On Nancy Pelosi

I read her memoir - so you don't have to!

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I don’t read that many political memoirs, because they’re usually not that interesting. Most of them manage to selectively omit anything that could make the author look bad while also being mind-numbingly comprehensive at the same time. You learn why the author was right about everything, and I mean everything. Their narrative tends to be a welter of detail presented without any compelling interpretation. I think this is often a function of the fact that authors rely on meeting notes to remember otherwise forgotten events - but when you combine it with the obvious selectivity, the result is often worse than useless. I can’t rely on it to give me a compelling new way of looking at things, and I can’t rely on it for accurate historical detail. So what can I rely on it for?

I made an exception, though, for Nancy Pelosi’s memoir, The Art of Power, which came out in the last few months. Pelosi is a compelling figure - arguably the most powerful woman in the history of U.S. politics - and because she’s at the end of her political career, I thought maybe she might at least spill some real beans. Sadly, she doesn’t deviate much from the typical features of the genre, which made it a disappointing read.

This isn’t a criticism of Pelosi herself, who remains a force to be reckoned with and a truly inspirational figure. It’s not an exaggeration when people say that she’s arguably the most effective Speaker of the House of Representatives in history, and I strongly believe that her influence over the Democratic Party in particular and American politics in general has been hugely to their benefit. In a great example of that, she just made a huge - perhaps the decisive - contribution to forcing Joe Biden not to make a disastrous run for re-election. On the other hand, she now seems somewhat like a figure from a passing era, and the question to ask about her passing from the scene is not so much Who is the next Nancy Pelosi? as Will there be any more like her?

That’s what I was thinking about as I read her memoir, however flawed it may have been.

Different priorities

Over the past decade, Pelosi has traveled a trajectory somewhat similar to that traveled by the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both became powerful female faces of “the Resistance”, the anti-Trump coalition in which women played a prominent role. The Women’s March, the women’s groups that powered the Democrats to victory in the 2018 midterms, and Resistance moms around the country embraced both Ginsburg and Pelosi as symbols of defiance to Trump. Young women who hadn’t even been born when Pelosi was first elected to Congress (1987) eagerly reshared memes and TikToks featuring the octogenarian.

But if you read Pelosi’s memoir, it quickly becomes clear that she does not want her legacy to be defined by the Trump era, which, after all, was hardly one of Democratic success - unless you count the task of preventing Trump from burning the country to the ground, which is still unfinished. Pelosi wants instead to be defined by her own efforts and ideals. And, as with Ginsburg, these have a much deeper history - one that is grounded in a pre-Trump appreciation and reverence of America’s institutions and rituals of democracy. For Ginsburg, the important institution was the Supreme Court and its supposedly detached quest after constitutional truth. For Pelosi, it is the House of Representatives and the process of democratic deliberation.

This becomes apparent as soon as you look at the list of chapters, which may surprise someone who knows Pelosi mostly in her Resistance Lib incarnation. You’ll find chapters on her opposition to the 2003 war on Iraq, the healthcare reform push of 2009-10, and the saving of the economy in the Great Recession of 2007-8. You’ll find chapters on how she became Speaker of the House, the January 6th insurrection (which, remember, targeted Congress) and on “Why I Love the House”. You read again and again how she did it all “for the children”. What you won’t find, though, is much about Donald Trump.

What comes through in these chapters is Pelosi’s appreciation of politics as a game which is best played when all of the players have mutual respect. She writes repeatedly about how “gracious” President George W. Bush was, and glowingly of an earlier era when bipartisan cooperation with Republicans was possible. She never really probes the deeper, structural problems with the Republican Party and the conservative movement which produced Donald Trump - among them, the Islamophobia and hysteria over terrorism which flourished under the very same Bush’s presidency. Nor does she touch upon the ways in which liberals were complicit in the creation of this culture, which was (“admirably”, you might say) bipartisan.

The art of power

I mean all of this not as an indictment of Pelosi’s actual career, but just to say that her book is not a particularly illuminating window into contemporary American politics. It also fails to capture what was so strong about Pelosi’s own career as Speaker - the ways in which she relentlessly marshalled and corralled her party into combat, using the art of the possible to maximize Democratic gains when they held power and to minimize Republican gains the rest of the time. In other words, it fails to capture her ruthlessness - the quality which was most prominent during what may be her final major political act, the campaign to force Biden to drop his bid for re-election.

That ruthlessness, as well as her sense of propriety, was on display in Pelosi’s attitude towards “the Squad”, the set of prominent progressive Democratic representatives, among whom Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most prominent of the prominent. Pelosi initially welcomed AOC into office - “we already have too many old white men here in Congress”, she reportedly said - but soon made it clear that although welcome, the Squad were supposed to know their place. The Squad are part of a new strain of Congresswomen and men whose power flows from outside Congress - from Twitter, and memes, and grassroots support. But that’s not the sort of power Pelosi has ever respected, or had much need for, as she made clear in an interview:

After the members of the Squad became the only four Democrats to vote against an immigration bill backed by Pelosi, she breezily dismissed their opposition. “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” she told The New York Times in an interview, after breezily popping a chocolate treat in her mouth. “But they don’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”

That’s how many votes in Congress they’ve got - to Pelosi, that was all that mattered.

Now that she’s in the sunset of her career, it’s not clear - yet - that American politics has anyone to replace her. As the forces of polarization, social media, and democratic erosion produce a new, more turbulent era of American politics, people whose primary concern is how to count votes in Congress and how to use them are not guaranteed to remain in the saddle. There are other forces at work, and on the right those forces are downright dangerous. Indeed, they threaten the entire constitutional edifice that Pelosi reveres.

They’re something new, but they’re also the product of the failures of that earlier era of consensus, cooperation and vote-counting whose passage Pelosi laments. That era wasn’t Pelosi’s fault - but she lived in it, breathed its air, and embodied not only its highest virtues but also some of its mistakes. That’s what I wanted to read about in her memoir. Unfortunately, I didn’t.