14 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
the former Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development, did not help mat-
ters when, during a discussion of pub-
lic-option insurance enrollment, he
seemed gleeful at a chance to portray
Biden as doddery—“Are you forget-
ting already what you said just two
minutes ago?” he asked. Castro later
said that his approach was the way the
primaries are supposed to play out. But
his gibe seemed a crude bit of gaslight-
ing, since Biden hadn’t quite said what
Castro claimed he had. As Klobuchar
put it in an interview following the de-
bate, the remark was “not cool.”
Castro barely qualified for the de-
bate; he is averaging about one per cent
in the polls. Of the ten candidates on-
stage, only three—Biden, Warren, and
Sanders—are polling in the double dig-
its. For some of the others, to continue
competing seems to call for either an
extraordinary amount of confidence in
themselves or, especially in the case of
Andrew Yang, in the resonance of their
message. Yang, a businessman, presents
a notable example of the twinned qual-
ities of pessimism and hope. He believes
that, in the face of automation, tradi-
tional responses to unemployment, such
as retraining programs, are hopeless, but
that, with a universal basic income of a
thousand dollars a month and the “boot
off of people’s throats,” Americans will
not sink into inertia but remake their
lives and their country. He undercut his
own message on Thursday, however, by
announcing, game-show style, that his
campaign would give that money to ten
American families so that they could
try the plan. At its most developed, the
strength of the case for basic income
lies in how it would change the entire
economic climate, not just the prospects
of a few lucky winners.
There is also the reciprocal aspect of
the trust equation: having faith in vot-
ers. The Democratic Party seems split
on the question of how much of its
resources should be directed toward cer-
tain voters, particularly white work-
ing-class men struggling with deindus-
trialization. The willingness of so many
voters to cast their ballots for Donald
Trump has been disorienting. But the
case remains that some of those same
people previously voted for Obama. The
categories are rarely neat. As Buttigieg
noted, “Where I come from, a lot of
times that displaced autoworker is a
single black mother of three.”
None of this is easy. Even Buttigieg’s
decision to come out publicly, which he
did in 2015, would likely have turned
out very differently twenty years ago.
But it is true that the victories surround-
ing L.G.B.T.Q. rights have been brought
about by a combination of activism, lit-
igation, and people telling their stories
within their communities—through
conversation, as O’Rourke put it, as well
as confrontation. This is how primaries
ought to play out. Every election is an
exercise in trust.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
figuring out “How can you spend your
time and your resources trying to be
useful?” He has bought a controlling
stake in the Tribeca Film Festival; in-
vested in Artists, Writers & Artisans,
a company that produces comics and
graphic novels; and put twenty mil-
lion dollars into the Void, a virtual-
reality-entertainment company, among
other ventures.
He has also donated to the Dem-
ocratic Presidential candidates John
Hickenlooper and Pete Buttigieg. Of
the latter, he said, “It’s clear to anyone
who hears him speak that he has an
extraordinary mind.” The 2020 elec-
tion, he said, is “a really crucial mo-
ment” for liberal democratic values.
Having spent years working for his
family’s company in the Far East and
Europe, James said that he has grown
worried about rising threats to dem-
ocratic societies around the world.
“There’d been a bet for a long time
that economic liberalization would
inevitably lead to political liberal-
ization,” he said, “but it didn’t work
out that way.” Instead, he said, au-
thoritarian regimes are using digital
disinformation tactics and other
high-tech weapons to undermine de-
mocracies. “The connective tissue of
DEPT.OFDYNASTIES
FREAKFLAGF LY I N G
I
f you’re wondering how “Succes-
sion,” the HBO series about sib-
lings fighting for control of a family
empire—thought to be inspired by
Rupert Murdoch’s family—ends,
James Murdoch can tell you, despite
never having watched the show. James,
Rupert’s younger son, often referred
to as “the smart one” in the clan,
walked away last March with some
two billion dollars—but no job—
after his father merged most of the
Murdochs’ Twenty-first Century Fox
media empire with Disney. James’s
brother, Lachlan, was chosen by their
father to run the corporate bits that
remained after the merger (chiefly,
Fox News and Fox Sports). But no
role had been carved out for James,
who for years was the C.E.O. of
Twenty-first Century Fox and Sky,
P.L.C., and the deputy C.O.O. of
News Corp, the publisher of papers
such as the Post.
“It’s all good,” James, who is forty-
six, said. “I just feel very lucky to have
the opportunity at this point to make
a clean break, and literally have an
empty slate.” He was sitting in an up-
per floor of a modern office building
in the West Village, the new head-
quarters of his private-investment
company, Lupa Systems. (It is named
for the mythical wolf who suckled the
founders of Rome, one of James’s fa-
vorite cities, where he worked as an
archeologist’s assistant before attend-
ing Harvard.) The only newsprint
publication on display was a copy of
The New York Review of Books.
In May, James delivered a com-
mencement address at the American
University of Rome, and his remarks
seemed as fitted to his own new life
as to those of the graduates. “The out-
comes in our lives are never predes-
tined,” he said. He urged the students
not to “let others define what your
success will be,” and to “fly your freak
flag high.”
So far, for James, this has meant
investing in a smattering of tech and
media enterprises and defying his
family’s conservative politics. The
challenge of waking up two billion
dollars richer, as he described it, is
