Sarah Kendzior

My first article for The Diplomat is on the parallels between Donald Trump and the leaders of Central Asian authoritarian states:

In January, shortly before he began sweeping the primaries after months of hate rhetoric, Trump staged a rallyin which three girls–called “The Freedom Kids”–lip-synched a pop song praising the brutality of their incumbent leader. “Enemies of freedom face the music/ C’mon boys, take them down/ President Donald Trump knows how to make America great/ Deal from strength or get crushed every time!” they sang, dancing in their red, white, and blue outfits before an enthusiastic crowd. Many Americans found it baffling. For those familiar with the decadent patriotism of Central Asian national performances, which commonly feature declarations of loyalty from dancing children, it was disconcerting in its familiarity.

Adams notes that “spectacle enables elites to close opportunities for input from below, but without making the masses feel left out.” Spectacle soothes the masses while distracting them from their suffering. Trump, a master of the American reality TV genre which has made a spectacle of human suffering – he made “You’re fired!” a beloved tagline during one of the worst economic crises in U.S. history – knows how to make an audience feel included through the theatrical exclusion of others. This tactic carries over into Trump’s rallies, where protesters are booted — and sometimes beaten — with fanfare. It also carries over into his policies, which are structured around exclusion: a wall against Mexico, banned entry for foreign Muslims, a database for U.S. Muslims, and a media denied access unless they acquiesce to Trump’s demands.

Spectacle is not all Trump’s proposed America and the Central Asian dictatorships have in common. Trump’s vision of America also supports a restricted press; persecution of devout Muslims and ethnic minorities; totalized control of government through a sequestered elite (Trump refuses to name potential partners and advisors); incredible wealth with little transparency concerning its accumulation (Trump refuses to release tax returns); and paranoid recitation of enemies both foreign and domestic, who are said to threaten the “greatness” of the state – and its leader. These are the standard characteristics of dictatorship, practiced in many countries around the world. But there are more distinct parallels to Trumpism to be found in Central Asia.

The most obvious corollary to Trump is Turkmenistan’s deceased leader Niyazov, also known as “Turkmenbashi”, or “Leader of the Turkmens.” Before he died in 2006, Niyazov was best known for the monuments and dictates bolstering his personality cult. They included building a giant golden statue of himself which rotated to face the sun; renaming the months and common words, like “bread”, after his relatives; and the Ruhnama, or “Book of the Soul,” a collection of autobiographical anecdotes, Turkmen “history” (loosely defined), and parables which all citizens were required to read. (A giant electronic version of the Ruhnamablared Niyazov’s wisdom from its perch in the capital.) Like Trump, Niyazov was an avowed isolationist, proclaiming a policy of “permanent neutrality” while focusing his efforts on social control disguised as public spectacle.

“I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets, but it’s what the people want,” explained Niyazov when asked about his ubiquitous visage. It is easy to imagine Trump making similar claims, given his deflection to “the people” when confronted about his sometimes violent and overtly racist fan base. It is also easy to imagine a “Trumpmenbashi” building a giant golden statue of himself that revolves to face the sun.

Read the whole thing — Trumpmenbashi What Central Asia’s spectacular states can tell us about authoritarianism in America — at the Diplomat.

For The Globe and Mail, I wrote about the decline of the Midwest, and the attempts of politicians to court Midwestern voters:

Missouri is a purple state – purple, like a bruise.

This year, no one cared what Missouri thought. The former bellwether state was polled only once until the week before the primary, when suddenly Missouri counted again. Donald Trump visited St. Louis, which became the first city where protesters seriously disrupted his rally and were beaten and arrested in return. Their efforts were scarcely noted as the media focused on his rally’s shutdown in Chicago. Bill Clinton campaigned for Hillary at a labour hall near a fuming nuclear-waste site in Bridgeton, Mo., which locals have been begging the federal government to fix. He didn’t acknowledge its existence.

Missourians are treated like subordinate statistics. We count when politicians literally need to count us, while citizens learn again they can’t count on politicians to care.

The story of the Midwest remains largely untold. All candidates court the Midwest by bemoaning its loss of industry, but one of the main industries it lost is media. The geographic concentration of national media in affluent, mostly coastal cities leaves the Midwest talking to itself. We ask each other questions, like how many people died from guns or prescription pills, or where all the jobs went, or when someone is going to notice, or whether if they notice, they will care. People care when the water turns toxic, like in Flint, Mich.; when the city goes bankrupt, like Detroit; or when there are mass protests over slain black men, like in Cleveland and Ferguson. But the everyday struggle is quietly mourned, rarely noted by a national figure until they want something.

Pundits like to say the heartland votes against its own interests. But how do you vote for your own interests when no national candidate seems interested? How do you make history when you are considered a footnote?

Read the whole thing at the Globe and Mail.

For the Guardian, I wrote about the St. Louis Trump rally, and how easily a line of polite and friendly Trump fans transformed into a violent mob hurling racist slurs:

Some fans drove through the night from nearby states, including Indiana and Illinois, to arrive at dawn. Others camped out overnight to ensure their places in line, like attendees at a Star Wars convention tinged with more fascism than stormtrooper costumes usually provide. The rest of the rally-goers nervously clutched their tickets, firm in their belief that they had followed the rules and would get to see the candidate – only to find by noon that their hero had overbooked the event. They were stranded in the plaza outside.

But denied entry does not disqualify attendees from participation in the Trump experience. A Trump rally is communal fury, in which men and women and children who stand obediently in line transform into an angered mob when they gather en masse. Surrounded by protesters and barred from the Peabody by a line of police, they listened to the voice of their leader booming from speakers – and they talked back, first with worship, then with rage.

Trump is notorious for sequestering the media in an area that limits their interaction with the crowd. To experience the rally first-hand, I got a ticket and stood in line with everyone else. When you spend two hours talking with Trump fans who also assume you are a Trump fan, you see and hear things you would not from the perch with the press. As a white St Louis woman, I blended in easily – in general, there’s nothing remarkable or uniform about Trump fans, other than their overwhelming whiteness. (In a crowd of thousands, I spotted roughly a dozen who were not white.)

Outside the Peabody, “the banality of evil” was scrawled on protesters’ signs – a quote from the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who wrote about life under the Nazi regime: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Trump’s campaign is a study in the mob mentality, how people who would normally act with kindness and compassion can turn cruel in response to the rhetoric of their leader, or in retaliation to those who oppose him.

Read the whole article at the Guardian

Also, check out the Storify of my live-tweeting of the Trump experience. (And thanks again to journalist King Kaufman for curating it.)

I’ve been a bit slow about updating this website, apologies readers. Here is an article I wrote for the Globe and Mail a week ago about racism in the 2016 elections. More on this to come:

It has long been proclaimed that the American Dream is dead – whether from wage stagnation and factory closures that chipped away at the middle-class in the 1970s, or the brutal devastation of the 2008 economic crisis. But in truth, the American Dream was never everyone’s dream.

When Mr. Trump speaks of making America great again, he appeals to nostalgic visions of white security in a segregated land, one where his KKK backers could preach with less stigma. When Ms. Clinton speaks of making America whole again, she peddles a fantasy which ignores that for much of American history, black citizens were not even considered whole, but three-fifths of a person. When Bernie Sanders launched his America campaign video, he portrayed an almost entirely white America, capped by the fervent fans of his lily-white rallies.

Last night, Mr. Trump swept a geographically diverse array of states won by no other Republican primary candidate in history, ranging from the south to New England. He did it after promising to evict Mexicans and create a database of Muslims (when not shooting them with bullets soaked in pig’s blood). He did it a few days after receiving an endorsement from David Duke, and one day after booting black voters from a Georgia rally. He did it as news stations – as cash-strapped and panicked as their audience – aired his racist rhetoric around the clock, showering him with private town halls. Mr. Trump dominates the media like a dictator, only our press’s acquiescence is voluntary. The media feeds the hand that bites them – despite Mr. Trump’s professed contempt. While white Americans – his core constituency, regardless of location – lap the loathing up. His win shatters the illusion that American bigotry is geographically relative.

On the Democratic side, voters were fractured along racial lines, with black voters assuring Ms. Clinton’s dominance much as it had in the South Carolina primary. (Latinos, too, rallied for Ms. Clinton by a 2-1 margin.) Mr. Sander’s wins were in the whitest states, where he attracted large numbers of young, white men and lost in nearly every other demographic category. His loss followed a series of campaign gaffes which included counting the number of times he has said the word black (51), dismissing the black deep south vote, praising a book that slammed President Barack Obama, cultivating a fan base who attacked black voters online and on the phone, having supporter Susan Sarandon scold Latino activist Dolores Huerta, and failing to produce compelling evidence that he had advocated for non-white voters in this millennium. Mr. Sanders is called a one-issue candidate, but he is really a black-and-white candidate – in that nearly every photo of him advocating for civil rights is a black-and-white image from more than 50 years ago.

Read more at the Globe and Mail

Yesterday I tweeted about Trump’s relationship with the mass media. The tweets got a lot of attention, so I’m archiving them here.

1. Trump captivates those sick of condescending, elite media. Media bromides about his genuine threat to US will do nothing to change minds.
2. And the sudden turn from “Let’s cover everything Trump does” to “Stop it, he’s a fascist” is too disingenuous, and too late. Damage done.
3. Financially flailing media seeks attention, clicks for cash. Trump needs no money, only attention — clicks for votes. Exploitative synergy.
4. Media are just as panicked as Trump’s base — they have no money. They’re exhibit A of his strategy. Clicks, cash — make media great again.
5. Media will get ratings + readers until election. Americans will get a neo-fascist. Media layoffs will begin. But the neo-fascist will stay.
6. Media is a white-collar industry that pays blue-collar wages. It is exclusionary and desperate at the same time. Perfect mark for Trump.
7. Media over-covers Trump for the same reason people vote for Trump: panic. Layoff after layoff, no security. Desperation to stay afloat.
8. This entire country is running on panic. Which means it is being run into the ground. Only person not panicking: Trump.
9. Media values conformity above all. Aggregation is a form of conformity. Reprint what’s popular, regardless of content. Fascism is popular.
10. Next step: “And he’s really not so bad after all.” Watch my words, it’s coming.

Today, Christie endorsed Trump. Media will continue to acquiescence. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In 2015 I wrote on a wide variety of issues for a wide variety of outlets. I switched mostly to features from op-ed, since my op-eds on exploitation, corruption and decay from previous years tend to resonate to the unfortunate degree that people think they’re new. Nothing changes. I keep getting vindicated when I’d rather be wrong. Here’s to going out of style in 2016.

These are my top ten articles from 2015, based not on traffic or outlet but on how much I liked them:

1. Ferguson in Focus– The Common Reader — (10/30/15)
2. ‘We Are Not Afraid’– Foreign Policy — (7/14/15)
3. Ferguson, Inc. – Politico — (3/4/15)
4. The US payday loans crisis: borrow $100 to make ends meet, owe 36 times that sum – The Guardian — (5/9/15)
5. Ferguson’s radical knitters– The Guardian — (8/6/15)
6. Uzbekistan’s Forgotten Massacre– The New York Times — (5/13/15)
7. ‘We’re surrounded by murders’: a day in St Louis’s most dangerous neighborhood– The Guardian — (8/19/15)
8. Academia’s One Percent– The Chronicle of Higher Education — (3/6/15)
9. The Jewish and Palestinian Activists of the Ferguson Movement– Medium –(9/17/15)
10. Generations Left Behind– The Brooklyn Quarterly — (10/27/15)

For the Common Reader, I wrote a long piece on the legacy of Ferguson and how the St. Louis region and its people were left behind as the town became the symbol of a national movement. Though “Ferguson in Focus” was published last week, I wrote it in the spring, when the wounds were still fresh. I am depressed by how well it holds up now:

Ferguson has become a buzzword, a brand name, but on the streets of St. Louis the same desperate pleas continue: when are things going to get better? When are things really going to change? Who cares what happens to the people who live here, who experience the region’s tension and tragedy every day? Who seeks to serve instead of using the region as a stepping stone?

Drive through the St. Louis metro area, through the scarred suburbs and blighted city and you will find a legacy of abandonment: buildings without bricks because people stole them and sold them for money for food, hallowed out factories of a long dead economy, houses left behind by waves of white flight. This is Ferguson’s inheritance, St. Louis’s inheritance.

What will be the region’s future is hard to say. One cannot invest in a flashpoint. It glimmers, it burns, sometimes so brightly it eclipses the pain of day-to-day living. A vigil became a protest became a movement. But the lingua franca of Ferguson was always grief.

Read the whole thing at the Common Reader.

My latest for the Brooklyn Quarterly is on opportunity hoarding, inherited wealth, and what it means for the future of our kids:

The gulf separating the current generation of younger adults – born in the 1970s or later – and their baby boomer predecessors is well documented. Memes of “Old Economy Steve” describe a baby boomer dreamland of $400 college tuitions, minimum wage jobs that paid enough to buy a house, and minimal student loan debt. This is the long-gone fantasy that David Brooks and other baby boomer pundits espousing the virtues of American meritocracy inhabited as youth. This was an era when it made little difference where you came from because access to cheap and good education made it easier to get where you were going – whether to get an affordable college education or a well-paying job that did not require one. The fate of the next generation, however, relies on how heavily parents are able to invest in the expensive credentials now required to purchase a professional future.

Their offspring are the first generation of Americans to be born into an entrenched meritocracy, one structured on what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the social alchemy that turns class privilege into merit.” In an entrenched meritocracy, advantages conferred by birth are marketed as achievements, but these achievements – a good education, a prestigious-but-unpaid or low-paying entry-level job – are only possible for those who have the means to afford them. The cycle repeats itself, with a wealthy and educated elite conferring their own advantages onto their children.

There is no room, in this scenario, for those who cannot pay the price to educational entry. Broadly speaking, there is no room, period. Opportunity hoarding has become the pastime of the elite, with education used as a proxy for rejection based on “merit,” and “merit” redefined as how many prestigious accolades one is able to purchase to gain access to education.

Read the whole thing, Generations Left Behind, at the Brooklyn Quarterly.

Speaking of Brooklyn, I’ll be there November 14-15 giving a talk at the Creative Time Summit on debt, wages, and lost opportunity in the creative economy.

For the Guardian, I profiled a woman who went from living in a suburban house and making $60,000 per year to living in a homeless shelter in downtown St. Louis. Suburban poverty and homelessness are both on the rise — and homeless shelters are under attack:

Reverend Larry Rice, who has run the shelter since it opened in 1972, sees a two-fold problem. St Louis County’s refusal to build a shelter has brought the suburban homeless to his door, as New Life is the only walk-in shelter in the region. At the same time, wealthy suburbanites have begun moving to his neighborhood, and they are determined to put New Life out of business. Tactics used to hurt New Life include banning porta-potties, thus making a homeless person more likely to be arrested for public urination, and requiring Rice to build a barrier around the building.

“The irony is that the homeless were here first,” Rice says. “People from the suburbs have started coming into the city to buy cheap property. But they want the homeless out of sight and out of mind. Don’t forget ‘gentrification’ is rooted in the word ‘gentry’. St Louis’s gentry, rich suburbanites, move their problems to our backyard and then they want to destroy our yard because they don’t like the people living in it. They’re hateful, vindictive, and vicious. They’re all white people, and they like to think of themselves as white progressives. But all problems have to be in someone else’s backyard. It’s a very racist issue.”

Rice, who says about 50% of New Life residents come from the suburbs, is fighting closure through demonstrations and the courts, which he claims are violating a Missouri law that says every county is obligated to provide a shelter. He says responsibility for the homeless has fallen to the police, who are unequipped to handle the rapid rise in suburban poverty.

Read the full article, Suburbanites are becoming the new face of homelessness in America, at the Guardian.