Greil Marcus responds below to an “Ask Greil” query about Jeet Heer’s recent piece in “The Nation” defending those who ousted Al Franken from the Senate.
Heer is trying to get out from under Jane Mayer’s very strong and comprehensive piece in The New Yorker, which is less a defense of Al Franken than a takedown of the senators who forced him out. It’s a weaselly piece: Heer seems to most of all want to affirm his own (and I so loathe the word but in context it may be the right one) wokeness.
It was clear from about Day 2 that this was a right wing ambush and most of Franken’s compatriots walked right into it. They gave Franken no option. If he hadn’t quit—and raising that as a real possibility is to me an instance of naïveté on Mayer’s (and Franken’s) part—the same people who were so intent on purifying themselves would have read him out of the party, taken away his committee assignments, and ostracized him. The after-the-fact justifications—Oh, if the Democrats didn’t show how they stood for absolute probity against the depredations of the GOP, Doug Jones wouldn’t have beaten Roy Moore—are dubious on their face—and both avoid a central question—was it worth it to trade Doug Jones, fine a person as he is, for the smartest person in the Senate?—and exposes the cynicism of the self righteousness: would Gillibrand’s mob, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have done the same if the man accused was, say, Sherrod Brown, where he would have been replaced by a Republican, as Ohio had a Republican governor and Minnesota didn’t?