14 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
THECAMPAIGN TRAIL
ESPRITDEORBCORPS
A
couple of Thursdays ago, at a rally
in New Hampshire, President
Trump—after telling an overweight
supporter to “go home, start exercis-
ing”—referred to his campaign as a
“movement built on love.” Meanwhile,
in San Francisco, three hundred and
fifty people waited at Manny’s restau-
rant, in the Mission District, to see
Marianne Williamson, the Democratic
Presidential candidate who has vowed
to “harness love” in order to defeat
Trump in 2020. Before she started her
campaign, Williamson was known as
Oprah’s spiritual adviser. Her platform
includes offering mindfulness training
in grade schools, paying two hundred
billion to five hundred billion dollars
in reparations for slavery, and reducing
the nation’s “moral deficit.”
“She’s meant to be here at six o’clock,
but life is full of surprises,” Steven Band,
Williamson’s California State director,
said. (Or, as one of Williamson’s blog
posts puts it: “In the quantum realm
time does not matter anyway.”) “What
kind of car are you guys in?” Band asked,
speaking into a headset. “O.K., appar-
ently we’re looking for a white Prius
with red fireballs on the side.”
A man in a T-shirt that read “GOT
RIGHTS?” walked over to Band. “I’m an
expert on depression treatments,” he
said. (Williamson has cautioned against
the overprescription of antidepressants
and has said that there is “value some-
times in.. .feeling that dark night of
the soul.”) He continued, “When you
talk about depression and suicide, it’s
like a pyramid—” Band promised to
take his contact information and walked
away. “Marianne is here,” he said. “Not
in corporeal form, but in spirit.”
Inside the restaurant, which is staffed
by people who used to be homeless or
incarcerated, Williamson fans—some-
times called the Orb Gang (like the
candidate Andrew Yang’s Yang Gang)
or Orb Corps—sprawled out on afghan
rugs, drinking out of Mason jars. (A
popular cocktail: the Obama Care Tea
Tonic—saffron-rose tea, a yuzu-citrussake-vodka blend, and lemon.) Manny
Yekutiel, the “Manny” in Manny’s, as-
sured the crowd that Williamson was
en route. Yekutiel led Hillary Clinton’s
fund-raising efforts in Silicon Valley
before opening his café, which doubles
as a civic-event space. “We welcome
people from all spectrums,” he explained,
“from the anarchists to the moderate
Democrats.” No Republicans are in-Marianne Williamsonof a high-level revolutionary, Xi grew
up near the Party headquarters in Bei-
jing. As a teen-ager, he lived through
the chaos of the Cultural Revolution,
when young Red Guards forced him to
wear a metal dunce cap and imprisoned
his father. In the nineties, many of Xi’s
peers decamped to Hong Kong and else-
where to make their fortunes, but Xi
didn’t join them. He never studied abroad
or learned a foreign language. Instead,
he made his way to the apex of a Le-
ninist state. Since taking power, in 2012,
he has set about extinguishing all chal-
lenges to his authority. He has abolished
term limits on his Presidency, detained
hundreds of activists and human-rights
lawyers, and overseen an anticorruption
purge that has punished 1.5 million mem-
bers of the Party. In Hong Kong, that
rigidity has taken a toll: in the run-up
to the crisis, Xi’s proxies rejected even
minimal demands, betting, wrongly, that
the protesters would relent. Compro-
mising now, the theory of hard-line
politics goes, would encourage further
defiance, so the risk of a crackdown, or
a sudden wave of mass arrests, is real.
And yet, for Xi and his country, a
massacre reminiscent of Tiananmen
would be almost incalculably costly. He
faces a wobbly economy at home, and
Hong Kong is a mammoth financial hub,
a currency exchange and a source of for-
eign capital, with a stock market larger
than London’s. A crackdown would also
undermine Xi’s larger mission: to con-
vince the world that China is a credible
contender for global leadership in the
age of Trump. On Xi’s political calendar,
he has upcoming reasons for avoiding a
calamity, including a triumphant cele-
bration, set for October 1st, to mark the
seventieth anniversary of the People’s
Republic, and, in January, elections in
Taiwan, another territory that China
would like to see reunified. Bloodshed
in Hong Kong would shatter the pros-
pects, however slim, of healing the rift
with Taiwan, which Xi has declared “can’t
be passed on for generations.”
Unless protesters overwhelm Hong
Kong’s government or its courts, Xi may
well stick to a less dramatic strategy—the gradual absorption of Hong Kong’s
autonomy. Beijing’s liaison office in
Hong Kong has steadily extended
its reach: it provides financing to pro-
China businesses; it owns more than
half the territory’s bookstores; and it
backs friendly candidates for govern-
ment posts. As that influence grows, the
underlying conflict will be the buried
seed of future troubles.
Ying-yi Hong, now of the Chinese
University in Hong Kong, continues to
measure people’s attitudes, and did so
during the protests. Her latest conclu-
sion: young Hong Kongers will have
confidence in their local government if
they see it as “relatively autonomous,”
she said last week. “However, if they
think that the mainland government is
interfering with the Hong Kong gov-
ernment, it plummets.”
For years, Hong Kongers have feared
becoming, as a common saying goes, just
another Chinese city. In Beijing, that
description is regarded not as pejorative
but, rather, as the natural order of things.
—Evan Osnos