Author: Anand Giridharadas

  • Like bottomless mimosas and a mother’s unsolicited advice, eras don’t just end. The new thing elbows its way in, the old thing lingers like a houseguest, and they compete for primacy. Only eventually — sometimes long after — do you notice the eclipse.

    No one was ever going to announce that the era of performative elite do-gooding had ceded to the era of naked oligarchy. But this week three events made that eclipse clear.

    The first was the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’s wedding, in Venice, to Lauren Sánchez, who would surely float if she fell into a canal. As celebrities poured into a city already strained by tourism, and the happy couple was photographed frolicking in a literal foam party aboard a yacht, there was an almost refreshing, well, nakedness to the avarice, to the carelessness, to the not-giving of civic fucks. There was a reminder of the omnipotence and the utter loneliness at the commanding heights: you can get anyone you want to your wedding, and the people you want are the people you’d invite if you told your assistant to run to the dentist’s office, pick up People magazine, write down names in it, and invite them. These are people who have everything, and who don’t have the thing everybody else does.

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    The second was the inevitable announcement by multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable foundation, run with his wife, Priscilla Chan, that it is no longer focused on ending all the diseases, as it once promised. Rather, in the Trump era, it is focused on things that would not be any trouble to Trump. “Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?” read a screen behind the couple at a rehearsal in 2016. The answer turns out to be: No. The Washington Post, owned by the oligarch in the above item, nonetheless rightly warned, in the Zuckerberg-Chan case, of “the risks for communities reliant on wealthy private donors.”

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    The third event was the passage today of Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ budget, a document of searing meanness that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the “Worst Bill in History” — a “giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill.” Like the Bezos wedding and the Zuckerberg-Chan pivot, the bill had one refreshing quality, though. It made zero effort to mask its ugliness. It said the cruel part out loud.

    There is a nakedness to our oligarchy now, and it is pruny as hell. But at least there is this: As far as I can tell, the era of highly performative elite do-gooding is passing. The billionaires who felt the need to give TED talks about eradicating poverty while also causing poverty. The incessant blabbing about Africa by oligarchs who rarely left Connecticut. The pledges to save democracy, save the planet, and, yes, end all diseases. The buy-one-donate-one products. Red things involving Bono.

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    I wrote a whole book about that era and its maneuvers and deceptions and costs, and it occurs to me now that the entire complex of activities I chronicled is giving way to something altogether different. What is ascendant now is nakedness — of greed, of sociopathy, of power thirst. Somewhere along the way, the professed goal of the elite morphed from fighting inequality from above to defending their castles in the sky.

    There is a kind of progress in this, because what is naked is easier to see, even if pruny.

    This eclipsing of performative virtue by pungent avarice, of fake billionaire “change” by real billionaire wolfishness, is part of why figures like Zohran Mamdani are rising. When I published Winners Take All in 2018, the things I was trying to deconstruct took explaining. That is, after all, why you write a book. I’m not sure a book is needed now.

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    The moves, the lust, the underlying goals — all of it is in the open. This era is less confusing. And people are voting accordingly.

    It’s also why a generation gap is opening. The old guard power elite, seeing Mamdani’s rise, is terrified that the Soviet Union could soon be coming to a bodega near them, even though they probably don’t live near any bodegas and probably think the word “bodega” is Arabic. But their children and grandchildren are not afraid of free buses and childcare. They’re willing to take a chance on something that would switch their trajectory off the track from nothing to nowhere and on to a course of life.

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    Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • We just talked live with Matthew Duss, the foreign policy scholar and former Bernie Sanders advisor. He gave a powerful whirlwind explanation of the recent U.S. war with Iran (remember it?), and we discussed everything from the 14 million deaths the U.S.A.I.D. cuts will reportedly cause, to the effects of the war in Gaza on trust in Democrats, to the new budget bill’s supercharging of ICE, to whether foreign allies will stand with the American people against anti-democratic American leaders.

    Most importantly, perhaps, Duss talked about the possibilities for a left-right, progressive-MAGA, keffiyeh-and-cowboy hats coalition against war and for peace.

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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • We just talked live to our regular Monday guest, the scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and 2,600 of you. We dug into Trump’s war on reality itself, as evidenced in his lies about the success of his bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites, and the gaslighting of calling Trump’s cruel budget “beautiful.”

    Ruth explained how Trump has been able to achieve many of the goals of dictators even as the United States remains a largely free society. The ends may be the same, but Trump is adapting the means to what is legally possible in the United States.

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    We also talked about how Zohran Mamdani’s victory as an unabashed progressive in New York City may point the way toward beating Trumpism — if the Democratic Party can be pressured to learn any lessons.

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    And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s newsletter, Lucid.

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    Join us for more Live conversation this week!

    Tomorrow, Tuesday, July 1, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be talking to foreign policy expert Matt Duss.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary has electrified people across the country and stirred hope in the dark. So today we talked to three experts — messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, strategist and writer Waleed Shahid, and New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander — to understand what happened in the race and what it bodes for the future of the Democratic Party.

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    Shenker-Osorio talked to us about how Mamdani’s campaign was a textbook example of two of her political mantras — Sell the brownie, not the recipe, and Animate the base to persuade the middle.

    Lander took us inside how he and Mamdani were able to do what Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders ultimately weren’t in 2020 — collaborate as progressives to advance shared goals. He told us about how their partnership helped bridge the gap between Muslim and Jewish voters, and how it demonstrated that, even in this very dark timeline, politics can be a team sport instead of a contest of self-interest.

    And Shahid talked about Mamdani’s win as a triumph of substance, not vibes. Mamdani’s real talk about Palestinians and the war in Gaza, about democratic socialist policy ideas, and about himself were all important in telling a story that could connect Democrats across ideology. He also talked about the very real work that remains to be done if progressive candidates are to do better with Black voters.

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    Join us for more Live conversations next week!

    On Monday, June 30, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be joined by scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. On Tuesday, July 1, also at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be talking to foreign policy expert and former Bernie Sanders advisor Matt Duss. Then on Wednesday, July 2, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll meet with the Book Club to start talking about Karim Dimechkie’s The Uproar.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • At what became the victory party for Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old phenom who palpitated the political establishment to become the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, the guests were trying to process a shared feeling that was hard to put into words.

    It was the opposite of what everyone had been feeling for seven and a half long months. What is this feeling? people kept saying to each other, only half-joking, half also wondering.

    It was something at the intersection of believing sincerely again, feeling defended again, not thinking yourself crazy to want basic things. It was a feeling of dawn after a very long night.

    Overnight, Mamdani’s improbable victory drove headline writers to their thesauruses for synonyms to “stun” and “shock” and “surprise.” But victories like this one are, of course, not miracles or black swan weather events. They are the product of very specific choices.

    If the Democratic Party Mamdani took by storm is interested in learning from what he did, there are lessons. If it isn’t too scared by the idea of winning by making people feel things.

    In his victory address last night, Mamdani himself did not shy away from this interpretation of his own success. He spoke of a goal “to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party.” So what are some elements of the model?

    1. Embrace the politics of feeling

    Faced with a populist authoritarian demagogue in Donald Trump, one whose pulsing rallies were the foreshadowing of electoral success, Democrats continue to be stuck in a pointy-headed contempt for simplicity and feeling.

    There is a dismissal of “vibes.” There is a sneering attitude about “messaging.” A brilliant pundit like my friend Ezra Klein will call Mamdani’s highly simple, memorable ideas “memetic,” as if designed to spread more than help.

    Let me say this plainly, since more subtly has not worked. The Democratic Party establishment, and various others in its orbit, including many political commentators and opinion journalists and others, are brainiacs with a personal blind spot for how most human beings feel and think, and their discounting of the politics of feeling is risking the republic itself, and it needs to stop now.

    Just ask Zohran. Mamdani had ideas — was full of policy ideas. He even has a website and everything. But he understood, as few in his party do, as few in his party want to do, that it’s hard to get people to think like you if you can’t get them to feel for you. He used his, yes, simple, memetic ideas to make people remember, and then, having remembered, he gave them something to talk about with their grandmother and their ex. He used a combination of these simple, repeatable ideas, shrewd and disciplined messaging, and in-person human communion to awaken people from slumber.

    Anytime anything happens like this, the Democrats get scared. Nothing scarier than young people getting excited about something. Stop it now! So scary. A party that too often caves to donors is liable to be afraid of voters finding their voice and power and believing they can actually have nice things. But maybe, just maybe, Democrats should try to make people feel.

    When the old guard sent out former President Bill Clinton to endorse former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, you had to laugh. It was like an attempt to forge a union of solidarity among men who have been accused of sexually harassing women.

    Stop circling the wagons. When something new is happening, let it bloom. Don’t be scared.

    2. Excite the base to move the middle

    What is the counter-offer to Trumpism?

    To listen to many Democrats in this moment is to hear warnings to play it safe, lay low, offer lite, moderate, no-jazz-hands incrementalism.

    The theory is that Trump is self-immolating. So just be the guy who’s not on fire.

    Mamdani did something different. He channeled what the progressive political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio has called animating the base to move the middle — her attempt to overturn the prevailing Democratic Party approach of catering to the middle at any cost, including, all too often, demoralizing the base.

    Exciting the base to move the middle works like this: You give your core supporters something to write home about. Ideas they simply cannot shut up about. Wow? He proposed that?

    As they start not being able to shut up, people hear them. Because of how ideology and population distribution work, the people who start hearing them are often less ideological or passionate or knowledgeable than they are. But they like seeing their friend/lover/relative come alive. Like in “When Harry Met Sally,” they want to have what that person is having. And so ideas spread from base to middle.

    Mamdani didn’t water down his ideas to court the middle. He tried to thrill the living hell out of a core base of support, so that they would take time they didn’t have out of their lives to tell everyone they knew. And he won.

    3. Mercy and empathy for Trump voters

    Democrats have a confused attitude toward Trump supporters. They view them, in many ways, as victims of giant manipulation by billionaire media owners and the demagogue-in-chief himself. But all too often they treat them as irredeemable, morally abominable souls.

    One of the signature elements of Mamdani’s campaign was not doing that.

    He went deep into the heart of immigrant Queens and filmed conversations with people born elsewhere, many of them people of color, who had voted for Trump. Without judgment, he asked why. He heard their stories. I have seen few Democrats doing this since November 2024. He seemed genuinely curious.

    What he found was that people’s lives hadn’t gotten easier in tangible ways, and almost universally had grown more expensive. These immigrants in Queens weren’t signing up for white nationalism. They were signing up for a hope, a dice roll, of shaking up the system.

    The more he talked to them, a funny thing happened. People who had voted for Trump were also super excited about his democratic socialist ideas of free buses, publicly run neighborhood stores, and universal childcare.

    Politics isn’t as ideological, as neatly left-right, as many think. People are complicated, full of cross-currents. He demonstrated how empathy and mercy for people who lurch to the right can bring them back in democracy’s fold.

    4. Reclaim what cities are for

    Mamdani focused totally on affordability. The campaign framed itself as aspiring to build a city people can afford to live in. It was, one presumes, the message that won the primary.

    But along the way, Mamdani verged on something important in the discussion of prices. High prices, he said in various ways, change what cities are, how they work, what they’re for. High prices turn a place like New York into a hamster wheel of daily survival instead of a place where people are consumed by the things they want to make, the art they came here to create, the businesses they dream of starting, the families they want to start.

    Prices are not just about prices. When they rise, they turn a place like New York into a place one goes to enjoy having had success rather than a place one goes to find success. That is a fundamental change in the meaning of a city. Mamdani pointed toward a new theme of making cities more livable, not just because livable is good, but because this is a country where people want to build and create and do stuff, and affordable cities make that happen.

    5. Organizing is everything

    I took a very, very long walk through Brooklyn on Sunday — different neighborhoods, real estate price points, racial mixes, social histories.

    In a few hours of walking, I saw canvassers for Mamdani several times. I did not encounter one canvasser for any other of the many candidates in the race for mayor.

    Organizing is everything. The Mamdani campaign was not a campaign of a political star. He is a star, who ran on the top of a giant organizing effort. Physical, IRL, boots-on-the-ground organizing.

    The Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists of America, and other organizations put people on doors. This was not an airwaves campaign. It was a stoop campaign. As obvious as this might seem, it’s a lesson that keeps going unlearned.

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • We talked today with Terry Moran, the veteran journalist let go by ABC News under White House pressure after a tweet calling out Donald Trump and Stephen Miller as “world-class haters.” Which, according to The Ink’s fact-checking department, they are. We spoke about the media’s handling of the second Trump term, the importance of reclaiming patriotism from far-right nationalists, what happened to the American social order, and why Moran still has hope in the basic normalcy of most people.

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    We also talked about what it means to be a journalist today, how traditional training left the press unprepared for Trump’s hijacking of its own tools and grammar, and what a new media can do differently to recapture not just eyeballs but the meaning-making function of great reporting at its best.

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    How to participate in the Book Club

    The Ink Book Club is open to all paying subscribers of The Ink. We’ll choose a new book each month, and we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — every Sunday, and each Wednesday we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest. Look out for posts with further details. We’ll also host chat threads to get your insight on key questions in advance of our meetings.

    For our Substack Live author talks, you can watch on desktop at The Ink or join us from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. Most Wednesdays, Book Club meetings will take place on Zoom (and we’ll post a link in this space). Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • When New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested at immigration court on Monday while escorting an immigrant, then threatened with assault charges despite video evidence to the contrary, he became the latest victim of the Trump regime’s effort to “liberate” Americans from their local elected officials.

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    At the time of his arrest, Lander was working with the group Immigrant ARC to help immigrants resist DHS’s latest strategy to deny them due process: “dismissing” their deportation cases and thus stripping them of their status as asylum seekers — making them eligible for immediate arrest by waiting ICE agents. We talked to Lander about this cynical legal innovation by the Trump regime to purge immigrants without due process, what he learned talking to his jailers, and how he would fight on as mayor.

    “These are gestapo tactics,” Lander told us.

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    More Live conversation today!

    Come back at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today, when we’ll be speaking with journalist, former ABC News anchor, and new Substacker Terry Moran. You won’t want to miss either of these conversations!

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android

    How to participate in the Book Club

    We’ll post questions — our discussion guide — every Sunday, and each Wednesday we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest. Look out for posts with further details. We’ll also host chat threads to get your insight on key questions in advance of our meetings.

    For our Substack Live author talks, you can watch on desktop at The Ink or join us from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. Most Wednesdays, Book Club meetings will take place on Zoom (and we’ll post a link in this space). Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink.


    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Today we were joined by the journalist, novelist, and memoirist Omar El Akkad, the author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which we’ve been reading this month with The Ink Book Club. The book is a reflection on the devastation of Gaza, a memoir of the immigrant experience in North America, and a kind of breakup letter to the West from someone disillusioned not just with its worst hypocrisies and blind spots, but also with his own sense of complicity in an illusion.

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    “What’s changed in the last 20 months,” El Akkad told us, “is that my ability to remain oblivious to the price tag” of the West is gone.

    We had a moving and soulful and difficult conversation about what the war in Gaza revealed to El Akkad, whether the ideals that Western countries profess are merely imperfectly enacted or are in fact outright lies, and the possibility of solidarity and courage in the face of cruelty and silence.

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    Buy “One Day” from Bookshop.org


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    More Live conversations this week!

    Join us tomorrow for discussions with two people very much in the news this week, Thursday, June 19, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, when we’ll be speaking with New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander. Then at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk to journalist, former ABC News anchor, and new Substacker Terry Moran. You won’t want to miss either of these conversations!

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Today, we were joined by Adam Met, musician, activist, Ph.D. in human rights law, and now author. Met has a new book — Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World — which explores the connections between music and politics, and how storytelling is at the heart of the emotional appeal — “collective effervescence,” as it’s known in sociology — that builds both audiences and social movements.

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    We talked to Met about how the skills musicians use to build a connection with fans are the same ones progressive politicians should be using to build community, why they so often aren’t, and how they can learn.

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    More Live conversation this week!

    Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, June 18, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, will join our Book Club meeting here on Substack Live.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Today, Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, joined us to talk about the threat of a new war in the Middle East and the bipartisan attempt to stop it, the difficulty of legislating and living with the chaos of Donald Trump’s White House, and the ongoing battle for the direction and soul of the Democratic Party.

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    Trump, his budget, and his immigration raids may be deeply unpopular, but Democrats are more unpopular than ever. Rep. Casar explained why — and told us about how he hopes to repair the Democratic brand.

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    More Live conversation this week!

    Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, June 18, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, will join our Book Club meeting here on Substack Live.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Today, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar of authoritarian regimes, joined 3,000 Ink and Lucid readers to discuss the weekend’s dueling events: the huge turnout all over the country for No Kings rallies, and the much smaller crowds that turned out for Donald Trump’s limp military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

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    Trump may have big authoritarian pretensions, but why was it so hard for him to get the military parade he dreamed of? We discuss.

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    And for more of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s thinking on authoritarianism, its history, and its future, make sure to subscribe to her newsletter, Lucid.

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    More Live conversations this week!

    Tomorrow, Tuesday, June 17, at noon Eastern, we’ll talk with Texas Congressman Greg Casar; then at 12:30 p.m., we’ll have a piano-side conversation with musician, activist, and author Adam Met. And on Wednesday, June 18, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, will join our Book Club meeting.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Join us today, Monday, June 16, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we talk again with scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. You can watch our Live events on your desktop at The Ink or on your phone or tablet with the Substack app.

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    The country that invented jazz was never going to be good at putting on a military parade. It was never going to be us.

    In the wake of Donald Trump’s flaccid, chaotic, lightly attended, and generally awkward military parade, a meme began doing the rounds. Its basic format was the juxtaposition of images of the kinds of parades Trump presumably wanted with the parade he actually got.

    Over here, thousands of Chinese soldiers marching in perfectly synchronized lockstep; over there, a lone U.S. soldier holding up a drone. Over here, North Korean legs kicking up and coming back down with astounding precision; over there, a dozen U.S. soldiers walking somewhat purposelessly through Washington.

    Trump’s biggest mistake was wanting a military parade in the first place. The United States military is not a birthday party rental company. Any therapist will tell you that no number of green tanks on the street is enough to heal the deep void left by a father’s withheld love.

    But, setting aside the wisdom of wanting a military parade, there is the issue of execution. Even if you’re going to do the wrong thing, do it well. Do it with flair. With the most powerful military in history at his disposal, Trump couldn’t even pull off a decent parade.

    But I’m here to say it’s not his fault alone. It’s hard to wring a military parade of the kind he dreamed of from a people free in their bones.

    You see, it is a good thing not to be good at some things. The great beauty of his terrible parade is the reminder that Trump is waging a war against the American spirit, and this fight he is struggling to win.

    No matter how much money and effort you throw at the parade, you cannot escape the fact that America is not the country of North Korean unity. We’re the country of Korean tacos.

    The Korean-American comedian Margaret Cho once described those tacos, as made famous by the chef Roy Choi, of similar heritage, thus: “There were so many things happening: The familiarity of the iconic L.A. taco, the Korean tradition of wrapping food, the falling-apart short rib that almost tastes like barbacoa, the complementing sweetness of the corn tortilla.” Korea running into Mexico, running into North Carolina, and beyond. Today on the website of the Kogi food empire that Choi built, these are some of the recipes: a Korean barbecue pizza, a Korean Philly cheesesteak, a kimchi fried chicken sandwich, a Korean gyro, and Korean pulled pork nachos. I may be wrong, but here is my hypothesis: the kinds of places good at putting on parades like North Korea’s will never come up with food like this; and the kinds of places good at making food like this will never rival the give-me-synchronicity-or-give-me-death parades of places like North Korea.

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    America is not the country of perfectly synced swinging arms. It’s the country of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” That song, by the legendary Duke Ellington, belongs to a genre of music that could only have been invented in America — jazz. As the documentarian Ken Burns explained, jazz was born in New Orleans when and because people from so many heritages were jammed together — the sounds of Africa and the sounds of Appalachia and the sounds of Germany and the sounds of indigenous people colliding to make something new. It was never scripted, always improvisational. Ellington himself made the connection to democracy:

    Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom…In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.

    I may be wrong, but it seems to me societies that have the thing Trump wanted in his parade don’t got that swing, and societies that got that swing don’t have the thing he craved.

    America is not a country of uniformity, even in its uniforms. It’s a big multicolored mess.

    What is striking in the images of Chinese and North Korean and Iranian parades is the uniformity, right down to the uniforms themselves. The soldiers are often seen wearing the same thing. It gives the kind of picture Trump likes. But the images this weekend were not like that at all. In America, different units wear different uniforms. Images from the parade this weekend showed one uniform after another. The military is not a monolith. It is made up of units with their own histories and traditions and identities and loyalties. There are rivalries and competing slogans.

    I may be wrong, but I would wager that societies that have first-rate matchy-matchy uniform aesthetics may look good but fight wars mediocrely, and societies that allow for variety and diversity may give less pleasant aerial shots during parades but fight wars better.

    Today is ten years to the day since Trump came down the escalator and changed the course of the country and, in so many ways, changed us. It is a moment to think back and think of how much coarser, uglier, crueler the nation has become in the hands of an unwell man. The daily drumbeat of abductions and cuts and eviscerations and illegal actions and sadistic policy ideas slowly corrodes the heart. We are being remade in Trump’s sickness.

    And yet. And yet what the parade reminded me is that Trump, in one regard, at least, faces steep odds. His project depends on turning Americans into something we are deeply not: uniform, cohesive, disciplined, in lockstep.

    But we are more hotsteppers than locksteppers. We are more improvised solo than phalanx. We are more unruly than rule-following. Trump has a lot working in his favor as he seeks to build a dictatorship for his self-enrichment. But what will always push against him is this deep inner nature that has stood through time: the chaotic, colorful spontaneity of the American soul. We don’t march shoulder to shoulder. We shimmy.

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    Live conversations this week!

    Join us on Monday, June 16, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we talk again with scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Tomorrow, Tuesday, June 17, at noon Eastern, we’ll talk with Texas Congressman Greg Casar; then at 12:30 p.m., we’ll have a piano-side conversation with musician, activist, and author Adam Met. And on Wednesday, June 18, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, will join our Book Club meeting.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.


    Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • What’s really happening on the streets of Los Angeles? What are immigrants taken in ICE raids facing? And what does it mean for the upcoming No Kings rallies this weekend?

    We just talked about it all with political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio and Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, a lawyer and organizer at the ACLU of Southern California. Both are immigrants themselves, and, as with so many Americans, they bring that experience to their work supporting the protesters and to their long fight for immigrants’ rights (Kwon, in fact, was motivated to become a lawyer by his own fight for citizenship).

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    The city of Los Angeles, Kwon told us, just faced the most devastating wildfires in recent history, and now faces a manufactured firestorm. And that’s because, Anat told us, Los Angeles is what Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fear most. It’s a famously immigrant city, where people from all backgrounds can feel at home and come together to build something new. But that’s also the American story. 1 in 8 Americans lives in California. 1 in 35 Americans lives in Los Angeles. It’s as real as America gets, and it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise. What’s happening now, she said, isn’t just a struggle in the streets, but the epic narrative battle to define what America is.

    The pushback against the Trump regime, Anat suggests, may be the spark that catalyzes mass resistance, that provides social proof that Americans are indeed in the know (we understand what’s going on) and in the no (that we refuse this).

    So get out there this weekend for the No Kings demonstrations happening nationwide on Saturday, June 14. As Anat has told us before, “Resist, refuse, and ridicule!” And say no to kings, as she sang today (watch the video above and wait for it, with TLC’s “No Scrubs” in your mental karaoke machine).

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    More Live conversations next week!

    Join us on Monday, June 16, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we talk to scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Then on Tuesday, June 17, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have a musical conversation with musician, activist, and author Adam Met. And on Wednesday, June 18, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyhone Will Have Always Been Against This, will join our Book Club meeting.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • This afternoon, we had a very spirited conversation with journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the authors of Original Sin — a conversation that we realize a lot of readers of The Ink didn’t want us to have (we know, because you told us so before and during the event).

    The book, Tapper and Thompson made very clear, may be about Joe Biden’s decline and the effort White House insiders made to hide it, at a terrible cost to the country, but it’s about something bigger. And that’s not just the problem of our gerontocracy, but on an even larger scale, the failure on the part of both political parties and the media to do the kind of self-reflection that makes growth and progress possible. And if the Democratic Party had been able to come to that kind of reckoning, Tapper and Thompson argue through reporting, we wouldn’t have Trump in office now.

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    As Tapper told us, “A party that is only able to criticize the other side but not look within itself is one that is going to have a hard time winning independent voters or winning back disillusioned Democrats. And you can’t win an election that way.”

    Say what you will about the book’s timing, or whether Republicans need to take a look a Trump’s own cognitive or personality issues — but that’s a “different wing of the hospital,” as Tapper put it. And with the Democratic brand in decline and the country desperately in need of a strong opposition party, we might just as desperately need to have the conversation that Original Sin is trying to occasion.

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    More conversations this week!

    Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, June 11, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for The Ink Book Club (A reminder: this week’s conversation is moving to Zoom; details at the bottom of this post). And on Thursday, June 12, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’re back with political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • To coin a proverb, one fascism scholar is an expert; two is an unlawful gathering. So today we talked with scholars of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Jason Stanley (and 4,100 readers) about whether Donald Trump’s disproportionate response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles puts the United States further down the path towards a police state — or opens up possibilities for an effective and sustained mass response.

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    Both suggest that Trump is over-responding to the Los Angeles protests as “insurance” — he’s not concerned these protests specifically; like the military parade planned for next week, it’s about habituating Americans to seeing force on the streets, to pressure people not to protect their neighbors and communities, because the regime is weak, not strong. And as benefits stop and the economy contracts, Ruth suggests, a reckoning — and a real mass movement — is on the way.

    What does that look like? As Jason told us, it’s going to require something new. “Fascism is a revolution,” he says, “and you cannot defeat a revolution by returning to the status quo.” “When we resist,” says Ruth, “we’re modeling a different ethos — becoming part of something bigger.”

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    And if you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s newsletter, Lucid.

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    More Live conversations this week!

    Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, June 10, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll speak to journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about Joe Biden and the future of the Democratic Party. On Wednesday, June 11, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll meet with The Ink Book Club (This week’s conversation is moving to Zoom; details at the bottom of this post). And on Thursday, June 12, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’re back with political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • We just talked with legendary prosecutor and former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. But the conversation ranged to all sorts of other things: the political impact of Cardi B, how much making the effort to pronounce names matters in building a multicultural democracy, the failures of meritocracy (and the internet), and what A.I. means for the future of creativity. Plus, everyone committed to quitting before they become billionaires and (should such a thing happen) to work for a truly progressive tax plan so billionaires could never happen again.

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    The survey runs through tomorrow, so get your answers in soon. Just click on the button below to get started.

    Start The Ink’s future-of-media survey


    More Live conversations next week!

    Join us Monday, June 9, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for our regular conversation with scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Then on Tuesday, June 10, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll speak to journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about Joe Biden and the future of the Democratic Party. On Wednesday, June 11, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll meet with The Ink Book Club. And on Thursday, June 12, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’re back with political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio. We hope you can join us for all of our Live discussions!

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) from our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Does the Democratic Party need an honest reckoning after the 2024 election? Or does it just need to move on and start fixing stuff?

    Governor Wes Moore of Maryland — who joined us this afternoon for his very first Substack Live — told us that while it’s important to understand how we got here, he doesn’t have much time for a party of “slow and no.” It’s a time for action, and he sees governors as uniquely able to do just that in the fight against a president who sees the constitution as a suggestion at best. Moore is raising taxes on the wealthiest Marylanders, hiring laid-off federal workers, and funding HBCUs — all of these things right now — rather than commissioning a study so someone can do it one day.

    Moore clearly has the kind of political talent that gets the notice of presidential whisperers like George Clooney. I asked him if there was any way he would run.

    Don’t miss it. Tune in above, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

    Leave a comment


    These full replays of our conversations are typically available to our supporting subscribers. We’re opening this one to all today, but we would love you to subscribe and help grow this work.

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    Take our future-of-media survey

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    More Live conversations next week!

    Join us Monday, June 2, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for a conversation with historian and biographer Sam Tanenhaus, who’ll be talking about his new book about William F. Buckley. Then on Tuesday, June 3, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll speak to Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell. On Wednesday, June 4, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll meet with The Ink Book Club. And on Thursday, June 5, at 11 a.m. Eastern, we will be joined by lawyer and former United States Attorney Preet Bharara. We hope you can join us for all of our Live discussions!

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) from our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Does the Democratic Party need an honest reckoning after the 2024 election? Or does it just need to move on and start fixing stuff?

    Governor Wes Moore of Maryland — who joined us this afternoon for his very first Substack Live — told us that while it’s important to understand how we got here, he doesn’t have much time for a party of “slow and no.” It’s a time for action, and he sees governors as uniquely able to do just that in the fight against a president who sees the constitution as a suggestion at best. Moore is raising taxes on the wealthiest Marylanders, hiring laid-off federal workers, and funding HBCUs — all of these things right now — rather than commissioning a study so someone can do it one day.

    Moore clearly has the kind of political talent that gets the notice of presidential whisperers like George Clooney. I asked him if there was any way he would run.

    Don’t miss it. Tune in above, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

    Leave a comment


    Our live conversations are open to all. This full replay of the conversation is available to our supporting subscribers.

    Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build a new media. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

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    Take our future-of-media survey

    We want to know what sort of news and analysis you are looking for, and how you feel about the legacy press, and the latest forms (like this newsletter) — and we hope you won’t mind answering a few questions for us. Help us understand — and shape — the future of media.

    Start The Ink’s future-of-media survey


    More Live conversations next week!

    Join us Monday, June 2, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for a conversation with historian and biographer Sam Tanenhaus, who’ll be talking about his new book about William F. Buckley. Then on Tuesday, June 3, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll speak to Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell. On Wednesday, June 4, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll meet with The Ink Book Club. And on Thursday, June 5, at 11 a.m. Eastern, we will be joined by lawyer and former United States Attorney Preet Bharara. We hope you can join us for all of our Live discussions!

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) from our homepage.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android


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  • Is calling the Republican budget proposal the “MAGA Murder Bill” too alienating to moderate voters, or is it how you do what the right does so well — get people to have your conversation, even if they disagree?

    Is now not the time to point out the Democratic Party’s incoherence in the face of Donald Trump’s attacks on American institutions? Or is now precisely the time?

    And why do focus group voters see Republican leaders as apex predators and Democratic leaders as turtles or deer in the headlights? And what animal would be a better model for reinvigorated Democrats?

    This is some of what we covered in our live conversation today with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio. Tune in and tell us what you think.

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    Take our future-of-media survey

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    Start The Ink’s future-of-media survey


    More Live conversation — today!

    Join us later this afternoon, Wednesday, May 29, at 3 p.m. Eastern, for a conversation with Maryland Governor Wes Moore.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • Last night at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, America got a talking-to. And so did I.

    Beyoncé Knowles-Carter performed her “Cowboy Carter” tour act over three hours in a stubborn May rain. It was full of what one might expect from one of the most ambitious artists of our time: literal and vocal pyrotechnics, costume changes that on their own justified the ticket, a buffet of music going back decades, video art that painted a personal narrative and situated her in a cultural lineage and political tradition, the inclusion of her kids, a seemingly spontaneous gender reveal, and more.

    Yet I couldn’t help but notice that there was something else going on, both underneath and over top of everything else, both subliminally and very, very not subliminally. Beyoncé was telling a whole nation: Fuck fatalism. Ditch your despair. To save America, reclaim America.

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    In case you didn’t get the message’s more subtle incarnations, she repeatedly put up on a big screen an image of herself in a sash that said, “The reclamation of America.”

    ICYMI, as they say.

    Today a right-wing populist authoritarian movement — fueled by racism and xenophobia and misogyny and nativism and the hatred of anyone who doesn’t fit some impossible definition of who a person is allowed to be — has captured the government of the United States. Its force is immense. Its project is ambitious and lethal. It is doing great damage. It is linked to allied movements worldwide.

    In the face of such movements, there is the question of how to respond. There are those who suggest laying low and waiting for self-immolation. There are those who suggest safe ideas, incremental policies, no jazz hands. There are those who seize on these developments to talk about how terrible America always has been, in fact, that this is just more naked now. There are those who dream of Portugal. There are those who march and fight back. And there are those who speak as though it has already happened, the country has been lost, everything is ruined, how sad to lose it all.

    Fuck your despair, Beyoncé is telling you, though she was raised too well to say that.

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    Last night at MetLife we all got a talking-to about another way of meeting the moment. By wrapping herself in the flag, in image after image, costume after costume, song after song (she snuck in the national anthem), she made an emphatic case for refusing to concede patriotism, a mistake progressive forces in American life have long and disastrously made. Do not let them be the arbiters of who belongs.

    Without needing to make it explicit — leave it to lesser artists like me to do that crass translation — she got in the face of MAGA every few minutes. She did so both deniably and undeniably. She did so without lapsing into academic jargon of inclusion or “woke” terminology. Rather, she celebrated what it looks like when everyone has a voice, when no one is cowed, when history is not erased, when everyone is liberated, when women are loud and powerful, when who you love doesn’t determine your level of safety, when you can be proud of your roots, when love triumphs over cruelty.

    The crowd was the crowd of the emerging country, whose birth even Donald Trump doesn’t have the power to abort. It was a crowd of many colors and histories, a crowd of all kinds, less confined to the identity boxes of the past, a crowd of complexities. The crowd was its own rejection of the rejections at the heart of the MAGA project.

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    Beyoncé once again reminded her audience that the nostalgia for an imaginary past that seethes on the right is rooted in ignorance and denial. She frontally took on those cable pundits who said she was ruining country music, with only the most thinly veiled racism, putting up their “punditry” right there on big screens. And then she revealed the lie by showing you the rich tradition of Black country artistry in whose footsteps she followed. Nostalgia isn’t just bad for the neck. It brings on blindness.

    This is a boxed country now. You are in this tribe, or that one, and everyone has gatekeepers. We live in an age in which movements that need to grow to survive and win devote more energy to moral background checks than recruitment. Beyoncé defied the boxes, claiming all the inheritances and memberships at once, basking in being, as she calls it in one song, “contradicted.” She is a daughter and granddaughter of civil rights, she is a part of a tradition of revolution, she is an avatar of financial aspiration, she is a feminist, she is a boss, she is a southerner, she is a country musician, she is a rapper, she is a legatee, she is an innovator, she is, she is, she is.

    As I watched her, I felt jolted into a realization. The idea of losing the country can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fuck that capitulation. She is not capitulating. You shouldn’t either. This is her country. This is your country. This is my country. Reclaim it. Remember that politics is downstream of culture, and you have to make your case in the culture if you are to have any hope down where politics begins. Refuse the stories that erase you. Refuse the idea that they can steal your country from you.

    Welcome to the reclamation of America.


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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • We just got off a call with the technology journalist Karen Hao, the keenest chronicler of the technology that’s promising — or threatening — to reshape the world, who has a new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

    The book talks not just about artificial intelligence and what it might be, or its most visible spokesperson and what he might believe, but also about the way the tech industry titans resemble more and more the empires of old in their relentless resource extraction and exploitation of labor around the world, their take-no-prisoners competitiveness against supposedly “evil” pretenders, and their religious fervor for progress and even salvation. She also told us about what the future might look like if we get A.I. right, and the people who produce the data, the resources, and control the labor power can reassert their ownership and push back against these new empires to build a more humane and human future.

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    You won’t want to miss this, so check out the full conversation above, and click on the image below to get a copy of Hao’s essential book.

    Cover image of "Empire of AI", the new book about OpenAI by the technology journalist Karen Hao

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    More Live conversations this week!

    Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, May 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we will meet Live with The Ink Book Club to wrap up our discussion of Abundance, and on Thursday, May 29, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll be back with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio. We hope you can make it to both conversations!

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events..

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.


  • Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

    Get 20% off a group subscription


    Leave a comment


    More Live conversations next week!

    Join us next Tuesday, May 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll talk with author and journalist Karen Hao about her new book, Empire of AI. On Wednesday, May 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we will meet Live with The Ink Book Club, and on Thursday, May 29, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be back with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • I’m so proud of this book club. The idea that we can get thousands of people to engage with a book, discuss it together, meet the authors, struggle with the ideas, and do so with kindness, openness, and an interest in learning — a modern miracle!

    For our third meeting of the Book Club, we were joined by Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. We talked about how the ideals of the political left — such as that housing is a human right — are contradicted by the policies it enacts; about their effort to make Americans more obsessed with the future than the past; and why they believe an “abundance” agenda would help defeat authoritarianism.

    And I put to them some of the criticisms our community has raised: Does Abundance evacuate power and predation from the conversation? Are the authors ignoring the almost inevitable hijacking of this revolution, too, by the same oligarchic interests that have cornered the fruits of virtually every other leap forward in our lifetime? Is the kind of progress they seek win-win, or almost certainly win-lose in the capitalist, post-Citizens United society we live in?

    We had a spirited discussion, and I encourage all who couldn’t join us to tune in.


    The discussion guides and group chats and live and video discussions of the book club are open to supporting subscribers of The Ink.

    Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

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    Leave a comment


    More Live conversations this week!

    Tomorrow, Thursday, May 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with author and finance expert Ramit Sethi, then at 4:00 p.m., we’ll be speaking with the journalist Jim Acosta. We hope you can make it to all of these great discussions.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android

    Read more

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • I was going to be brave, but we’re all on my health insurance.

    I was going to be brave, but I have a mortgage.

    I was going to be brave, but have you seen what college costs now?

    I was going to be brave, but my stock options haven’t vested yet.

    I was going to be brave, but our cancer research depends on federal funding.

    I was going to be brave, but I think I should wait until my platform is bigger.

    I was going to be brave, but then I got a book deal.

    I was going to be brave, but I believe I signed an NDA.

    I was going to be brave, but I have spent so long building up this life.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t want all the negativity.

    Leave a comment

    I was going to be brave, but I’m not sure I’m the right person to speak up.

    I was going to be brave, but I’m really in a place of taking care of myself right now.

    I was going to be brave, but then I thought of alienating my friends.

    I was going to be brave, but what will people say?

    I was going to be brave, but it won’t be worth it if I never get invited back.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t like being a Johnny-one-note or a Debbie Downer.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t always want to be that person.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t want to make everything about politics, you know?

    I was going to be brave, but I realized I could be more effective behind the scenes.

    I was going to be brave, but talk is cheap and strategy is what matters.

    I was going to be brave, but I thought we should have a meeting first.

    I was going to be brave, but then we decided to have a vote of the partners first.

    I was going to be brave, but our merger has not been approved yet.

    I was going to be brave, but we are looking to expand our audience.

    I was going to be brave, but after this fundraising round.

    I was going to be brave, but we’re a tax-exempt organization.

    I was going to be brave, but I fear being smeared as an extremist.

    Share

    I was going to be brave, but I prefer to let the work speak for itself.

    I was going to be brave, but I tell stories — I’m not an activist.

    I was going to be brave, but so many people could be hurt if I said something.

    I was going to be brave, but maybe it’ll all just work itself out.

    I was going to be brave, but the damage is still on a pretty small scale.

    I was going to be brave, but we’ve survived worse.

    I was going to be brave, but the system always self-corrects.

    I was going to be brave, but, ultimately, I know it won’t happen in America.

    I was going to be brave, but let’s see how the courts rule. How the midterms go. How…

    I was going to be brave, but maybe this will accelerate the collapse of the old ways and wake people up and bring in the new.

    I was going to be brave, but I’m not an expert.

    I was going to be brave, but I’m still listening and learning.

    I was going to be brave, but people like me shouldn’t be out front.

    Subscribe now

    I was going to be brave, but I’m not perfect and don’t want to be a hypocrite.

    I was going to be brave, but it’s complicated.

    I was going to be brave, but everything shouldn’t be reduced to good and evil.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t want to add to all the division.

    I was going to be brave, but what if they come after my family?

    I was going to be brave, but the timing has to be right.

    I was going to be brave, but

    I was going to be brave

    I was going to be

    I was going to

    I was going

    I was

    I

    Share


    If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.

    That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

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    Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • I was going to be brave, but we’re all on my health insurance.

    I was going to be brave, but I have a mortgage.

    I was going to be brave, but have you seen what college costs now?

    I was going to be brave, but my stock options haven’t vested yet.

    I was going to be brave, but our cancer research depends on federal funding.

    I was going to be brave, but I think I should wait until my platform is bigger.

    I was going to be brave, but then I got a book deal.

    I was going to be brave, but I believe I signed an NDA.

    I was going to be brave, but I have spent so long building up this life.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t want all the negativity.

    Leave a comment

    I was going to be brave, but I’m not sure I’m the right person to speak up.

    I was going to be brave, but I’m really in a place of taking care of myself right now.

    I was going to be brave, but then I thought of alienating my friends.

    I was going to be brave, but what will people say?

    I was going to be brave, but it won’t be worth it if I never get invited back.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t like being a Johnny-one-note or a Debbie Downer.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t always want to be that person.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t want to make everything about politics, you know?

    I was going to be brave, but I realized I could be more effective behind the scenes.

    I was going to be brave, but talk is cheap and strategy is what matters.

    I was going to be brave, but I thought we should have a meeting first.

    I was going to be brave, but then we decided to have a vote of the partners first.

    I was going to be brave, but our merger has not been approved yet.

    I was going to be brave, but we are looking to expand our audience.

    I was going to be brave, but after this fundraising round.

    I was going to be brave, but we’re a tax-exempt organization.

    I was going to be brave, but I fear being smeared as an extremist.

    Share

    I was going to be brave, but I prefer to let the work speak for itself.

    I was going to be brave, but I tell stories — I’m not an activist.

    I was going to be brave, but so many people could be hurt if I said something.

    I was going to be brave, but maybe it’ll all just work itself out.

    I was going to be brave, but the damage is still on a pretty small scale.

    I was going to be brave, but we’ve survived worse.

    I was going to be brave, but the system always self-corrects.

    I was going to be brave, but, ultimately, I know it won’t happen in America.

    I was going to be brave, but let’s see how the courts rule. How the midterms go. How…

    I was going to be brave, but maybe this will accelerate the collapse of the old ways and wake people up and bring in the new.

    I was going to be brave, but I’m not an expert.

    I was going to be brave, but I’m still listening and learning.

    I was going to be brave, but people like me shouldn’t be out front.

    Subscribe now

    I was going to be brave, but I’m not perfect and don’t want to be a hypocrite.

    I was going to be brave, but it’s complicated.

    I was going to be brave, but everything shouldn’t be reduced to good and evil.

    I was going to be brave, but I don’t want to add to all the division.

    I was going to be brave, but what if they come after my family?

    I was going to be brave, but the timing has to be right.

    I was going to be brave, but

    I was going to be brave

    I was going to be

    I was going to

    I was going

    I was

    I

    Share


    If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.

    That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

    Get 20% off a group subscription


    Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • We just had a long and very challenging Live conversation with Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, journalist and novelist Ross Barkan, and our friend (and former Trump advisor) Michael Cohen. We talked about how the reality of Donald Trump’s presidency has upended American politics, not least for Trump and the MAGA movement. Rep. Himes, a noted pragmatic centrist, is now willing to talk seriously about progressive ideas like Medicare for All. Cohen’s trajectory out of the Trump orbit has made him a fiery advocate for constitutional rights. And for Barkan, the first months of Trump 2.0 signal that the MAGA brand has peaked and is in decline. Watch the whole video for their thoughts on what’s next.

    If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.

    That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

    Get 20% off a group subscription


    Leave a comment


    More Live conversations this week!

    Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 21, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, join us for this week’s Book Club meeting. We’ll be joined by Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Then on Thursday, May 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with author and finance expert Ramit Sethi, then at 4:00 p.m., we’ll be speaking with the journalist Jim Acosta. We hope you can make it to all of these great discussions.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

    Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app
    Available for iOS and Android

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • I’ve been seeing commencement addresses popping up here and there. Unfortunately, I’m the kind of person who is invited to do everything exactly once. Not sure what it is about me…

    So I thought I would share the one and only commencement address I have ever given, to my former high school, Sidwell Friends.


    “You will rewrite the rules of the world”

    Commencement address to Sidwell Friends School

    June 9, 2023

    Bryan Garman, one of the finest teachers I’ve ever had; faculty and staff of this school that molded me; parents and caregivers; visiting Canadian smoke; and you, bright, shining graduates:

    The task of the high school commencement speaker is to give older-person life advice to people who hate older people giving them advice.

    Hey, I get it. Your generation already gets so much bad advice.

    Don’t spend $10 on avocado toast; invest in avocado toast futures! Don’t buy coffee on the way to work; inherit a coffee shop chain!

    It’s like: “Here’s a broken world. May we offer you some life hacks?”

    But let me say: Just because your parents have left you a broken world, doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It just means they love other stuff more. Like Range Rovers and lobbying.

    Today is a special moment for any family, because right around now an invisible milestone is crossed: Every meal you have with your family from now on is optional. So if your elders are sentimental, hug them. They see the arc of life bending. They used to change your diapers. Soon, you’ll change theirs.

    Today you make a new beginning. But the burden of your generation is that you make that beginning in a moment in history full of the fear of endings. You hear it all around you: liberal democracy is doomed, the American dream is dead, truth itself is in peril, the earth is toast.

    Happy Graduation!!! Your present is smoke.

    Subscribe now

    When Bryan asked me to give this address, here was the question that came to me: When the world feels like it’s ending but you are only just getting started, how might you build a good life?

    The first invitation I want to make to you — I’m offering invitations, not advice — is to rewrite the rules of the world.

    The failure of previous generations to solve our gravest problems is your inheritance. But it includes a gift that comes to few generations in history: a chance to reject the dogmas of old and, in the words of James Baldwin, “begin again.”

    As much as any generation in history, yours has earned the right to reimagine the world.

    Take climate. Bad. Very bad. And yet it is the very direness of the situation that has given your generation newfound power.

    If our institutions were working fine, the climate issue would have remained narrowly about climate — about tax credits and wind turbines. But because our institutions are not working fine, your generation has stepped up, sat in, grabbed the bullhorn, and changed the conversation.

    Because of you, the climate discussion is no longer just about 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s about redrafting our social contract, reckoning with capitalism, redressing racial injustice, and rebuilding the physical landscape of our societies in order to solve the climate crisis. And it’s about using the climate crisis to solve these things we should have solved a long time ago but lacked the guts.

    Your generation understands what prior generations failed to: that the fight for an earth we can live on can’t just be about doom and sacrifice. That people aren’t really motivated to make stuff less bad. That we must invite people in to a thrilling, purpose-giving project to create better societies.

    Leave a comment

    Or take gender. Once again, your inheritance is a hot mess. The patriarchy is in full-fledged revolt against a world trending toward equality. Millions have been radicalized to fear trans and nonbinary people as an existential threat.

    But here, too, the hot mess you inherit is a permission slip. You have a freedom now that few in history have had to reimagine a world liberated from the fetid jail cells of gender.

    And you’re already doing it. Your generation is redefining masculinity, testing out new ways of being a man not rooted in dominating women. You are fighting in defense of gender diversity and the freedom of people to be who they are.

    That fight isn’t just for some of us. It’s for all of us who, at some moment or other, have been caught in the straightjacket of gender dogmatism. Every boy who’s ever cried and been told not to, or who happened to prefer art to football. Every woman crushed by the relentless pressure to look, talk, think, and smile in a certain way.

    Thank you for reading The.Ink. This post is public so feel free to share it.

    Share

    Anyone who has TikTok knows that your generation has a talent for seeing through adult lies and hypocrisies, and of thinking for yourselves. The world needs your reimagining. Multi-racial democracy — how do we realize it? Capitalism — reform or overthrow? Housing — commodity or right? What role should work play in our lives now? Should we abolish offices?

    Should we abolish podcasts?

    You have a chance to ask and answer more fundamental questions than most generations get to. You will rewrite the rules of the world.

    Now to my second invitation: Even as you rewrite these rules — an ambitious task — your generation will be called to redefine ambition.

    Look: The fact that you are here means you have survived a “Hunger Games” ambition gauntlet. You have had to cultivate the kind of ambition that tells you to stay up another hour when your teenage body is begging you to rest. You’ve submitted to endless structure at the expense of exploration and connection. Perhaps you’ve had to suppress the wilder parts of yourself to develop the meritocracy-conquering, college-bound self.

    That kind of ambition got you here. But it won’t get you where you’re going — if where you want to go is a fulfilling life, not a depleted one.

    Many adults won’t tell you the truth about this, sometimes because they’ve lived depleted lives themselves and they feel it’s your turn now. Or because they worry you will struggle if you don’t have that manic drive. Or because schools and colleges benefit when you make a ton of money and donate to them, even if your soul is shriveling.

    Let me be the grown-up with no dog in the fight who tells you there is another way.

    I’m not saying abandon ambition. After all, for two decades I have been plotting to be your 2023 commencement speaker. Ambition works.

    I’m not saying be less ambitious. I’m saying be ambitious about your whole life, about everything, not just your work and your career.

    Be ambitious about cooking people meals that make them remember their grandmother. Be ambitious about being the first friend people call — not text — after the oncologist calls them.

    Be ambitious about everything: About how interesting a partner you are, about the new thoughts you bring your love when you get a babysitter and sneak out for dinner. About the parties you host. About the gestures you make as a neighbor. About making friends.

    Leave a comment

    Because let me tell you: Unlike friendship when you’re 23 with great skin, adult friendship is not automatic.

    And redefining ambition doesn’t just mean balancing work and personal life. It also means rethinking what it is to be ambitious about work.

    Pursue the ambition of a craft, not of a career. There’s a difference.

    A craft is a basic activity you dedicate yourself to day after day, decade after decade, like batting practice. My craft is making sentences. Painting is a craft, editing film is a craft, designing buildings is a craft, drafting arguments is a craft, butchering hogs is a craft, writing code is a craft, organizing neighborhoods door to door is a craft.

    Too many people chase career success more than craft and end up with neither. If you commit to doing something particular and focused really well, and obsessively try to get better at that thing, you will find your career and your success. Don’t obsess about how to rise. Obsess about getting really, really, scarily good at something.

    And don’t do work you don’t believe in. Frankly, I trust your idealism right now. But soon there will be apartments to buy, dates to take nice places, children to send to expensive schools. Your idealism will be tested. You might tell yourself, “I did want to study law to defend human rights, but corporate law is cool, too, right?

    It’s not.

    Too many people with top-shelf educations go on to lead lives of professional misery, surviving on rationalizations, coming home to their families morally emaciated, because it’s draining to spend your life pretending to believe.

    Don’t get degrees you don’t want. Don’t choose work based on fear — especially the fears of your elders. Don’t use your eventual partner’s and kids’ alleged needs to justify an immoral career.

    Remember: Being set up to make the most money possible isn’t why you came to this school.

    It’s why your parents sent you here.

    And, by the way, this invitation to redefine ambition isn’t just about you having a good life. It’s also about you being able to fix a world in crisis. Because we’re not going to fix what’s broken in the world with the same ethic that broke things.

    You know the ethic. The one that says never rest. Join clubs that will get you into the Ivies, not those that feed your soul. Pursue a C.V. at any cost, even to connection and friendship. That ethic is the high-school-kid variant of the virus that, in its adult form, has wrecked everything: the extractive, slash-and-burn, me-first orientation that brought us unlimited money in politics, unlimited oil drilling, unlimited billionaire hoarding, unlimited power lust by authoritarians.

    A new kind of society will require a new kind of ambition.

    A more sustainable earth will not be realized by people who work unsustainably, treating their bodies like fossil fuels to be extracted at any cost. A multi-racial democracy that listens to every voice and moves beyond domination and supremacy will not be realized by people who believe the right things on paper but sustain the old cultural habits of talking more than listening and needing to dominate every meeting. A more humane economy and more vibrant communities will not be realized by people who don’t know how to turn work off and invite their people over and cook for them. The right of people to be who they are and love who they love will not be realized by people who don’t give themselves space for being and loving.

    Leave a comment

    My third and last invitation is: reclaim the idea of America.

    I’m going to make an assumption that most of you here are in the camp that still believes in liberal democracy, still believes in evidence-based reality, still believes in the ideals of freedom and justice for all. (If you’re not, welcome anyway. We’re recruiting.) If you believe in those things, this has been an era of despair in American life. But I believe that we on the pro-democracy side of things tend, in our despair, to make two big mistakes.

    First, we rightly criticize what needs fixing. But we forget we are doing so because there is something good and noble in America worth fighting for.

    Second, we rightly push back on the foes of progress. But we forget that they are having their little moment precisely because of our progress.

    Forgetting these things, we fall into a funk. We get down on America and despair about the future, and we fail to remind people what we’ve won and what we’re for and not just what we’re against. We make change sound impossible. And, to be honest, we come off like losers.

    And we’re not. In fact, we are falling on our face right now in America because we are jumping high. And it’s time we told that story.

    Share

    For your generation, I know even saying there is anything worthy in the idea of America is what you might call “cringe.” Because you are, rightly, so attuned to America’s failings.

    But let this washed-up geriatric boomer millennial challenge you for a moment. Believing in America, reclaiming the idea of America from fools and bigots, is not cringe. It’s how we get the progress and freedom we seek.

    If our general vibe is that America irredeemably sucks, is irredeemably racist and patriarchal and genocidal and heteronormative and ableist and you-name-it — first of all, we are going to lose every contest for hearts and minds. Being a turnoff is not a political strategy.

    But it’s not just bad strategy. It’s also not true.

    I believe you can be clear-eyed about the injustices and violence and hypocrisy America was built on — and still see the promise of its story.

    This is a country founded on incandescent ideals its own founders were not brave enough to live. A country that has tried to get better, like people do. Tried to get truer to what it said. A country that has made real progress, progress often achieved by those America loved least, loving America enough to strive to make it better.

    Every generation, there has been a struggle over whether to build a bigger “we.” Whether to extend the blessings of liberty and justice to more people. Struggles over slavery, the protection of farmers and factory workers, women’s suffrage, labor unions, a safety net and old age insurance, racial integration, voting rights, poverty, clean air and water, human ability, the right to love and be.

    Each struggle was grueling. In the eye of those storms, progress hardly felt inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable. But over the long run, again and again, the small-hearted faction has been defeated, and the quest for a bigger “we” has won.

    Remembering that helps put today’s American fascist movement in its context and its place.

    This is not some bold new movement of the future. It is a movement of backlash. It is the same small-hearted faction we know from our past. This movement is not steering the ship of our republic. It’s a barnacle on the hull of our progress.

    And our progress is real, and it is good, and it is worthy of celebrating loudly and proudly.

    Because if we don’t claim our progress, the story of that progress will be turned upside-down and weaponized into a dystopian tale of groomers, wokeism, and critical race theory. We need to be evangelists for our progress, cheerfully spreading the good news.

    America isn’t just a country that’s done bad things. It is. But if you have the chance to travel the world, as I’ve been privileged to do, you’ll also realize that America is trying to do something remarkable and rare: create a country forged of the world, made of all the other countries, a country that takes people from everywhere and turns them into the fullest versions of themselves. A country without a shared race or ethnicity, shared religion, shared first language, uniting people instead by values. It’s a dazzling vision no great power in history has ever reached for. And we’re closer than we realize to achieving it. We’re falling on our face because we’re jumping high.

    And if young people like you don’t proudly claim this vision, don’t invent your own authentic patriotism, the loudest voices talking about these changes will be those trying to stop them dead.

    So, my dear class of 2023, these are my invitations to you: reclaim the idea of America; redefine ambition; rewrite the rules of the world.

    And before I send you off, let me salute those who raised you. Let me celebrate your teachers for bringing out your talents. And let me congratulate you. Today you enter adulthood. The world literally can’t wait for what you’ll do with it.


    Photos: Courtesy of Sidwell Friends

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • We just talked live to the economist, author, and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman (and more than 5,000 of you) about Trump’s budget plan and the economics of sadism.

    Krugman explained the Trump budget plan — an “incredible piece of cruelty,” he calls it — and what it would do to Americans’ lives. We also talked about the Democrats, the presidential chances of A.O.C., whether he thinks billionaires should exist, what economists most got wrong over the last generation, what conventional analyses of trade missed about human life, his fear of losing the republic, and why maybe only a color revolution can save American democracy.

    If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.

    That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

    Get 20% off a group subscription


    Leave a comment


    More Live conversations this week!

    Tomorrow, Tuesday, May 20, at 12 p.m. Eastern, we will speak with Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, and at 12:30 p.m., we’ll be joined by author Ross Barkan. Then, for our Book Club meeting (open to supporting Ink subscribers) on Wednesday, May 21, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be joined by Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. On Thursday, May 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with author and finance expert Ramit Sethi, then at 4:00 p.m., we’ll be speaking with the journalist Jim Acosta. We hope you can make it to all of these great discussions.

    To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

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    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • a painting depicting the idea of Manifest Destiny

    Six months ago, Donald Trump won the presidency for the second time — and a legion of people and institutions that stand opposite him vowed a reckoning. The country was promised real soul-searching and sincere, if grueling, introspection — by the Democratic Party, by activist organizations, by the press that aspires to hold Trump to account. Lessons from the first term would be learned this time around. Blind spots would be filled. Sacred cows would be slain for the sake of reinvention.

    Somehow or other, over this past half year, I ended up in many situations in which planned or spontaneous reckoning found its way onto the agenda. Sometimes it was former aides to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris debriefing the campaign. Sometimes it was summits of progressive organizers and movement leaders. Sometimes it was gatherings of labor leaders. Sometimes it was a meeting of funders. Sometimes it was desperate calls from a Democratic Party leader asking what the hell could be done. Sometimes it simply emerged at a dinner party. Sometimes it was more organized. But, again and again, people were asking a version of: How did this happen, again? What do we not see? What must change?

    For a moment, it seemed there might be a window of openness to a real reckoning worthy of the word and age. With a loss so devastating to so many, there was space for rethinking.

    But as I look back on this half year, I can’t escape the conclusion: there was no reckoning. In fact, as far as I could tell, quite the opposite.

    The Ink is brought to you by readers. Support free and independent media that bows to no billionaire or tyrant by becoming a subscriber.

    What I observed in these settings was those who found themselves facing Trump for the second time — whether in active opposition to him or in the adversarial role of the press — wriggling out of the hard self-examination so many promised and craved in November.

    After what was once heralded as a wake-up call, I saw instead in so many quarters human qualities that make reckoning all but impossible: defensiveness, incuriosity, touchiness, the inability to see oneself as others see you, certitude in the name of so-called “moral clarity,” smugness, condescension, blame casting, deflection, and a total rejection of introspection.

    So many of the people and organizations that should be grappling hard in this moment instead seem consumed by the feeling that they have been getting it absolutely right in a world that fails to appreciate their good sense. We were promised a reckoning; instead, we got complexes of feeling misunderstood. Here we are — amazing political party or news organization or activist group — and people don’t get it. Everyone is crazy. But we’re sane!

    This pandemic of incuriosity has spared few.

    Leave a comment

    Former Bidenworld insiders refuse to crack the doors of their minds three percent ajar to the possibility that his decline was a bigger deal than they treated it as being, with consequences the entire country is living through. And the former president himself is now being sent out to do interviews denying it all, everything is fine, I would have won, nothing to see here. It is remarkable, in a sense, this ability to be impervious to and oblivious to what so many others see, to be so uninterested in the possibility of learning from the past.

    People who served on the Harris campaign engage in their own doubling down, insisting that the problems with the campaign were all external to it — the short time horizon, the pressure to stay close to Biden on policy. That the campaign itself was more lackluster and less inspiring and transformational than it could have been — that there are, therefore, lessons that could be drawn for next time — nope. This is no time for genuine reflection.

    The same incuriosity can be found in the progressive wing of the party, among activist and organizing groups. Many meetings have been held, and then at those meetings the same behaviors that made progressive ideas less popular than they would naturally be were repeated. The out-of-touch, jargony, apologetic throat-clearing, the social justice terminology that feels inaccessible to those outside activism or academia, the breathtaking insistence on talking about politics in ways most normal people would not understand, the focus on issues affecting very small numbers of people instead of issues affecting everyone — these habits and reflexes reared their head in progressive “reckonings,” signaling that almost nothing meaningful would be rethought. Progressives have a giant normie problem in America; they don’t seem interested in fixing it, unless repeating the word “intersectional” until everyone comes around counts. Land acknowledgements are fine, but progressives might consider adding “game acknowledgements” to their repertoire. That’s when, like 98 percent of people in this country, you start by joking about last night’s game.

    The Ink is brought to you by readers. Support free and independent media that bows to no billionaire or tyrant by becoming a subscriber.

    At the other end of the spectrum of the broadly defined left, you have corporate-adjacent groups like Third Way, which advocate for business-friendly policies. There is a broad consensus today that the excesses and depredations of neoliberal economic policy and unfettered capitalism and globalization and financialization helped break the country and contributed mightily to the present moment. Do you see a reckoning at places like Third Way, therefore? Nope. You see it putting out statements about how important centrist and business-friendly policies are going forward.

    Then you have the national Democratic Party. Here is another place we were told reckoning might occur. But, spoiler alert, reader, it did not occur. The fact that the national party is not even really a party so much as a fundraising vehicle, the fact that it has embarrassingly little physical presence in much of the country, the fact that it is so cozy with the very donors whose business practices have fueled so much of the populist rage of this moment — none of this was truly reckoned with. Senior party leaders reached out widely for advice but seemed reluctant or unable to act on it.

    Or consider the Democratic Party’s top elected leaders. Can anyone report some dazzling reckoning there? Some really sharp reimagining? The double down is in full force. It is a panglossian politics: everything that should be done is everything we already happen to be doing. There is nothing the angry street is telling us that gives us the shadow of a new idea. We are perfectly perfect, standing where we should be standing, saying what we should be saying. When, on rare occasion, someone like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut or Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois speaks of the failure to reckon, it catches fire. People feel heard. This appears to scare party leadership instead of galvanizing them. Don’t threaten them with the good time of their constituents feeling understood, at last.

    Share

    Among the resistance, too, there is incuriosity. It is admirable, taking up of the cause of defending democracy, the work it involves, even the bravery. But the resistance has been hurt by an attitude that can sometimes imply moral superiority or dismissiveness toward the very citizens it hopes to persuade. There is often an affect of being the only ones to get it. The movement has struggled to attract people of color, and Black people in particular; it has struggled to attract young people and working class people who don’t have the luxury of time and gas money. And these conspicuous (and democracy-threatening) absences often seem to inspire contempt for those who don’t see rather than curiosity about the resistance’s own limitations. In politics, if your ranks are fewer than you want them to be, the safe assumption is that it’s your own fault.

    The press is, of course, not the opposition to Trump — even though some would like it play more of that role. But it was widely agreed in many quarters of my profession that some rethinking was in order after Trump’s second victory. How do you combat his lies rather than unwittingly amplify them? How do you cover a man who uses the vernacular of traditional media forms to spew propaganda? How do you hold to account a man who is waging frontal war on the press itself? Why is the mainstream press so distrusted, and why is so much of the bled-out trust finding its way to independent podcasts and newsletters? But I have been struck by how many of my peers in the media have chosen to double down rather than truly rethink and reimagine. Here, too, is a defensiveness almost heroic in its devotion to keeping the old thing going. We just have to keep doing what we were doing. Our critics don’t get it. People want us to be this and that; they want us to betray ourselves. We will stick to what we know. And the trust bleeds further out, and many of the traditional media forms reach fewer and fewer Americans.

    Of course, there are exceptions to these phenomena. But, from where I sit, I have noticed infinitely more wagon circling and doubling down. Ask yourself: In what sectors of American life have you seen leaders (and regular people) engaging in the actual kind of reckoning I’m talking about, letting the criticisms fall on them, trying to figure out what they mean, secure in knowing they are still decent even if they have limitations they can’t see?

    Leave a comment

    The defensiveness and incuriosity are understandable. People naturally feel defenseless in this moment; the cavalry is very clearly not coming. No one is in the mood to make themselves vulnerable right now, because vulnerability is danger. The stakes are high, and every hint of weakness will be exploited. If the Democratic Party takes a genuine public look at itself, or if a big media company does, won’t Trump exploit the crack in the armor? It takes a level of security to look at yourself and criticize part of what you’ve become without feeling that you are at risk of invalidating the whole. It may not feel like the time.

    The problem is that, in refusing reckoning, refusing introspection, turning against curiosity itself, those facing Trump become more like him.

    The mirror neurons of our collective brain are firing on full blast right now. Introspection is, of course, the central gaping absence in Trump himself. But now his deepest tendencies are becoming our tendencies standing across from him.

    An unthinking man is making us unthinking. An unreflective man who always thinks his first thought is his best thought is inspiring that instinct in his foils. A president blindly sure of himself is making others blindly sure that everyone who supports him is deluded or ill. A man who sees all critics as haters is stirring a similar defensiveness in those who face him.

    Trump is causing those playing opposite him in this drama to remake themselves in his image. His is a Trumpomorphic opposition.

    What perhaps protects Trump’s power and position as much as any formal power is how he changes those opposite him. There is a small chance he will throw someone like me in jail one day. But he has already remade my heart, made me at times harsher, less prone to assume good faith, more dismissive, than I would have been. This is a way of defanging your opposition that is considerably easier to scale.

    Trump makes those he faces less equipped to face him. Less and less prone to living the lives of curiosity, openness, self-doubt and self-questioning, visioning and revisioning, wondering, renewal, and constructive jettisoning that is so vital to actual strategy and action. He drains his foils of their lifeblood, and, remarkably, has them celebrating the wasting of their minds as imagined strength.

    Trump will never be defeated, or held to account, or kept in proper check — pick your lane and vocation — by people as unthinking and defensive and incurious as he is. Making you as facile as he is serves only him. Nuance and complexity are part of the way out — and, above all, curiosity about what you don’t see.

    Subscribe now

    A culture of incuriosity prevents any real understanding of Trump’s enduring appeal — even in the face of the present chaos and pain. Everyone with some one- or two-word catchall explanation for what is going on — Fox! racism! — is pretending they know things. This incuriosity prevents his opposition from seizing on the clearly potent issues he has latched on to — say, how trade works — and offering their own, non-rampaging version. The incuriosity prevents the construction of a broad pro-democracy coalition. It prevents the reform and transformation of political parties and movements. It prevents the kind of changes to the news business that could allow good information to reach way more people.

    The cost of all this incuriosity can be measured in distrust. Majorities of Americans do not trust the major political parties, do not trust journalists, do not trust people in sclerotic institutions who are so wedded to their certainties that no new information can derail them. Trump has lost a considerable amount of support since taking office. Yet it is a remarkable fact about our present situation that this slide has not really seemed to benefit Democrats.

    Incuriosity is perhaps the knowledge culture of a tribal age. In more tribal societies, people don’t ask what’s the best way to prepare bread or throw a wedding or allow women to spend their time. They do those things the way they do those things. Questions are trouble. When you’re scared and hunkering down with your people, you may not feel in the mood for a big rethinking. This fear has to be gotten over.

    Where is the boldness? Where is the wildness? Where are the people willing to shred their own deepest assumptions and roll the dice? Where are the institutions renovating their entire strategy, in the cold light of new realities?

    After all, the opposite of Trumpism is not just a different immigration or tax policy. It is, at bottom, fundamentally different habits of mind: curiosity, humility, openness to criticism, a hunger for growth, and the courage to change.

    Share


    If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.

    That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

    Get 20% off a group subscription


    Image: “American Progress,” by John Gast, 1872

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.

  • a painting depicting the idea of Manifest Destiny

    Six months ago, Donald Trump won the presidency for the second time — and a legion of people and institutions that stand opposite him vowed a reckoning. The country was promised real soul-searching and sincere, if grueling, introspection — by the Democratic Party, by activist organizations, by the press that aspires to hold Trump to account. Lessons from the first term would be learned this time around. Blind spots would be filled. Sacred cows would be slain for the sake of reinvention.

    Somehow or other, over this past half year, I ended up in many situations in which planned or spontaneous reckoning found its way onto the agenda. Sometimes it was former aides to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris debriefing the campaign. Sometimes it was summits of progressive organizers and movement leaders. Sometimes it was gatherings of labor leaders. Sometimes it was a meeting of funders. Sometimes it was desperate calls from a Democratic Party leader asking what the hell could be done. Sometimes it simply emerged at a dinner party. Sometimes it was more organized. But, again and again, people were asking a version of: How did this happen, again? What do we not see? What must change?

    For a moment, it seemed there might be a window of openness to a real reckoning worthy of the word and age. With a loss so devastating to so many, there was space for rethinking.

    But as I look back on this half year, I can’t escape the conclusion: there was no reckoning. In fact, as far as I could tell, quite the opposite.

    The Ink is brought to you by readers. Support free and independent media that bows to no billionaire or tyrant by becoming a subscriber.

    What I observed in these settings was those who found themselves facing Trump for the second time — whether in active opposition to him or in the adversarial role of the press — wriggling out of the hard self-examination so many promised and craved in November.

    After what was once heralded as a wake-up call, I saw instead in so many quarters human qualities that make reckoning all but impossible: defensiveness, incuriosity, touchiness, the inability to see oneself as others see you, certitude in the name of so-called “moral clarity,” smugness, condescension, blame casting, deflection, and a total rejection of introspection.

    So many of the people and organizations that should be grappling hard in this moment instead seem consumed by the feeling that they have been getting it absolutely right in a world that fails to appreciate their good sense. We were promised a reckoning; instead, we got complexes of feeling misunderstood. Here we are — amazing political party or news organization or activist group — and people don’t get it. Everyone is crazy. But we’re sane!

    This pandemic of incuriosity has spared few.

    Leave a comment

    Former Bidenworld insiders refuse to crack the doors of their minds three percent ajar to the possibility that his decline was a bigger deal than they treated it as being, with consequences the entire country is living through. And the former president himself is now being sent out to do interviews denying it all, everything is fine, I would have won, nothing to see here. It is remarkable, in a sense, this ability to be impervious to and oblivious to what so many others see, to be so uninterested in the possibility of learning from the past.

    People who served on the Harris campaign engage in their own doubling down, insisting that the problems with the campaign were all external to it — the short time horizon, the pressure to stay close to Biden on policy. That the campaign itself was more lackluster and less inspiring and transformational than it could have been — that there are, therefore, lessons that could be drawn for next time — nope. This is no time for genuine reflection.

    The same incuriosity can be found in the progressive wing of the party, among activist and organizing groups. Many meetings have been held, and then at those meetings the same behaviors that made progressive ideas less popular than they would naturally be were repeated. The out-of-touch, jargony, apologetic throat-clearing, the social justice terminology that feels inaccessible to those outside activism or academia, the breathtaking insistence on talking about politics in ways most normal people would not understand, the focus on issues affecting very small numbers of people instead of issues affecting everyone — these habits and reflexes reared their head in progressive “reckonings,” signaling that almost nothing meaningful would be rethought. Progressives have a giant normie problem in America; they don’t seem interested in fixing it, unless repeating the word “intersectional” until everyone comes around counts. Land acknowledgements are fine, but progressives might consider adding “game acknowledgements” to their repertoire. That’s when, like 98 percent of people in this country, you start by joking about last night’s game.

    The Ink is brought to you by readers. Support free and independent media that bows to no billionaire or tyrant by becoming a subscriber.

    At the other end of the spectrum of the broadly defined left, you have corporate-adjacent groups like Third Way, which advocate for business-friendly policies. There is a broad consensus today that the excesses and depredations of neoliberal economic policy and unfettered capitalism and globalization and financialization helped break the country and contributed mightily to the present moment. Do you see a reckoning at places like Third Way, therefore? Nope. You see it putting out statements about how important centrist and business-friendly policies are going forward.

    Then you have the national Democratic Party. Here is another place we were told reckoning might occur. But, spoiler alert, reader, it did not occur. The fact that the national party is not even really a party so much as a fundraising vehicle, the fact that it has embarrassingly little physical presence in much of the country, the fact that it is so cozy with the very donors whose business practices have fueled so much of the populist rage of this moment — none of this was truly reckoned with. Senior party leaders reached out widely for advice but seemed reluctant or unable to act on it.

    Or consider the Democratic Party’s top elected leaders. Can anyone report some dazzling reckoning there? Some really sharp reimagining? The double down is in full force. It is a panglossian politics: everything that should be done is everything we already happen to be doing. There is nothing the angry street is telling us that gives us the shadow of a new idea. We are perfectly perfect, standing where we should be standing, saying what we should be saying. When, on rare occasion, someone like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut or Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois speaks of the failure to reckon, it catches fire. People feel heard. This appears to scare party leadership instead of galvanizing them. Don’t threaten them with the good time of their constituents feeling understood, at last.

    Share

    Among the resistance, too, there is incuriosity. It is admirable, taking up of the cause of defending democracy, the work it involves, even the bravery. But the resistance has been hurt by an attitude that can sometimes imply moral superiority or dismissiveness toward the very citizens it hopes to persuade. There is often an affect of being the only ones to get it. The movement has struggled to attract people of color, and Black people in particular; it has struggled to attract young people and working class people who don’t have the luxury of time and gas money. And these conspicuous (and democracy-threatening) absences often seem to inspire contempt for those who don’t see rather than curiosity about the resistance’s own limitations. In politics, if your ranks are fewer than you want them to be, the safe assumption is that it’s your own fault.

    The press is, of course, not the opposition to Trump — even though some would like it play more of that role. But it was widely agreed in many quarters of my profession that some rethinking was in order after Trump’s second victory. How do you combat his lies rather than unwittingly amplify them? How do you cover a man who uses the vernacular of traditional media forms to spew propaganda? How do you hold to account a man who is waging frontal war on the press itself? Why is the mainstream press so distrusted, and why is so much of the bled-out trust finding its way to independent podcasts and newsletters? But I have been struck by how many of my peers in the media have chosen to double down rather than truly rethink and reimagine. Here, too, is a defensiveness almost heroic in its devotion to keeping the old thing going. We just have to keep doing what we were doing. Our critics don’t get it. People want us to be this and that; they want us to betray ourselves. We will stick to what we know. And the trust bleeds further out, and many of the traditional media forms reach fewer and fewer Americans.

    Of course, there are exceptions to these phenomena. But, from where I sit, I have noticed infinitely more wagon circling and doubling down. Ask yourself: In what sectors of American life have you seen leaders (and regular people) engaging in the actual kind of reckoning I’m talking about, letting the criticisms fall on them, trying to figure out what they mean, secure in knowing they are still decent even if they have limitations they can’t see?

    Leave a comment

    The defensiveness and incuriosity are understandable. People naturally feel defenseless in this moment; the cavalry is very clearly not coming. No one is in the mood to make themselves vulnerable right now, because vulnerability is danger. The stakes are high, and every hint of weakness will be exploited. If the Democratic Party takes a genuine public look at itself, or if a big media company does, won’t Trump exploit the crack in the armor? It takes a level of security to look at yourself and criticize part of what you’ve become without feeling that you are at risk of invalidating the whole. It may not feel like the time.

    The problem is that, in refusing reckoning, refusing introspection, turning against curiosity itself, those facing Trump become more like him.

    The mirror neurons of our collective brain are firing on full blast right now. Introspection is, of course, the central gaping absence in Trump himself. But now his deepest tendencies are becoming our tendencies standing across from him.

    An unthinking man is making us unthinking. An unreflective man who always thinks his first thought is his best thought is inspiring that instinct in his foils. A president blindly sure of himself is making others blindly sure that everyone who supports him is deluded or ill. A man who sees all critics as haters is stirring a similar defensiveness in those who face him.

    Trump is causing those playing opposite him in this drama to remake themselves in his image. His is a Trumpomorphic opposition.

    What perhaps protects Trump’s power and position as much as any formal power is how he changes those opposite him. There is a small chance he will throw someone like me in jail one day. But he has already remade my heart, made me at times harsher, less prone to assume good faith, more dismissive, than I would have been. This is a way of defanging your opposition that is considerably easier to scale.

    Trump makes those he faces less equipped to face him. Less and less prone to living the lives of curiosity, openness, self-doubt and self-questioning, visioning and revisioning, wondering, renewal, and constructive jettisoning that is so vital to actual strategy and action. He drains his foils of their lifeblood, and, remarkably, has them celebrating the wasting of their minds as imagined strength.

    Trump will never be defeated, or held to account, or kept in proper check — pick your lane and vocation — by people as unthinking and defensive and incurious as he is. Making you as facile as he is serves only him. Nuance and complexity are part of the way out — and, above all, curiosity about what you don’t see.

    Subscribe now

    A culture of incuriosity prevents any real understanding of Trump’s enduring appeal — even in the face of the present chaos and pain. Everyone with some one- or two-word catchall explanation for what is going on — Fox! racism! — is pretending they know things. This incuriosity prevents his opposition from seizing on the clearly potent issues he has latched on to — say, how trade works — and offering their own, non-rampaging version. The incuriosity prevents the construction of a broad pro-democracy coalition. It prevents the reform and transformation of political parties and movements. It prevents the kind of changes to the news business that could allow good information to reach way more people.

    The cost of all this incuriosity can be measured in distrust. Majorities of Americans do not trust the major political parties, do not trust journalists, do not trust people in sclerotic institutions who are so wedded to their certainties that no new information can derail them. Trump has lost a considerable amount of support since taking office. Yet it is a remarkable fact about our present situation that this slide has not really seemed to benefit Democrats.

    Incuriosity is perhaps the knowledge culture of a tribal age. In more tribal societies, people don’t ask what’s the best way to prepare bread or throw a wedding or allow women to spend their time. They do those things the way they do those things. Questions are trouble. When you’re scared and hunkering down with your people, you may not feel in the mood for a big rethinking. This fear has to be gotten over.

    Where is the boldness? Where is the wildness? Where are the people willing to shred their own deepest assumptions and roll the dice? Where are the institutions renovating their entire strategy, in the cold light of new realities?

    After all, the opposite of Trumpism is not just a different immigration or tax policy. It is, at bottom, fundamentally different habits of mind: curiosity, humility, openness to criticism, a hunger for growth, and the courage to change.

    Share


    If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.

    That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

    Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.

    Subscribe now

    Give a gift subscription

    Get 20% off a group subscription


    Image: “American Progress,” by John Gast, 1872

    This post was originally published on The.Ink.