Elizabeth Warren’s Rough Week
The Massachusetts senator gives the Native American claim another try.
Recently the Boston Globe explained why Ms. Warren needs to address the issue:
There’s a ghost haunting Elizabeth Warren as she ramps up for a possible 2020 presidential bid and a reelection campaign in Massachusetts this year: her enduring and undocumented claims of Native American ancestry....
As Warren is mentioned as a serious presidential contender in 2020, even some who should be her natural allies say Warren has displayed a stubborn unwillingness to address the gap between the story she was told of Native Americans in the family tree and a dearth of hard evidence to back it up.
And of course people who are not natural allies have been rather less charitable. President Donald Trump has taken to calling her “Pocahontas” and other critics have called her a “fake Indian.”
The website MassLive has published a copy of Sen. Warren’s prepared remarks for the Wednesday speech:
I get why some people think there’s hay to be made here. You won’t find my family members on any rolls, and I’m not enrolled in a tribe.
And I want to make something clear. I respect that distinction. I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes -- and only by tribes. I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.
Hmm. She seems to be acknowledging that no one in her family is a member of any tribe, and also claiming that she never used her “family tree” to get ahead. But did she get ahead by pretending to be part of someone else’s family tree? According to the Globe:
In 1984, she contributed five recipes to a Native American cookbook entitled “Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes From Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.” In the book, which was edited by her cousin and unearthed during her 2012 campaign by the Boston Herald, her name is listed as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.”
Warren also listed herself as a minority in a legal directory published by the Association of American Law Schools from 1986 to 1995. She’s never provided a clear answer on why she stopped self-identifying.
She was also listed as a Native American in federal forms filed by the law schools at Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania where she worked.
And in 1996, as Harvard Law School was being criticized for lacking diversity, a spokesman for the law school told the Harvard Crimson that Warren was Native American.
Warren has not formally claimed to be Native American during her time in the Senate, where the chamber’s historian lists three former senators as having American Indian heritage. Senators self-report their ethnicity to the historian’s office. Her office has declined to comment on why.
But as of this week’s address it seems she is once again claiming Native American heritage. According to the prepared remarks:
...my mother’s family was part Native American. And my daddy’s parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped.
As far as this column can tell, Sen. Warren has still not presented evidence to back up the claim that her family is part Native American, nor for the insinuation that her paternal grandparents were racists. Even if they were as hard-hearted as Ms. Warren suggests, if a Native American ancestor was so distant on her mother’s side that the senator cannot even come up with a name, how would her father’s family have even known?
Later in her Wednesday remarks, Sen. Warren creates still more confusion. Having just renewed her claim of Native American ancestry, she then appears to cast doubt on it by addressing Native Americans in the second person, instead of the first-person plural. She speaks of “your story” and “your history” and “your people.” Doesn’t she mean to say, “our people”?
While the senator mulls over her identity, it seems that few voters in the early primary state next door are identifying themselves as Warren supporters. This week the University of New Hampshire’s Granite State Poll reports that former Vice President Joe Biden is the favorite for 2020 with the support of 35% of Democratic primary voters. Meanwhile 2016 primary winner Sen. Bernie Sanders is running second with 24% and Sen. Warren polls third at 15%.
So the political news is discouraging, and the policy news isn’t so hot either given the changes underway at her bureaucratic legacy, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Charles Gabriel of Capital Alpha Partners says that progressive dreams have lately been dying hard at the agency. Acting Director Mick Mulvaney is spoiling all the fun by requiring agency staff to remain within the legal boundaries of their authority. He noted this week in the bureau’s long-term plan:
...we have committed to fulfill the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities, but go no further. Indeed, this should be an ironclad promise for any federal agency; pushing the envelope in pursuit of other objectives ignores the will of the American people, as established in law by their representatives in Congress and the White House. Pushing the envelope also risks trampling upon the liberties of our citizens, or interfering with the sovereignty or autonomy of the states or Indian tribes.
Sen. Warren has opposed Mr. Mulvaney’s leadership but perhaps she should reconsider, given his respect for the authority of her people.
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Is Erogan, NATO's biggest nemesis outside of Putin?(See 1 below.)
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Let's hear a cheer for The Univ. of Chicago and its president. (See 2 below.)
https://imprimis.hillsdale.
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https://imprimis.hillsdale.
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An attempt to "kosher" a radical. You decide. (See 3 below.)
Goldwater once said "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Do you agree?
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Dick
Dick
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1)
Erdogan’s Fatal Blind Spot
The real threat to Turkey isn’t the Kurds. It’s the Islamic State.
The collapse of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate has benefited Iraq and Syria, the two countries where the extremist group once maintained its sanctuary, but it is also a threat to the nations where fleeing fighters might go next.
At the top of this list is Turkey, a logical landing spot for many fleeing Islamic State militants since it is next door to both Iraq and Syria.
In early February, the New York Times reported that “thousands” of Islamic State fighters have fled Iraq and Syria while a substantial number “have gone into hiding in countries like Turkey.” These revelations are nothing new. A 2016 interview by the Times correspondent Rukmini Callimachi with a former fighter from Germany revealed that the Islamic State deliberately dispatched hundreds of its fighters to Turkey. Smugglers on both sides of the border continue to move people, including Islamic State fighters, back and forth from Syria to Turkey, in some cases bribing Kurdish fighters so they can pass through territory controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces.
In the aftermath of the Islamic State’s deadly assault on Istanbul’s Reina nightclub in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2017 — an attack that killed 39 and wounded 71 — it was revealed that the group had established robust terrorist cells in Turkey. There are two types of cell structures in Turkey: those composed of Turks and those manned by foreign fighters. The foreign fighter cells primarily consist of militants from the Caucasus, Uighur Turks from China, and Central Asians from the former Soviet Union, as well as fleeing Arab and European Islamic State fighters.
Istanbul has historical resonance to many Muslims as the previous seat of a Sunni caliphate. The fact that the Islamic State could not realistically hope to re-establish its caliphate on Turkish territory doesn’t mean its fighters won’t bring instability to Turkey; their mere presence will destabilize the country.
In the past year, the Islamic State has been far more cautious in launching attacks on Turkish soil, perhaps to avoid scrutiny from the security forces. But the growing number of Islamic State fighters, which is estimated to be in the hundreds, will likely precipitate future clashes with Turkish police and soldiers attempting to root them out. There is also the possibility that a spectacular attack could be engineered from Turkish soil, as one nearly was when the components for an improvised explosive device were airmailed from Turkey to Australia last August.
Turkey could serve as a logistics hub to plot future attacks. Unlike many other terrorist sanctuaries, such as Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia, Turkey is not a failed state.
This is important because militants have easier and more reliable access to communications, transportation, and financial networks due to relaxed Turkish visa procedures, extensive airline connections, and shortcomings in financial tracking systems. Corruption and complicity among Turkey’s security forces, including members of the armed forces and police, facilitate further access through a mixture of bribery and coercion.
The willingness of some Turkish politicians and high-ranking members of the security forces to counter the Islamic State is also in doubt. In early February, more than 10 high-profile Islamic State members — including the “emir” of Diyarbakir and militants who had been involved in bombing attacks in Istanbul, Ankara, and Gaziantep — were abruptly released by judges. In many cases, Turkish intelligence officials who did not see the group as the primary threat pressured the judiciary to let dangerous suspects go despite the fact that prosecutors had sought extremely long prison sentences for them. Since Turkey has been accused of recruiting thousands of former Islamic State fighters to attack Kurds in Syria, some speculate that the release of Islamic State members without explanation could be the result of a backdoor deal with the Turkish intelligence service. (One of us left the Turkish police force out of a refusal to work with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government and allow foreign fighters to pass through the southern Turkish city of Sanliurfa.)
Over the past decade, Turkey has slowly developed into a country with dense pockets of support for Salafi jihadi groups
, including the Islamic State and al Qaeda, in major cities, towns, and villages along the Turkish border with Iraq and Syria. Domestic stability in Turkey will hinge on radicalization trends, how varying degrees of support for jihad among the Turkish population (and growing refugee population) manifest themselves in the future, and on the intensity of the transnational Kurdish insurgency.
The threat posed by the Islamic State has been compounded by Erdogan’s purges after the failed July 2016 coup that replaced the counterterrorism and intelligence forces, including the police, gendarmes, and portions of the military. As a result, relatively inexperienced and untrained recruits have been tasked with managing counterterrorism operations against a sophisticated adversary.
Another issue is Erdogan’s priorities, which primarily revolve around consolidating power and continuing to purge any suspected collaborators in the 2016 coup attempt, as well as battling Kurdish militants, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its allies in Syria, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). The Turkish military’s recent incursion into Afrin in northern Syria is a prime example of this.
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2)
The Free-Speech University
Steve Bannon is giving a talk at Chicago. Its president is confident he won’t be shouted down.
Snow carpets the ground at the University of Chicago, and footfalls everywhere are soft, giving the place a hushed serenity. Serene, too, is Robert Zimmer, the university’s 70-year-old president, as he talks about a speaking invitation that could turn his campus turbulent.
Steve Bannon is scheduled to talk at the school early next month—there’s no confirmed date—and Mr. Zimmer is taking criticism for the imminent appearance of Donald Trump’s former right-hand man, a paladin of alt-robust conservatives. Mr. Bannon is precisely the sort of figure who is anathema on American campuses, yet Mr. Zimmer is unfazed by the prospect of his visit, confident that it will pass with no great fuss.
“It’s been quite interesting to watch this because, as you can imagine, there are many people who are opposed to Steve Bannon and wish that he hadn’t been invited,” Mr. Zimmer says. Nonetheless, “the students have been remarkable. The student government had a ‘town hall’ with the faculty member who invited Bannon.” The students ran the event, “and they were very clear that there was to be no disruption, that they wanted to have a conversation.”
But at American universities, it isn’t just the students you need to worry about. More than 100 Chicago professors have signed an open letter to Mr. Zimmer objecting to Mr. Bannon’s invitation: “The university should model inclusion for a country that is reeling from the consequences of racism, xenophobia, and hate.” They propose to “model inclusion” by excluding viewpoints they find objectionable: “We believe that Bannon should not be afforded the platform and opportunity to air his hate speech on this campus.”
Mr. Zimmer says most Chicago faculty support free speech, and the letter’s signers are exceptions. “What we see among our faculty is that only a few of those who dislike what they view Bannon as representing have asked that he be disinvited.” Most of their colleagues have instead “talked about counterprogramming, and have talked about protests—nondisruptive protests—which, of course, is totally fine.” He sums up their strategy: “It’s ‘How are we going to effectively argue with this guy?’, not ‘How are we going to prevent him from coming to campus?’ ”
Mr. Bannon was invited to the university by Luigi Zingales, a finance professor. Would Mr. Zimmer ever contemplate having a quiet word with the prof and asking him to withdraw his invitation to Mr. Bannon? “I wouldn’t even think of it,” Mr. Zimmer answers, in a mildly but unmistakably indignant tone. And no, he won’t be attending the Bannon event. “We have many, many talks,” he says. “I’m really pretty busy.”
Mr. Zingales’s attitude is consistent with the norm Mr. Zimmer seeks to uphold. When I asked the professor by email why he extended the invitation, he replied that Mr. Bannon “was able to interpret a broad dissatisfaction in the electorate that most academics had missed. Remember the shock on November 9, 2016? Regardless of what you think about his political positions, there is something faculty and students can learn from a discussion with him.” Mr. Zingales, too, welcomed peaceable protests as a healthy exercise of free speech. “I admire the way our students have conducted their protests,” he wrote. “It speaks very well to the values that our university shares.”
The University of Chicago has long enjoyed a reputation for tough, even remorseless, intellectual inquiry. Its world-famous economics faculty, for instance, is not a place where faint-hearted academics go to road-test their research. In recent years, as colleges across America have censored unfashionable views, Chicago has also come to be known for setting the gold standard for free expression on campus. Mr. Zimmer, who became president in 2006, deserves much credit. He has been outspoken in defense of free speech and in 2014 even set up a committee—under the constitutional law scholar Geoffrey Stone —that produced the Chicago Principles, the clearest statement by any American university in defense of uninhibited debate.
Mr. Zimmer, a mathematician, says Chicago’s intellectual and moral strengths are “totally tied together.” He’s also quick to point out that its commitment to free debate precedes him, naming virtually every one of his predecessors as a guardian of openness. Mr. Zimmer created the Stone committee, he says, after watching free-speech struggles at other schools: “People were starting to be disinvited from campuses—speakers of some stature, in fact. You started to see this pattern.”
A nadir came in 2013. That year the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) counted 34 “disinvitation attempts”—a record. The University of Pennsylvania canceled a keynote from the future prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, for fear of “potential polarizing reactions.” At Brown, New York’s then police commissioner, Ray Kelly, was shouted down by students holding signs like “Ray(cist) Kelly.” FIRE reports that the 2013 record was exceeded three years later, when the group counted 42 incidents.
Mr. Zimmer attributes this campus intolerance to “the national mood,” as well as a change in “the ambient environment” in which universities exist. He describes a sort of national attention-deficit disorder: “How much is the national environment amenable to long-term thinking and investment, versus just responding to particular issues, particular needs?” The importance of education and research, he says, “has certainly come under question” in recent years, in part because “the entire tone of the country has shifted toward people being more focused on the immediate and the short-term.”
Mr. Zimmer shames this age of ours by pointing to the Morrill Act of 1862, one of his favorite examples of investing in the long term: “In the middle of the greatest single crisis in the history of the country—the Civil War—the Congress passed, and President Lincoln signed, this act which essentially established the land-grant university system.” The foresight was there then, he says. It isn’t now.
Two examples: budget cuts that are starving state universities of the money they need to grow, and “the nature of our immigration policies.” Mr. Zimmer takes a particular interest in the latter: “Even just in the last two decades, if you look at Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans in the sciences, something like 40% are immigrants. And this doesn’t include those whose parents may have migrated to the United States.” Mr. Zimmer laments that Americans no longer seem to recognize fully “the unbelievable power that being attractive to the most talented people in the world has brought to the capacity of this country.” Trying to imagine the scientific and technological output of the U.S. over the past century without immigration, he says, is “simply inconceivable.”
But America, Mr. Zimmer believes, is “getting less attractive than other places,” so much so that it is in peril of “discarding this huge comparative advantage.” The problem, he says, precedes Donald Trump’s presidency: “It’s been exacerbated, but it’s not a new problem. Trump has obviously taken a position more pronounced than others, but it’s been a problem for some time.” Specifically, foreign students who come to the U.S. and earn doctorates face a lot of obstacles “to be able to work here, to have a spouse who can work here.” Ultimately, he says, people are going to look for other places to go—to America’s detriment.
Although conflict on campuses “is not a new thing,” Mr. Zimmer does think that “right now, we’re in a particular period of moral fervor,” with people believing that there’s “a sense of urgency about the rightness of what they’re doing.” Mr. Zimmer was an undergraduate in the 1960s, so he’s no stranger to political ferment. The activists then, however, were motivated by two issues, civil rights and the Vietnam War: “There was a huge amount of focus on what the laws were, and what rights people had under them. And the Vietnam War was very much a matter of government policy.”
The 1960s protests “may have had cultural roots,” Mr. Zimmer says, “but there was a lot of focus on what actions the government should be taking.” Today’s campus indignation is “a bit more broad-based. Yes, what should the government be doing—but it’s also focused on corporations and NGOs, and what communities and universities should be doing.”
One could argue, perhaps paradoxically, that today’s campus activists are much more atomized as well. Identity groups push for their own particular agendas, often in absolutist terms: It matters to me more than anything else in the world that you call me “they,” not “she.” That’s not exactly a broad-based concern.
When I put this argument to Mr. Zimmer, he gently deflects: “Again, I’d go to the point that the main issue is—whether everybody is focused on one thing, or whether there are multiple groups focused on multiple things—that you get the same . . . kind of fervor, which says certain ideas should not be discussed and thought about. And that’s what the problem is.”
Mr. Zimmer has his eye on the future of free speech in another, innovative way. As president of a university, he sees himself as a stakeholder in America’s high schools. “High schools prepare students to take more advanced mathematics, and they prepare them to write history papers, and so on,” he says. But “how are high schools doing in preparing students to be students in a college of open discourse and free argumentation? I’ve started thinking about this.”
The free-speech president, as some of his colleagues call him, is going on a free-speech roadshow. Mr. Zimmer invited six high-school principals—including from his alma mater, Lower Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High—to dinner in New York City to talk about this question last month. He plans two similar dinners in Chicago, followed by more in other cities. The initiative is still embryonic, and although Mr. Zimmer insists he’s “not going to pretend to tell high schools how to prepare people,” he does consider it “an important question for high schools to confront.”
Mr. Zimmer says, optimistically, that even universities that “may not have been talking about issues of free expression two years ago” are at least “trying to confront them, at least recognizing that maybe there’s a problem.” In the same vein, it would be very healthy, he thinks, for high-school teachers “to actually be thinking about this in a kind of systematic way.” He’s observed that “a lot of students are not prepared for this environment.” Some of that is inevitable, Mr. Zimmer believes, because “free expression doesn’t come naturally for most people. It’s not an instinctive response.” Young people need “to be taught it”—and it’s better if universities don’t have to start from scratch.
Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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3)
Better Call Saul: The U.S. Needs Radicalism, Not Extremism
Alinsky is one of the most misunderstood figures of the 20th century. Let’s set the record straight.
It may seem strange to argue that the U.S. needs more radicalism, especially in this period of outrageous rhetoric and intense overreaction. But the right kind of radicalism can improve American politics by focusing on fundamental public goods. Leaders should replace showmanship with a radical approach that galvanizes ordinary American citizens.
This concept of political radicalism has a storied history, but the term has faded from the popular lexicon. In 1951 Wall Street Journal editor William H. Grimes described this newspaper’s philosophy: “We are not much interested in labels, but if we were to choose one, we would say we are radical.”
Saul Alinsky had a different perspective, but he also considered himself a radical who wanted to serve the interests of ordinary Americans. In 1940, while the world was being torn apart by war, it was radical to organize beleaguered stockyard workers in immigrant neighborhoods. Many policy makers doubted that American democracy could contend with the military might of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and preferred placing power in government rather than the fractured American public.
Even some of Alinsky’s supporters doubted whether the time was right to pit citizens against government. He had founded the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940 to “petition the Government for the redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment empowers citizens to do. But the business, religious and civic leaders on IAF’s board struggled to balance public spiritedness with the group’s often adversarial relationship to government.Alinsky put the unease to rest by reminding the board that standing against ineffective government is part of good citizenship. This approach to politics, he wrote in 1942, could break the “strangleholds of undemocratic practices” and force government to serve the needs of the people. The IAF remains committed to helping communities and individuals hold government and bad corporate actors accountable.
The radicalism of the IAF is an antidote to the utopian fever that often courses through American politics. Alinsky disappointed many student activists in the 1960s by insisting that the purpose of politics is not to enact an idealistic fantasy. Rather, he argued, most people want to participate in America’s existing free and democratic system. The goal of organizing is merely to ensure that citizens have real power and equal access. When government is open and accountable, workers can protect their health and safety and negotiate for better wages, and residents can improve their communities so that their children can live on safe and decent blocks.
This pragmatic radicalism attracted me and many of my longtime colleagues to the IAF nearly 40 years ago. The organization’s focus on the gritty details of public life has allowed us to see through bad actors and ideas on both sides of the political aisle. We rejected the rhetorical posturing of the New Left movement, which was led by privileged young people who often viewed working-class Americans with contempt. We opposed the Democratic leaders of Chicago, who built a brutal political machine by barring independents and reformers from power. And we saw through the ideological fairy tales of corporate elites and the far right, who sought to maximize economic freedom without regard for the needs of ordinary citizens.
We continue to teach those ordinary citizens how to build and wield power. But we do not treat politics as “an endless war” against elites, as the New York Times’s David Brooks falsely described Alinsky’s view in a recent column. Our mission is to enable citizens to compel their leaders to serve them with attention and respect. When that happens, people cease to be have-nots and become full citizens, or “have-withs.”
From East Brooklyn to South Texas, IAF-backed organizations have helped people delete the “not” and add the “with.” East Brooklyn Congregations turned former ghettos into livable communities with thousands of affordable homes, while Valley Interfaith has made sure that roads and water lines reach Mexican-border neighborhoods. These and scores of other organizations have nurtured generations of local leaders who do not overreact to their critics, or re-enact old political dramas. These leaders act with purpose and secure policy changes that improve the lives of communities and individuals.
Democracy is as much a muscle as a value, and like any muscle, it needs to be exercised regularly. The approach to politics that IAF champions builds democratic strength at the community level. And it will take incredible strength to push away extremism and replace it with a new era of pragmatic radicalism.
Mr. Gecan is a co-director of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of “Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action.”
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