Building on the momentum of the convention, this week the Harris campaign returned to the work of reaching the American people in person and on all media fronts. The candidates set out on a bus tour to meet swing-state voters and finally met the press, with Harris and Walz sitting for a CNN interview after weeks of resistance. Whether the campaign mended its relationship with the major news organizations remains to be seen, and frustration with the inadequate response of major news organizations to the very real threats democracy faces at the hands of MAGA Republicans.
In this week’s readings — the links we pull together for our paid subscribers each weekend — we’ve collected stories on the challenges facing and posed by the press, te difficulties facing women candidates in a nation that’s transmuted misogyny into partisanship, and the prospects for democracy this election season.
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In case you missed it
Until this week, the Harris campaign has kept the press at arms’ length, refusing interviews and taking its message directly to the public or turning to influencers and content creators. We looked into what’s behind the divide, and what can be done to repair the broken relationship between the Democratic Party and old-school journalism.
[T]here is a lot of validity in the sense of hurt on both sides. I also think there are dangerous attitudes at play. The media need to realize that a lot of how a lot of it has covered these serious times and the rising threat of authoritarianism is flawed. That is real. Campaigns are right to be wary. And the campaign needs to realize that a streamer or a YouTuber, no matter how compelling their work (and I think their work can be incredibly compelling), is not the same as the press.
Continuing our UNBURDENED series, in which experts imagine what a Harris administration truly free of the past could do on the biggest policy questions of our time, journalist Jane Perlez talked to us about how the U.S. can improve relations with China.
The U.S. should recognize the need for quality diplomacy, not just diplomacy around the edges. This is envisioned in a report for the Council on Foreign Relations by Robert Blackwill and Philip Zelikow. Talking to China about fentanyl and climate change is necessary. The need to talk to China about the geopolitical situation is just as urgent. Xi Jinping will likely be in charge until 2035. Trying to change that calculus by talking of regime change by the US should be taken off the table. Though difficult, efforts can be made to chip away at the China/Russia axis.
We talked to veteran organizer Deepak Bhargava about the power of deep story, the role of movements in creating change, and the possibility a resurgent labor movement represents for the future of American democracy.
There’s a proud tradition in this country of bottom-up social change. And the tradition goes back hundreds of years. Arguably, the movement to abolish slavery is the ground, a mass movement over centuries is the ground from which everything else has flowed. I always think it’s a miracle that David beats Goliath, but it happens time and time again in our history. It’s how most of the progress has been won — by everyday people in large numbers coming together to push for something better. And that lineage should give us hope because things have been far worse than they are today, with far more formidable opponents.
And as part of UNBURDENED, we talked to strategist Michael Podhorzer about what a truly transformational Harris administration labor policy could look like — not just defending the right to organize, but removing the obstacles that have stood in the way of labor power, industrial policy, and democracy.
The biggest thing—assuming Democratic control of both houses of congress and the White House—would be enacting the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. And it will take the boldness of calling on the Senate to reform its rules to allow critical bills about democracy to not be blocked by a minority in the Senate. A minority should not stand in the way of the majority’s demand for democracy (in this case, workplace democracy but also fundamental human rights to organize and collectively bargain). This would require a focused educational campaign about democracy and how the Senate is hobbled from doing the people’s business (at least with respect to how its rules have come under such frequent anti-majoritarian abuse).
And we published an excerpt from People, Power, Change, the new book from organizing legend Marshall Ganz (who’s been involved in everything from working with César Chávez to build the United Farm Workers of America to Obama’s 2008 campaign); Ganz also talked to us about the power of organizing, the state of American democracy, and the prospects for change.
One thing for sure is that you can’t predict the future, so pessimism and optimism are both arrogant. Hope, on the other hand, is realistic. It is belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable. It’s always probable Goliath will win, but sometimes, David does. It was deeply improbable we would elect a Black man President of the US, but it happened. Hope is a sense of possibility, of what could be, not what will be. It lives in the space between fantasy and certainty. So, while we can’t predict the future, we can prepare for it, by developing skilled leadership, building community with that leadership, and building power from the resources of that community. That’s called organizing: the practice of democracy.
Readings
Purity tests and impossible demands
We don’t need to rehash the well-documented, rampant sexism of Clinton’s second go-round in 2016 that contributed to her loss. But I will tell you that when news came of Trump’s victory, I was eight months pregnant inside the Javits Center in New York City at Clinton’s would-be victory party. Instead of celebrating that night, I felt something break in me that would not be repaired for years—not until last week at the DNC.
It would take years to forgive or reconcile with those who sat out that election because of the impossible double standards they had held Hillary Clinton to and what the next four years would bring about (Charlottesville, the extreme mismanaging of COVID, the literal attempted coup on January 6th incited by a former United States president, and so much more). Years later, Biden would win the election and would earn votes from friends of mine who did not vote for Hillary, despite the fact that he also supported the 1994 crime bill, and also voted for the war in Iraq, and also and also… so many other similar decisions they despised Clinton for. Why him and not her? (This, my friends, is the question I have asked of so many things for my entire life.) [Listening in the Dark with Amber Tamblyn]
This post was originally published on The.Ink.