Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  There was one other thing he said to me that morning: the town was Jewish. Even those who weren’t had formed themselves to the habits of a business that had been started by Jews and where Jews were still smarter and more experienced than the rest. It was something he actually liked about Hollywood, he said. “It’s not like with WASPs. Here, you know where you stand with people. They tell you.” But he cautioned me to be mindful that, as a Muslim, I might be seen as an enemy. “Get out in front of it,” he suggested. “Find ways to let them know up front that you’re not coming for them.”

  “Coming for them?”

  “You know—that you’re not against what they stand for.”

  “Meaning…”

  “Israel, the rest of it.”

  “Mike—”

  “Don’t get defensive, bro. I’m just looking out for you.”

  “I’m not against what they stand for. My favorite writers are all Jewish. I’ve been going to school on Philip Roth and Arthur Miller since I was in my teens.”

  “All good,” he said, only partly smiling. “Make sure they know it. You’ll be fine.”

  It was all typical Mike Jacobs, the caustic, well-intentioned directness, the charged racial views offered without judgment or apology. He owed what he sometimes called his “cheery pessimism” to his father, Jerry, also a lawyer, whose shadow loomed large in Mike’s life. Jerry Jacobs gave up a career in Washington, DC, to move the family back to Opelika, Alabama, where generations of Jacobses had lived for over a century. It was a remarkable choice considering the start he’d made: right out of law school, Jerry landed a clerkship under Spottswood Robinson at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the highest appeals court in the land. Stately, mild-mannered “Spotts” Robinson was a legend at that point, the first lawyer to argue Brown v. Board of Education, later the first black judge to be appointed to the DC Circuit. Clerking for Robinson back then—this was during the 1980s—was a stepping-stone without equal for a young black lawyer like Mike’s father. But the professional prospects, however bright, didn’t ultimately blind Jerry to what was taking shape in DC, the rise of the ideological framework he foresaw would hurt American blacks more than anyone realized. So Jerry decamped from the nation’s capital for Opelika, where he joined a local law practice, served on the city council, and eventually got elected to the Alabama House of Representatives. I met Jerry once, when he and Mike’s mother were visiting New York in the late ’90s, a sinewy, balding man with a high-pitched voice and a spectacular mustache. It was immediately obvious just how much Mike owed to the man—the preemptive exuberance, the jaunty physical rhythms. Even the faint traces of deeper, world-weary fatigue I’d divined in Mike’s distracted pauses and half smiles. Years later, Mike mentioned in passing that his father’s favorite movie star was Jimmy Stewart—and that his favorite film was It’s a Wonderful Life—and I would imagine I’d stumbled onto the source of that high-strung, high-octane charm innate in father and son, the peculiar, willfully boyish strain that only partly masked a deeper battle against disillusionment. It was an emotional alloy familiar to anyone who knew Stewart’s heroes, all characters whose infelicitous confrontations with America’s darker truths left them, in one way or another, spiritually crippled.

  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 Gödel’s theorem, that the Market could be depended on to regulate its own aberrations and idiosyncrasie
s. 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.

  For their part, Spotts and Bork had been on terrible terms ever since issuing differing opinions in the case of Dronenburg v. Zech. In the spring of 1981, James Dronenburg, a twenty-seven-year-old petty officer in the navy, was caught engaged in “homosexual acts” in the naval barracks and honorably discharged. He filed suit, claiming the discharge violated his constitutional rights. The case wound its way to the DC Circuit, where Bork voted with the majority to uphold the navy’s decision to punish the young gay man. Robinson wrote an angry dissent, which provoked a dismissive personal rejoinder in the majority opinion penned by Bork. The relationship between the two judges had never been great, but after Dronenburg they barely spoke any longer. Irked by Bork’s interest in his clerk, Spotts advised Jerry to be careful: Bork’s imperiousness toward black appellants and solicitors was a sure sign of racism; there had to be some ulterior motive at work.

  Meanwhile, Bork had introduced Jerry to someone at the White House; a pair of subsequent lunches led to a brief audience with the Gipper himself. Though it was never made explicit, Jerry gathered there was a need for black faces to support the administration’s deregulatory initiatives. In particular, black businesses across the country were starting to organize against Reagan’s new antitrust policies. It was an era of easy money; mergers and takeovers were all the rage. Ever-larger companies were swallowing up market share, putting smaller businesses out to pasture, offering the promise of lower prices to compensate for the havoc wreaked on American Main Streets. At an earlier time in the nation’s history, the federal government would never have allowed the naked corporate grab then under way; in the late ’60s, even a potential 8 percent market share was cause for the courts to block the merger of two grocery store chains in Los Angeles. The judges explicitly sided with those who stood to lose their jobs and their businesses—even if the grocery merger might mean lower prices for consumers. Bork destroyed this way of thinking. In 1978, he would publish The Antitrust Paradox, a book responsible for entirely reframing our ideas about corporate competition and the benefit to the consumer, a book described as the most cited work on its subject in American history. In his years before sitting on the DC Circuit—teaching at Yale Law School and working in the Justice Department under Nixon—Bork had educated and promoted a generation of disciples who shaped opinion from the bench, on the nation’s business pages, and in America’s boardrooms. Increasingly, the benefit to the consumer would become the dominant metric of the common good, and that benefit would be solely defined by the lowest price. A company’s scale no longer signified a potential abuse of power, only opportunity, for the bigger you were, the more power you had over your suppliers and employees; greater latitude to cut costs with impunity meant passing on savings to the consumer. The consolidation began in grocery stores2 and other retail establishments and would later expand to banks and insurers, railroads, trucking, airlines. (Decades later, of course, this process would culminate in the rise of companies of almost God-like proportions, merchants of human attention and data whose digital technologies and algorithms would come to command our very cognitive activity itself.)

  Concussive scale, market share, shirked responsibility to communities and workers: all this has been permitted—no, encouraged—because of a so-called benefit to the consumer. But to hear Mike tell it, in the mid-’80s black intellectuals and businessmen were already wondering whether the nation could really thrive through buying alone. Is that all we were as Americans? Consumers? Certainly we were also laborers and owners and perhaps even citizens as well. Was there really no need to protect these aspects of our social being, too? Did the nation’s welfare truly amount to little more than saving money at the cash register?

  If you were black in the ’80s, Mike said, you couldn’t ignore what the new laws really meant. Black banks, black insurers were getting bought up by white-owned holding companies and turning their backs on their new black customers; these growing conglomerates were not locally owned, had no local stakes, and had no incentive to attend to the needs of communities they didn’t live in, didn’t understand, and, frankly, didn’t like. And connected to all this not very thinly veiled commercial racism was something people like Justice Spottswood Robinson couldn’t forget: that their civil rights battles had owed more to black-owned businesses than most would ever understand. Economic independence was essential to the battle for full rights; the money to sustain the struggle had to come from somewhere; most often, it came from local black businesses. Black grocery store owners bankrolled bus boycotts; black drugstore owners financed “wade-ins” at segregated beaches; black funeral owners pulled their money from white banks until WHITES ONLY signs were removed from water fountains and bathrooms.

  In the series of meetings that young Jerry Jacobs took with members of various federal agencies and lobbying firms, he started to get a better picture of why they wanted him. Scarred by their defeats in the civil rights era, convinced beyond any doubt of the transformative force of organized black protest, Reagan Republicans were taking no chances. They were worried about a critique already current in the black community, one that gave the lie to all this talk about efficiency and the consumer good, a critique articulated even before the Great Depression by none other than W. E. B. Du Bois:

  To ask the individual colored man to go into the grocery store business or to open a drygoods shop or to sell meat, shoes, candy, books, cigars, clothes or fruit in competition with the chain store, is to ask him to commit slow but almost inevitable economic suicide.

  Recruiting black lawyers to serve in the cause of deregulation had become a top priority, and Bork, according to Mike, had identified Mike’s father as a perfect candidate. Jerry Jacobs would be offered a job at the Federal Trade Commission in 1986, but by then, after having flirted with Reaganites for more than a year, he’d figured out what they were up to. The way Jerry saw it, they had no illusions about the future; they saw the rising tide of racial diversity and its economic and political consequences; they were plotting their response—a reassertion of white property rights, an accumulation of power in corporate hands to ensure that whites remained in charge.

  Spotts Robinson patiently watched as his young clerk was slowly disabused of his illusions around these modern heirs to the party of Lincoln. Honest Abe was probably rolling over in his grave, Spotts would say; he’d risked so much to free American blacks from slavery, and here, folks like Baker and Bork and Atwater were using his party’s great name to slip them right back into chains, albeit financial ones. When I first knew Mike, he had tried his hand a
t a screenplay, and that night in Harlem I finally understood where the inspiration for it came from. The screenplay told the story of a young black lawyer lured by the promise of influence and wealth, tempted into a self-enriching cause that leads to his betrayal of a beloved paternal mentor—a thin, stately, self-effacing attorney from the Old South in the mold of Spottswood Robinson. Far more than its plotting—which, I thought, owed too much to any number of John Grisham thrillers—the moral of the story was complicated and appeared indebted to what Mike’s father learned about himself during his DC years, perhaps to what Mike felt his father still hadn’t fully learned as well: point of view is always shaped by desire; if some part of you doesn’t trust your desire, then you better not trust the picture of the world it’s giving you.

  Eventually, Mike came to see his father’s decision to leave the nation’s capital and come home to Alabama as marred by sentimentality. It was all well and good to want to do right by those you loved. But as Mike saw it, you better have a real idea of what that might actually entail. His father had certainly seen what was starting to happen in America, but Mike wasn’t sure he’d understood just how little a person could do about it from a law office on Main Street in Opelika or even from the statehouse in Montgomery. The new political order was mercantile at its root, shaped and paid for by the cash accumulated in the coffers of bigger and bigger business—and what it was doing to black businesses it was doing to everyone. Chains and conglomerates weren’t shuttering more black concerns than they were white ones. The mistake his father made, Mike started to understand, was to see all this solely through the lens of race. Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. In the South, it was in farming that you saw the worst of it. People—black, white, or brown—couldn’t live off their land anymore. Corporate consolidation led to larger and larger tracts and the increasingly automated systems required to water and harvest them. Prices for produce dropped, yes—but so did the tax base. There’d never been more jobs that paid so little, most of which went to migrants who didn’t object to making a pittance. Towns were poorer, which meant schools were poorer, too. Public education started to crumble. So did the roads and bridges. There were fewer landowners giving less money to an ever-dwindling number of churches and charities. Everywhere you went, people poured into big-box stores to spend less on things they had less money to buy. The twenty-year downward slope of opportunity and morale in places like Opelika and Wichita and Grand Rapids and Scranton—and just about everywhere else across middle America—defined a descent from which, increasingly, there appeared to be no recourse. Suicide was on the rise, and so were drugs, depression, anger.