Homeland Elegies(73)
Cheery pessimism. Or weary idealism. Take your pick.
*
It’s hard from the perspective of more than two years now—as I write these words in the summer of 2018—to recall just how unlikely Trump’s rise felt while it was happening. Before he secured the nomination, in July of 2016, and even as late as early March of that year, Trump’s outlandishness, his flagrant disregard for any of the accepted rules of engagement, his ignorance of the issues, his willful mendacity and vulgarity, the constant stream of his demeaning offensiveness, all this seemed to bode ill for his ultimate chances. It was a much-repeated platitude that Trump was one inevitable faux pas from flaming out. But by April it was clear Trump’s mishaps were only swelling the ranks of his supporters. Trump would crush his opponents in the weeks ahead, first in New York, then in Pennsylvania, at which point his path to the general election—and a catastrophic loss to Hillary Clinton—appeared all but certain.
Mike was in New York on business in early May of 2016, a week after the Pennsylvania returns. We met for a drink at Red Rooster in Harlem, a popular spot for high-end soul food along Lenox Avenue, owned and operated by Marcus Samuelsson, a Swedish chef of Ethiopian extraction. Bill Clinton had apparently been for dinner the night before, hosted by a gaggle of hedge-fund managers, and the restaurant staff was still aflutter from the visit. Clinton had gone back into the kitchen to hang out with the busboys and line cooks, the bartender bragged to us as he poured our martinis, marveling at the man’s political skills and bemoaning Hillary’s charmlessness. Once the bartender was out of earshot, Mike announced to me that Trump would be our next president.
I laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all.”
“You actually think he’s going to win?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
He took a moment to consider: clearly this was not just small talk to him. “Let’s get a table,” he said. “I’m hungry. And this is going to take a while.”
*
I’m ashamed to admit how little I knew about Robert Bork before that night at Red Rooster. During Mike’s father’s clerkship under Spotts Robinson, Bork was one of the judges also seated at the DC Circuit. This was three years before Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1987, the same year of the infamous senate hearings that would deny the judge’s nomination, hearings so rancorous that in the popular vernacular Bork’s name would become synonymous with any concerted political attack on a career or nomination. I vaguely remember the fuss at the time but don’t recall having any sense of what it was all about. (I was fifteen.) In college, I would be taught that Bork’s America was one
in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.
The quotation is from Ted Kennedy’s attack on the man during those ’87 hearings, an address that would end up shaping the image of Bork for a generation to come: that of a conservative ideologue who sniffed decadence in Dixieland music and detective fiction, whose vision of a healthy society resembled a reactionary fever dream, and whose defeat in those confirmation hearings was seen to signal a decisive victory for America’s progressive ideals.
All this was an unfortunate and misleading simplification.
Bork’s real influence on American life would have little to do with his reactionary cultural and political views. It was as an antitrust ideologue—who believed that the only meaningful check on corporate power should be the competitive threat of other corporations and that the consumer’s benefit should be the only metric to gauge whether the government had cause to intervene—that Bork and his ideas would fundamentally reshape our country. His notion that the collective good was determined solely by benefit to the consumer would prove to be the necessary lubricant in the world-historical shift to the form of free-market capitalism that has engulfed the planet. To call him a conservative is to miss the point. There was nothing conservative about his antitrust views, at least not in any traditional sense of the word conservative. Bork, along with economists like F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan—figures whose work I had never studied or even read until after that night in Harlem—advocated not the conservation of traditional structures but the abolition of them; they wished to eliminate all real checks on private enterprise; and they believed, in contradiction not only to all common sense but also to G?del’s theorem, that the Market could be depended on to regulate its own aberrations and idiosyncrasies. In other words, however much Bork and others like him may have inveighed against personal liberties in the public sphere, they were positively gaga over individualism’s most wanton, unfettered forms in the private sector. Indeed, I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise.
Over Hot Honey Yardbird and the Obama Short Rib, Mike explained to me what his father had come to understand about America during his clerkship on the DC Circuit in such close proximity to Bork at the height of the Reagan years. Even back in the mid-’80s, the city’s political culture was still one of gentlemanly exchange; partisan arguments before the bench or on the Senate floor were put aside when it was time for martinis and oysters at Occidental or Old Ebbitt Grill. It was at a similarly collegial evening in Georgetown that Bork found himself seated next to the young black lawyer he recognized from Justice Robinson’s team. The two men launched into a lively conversation. Mike said that his father discovered in Bork that night someone far more personable than he’d expected given the man’s haughty demeanor on the bench. Bork, too, was impressed, and that evening initiated a friendly intimacy between the men, which, as it grew over the following weeks and months, made Jerry’s boss, Spotts Robinson, more than a little uncomfortable.