Dianne Feinstein Is American Politics
role in torturing terrorism suspects during the Bush years. In the words of one California political operative, “she was practically melting witnesses with her eyes, just having this steel-trap mind and asking for more details.” It was a moment when even progressive Californians could feel a sense of pride in their unapologetically moderate senator, who may have seen in the CIA’s brutality a breach of the norms she believes in so fervently.
As George Shultz, the former secretary of State, told the New Yorker’s Connie Bruck in 2015, “Dianne is not really bipartisan so much as nonpartisan.” Her devotion is to the system, in which laws are made, regulations are implemented, and oversight is prized. She is stalwart in her conviction that the way to make progress is to maintain open, friendly lines of communication with members of the opposition party, a stance that her defenders argue is crucial to getting anything accomplished in the Senate.
Describing the Ten-in-Ten Fuel Economy legislation passed in 2007 by Feinstein and several colleagues, which ensured that emissions standards grew ten miles per gallon in ten years, Millman said, “Could it have been 20 miles per gallon? Yes, but then the few Republicans wouldn’t have signed on to it, and it wouldn’t have been a law; it would have been a regulation. And when Trump came into power, he could simply have undone it.”
She is probably most famous for her push, as soon as she got into the Senate, for an assault-weapons ban. She had been spoiling for this fight for decades; back when she was mayor of San Francisco, her controversial ban on handguns provoked a recall campaign (she survived it). In 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig challenged her by saying, “The gentlelady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics.” In response, Feinstein said, “I am quite familiar with firearms. I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house, when my husband was dying, when
I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”
The assault-weapons ban passed in 1994 as part of the crime bill; its 2004 expiration marked the start of our infernal era of near-daily mass shootings. On this issue, Feinstein has been receptive to the activist politics of a younger generation. She appeared in San Francisco with teenage demonstrators in 2018’s March for Our Lives. The footage is kind of heartbreaking from a generational perspective: crowds full of kids who have no idea who the ancient woman on the stage is, what she has lived through, that she has spent decades fighting the battle that has, horrifically, now become theirs.
Feinstein implored her colleagues to act after the murders of 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook in 2012: “Show some guts,” she said. She told the New York Times that one reason the Senate could no longer pass an assault-weapons ban was the rising abuse of the filibuster. Of course, Feinstein has been unwilling to commit to ending it.
She acknowledges to me that politics have “hardened” around gun laws in recent decades, saying that “everything has become more partisan than it was when I came to the Senate. When I came to the Senate, Bob Dole was the leader, and he stood up and said … What was it? Tom, help me, what was the quote?” Her aide Tom Mentzer filled in that Dole had agreed that the gun issue was too important to filibuster and put it to a vote.
When I suggest to Feinstein that the partisan hardening has been asymmetrical, that her Republican colleagues have grown more radical and rigid while she and many of her fellow Democratic leaders have been all too willing to compromise, she responded, “Well, yes. I think that’s not inaccurate. I think it’s an accurate statement. What did you first say about Democrats moving?” I repeated that it was the right that has gotten more inflexible while the Democrats have been willing to cede ground.
“I’m not sure,” she responded. “But it’s different; there’s no question about it. And I think there is much more party control. When I came to the Senate, we spoke out, and we learned the hard way, and we took action, and it was clear what was happening with weapons in the country. It still is. And in a way, the weapon issue was a good one because we were able to pass the first bill. When was it, Tom?” Mentzer reminded her that the assault-weapons ban was passed in 1994.
When I asked her about her stated commitment to centrism as a reaction to the tumult of her early political life, she began speaking, unprompted, about Dan White, clearly still appalled by his violent transgressions against the respectability politics that have helped her navigate the world. “A former young, handsome police officer who goes in and kills the mayor,” she said. It was the kind of incident that should grab the government’s notice and compel it to “try to fix those things which are wrong.” But the ultimate lesson she derived from the response to Milk’s murder possesses an almost Olympian complacency: “I think one great thing about a democracy is that there is always flexibility, newcomers always can win and play a role, and it’s a much more open political society, that I see, than I hear of in many other countries.”
From her youth, Feinstein has been an institutionalist, with an institutionalist’s respect for structure, management, and hierarchy as means to manage the rabble of activism and protest. She seems unable to appreciate the possibility that partisan insurgents have overrun those institutions themselves. The crowds who came through the door with battering rams in January 2021 looking to kill a vice-president surely had chilling echoes for Feinstein, but days later, in the name of the Senate, she was defending Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley—a man who had offered up a sign of solidarity to the insurrectionists—in their attempts to delegitimize the election of Joe Biden.
“I think the Senate is a place of freedom,” she told reporters. “And people come here to speak their piece, and they do, and they provide a kind of leadership. In some cases, it’s positive; in some cases, maybe not. A lot of that depends on who’s looking and what party they are.”
“She’s like Charlie Brown and the football,” said Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s senior legal analyst, describing Feinstein’s unstinting belief that her institution is still functional. “But she doesn’t see that the whole football field is on fire.”
Long before Feinstein sealed the deal with her embrace of Graham, she and her senior colleagues on the Judiciary Committee were criticized for being passive as Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat from the Democrats. When Republicans crisscrossed the country bragging about holding on to Antonin Scalia’s seat after his death, Democrats did nothing. When Trump appointed the staunch conservative Neil Gorsuch, Lithwick said there was “a little chatter about boycotting the hearings,” but then Democrats “went ahead and had the hearing and confirmed him.”
Feinstein’s belief in the Senate’s sanctity may mean that the enduring moment of her career will not be the assault-weapons ban or her grilling of CIA torturers but that awkward, notorious embrace of Graham. In seeking refuge in government institutions as the shield against instability and insurrec
tion, Feinstein has been unable to discern that it was her peers in government—in their suits, on the dais, in the Senate, on the Judiciary Committee—who were laying siege to democracy, rolling back protections, packing the court with right-wingers, and building a legal infrastructure designed to erase the progress that facilitated the rise of her generation of politicians. But this is who she has always been.
Of that “appalling moment” with Graham, Cleve Jones recalled thinking, “Oh my goodness, you just really cling to this notion of civility and bipartisan discourse. One can marvel at it. But it’s genuine. It’s the core of her.”
The senate rewards its longestserving members with power. The most dynamic freshman senator in the world would not have the influence that a senior senator does, which is part of the pernicious trap that has created the bipartisan gerontocracy under which we now wither.
As the senior senator from California on the Appropriations Committee, the temptation to stay forever is great, not just for selfish reasons but for the good of her state. “If we lost her seniority … every other state benefits from California not having seniority, because our appropriations are so much larger,” said Millman.
She has the conviction, held by some in their later years, that she knows better. This is the woman who helped to create Joshua Tree National Park but who also spoke dismissively to the youth activists from the Sunrise Movement who came to her office in 2019, telling them they didn’t understand how laws are made. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said to the group, insisting, “I know what I’m doing.” But now, with age and all its attendant authority and power, comes serious diminishment.
Multiple reports of her failing memory have been rumbling through Washington, D.C. In 2021, Chuck Schumer removed her from that ranking role on the Judiciary Committee. The Chronicle reported that “the senator is guided by staff members much more than her colleagues are,” a remarkable change for someone who once said, “You can’t let staff run you.” I had let Feinstein’s staff know in advance that I would be asking her about her record on gun reform, and early in our conversation it was clear that Feinstein had come prepared with notes. “The overwhelming statistic is that we have had 200-plus mass shootings so far in 2022, 230 people have been killed, and 840 injured. These are things that we wanted you to hear,” she said, before adding, “So I have this on a card, but I think those are key features.” The acknowledgment of the card felt like a point of pride: She wanted me to know she was sharp enough to know I was sharp enough to know.
That Feinstein may be wrestling with dementia is in fact among the most sympathetic things about her. Getting very old can be hard, lonely; her third husband died of cancer this spring. It is pretty awful now to watch her tell CNN’s Dana Bash, in 2017, that she will stay in office because “it’s what I’m meant to do, as long as the old bean holds up”—and put her finger to her head.
Why didn’t she decline yet another sixyear term in 2018 or earlier, when it was perhaps clear that the old bean was not really holding up as she had hoped? Her defenders will lay out all the reasons that retiring in 2017 didn’t make sense, including simply that she won. “Is a diminished Senator Feinstein better than a junior California senator?” asked one of her former staffers. “I would argue, emphatically, yes.” Feinstein’s office released a statement that read in part, “If the question is whether I’m an effective senator for 40 million Californians, the record shows that I am.”
It is also true that she works among plenty of colleagues who are dumb as a box of hammers and have been so since their youth. “I’ve worked in politics my whole life,” said Jones, “and met a lot of politicians who are little more than cardboard cutouts propped up by staff. It’s important to understand that she was never that person.”
But the fact that many of her colleagues, on their best days, are less acute than Feinstein on her worst is exactly the kind of dismal, institutionally warped logic that has left us governed by eldercrats who will not live long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their failures. Feinstein’s defenders argue that there is something gendered about focusing on her overextended tenure, especially when the history of the Senate includes Strom Thurmond, who retired at 100 and was basically not sentient by the end. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy and Mitch McConnell are all in their 80s. Joe Biden first got to the Senate in 1973, and he’s the president of the United States. But being no worse than Strom Thurmond was not the standard to which we were supposed to aspire at this juncture. And while it may indeed be feminist heresy to expect more from women, in fairness, some of those women told us to expect more from them. They were the ones who cast their own elections as the dawn of a new era. They were the ones who argued that every generation does better than the one before.
Indeed, what may be producing the anger at this generation of Democrats is not just ageism, sexism, or the correct apprehension that America’s governing structures incentivize officials to hold on to power sometimes until they literally die. It is also the smug assuredness with which Democratic leaders, in whatever state of infirmity, can still confidently, in the summer of 2022, tell us to trust them and see themselves as a bulwark against the ruin that is so evidently our present and near future.
Perhaps the progress made over several decades in the middle of the 20th century gave Feinstein and her peers an idealized sense of the nation’s institutions as pliable and always improving. She could urge patience and civility because so many structural exclusions had begun to give way. “Women have really grown to the position where their capability is enormous,” she told me. “I see this with great pride: when women come in who are major officers in our military, in uniform, talking about a given problem, and they are articulate, they’re committed, and they make change. And so this is a day that we should not be disappointed in. It’s a day where, if you look back 50 years, it was very different. But progress has been made, and progress will continue to be made. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”
But those articulate women in the uniforms Feinstein fetishizes got there in part because of the social and political upheavals Feinstein has strained so hard to quell. The gains made by women and people of color and gays and lesbians and trans people and immigrants were extracted from a system that had been built to exclude them. To be on the side of the system in the wake of victories wrenched from that system was not to be at the center. It wasn’t moderate. It wasn’t neutral.
Feinstein doesn’t subscribe to this reading of American democracy. She believes those at the top of institutions can help those at the bottom get what they want. But American government has become less democratic in the same years that she and her peers have risen to lead it. A majority of Americans want gun control, but the Senate, whose arcane rules Feinstein still submits to, will not allow it. They want abortion rights, but the Court, which was stolen by Feinstein’s Republican friends, is poised to ensure that those rights are erased.
There is a great story in Roberts’s biography about how when Feinstein was on the Board of Supervisors, she got word that the headmistress of her old school, Sacred Heart, had been arrested protesting on behalf of farmworkers with Cesar Chavez. That headmistress, Sister Mary Mardel, told Roberts about how her former pupil had called the jail to speak to her. “Sister, what are you doing in jail?” Feinstein had asked her in alarm. “What about all the white gloves?”
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years of developing it—first for Fox, then for Comedy Central—it got canned. He thought booking the NBC sitcom Sunnyside in 2019 might be his big break, but the show was unceremoniously canceled after one season. “I was like, Oh, I almost made it,” he says. “Then there was this big fear: Oh God, is this where I top out?”
Sunnyside was a crucible moment for his mental health. The start of production was the catalyst that led to Booster’s diagnosis as bipolar. The table read for the first episode was to take place in L.A. right at the start of a planned vacation to New York City, then on to Fire Island. Booster was in the midst of a manic episode and tried to quit the show before it even began filming. “If I’m manic and one thing goes wrong, I explode,” he says. “I sent an email to producers saying, ‘I am no longer going to be on your show because I am going to miss part of my vacation.’ My reps were freaking out. I locked myself in my apartment for three days.”
He did, in fact, keep his travel plans—sort of. He flew to New York, where he stayed for 12 hours, then flew back to L.A. for the table read, only to hop back on a plane to go to Fire Island. “Everyone thought it was so funny and quirky I was doing this,” he says. “Meanwhile, I was truly losing my mind and almost losing one of the biggest opportunities of my entire career. I was finally like, Okay. This isn’t normal, and it could really hurt me in the long run.” It took him another year of instability before he made a change; he had read too many Reddit posts about how antipsychotics can dull your personality. When the pandemic hit, he decided to go on medication. He went off it again before shooting Fire Island; he reasoned that because he had written the script off meds, he should perform it that way, too. “The shitty part is sometimes the mania feels amazing,” he says. “Sometimes I miss it, to be honest, but not enough to want to fuck up the rest of my life.”
t akbar, people take breaks outside to do key bumps of coke, and in a powdered minute, it’s 1:30 a.m. and last call. Booster is trying to corral everyone up to finish the night out at his place. He looks remarkably alert—eyes
Apopping. We’re standing outside waiting for another round of rideshares. A pale person with a bow tattooed on their eyelid is whispering something to their friend. They come over and ask me if I’m on SNL. Yang and I give each other a look.
The “Asians”—Booster, Yang, and I— are taking an Uber together. “I wanna be in the Asian car!” Rogers screams. After all, maybe he could be considered Asian American too because he’s Greek. “We’ve had to fit in all our lives,” Yang says drolly. “But now we belong.”
From the start, Yang was set to play Booster’s best friend in Fire Island (initially, the names of the characters were Joel and Bowen). They met in 2014 through a mutual in the comedy world—a white guy—who thought the two gay Asian guys he knew should meet. Well, what do you know: Even broken clocks, etc. Despite their different styles and personae, they would still be confused for each other in the comedy scene, as if they were interchangeable. Moreover, as gay Asian men in New York, they bonded over their shared experiences with rice queens—that is, non-Asian men who eat only “rice,” get it, ha ha—even sleeping with some of the same ones. (There was one at Akbar, “a histrionic who sucked both of us into his orbit on separate occasions,” Yang tells me.)
In the movie, Noah and Howie’s relationship comes to a head when Noah tries to discourage Howie from hooking up with the resident rice queen of the island, who has “like five anime tattoos.” Howie is frustrated; he was just trying to have some brain-empty sex like Noah wanted him to. But not with him, says Noah. Anyone but him. “Stop talking about this like we’re the same,” says Howie. “But we are,” replies Noah. “No, stop,” Howie spits out. “You want to feel so good so badly that you did all this,” he says, gesturing up and down Noah’s toned body. The fight is a reality check that a shared experience of racism does not, in fact, make them the same. It is the best and most cutting part of the movie and the one that threatens to undermine the conceit of the rom-com.
Booster and Yang’s separate but rising paths have converged with this film. While Fire Island was in development—first at Quibi, before the platform’s implosion— Yang received increasing acclaim on SNL, including an Emmy nomination for acting. When Searchlight picked up the script, there was still a desire to cast famous names, and Yang now qualified; so did Cho. “Of course, I was jealous when Bowen got SNL and became the premiere gay Asian person in comedy,” Booster says. “But now I’m thankful he got there first. Every time we go out, he’s stopped by a thousand people. I’m like,
Oh, I used to think that’s what I wanted.”
“Joel has been able to hack into the Matrix as a gay Asian man,” says Yang. “He’s cleared a lot of stage gates in gay culture: being visible, successful, desirable. Do I want to be him? In some ways, yes.”
Back at the house, some people settle on the couch. Yang and Rogers commandeer the remote and play iconic lip syncs from Drag Race—Naomi Smalls’s oeuvre and the time Jorgeous crucified Orion Story. After a stint in the bathroom, Booster, stonefaced, comes up to us and says at a slightly lower decibel level, “Sam Smith is coming.” “Who?” I ask.
“The sing-er,” he says.
Oh, right, that Sam Smith, famously the first gay person to think they were the first gay person to win an Oscar during an acceptance speech. Apparently Schleicher saw Smith at Akbar and invited them to come back. Within minutes, Smith is standing in the kitchen, telling us they plan on going to the Tower of London to visit Anne Boleyn’s grave for their 30th birthday. Someone asks if they support the British monarchy. “I don’t support the monarchy, but I love the old queens,” they reply. “I’m always going to stick up for the girls of English history.” They feel bad for the royals. Imagine being so young and born into this public role. How suffocating must that be? I get the sense they can relate.
Many of those here tonight became part of Booster’s L.A. crew on the night of the Pulse nightclub shooting, when he texted his friend Louis Virtel, whom he worked with as a writer on Billy on the Street. Booster didn’t want to be alone, and Virtel and his friends had just done molly, so everyone was feeling tender and open. There was none of the clenching that sometimes occurs when gay men meet other gay men for the first time—what Yang describes as an internal line of questioning: “Do I want to be them? Do I want to fuck them? Or do I want to be friends with them?”
Maybe all relationships are some combination of the three: a way to find people who fill the voids you feel within yourself. Booster doesn’t always feel the post-acid-trip lucidity he had that day on Fire Island. “I don’t see that person all the time,” he says. “I still want to talk about feeling insecure, ugly, and undesirable, but I can’t because gay guys roll their eyes and say, like, ‘Oh, woe is you. It must be so hard to look like that.’”
Tonight, he looks more at ease than I’ve seen him all week. Active listening, active laughing. There’s a damp chill in the air, and the patio light hits his face just so. He isn’t checking his phone or looking for the exit. He has his friends, his boyfriend, a beautiful house. And what more could a person want? ■