The Women's March, Louis Farrakhan, and the Disease of American Political Life

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

12 March 18

f all the news from which one can get a sinking feeling this week, my brain chooses two. One is the apparent poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain. The other is the evidently dead-end conversation—on Twitter and, subsequently, in the media—about the association between Tamika Mallory, one of the leaders of the Women’s March, and the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Bizarrely, one of these disheartening stories helps me understand the other.

Two weeks ago, when Farrakhan delivered his annual address to a Nation of Islam gathering in Chicago, he gave a shout-out to Mallory, who was in the audience. Farrakhan’s speech was, as it usually is, replete with anti-Semitic, homophobic, and transphobic invectives. When the news of Mallory’s presence at the event surfaced, she did not disavow Farrakhan’s comments. (Mallory and fellow Women’s March leader Carmen Perez have both posted pictures of themselves with Farrakhan to Instagram; in a caption, Mallory calls him “definitely the GOAT”—the greatest of all time.) The group leadership of the Women’s March eventually issued a statement distancing itself from Farrakhan’s positions and affirming its commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and white supremacy, listed in that order. The statement explained that the Women’s March leadership had been silent for the first days of the controversy because they had been in talks with “queer, trans, Jewish and Black” activists in an effort to “break the cycles that pit our communities against each other.” To many commentators on social media and in conventional media, this was too little, too late, and the Women’s March was tainted.

On Twitter, Instagram, and elsewhere, Mallory continued to fumble and equivocate. She wrote that she had been attending Nation of Islam events since she was a child, and would continue to do so. She bristled at the suggestion that she was not fully committed to fighting anti-Semitism and homophobia. She certainly did not apologize. “The Women’s March, throughout this whole controversy, just hasn’t come across as taking anti-Semitism very seriously,” Jesse Singal wrote at New York. “Mallory’s unwillingness to see Farrakhan for what he is will surely cost the entire Women’s March organization its credibility among many Jewish people, LGBTQ people, and those who see themselves as allies to those communities,” Christina Cauterucci predicted at Slate. It seemed reasonable to take the position that as long as any of the leaders of the Women’s March was associated with a vicious bigot like Farrakhan, the entire organization was delegitimized. This is also an oddly satisfying position.

That feeling of righteousness is familiar to me from living in Russia. That’s a country that has, among other things, been killing its dissidents and exiles—through arranging car accidents, hiring icepick- or gun-wielding assassins, and, most consistently, through poisoning, as in the recent incident in Britain—for nearly a hundred years. When you are staring clear, unadulterated evil in the face—and a state that routinely practices political murder is certainly clear, unadulterated evil—your options crystallize. Politics begins to permeate everything, obliterating the division between public and private, but also imbuing action and speech with exhilarating meaning. Hannah Arendt wrote about this state of being in “Between Past and Future,” describing the private citizens who had become members of the French Resistance: “He who joined the Resistance found himself. . . . He ceased to be in quest of himself, without mastery, in naked unsatisfaction. . . . He who no longer suspected himself on insincerity, of being a carping suspicious actor of life . . . could afford to go naked. In this nakedness, stripped of all masks . . . they had been visited, for the first time in their lives, by an apparition of freedom.” Arendt might have been writing about Mallory, other Women’s March leaders, and many of the activists who have emerged since the election of Donald Trump. Their sense of purpose is palpable. But in the case of Mallory, it seems that what she thought of as a private, basically familial association with Farrakhan has taken on public, explicitly political meaning.

In her other work, Arendt showed that she was suspicious of the comfort and cohesion that stem from living under political siege. That sense of mission is a symptom of the disappearance of politics. Politics is not a war; it is the coöperation of people with disparate views, needs, and interests. “The art of compromise,” distilled from Bismarck’s definition of politics as “the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best,” is not the worst description.

But is compromise possible with a bigot? Can someone who won’t denounce a bigot be acceptable as the “next best”? Could one say that Mallory is just one of several leaders of an organization whose agenda speaks for itself, or is this bigotry by proxy so virulent that nothing but a purge can save the March now? In other words, is Farrakhan’s bigotry the same sort of unmitigated evil as, say, the murderous Russian state? (In The Atlantic, John-Paul Pagano does a thorough job of excavating the resentments and alliances that lie at the root of Farrakhan’s brand of anti-Semitism; on the other hand, in Russia, the case for political murder has been typically grounded in Russia’s litany of grievances against the West.) It’s hard, if not impossible, to make the case for compromise with—or in any way involving—Farrakhan. No politics is possible here.

The tragic part is, the actors are not marginal figures in American politics. Farrakhan has been wielding major political influence for two generations. The Million Man March he organized, in 1995, is a significant milestone in African-American organizing. At least as late as 2005, he was an invited guest of the Congressional Black Caucus. His recent speech in Chicago commanded an audience of thousands. The Women’s March, meanwhile, represents the hopes of millions of Americans who were mobilized by the election of Donald Trump. A giant, influential organization finds itself in the emotional state of a tiny resistance cell, holding on desperately against a hostile world. This is a symptom of a deep disease of American political life, the descent into positional warfare in which politics—the art of compromise—is no longer conceivable.

This disease did not start with the Trump election. The progressive simplification of political discourse began decades ago, and even back when the discourse was more complex, it excluded millions of Americans. Blind partisanship didn’t start with Trump, either. But the Trump Presidency, which is both the epitome of anti-political politics and the product of hyper-partisanship, is helping to expose the disastrous state of American politics. Before Trump, there lingered the illusion that the public sphere contained something more than black-and-white choices and disastrous moral threats. In the eight years before Trump, even as Congress willfully descended into dysfunction and election campaigns turned into slugging matches fought with soundbites, President Barack Obama stubbornly stuck to the idiom of politics as coöperation. The Trump Presidency has trampled that political vestige. Now, when the Women’s March fights a Twitter war about Farrakhan, it seems that this is all there is.