THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDTUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 N A27
LAST WEDNESDAY, after Robert Mueller’s
terse and sometimes halting congres-
sional testimony, conventional wisdom
quickly congealed: Mueller’s perform-
ance had made Donald Trump’s impeach-
ment far less likely. “Robert S. Mueller
III’s disastrous testimony has taken the
wind out of the sails of the Democratic im-
peachment drive,” wrote Marc Thiessen
in The Washington Post. CNN’s Chris Cil-
lizza declared Mueller’s testimony “a bust
— at least when it came to generating mo-
mentum for impeachment.”
Less than a week later, it’s clear that
these hot takes were wrong. At no point in
Trump’s wretched rule has impeachment
appeared more probably. Indeed, Demo-
crats on the House Judiciary Committee,
which would oversee impeachment hear-
ings, argue that an inquiry into impeach-
ment has already begun. An inexorable
confrontation between the House and the
president has been set in motion.
Before Mueller’s testimony last
Wednesday, 93 House Democrats had
come out for an impeachment inquiry. As I
write this on Monday, the number is up to
109; among them are Katherine Clark,
vice chairwoman of the House Democrat-
ic caucus, and Mike Levin, a freshman
from a swing district. By the end of the
week, more than half the Democratic cau-
cus could be on board.
Mueller’s presentation may have been
underwhelming, but he allowed Demo-
crats to put a bow around his findings,
clearing away some of the deliberate con-
fusion created by Attorney General
William Barr’s misleading summary. “The
press focused on the performance and the
optics instead of on the substance,” said
Jerry Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary
Committee. “Mueller said we were at-
tacked by the Russians, the Trump cam-
paign cooperated in many ways with that
attack, they welcomed it, in many ways
they worked with it.”
Democrats already knew all this, of
course. But just as Trump’s recent racist
outbursts forced renewed attention to his
bigotry, Mueller made Congress squarely
confront the president’s perfidy. Once he
testified, Democrats could no longer punt
on the impeachment question by saying
that they were waiting to hear from him.
And even if Mueller’s appearance didn’t
change many minds, it galvanized some
voters. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat,
told me that in recent days, “The constitu-
ent calls that I have been getting have just
increased, both in number and intensity,
saying: ‘Enough is enough. It’s time for
him to go.’ ” On Monday, she came out for
beginning an impeachment inquiry.
Perhaps even more significant than the
growing number of calls for impeachment
is a lawsuit filed by the Judiciary Commit-
tee on Friday. The filing, demanding ac-
cess to grand jury material from the Muel-
ler investigation, says that the committee
“is conducting an investigation to deter-
mine whether to recommend articles of
impeachment.” In other words, the Judi-
ciary Committee, which would oversee
any potential impeachment, announced,
with surprisingly little fanfare, that an im-
peachment inquiry is already underway.
For months now, there’s been an acri-
monious intra-Democratic debate about
whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
should call a vote to begin such an inquiry.
Now, however, the Judiciary Committee is
asserting that such a vote isn’t required,
and as Nadler points out, Pelosi has
signed off on the strategy. The House
would have to vote on impeachment itself,
but that would come only after the Judicia-
ry Committee has done much of its work.
“The Constitution does not delineate
what a formal impeachment inquiry is,
and the House rules don’t define what a
formal impeachment inquiry is,” said
Jamie Raskin, a Democrat on the Judicia-
ry Committee who was a professor of con-
stitutional law. “We all looked up after
Robert Mueller’s testimony and realized
that we are in an impeachment inquiry.
What is this if not an investigation into
high crimes and misdemeanors? That’s
obviously what we’re doing.”
This might seem a little too cute — it al-
lows Democrats to satisfy their base’s de-
mand that Trump be held accountable
without forcing representatives from con-
servative districts to take a potentially
perilous vote.
But Nadler argues that the Judiciary
Committee started its impeachment in-
quiry into Richard Nixon before the full
House voted to approve it. Impeachment
proceedings for federal judges have be-
gun in the Judiciary Committee without a
House vote.
Whatever you want to call it, Nadler is
hoping that Mueller’s appearance is just
the first in a series of high-profile hear-
ings. Soon his committee will go to court to
enforce a subpoena of Donald McGahn,
the former White House counsel. If the
Democrats prevail, Nadler argues it will
clear the way for them to compel former
Trump staffers like Hope Hicks to testify.
So Mueller’s testimony last week wasn’t
the end of the investigation into Trump. It
was only the end of that investigation’s
first phase. Now Phase 2 begins.
“The numbers will continue to grow,”
Raskin said of Democrats joining the call
for impeachment. “The hardest place to
be in politics is on the fence. And these
members who are coming off the fence
and calling me, tell me that they feel a
great sense of relief.” The first step in solv-
ing a crisis of democratic governance is
admitting you have one. 0
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
Impeachment
May Have
Already Begun
Even if it was dull,
Mueller’s testimony
marked a turning point.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD ASKEDGod to give
him the power to will one thing. Amid all
the distractions of life he asked for the
power to live a focused life, wholeheart-
edly, toward a single point.
And we’ve all known geniuses and oth-
ers who have practiced a secular version
of this. They have found their talent and
specialty. They focus monomaniacally
upon it. They put in the 10,000 hours (and
more) that true excellence requires.
I just read “You Must Change Your
Life,” Rachel Corbett’s joint biography of
the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his pro-
tégé, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and
they were certainly versions of this type.
The elder Rodin had one lesson for the
young Rilke. “Travailler, toujours tra-
vailler.” Work, always work.
This is the heroic vision of the artist.
He renounces earthly and domestic
pleasures and throws himself into his
craft. Only through total dedication can
you really see deeply and produce art.
In his studio, Rodin could be feverishly
obsessed, oblivious to all around him.
“He abided by his own code, and no one
else’s standards could measure him,”
Corbett writes. “He contained within
himself his own universe, which Rilke
decided was more valuable than living in
a world of others’ making.”
Rilke had the same solitary focus. With
the bohemian revelry of turn-of-the-cen-
tury Paris all around him, Rilke was
alone writing in his room. He didn’t drink
or dance. He celebrated love, but as ageneral outlook and not as something
you gave to any one person or place.
Both men produced masterworks that
millions have treasured. But readers fin-
ish Corbett’s book feeling that both men
had misspent their lives.
They were both horrid to their wives
and children. Rodin grew pathetically
creepy, needy and lonely. Rilke didn’t go
back home as his father was dying, nor
allow his wife and child to be with him as
he died. Both men lived most of their
lives without intimate care.
Their lives raise the question: Do you
have to be so obsessively focused to be
great? The traditional masculine answer
is yes. But probably the right answer is
no.
In the first place, being monomaniacal
may not even be good for your work. An-
other book on my summer reading list
was “Range,” by David Epstein. It’s a
powerful argument that generalists per-
form better than specialists.
The people who achieve excellence
tend to have one foot outside their main
world. “Compared to other scientists,
Nobel laureates are at least 22 times
more likely to partake as an amateur ac-
tor, dancer, magician or other type of per-
former,” Epstein writes.
He shows the same pattern in domain
after domain: People who specialize in
one thing succeed early, but then they
slide back to mediocrity as their minds
rigidify.
Children who explore many instru-
ments when they are young end up as
more skilled musicians than the ones
who are locked into just one. People who
transition between multiple careers
when they are young end up ahead over
time because they can take knowledge in
one domain and apply it to another.
A tech entrepreneur who is 50 is twice
as likely to start a superstar company
than one who is 30, because he or she has
a broader range of experience. A survey
of the fastest-growing tech start-ups
found that the average age of the founder
was 45.
For most people, creativity is precisely
the ability to pursue multiple interests at
once, and then bring them together in
new ways. “Without contraries is no pro-
gression,” William Blake wrote.
Furthermore, living a great life is more
important than producing great work. A
life devoted to one thing is a stunted life,
while a pluralistic life is an abundant one.
This is a truth feminism has brought into
the culture. Women have rarely been
able to live as monads. They were gener-
ally compelled to switch, hour by hour,
between different domains and roles:
home, work, market, the neighborhood.
A better definition of success is living
within the tension of multiple commit-
ments and trying to make them mutually
enhancing. The shape of this success is a
pentagram — the five-pointed star. You
have your five big passions in life — say,
family, vocation, friends, community,
faith — and live flexibly within the gravi-
tational pull of each.
You join communities that are differ-
ent from one another. You gain wisdom
by entering into different kinds of con-
sciousness. You find freedom at the bor-
derlands between your communities.
Over the past month, while reading
these books, I attended four conferences.
Two were very progressive, with almost
no conservatives. The other two were
very conservative, with almost no pro-
gressives. Each of the worlds was so her-
metically sealed I found that I couldn’t
even describe one world to members of
the other. It would have been like trying
to describe bicycles to a fish.
I was reading about how rich the plu-
ralistic life is, and how stifling a homo-
geneous life is. And I was realizing that
while we’re learning to preach gospel of
openness and diversity, we’re mostly not
living it. In the realm of public life, many
live as monads, within the small circles of
one specialty, one code, no greatness. 0DAVID BROOKS
Do You Have
To Be a Jerk
To Be Great?
Navigating the tension
between work and
relationships.
T
O WIDESPREAD applause in
the markets and the news media,
from conservatives and liberals
alike, the Federal Reserve ap-
pears poised to cut interest rates this
week for the first time since the global fi-
nancial crisis a decade ago. Adjusted for
inflation, the Fed’s benchmark rate is now
just half a percent and the cost of borrow-
ing has rarely been closer to free, but the
clamor for more easy money keeps grow-
ing.
Everyone wants the recovery to last,
and more easy money seems like the obvi-
ous way to achieve that goal. With trade
wars threatening the global economy,
Federal Reserve officials say rate cuts are
needed to keep the slowdown from
spilling into the United States, and to pre-
vent doggedly low inflation from sliding
into outright deflation.
Economists dread deflation. For cen-
turies, deflation was a common and
mostly benign phenomenon, with prices
falling because of technological innova-
tions that lowered the cost of producing
and distributing goods. But the wide-
spread deflation of the 1930s and the more
recent experience of Japan have given the
word a uniquely bad name.
After Japan’s housing and stock market
bubbles burst in the early 1990s, demand
fell and prices started to decline, as in-
debted consumers began to delay pur-
chases, waiting for prices to fall further.
The economy slowed to a crawl. Hoping to
jar consumers into spending again, the
central bank pumped money into the
economy, but to no avail. Critics said Ja-
pan took action too gradually, and so its
economy remained stuck in a deflationary
trap for years.
Many Western economies appeared to
face a similar threat following the global
financial crisis of 2008. Since then, led by
the Fed, central banks have responded ag-
gressively to every hint of a downturn,
making money ever cheaper and more
plentiful to try to juice growth.
Yet, in this expansion, the United Stateseconomy has grown at half the pace of the
postwar recoveries. Inflation has failed to
rise to the Fed’s target of a sustained 2 per-
cent. Meanwhile, every new hint of easy
money inspires fresh optimism in the fi-
nancial markets, which have swollen to
three times the size of the real economy.
In this environment, cutting rates could
hasten exactly the outcome that the Fed is
trying to avoid. By further driving up the
prices of stocks, bonds and real estate, and
encouraging risky borrowing, more easy
money could set the stage for a collapse in
the financial markets. And that could be
followed by an economic downturn and
falling prices — much as in Japan in the
1990s. The more expensive these financial
assets become, the more precarious the
situation, and the more difficult it will be to
defuse without setting off a downturn.
The key lesson from Japan was that
central banks can print all the money theywant, but can’t dictate where it will go.
Easy credit could not force over-indebted
Japanese consumers to borrow and
spend.
Today, politicians on the right and left
have come to embrace easy money. Presi-
dent Trump has been pushing the Fed for
a large rate cut to help him bring back the
postwar miracle growth rates of 3 percent
to 4 percent.
But much as in Japan two decades ago,
an aging population and falling productiv-
ity have sapped the capacity of the Ameri-
can economy to sustain its previous pace.
The economy’s growth potential has fallen
by half from its postwar average to less
than 2 percent now. With the domestic
economy already growing a bit above that
pace, injecting more easy money into the
engine won’t make it run much faster, par-
ticularly not after 10 years of trying.
At the same time, liberals like Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezare turning to unconventional easy money
theories as a way to pay for ambitious so-
cial programs. But they might want to
take a closer look at who has benefited
most after a decade of easy money: the
wealthy, monopolies, corporate debtors.
Not exactly liberal causes.
By fueling a record bull run in the finan-
cial markets, easy money is increasing in-
equality, since the wealthy own the bulk of
stocks and bonds. Very low interest rates
have also helped large corporations in-
crease their dominance across United
States industries. Once seen as a threat
only in Japan, zombie firms — which don’t
earn enough profit to cover their interest
payments — have been rising in the
United States, where they account for one
in six publicly traded companies.
All these creatures of easy credit erode
the economy’s long-term growth potential
by undermining productivity, and raise
the risk of a global recession emanating
from debt-soaked financial and housing
markets. A 2015 study of 17 major econo-
mies showed that before World War II,
about one in four recessions followed a
collapse in stock or home prices (or both).
Since the war, that number has jumped to
roughly two out of three.
Recessions tend to be longer and
deeper when the preceding boom was fu-
eled by borrowing, because after the
boom goes bust, debtors struggle for
years to dig out from under their loans.
And lately, easy money has been enabling
debt binges all over the world.
As the Fed prepares to announce a deci-
sion this week, growing bipartisan sup-
port for a rate cut is fraught with irony.
Slashing rates to avoid deflation made
sense in the crisis atmosphere of 2008,
and cutting again may seem like a logical
response to weakening global growth
now. But with the price of borrowing al-
ready so low, more easy money will raise a
more serious threat.
Easy money is not a painless fix, it’s a
dangerous addiction. 0We Should Fear Easy Money
Ruchir Sharma
Cutting interest rates now
could set the stage for a
collapse in the markets.
RUCHIR SHARMAis the chief global strat-
egist at Morgan Stanley Investment
Management and a contributing opinion
writer.JAMES YANGI
N RECENT years, the debate sur-
rounding the movement to boycott, di-
vest from and sanction Israel over its
treatment of Palestinians has ex-
panded from food co-ops and university
department meetings to the House of Rep-
resentatives. Alas, it has not improved in
clarity — if anything, the latest round
shows that for both sides, the Boycott, Di-
vestment and Sanctions movement has
very little to do with the movement’s origi-
nal goals.
Last Tuesday, the House voted 398 to 17
for a bill denouncing B.D.S. for allegedly
promoting “principles of collective guilt,
mass punishment and group isolation”
vis-à-vis Israel. The bill was strongly sup-
ported by most mainstream Jewish orga-
nizations. It was opposed, however, by
many progressives, including some presi-
dential candidates, perhaps because
B.D.S. supporters are often liberal and
left-wing activists — the kinds of people
who vote in primaries and caucuses.
This isn’t the first time anti-B.D.S. legis-
lation has come up in Congress. Poli-
ticians looking to play both sides have of-
ten abstained from such bills, claiming
that they violate protesters’ freedom of
speech. This time was different: After the
bill was introduced, Representative Ilhan
Omar, Democrat from Minnesota, offered
a bill affirming the “right to participate in
boycotts in pursuit of civil and human
rights at home and abroad.”
Though the resolution never explicitly
mentions B.D.S., it refers to boycotts
against “Nazi Germany from March 1933
to October 1941 in response to the dehu-
manization of the Jewish people in the
lead-up to the Holocaust” — setting off a
storm of outrage from Ms. Omar’s critics.
The bill has only six co-sponsors, but they
include the legendary civil rights leader
John Lewis, and it has earned the support
of both the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street
and the A.C.L.U.
All of this makes for dramatic news cov-
erage. But with each iteration of the B.D.S.
“debate,” the underlying issues seem to
recede into obscurity.
Consider the way Republicans took upthe issue. Senator Marco Rubio, for exam-
ple, attacked Ms. Pelosi for allowing what
he called “the radical, anti-Semitic minor-
ity in the Democratic Party to dictate the
House floor agenda.”
One reason partisans feel comfortable
using B.D.S. as a political tool is that, as a
political movement, B.D.S. is insignificant.
Recent studies have demonstrated that
the B.D.S. movement has had no discern-
ible impact on Israel’s economy. Hardly
any significant American institution —
government, corporate or academic —
has actually signed onto the boycott. Were
I a bookie, I would offer better odds on the
folks waging the War on Christmas.
Supporters of B.D.S., while far less pow-
erful, are no less slippery. Representative
Omar says, “We must support an end of
the occupation and seek to achieve a two-
state solution.” The movement she sup-
ports, however, does not. Nowhere in themovement’s official documents is there
any recognition of Israel’s right to exist
within in its pre-1967 borders. Mr. McCon-
nell and Mr. McCarthy are not wrong to re-
mind us that “Omar Barghouti, one of the
movement’s co-founders, proclaimed in
2013 that ‘no Palestinian — rational Pales-
tinian, not a sellout Palestinian — will ever
accept a Jewish state in Palestine.’ ”
If you ask even the most prominent
B.D.S. supporters and leaders about their
strategic vision for victory, they inevitably
start talking about South Africa and the
need to be “on the right side of history.”
What they cannot offer is a remotely prac-
tical theory of how their movement will
somehow lead to a better life for Palestin-
ians, much less their “free Palestine, from
the River to the Sea” pipe dream.
Instead, B.D.S. has become a purity test
of sorts for progressives in certain corners
of American society — a defining part of
what it means to be woke. I see it every
day, in my triple role as a college professor,
columnist for a left-liberal magazine andfather of a college-age daughter who gives
me regular reports about her school’s “Is-
rael Apartheid Day.” From all three, I get a
regular earful about the importance of
B.D.S. — but I’ve learned over time that
actually boycotting, divesting from and
sanctioning Israel could not be further
from most anyone’s mind, either as a
threat or a goal.
Like vegetarian diets and carbon-neu-
tral living, it has become something that is
vital to espouse, but much less important
to explain, let alone carry out.
So why are so many people worried
about B.D.S.? Partly, concern over the
movement is driven by parents — with
whom I can relate — who fear that their
children are being permanently turned
against Israel by their professors and fel-
low students. The rapid growth of anti-Zi-
onist organizations like Jewish Voice for
Peace, along with calls I get from my
daughter, tells me that these fears are not
entirely unfounded.
In turn, “pro-Israel” groups and cynical
politicians exploit these fears largely for
fund-raising purposes by pretending that
the threat of a genuine boycott of Israel is
real. Some even engage in McCarthyistic
attacks on pro-Palestinian faculty mem-
bers. Even among the more honest oppo-
nents of the movement, there are so many
Jewish groups tripping over one another
to “help” students oppose B.D.S. on cam-
pus these days that I would not be sur-
prised if they were driving up the price of
kosher catering.
The propensity of activists on either
side to try to turn B.D.S. into a litmus test
is misguided at best. Both sides make a
huge deal about it because neither side
any longer engages with its substance.
As a liberal Jew who agonizes over
what this endless occupation is doing —
not only to the Palestinians but also the
Jews, both here and in Israel — I wish I
could find a movement that actually
sought to help Israel realize the folly of the
self-destructive path it is on and simulta-
neously advance the cause of a peaceful
state for the Palestinians. Unfortunately, I
can’t find one, on either side of the B.D.S.
divide. 0Does Anyone Take B.D.S. Seriously?
Eric Alterman
A movement to pressure
Israel is hot air — and
just a tool for politicians.
ERIC ALTERMANis the media columnist for
The Nation and a professor of English at
Brooklyn College.