Today’s sexual “Reign of Terror” started in the 1960s, when the Left turned social mores on their heads — and it will get worse before it gets better.
The original “Reign of Terror” occurred during the French Revolution, when socialism itself was fully birthed. It was a period during which the French Revolutionaries executed thousands of people, many of whom were themselves Revolutionaries, including the father of the French Revolution, Robespierre. We are seeing something akin to the Reign of Terror on the Left today with the sudden purging of stalwart Progressives who have engaged in sexual harassment and abuse. How did we get here and how will it end?
Through the early 60’s, we had conservative culture that I think could be defined by two things — a general belief in the chivalric code and a restrictive, though amorphous, view of appropriate sexual conduct and morals that was half Biblical and half Victorian. Society at large called girls “sluts” if they engaged in any sex outside of marriage. Meanwhile, we boys called such girls . . . on Friday nights with no real opprobrium unless we got the girl pregnant. There was a double standard, but one dictated by biological realities.
At its best, such conservatism comes from ancient Jewish and later Christian traditions aimed at creating and maximizing the strength of families, since families have, since time immemorial, been the foundational unit of civilized society. These traditions reined in men, whose biological impulse is to spread their seed far and wide. They made it clear morally that men should marry a woman, be monogamous during marriage, and raise the children of the marriage.
Having these traditions in place protected women, for whom pregnancy is a life-changing event, and, most importantly, protected children from the scourge of single motherhood. Today, the risks are poverty for the girls and criminality for the boys. In olden days, the more extreme risk was starvation.
Such traditions also promoted a healthy society, by limiting the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, many of which were potentially fatal in the long run. At their worst, such traditions were stamped with 5th century Augustinian notions that sex was evil, sinful and dirty.
All of this set up a permanent tension in society. Perhaps most illustrative of this is American Puritan society during the century after their arrival on these shores in 1620. Despite being intensely religious, they also struggled with natural human impulse. True, they punished with fines and the lash unwed women who bore children (though Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, written long after the demise of Puritan society, unfairly caricatures that time).
But of all the discussions I have read in original sources, at least outside of the pulpit, the Puritan’s concern with unwed pregnant women was pragmatic, not biblical. They were concerned with the societal costs of unwed mothers and their children raised without a father.
That said, Puritans were, perhaps surprisingly, fully human in giving in to their sexual impulses. Best estimates are that half of the women in American Puritan society between 1620 and 1720 went to the altar with a baby bump. The Left, in attacking Western civilization, ridicules that as hypocrisy. Actually it is nothing more than the aspirational goals on one hand and the reality of humanity on the other, with Puritan mores intervening to shape, as best as possible, the result of that tension.
Fast forward to the rise of socialism and the socialist goal to remake the West into a utopian society. Ms. BWR, in an American Thinkerarticle several years ago, pointed out that socialists have, since their inception, used sex as a tool to attack the Judeo-Christian religions and to sexualize children. In a related post of a few years ago, I traced the long effort of the socialist movement in this country to intervene in the family unit, inserting government (Leftist government) in loco parentis to strip sex of its moral and ethical dimensions for children. What began with the avowedly socialist Margaret Sanger in the early 20th century became part and parcel of the radicalized Third Wave feminist movement of the 60’s.
Just as an aside, First Wave feminism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was concerned with voting and gaining equality before the law. Second Wave feminism of the first half of the 20th century was concerned with equality of opportunity and treatment. I know of no one who does not support the goals of First and Second Wave feminism.
Enter the sexual revolution of the 70’s, driven by the availability of the Pill. As a child raised in this era, I deeply appreciate that the sexual revolution did away with the Augustinian gloss on sexual morality and notions of shame associated with sex. But once that pendulum started to swing, the Proggies / Third Wave feminists rode it far beyond that limited, long overdue good.
The Left began with an attack on all sexual and moral dimensions to sex. With that success, feminists moved towards changing the dynamic between male/ female relations, destroying the concept of chivalry for both sexes (men to act as protectors, women to act as desirous of and worthy of male protection) and, most recently, establishing a set of neo-Victorian, neo-Augustinian rules and attitudes regarding sex.
As Third Wave feminists would have it, sex is no longer sinful and dirty in the Augustinian sense. Instead, it’s much worse: all heterosexual sex is presumed to be rape unless the woman does not complain.
Even as men are no longer expected to act with chivalry towards women, since the rise of Obama, they are expected to abide by rules more strict than any Victorian era law in that they allow women to claim rape at any time during or after consensual sex. Men are presumed guilty and may or (preferably for radical feminists) may not be given any chance to prove their innocence. In the Third Wave world, though, women are free to be promiscuous without consequence and should exercise complete power in the world of sex.
It is poetic that today’s justifiable “reign of terror” against un-chivalric men who have sexually harassed or abused women should begin with the iconic progressive, Harvey Weinstein, in the iconic home of progressivism, Hollywood, and with Hollywood’s infamous tool of sexual abuse, the “casting couch.” Conservative men who still believe in chivalry and in treating all women (including, and especially, those whom we would like to bed) with respect, must applaud and support this. Their support, however, comes with an important caveat: We must not automatically presume guilt based on accusations nor on the subjective feelings of a woman (or man) who engaged in consensual sex.
Looking at today’s headlines (and predicting tomorrow’s) it is completely predictable that the vast majority of men being tied to the stake for burning are Progressive men, from Clinton to Weinstein to Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey and others. For the past six decades, these men have lived in a world of their own making, one with no moral or ethical limits on their sexual desires, nor any expectation that they act with chivalry. Thus anything short of actual rape has been within their acceptable limits and, so long as they espoused progressive ideals, their fellow Progressives were content to give them a perpetual pass. There are no better examples than the three most powerful sexual predators, Harvey Weinstein, Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
This is not to say that the problem does not occur on the right. Bill O’Reilly and Roy Moore may have engaged in sexual harassment, although that is not clear (and is becoming increasingly less clear in Roy Moore’s case). Regardless, I doubt that there is a red-blooded man alive on the right who hasn’t acted boorish on occasion. When it happens on the Right, though, these occasional behaviors have been a moral and ethical lapse. When it happens on the left, it is a day that ends in “-y.”
So why this “reign of terror” now, after all these years of protecting Progressive men? Has the radical feminist movement, with its goal of making all men a subservient class, finally matured to the point that the movement’s loudest harridans no longer feel that they need progressive men? Prof. Jacobsen, at Legal Insurrection,has a theory:
There is honest built-up resentment and anger among liberal women who have been the victims of predatory conduct by liberal men. They were expected to maintain their silence for the liberal cause, because to air their legitimate grievances would call into question the icons of Democratic Party history, the Kennedy’s and the Clintons, and the key funders of liberal causes in Hollywood and the entertainment industry.
Trump’s victory over a Clinton, oddly enough, freed liberal women to stop being silent about liberal male abusers in a way not possible after the Obama victory over Hillary in the 2008 primary. . . .
That explains why the women are coming forward, but it doesn’t explain the seeming pleasure of the liberal media in telling their stories, and even seeking out those stories. So there must be more going on.
Major media, which has a vested interest in the success of the Democratic Party and the eventual defeat of Trump, knows that defeat of Trump cannot take place until there is a changing of the Democrat guard. The Clintons and vestiges of the Clintons must be purged, and what better way than to portray the party and liberalism as a coming to grips with the past abuses of Bill Clinton as covered up by Hillary. The major media now is acting as something of a truth and reconciliation commission, in which exposure of others in addition to the Clintons is necessary.
Additionally, that purging of the Clintons is necessary for the progressive wing to take over. The Clintons, and all that the Democratic establishment represents, is entrenched even in defeat. The airing of grievances against the Democrat harasser/abuser in chief, and his henchwoman, is necessary for the party to move on to it next, more radical, phase. That more radical phase will have people like Keith Ellison, who is being promoted as a replacement for Al Franken, in leadership. . . .
I’m not sure how this liberal purge ends. But it’s long overdue.
I agree with all of that, but I think that how this “liberal purge ends” is quite foreseeable. The Progressive movement, and even all of its conflicting victims’ groups, have a single goal, attaining permanent power. At some point, when the progressive wing fully takes over the Democrat Party, the Progs will try their damnedest to expand this “reign of terror” to tarnish conservatives.
This inevitable effort to tar the conservative with the Leftist’s sleazy brush has already begun with the #MeToo movement, which makes every bit of boorish behavior by any and every man roughly equal to the very serious sins of Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Teddy Kennedy, Bill Clinton, etc., all of whom stand accused of behavior that far exceeds clumsy flirtation.
Progressives are already pushing the meme that the GOP is the “party of pedophiles,” and at least one woman has endorsed others lying about sexual harassment to achieve her political goals. Progs are doing the “Reign of Terror” backwards because they began, rather than ended, with eating their own. They need to be stopped now that they’re trying to take their movement beyond sexual abusers and predators, and trying to restore Democratic hopes by tarnishing those on the right who are innocent of acting like Proggies. ____________________________________
*Wolf Howling wrote this post, but was only able to email it to me before his internet went down. That’s why I’m publishing his post under my byline.
One more point here from me, Bookworm. When I read Wolf Howling’s point about the fact that the Proggies are trying to say that flirtation and compliments from conservatives are the same as sexual assaults from Proggies, I suddenly knew where I’d seen that idea before — that is, the idea that flirting (not rape, but flirting) is a sin deserving of death (or a punishment almost as severe):
I predicted 8 years ago that Obama’s Iran outreach would throw Israel and Saudi Arabia closer together, an alliance that has significant benefits for both.
Although I haven’t written about Saudi Arabia, I have been paying a great deal of attention to what’s going on in that kingdom. If Prince Mohammed bin Salman can avoid assassination (and I devoutly hope he can), he is a true reformer. He is trying to upgrade women’s status, he is purging the most corrupt members of the royal family and, most importantly, he is behind the outreach to Israel. There have been rumors that a member of the House of Saud made a secret trip to Israel and, assuming that rumor is true, Prince Salman is the best bet.
According to the Turkish Anadolu news agency, reported here, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al Sheikh, has issued a quite remarkable religious ruling. Answering a question on TV about the Palestinian Arab riots over Temple Mount last July, he didn’t merely denounce Hamas as a “terror organisation”.
Much more significantly he actually issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, forbidding war against the Jews; and he said that fighting against Israel was inappropriate.
How can this be anything other than highly significant?
After discussing the Grand Mufti’s conservative stands and enmity towards Israel, Phillips believes something important is happening:
Nevertheless, he is the most senior cleric in the state which has served as the epicentre of Sunni Islamic fanaticism and the most austere and conservative interpretation of a religion which has Jew-hatred at its theological core. If such a man is now saying that war against the Jewish state is not holy at all but must be forbidden on religious grounds, will this not have some impact within the Islamic religious world for which holy war against the Jews is an article of faith?
Phillips and my friend Wolf Howling have reached the same conclusion about Saudi Arabia’s softening towards Israel. This is what Wolf Howling wrote me:
In the larger context of what is going on, it makes complete sense. Indeed, nothing could be more Islamic than the old saw that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Hamas, nominally a Sunni organization, is funded by Iran. And nothing will drive the Saud clan into the arms of Israel quicker than being clearly threatened by Iran. Seems to me that when Obama threw the weight of the West, and its billions in cash, behind Iran, he may have done more in the long run for Middle East peace than anyone else in history. He made Iran such a threat that all of the non-Shia Middle East has to react against the mad mullahs.
I will say this for the Sauds. They are an incredibly corrupt clan, but they also enjoy their petro-billions and have no desire to so rock the boat that they have ever willingly joined in the Middle East wars of their era except on the most tangential level. True, it is their Wahhabi religion that has created the world wide mess that is radicalized Islam, but the Sauds funded and fanned that toxin to keep Wahhabism pointed at outward expansion, not at inner Saud corruption. If the Saud clan were not frightened of the Wahhabi scorpions in their midst, one gets the feeling they would all, each and every one of them, much rather be on the Riviera drinking Scotch and banging European hookers.
Exactly. Salman is reforming to survive — and more power to him. I don’t care what his motives are. I just care that Israel might have gained a powerful ally. I also think it would be a wonderful thing if Saudi Arabia, which is seeing its petro-wealth fade away to dry wells and American fracking, takes steps to enter the 21st century, a world in which women have some equality and the men (who are notoriously resistant to work thanks to decades of petro-wealth) begin to act like real men, and not effete, pampered, tyrannical princes.
One more thing: As you watch shifting Middle Eastern alliances, keep in mind the fact that Egypt too, under al-Sisi, is working more closely with Israel.
To pat myself on the back, I’ll just quote from a post I wrote in May 2009, when Obama first began his attack on Israel (which ended with his abandoning Israel at the UN) by trying to force Israel to admit that it has nuclear weapons. As I commented in 2009, Israel was never interested in a nuclear armsrace. She sat quietly on her armory, with her very silence telling the hostile nations surrounding her that, while she will never use them offensively, she will, if necessary use them defensively.
In that same post, regarding Obama’s simultaneous groveling outreach to Iran, I had this to say:
The other thing that Obama fails to understand is that, even if Israel is forced to show her hand and the pressure is on for disarmament, Iran will never disarm. It will lie, lie, lie, and lie again to ensure that it continues to have a usable weapons stock pile. While Israel’s goal is a simple one: to stay alive, Iran has a much more sophisticated set of three-tiered goals. Its first goal is Israel’s destruction; second, it seeks Middle East domination; and third, it desires world domination. Israel and all of the other nations in the Middle East understand Iran’s first two goals. Obama and team, despite their myriad degrees, don’t seem to understand any of Iran’s goals.
It will be interesting to see if Israel can withstand Obama’s pressure. I’m reasonably optimistic that, with Netanyahu at the helm, Israel understands what Obama is doing and understands what will happen if he gets away with it, and will resist this threat. I also think that, under the rubric of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” allegiances are going to start shifting in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, etc., may hate Israel, but they fear a nuclear Iran even more than they hate Israel. My long-held suspicion since Obama’s election (which instantly meant Israel lost her only friend) is that Saudi Arabia, somehow or other, is going to give Israel cover for an attack against Iran.
Before I give myself too many pats on the back, let me hasten to add that the outcome we see today was obvious to the meanest intelligence back in 2009. Obama is not stupid, but his ideological blinders were so all-encompassing that they acted as the functional equivalent of a profound IQ loss. The only alternative explanation to stupidity is to believe that, all the way back in May 2009, Obama began intentionally destabilizing the entire Middle East to achieve a Saudi rapprochement with Israel.
Of course, accepting this alternative view means that, beginning in June 2009, when Obama turned his back on the Iranians protesting against the Mullahs’ totalitarian dictatorship, he was looking ahead eight years in the future to a time when the Mullahs would become an unbearable threat to Saudi Arabia. Likewise, to justify Obama’s decision during the Arab Spring to (1) dethrone Egypt’s Mubarek, who had abided by the peace treaty with Israel and (2) replace him with a Muslim Brotherhood candidate who was so loathsome that the Egyptian’s rebelled and supported a military coup that included a leader farsighted enough to see Israel as an ally — well, we’d have to believe that Obama was almost magically prescient to foresee that particular chain of events.
Frankly, just as it’s ridiculous to see the actions as prescient, so it’s ridiculous to see any farsighted planning from other Obama initiatives in the Middle East, including his invasion of Libya and the overthrow of Qaddafi; his imaginary red line in the Syrian civil war; his refusal to acknowledge that Al Qaeda was rising; his ridiculing of ISIS; his deadly failure in Benghazi; his cash infusion to Iran; and his joining with Merkel to encourage the Muslim invasion of Europe.
Still, whether Obama was prescient or so stupid and ideological that he was an incompetent, misguided, and dangerous man, the result is the same: Armageddon became such a real possibility that those living in a post-Obama Middle East have been forced to do whatever they can to stay alive. I’m pretty sure Obama was not prescient, but was, instead, just dumb . . . so no pats on the back for him.
Oh come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.
Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.
The LORD works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
Sing to the LORD, all the earth! Tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples! For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and he is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the LORD made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and joy are in his place.
Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength! Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; bring an offering and come before him! Worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness; tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice, and let them say among the nations, “The LORD reigns!” Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall the trees of the forest sing for joy before the LORD, for he comes to judge the earth. Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!
“Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the LORD GOD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.”
With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day:
“Give thanks to the LORD, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the peoples, proclaim that his name is exalted.
“Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously; let this be made known in all the earth. Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.”
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
ven at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett. Party operatives, administration officials—they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence. When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record.
This is not as irrational as it sounds. Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate. “Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing,” says Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director. Broader, even, than the role ofrunningthe West Wing. This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha’s Vineyard. When I asked Holder if Denis McDonough, the chief of staff, was part of the conversation, he thought for a moment and said, “He was not there.” (Holder hastened to add that “someone had spoken to him.”)
Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize say on ambassadorships and judgeships. She helps determine who gets invited to the First Lady’s Box for the State of the Union, who attends state dinners and bill-signing ceremonies, and who sits where at any of the above. She has placed friends and former employees in important positions across the administration—“you can be my person over there,” is a common refrain.
And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself. When administration aides plan “bilats,” the term of art for meetings of two countries’ top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate—nine by nine, eight by eight, etc.—our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.
Not surprisingly, all this influence has won Jarrett legions of detractors. They complain that she has too much control over who sees the president. That she skews his decision-making with her after-hours visits. That she is an incorrigible yes-woman. That she has, in effect, become the chief architect of his very prominent and occasionally suffocating bubble.
There is an element of truth to this critique. While aboard Air Force One at the end of the 2012 campaign, Jarrett turned to Obama and told him, “Mr. President, I don’t understand how you’re not getting eighty-five percent of the vote.” The other Obama aides in the cabin looked around in disbelief before concluding that she’d been earnest.
Still, Jarrett’s role is far more textured than this narrative would suggest. She has served as a teller of hard truths, urging Obama to clean up his initial remarks about Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates’s arrest in 2009, which, she worried, sounded disrespectful to police. She is an all-wise interpreter of the president’s thoughts. When the White House began taking flak for its man-cave sensibilities, senior officials consulted Jarrett to figure out where Obama stood. “The White House counsel Greg Craig stopped by,” recalls a former Jarrett aide. “He was like, ‘Hey, is the president worried about this?’” (He was.) Jarrett even plays the role of advance dining scout for the Obamas, locating restaurants discreet and exacting enough to serve the first family. (Fiola Mare in Georgetown has become a standby.)
So adept is Jarrett at catering to the president’s needs that Michelle Obama has, at least on one occasion, chafed at the portrayal of their relationship. Late in the 2008 campaign,Voguepublished a long profile of Jarrett titled “Barack’s Rock.” According to a senior campaign aide, Michelle sniffed about the magazine bestowing a title that she considered hers.
Jarrett’s job may be nothing less than to reflect the most authentic version of Barack Obama back at himself. “My speculation has always been, when you are any president or Democratic nominee, at the pinnacle of American political power, you are necessarily surrounded by layer and layer of bureaucracy,” says a former White House aide. “You’re completely disconnected. For someone to come to you and say, ‘I am going to be the person who is your connection to the real you’ ... is very attractive.”
And Jarrett is, in turn, our connection to the real Barack Obama. A decade after his ascent, there is still a basic unknowability about him, a puzzling gap between his talents and the public’s enthusiasm for his years in office. No wonder Jarrett inspires such fevered theorizing. She is the closest we have to a human decoder ring—the only person who can solve the mystery of why this president has left so many feeling so unfulfilled.
Valerie Jarrett’s role in the White House has changed markedly from the first term to the second.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The Clinton alumni Obama initially hired to run his White House and hash out his economic policy were flamboyantly centrist, fanatical about winning over financial markets and moderate voters. In their view, a Democratic president could make no bigger mistake than becoming a captive of the left. And they acted as if they owned the place.
They certainly didn’t view Jarrett as much of a threat. She had enjoyed real clout on the campaign, but the way she used it—encouraging Obama to give his famous race speech, and bringing Latinos, blacks, gays, and women into the heart of the operation at a time when the post-racial rhetoric had gotten thick—didn’t win her much respect. Even after Obama made Jarrett a senior adviser and put her in charge of outreach to constituency groups, her lack of Washington experience made her easy to dismiss. “Larry Summers’s office was literally across the floor [from ours],” says a former Jarrett aide of the president’s top economic adviser. “It was amazing how little he looked at her, talked to her. It was so clear he kind of wanted ... nothing to do with her.”
That was a mistake. Jarrett was a beloved figure among the fresh-faced Obama-hands who flocked to Washington. She shepherded their careers, clucked about their health, and turned up unexpectedly at weddings and maternity wards. And though she had been a confidant of Barack and Michelle Obama’s since the early ’90s, the three became even closer after the election. It gradually became clear that she had the president’s blessing to challenge his top brass and better align his White House with the outsider ethos of his candidacy.
In the spring of 2009, Obama called in Summers, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and other members of the economic team to discuss their plan for reforming the financial system. The president was generally pleased with the product, but concerned that it wasn’t aggressive enough. “I want you to go think about, if we were going to do something more in three or four areas, what would they be?” Obama told them, according to a former administration official. “Bring me a proposal.”
A few weeks later, the economic team presented their ideas to other White House staffers, but not the president. They’d tacked on only the most marginal of changes. “No, we were right the first time. We shouldn’t do anything else,” is how the official sums up their basic message. Although Jarrett said she didn’t think they’d done what Obama had instructed them to do, they brought the proposal to him anyway. The president responded as though he’d been primed against it. “He comes in and says, ‘This is not what I asked for,’” says the official. “You can be sure she talked to the president first.”
Jarrett’s inescapable presence made her an object of fear and scorn. “It’s pretty toxic,” says another former administration official. “She went to whatever meeting she wanted to go to—basically all of them—and then would go and whisper to the president. Or at least everyone believed she did. ... People don’t trust the process. They think she’s a spy.”
But Jarrett’s involvement clearly served the president well. Over the next several months, Jarrett set up meetings between Obama and more hawkish reformers like former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Bill Donaldson. Eventually, Obama took up Volcker’s idea of blocking taxpayer-backed banks from making speculative bets, which both Summers and Geithner had resisted.
Jarrett also made her influence felt among the men who plotted Obama’s political strategy. In the spring of 2010, Donna Brazile, a New Orleans native and Democratic elder who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign, watched with horror as the administration slow-played its response to the BP oil spill. After weeks of back-channeling to White House political director Patrick Gaspard, Brazile finally took her frustration public. “One of the problems I have with the administration is that they’re not tough enough,” she said on ABC. “They are waiting for BP to say, ‘Oh, we’ve got a new plan to stop the oil leak.’ They need to stop it, contain it, clean it up.”
This set off a debate within the White House over whether the president should call Brazile, until, according to a former aide, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel shut it down in favor of his longstanding view that “the worst thing you could possibly do is reward bad behavior.” Jarrett did not consider the matter settled, however. She waited until she and Gaspard were safely away from Emanuel and inside the Oval Office, at which point she asked Gaspard a leading question about the utility of a call. “Sounds good, get her on the phone,” the president replied. Jarrett called Brazile and handed her cell phone to Obama.
The move validated every one of her rivals’ fears. And, as with Summers, personal grievances may have explained it. Emanuel had objected to Jarrett’s portfolio at the start of the administration and questioned the secret-service detail she maneuvered to receive a few months later. In return, Jarrett seemed keen to undermine him.
At one point, Obama personally ordered Emanuel to rein in his habit of screaming at subordinates. Emanuel soon lost his cool at a subsequent meeting and received another talking-to from the president. He was convinced that Jarrett had ratted him out. It was the sort of tradecraft Emanuel himself might have admired had he not been on the receiving end. As a former White House official told me: “In the wild, they would have been natural allies. In captivity, they became natural enemies.”
Whatever the case, calling Brazile was unquestionably the right approach. A few months later, the administration pressured an African American Department of Agriculture employee named Shirley Sherrod to resign after right-wing journalists circulated a video of her appearing to denigrate poor whites. Within a few days, it became apparent that the clip was egregiously out of context and that the ouster of Sherrod, whose husband had been a prominent civil rights leader, was unfair. Critics were furious at the trigger-happy White House—Jim Clyburn, the House’s third-ranking Democrat, toldThe New York Timeshe didn’t think a “single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired.” For her part, Brazile was far less cutting than she had been during the BP spill. She didn't single out the administration for blame.
Jarrett’s work behind the scenes served the president well so long as people like Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, and Robert Gibbs (the former press secretary, with whom Jarrett also clashed) remained inside the building. She diversified the views he received without stifling internal debate. But then, one by one, the big personalities left. After two years, Summers and Gibbs had been replaced by far more amenable actors; Emanuel’s strong-willed successor, Bill Daley, lasted less than a year before being replaced by a relative cipher, too.1
Today, Obama’s top economic adviser is Jeff Zients, a former management consultant and Jarrett pal who had no experience in government before joining the administration. The senior adviser seat that David Axelrod once occupied now belongs to Dan Pfeiffer, and the chief of staff is Denis McDonough. Both joined Obama in 2007 and have long since made their peace with Jarrett’s influence. “My sense is Denis does his best to not turn that into a reckoning kind of relationship,” one former White House official told me. “He doesn’t want to test it.”
As Jarrett has outlasted her rivals, it has increasingly fallen on her to do more than simply protect Obama from those who might undermine his presidency. She must nudge him when he becomes self-satisfied and rein in his worst political impulses. It is a position for which she is uniquely unqualified.
Valerie Jarrett is not above keeping a shit list—or as hers was titled, a “least constructive” list. One progressive activist recalls Jarrett holding the document during a meeting and noticing her own name on it, along with the names of others in the room. “It was kind of an honor,” the activist told me. This was not out of character for Jarrett. The woman who once resisted Emanuel’s commandment against rewarding bad behavior has often gone out of her way to suppress dissent among ideological allies and others who question the president. (A White House official says the document was prepared by a staffer acting without orders and that it is not a common practice.)
Consider her interactions with the LGBT community when they agitated for an executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors. Jarrett had been one of the Obama team’s biggest supporters of gay rights since the campaign (long before Obama himself “evolved” on the marriage question). She had even authored a memo advising the president to sign the executive order. But when Obama decided against it in 2012, he dispatched Jarrett to deliver the news to four or five groups active on the issue.
The meeting was a minor fiasco. ABuzzFeedreporter had broken word of the gathering just before it began, prompting Jarrett to lecture everyone in the room for several minutes about speaking to the press. She fumed that the reporter was outside “writing stories,” and told the activists that “we can’t have White House meetings if you do this kind of thing.”
Then, after ticking off the administration’s good deeds on behalf of gays, Jarrett offered no rationale for why Obama was shelving the executive order. She held out the possibility of a study to gauge the order’s effect on business, even though the question had been studied to death. About halfway through the meeting, Jarrett finally produced an explanation: a likely legal challenge. But the legal precedent was clear thanks to executive orders banning other forms of discrimination.
Had Jarrett leveled with the activists—conceding that the decision was political, probably intended to avoid a backlash among business—none of the groups would have been pleased, but many probably would have accepted the verdict and kept details out of the press. The previous fall, the Human Rights Campaign had commissioned a poll showing overwhelming, bipartisan support for the executive order, but declined to make it public for months so as not to embarrass the administration. The Center for American Progress, another group in attendance, had encouraged the LGBT community to abide by a moratorium on public pressure to allow for negotiation.
Instead, the reaction to the meeting was woeful, epitomized by a scathingWashington Postpiece quoting the activists. “There was a blowup,” says one longtime advocate. “People were withholding money. ... Straight donors, gay donors were like, ‘Whatisthis?’”
When the president made Jarrett his ambassador to the world outside the White House, he did so with a specific purpose in mind: to communicate how important he considered these relationships. “You know she’s speaking for the president, more so than anyone else on the staff,” says a trade association leader who’s met with Jarrett multiple times.
But Jarrett’s obsessiveness about control, and her response to even good-faith criticism, are often self-defeating. “She just cuts off. It’s stone cold,” says one person who received this treatment. “It couldn’t be a conversation.” A former administration official recalls publicly registering a gentle, offhand criticism of the White House, only to draw a one-line e-mail from Jarrett: “Why didn’t you call me first?” Even Jarrett’s most benevolent comments—“I want you to be my best friend,” she likes to say—implicitly threaten an abrupt loss of favor.
With the LGBT community, the agita subsided thanks to the president’s unplanned turnabout on gay marriage the following month. (Obama finally signed the executive order this July.) But on other issues, her heavy-handedness has been more costly. Earlier this year, after House Republicans rejected John Boehner’s overtures on immigration reform, a number of activist groups turned their attention away from Congress and toward the White House. They wanted Obama to sign an executive order protecting illegal immigrants from deportation over the next few years, the way he had back in 2012 for those brought to the country as minors.
The pressure mounted when Janet MurguÃa, president of the National Council of La Raza, one of the largest and most established Latino rights groups, gave a speech in March calling out both Boehner for having “pulled the plug on legislation” and Obama for denying he had “the authority to act on [his] own.” Echoing a line that was circulating on the left, she dubbed Obama “the deporter-in-chief.”
A week and a half later, the president and Jarrett summoned representatives from 15 to 20 reform groups to the White House for a meeting. Unlike the gay rights meeting two years earlier, there was no directive about keeping the discussion out of the press. But the activists were later told that the success of the meeting would be judged by the media coverage. “Even if you think that, it was like, ‘Eeeewww,’” says one of the reformers who attended. “I was embarrassed by the meeting.”
The president was in a foul mood, spending most of the next two hours lecturing the activists. You guys are turning on me, Obama said, according to several attendees.That’s what Republicans want, you’re taking the pressure off Boehner.If I was a GOP strategist, I’d be thrilled by what you’re doing.When some of the activists pointed out that the situation in the House was hopeless, Obama would interrupt and talk over them. (Administration officials say Boehner had assured them he would take another shot at the legislation.)
Finally, when it was MurguÃa’s turn to speak, she tried to put her earlier remarks in context. She explained that, while she’d been critical of the administration, she had also criticized Republicans and had urged her community to elect a more amenable Congress. “It took him what felt like ten minutes—it was probably thirty seconds—to compose himself. You could just feel the tension,” says one activist in the room. Whereupon Obama fell into an extended monologue:You’ve been around this town.You know the press will only report criticism of me.The La Raza president looked on the edge of tears as he spoke. Meanwhile, “Valerie was sitting next to him, staring, giving MurguÃa stink eye,” says the activist.
Relations with groups that had been critical only grew worse from there. Some were scrubbed from White House e-mail lists, not invited to subsequent meetings, or both. Another activist recalls not hearing from the White House for months, only to get a passive-aggressive e-mail after leveling a harsh critique of the president. “I don’t work for you,” the activist wrote back.
In late June, the president reversed course and effectively promised to sign the sought-after executive order by the end of the summer. Some of the critics had been rehabilitated, but not MurguÃa, who was left out of the Rose Garden event where the president announced his decision. “It was such a shitty thing to do,” says one of the activists of MurguÃa’s treatment. In any case, the president soon changed his mind yet again. In September, he announced that he wouldn’t consider the order until after the election. Suddenly, all the bad will that had built up throughout the year came pouring forth. “Where we have demanded leadership and courage from both Democrats and the president, we’ve received nothing but broken promises and a lack of political backbone,” the head of a prominent pro-immigration group told the Post.
Jarrett’s highly disciplined outreach effort had been a tactical mess. While the White House held some two-dozen meetings to take the pulse of activists throughout the summer, there was rarely a meaningful back-and-forth on strategy, especially in the run-up to the big announcements. “It does make it hard for dissenting voices to be raised,” says another activist who deals with the administration on the issue. “Almost everything is raised to the level of personal loyalty.”
The Clinton White House was porous and chaotic, with numerous staffers working numerous angles at any given moment. But it made advocates feel like part of the process. “People protected them more with the press,” says one of the activists. “No one protects Obama. Part of being hermetically sealed is, if you don’t want shit to leak, the higher the premium is on leaks, which gives advocates more of an incentive to leak.” In fact, it’s precisely because the activists don’t feel listened to that they speak to the press. And when the White House complains, it exposes itself even further. “They show you where they’re vulnerable,” says the activist. “If you’re worth your salt as an activist, that’s where you hit them. See: ‘deporter-in-chief.’”
Jarrett and Obama comparing notes backstage before a reception in Philadelphia in 2011. PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE/CORBIS
Jarrett isn’t always standoffish when outsiders are critical. After business leaders complained about the president’s occasional populist flourish—most notably his late 2009 comment that “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers”—Jarrett began pressing Axelrod and the speech-writing team to strip potentially inflammatory lines from his public statements. “Valerie viewed Wall Street and the business community as a constituency and was generally uncomfortable with expressions of chastisement toward Wall Street,” Axelrod told me by e-mail.
On one level, it was Jarrett’s job to soothe the fragile egos of corporate executives. The relationship between the White House and business is one of the many relationships that Jarrett’s Office of Public Engagement formally oversees. But on a deeper level, Jarrett fundamentally empathized with the concerns of business in ways she sometimes didn’t with other groups. “You could tell she felt at home with private-sector business leaders,” says a former aide. “Even health care—it was a presidential priority, the entire White House was involved. But I’d never seen her animated until it was CEOs talking about health care.”
This may seem at odds with Jarrett’s first-term role as Obama’s liberal id. But back then she was largely acting in opposition to the Clintonites around Obama. In terms of who she believes has the power to make or break the presidency, and therefore who needs access to the highest levels of the White House, Jarrett is not so different from her nemeses.
Jarrett was groomed from birth to be a thoroughly establishment figure—her family’s roots in Chicago go back several generations—and she accepted her destiny gracefully. She worked as a corporate lawyer and later ran Mayor Richard Daley’s housing and transit authorities. When Harvard Law Professor David Wilkins conducted a study of the Chicago legal world in the late ’90s, he found that most of the city’s lawyers were acquainted with Jarrett. “Valerie is the liaison between the white North Shore elites and the black South Sides elites,” he told David Remnick inThe Bridge,a biography of Obama. Upon accepting the White House job, Jarrett resigned from no fewer than seven corporate and nonprofit boards.
Any casual follower of Jarrett’s West Wing comings and goings these days will notice a distinct fondness for big shots, corporate or otherwise. It’s not just that Jarrett is a fixture at the standard A-list events—parachuting into New York forTimemagazine’s 100 Most Influential People Gala, popping into a birthday party for Britain’s Prince George. Jarrett also inhabits a much more rarefied plane than the standard Washington eminence. She attends the highest-profile arguments at the Supreme Court and often accompanies the president on fund-raising trips to New York, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. She recently made a cameo on “The Good Wife” and appeared in a Billie Jean King documentary.
“Valerie’s probably best known as the go-to person for the real opinion leaders in business and in the celebrity world,” says a former administration official. By contrast, she can come across as bored when meeting with the political world’s grayer operators. One leader of an influential but relatively anonymous advocacy group recalls arranging a meeting with Jarrett to explain how his team was advancing a cause dear to the president. “I felt like she was looking at her watch. She was annoyed that I even felt it was reasonable for me to meet with her,” says this person. “How dare I take up her time?”
In some cases, this outlook has served the administration well. Jarrett made an ally of Rupert Murdoch on immigration reform and soothed Silicon Valley in the tense moments after the NSA revelations. “She has very strong relationships with Facebook and Google,” says her fellow senior adviser, John Podesta.
Jarrett also helped mastermind the public-relations campaign to enroll seven million Americans in Obamacare prior to this March’s deadline. She spent months fine-tuning a plan to reach the uninsured “where they are,” by which she meant enlisting the figures they look to for guidance: community leaders, DJs, pop-culture icons. “I can remember dozens of times going back to her with plans, having this x’d out and that crossed out. This person is a bad idea for this, not that,” recalls an aide. Jarrett excelled at making the biggest asks personally. “When it came to getting other major people involved—you know, Zach Galifianakis, an LL Cool J tweet in the Grammies, Katy Perry—we were like, ‘We need to have Valerie make this call, sit in on this meeting,’” says Anton Gunn, one of the administration officials in charge of the enrollment push.
But in other cases, Jarrett’s establishmentarianism has simply reinforced the administration’s blind spots. There is, for example, Jarrett’s underappreciated influence in an area like budget policy. After Republicans took control of the House in 2011, Obama had to decide whether to stick with his efforts to boost the fragile economy or join in the deficit-cutting that Republicans were demanding. He opted for the latter, agreeing to slice billions from the 2011 budget. While some administration economic officials argued for staring down the House GOP, the approach never had a chance. “That wasn’t a huge debate because [former adviser David] Plouffe and Bill [Daley] and Valerie agreed,” a senior White House official told me later that year.
The White House believed that avoiding a fight was better for the economy and would help the two sides reach an even bigger deal later on—one that raised taxes and cut trillions in spending over ten years. This was flawed in two ways. First, notwithstanding the enthusiasm for deficit-cutting on the set of “Morning Joe” (where Jarrett is an occasional guest), it was a perverse priority at a time when the country still faced an unemployment crisis. Second, the White House completely misunderstood the psychology of House Republicans, who took Obama’s concessions as a vindication of their anti-spending mania and repeatedly balked at tax increases. Inexplicably, the White House continued to pursue a deal for years after the GOP showed its bad faith, efforts that Jarrett supported as well.
It wasn’t the only time she got burned by assuming good intentions. In 2010, Jarrett met with members of the Business Roundtable, a group representing the largest corporations in the country. She was proud that she had dialed back the president’s occasional verbal salvos and hoped it might win him some support in exchange. “She was like, ‘Last time I was here, you guys told us the key thing was the rhetoric,’” recalls a former colleague. “ ‘Look at the president’s speeches. They’re very different in tone based on your input.’”
The group’s chairman took this all in, then offered the all-too-predictable response. “Yes, yes, we noted that,” he said, according to the colleague. “We have five other objections.”
The Obama era has been deeply disorienting for the left. Eight years ago, progressives would have delighted at the idea of a president who withdrew from Iraq, remade the rules for Wall Street, slowed the proliferation of greenhouse gases, brought the country within spitting distance of universal health care, and multiplied the rights of gays and lesbians. And yet it’s hard to be a self-respecting progressive these days and not feel a frustration that borders on disillusionment. The victories have been muddled, the errors unforced, the ambitions preemptively scaled back.
How could these two legacies coexist in one presidency? They emanate from the worldview that Jarrett and Obama share—call it “boardroom liberalism.” It’s a worldview that’s steeped in social progressivism, in the values of tolerance and diversity. It takes as a given that government has a role to play in building infrastructure, regulating business, training workers, smoothing out the boom-bust cycles of the economy, providing for the poor and disadvantaged. But it is a view from on high—one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms.
Notwithstanding his early career as a community organizer, Obama, like Jarrett, is fundamentally a man of the inside. It’s why he put a former Citigroup executive and Robert Rubin chief of staff named Michael Froman in charge of assembling his economic team in 2008, why he avoided a deep restructuring of Wall Street, why he abruptly junked the public option during the health care debate, why he so ruthlessly pursues leakers and the journalists who cultivate them. It explains why so many of his policy ideas—from jobs for the long-term unemployed to mentoring minority youth—rely on the largesse of corporations.
It’s the boardroom liberal in Obama who gets bent out of shape over criticism from outsiders, despite having once urged progressives to press him the way civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph pressured Franklin Roosevelt. He is a president profoundly uncomfortable with populist rhetoric. He prefers to negotiate behind closed doors, as he did on the stimulus, health care, and deficit reduction, rather than wage a state-by-state political campaign to force concessions. Except for a handful of moments over the last six years—like when the administration tried to pass a second stimulus bill known as the American Jobs Act—Obama has rarely tried to mobilize public opinion in any sustained fashion. He has been consistently slow and half-hearted about taking unilateral action.
Bill Clinton was in many ways more conservative than Obama, whom you couldn’t imagine signing a draconian welfare law, or an anti-gay-marriage law, or, for that matter,de-regulating Wall Street. But Clinton was not above riling up voters for partisan gain. By August of 1995, the year Republicans took over Congress, Clinton and his surrogates wereflogging them dailyover “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment.” When Republicans retook the House in 2011, Obama spent most of the year shunning partisan taunts in hopes of consummating a grand bargain. And Jarrett was there at his side, amplifying those sensibilities. “The context for that is that it’s consistent with who the president is,” Jarrett’s first-term chief of staff, Michael Strautmanis, told me. “She has only one agenda. And it is the president’s agenda—either from conversations he’s had with her, what she’s heard him say, or based upon their history together.”
As it happens, the way the White House runs these days does even less to check Obama’s inclinations. According to a former high-level aide, there is no longer a daily meeting between the president and his top advisers. Under the old system, if the president waved off one adviser’s objection to his preferred plan of action, another could step in to vouch for the objection’s merit. The advice Obama gets now, though, comes more regularly through one-off interactions with the likes of Jarrett and Denis McDonough, who don’t have anyone else to back them up. In the second term, observes the former aide, “Maybe the president says, more often than in the past, ‘We’re doing it.’”
The result is that Obama has become even more persuaded of his righteousness as the years have gone on. His belief that he can win over opponents is unshaken. Unfortunately, these opponents include a party in the throes of radicalism and a self- interested class of ultra-rich that increasingly calls to mind plutocracy—not people whose better instincts you can appeal to. Obama and Jarrett should know this. Any time they have made preemptive concessions to the GOP or business leaders, their negotiating partners have simply pocketed the concessions and asked for more. From the budget battles to immigration reform, they have consistently overestimated the ability of Republican elites to reason with their rank and file. As recently as early this year, the official White House position was that it preferred Congress to ban workplace discrimination against gays.Congress!
Perhaps no episode illustrates this mind-set better than the fate of the consumer agency that the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill created. In 2010, Jarrett and two other advisers persuaded Obama to install a genuine populist in the person of Elizabeth Warren to set up the agency. But they never intended for her to actually run it, a promotion Warren aggressively sought. “Having Warren in the short-term role was their elegant solution,” says a former administration official. “It was the best way to appease the left while preserving [Obama’s] reasonableness to business. That’s what drives him: Do they look reasonable? ... That’s what Valerie’s all about.”
It’s no surprise that Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett would govern as reasonable people. It’s who they are. The tragedy is that we live in surpassingly unreasonable times.
This refers to former chief of staff Jack Lew, now the Treasury secretary. A bit of explanation is in order: While Lew was regarded as a very strong figure on matters of policy, he was less interested in the political goings-on at the White House, and therefore much less of a presence when it came to politics. As one former top Obama aide put it to me, "Jack Lew as chief of staff was not a political person. He was making the trains run on time on the policy side. He would report back at the end of the day on the governance side." Recall that Lew ran the White House in 2012, when Obama was campaigning for re-election. Most of the strategic political decisions within the White House were made by senior adviser David Plouffe, Obama's 2008 campaign manager, at that point.
CORRECTION: This story initially said that Donna Brazile "limited her kvetching to private phone calls and struck her best 'we’re all in this together' posture" during the Shirley Sherrod episode. It has been corrected to better reflect her comments.
The original “Reign of Terror” occurred during the French Revolution, when socialism itself was fully birthed. It was a period during which the French Revolutionaries executed thousands of people, many of whom were themselves Revolutionaries, including the father of the French Revolution, Robespierre. We are seeing something akin to the Reign of Terror on the Left today with the sudden purging of stalwart Progressives who have engaged in sexual harassment and abuse. How did we get here and how will it end?
Although I haven’t written about Saudi Arabia, I have been paying a great deal of attention to what’s going on in that kingdom. If Prince Mohammed bin Salman can avoid assassination (and I devoutly hope he can), he is a true reformer. He is trying to upgrade women’s status, he is purging the most corrupt members of the royal family and, most importantly, he is behind the outreach to Israel. There have been rumors that a member of the House of Saud made a secret trip to Israel and, assuming that rumor is true, Prince Salman is the best bet.
