to be in crisis. Close friends are passing on. Women are supposed to live longer than men, but on my journey, wives of close friends are passing too, leaving a hole in the hearts of those I have cared for deeply.

So, it was excruciating to wake up on January 21 to see violent criminals, their guilt established on videotape. absolved and set free, and to see an unconstitutional attempt to repeal birthright citizenship by a mere executive order. During the campaign, Trump promised to accomplish these nitwit actions by executive order, but I didn’t think he would dare. I was trained as a lawyer and served in the 1960s as a federal prosecutor. Trump’s actions are at odds with everything I grew up to believe about this country and the rule of law.

The roughly 1500 January 6 convicts showed no remorse: The poster child, Jacob Chansley, the one the press called the QAnon Shaman in recognition of his horned-animal headdress and body paint at the insurrection, exulted: “I JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER… I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Chansley was convicted following his guilty plea to a felony indictment charging him with obstructing an official proceeding. He was sentenced to three and one-half years in prison. He gloated over his pardon.

“NOW I AM GONNA BY [sic] SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Also pardoned was Enrique Tarrio, former chairman of the right-wing extremist group known as the Proud Boys, who was implicated in the planning of the Capitol riot. Tarrio was convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy in connection with January 6 and sentenced to 22 years imprisonment, although he was not physically present at the Capitol that day.

The pardons, which included violent criminals like Chansley and Tarrio, startled Republicans.

On January 12, J.D. Vance told Fox News Sunday that “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

Asked what they thought of the blanket pardons, GOP Senators were taken aback. Even MAGA Senator Tommy Tuberville said it was unacceptable to pardon people who assaulted police officers. More enlightened GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins criticized Trump’s blanket amnesty.

A Scripps News/Ipsos poll conducted in late November, after Trump had won the presidential election, found that only 30 percent of Americans supported pardoning the January 6 rioters. In early January, many Republican lawmakers said they would not support pardons for those who committed violence against police officers.

The D.C. Police Union expressed its “dismay over the recent pardons,” stressing its position that “anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, without exception.”

Trump’s move came as a tonic to the MAGAs that the justice system that tried to hold him—and them—accountable for lawless acts is corrupt. He will protect the Pretorian Guard that defends.

Since taking office this week, Trump has issued at least 26 executive orders on subjects ranging from immigration to energy policy. The orders include:

• Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization.

• Declaring a national emergency at the southern border

•  Rescinding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within the federal government.

•  Redefining gender as strictly male or female at the federal level.

I found some of these pretty troublesome, even mean-spirited. He had them at the ready as part of his Project 2025. But, in his executive order concerning birthright citizenship, he demonstrated his willingness to take autocratic action.

Trump assumes the power to decide who can be considered a citizen.

In 1868, following the Civil War, Americans added the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to enable the federal government to override discriminatory state laws. At the outset, the Fourteenth Amendment provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and then declared that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The Fourteenth Amendment made it clear that being born in the United States made someone a United States citizen. The qualifying language in the amendment, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” has historically been used to carve out limited exceptions to birthright citizenship. For example, U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats who are not subject to the jurisdiction of our laws since they enjoy diplomatic immunity are not American citizens. For over a century and one-half, the exception has been narrowly construed. That is, until now.

Trump’s argument centers on the contention that children born in the U.S. to people lacking legal immigration status don’t qualify. But that argument is patently absurd. Both the parents and the child are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in ways that foreign diplomats can’t be. 

The idea of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect former slaves and their children by granting them U.S. citizenship. Before that, the Supreme Court had ruled in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that enslaved people and their descendants were not citizens, were not eligible to become citizens, and were not entitled to any protection under its laws.

The Fourteenth Amendment put Dred Scott where it belonged—in the ashcan of history.

As the Court elaborated on the Amendment:

“[T]he protection of the Fourteenth Amendment extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State and reaches into every corner of a state’s territory. That a person’s initial entry into a State, or into the United States, was unlawful, and that he may for that reason be expelled, cannot negate the simple fact of his presence within the State’s territorial perimeter. Given such presence, he is subject to the full range of obligations imposed by the State’s civil and criminal laws. And until he leaves the jurisdiction — either voluntarily, or involuntarily in accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States — he is entitled to the equal protection of the laws that a State may choose to establish.”

In short, if you are born in the United States of immigrant parents (even parents who are here illegally), you are a United States citizen under the Constitution. There is also a federal statute that provides for birthright citizenship. No wonder 22 state attorneys general brought actions to declare the Trump executive order unconstitutional.

But the Constitution doesn’t matter to Trump even though he swore to “preserve, protect and defend” it. “We’re going to end [birthright citizenship] because it’s ridiculous,” he said.

The Supreme Court reinforced the Amendment’s intent in the late nineteenth century despite a period of anti-immigrant sentiment primarily directed against the Chinese.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of workers from China. Thirteen years later, in 1895, Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. He sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, and he won. The Supreme Court, in a lengthy opinion, determined that the children of immigrants were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship and that no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment. If an act of Congress can’t pass constitutional muster, how can an executive order? The case has been taught to generations of law students.

Trump is facing lawsuits not only on his attacks on birthright citizenship but also on the executive order that would enable him to fire nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with MAGAs.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington State just issued a two-week restraining order blocking Trump from moving forward on an effort to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors, calling the directive “blatantly unconstitutional.” Who said there are no guardrails? This Supreme Court may have overruled Roe v Wade, but they will be hard-pressed to overrule this.

And, in a trice after Trump took the oath, at least three lawsuits were filed in Washington, D.C., against the new Department of Government Efficiency, known by the acronym DOGE (I always thought a “Doge” was a Venetian Duke). Doge is run by Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world—Vivek Ramaswamy has been given his walking papers—charging that it was breaking transparency laws.

The new administration has other problems as well. Even before he took office, Trump began to renege on his campaign promises—on lowering food prices, for example—and the administration is continuing to move the goalposts now that he’s in office. After the Senate unanimously confirmed Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, reporters asked him about Trump’s repeated promise to end the war in Ukraine on Day One; Rubio said that Trump meant that the war in Ukraine needed to end. A minor detail!

Trump also pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the dark founder and administrator of an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold with cryptocurrency, Trump’s latest enterprise. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 illegal options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.

In May 2024, during his presidential campaign, Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht to court the votes of libertarians who support drug legalization because people should be able to make their own choices.

Tonight, Trump posted that he had pardoned Ulbricht: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences plus 40 years. Ridiculous!” Now the lawyers are “scum,” not the criminals.

Executive orders have the legal effect of a White House press release. The president can only use them to direct activity within the executive branch. He can’t make other people comply. Orders must comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States.

It’s all so depressing. I always thought when I reached age 85, I might have an easy time of it. I guess it is not to be.

The post Trump’s Executive Orders—Making America Hate Again appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Donald Trump took the oath of office for the second time, his hand wasn’t on the Bible, an exceedingly odd omission for a president with such fervent religious supporters and who is very familiar from his years of litigation with the proper way to take an oath. Why he chose to leave his arm at his side instead of engaging the Bible will come under scrutiny in the coming days, but so should other omissions from his combative inaugural address. These elisions suggest a shrewdness that Trump’s opponents would be wise not to underestimate. 

After being sworn in, his first talk with the nation had continuity with other presidential inaugural addresses. Like other incoming presidents, he tended to exaggerate the country’s woes, the better to make his arrival seem like deliverance. But Trump took it further, not merely exaggerating the country’s ills but fabricating new ones. “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place,” Trump told those gathered in the U.S. Capitol’s Rotunda,  “and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed, their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.” 

But any red skeins of normalcy connecting Trump to previous inaugural speakers were frayed or nonexistent. Usually, the incoming president offers some nod to the outgoing one, if only to praise their cooperation during the transition. No one mistakes the tip of presidential hats to one’s predecessor for genuine affection, like when Ronald Reagan praised Jimmy Carter for the transition. It’s a form of politesse to reassure the country that this isn’t a time for enmity. But acknowledging that Biden was on the dais was about the closest Trump could come to adhering to this norm. While Trump ticked off the name “Biden” as he welcomed former presidents, he put the 46th president in the crosshairs. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end,” Trump brayed, putting his personal prosecution in the third paragraph of his address. 

Lest his meaning was unclear, he returned to talk about his alleged persecution, linking his attempted assassination with the myriad civil and criminal prosecutions that he’s faced. 

What else was missing from the speech? The words “Russia,” “Ukraine,” “NATO,” “Israel,” and “unborn” (or its variants). Tax cuts didn’t get a shout, which is surprising considering what’s at the top of his agenda, but also wise. It was smart not to engage in the coming showdown over Ukraine or emphasize the tax cut portion of his agenda. Tariffs and trade got some love and misrepresentation, as did Trump’s new favorite president, William McKinley, whose name he’s determined to restore to the continent’s tallest mountain, Denali—a moniker long-ago approved by Alaskans of all parties.

Canada did not get a shout-out, which was wise, although Trump has expressed territorial ambitions toward the second-largest nation in the world. Expanding “our territory” was about as close as the 78-year-old came to laying claims on Greenland or Canada, but he was more explicit with Panama. He said of the Canal: “We’re taking it back,” which wouldn’t seem to leave much room for negotiating fees or Chinese presence in the Canal zone. 

God was mentioned, as he/she/they always receive. (More on pronouns in a minute), but school prayer was wisely elided. Charles Darwin suffered no slights from Trump, so thank heavens for that. Avoiding the hopes of his more zealous backers was wise.

It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Inauguration Day, and the martyred prince of nonviolence got a name check: “We will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.” Trump didn’t define the King’s dream but threw a bouquet to “a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” probably the squarest critique of affirmative action in a presidential inaugural address since the policy’s inception in the 1960s. It couldn’t have landed well with Biden-Harris supporters after four years of support for “equity,” but I suspect it tested well.

In a clapback to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration vow to put an American on the moon and return “him” safely to Earth by the end of the decade, Trump set his sights on Mars, which elicited cheers from Elon Musk, who otherwise seemed emotionless when the camera panned to him. 

The Murderers Row of Tech Billionaires was an unforgettable visual from the inaugural. There was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Musk of Space X and Tesla fame. If ExxonMobil, Walmart, or UnitedHealth Group CEOs were there, they weren’t astride the dais despite their companies’ mammoth size. The words “tech,” “artificial intelligence,” or “AI” didn’t emerge from Trump’s lips, but neither did they need to. He courted a powerful constituency. He has stepped back from his earlier opposition to them through things like antitrust enforcement and the TikTok ban. 

Others got thrown under the bus. Trump, who had vowed in his 2016 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” took a different tack on Monday. In his second inaugural speech, Trump vowed to eliminate the T, declaring that the federal government would recognize two genders and withdraw any recognition of trans existence. What that means for trans civil servants, civilian defense employees, or any American or foreign national who identifies as such on federal forms is anyone’s guess and presumably headed for litigation. 

Likewise, Trump’s declaration that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, which evoked a laugh from Hillary Clinton, should prove of interest to the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Energy Management (which leases tracts on the outer continental shelf), the Office of Federal Land Records, U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and a slew of departments, agencies, and commissions that have to figure out what to make of the president’s name change when statutes, regulations, and precedents say otherwise. 

Trump also avoided the word “carnage,” the startling dystopian utterance that defined his first inaugural and was indeed one of the things that led George W. Bush to call the speech “some weird shit.” The second inaugural was billed as optimistic, but it wasn’t much less dark or weirdly solipsistic than the 2017 gotterdämmerung. Trump told the globe that God spared his life for a reason, usually a comment best left to others. (Many presidents have faced assassination attempts but have generally not chosen to declare that their good fortune was because God wanted them to complete a second term.)

We’ll know soon whether the address, the inaugural, and the bevy of executive orders will give Trump the bounce that usually accompanies a new presidential term. My guess is that as weird and distasteful as the address was and the frivolity and ugliness of his executive orders—ending birthright citizenship, pardoning January 6 convicts whether or not they committed violence—he’s going to get some pop out of this despite how cacophonous it sounds to his detractors.

The post The 47th President’s First Words appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Note: In 1988, I wrote this article, and it appeared as a cover story in the Washington Monthly. There have been myriad changes in public policy toward poverty in the intervening 35 years, including the enactment of welfare reform and the short-lived expansion of the child tax credit during the pandemic. Republicans have expressed interest in work requirements for SNAP, widely known as food stamps, and Medicaid. But I wanted to republish it on Christmas last year and this because it remains, I think, relevant. We have had great works of art that focus on the poor in the years since. HBO’s The Wire is often and rightly called Dickensian. Its societal indictments, moral complexity, attention to personal agency, and riveting installments over the years echo Dickens, whose novels were serialized. But with due respect to David Simon, the show’s creator, I’d argue that we still need a new Dickens, an artist who commands global fame and unalloyed praise and whose work helps those who need help the most. That’s a lot to ask for this troubled and war-torn Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, but we can hope as 2025 approaches.

Matthew Cooper
Christmas Day, 2024

Christmas is always the busy season for Charles Dickens, but this year there’s more going on than usual. There’s a Bill Murray remake of A Christmas Carol (playing the perfect ’80s Scrooge—a TV exec too busy to do lunch with his ghost) and, for the truly sturdy, a two-part, six-hour film of Little Dorrit. Coming soon: Disney’s Oliver Twist. And a new biography of Dickens is getting prominent reviews, including front-page billing in The Washington Post Book World.

But what’s been missing from the articles I’ve read about these works is the recognition of Dickens’s central accomplishment: He prodded (and entertained) millions of readers into caring about the poor. Instead of seeing the poor, as Malthus did, as some abstract, seething mass of “surplus population,” Dickens saw them as individuals, engaging enough to merit novels of 700, 800, and 900 pages. He made his readers see them that way too. And that was a revolutionary accomplishment.

One indication of his influence lies in numbers. He was the best-selling author in Victorian England, writing novels that became standard household items, as common as candles and brooms. In the 12 years after he died, nearly 4 million copies of his books sold in Britain alone—an amazing feat even by Stephen King standards. When it came to influence, Daniel Webster argued that Dickens had “done more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into Parliament.” Even the conservative Economist conceded that Dickens fueled “the age’s passion—we call it so designedly—which prevails to improve the condition of the working classes.” Queen Victoria hailed his humanizing influence on the nation and his “strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.”

As for the poor themselves, they not only saw Dickens as their champion, they read him. Journals of the period are filled with accounts of chimney sweeps and factory hands captured by his work. And when they couldn’t make out all the words, there were plenty of illustrations to help them along. The working classes responded by deluging Dickens with invitations to speak before their guilds. “Ah! Mr. Dickens!” shouted a carriage driver to Dickens’s son, on the day of the novelist’s funeral. “Your father’s death was a great loss to all of us—and we cabbies were in hopes that he would be doing something to help us.”

It was not without reason, then, that Dostoevsky called Dickens “the great Christian.’” Characters like Oliver Twist and Mr. Bumble, who ran the infamous workhouse, carry lessons as old as the New Testament. When Mr. Bumble terrorized Oliver for asking for a second helping of gruel, even affluent Englishmen knew how the orphan felt. They knew, too, that they had an obligation to help. That kind of empathy stoked the era’s major reform movements. The resulting bouquet of triumphs included everything from fewer working hours to free education and universal suffrage.

There’s more to Dickens, though, than misty-eyed sentiment. His was a subtle and muscular vision that recognized (and condemned) the sins of impoverished individuals as well as the collective guilt of society. Dickens gives us not only Oliver Twist but also Fagin, the criminal ringleader who press-gangs Oliver into service. He’s no victim of society. Fagin’s problem is Fagin.

Is there any relevance in this today? After all, the sprawling squalor of Victorian Britain has gone the way of the workhouse. The laissez-faire liberalism that Dickens deplored is light-years away from today’s social welfare state. (No food stamps had Oliver. No caseworker.) But America today is in at least one way like the England of the 1830s: Most of us see the underclass as a seething, abstract mob. Of course, it’s not just our artists who’ve failed us, but our politicians, too. And it’s too much to expect all art to serve as social glue, binding each of us to the concerns of the less fortunate. But today, when so much fiction is either mired in minimalist ennui or panting with the lifestyles of the rich and promiscuous, we need someone who can animate our social concern. We need a new Dickens.

A street-walking man

Where to find one? My guess is that it can only be someone who has seen poverty up close; perhaps a journalist. Dickens himself became acquainted with the poor as what today’s social scientists would call a “participant observer.” He was one of them.

His father, John Dickens, tried to give his children a life of parlors and singing lessons on the paycheck of a Navy clerk. As a result, like so many working people of the time, the Dickens family floated in and out of debtors’ prison (bringing their servant with them, as was the custom of the day). By 1822, when Charles was 10, debt’s constant tug forced his family to yank him out of school and place him in a factory pasting labels on pots of shoe polish. When not at work, he spent long days wandering the alleys of work-weary London. With his parents often imprisoned, describing what he saw became a way of mastering a hostile world. He’d jot down dozens of “sketches,” detailed descriptions of just about anything he’d run into. They captured not only turmoil and toil but character, as well. Typical was the one about his uncle’s Soho barber, a man who, playing Monday-morning quarterback, recounted how he would have guided Napoleon’s troops at Waterloo.

Eventually, his family earned its freedom, and Dickens became a law clerk, allowing him to tame “the savagery of stenography,” as he put it, and later become a reporter. At the time, reporting mostly meant taking shorthand, but Dickens was so talented one editor called him “the most rapid, the most accurate, and the most trustworthy reporter then engaged on the London press.”

With his star rising, Dickens didn’t leave the poor behind. Instead, he sketched them. Under the pseudonym “Boz,” he churned out copy about vulgar vendors, ragged children, and raging arguments. In “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” Dickens presented his comfortable readers with a prostitute: “The lowest of the low; dirty, unbonneted, flaunting and slovenly.” In his “Visit to Newgate,” he took them inside a prison that housed children. “Fourteen terrible little faces we never beheld. There was not one redeeming feature among them—not a glance of honesty—not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection.”

This kind of firsthand experience became central to Dickens’s fiction. To write Hard Times, for instance, he traveled to the north to cover a workers’ strike. He was no sit-in-the-study author. After writing in the mornings, Dickens would take afternoon walks of 10 miles or more that returned him to the streets that powered his prose.

Obviously, it wasn’t just the reporting that made Dickens Dickens. It takes a little more than stenography, and a lot of something called imagination, to spin a 900-page novel. But Dickens’s immersion in street life made his novels richer. When a barrister picked up Dickens’s work, he saw his servants and his slums. He saw his London.

The stenographer’s eye and the novelist’s mind gave Dickens the ability—virtually unprecedented—to make the poor seem real. As Gertrude Himmelfarb explains in The Idea of Poverty, this was a time when servants were invisible, even to their masters. When a contemporary critic hailed Dickens’s talent for making a “washerwoman as interesting as a duchess,” it was a tribute not only to Dickens’s wonderful prose, but also to his new vision.

After all, one of the main characters in his first lengthy work of fiction, the serial Pickwick Papers, is Sam Weller, a servant. He not only fails to remain invisible; more often than not he seems a good deal wiser than his master. When he first signs on as Pickwick’s valet, the negotiations turn into a “Who’s-on-first?” routine that sounds like Weller is hiring Pickwick. Weller still seems in control when Pickwick checks into an inn. After Pickwick stumbles into the wrong bedroom, only to be kicked out by a very unhappy woman, it’s Weller who rescues him and guides him to his room. “You rayther want somebody to look arter you, Sir, when your judgment goes out a wisitin’,” Weller chirps. The servant’s introduction in the serial’s fourth issue sent sales surging.

In his next book, Oliver Twist, and throughout the other novels he was to write until his death in 1870, Dickens stuck to the simple proposition that no class had a monopoly on smarts or morality or decency or humor. This was a revolutionary creed at a time when the affluent saw the poor as a mob—to be feared or appeased, perhaps, but definitely not to be considered as individuals. And the rich were scarcely alone in their class-bound vision. As Dickens was spinning novels, the history of the working class in Manchester was being written by a German emigré named Friedrich Engels.

The idea of Jacobin-style revolution haunted Dickens, who poured his fears into prose in A Tale of Two Cities. In our century of failed revolutions, there’s no more haunting or timely image than Dickens’s Madame Defarge, knitting by the guillotine. He recognized that, just as the poor weren’t all good, the rich weren’t all bad. His pages brim with venal landlords, nasty bankers, and callous captains of industry; but good-guy capitalists pop up too. A product of the streets himself, Dickens saw no romance in revolution. It’s not the proletariat who overthrew Scrooge, but his conscience.

If Dickens feared revolution, he didn’t fall into the opposite trap of forgetting why mobs charged the barricades. He understood that the capitalist society was rife with institutions that kept the poor down. The villains of Hard Times aren’t just bad apples but overlords of a cruel factory system, dehumanizing in the monotony of its work. The tragedies of Bleak House, one of his last and gloomiest books, are found in the systematic injustice of the courts. By challenging these institutions, he made the lawyer or factory owner see that they shared responsibility.

The idea of poverty

And when Dickens trained his guns, liberals weren’t exempt. The workhouse that Dickens took on in Oliver Twist was one of the most prominent liberal programs of his day. Today it’s hard to think of the book’s cruel overseers as being progressive. But the Poor Law of 1834 was considered a great liberal victory, one that would segregate the indebted poor and prevent them from dragging their fiscally responsible neighbors into the red. (Talk about the unintended consequences of liberal reform.) When Oliver meekly seeks a double dose of gruel, we see unbridled cruelty. “Enlightened” Victorians saw themselves.

And what they saw was folly. Consider the way that Mr. Bumble—who runs the “progressive” workhouse—understands Oliver’s revolt.

“It’s meat.”

“What?” exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

“Meat, ma’am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “You’ve over-fed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am, unbecoming a person in his condition.”

The humor of the scene helps carry its meaning. Had Dickens’s criticisms been heavy-handed, as [the late scholar of the Victorian Era] Steven Marcus points out, middle-class readers wouldn’t have touched his works. Instead of promoting a specific alternative to the workhouse, he satirized it, appealing to his readers’ Christian charity. A second key to Dickens’s success is his choice of the symbol of the good child, in Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit or David Copperfield. He tapped the wellsprings of protectiveness that cultures can be made to feel for the young. Martin Luther King Jr. put that same insight into action when Birmingham schoolchildren stared down firehoses and police dogs, leaving us with one of the most arresting images of the civil rights movement.

But even as he skewered institutions, Dickens understood that the poor were often in the wrong themselves. If anything, there’s a schism in his writing, dividing what you might call, for lack of better terms, the worthy poor from the unworthy—between those who merit our admiration and those who don’t.

Winning hands down in the Worthy Category, family division, are the Christmas Carol’s Cratchits. It’s not just their “conditions” that make them sympathetic—the fact that they’re poor or that Bob Cratchit has a boss like Scrooge or that Tiny Tim needs crutches. It’s the family’s own nobility that lends the story such power, remake after remake. One clear signal to Victorian readers was the Cratchits’ white-glove cleanliness—a paramount virtue at a time when filth was almost always followed by disease. The Cratchits were “darned and brushed” before the Christmas feast. After supper, “the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept.” In the Cratchits, like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Little Dorrit, respectable British middle-class readers found an ideal of themselves.

Meanwhile, a first in Unworthiness might go to the brickmakers of Bleak House, who seem like something out of a documentary on battered wives. We spy them when Mrs. Piggle happens by. “An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome,” boasts the father. “And we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them … And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I giv’ it her; and if she says I didn’t she’s a Lie!” Today, when many liberals still romanticize the poor, Dickens’s ability to distinguish poverty from nobility is well worth remembering.

Dickens understood that there were good and bad individuals within every class. But he rarely saw the individuals who were a mixture of good and bad. His heroes and heroines don’t whine, don’t curse, and even though they’re raised in the company of foul-mouthed, cockney villains, they speak the King’s English. To be sure, his supporting cast could include people like the Peggottys in David Copperfield, who were not so well-spoken. But they, too, were practically flawless. This strict division between the worthy and the unworthy poor is more than an aesthetic flaw. It limits Dickens’s relevance today.

Dickens makes his readers want to help the deserving poor. And, indeed, the Victorian (and New Deal) reforms that were, in part, inspired by Dickens focused on these able-to-help-themselves characters. Kids who’d be okay if child labor was abolished; workers who’d prosper with a union. This is the story of America through the 1950s: The New Deal and rising prosperity catapult the “worthy” poor into the middle class. Oliver goes to Levittown.

This left behind an underclass that seemed short on lovable Cratchits and long on pregnant teens, drug addicts, and gang members. What we don’t have is the popular literature that will jar the affluent into caring about these less savory characters. We don’t have the literature that will condemn their faults and recognize that these are people who can be helped. When I worked in a Big Brothers program in New York City, I remember noticing that there was no novel or film that got at the downright weird complexities of those tenements I visited on 102nd Street. I couldn’t point to any book that explained how those kids could be such utter failures in school, unable at age 15 to write a single sentence, and still be as sharp and savvy and as alert as any kids I had known growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. There was no film that I could tell my friends about that captured the complexity of those mothers I would meet who’d blow much of their money on VCRs and HBO but who were also selfless when it came to helping their kids. There was—and still is—no writer who combines great talent and great popularity and who captures that bizarre marriage of sin and decency I saw in those tenement families.

The Dickens character who most reflects our dilemma is the Artful Dodger, the young pickpocket who befriends Oliver Twist. He’s engaging, to be sure. The first thing we see him do is take Oliver drinking; by the end, he’s in court, trying to sweet-talk a magistrate into pardoning him. But he’s a side dish. We never understand or care about him the way we care about Oliver. The next Dickens needs to put us not in our Olivers’ shoes but in those of our own Artful Dodgers.

While a new Dickens couldn’t cure poverty, he could inspire personal commitment from the middle class. I don’t mean the anesthesia of paying for yet another government program, but involvement. And that takes understanding. Public health care won’t improve unless talented doctors and nurses want to choose Harlems over Humanas, at least for a few years. We won’t really become a kinder, gentler nation unless our leaders know something that’s true about those on the bottom. But working with or for the poor requires inspiration; it doesn’t come naturally. Individuals disappoint. Projects collapse. Easier lives beckon. Great art, as opposed to Brookings reports, can be the spur we need.

In 1945, Lionel Trilling lamented that no writer in his day had done what many of the leading Victorian writers had done—combine great literature and social concern. “In three-four decades, the liberal progressive has not produced a single writer that itself respects and reads with interest. A list of writers in our time shows that liberal progressivism was a matter of indifference to every writer of large mind—Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann, Kafka, Yeats.” The absence of such a writer may have been a marginal loss in the middle of this century, when the politics of the time were liberal even if the great novelists were not or when poverty seemed like it could be erased simply through economic expansion and a few social reforms. Today when politicians are retreating from helping the poor and growth offers no panacea, we need another Dickens to inspire each of us to help.

I don’t know if there will be a single figure—be it a novelist filmmaker, or journalist—who can animate a nation’s imagination the way Dickens did or whether it may take a disparate group or even an artistic movement. But I’m certain those Dickens-like qualities will not be had by some writer-in-residence strolling the hallowed halls of Haverford. The Dickens mantle demands a life outside the academy, exposed to the real world. It belongs to the writer who can make us care not only about our Tiny Tims but about our Artful Dodgers, too.

The post Why We Need a New Dickens appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Trump 2.0 is likely to make America worse in a wide range of areas: immigration, taxes, energy, education, trade, healthcare, public health, etc. A principled opposition needs well-thought-out policy ideas and political strategies at the ready to take advantage of his mistakes and fix whatever he breaks. 

With tragedy comes opportunity, and the role of this magazine is to get the American people ready with ideas they can use when the opportunity arises.

We’re a nonprofit and depend on the support of donors like you to keep going forward at this perilous time.

You can donate to the Washington Monthly here.

***

On Tuesday I argued that the controversy around President Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden should not obscure the larger truth that the Biden administration is one of the most ethical in history, with no indictments or convictions of any political appointees.

However, that perfect record could change once a vengeful Donald Trump moves back in to the White House. Over the past few years, Trump named more than 70 people whom he baselessly deemed deserving of prosecution and imprisonment.

Biden can prevent the possibility of politicized prosecutions by using his pardon power, in the same manner that he did for his son, and mitigate concerns that Hunter got preferential treatment.

But first, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website:

***

Justin Trudeau Is Blowing It: My criticism of how the Canadian prime minister is handling Trump’s tariff threats. Click here for the full story.

The Trouble With Trump’s Pick to Run the FDA: Merrill Goozner, publisher of the GoozNews health care newsletter, raises concerns with Marty Makary’s habit of cherry-picking scientific evidence to support his positions. Click here for the full story.

***

Trump may not be the only person in his administration with an enemies list in his pocket. His nominee to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, once said, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out … We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

Patel also published a book in which he called the “Deep State” a “cabal of unelected tyrants” and listed the names of 60 people—mostly different than those publicly fingered Trump—whom he considered members. (Politico collected all of the political and media figures that Trump has claimed broke the law. The New Republic compiled the names of Patel’s list.)

This week Politico reported that Biden’s top aides are debating whether the president should issue preemptive pardons to protect those threatened by political prosecutions.

This shouldn’t be a debate. Just as with Covid-19, anyone with a remote chance of being infected by a weaponized Justice Department deserves inoculation.

The counterargument raised in the Politico story–”it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms”–collapses on its own weight. Trump’s (fictional) criticisms are already maximally fueled by his election. Blanket pardons don’t suggest impropriety by the recipients, but by Trump and his lackeys who have openly talked about retribution.

In pardoning his son, Biden said, “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” Nor should we assume it would stop to spare anyone on the Trump and Patel enemies lists. They deserve the same protection from Biden that his son got.

Best,

Bill

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The post Biden Should Pardon Everybody on the Trump and Patel Enemies Lists appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Was there a mix-up in the hospital or did the Kennedy gene skip Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? In his presidential run on a platform attacking vaccines and fluoride, RFK Jr. might as well have been named Jones for all he invoked his family’s storied service. Instead, he ran a Quixotic campaign as a Democrat and then as an independent and, when it failed, threw his jacked (maybe steroid-enhanced?) weight behind Donald Trump. For that, the president-elect nominated the quack without a medical degree to be Secretary of Health and Human Services with a consolation prize of a $3 trillion budget to “go wild” with. 

My fellow Americans, take two aspirin and call your dentist in the morning—and your kid’s pediatrician. Kennedy’s coming for your fluoride, your Wi-Fi, your “Thank You, Dr. Fauci” lawn sign, and your mumps, rubella, polio, and other vaccines. He’ll be in your grocery store, refrigerator/, medicine cabinet, milk carton (he prefers his raw), hospital room, Social Security, and Medicare. He wants to remove neurotoxins from your water and DTaP shots from your back-to-school to-do list. 

Scary as he is, the 70-year-old has competition for the most frightening cabinet pick. At this point, Marco Rubio for Secretary of State feels like George C. Marshall and even South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who killed her puppy and swayed on stage to show tunes and hymns for 40 minutes to make Trump’s dementia look normal, seems in the realm of acceptably horrible for Homeland Security. But the rest is like C-SPAN on acid: Tulsi Gabbard, who cozies with murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar Al Hassad, for Director of National Intelligence; For Defense, Fox & Friends Weekend host Pete Hesgeth (Steve Doocy from the main show wasn’t free?), with no experience running an organization, who’s admitted to paying money to a woman who accused him of sexual misconduct and wants to fire the chair of the Joint Chiefs to show how completely over diversity he is. Whether the now ubiquitous photos of his Jerusalem Cross chest tattoos and crusader slogans on his bicep mean he’s a white nationalist or just really into ink is almost irrelevant. I don’t want to have to think about the Da Vinci code symbology of a cabinet officer’s tats. It was once mildly shocking when reports out of Bohemian Grove had Secretary of State George Shultz sporting a tiger tattoo in honor of Princeton, his alma mater.

But we’ve found a bottom beneath which the sniveling Senate won’t sink. After a week of shame, former Representative Matt Gaetz, a rich party boy who’s been accused under oath of having sex with a 17-year-old (there’s witness testimony) and paying for his escapades with his stepson’s Venmo account, will not be Attorney General, itching to dig up something to indict Trump’s enemies for. Coming to a school near you, the Vaccine Police. Kennedy will also have a big role in migrant detentions, making Cheryl Hines’s husband (Hines is Kennedy’s third) Stephen Miller’s handmaid. 

Kennedy is no more a doctor than Trump is a statesman, or Hegseth has medals to display when he shows up at the Pentagon if he ever does. The enormity of Trump’s bad nominees protects Kennedy from the thorough strip-mining he deserves. Like Trump, he believes COVID was engineered in a lab (possibly true) to sicken most people and spare others, particularly in Kennedy’s tinfoil hat world, such as the Han Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Like Trump, he has cures.

His favorite is Ivermectin, one dangerous remedy away from drinking bleach and generally used to kill parasites. You don’t have to love Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex to prefer a COVID-19 shot to horse medicine. This is the Kennedy who will run the gems of American science, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the heart of the American safety net, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He may take his crusade against chemicals in what we eat to the Food and Drug Administration, which he will also be running, but he doesn’t know the first thing about getting additives out of our Cocoa Puffs. Republican Senator Charles Grassley, who runs a 750-acre corn and soybean farm in Iowa with his son, said he wants to have a go at the lightly informed nominee before any hearings. “I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture, and I’m willing to do that,” Grassley said.

Kennedy didn’t have to end up like this. Instead of campaigning as a chemtrails independent, he could have cleaned up his act and campaigned as a Kennedy Democrat, invoking memories of his Uncle Jack—the Back Bay politico with war wounds, a toothy smile, thick hair, Irish wit, and an elegant wife pregnant with John Jr. He had the Catholics at hello. The usually apolitical nuns at my parish church in Pennsylvania hung his stock photo in a cheap frame in the vestibule, decorated with a vase of flowers recycled from Sunday mass. He was sworn in as president in 1961 and killed in 1963. 

That was good enough for RFK Jr.’s father, Senator Robert Kennedy, the next brother in line to run for president in 1968, whose arc from Joe McCarthy hanger-on to Aeschylus-quoting champion of peace and the poor is one of the more remarkable arcs in American life, unlike his son’s that went from Harvard drug dealer to wanna be quack. After his second brother was assassinated after winning the California primary, being a Kennedy was good enough for Teddy, who tested the country’s enduring affection for the family with Chappaquiddick, where a female aide he was driving home from a party drowned when his car went off a Martha’s Vineyard bridge. The family name helped him recover, and the youngest brother ran for president in 1980 against Jimmy Carter, a Sunday school teacher and submarine officer, who won. But unlike RFK Jr., Teddy gave an electrifying speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden, invoking his brothers and ending with the promise that “the Dream will never die,” not the vow that Trump will return. Teddy returned to Washington, his libertine debauchery giving way to a happy second marriage in 1991. He created his own myth as the third longest-serving member in history.

RFK’s race didn’t end with a bang of a speech but a whimper and the grim duty of speaking to small crowds in church basements and tapping a wealthy Google divorcée to be his running mate to keep the thing afloat. His dismal failure was Trump’s opportunity to recruit a Kennedy Democrat into the MAGA cult with the mandate to “go wild.” 

Lightly and often mistakenly informed with a weakness for conspiracy theories, Trump lit up at the baseless idea that Big Pharma’s vaccines might be causing autism. Without the wish to do no harm, Trump and his accomplice risk setting back the stunning progress in eradicating the worst childhood diseases. For those born between 1994 and 2023, inexpensive vaccines prevented hundreds of millions of illnesses, tens of millions of hospitalizations, and more than one million deaths, according to the HHS’s Center for Disease Control. To RFK, these numbers are propaganda from the Medical Industrial Complex that made him a greater victim of oppression for his views than Anne Frank. (Yes, he said that and apologized.) 

The 70-year-old who traded Hyannisport for Hollywood is having none of it. He’ll do his investigations, come up with his own numbers, and put HHS’s imprimatur on it. Finally, his view is no longer that of a skeptic but of a person in authority. He can then use his office to try to withhold money from schools that persist in mandating immunizations before enrollment. He’ll do this fully aware that so far this year, because of anti-vax efforts, not scarcity, cases of whooping cough and measles have risen dramatically. 

In his generation of Kennedys, RFK Jr. isn’t the only tragic figure but the only one who thought he deserved to be president. Some ran for and won office, serving honorably like Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Joseph Kennedy II, but none had the nerve to launch a campaign for president, complete with a Super Bowl ad putting their face on an old Jack Kennedy ad from 1960. But RFK Jr. will do anything for attention and sees his dark history as an opportunity, joking that if all the skeletons in his closet voted for him, he’d win in a landslide. A heroin addict as a teenager, he kicked the habit just before his 30th birthday. He had a bad first marriage and moved on to a second and a brutal divorce. His wife hung herself from the rafters of their barn. There were other drugs, including a suspected addiction to testosterone (his ripped septuagenarian abs don’t come from touch football) and ones to control a condition that makes it impossible for him to clear his throat. Addiction is no sin, but it does not give him the authority to teach the country how to overcome its addictions. There’s no Hubris Anonymous to overcome his vision of himself. 

But look what it got him: a high government position. Until his campaign, the family stayed quiet through all of Bobby’s escapades. They suffered through his visit to Sirhan Sirhan in prison, after which he proclaimed him innocent of the 1968 murder of his father. He suspects the CIA. He craves attention and will lie to get it, as he did by exaggerating his accomplishments cleaning up the Hudson River so that his sister Rory, making a documentary for HBO, had to leave so many lies and exaggerations on the cutting room floor, there was a huge hole where a credible brother’s testimony should have been. They tried to send a message by publicly appearing at the White House to show solidarity with Joe Biden. But as his rhetoric worsened, they (including Caroline Kennedy) raised their voices, warning that he wasn’t fit to be president while professing their love for him. 

The behavior that repelled RFK’s own family is catnip for Trump, who welcomed his support and promised him a job, not necessarily in that order. Now, the president could meet the moment, taking back his plea for Kennedy to “go wild” and instead ask what he could do for his country. He won’t. Trump has long been driven to stick it to The Man. He’s so damaged that he can’t see that at age 78, and in the White House, he is The Man.

The post Bobby Kennedy Jr., We Know Ye Too Well appeared first on Washington Monthly.