14 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
PARISPOSTCARD
ROLLOFTHEDICE
A
mid a turn toward the convergence
of leisure and escapism—I’m look-
ing at you, recreational sourdough bak-
ers—a number of French citizens are
heading in the opposite direction. Take
the success of Kapital!, a board game
about class warfare. Kapital! is the cre-
ation of Michel Pinçon and Monique
Pinçon-Charlot, celebrity sociologists
in a country where “celebrity sociolo-
gist” is not an oxymoron. At Christ-
mas, the game was a runaway hit. The
magazine Les Inrockuptibles recom-
mended it as “a delicious poisoned gift
for your right-wing friend,” and ten
thousand copies sold out in weeks. Since
then, another twenty thousand cus-
tomers have paid thirty-five euros apiece
in order to “understand, apprehend,
and even experience the sociological
mechanisms of domination,” as the
game’s promotional copy promises. “It
makes you want to take up a pitch-
fork!” Maud R. wrote, leaving five stars
on a retailer’s Web site.
“Les Pinçon-Charlot,” as the cou-
ple is known in the press, met in the li-
brary at the University of Lille in 1965
and have been married for fifty-three
years. He is the son of laborers from
the Ardennes; she was raised in the
moyenne bourgeoisie of the Lozère, where
her father was a prosecutor. “We both
had a kind of rage in our stomachs,”
Pinçon-Charlot recalled. “We were con-
vinced that our respective unhappinesses
were as natural as the sun or the snow.”
In their life’s work of studying class re-
lations, they have met the patrimonial
classes where they live: villas, châteaux,
vineyards, banks, private clubs, private
schools, racecourses, dinner parties. They
spent three years biking around France
doing research for a book on stag hunt-
ing, and have conducted field work in
their bathing suits on the beaches of
the Riviera. “It helped that we could go
out together, as a couple,” Pinçon-Char-
lot said. “Everything operates through
that worldly sociability.”
Pinçon-Charlot is tiny, with heav-
ily lined, no-bullshit eyes peeking outfrom under dense bangs. (The hair style,
an interview subject once gingerly in-
formed her, marked her as an interloper
on the society scene.) She was sitting
in the dining room of the couple’s row
house, in Bourg-la-Reine, a suburb of
Paris, offering a visitor hand sanitizer
and sparkling water while her husband
trimmed hedges in the garden. A red
(like Communism) Kapital! box sat on
the table. Pinçon-Charlot (“a Commu-
nist of the soul,” if not currently a Party
member) opened it and took out a game
board, a die, and a stack of K, the game’s
paper currency.
“Let’s roll the die!” she instructed.
The visitor rolled a two. Pinçon-Char-
lot rolled a six, establishing her as the
“dominant” player to the visitor’s “dom-
inated.” “In life, it’s like that,” she said,
sighing. “Frankly, it’s all chance.”
Pinçon-Charlot began distributing
the cash. She dealt herself 50K in each
category: financial capital, cultural
capital, social capital, and symbolic
capital, according to the groups first
established by the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu. Her opponent received a
fifth of that.
“In real life, I wouldn’t have five timesgets the job. If the National Popular Vote
plan ever succeeds, it would elide some
problems, such as the current system’s
reliance on winner-take-all plurality vot-
ing, but it would fix the most egregious
deficit: the undermining of one person,
one vote.
The various arguments advanced for
and against the Electoral College seem
to outnumber the stars. A book issued
by the group promoting the National
Popular Vote plan runs a thousand pages,
refuting no fewer than a hundred and
thirty-one “myths” about the way we
elect our Presidents. But the basic case
for a national popular vote is simple and
appealing. To be fair, the case made by
supporters of the Electoral College also
relies on a clear foundation: the role of
federalism in the American experiment.
Some who favor the status quo fear that
a nationalized Presidential vote would
also nationalize American politics and
undermine states. In fact, the constitu-
tional powers of state governments and
the role of the Senate, whose member-
ship advantages small states over large
ones, would, among many other con-
tinuing features of federalism, insure
that the United States remains a “con-
sensus democracy,” in the phrase of the
political scientist Arend Lijphart—that
is, one in which, by design, we must
grapple with divided power.
A few days after the 2016 election,
Trump told Lesley Stahl, of “60 Minutes,”
that he had “respect” for the Electoral
College, but would “rather see it where
you went with simple votes. You know,
you get one hundred million votes, and
somebody else gets ninety million votes,
and you win.” Like so many of his state-
ments, this one proved unreliable. And,
as his supporters realized that he had
become President because of the Elec-
toral College, their preference for the
institution hardened. In 2012, fifty-four
per cent of Republicans and Republi-
can-leaning independents favored re-
placing the College with a national pop-
ular vote, according to the Pew Research
Center, even though George W. Bush,
too, had lost the popular vote, in 2000.
Today, only a third of them take thatposition. The National Popular Vote
project relies mostly on the backing of
Democrats and blue states; after Trump,
it will not be easy to revitalize cross-
party support. Yet a Presidential elec-
tion decided by the popular vote might
very well improve our rancid politics. A
Republican Party with an incentive to
compete for votes in California and New
York, for example, might be less tempted
by white nationalism.
Whenever the Trump years pass, our
democracy, assuming that it endures,
will face a major repair job. There will
be new laws, one hopes, to prevent fu-
ture Presidents from owning hotels down
the street from the White House, and
from withholding their tax returns, and
from using the Justice Department as
a personal law firm. To tear at the roots
of Trumpism, however, will require much
more. The Electoral College is a legacy
of “distrust of the people,” as Kefauver
put it, and an artifact of racial injustice.
If we haven’t learned by now that it must
go, what will it take?
—Steve Coll