The Loyalist

Having previously served as chief speechwriter and a senior policy adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, Stephen Miller returned to the West Wing this year as deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser—roles that mark him as one of the most powerful people in the White House and, by extension, the world. One of the architects of the attempted “Muslim ban” as well as the infamous child-separation policy during the first Trump administration, Miller has now pledged to oversee “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Since he was a teenager in Santa Monica, Miller has harbored fantasies of helping to transform America in precisely this way. But, as David Klion asks in an essay for Books & the Arts, “How to make sense of Miller and his trajectory?” Klion revisits a 2020 biography, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, by the reporter Jean Guerrero, to track Miller’s journey to the White House, from teenage shock jock in Southern California to collegiate troll at Duke and finally congressional staffer in Capitol Hill, where he was part of a right-wing, anti-immigrant vanguard that seized upon the rise of Trump. As Klion sees it, “the story Guerrero recounts is an urgent one, packed with insights into the kind of personality that self-radicalizes toward the far right in the unlikeliest of circumstances.” And we need to better understand Miller’s story because his “particular brand of virulent xenophobia…is now politically ascendant, and his biography is inescapably central to the history of the present.” Read “The Cruel World According to Stephen Miller”

Protecting the Unknowable

Political theorist Lowry Pressly’s aim in The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life is to help us reimagine privacy, proposing a more expansive, even romantic, ideal—one that is not about controlling our data and avoiding surveillance, but about protecting the unknown and the unknowable. It is a novel but intuitive conception of privacy: Sometimes we want others—and even ourselves—not to need to know anything at all, because, as Pressley writes, protecting the unknowable “is essential for the sense of potentiality, depth, play, and freedom in human affairs” to flourish. In her review of The Right to Oblivion, Cora Currier finds that “making a moral case for privacy—and why it is necessary for human flourishing,” as Pressly does, helps move the conversation around privacy away from the purely legalistic to more humane concerns: “The idea that privacy protects something like quiet—an ineffable idea of the self, a slippery sense of possibility essential for creativity and love, for community and solidarity—is a moving one,” Currier argues. Ultimately, she writes, “It is a concept that I and many others have needed, something I have tried to defend, even without knowing what it was.” Read “Can We Still Recover the Right to Be Left Alone?”