I normally try to be calm (well, sort of). But these are extraordinary times, and we need an extraordinary opposition, and we are quickly learning that we don’t have one.

And so the above is a rant.

(Apologies in advance if this is too much for you. Hold out for my next sober essay.)

But it’s time to stop coddling the Democrats, even in our own minds. If you are not part of the future of an extraordinary pro-democracy opposition, make way. Time to start that restaurant or sheep farm or book-writing project you’ve always talked about.

And I also talk here about the media’s role. Words have meaning. Call a purge a purge, not a buyout. Call a coup a coup, not a spending pause that is sparking confusion. And whatever you do, absolutely do not do this:

Thank you for supporting independent media and giving me the freedom to speak clearly and plainly and, yes, today, rantingly. I am more convinced than ever that The Ink has a big role to play in what’s coming, and I invite you to be part of it.

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I am by birth and by right an American. I do not wish to change this fact, and I will not surrender to those who would change it for me.

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, a place I invariably think back to on those rare occasions when someone says, “Go back to your country.”

Cleveland? You want me to go back to Cleveland?

And, yes, I was born as the thing now being argued over nationwide: a birthright citizen. Which is to say, my parents were not yet American citizens when they had me.

Had they given up everything they knew to come here? Yes. Had they strained family bank accounts back in India for so much as a plane ticket? Yes. Had they committed every morsel of their energy and perseverance and ingenuity to making a life here? Yes, yes, and yes. Had my father, quoting the folk singer Tom Paxton, written to my mother of their departure from India’s comfortable certainties that the two of them were now venturing “Outward bound upon a ship that sails no ocean / Outward bound, it has no crew but me and you / All alone when just a minute ago the shore was filled with people / With people that we knew”? Yes. And he still quotes it to her.

But they were not yet American citizens. Nevertheless, they dared to cast the biggest vote of confidence a human being can cast in another country: creating a child who will belong first to it, and not to the country of their own certainties. To have a child is to begin to lose control from the moment of physical separation. They never go back in; eventually, they acquire minds of their own. But the loss of control is greater, the faith deeper, when you are one thing, and you engender a child who is another.

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My father used to introduce my sister and me as “the original Cleveland Indians.” The joke killed before the team’s name change.

But really we were just Americans. Americans with masala, maybe, but Americans. Baseball and Hot Wheels and hot dogs and a big Oldsmobile and a yard and, more than anything else, a sense that history didn’t have to be some big drag, that here, eyes to the horizon, standing atop the old, not under it, you become, become, become.

President Trump wants to end birthright citizenship. Because he is inelegant, his way of going about it would inevitably imperil much of the legal infrastructure that pulled America out of slavery, brought down segregation, and laid the foundation for women’s rights and equality and the freedoms of many other populations.

Legal writers more knowledgeable than I have explained why Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is both perilous and, legally speaking, hogwash. I want to make a different point, borne of my experiences in America and outside of it. Birthright citizenship is not only a profound legal foundation of the United States. It is a cultural idea that does as much to make America feel like America as any other thing.

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My family learned this lesson the difficile way.

A dozen years after my father first touched down in America as a graduate student, a decade after my mother joined him, they decided to take their now-family of four on an adventure. We were moving to France!

Now, France is a very captivating country. Don’t get me wrong. But even though I was merely seven years old when we moved there, I remember watching my parents daily confront a reality that they would have had no way of understanding from the other side of the Atlantic: in France, there is something called Frenchness, and the only way to access it or participate in it fully is to have the luck of already being French.

This poses a challenge to outsiders. If the only way to become French is to have already been French, then how do you become French? The short answer is you don’t. You can live there; there are ways to finagle citizenship. But at the heart of French law and culture is the idea that Frenchness is a specific culture, French people have a specific blood, and the barriers to entry are high. You can be there. But you can never be of there. You can enjoy the place. But the place will never truly belong to you.

That is changing slightly even in France, as I have seen on recent trips. But those who would open up the definition of Frenchness are, and always will be, playing defense.

Many countries around the world function in this same way, with a cultural and legal idea of citizenship rooted in blood and soil and lineage. Basically, in one form or another, to be a citizen requires your parents or even grandparents to have been citizens. What this means at a philosophical level is that a citizen is something you are because they were, not something you become as you, because you were born here.

I always think of something my friend Eric Liu, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, said (and I paraphrase). His family came from China to the U.S. They became American, like so many before. And, Liu notes, having been rooted in China’s soil for thousands of years and uprooted into America’s for only a few decades, Eric could never “become Chinese” by moving back. One severed link: the chain ends.

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This is why, for all of the dangerous things President Trump has proposed in his first days, the assault on birthright citizenship strikes me as so fundamental. Because it’s an attack not just on a policy question of how and when passports are given out. It’s an attack on the idea that anyone can be part of this, that this is a nation of becoming.

So fundamental is this culture of becoming that even Trump cannot escape it. He can slap 10 percent tariffs on foreign goods, but nothing will change the fact that 67 percent of his own wives were imports. And I want to say for the record that I will never use the fact that Melania Trump was not born in the United States against her. I believe she is every bit as American as I am.

I used to live in the Boston area. One day, several friends and I went down to the river and laid out contiguous picnic blankets and waited hours for the Fourth of July fireworks. The bank grew more crowded by the hour. There were minor arguments about space and the obstruction of views. Most of it was totally peaceful. But at some point, our group, a large and diverse crew, came into the focus of a man who did not like how many blankets we had laid out.

“Go back to your country!” the man barked at me. I remember being taken aback. Cleveland? “Why did you even come to this country?” the man persisted. His tone suggested he wasn’t thinking of Cleveland.

As the situation escalated, another man came forward. He was white, in a sleeveless shirt, with a bald head, full of tattoos, and with a generous belly. He looked like he might be a Hell’s Angel or some type of biker dude. Given the argument we were in about whether we belonged, he didn’t necessarily look like he would fall on our side.

But he turned to the man barking at us and said five words I will never forget — five words so simple and profound that Trump will live and die without grasping them: The man said, “These are my people, too.”

It was a big idea; it is a big idea. But to him, it was also no big deal. He didn’t want to make a big fuss about it. It was just what he knew to be true. Whether or not he had ever spent much time ruminating about “birthright citizenship,” he had internalized the culture of it. These are my people. Anyone can become my people. We become.

And where that story leaves me is this: I don’t think of Trump as being in a contest with me over my citizenship, or in a contest with legal scholars and the courts over the proper reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. Fundamentally, I think of Trump as being in a contest with that biker dude. With the deep and abiding culture he spoke for. With the lifeblood of a nation of becoming. I believe the biker dude will prevail.

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Photo: The author

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Today Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the historian of fascism and authoritarianism, and I had another great conversation. We covered many subjects — from how to understand Trump’s imperialist shouts, to why he wants a puppet at the helm of the most powerful military on earth, to why Democrats struggle to command attention in the way he does, to what the proper place f…

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Faiz Shakir is on fire in this essential interview we ran this morning. DO NOT MISS IT. This is someone dropping fiery truths about the Democrats, and he is doing so even as he is running to lead the party.

AND TODAY, AT 12:30 P.M., I GO LIVE AGAIN WITH RUTH BEN-GHIAT, SCHOLAR OF AUTHORITARIANISM. JOIN US BY DOWNLOADING THE SUBSTACK APP AND TURNING ON NOTIFICATIONS. DON’T MISS IT.

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Happy Sunday! I wanted to re-share this vital, informative conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian of authoritarian movements and leaders, from earlier this week, in case you missed it.

President Trump did many things in his first week. But they don’t all point in the same direction. There are tensions among many of his own moves. Ruth helped me find…

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Sometimes we talk to our children about “asks and offers.” People make both all the time. But sometimes the balance can tilt too much one way, or too much the other. We try to get them to notice their ratio — of thank-you-card-writing to present-opening, of room clean-ups to ice creams, of acts of sibling kindness to requests for a drone.

I was so moved by all of you who spoke up in yesterday’s open thread. And I thought we’d close the week — this head-spinning week — with something a little bit new.

This community is so full of warmth and concern and care and hope — and capacity. Why not, I thought, invite people to share asks they have right now — and offers?

So that’s just what we’re doing today. What do you need that maybe someone on here can help with? Ideas for organizations to volunteer with? Info on how to explore running for local office? Job interview advice? A job? Books to read? Resources to protect your family from Trump policies?

And what might you offer to someone else? Some of the above things? Eyes on a long-idling manuscript? Simple commiseration?

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This is an experiment, so be cool and thoughtful about it, and don’t make me regret it. Find each other in the comments; maybe DM to take it offline if necessary. Be nice!

A reminder: These spaces are for our supporting subscribers, not anyone who happens to be on the internet. And so we expect you to be kind and respectful to each other. This is your space.

Join our community if you haven’t yet.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

It’s been a week. Technically, we’re not even halfway through it.

How are you doing?

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Bonus points for sharing what you are reading, watching, listening to, or cooking to help you get through the moment.

A reminder: These spaces are for our supporting subscribers, not anyone who happens to be on the internet. And so we expect you to be kind and respectful to each other. This is your space.

Join our community if you haven’t yet.

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And catch up on our latest:

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has the answers so many of us have been desperate for, ever since fascism leapt out of the history pages and became a modern-day American menace.

Today we checked in on each other during this tumultuous week, and tried to unpack the logic of Trump’s early moves and postures. Things aren’t always what they seem.

He is a facile and simple man…

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

It has always been tempting to think of Donald Trump as an infection. A rare bacterial strain that emerged out of nowhere (or Queens) and began to sicken the American body politic. To turn us meaner and nastier, to corrupt our institutions, to rig our systems, to divide us, to inflame our hatreds, to delude us, to engross us with lies, to make enemies of friends, to neglect, to grift, to leech a nation for profit.

The alien-invader thesis could be soothing when so little else was. He was a gift from Russia, a Manchurian candidate, a plant, a puppet dangled by shadowy possessors of kompromat. Or: He was not a real Republican. He was a thrice-married, pro-choice New York Democrat who had infected the Republican Party and colonized it. “This is not who we are,” you used to hear. People really seemed to believe that for a while.

If you subscribed to the bacterial delusion, you were constantly on the hunt for antibiotics. Maybe Bob Mueller was it. Maybe Merrick Garland was it. Maybe Jack Smith was it. Maybe this trial and this judge; maybe that one. Maybe this report. Yes, yes, this — this would be the end of him.

But everything kept not being the end of him. Every antibiotic took its best shot. Nothing did it. Not the courts, not the Department of Justice, not special reports, not impeachment trials. Trump was the most resistant strain in history.

The truth that was harder to accept was staring at us all along: This man was not alien to us, a foreign invader. He was us, or at least a part of us. This wasn’t a bacterial infection. It was an autoimmune condition, parts of who we are flaring heatedly against other parts of who we are; a vicious battle within our own hearts; not a sectional conflict but an intracellular fight.

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Today, as the second inauguration of Donald Trump takes place, it is a chance to cast off the alien-invader delusion once and for all, and to recognize Trump and Trumpism for what they are: an outgrowth of our own innermost tendencies. Doing so might finally free us to face certain parts of the American being and transform them.

After all, was it really so hard to explain why this peddler of outrage rose in a country where outrage had become how you make ideas move, how you sell things, how you get attention, how you make money, how you make the algorithm choose you?

Is this vulgar peddler of coins and sneakers and steaks and educations and Bibles so, yes, outrageous to us that we cannot see that this, too, is us — a country of get-rich-quick schemes and big-smiling salesmen, of trusted media voices who sell gold and supplements on the side, a country where now you must have a personal brand to be a painter, a writer, even a professor or a schoolteacher crowdfunding for pencils, where religious leaders are multimillionaires, where former presidents build corporate empires, where you cannot get news of public affairs without being sold to?

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Is Trump’s famously short attention span all that alien to our scrolling, swiping ones?

Is his success as a self-styled billionaire savior, uniquely capable of fixing it, because he milked the system he now heads, because he broke the rules he now proposes to reform — is this profoundly American figure not an emanation of our own strange relationship with the rich superhero? A relationship you don’t find in many other places. A tendency to put these people on magazine covers, to treat them as social visionaries, to take their money for good causes and sell them reputational detergent, to think that they are in possession of special brains that know how to run society?

Is this man who has been so deeply moulded by the activity of Not Reading all that alien from a country that reads less and less?

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Is the allure of the 24/7 show this once-banished, now-returned, riveting felon puts on so inexplicable in a country whose preferred forms of entertainment are conflict-saturated fictions called “reality TV” and crime procedurals and superhero reboots?

Is Trump’s stoking of tribalism unconnected to the filter bubbles and civic fatalism and contempt we let creep into our hearts?

Is his insecure masculinity not the insecure masculinity that has been allowed to fester in millions of Americans? Left to fester in part because of a belief that to help those who once enjoyed certain privileges is to compound the old oppressions.

Is Trump’s certitude not the certitude we have let attack our own curiosity? Is his knowing before thinking not familiar? Is his being a person only of answers, never of questions — do you not recognize this at all?

Is his consequentialist view of truth — that the only truths worth hearing are those that benefit him — not also ours? Whether about an aging president or a war in Gaza, how interested, how open, are we to truths unhelpful to our causes and our teams?

I would never in a million years argue that today, at high noon, we are getting what we deserve. No one deserves all that may be coming. But America is getting a playback of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

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I don’t write all this to depress you. On the contrary. The alien-invader thesis, the bacteria delusion, the antibiotic dream — these were attempts at comfort that ended up being depressants. Because we kept thinking this not-us force could be expelled and then we would snap back to being ourselves. Every time we didn’t snap back, it was gutting. Lucy and the football. No one coming to save us. We are on our own.

I favor the autoimmune idea partly because I think it’s true, and partly because it gives us something to work toward. If you liberate yourself from the story that Trump is so ornately, gildedly singular, you open doors to what can actually be done.

To understand him in autoimmune terms is to understand that parts of us, now as before, are up against other parts of us. This is the real contest. The electoral contest is downstream from the intracellular. You are not entitled to leaders better than you.

What is also true, and we forget, is that these deep habits in us that appear, too, in Trump are up against other deep tendencies.

We are the country of four centuries of white domination and slavery morphing into segregation morphing into mass incarceration, but we are also the country of the civil rights movement that inspired the world and the country with perhaps the world’s most generous view of the possibility of becoming American, becoming one of us. We are a country of deep racism, and we are a country of a kind rare in the world — a country made of all the other countries, bonded by creed, not blood and soil.

Today, after all, is both Donald Trump’s re-inauguration day and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday. We are both.

We are the country of book bans, and we are the country that has published many of the books that have driven much of the world’s conversation for many decades.

We are a country in the grips of a backlash, and we are a country that has in recent decades changed more in the status of millions of people who once lived on the margins of society than our forebears in many previous centuries combined.

So, yes, today, painfully, we are witnessing the inauguration of us. It is not the triumph of some Americans over other Americans so much as the triumph of the small-hearted tendency in American life over the generous one, the cruel impulse over the humane one, the vengeful drive over the magnanimous one, the safety of the smaller “we” over the dream of the bigger one.

And, again and again in history, the generous tendency, the humane impulse, the magnanimous drive, the bigger “we” has ailed and then returned stronger than ever.

Will it again? I trust in my bones it will. But its revival will not be a function of the clock. Time may heal wounds, but it doesn’t on its own resolve the battle for your soul.

What begins today isn’t who we are, and it is. What should give us some hope is that who we are is still a matter of our choosing.

Photo: Getty/Saul Loeb

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Is this the last weekend of an era? What new day will Monday bring? We don’t know.

Today I found myself returning to some of the wisdom we have featured here from the brilliant and thoughtful Rebecca Solnit, and I wanted to share it with you as well.

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We also encourage you to visit her Facebook page and her books, and revisit the conversations we’ve had with her this year.

And if you haven’t yet, sign up as a paid subscriber to support The Ink’s mission of truth telling and thought provocation — and independent media in general. Today and tomorrow only, there is a special flash sale of 50 percent off for your first year.

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By Rebecca Solnit

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

The Wobblies used to say don’t mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.

People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.

We encourage you to read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. And to stay hopeful.

Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

With the new majority in place, the House got quickly to work this week — not addressing pressing national problems, but capitalizing on the panic over the rights of transgender Americans that the Republicans invested so heavily in creating during the final weeks of the campaign. Yesterday, they passed the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025,” amending Title IX protections to restrict trans kids’ participation in school sports.

The bill passed the House along clear partisan lines (only two conservative Democrats voted in favor), and representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke vigorously against the measure and in favor of the basic freedoms it would deny Americans — not just trans youth, but all girls and women — if it becomes law. But while the vote, in this case, is heartening, the Democratic Party isn’t unified in its defense of trans rights, and its path forward on trans issues is unclear given both the credit many within the party have given to Republican messaging against trans folks as a deciding factor in November and the fact that the scapegoating of vulnerable communities will certainly continue.

But if you look around the country, there are some models the Democrats can learn from. In that light, we encourage you to look back at a conversation we had with a red-state Democrat back in 2023 on how to get serious about fighting an anti-trans agenda.

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As Republicans in her state sought to crack down on transgender people, Nebraska state senator Machaela Cavanaugh refused to be polite. She threatened to filibuster, and then began to filibuster, all but shutting down the state’s ability to pass laws. In my favorite moment from the clip that exploded across the country, she addresses the criticism that she is threatening Republicans by holding bills hostage:

“If people are like, ‘Is she threatening us?’ Let me be clear: Yes, I am threatening you.”

For once. A bully for good, as a little girl who lives in my building puts it.

For the full audio of our conversation, just click on the play button at the top of this post

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“Nothing is more important”: a conversation with Nebraska state senator Machaela Cavanaugh

Every now and then, someone creates a moment that the whole country pays attention to. And often these moments are not moments people necessarily plan or have any foresight that they’re going to happen, but they happen. And you recently had one of these moments where you really captured the country’s imagination with your defense of trans kids and, I would say, human rights more generally. Can you take us into the backstory of your decision to speak up, and speak up in the particular way that you did?

Well, I think a moment is probably an accurate description, because there wasn’t a lot of planning or forethought about it. I am on the committee, the Health and Human Services Committee, where this bill, this anti-gender-affirming care for youth bill, was heard and our committee was taking action on it. I was obviously opposing moving it out of the committee to the body for full debate. And I told my committee members that this was going to be a problem if they wanted to move this to the floor, that it was going to be extremely problematic and I was going to make it problematic.

That was at, I don’t even know, 7 or 8 o’clock at night on a Wednesday, and there was an ice storm. So I ended up having to stay in Lincoln, the capital city, that night. The next morning, I showed up feeling very not well at all. Turned out that I had strep throat that I didn’t know of.

And I thought, “Well, I told them this was going to be problematic, so I’ve got to make it a problem, and I’ve got to do it right now, starting today.” And so I just got on the mic and started talking. That was pretty much the beginning, middle, and end of my thinking. I said I was going to do it, and I’m a woman of my word, so here I am. I, oftentimes when I’m speaking on the floor, speak from my head and my heart at the same time. I don’t have written remarks very often. I have general themes that I want to discuss. And so that’s what happened. I just said what I was thinking. I said how I felt about it all, and somebody made a clip and put it on the internet.

You first of all challenged and opposed this attempt to crack down on or criminalize trans and non-binary kids getting the care they need. But I think what really captured the imagination of a lot of Democrats around the country is that there was a kind of benign threat in there. And you named this issue of threatening: If folks are going to say that I’m threatening to shut down this legislature, you’re right, I am. I will say as someone who watches politics a lot, who often longs for Democrats to have a little more tooth and a little more nail in their politics, it was such an unusual moment. Can you talk about that notion of what a little girl who lives in my building refers to being “a bully for good”?

I haven’t thought of it that way, though some of my colleagues have been calling me a bully. So I like thinking that, if I am a bully, it’s for good. I appreciate that how I’m talking about what I am doing is not necessarily typical. It’s typical for me. I am brutally honest about my intentions most of the time. And so, for me, this is not an unusual way. I am always very clear and transparent with my colleagues about what I’m doing and why I am doing it. I am not really a political games person. I’m very direct. And since the start of this legislative session, when we saw across the country a lot of really anti-LGBTQ, transphobic bills being introduced, anti-women reproductive healthcare bills being introduced, myself and several colleagues have been talking on the mic about how we are going to slow the session down.

But when this particular bill was voted out of committee and it was clear that it was going to get more time than other things that are impacting people’s lives, I wanted to make this a choice that the body had to make. Do they want to legislate hate, or do they want to do the business of government? And so that’s really what has been driving me. I mean, yeah, I guess I’m a bully. I’m comfortable with that, though.

Do you share the view that too often in the defense of these issues Democrats are too nice?

I don’t know. I haven’t seen a lot of defense of these issues.

There you go.

Yeah.

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Part of why these moments happen — and you remember the moment with the Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow last year — I think there’s a hunger for a more full-throated defense of us. One of the ways I sometimes think about this is that, with the rise of right-wing, hate-fueled authoritarianism in this country, a lot of Americans, if you put it in a family model, feel like there’s a predator in the house or there’s an abuser in the house, and then there’s a good parent who’s not really protecting them, who is not doing bad things to them but is slightly weak in their defense.

Making it permissible.

Yeah. So occasionally when someone is not doing that, is actually “a bully for good,” to stick with that idea from the little girl in my building, it just strikes such a chord with people because it’s not just about politics. People feel really undefended right now in a lot of ways. These are not just policy issues like taxation. These are issues of, Are you safe? Can you walk down the street, move through the world, and not be kind of attacked by life? And I think a lot of people, as your moment illustrated through contrast, are feeling like, “No one’s fighting for me.”

And I don’t want people to feel like that anywhere in this country. I don’t want trans youth, LGBTQ youth, to feel like nobody is fighting for them.

So what has happened since you said you were going to shut down other legislating if they advance this?

I’ve been shutting it down. We are almost halfway through our legislative session. We have not passed a single bill this year. Not a one.

And you are actively filibustering each one when it’s in session?

Yep.

How have your Democratic colleagues felt as you not only made that statement and became well known for it, but also then in the ensuing filibustering you’re doing?

I would say that most people are uncomfortable and frustrated. For the most part, however, my Democratic colleagues are understanding and supportive of what I am doing. It does come at a cost to them, just like it does to everyone else. Their legislation is not getting moved, just like everyone else’s. And so this is costing the entire body their time and their priorities.

And it seems like that’s an affirmative choice on your part. Explain to a skeptic why you feel like it’s important for otherwise worthy pieces of legislation to be held up for this.

I don’t think that anything is more worthy than protecting trans children. Nothing is. Nothing is more important to pass than protecting trans kids — period.

Tell me about your origins in politics. I know your father was in Congress.

Yes, he was.

Tell me about your introduction to the idea of politics and political styles through him and then your own journey into politics.

I think my introduction was I was born. My dad served in the state legislature in the ’70s, and then he ran for Congress, and he served two terms in Congress. I am the middle of eight kids, and I was born in Washington, D.C., while my dad was serving in Congress. We moved back to Omaha, Nebraska, when I was not even two. So this is my home. This is where I grew up.

So you were not corrupted by Washington?

Wait, I’m getting there. I did live in Washington, D.C. I worked for Nebraska’s U.S. senator, Ben Nelson, when I graduated from college, in 2001. I started working for Senator Nelson after September 11. My first day that I was supposed to start was the day that his office closed because of the anthrax attack. So then I had to wait to start my job until the Senate reopened, which was a few months.

I interned in Tipper Gore’s office when Bill Clinton was president. So I’ve been around Washington a few times, and I’ve always been interested in politics. I have a master’s in public administration, and I’m a very much a public policy nerd. I love public policy. And the political side of things I’ve always viewed as just the thing you have to be involved in to be involved in public policy. But now it’s like all I do and I don’t do public policy the way that I want to. And that kind of breaks my heart a little bit because it really is my passion. But, like I said, nothing’s more important than protecting these kids. Nothing.

When did you first run?

I ran in 2018, and I was just reelected in 2022.

2018, if I remember right, was an enormous wave of first-time women running for office.

Yes, I think that it was. The legislature in my freshman year had the largest class of women in the Nebraska legislature. And then we went down in numbers the next election and we are back up in numbers again. We have more women than Democrats.

That sounds like it could be a state slogan: “Nebraska, more women than Democrats.”

That would be a fact. And it would be a better state slogan than “Not for everyone.” Our current state slogan is: “Honestly, it’s not for everyone.”

Is it really?

Yes. It’s horrible.

Who came up with this?

Some marketing firm in Colorado. Why we would have another state develop our slogan and why we would select it is beyond me, but that is our current U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts’ doing.

I mean, it’s an accurate description, especially currently — that Nebraska, we’re not for everyone. We are actively trying to legislate hate. So, yeah, I’d like to do away with this legislation, and I’d like to do away with that slogan.

Well, maybe after the trans fight you can get involved with the state slogan reform.

That’ll be my next issue to champion.

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Before we get back to the trans issue, I want to ask you about some of the other issues you were known for before that.

Paid leave. I also know you were a pioneer at breastfeeding on the floor of the legislature. Talk to me about some of the fights and issues that you were interested in in the run-up to taking on this fight for trans kids.

When I was running for office, I was also pregnant. My son was born between my primary election and my general election. When I was elected, I had a baby with me, and it’s Nebraska and we have blizzards. So there would be times where he would come with me to Lincoln because I’d have to stay overnight and I was breastfeeding. And, obviously, I would pump and things like that, but I didn’t — many women will understand the struggle — have a great milk supply. And he refused to take formula. So I always said he was a gentleman of discerning taste. He really just liked breast milk.

So he would come with me, and he’s the youngest of three kids. And when you are the youngest of three kids, it’s kind of like — there’s joke commercials about it, how parents are just whatever with that kid. That’s how I was with him. I would throw him in a Bjorn sling, take him wherever, feed him wherever. Didn’t really give it much thought. And I was sitting on the floor listening to floor debate, and I was nursing him, and one of my staffers just took a picture and posted it on Twitter, and it blew up.

Just like the speech I made recently, I was just doing what I’m doing. And it really resonated with people, which I’m happy for, that people need to see that reflection of who they are, that it is OK to be a working mom and to take care of your kid and your job because you can do that. My first year in the legislature, though, I did come to realize that we did not have a mother’s room in the building. So that became my first thing to make sure we got. And we did. I had to raise outside funds to make it happen. Forty thousand dollars from an outside group to help pay for the plumbing and furniture and all of those things.

So the Nebraska state government will not finance a lactation room for women in the legislature?

It wasn’t just for women in the legislature; it was for everyone that comes to the building. But no, no, they will not, they will not. Or they wouldn’t at that time at least.

It’s like a private problem that must be addressed privately.

Yes. So we did. We got it done. I got it done. That was kind of a crazy whirlwind experience. And I was like, “Wow, look at this. I did this.” They put a lot of obstacles in front of me. They couldn’t find a room. And then when they found a room: “Well, it doesn’t have plumbing.” And then: “Well, it’s very expensive. We can’t do that.” And so it was about a year of meetings, lots of meetings about just one room with a sink. But we got there. And now it is a lovely room with a sink and a microwave and a changing table and a refrigerator. And four different types of chairs, recliners, non-recliners, wide chairs, foot stools, so that when people come in there, they have a comfortable place to sit, and they can have their baby there or they can use it to pump. So, yeah, now we have a mother’s room or a lactation room.

I want to come back to the issue of the trans kids. From my point of view, living in Brooklyn, New York, it’s sometimes hard to understand the level of animus out there in other parts of the country. It’s hard, when I look at someone like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, for me to understand, based on where I live and what I see around me, the amount of purchase and emotive force that this anti-trans politics has. And the fact that very smart, savvy, dangerous right-wing authoritarians are not viewing this as a top 10 issue for them but a top 3 issue for them.

Something is happening where this issue is being weaponized and really being viewed, I think, as the ticket to ride for a lot of folks on the far right. Can you talk about, from your vantage point in Nebraska, what it is about this issue? Because it’s a small number of kids, it’s clearly an agenda of fear that has exploded across the country. What is going on to make this the fight it is?

I think what you just said: fear. It’s about exploding fear around an issue and exploiting that for political gain. And part of the reason, in my view, that that is able to happen, is that people become complicit in it by not speaking out against it and not speaking out about it very firmly. And I think this in some ways applies to the entire LGBTQ movement over decades but also abortion and reproductive healthcare. In Nebraska, our former governor, Pete Ricketts, constantly would say that we’re a pro-life state. And the reality is that like 59 percent of Nebraskans support access to abortion care. So we’re a pro-reproductive health state, but nobody ever would talk about that because everybody was scared of being maligned as a baby killer or something. And so we allowed the conversation to be driven by a loud minority. And I think the same thing is happening when it comes to trans youth. We are allowing the conversation to be driven by a loud, hate-mongering, fear-mongering minority, and we need to stop doing that.

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You can imagine all kinds of extremist pushes on all kinds of issues, but at different moments in time, they have more or less resonance with people, more or less salience with people. I’m always interested in the question of what are the underlying political emotions out there that give exploitation like this the kind of power and resonance it has right now. Do you think it’s the wider change in gender roles in the society, the anxiety people have about their kids in the modern world? What do you understand, as a parent but also a legislator, as the emotional undercurrent that these political leaders are exploiting?

I think it’s the lack of knowledge, really. Being in the position that I’m in, being on the committee that I’m on, the interaction that I have had with this gender-affirming care bill, I have learned so much about trans care, trans healthcare, and things that I didn’t understand or know. I was broadly supportive of the LGBTQ community and always want to uplift people in their autonomy and choices, but I didn’t really know that much about it. I didn’t really know what gender-affirming care even meant. I had to learn about it. And so I can see how it can easily be exploited. And I don’t know how it intersects with all of the things that you were just saying beyond just a complete lack of understanding and education.

I will say that, in the last two weeks, I have seen a great deal of growth in my colleagues, my Republican colleagues. So many of them have started engaging in this and learning about it and educating themselves and talking to their constituents and coming to a greater place of understanding and compassion that they didn’t have previously.

Really? I feel like that’s a plot twist.

Yeah, it is. There’s one conversation I had with one of my colleagues, who was discussing about how his constituent reached out and said that they had a trans child and that person took them through what their journey has been. And it helps that it’s a white conservative Republican parent that’s doing this. But having these messengers, having these parents, these families, reach out and they present the same way as the person they’re talking to, so they automatically have more standing with that person and sharing their life with them.

People might not like this, but politicians are people. And they do tend to have souls. And if we continue to treat politicians as though they are people who have a soul and try and engage with them in a real and human way, I think we can make progress. And I am seeing that in some of my colleagues.

At the start of all this, my Republican colleagues would say to me, “Well, I have to vote for it.” No, you don’t actually have to do anything you don’t want to do. They’re like, “Well, I mean, it’s the thing everybody’s doing. We have to vote for it. We have to vote for it.” And you start unpacking it a little bit more. And it’s like, this is actually against the entire platform of the GOP, which is individual rights. You’re taking away parental medical choice. You don’t have to agree with what the medical choice is, but imagine if this bill was about vaccines. Imagine if this bill was requiring every parent to get specific vaccines for their children no matter what. There’d be outrage.

I’m so interested in that kind of reframing. We saw it in Kansas last summer with the abortion referendum. There were these libertarian arguments made for abortion. And almost somewhat cynically, like invoking the fight against mask mandates, even though the campaigners themselves favored the mask mandates, but they whipped up some of that feeling of “Do you remember when you didn’t want the government to tell you to put something on your face? Well, you probably don’t want the government forcing more decisions about your body.” And it worked. And I think a lot of Democrats I know often are reluctant to reframe those things in more moderate- or right-wing-sounding frames and values. But I actually think that’s incredibly necessary. How do you think about that playing out on an issue like trans rights?

I really do think that, for most of my colleagues, it does come down to taking away parental rights in medical decision-making. That is a terrifying concept to them. And focusing on that is helpful. Having them be faced with people in their community whom they represent who are trans, and making it real for them and not just abstract mutilation of children, is very helpful. It’s very hard to vilify a human in front of you. I know, because there’s a lot of people who are in front of me every single day that I could easily vilify if I didn’t sit in a chamber with them. So it’s hard. It’s hard to view somebody as a villain when you have a personal connection with them. And I think that’s what more Republicans and conservatives writ large need. You shouldn’t have to know somebody to care about an issue, but it helps.

I feel like one way to understand your political project is to take that Nebraska slogan of “Not for everyone” and try to make it a little less true every day.

Yes. I want it to be a fallacy, entirely. Our state slogan used to be “The good life,” and that’s what it is to me. I want it to be the good life. I want it to be a good life for everyone and for all the people I love who don’t fit into some box of “normalcy.” Because I love living here, and I want my kids to want to live here when they’re adults.

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I am undeniably middle-aged now, so I’ve been thinking about posture. Am I sitting right? How is my spine doing? Do I run too much for my knees? Do I run too little?

But the question of posture that has most consumed me of late is less physical than moral. With a second Trump presidency looming, after what feels like a mere Biden interregnum, what is the right posture to adopt toward it, and toward our common life generally in the era that is coming?

I talk to people for a living. Over the holidays, with time off, I took a break from talking to people for a living by talking to people for free. And something I have been noticing in all of these conversations, and in the public conversations I scroll through, and even in the comments many of you have been making, is that many people are similarly wondering about their posture in this moment in history.

Here is what I mean. When I think back eight years ago, at the dawn of the first Trump term, people seemed clearer on their posture. For a lot of people who opposed him, that meant drafting themselves into a so-called #Resistance. It was a strange word, given that in other times and places it was a word that really meant something, denoted real and life-threatening risks taken to defy autocracy, whereas here we were often talking about Twitter beefs. But it was an idea that gave people purpose and brought a lot of less political people into politics and gave people who had been flailing in early November a solid sense of purpose by the time that January rolled around. The concept of resistance was useful and life-giving to laypeople, activists, organizations.

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And, of course, there were other postures back then — from tuning out the news, to going with the flow, to you-name-it. It’s a big country.

My overwhelming sense in talking to people over the last two months is that almost no one — there are some, but almost no one — is interested in signing up for Resistance 2.0. There will be, and there must be, brave people who, in fact, do just that, who suit up to file lawsuits, oppose nominees, investigate corruption. God bless them, every one of them. Democracy dies in people like that not existing.

But my strong sense is that a great many people who felt drafted into a resistance posture last time around do not feel so drafted this time. This does not mean they support Trump. Most of them are far angrier and more worried this time around. Most of them assume that this time will be worse, with fewer guardrails.

And yet. What I observe many people wrestling with is the question of whether one’s posture — the way you stand in the world relative to that world — should be reflexively, automatically, saturatingly decided for you by national political events.

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What I see and hear around me is a lot of people, in all walks of life, who are looking up at the national scene and then down at their watches, starting to think about their time on this planet. How much of your life can you spend yelling in opposition to something? Yelling in fury about something that most voters seemed to want? I was 33 when Trump rode down the golden escalator. I am 43 now. I am as devoted as anyone I know to democracy and freedom and the American constitutional order. But it occurs to me from time to time that I do not wish to spend the better part of my adult life in a posture of opposition to a vulgar demagogue. I wish to be and live about other, richer, bigger things.

But you don’t get to choose your era. I know that. The people I’ve been listening to know that. They are not welcoming the cruelties and hatreds that have been promised by Trump. I think what they’re wondering is how you actually end up getting the country you deserve.

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Is it by standing in perpetual resistance, philosophical fisticuffs in the air, chanting about democracy, calling out each incremental outrage?

Maybe it is. But maybe, I hear people saying of late, there are other postures to consider.

For some, it is the posture of retreat into the realms you can control: into private life, where you can make a good world for your children and loved ones even if you are struggling to achieve a good world in general. It may be a retreat into doing your actual work, your actual craft, your actual art, resuming a creative posture rather than living in a mode of reaction to the actions of a wannabe autocrat. And this posture of retreat is not, I think, like military retreat. It is not about handing over the country. It is rooted in the thought that what might make the country resistant to what has been happening to it is not more resistance but more health at the roots. Maybe what we can do is to nourish the roots again.

For some, there is allure in the posture of returning to the local. I hear many people who are not turning away from politics in general, but who are redefining the geographic sphere to which they pay the most attention. They are thinking closer to home. They are going to meetings they always left other people to go to. Again, this doesn’t seem to me like a capitulation to anything. It seems like an analysis of where there is actually room to maneuver.

For others I hear from, there is a posture of reorganizing. By this I mean people who are also not content to stand in hair-trigger opposition to Trump and every little thing he does, but who rather want to spend the next many years building the pro-democracy movements and civic organizations and political parties that, had we already them, would have prevented this mess. The old idea of resistance was that Trump was singularly problematic, and that by marshaling great anger toward him and also hawkish vigilance, the worst excesses could be curbed. The reorganizing types are less focused on Trump and more focused on the complete and utter failure of a pro-democracy movement to be trusted and in sync with most people.

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I also notice in many people a posture of rethinking. The first Trump presidency was a time of great and often smug certitude. He was so wrong that the contrast made us right. He was so against democracy and justice and freedom that anything we did was self-evidently heavenly. But self-righteousness corrodes the soul and the mind. And the long posture of resistance and fury and perma-vigilance have turned many of us into certitude bots instead of people of curiosity. Democracy is all about curiosity, it depends on curiosity, because it is about you and I figuring each other out and then choosing the future together, instead of the king doing it for us. But the moral clarity triggered by Trump’s vacuous viciousness lulled many of us into a dogmatic slumber. Now I see and hear around me people who are getting into a posture of real rethinking, who are returning to curiosity, who are willing to ask real and hard questions about what many of us missed and didn’t see and may not see still. Their posture is not outward but inward.

I want to be very clear. Much of what is coming in the next few years will be very grave and will be deserving of strenuous resistance and pushback and investigation and suing. I don’t believe the phenomenon I’m observing is people tuning out and unplugging and kissing the country goodbye. That is probably happening, too, somewhere out there. But that’s not what I’m seeing.

What I’m seeing is people attempting to attend more holistically to a nation in ill health. What I see is people spreading back out across many lanes, taking on what they know how to take on — at the level of the symptoms, and at the level of the causes. What I see is many postures of trying.

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We published the following words four years ago, in the depths of a terrifying time. They have new meaning now, and also much of the same meaning. I remain no less hopeful about the country than I was. We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail. — AG

We are falling on our face because we are jumping high

It’s scary out there right now. It’s going to be scary for some time to come. What has been unleashed, what has been revealed, is ugly. It is what makes democracies die.

In the despair, it is easy to lose perspective. I certainly do all the time. But from time to time, I step back and try to remember where we are as a country on the arc of things.

And I see then that this is both a very dark time and, potentially, a very bright time. It’s important to hold these truths together.

When I look down at the ground of the present right now, I feel depressed. If I lift my head to the horizon, I see a different picture.

This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something.

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Because the 40 years of this plutocratic takeover — of the ideology that said if you’re torn between doing what’s good for money and what’s good for people, always do what’s good for money; these stories about lazy workers and welfare queens; and any number of other fraudulent tales that were meant to justify life in the Hamptons — if I allow myself to feel this way on a good day, it all actually feels like it’s burning down.

And on matters of race and identity, likewise, the Trump era doesn’t have the crackle of a launch. It has been a mourning. A mourning for white power. A mourning for a time when simply to be white and show up was enough. A mourning for an era in which simply to be a man, and not necessarily an especially capable one, could get you ahead of other people. A mourning for a time when you could be the default idea of an American and not have to share your toys.

We must understand that what we’ve been living through is backlash. Backlash. It’s not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history. Then we might remember — just to pat ourselves on the back for a second — that what we are actually endeavoring to do right now is to become a kind of society that has seldom, if ever, existed in history. Which is become a majority-minority, democratic superpower.

I have a lot of love for my friends in Europe, but actually none of you all have your immigration rates and naturalization rates at a high enough level to get there anytime soon. And you all may never get there.

Look at India and China. I love India. My parents are from India. India is never going to be a nation of immigrants. It’s never going to be a country of people from all the world. It can barely get unity with people just from India. China is never going to be a nation of immigrants. No shade. That’s just not their history. It’s not who they are.

We are falling on our face because we are jumping very high right now. We are trying to do something that does not work in theory.

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To be a country of all the world, a country made up of all the countries, a country without a center of identity, without a default idea of what a human being is or looks like, without a shared religious belief, without a shared language that is people’s first language at home. And what we’re trying to do is awesome. It is literally awesome in the correct sense of that word.

And, therefore, that we are having insurrections on the Mall or four years of an autocratic attempt or racism oozing through the television and social media portals is both terrifying and a completely predictable, inevitable result of people in power exploiting these transitional anxieties for their own pecuniary gain.

And what we have to do is get smarter than those powerful people. Get more organized than them, and understand that there is a different story to tell those who mistakenly went to the Mall and the 12 percent of Americans who actually supported that terrorist attack, and everybody else — a story to tell them about something great we are trying to do. We will actually create a country that’s better for every single person. But we have to be willing to tell that story forcefully. We have to be willing to fight those people tooth and nail, and we have to fight to win.

We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.

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As the new year dawns, dread porn abounds.

We want, instead, for you to tell us something that is GIVING YOU LIFE right now. Bonus points if it’s something others can learn from, practice, adopt — as opposed to, say, your husband. (Unless you’re polyamorous.) A book, an organization you’ve joined, a work of art, an idea, a song, a recipe, a gummy.

Tell us: What’s giving you life right now? And drop a link or reference for others to follow.

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I hope many of you are getting some downtime over the holidays this week. If you happen to be simmering something for a very long time, or need something to play in your ears to avoid the sounds of your in-laws’ voices, we have got you covered.

In this episode of former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen’s podcast, Mea Culpa, we talk about the incoming Musk-Trump administration and how this new phase of billionaire power consolidation can be understood and then resisted.

Listen and tell me what you think. As always, we appreciate so much when you step up and subscribe. When you do, you give us the freedom to speak the truth.

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It’s not every day that a former president of the United States reads your book. Or is bothered enough by it to rebut it. So imagine my surprise when I got a Google alert this past weekend alerting me that Bill Clinton had discussed me in his new Citizen: My Life After the White House.

In a four-page section in the middle of the book, Clinton lifts up my…

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I went live this morning to talk about the billionaire war on Christmas and the potential government shutdown.

These lives chats are really enjoyable for me — and, I think, for those who join them. We’re trying to create a kind of call-in show vibe.

If you want to join us next time, download the Substack app and turn on notifications.

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We had a little spontaneous lunchtime live chat today. Thanks to all who popped on. And here it is for those who couldn’t make it. You’re forgiven: It was spontaneous!

Check out the video above. And if you haven’t yet joined The Ink as a subscriber, today is a great day to change that. We have a special end-of-year flash sale today and tomorrow only. A f…

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Assassination isn’t how we get what we deserve. It isn’t how you change the world. It’s wrong. In this tinderbox time, it’s dangerous.

All of the above should be clear. And this week, in the wake of the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, it was not clear enough to many people.

But even as we saw the glorification of violence from some, we saw a typical but no less facile response from others: a righteous deploring of the individual act, with little curiosity about the conditions that enable it.

Deploring individual acts of political violence is right on. The problem is the common tendency to have one’s thinking stop there.

In the UnitedHealthcare killing, the facts are only beginning to trickle in. But whatever turns up, the establishment habit of deploring the individual deed and soldiering on oblivious to surrounding conditions is going to get more people killed.

We endanger our leaders and ourselves when we huff the fantasy of the bad apple, the lone wolf, the fallen scion, and refuse to see people as the social biopsies they are.

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If you are willing to think, actually think, not just tsk-tsk people who break the rules, you cannot separate this one act of apparent political violence from the state of healthcare in this country — a system that millions experience, every day of their lives, as a kind of bureaucratic violence.

No more than you can separate the Trump assassination attempts this year from the conditions of a rising encouragement of political violence, often by Trump himself.

No more than you can separate riots that might break out in neighborhoods from the conditions of poverty and criminal justice and historical treatment in those places.

No more than you can separate the January 6, 2021, insurrection from the conditions of greed-fueled, lie-filled, hate-for-profit media that pump skulls full of disinformation.

There is a strange tendency in American life. When certain violent acts happen, there is a feeling in some quarters that one can either deplore or explain. Can’t do both.

Well, we can, actually. Our brains will not break.

We have to be brave and wise and curious enough to deplore the symptoms of the disease while also taking on the disease.

There is simply no question that that an America full of loneliness, isolation, despair, stagnation, status anxiety, revivified hatreds, undereducation, corporate cruelty, media collapse, and rampant disinformation is an America where desperate acts and political violence are more probable.

At this moment, more than most, we must be able to do two things at once: Deplore the things that must be deplored, condemn the actions that must be condemned, but also understand why things are happening.

Let’s deplore Trumpism while also trying, earnestly and thoughtfully, to understand the system failures that have facilitated it.

Let’s deplore the January 6 coup attempt without lapsing into the comfortable, self-congratulatory feeling that They are idiots and We are not. It’s a harder, but truer, thought that the breakdown of so many of our institutions, a breakdown in which we are involved, has engendered a situation in which many have given up on any conventional method of shaping the future and now believe only madness delivers.

And let us deplore, loudly and clearly, the assassination of a corporate leader and a family man in Midtown Manhattan while recognizing that the health insurance industry locks so many Americans in despair. That so many of our brothers and sisters and neighbors and friends have experienced that industry not as healing but as a desperate battle against bureaucrats who often seem determined to withhold the most fundamental of human obligations — care.

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It is not wrong to talk about both of these things in the same breath. It is wrong not to. If we were meant to think only a quarter of a thought at a time, our brains would have been the size of walnuts, easier to carry.

We are not going to walnut-brain our way out of the dangerous condition America is in, whether it’s by individual acts of murder, the bombing of ballot boxes, insurrections, riots, vigilante acts, or any other form of go-it-alone, screw-the-system, take-matters-into-your-own-hands violence. It’s the conditions, stupid.

History shows us very clearly that this kind of go-it-alone violence fluctuates according to surrounding social circumstances. There is more of it when systems don’t work and when people don’t feel heard and helped. There is less when systems work, when people have faith in institutions.

All around us, on the left and right, we keep getting mad at individual social phenomena without mustering much curiosity about why they occur. Why did he have to kill him? Why are people so exercised about a trans issue that barely touches them? Why did so many people fail to show up for Kamala Harris? Why are extremists rising everywhere? Why are so many people succumbing to conspiracy theories?

These are disparate phenomena — and they are connected. They all take root in a basic political emotion millions seem to hold now, across the political spectrum, of defenselessness: of the cavalry not coming, of the truth not being something you can count on from anyone connected to power, of companies and governments and other large institutions not caring about you, of the establishment having no idea what your life is like, what makes it hard at present and what might, if they cared, make it easier.

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Perhaps the only thing shared by Americans from left to right is the feeling that no one hears you and no one is going to help.

This is not just about one CEO killing, any more than it was about one insurrection or one protest-turned-riot. It is about the deep condition of the country, the generational pessimism of tens of millions of our neighbors and kin. Until we are talking about that every day, not just the individual desperate act, until we are thinking about how to fix it, we are just tap dancing around the thing.

Let me even offer one practical place to start. In honor of the late Brian Thompson’s life, and in the hope that no leader ever meets such an awful fate again, let us immediately pass universal, publicly provided healthcare once and for all. If we do, the words “deny” and “delay” will become distant memories, never to be seen on insurance company letters or bullets again.

If you want to tell people there is a better way to get the world they want, show them.

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We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

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A veteran progressive organizer, strategist, and advisor with a Bidenseque flair for coalition-building, Faiz Shakir has worked as a staffer for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, was political director for the ACLU, edited the influential progressive media site ThinkProgress, directs the media organization More Perfect Union, and chaired the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Whatever role he’s served in, he’s remained one of the most interesting thinkers and doers in American politics.

As the Democratic Party searches for a new vision following Kamala Harris’s electoral loss, Bernie Sanders is once again on many minds, including Shakir’s. This past week, he and Ezra Klein discussed Sanders’ lasting impact on the Democrats, and delved into the question as to whether Sanders — or a democratic socialist of similar stripe — could have won against Trump.

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Part of that search for meaning and identity — the soul of the party, really — is the race for DNC chair, and with the competition for the position just getting underway, progressives like Ben Wikler are mounting a left challenge to pragmatic centrists such as Rahm Emanuel and process-oriented insiders like Wisconsin’s Ken Martin. It’s even been rumored that Shakir may enter the race.

In that light, we revisit the conversation we had with Shakir last spring. His observations about our political moment — touching on the Bernie-Biden relationship, how his experience growing up in an immigrant family shaped his politics, his vision for a left media that can really educate voters, and how a thick-skinned left that isn’t afraid to have hard conversations with voters of all stripes can thrive — are just as relevant today, when there’s far more at stake.

To listen to the full audio of this conversation, visit the link below

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“In order to win, movements have to grow”: a conversation with Faiz Shakir

I want to start by asking you about the moment we’re in. It’s a moment of worker uprising around the country in a way that feels historic. It’s a moment of a historically moderate Democratic president who has acquired some progressive characteristics along the way and racked up a lot of legislative victories that were surprising to a lot of us. It’s a moment of movements on the left having really interesting conversations about cohesion and infighting and the future of the movement. And it’s obviously a moment of a very dangerous right-wing authoritarian movement that is seeing new players rise alongside Trump.

How do you see this moment in time, with all these things going on, in terms of the fights to which you’ve devoted your adult life?

Well, if we start from a political lens, with Joe Biden, the moment is making the man, and now there’s a question of whether the man is going to make the moment.

What I mean by that is essentially two major factors came in to affect Joe Biden. One is a progressive movement that has gained increasing sway within the Democratic Party and increasingly more represents the Democratic voter base. Joe Biden has essentially heeded it, built a coalition that comprises progressives instead of trying to stiff-arm them. The second thing that we know well is that Covid affected the economy and the psyche of Americans in a way that they wanted more government action, and the solutions that they were seeking were progressive in nature.

So those two things collide with Joe Biden entering office. To his credit, he says, I see you. I hear you. I feel you. And we’re going to start operating in a way in which government takes a much more aggressive role in a lot of different ways that progressives have been calling for — whether it’s in the healthcare markets or taking on large antitrust monopolies, heeding pro-worker movements, and also showing that, on Social Security, Medicare, and key safety net programs, I’m going to have your back.

Now there’s the man-making-the-moment question, which is remaking the Democratic Party to be more deeply aligned with working-class individuals. That’s an ongoing work in progress. That’s a struggle to win back lost trust in people who felt like either the Democratic Party didn’t align with the things that they cared about in their own lives, or that Democrats couldn’t make government work for them. So if you started to feel cynical about government, you started to feel cynical about the Democratic Party. We’re working on retooling that. I think how we flex for working-class people and show them that we’re on their side — that ends up becoming one of the big challenges to fight right-wing fascism and authoritarianism.

I want to go back to your beginnings in politics. For someone who ended up running a major American presidential campaign, you had an unusual background. You were one of the first Asian Americans and Muslim Americans to ever have that role. Can you talk about the background conditions of your life and how that led you into not just politics but progressive politics in particular?

My parents came as immigrants from Pakistan and had the dream of many immigrant parents, which is that their children will have a better life than their own and that, like many, particularly Pakistani, immigrants, this country for them held dreams that their child might go off to a place like Harvard, which seemed certainly out of reach for parents who were coming to this country and probably only knew three or four or five universities in this country and understood Harvard to be one of the best of them.

It turned out that, as I grew older, I played baseball and did OK at it and did OK with my grades, such that I got an opportunity to go there. My parents were running a dry-cleaning business at the time, and I grew up much of my life in a dry-cleaning plant and learning about the business. So the opportunity to go get a higher education, play baseball, and get an opportunity was a political awakening for me. And 9/11 occurred during my senior year in college, and certainly as a Muslim American affected how I saw injustice in our society. So there were opportunities and greatness that I had experienced, opportunities that, as an immigrant to this country, wow. What other countries would give you such opportunities? And then you see the injustice. You’re like, “Whoa, did we just execute this war that was morally heinous and sinful on a whole bunch of people and killed them unnecessarily?” Yes, we did.

Reconciling those two in my head and figuring out that I wanted to get involved in the fight to rectify injustice — this has always been the thing that drives me.

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I want to pause on what you just said. There’s one way you could tell your story or your family’s story as the American uplift story, the story of possibilities. There’s another way you could tell your story: 9/11, a tough business that your parents were in, where it’s a harder country, an often unkind country.

It sometimes feels like people specialize in either being boosters of the American story or critics of it. It always strikes me that that’s politically not great, that the ability to tell both of those stories simultaneously and try to reconcile them for oneself and others is really important work that too often we fail to do.

I’ve been back to Pakistan and had the good fortune of traveling to some other areas like Guatemala and such. You see people struggling, really, really struggling, with just the basics of ever achieving a standard of life for themselves. It’s so far out of their realm of possibility. Thankfully, in America, it is one of those countries that allows you to potentially achieve it. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it has a far greater opportunity for you to achieve it.

I think it’s important to start with an understanding and appreciation, a recognition, that you’re building on something that has good merits to it and you’re trying to improve upon it. One of the first conversations I had in building my own organization, called More Perfect Union, was this idea that if you’re calling it a more perfect union, what does it connote? It means that, in our founding and in our beliefs and in the reality of so many people, it’s been a good union, that there have been opportunities and the struggle is always to make it more perfect. It was built into the initial thought, which is to say it’s evolving, it’s growing, it’s improving, and that’s a mark of any good society.

You can and need to hold both of those thoughts, because to suggest improvements and alterations has to come from a place of appreciation and wanting it to succeed. If the criticism is coming from a place of “never liked you to begin with, you stink, you’re terrible, go to hell, I don’t even give a damn,” then it will be seen as such. Like, are you really invested in the success and the improvement and wanting this to succeed? The answer has to be, Absolutely yes.

You are deeply expansionary in your conception of politics. You’re obsessed with getting converts to the causes you’re interested in.

Can you talk about that instinct towards getting the people who are not with you? And why it is sometimes that, although it shouldn’t be controversial in some of these spaces, it actually is controversial?

That’s true. We never know how our circumstances in life affected our value systems, but certainly one thing I reflect on is that I grew up in a very conservative area in Florida, so conservative that Ronald Reagan flew into the small airport that we had and held a big rally there because the red turnout there for him was so strong.

I grew up around people who didn’t look like myself: a lot of white, largely white folks, working-class people in that zone. I grew up playing baseball with those types of people and lots of different types of folks that I think really just were nothing like the culture in which I was being raised, of Pakistani Muslims. So I got this opportunity to see and build relationships and appreciate that, while people might have harbored views about me that I thought were not accurate about my religion or my background, I also built a camaraderie and trust and understanding of where they were coming from.

I do measure our success and our efforts on whether we are converting or moving people who might not already be with us. That is a big point of emphasis for me.

I’m sure you know Maurice Mitchell from the Working Families Party, and this really magnificent essay he wrote a few months ago called “Building Resilient Organizations.” One of the things he’s arguing is that, in progressive spaces, the desire to feel and be safe has, in some ways, come to thwart the political project of conversion.

The culture has turned in a way where, rightfully, we want to protect people from being in situations that degrade them and subject them to pain. Can you talk about that tension a little bit? Because I think we would share the idea that you don’t want to just throw people into a difficult environment for them to feel dignity in, but also: politics is conversion. Politics is asserting the humanity of groups who are not currently rightly seen as human.

I think that if you sign up to be in political advocacy, the goal is to build movements that win. In order to win, movements have to grow. You have to get more people to your cause.

I understand the instinct of people who feel like they might be pained or angered or triggered or trolled by people who don’t agree with their values. You and I can empathize with that, that there might be folks who say, “When you say X, it triggers and causes emotional pain to me.” I would humbly suggest, then, that the political advocacy arena is maybe not the best-suited place. There are other ways that you can certainly find people who need help and support and maybe are more aligned and more consistent with the values that you already hold. But if you’re going to be in political advocacy, you’re constantly needing to deal with tension, debate, friction, fights with people with whom you disagree, and to project those to other people in ways that can win them over. That’s the nature of the game.

Bernie Sanders, despite losing in 2020 in the primary, has in some ways had more influence over the ambitions of the Biden presidency than you would expect given the history of Joe Biden’s Senate career. Can you talk about the Bernie-Biden relationship and tag team as you’ve seen it over the last couple of years?

Even during the course of the primary, there was respect between them. Part of that had always stemmed from Biden actually respecting Bernie’s first run for president in 2015-2016, when a lot of establishment Democrats were criticizing Bernie for even running and felt that it was unfair to Hillary Clinton. Biden reached out and had meetings with him and talked positively about Bernie Sanders. I think it was because there was a sense on Biden’s part that this guy’s out here sincerely — this isn’t a game; this isn’t a joke for Bernie Sanders; this is actually things that he truly believes, and he’s out here trying to fight for causes that he believes are just. And that, yeah, political corruption is a real thing. We should talk about money in politics, yeah. We should talk about a working class that doesn’t feel like the economy works for them.

After the 2020 primary was over, we built upon it. We developed a good relationship at the staff level, but also between them, there’s mutual admiration and respect.

It shouldn’t be rare for a major Democrat to see that Bernie Sanders has built a very popular and successful movement of ideas and substance. To my dismay, I think, for most of the Democratic Party, there’s kind of begrudging acceptance or, “OK, fine. Bernie is Bernie.” At least at the elite levels. And Biden actually is kind of rare in that he stands out and says, No, I like that guy. I like him, and I respect him. I’m willing to say that openly. I’m willing to appear in a video with him. I’m willing to travel with him. I’m willing to ask him to go campaign on my behalf. It is kind of a low bar, honestly, but it’s a bar that, even to this day, a lot of people don’t meet.

Bernie is far more comfortable being loud and proud and wielding a stick, where Joe Biden operates often with carrots. There’s something to be said for both of those approaches. There’s yin and yang to each other in that way. Old school politics — Joe Biden’s got it. Old school politics is you’re building your coalition, and you’re seeing who’s got power and sway. You’re bringing them into the tent, and you’re figuring things out together, and you’re finding roles for each of them. I think he sees that Bernie’s out there. He’s going to be a hammer, and I’m going to try to come in behind them and see where we can get things done through this government on an antitrust agenda or paid leave for rail workers or whatever it might be. I’m going to see where I can get things done after Bernie kind of goes out there and hammers away at these things.

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I want to talk about More Perfect Union, which is a media organization you’ve created. You were associated with and built Think Progress a long time ago, so you’ve worked in direct advocacy and movement building but also in this media component of advocacy before and are doing that again. Coming out of the Sanders campaign in 2020, how did you reflect on your theory of change being the creation of new media?

You remember one of our critiques on the Bernie campaign was often that the media doesn’t cover the plight of the working class because they don’t see it as interesting, sexy enough on a daily basis.

So you come out of that campaign with those media critiques in mind, and I was interested in saying, “Let’s do something about it.” Rather than criticize and blame the media, let’s see if we can build our own that tries to generate the type of content that we would’ve wanted to see and showcase that there is an audience for it, that people do want this content.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised that, in two years’ time, we’ve had a hell of a lot. There was something like 885 million video views over the course of two years, and we built it around video. Part of what we’re trying to do is break class bubbles in society here.

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There’s a struggle of a working class that is, I think, not seen, felt, or heard by those who don’t live it. I’m like, “OK. Well, I’m going to show it to you,” to an elite class, whether it be the media or political class. We’re going to try to show you a working-class struggle and then connect it to potential solutions, to do something about them.

What you’re doing now addresses a deficit that has always infuriated me. Which is that, on the left, there’s often a tendency to think about the political transaction as starting too late in the process: asking for votes, asking for money, asking for joining a thing.

Whereas I think the right, to oversimplify, has an understanding of a funnel of political education and political involvement in this moment that feels much more sophisticated. The right often starts with what people are feeling and what people are seeing. It doesn’t start with politics. It starts with just people observing things in a society, getting annoyed by things in a society, feeling fear and anxiety and other emotions about things around them. The right has built a complete radicalization pipeline, from feeling a little bit insecure that you didn’t like that you had to navigate a Spanish-speaking cashier for the first time at your Arizona Walgreens, or feeling a little bit weird that your kid asked you if America’s a good country because they’re learning about the Founding Fathers, or feeling a little weird about some training you had to go to at work.

The right meets you where you are in that initial moment of discomfort, disorientation, and it has a political funnel to take you from there deep into its radical political project. That kind of funnel, but for good, is missing from the left.

So I wanted to ask you about this notion of meaning-making. Before you’re asking for votes, before you’re asking people to be part of your movement, are you there answering the everyday questions when they’re trying to just sort out why things are happening the way they are, why they’re getting laid off, why China is doing this? Why is this happening? That feels like such an important political question in this age. Do you see the role of More Perfect Union and advocacy journalism on the left as being to fill a meaning-making void?

Oh, 100 percent.

Initially, when I said we were going to start doing videos, I did my own trawling of YouTube. I was like, Whoa, look, a bunch of these people on the right are just crushing it with YouTube. Millions and millions and millions of views. When you try to ask, Well, who’s doing this on the left as a project?, you’re like, Nope. There isn’t really any of it. It might be some independent creators who might be doing some things on their own, but, institutionally, there’s not a mission and a purpose of trying to educate people around progressive values. It didn’t exist outside of a campaign. A campaign, as you say, comes in very late — “OK, I just want some votes.”

There is also the question of what we should talk about. I hear words being bandied about often around neoliberalism, fighting neoliberalism. I’m like, OK. Who understands what you even are saying? The word that I would counter with is populism. I’m trying to bring back populism on the left, which is infused by Bernie, which is to say, If I’m going to go out to some town in random wherever, put me in a random place in Ohio, and you put me on the stump and say, OK, go, just talk, what are you going to talk about that resonates with those people?

You’re talking about neoliberalism? No. We’re going to talk to them about the effect of wealth and income inequality and the impacts that they’re having in their own lives. We’re talking about unionization. What’s happening to you? Why did the plant close? Let me tell you about that plant. Let me tell you about the CEO of that plant. Let me tell you about the stock buybacks of this company.

There’s so little education connecting these ideas to progressive solutions. It was just so ripe.

On your point about language and being understood: I think we have a normie problem as a movement. At the same time, the fact that, as you know, there is a discussion of neoliberalism in this country in the last few years in a way there wasn’t 20 years ago is progress. It’s really good that we have been having that conversation. The fact that there is a discussion of white supremacy in this country the way when you were a Pakistani kid growing up in Florida, and I was a Indian kid growing up in Ohio, that just wasn’t a discourse. There’s a lot of progress that’s come from this kind of honest facing of the lived reality that a lot of us have.

At the same time, I totally agree with you that some of those languages and frameworks and jargon, they don’t just stay indoors in the breakout sessions of the movement. They’ve become mainstream political communication, in part because everything is just refracted through everything online. There’s not a separation of, What conversations are we having indoors and what conversations are we having at rallies? It feels complicated to me because I want to be having conversations about neoliberalism and white supremacy in some places, and I want to be able to stand at a rally in Ohio and sound mainstream.

Let’s take some of the issues that you raised that might be difficult. If we put me on a stump in Ohio and said, Go, I’m talking about the economic justice issues that I’ve raised. I’m talking about income and wealth inequality. I’m going to talk to you about the Starbucks workers, why they’re organizing. I’m going to talk about CEOs’ buybacks, why we need increased taxes on them. Talk about degradation of the safety net. What happened to retirement in this community? What happens to education and why many of us are swimming in debt, both in credit cards and education debt? How did all these things happen? Those are the issues I really want to win them over with and discuss.

First, I want to build some trust and credibility with this community. And then I want to talk about things that we may disagree with. I’m going to own that. But it has to come from a place of respect. Something I think people miss about Bernie is that when he traveled this country, he didn’t yield on talking about the white supremacy of Donald Trump. He was saying it like at literally every stop. But people said, I trust this individual saying these things, even if I might disagree. He’s saying them because he believes in them. And he’s tying it back to a value system where, even if I might disagree with it, I see where he’s coming from. And so I think sometimes this just becomes a style issue on how you project that conversation that might be a hard one for people in which they have differences of perspectives and views on gender inclusion, racial inclusion, all kinds of related social justice issues. Do they start with a position of feeling like you respect them even if you might disagree with them?

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Hi, folks. By popular demand, we did another live chat today. I don’t know what these are exactly, but they feel like good talk radio. Thank you to all who came up onstage.

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Was it something I said?

The other day, I went on “Morning Joe” and was talking about the right wing’s media ecosystem. The right has built a conversion funnel that takes people from minor irritation and social confusion and pulls them all the way to full-blown radicalization.

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I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but it’s OK not to know the answers.

It’s OK not to have your perfect diagnosis of What Went Wrong at the ready.

It’s OK to consider possibilities that challenge everything you believe in.

It’s OK to be curious about what you don’t know and can’t see.

Everywhere, I hear people trying to figure out the meaning of the election and reckon with what went wrong and plan for the future.

But so much of what I see is doubled-down certainty masquerading as introspection.

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So let me just say that it’s OK to sit with doubt and self-criticism and confusion.

It’s OK not to represent your old ideas as new ideas.

It’s OK to use this as a moment of openness. And of rebuilding.

We are not throwing any of our people under the bus by opening ourselves to genuinely hard questions about how to communicate, how we sequence priorities, how we come across, how we strategize.

If your theory of where we go from here happens to be exactly the course you thought we should have been on before, either you are just amazingly brilliant, or you are unaware that, sometimes, to stay on the road, you have to turn the wheel.

I wonder what it would look like for more of us to be open to this moment and open to the fullness of the reexaminations it could bring.

Our movement for multiracial democracy and progress can no longer afford to behave like a subculture that we think would be ruined if too many normies heard about it.

It needs to behave like a commanding emerging majority.

Yes, feel your rage. Feel your grief. Feel your dread. Then a shower and back to work.

This country will not be easily subjugated. It is a dense thicket of institutions and systems and norms and tolerances and relationships and associations that will prove more resilient than the insurgents hope.

Be vigilant. And be, at the same time, hopeful.

Democracy is not a supermarket, where you pop in whenever you need something.

It’s a farm, where you reap what you sow.

We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

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When we talked with Dexter Filkins in February, our conversation focused on what America’s ongoing involvement in what he’s called the “forever war” — the proxy conflicts around the globe that, to some accounts, add up to what looks like a World War III in the shadows — meant for people and politics here at home.

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Democracy itself has always been contested territory in that global conflict, and as the lines have shifted so radically here in the U.S. following the election, we think it’s worth revisiting what Filkins had to tell us — based on his long experience reporting on collapsing states — about why a second Trump administration’s attack on American institutions is such a serious threat. It’s not just that core liberties might suffer in the short term, but that once the foundations we take for granted are swept away, it’s not clear that there’s a plan to build anything to take their place.

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If you step back, how do you understand America at this moment, at the intersection of all these crises that you’ve reported on for so long?

On one hand, the world around us, everywhere from the Middle East to the Far East and to the middle of Europe, is either disintegrating or is in a state of instability or near instability. And at the same time that all those challenges are presenting themselves, the United States is completely paralyzed domestically to respond in a kind of coherent way. 

So the other day, you had this really earnest bipartisan attempt in the Senate to deal with the chaotic and really catastrophic situation on the border. And at the same time, in the same bill, send a lot of money to Ukraine, which is defending itself against invasion in Europe by Russia, and at the same time, send a lot more money to Israel, which is in the middle of a very intense fight with Hamas. And it failed, it all collapsed. It all failed.

What I find so dispiriting about it is just, God, are we completely incapable of acting? Even when you have these enormous threats and these huge problems that everybody agrees have to be solved one way or another, we cannot act. 

America has been the anchor for global stability, such as it is, since the end of the Second World War and the leader of the world’s democracies. And I hope that isn’t coming to an end, but if not, it’s certainly going through a very difficult stretch.

Do you think in a sense it’s already ended?

No. No, I don’t. If you look at the globe, to the extent that it works — I’m talking about global trade, I’m talking about countries getting along together, I’m talking about flows of money — all of that works in an architecture that was created by the United States at the end of the Second World War. We still have that and it still works and it’s still in place, and it’s an American creation and it’s American-led. And so before kissing it goodbye, I hope we come up with an idea of what we would replace it with.

I think what you see across the board, among democracies around the world, whether Japan, Taiwan, or NATO, is that they are always waiting for American leadership. And when they get it, they welcome it. And so I think they’re watching the United States. When you talk to diplomats and ambassadors, they’re all very disturbed by what’s happening. 

I think they’re worried about another Trump administration. I don’t want to say whether they have a right to worry or not, but if President Trump would say, “We don’t want to do all this. It costs a lot of money. We don’t want to be the world’s policemen. We don’t want to be the world’s leader. NATO is just sucking money from us,” you have to ask yourself, if not us, then who?

And to me, that’s the biggest question. Is it going to be China? Do you want to hand the keys to China? Do you want to hand them to Russia? Because those are really the alternatives that you’re talking about. 

So standing way back, I think what we have right now is, on a very large scale, a global struggle between, on the one hand, the democracies, the Western democracies, the democracies in the Far East, led by the United States, against a kind of bloc of authoritarians who have a completely different view of the world and of human nature, really. That’s China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, increasingly working together, and they’re working to thwart the United States.

Do you think, turning to Yemen and Iraq and Jordan, and obviously Israel and Hamas, this is a new phase of the “forever war”? 

I think what we’re witnessing right now is a bunch of different conflicts in the Middle East and they’re all coming together in one way or another. It’s certainly connected. But there’s nothing all that new here. You have, on one hand, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which goes back to 1947. A huge portion of the population of Gaza is descended from refugees from what was then Palestine in 1947, 1948, when Israel was created. That conflict, the Israel-Hamas war, it’s that. It’s an old conflict. But I think what’s making this all really, really dangerous is, if you look around the Middle East, we have not just a war going on in Gaza, we have the Houthis, this tribal political group in Yemen, they’re trying to sink Western ships. And you realize that there are American soldiers in Jordan. We’re still dealing with the remnants of ISIS, which came out of the Syrian civil war. 

But I want to talk about one thing that doesn’t really unify these conflicts, but does make them easier to understand, and that’s the role of Iran. If you look around the Middle East and you look at the people, the groups, that are challenging the status quo or challenging the order that exists, whether it’s Hamas, or whether it’s Hezbollah in Lebanon, whether it’s the Houthis in Yemen, all roads lead back to Iran. Those three groups are Iranian proxies. 

You have a deep-seated, decades-old conflict between Israel and Iran. There’s a very intense local conflict in Gaza and there are these strange conflicts in Yemen with the Houthis, but they’re part of this very large and super dangerous conflict — really a war, it’s been a shadow war for many years — between Israel and Iran.

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Whether we call it shadow war or proxy war — and even looking at Ukraine, where it’s American money, American bombs — I wonder, are we living in an era in which we should stop calling these proxy wars? Maybe I’m a little naive, but aren’t the United States and Russia basically just at war in Ukraine? Aren’t the United States and Iran at war? Are we dealing with an outdated paradigm of what it means for two countries to be at war?

It’s pretty simple in one way. The United States is basically trying to help its friends. These are two democracies, one in Europe, the other in the Middle East. But to answer your question, should we just call this a war and not a proxy war? 

I think to a certain extent, it has become a war. And I’ll give you a really good example, which really surprised me. I don’t know how many of your readers saw, but there was the news report about the two Navy SEALs, Americans, I think they were around the Red Sea area where all this is going on. They drowned. I think one of the SEALs had fallen into the water, and then the other one went to get him. Those SEALs were on a mission to intercept, I believe, an Iranian ship that was going to arm the Houthis.

So the first thing I thought was, Wow, I didn’t know they were doing that. And the only reason why we know about it is because these two guys drowned. How many other SEALs are out there and many ships are they intercepting, and what’s really happening? And so a lot of this is happening in the shadows. And I think this has been true between Israel and Iran for a long time. Israel’s been carrying out these extraordinary, incredible spy movie missions in Iran for years. But I think we’re doing it, too. So there’s a lot of that. So it’s not quite a war that we’re fighting, but we’re arming everybody, and, certainly, we have people in the field, so it’s kind of proxy war plus.

And in Ukraine, we’re doing more than just arming — we’re providing a lot of the guidance and help in knowing where things are.

Well, yeah, for sure. Every time I read something about a Russian tank battalion being destroyed, I’m imagining the phone ringing in the headquarters of the Ukrainian Army, and it’s some guy in the Pentagon saying, “Here are the coordinates.”

Is it just that paradigms change and we’re looking for an image of 200,000 troops crossing a border, and maybe that’s just not what happens anymore? Between the United States and Russia, for example, or between the United States and Iran, because these are nuclear powers and everyone knows what the cost of an actual war would be. So is this the rise of a deniable war — boarding ships and giving coordinates for attacks but claiming you’re just helping your friends?

I think that’s the reason the United States is able to do what it’s doing, which is arming and helping to train and giving logistical support to the Ukrainians, same with the Israelis. The only way you can sell that politically in the United States is if you begin with the promise that there will be no Americans deployed in Ukraine. There are no American troops fighting in Gaza. That’s the only way it’s politically palatable because I think in the United States right now — like you saw recently, the bill to send a lot of money and arms to Ukraine failed — there’s no appetite for American war. We’ve done that. People are exhausted by it. They were exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan.

Every elected official in America knows that, especially Biden. We can’t get involved, but we want to help. And so I think what you’re seeing is the full extent of it right now. But as you say, it’s more than us sending them guns, clearly. And so there was a term that was made famous in Vietnam, “mission creep,” which is, the mission always gets bigger, it never gets smaller. And I think that the White House has been pretty careful about that. Again, I was very shocked to read about the SEALs, because that is mission creep. They’re doing stuff. Yeah, they’re pulling triggers and they’re not really telling American people about that. So the war’s definitely evolving, but I think at the moment, it’s kind of governed by this overarching political reality that there’s no appetite in the United States.

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And you think the line — I think it’s a very insightful point — the line in terms of the public is deployment? And things that feel like deploying troops are much harder than the kind of shadow actions you’re talking about.

Yes and no. Like you say, the line for the American public is deployment. Yes, I think that’s clear. That’s been made clear by the polls. Most Americans support what the United States is doing in Ukraine, though for a pretty large segment of the Republican Party, that’s too much. And that’s what we saw yesterday with the defeat. They don’t want to send money to Ukraine. And so people like Matt Gaetz, they stand up and they say, Look, we’ve spent $60 billion on Ukraine. And that’s money we should have spent in the United States. That’s the sort of classic isolationist argument, which is: Instead of sending money abroad, let’s spend it in the United States.

And let me just say one last thing, which is that you take that $60 billion that the United States spent in Ukraine, the Ukrainian armed forces have destroyed roughly half of the Russian army, half their tanks. The casualty figures among the Russians are mind-boggling. They’ve killed tens of thousands of Russians, frontline Russian troops. You could say that’s a bargain. I’d say it’s a bargain. For $60 billion, we just took out half the Russian army. But the point being — for, I think, a large part of the American public — even the money and even the arms, that’s too much.

I rarely do this, but I want to explore Matt Gaetz’s idea for a second. Obviously, you support the idea of spending that money on Ukraine, but do you think there’s any truth in the idea that we’d be better off investing it at home? Do you think there’s some truth in the notion that if we invest in ourselves and maybe less in these other countries, it ends up actually benefiting the world because we are less of a dysfunctional place?

That’s a really good question. I think they’re right to say, “What about the United States?” And I think if you take the United States today in 2024, we’re not just a deeply divided country, but we’re a very unequal society. And I think a lot of this comes down to wealth inequality. And so you have the red states or the half of Americans that support President Trump, if you look at the demographics — I hate the term have-nots, because we’re a very rich country — the people who haven’t benefited much from American economic growth, they’ve been left behind and they notice. That’s the result of policy decisions that have been made, mostly by Republican administrations, but also Democratic ones over many, many years. But that’s the America we’ve got now, and we are deeply divided, very polarized, and very unequal. And that’s why we’re finding ourselves incapable of acting abroad because the decay is so advanced.

But it’s a very fair question about whether we should be spending all this money abroad when our own society is beset by so many problems.

I wanted to ask you about the legacy of the Iraq War in particular, and the way in which the attempt to spread democracy to Iraq may have undermined democracy at home. First of all, there’s a question of trust in institutions, trust in the media, trust in the military, trust in leaders. And, more specifically, there were a bunch of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans involved on January 6th. They attempted to secure an election somewhere else and then overturn it here. What do you think about the legacy of the failure of Iraq for American democracy?

Well, that’s a really interesting question. We could talk about the legacy of the American wars in the Middle East and Central Asia for the rest of the interview. But what has their effect on America been? If you look at just the period from, say, 2001 to 2008, what did it bring America? Two failed wars that cost trillions of dollars, catastrophic failures, which left tens of thousands of Americans maimed, wounded, or killed. And many of those were from Trump’s America. You don’t meet a lot of soldiers who went to private school in the Northeast.

And then what else did we get in the same decade? We got the financial crisis, which was basically engineered by all the elites who run the banks, and they all got off scot-free. But not only did they get off scot-free, you saw tens of thousands of foreclosures on that first group of people. So think about that. You’ve got this large slice of America for whom, what did the last 25 years of the leadership by the American elite give them or bring them? It brought them financial ruin and maybe a maimed or dead son or daughter. And that’s a lot to be angry about. And, God, I get it. I get that. It’s like, You guys are in charge and this is what you’ve wrought?

One of the strange things about the United States being such a big and powerful country is that most Americans are incapable of having an outsider view of themselves, or an insider-outsider view of themselves. Americans live in a fully American world most of the time. Given your background, what do you see in this dangerous moment we’ve been talking about, based on the experience you’ve had watching so many countries struggle, go to the brink, collapse, or come back?

What troubles me is this. I think if I learned anything in all my years overseas, particularly covering places like Iraq and Afghanistan, is that once you sweep away everything you take for granted, the architecture of your daily life and the order that you take for granted, the rules and the expectations by which society is governed, it may take you a long time to ever get those back again. And once you sweep those things away, you can probably expect terrible things to follow. 

And so what scares me about America is when there’s a kind of nihilism in the air and people are angry, people are unhappy. They want change, they want to sweep it all away. And I saw that in Baghdad. I saw that. I saw what happens when it’s all swept away and it’s utterly hideous and they’re still dealing with the consequences of it. And there is absolutely no reason why America is not fully capable of going down the same road.

And when you say the desire to sweep it all away, what do you mean in the context of American life today?

Well, look, there are very intelligent critiques of what’s wrong in the United States, which are discussed all the time. But there is also, particularly among, and I’m not trying to be partisan about this, among the fringes of each party, whether it’s the extreme right or extreme left. The idea that America’s failed, it’s broken, it doesn’t work anymore. It’s a racist country, it always has been. It’s not worth saving, basically. And you hear a lot of that. You see a lot of it, read it. And I just want to kind of hit the brakes and say, Look, I get it. You have every reason to be unhappy. You’re entitled to make any criticism you want. I just hope you’re damn clear about what you want to replace it with when you get rid of it.

For instance, probably most of your readers, including me, didn’t pay much attention to it, but if you look at what happened in Congress over the last three months, where you had total paralysis. You had, for the first time, a speaker in the middle of the Congress being dumped, ousted. They couldn’t find another one. And once they bring a new one in — having gotten rid of the old speaker on the idea that government spending is out of control — they end up spending more money than before. But if you look at that entire exercise, beginning to end, it was instigated by people like Matt Gaetz. It was essentially destructive. And it’s tear down, tear down, tear down, tear down.

And I think people like Gaetz would say that they’re doing it for a reason, that it’s essentially positive. But what it looks like right now is they’re just tearing everything down. And so that worries me. That scares me because you think, Where does it end? Where does this end? When do we start building stuff or reforming stuff rather than just tearing it all down? Because again, living overseas, I saw that, and we don’t want to go there. We definitely don’t want to go there. We don’t want to go to Baghdad in 2007.

Since you’re from Florida, if you were to imagine Florida as a country right now with this kind of authoritarian leader cracking down on books and cracking down on medical care for kids and women, it’s the kind of thing that you could imagine being written about by a breathless foreign correspondent in another country. But because it’s in Florida, it’s sort of normal. Can you just talk about Florida from that inside-outside lens?

Yeah, I grew up in Florida. I grew up a block from the ocean in a little beach town, and it was a wonderful place to grow up. I think it’s changed so much since I was a kid.

I moved as a super young kid to Florida in the 1970s, and Florida then was growing by, on average, hundreds of people a day, entering the state from somewhere else in the United States. That’s continued. Hundreds of people every day, every year since the 1970s. And so as that’s happened, the state has just kind of exploded to where it’s sort of rivaling Texas and California as one of the largest states. 

But I think politically, when I go to Florida, I don’t really recognize a lot of it. A lot of it, whether it’s in Florida or Texas — I spent a lot of time in Texas last year — it’s intelligible to me because it’s a backlash against a lot of things in America that we’ve been talking about.

I think people are very angry and they’re particularly angry at the people who run the country, whether it’s the media or the corporate elites or whoever. And I think Ron DeSantis, the governor, he’s tapped into that. Graduate of Harvard and Yale. He understands that and he understands that the greatest joy he can deliver to the voters of Florida is a poke in the eye of the elites. 

Everything in Florida is extreme; just read a Carl Hiaasen novel. And Carl Hiaasen is so wonderful. He’s talked about this. He’s like, “I don’t make up anything in my novels. They’re just drawn from real life and I can’t even keep up with the real state because it’s so nuts and it’s so crazy.” And it is, it goes to extremes. But to me, it’s kind of like a continuation of everything, the political dramas that we’re seeing playing out in the United States.

Can you talk about what you actually saw and found at the border and maybe how it even challenged your understanding of what the situation was when you got up close to it?

I have to say that was probably the hardest story I’ve ever worked on. I thought I would just make a couple of phone calls and go down to the border and I’d write up the story. But in order to understand what was happening down there, it became this kind of mammoth task, in part because nobody in the Biden administration likes to talk about the border or wants to share information on what they have. But nobody wants to talk about it because it’s so completely out of control. 

It’s remarkable to see. And to me, what was remarkable is the volume of people who are coming. And this is sometimes hard to talk about because a lot of people don’t like to talk about it, but this is not legal immigration that we’re talking about. It’s illegal immigration. These are people that are not waiting in line. The United States swears in close to a million new citizens every year. That’s not who we’re talking about. We’re talking about people that come and walk across. And it’s staggering, the numbers. You’re talking about 5,000, 10,000, 14,000 people every day. And I think we can talk about why that is and how that is and how the system is broken because it’s broken in very particular ways, but it’s broken.

When Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, says in front of Congress the border is secure, it’s not secure. It’s not. Or if it is secure, it’s secure in a way that mocks the word. But the United States has basically lost control of its southern border. And I think that’s an extraordinary statement to make, but I think it’s true.

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The observation you just made, based on your work as an eyewitness, has been weaponized by often hateful actors or people who are trying to build quite dangerous and violent movements. And the other side gets kind of dug into an opposition to that position and it becomes very, very polarized instead of being about the reality of the situation. What are your thoughts on the dilemma for the left in having a different viewpoint about asylum and the need to have a humane country, and, at the same time, being responsive to the fact that most Democratic voters don’t love the idea of a chaotic border?

I think what’s happened, particularly if you’re talking about the politics of the border, is both sides, Republicans and Democrats, have become more extreme. And so on the Republican side, there’s simply no appetite for new people coming across the border, any of them. If you look at the collapse of the border bill, which I thought was a pretty remarkable compromise, a very tough border bill, it didn’t go far enough for them. It’s like, Nope, the numbers are too high. We don’t want to let anyone in. The Republicans didn’t use to be that way. And if you go to the Democrats, President Obama, deporter-in-chief, he used to say, “Look, if you want to come to the United States, you’ve got to get in line. You’ve got to do it legally. If you don’t do it legally, we’re going to catch you and we’re going to send you back or we’re going to deport you.”

And that used to be the middle of the Democratic Party. It’s not anymore, it’s moved to the left. And so now when I went to the White House to talk about this stuff, they’re all very defensive about it. But I remember I heard this phrase many, many times. They said, “We’re here to manage the flow of migrants.” They didn’t say illegal immigrants. But they said, “We’re here to manage the flow.” It wasn’t to stop the flow, it was to manage it. And so that represents a pretty profound shift from Obama as deporter-in-chief. And so what you have is a very extreme Republican Party now, basically saying build a wall, close doors, close the borders, and then the Democrats, who are saying, There are millions of people coming in the United States, you can’t stop it, so we just have to set up a kind of orderly process for that to happen. 

And there is no middle ground on this at all. That’s what we saw the other day when the Senate bill collapsed in the House.

When you look at the United States in this very precarious moment we’ve been talking about, based on all of your experiences in other places, do you think America has the resilience and the reserves of democratic strength and good faith and whatever else to come back from the brink? And why or why not?

Well, I do. I’m hopeful. I’m optimistic, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a terrible struggle along the way. I think if you look for reasons to be optimistic, the left in America lost its mind when Trump became president. And there were a lot of good reasons to be freaking out and to sound the alarms. But was it a tragedy or was it a farce? I think we made it through, though it was very difficult in a lot of ways. January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for America. But the lesson, for me, from the Trump years was that American institutions are pretty strong.

Trump didn’t do a lot of things that people thought he was going to do. And maybe he didn’t do them because he was too lazy or too scatterbrained, or he didn’t do it because he realized he couldn’t, but they didn’t happen. And so I’m sort of hopeful that, even if there’s a pretty good chance President Trump would be coming back, that America — American democracy, I should say — will hang together. And I should say, too, if you look at President Trump’s record, it’s not all bad. If you look at some of the things that he did or that he was right about — for instance, I think he was right about China. I think Biden’s foreign policy and trade policy vis-a-vis China is basically a continuation of Trump’s. So I’m hopeful about that, but it doesn’t mean it’s automatic.

It freaks me out when I hear J.D. Vance, who might be Trump’s vice president one day, being interviewed. He was on TV the other day and he talked about what he would have done on January 6th. And he said, Well, I think each state could have submitted multiple slates of electors and then Congress could kind of fight it out.

And that’s nuts. That’s just nuts. That’s crazy. That’s a prescription for total chaos. And then, once you get total chaos and the system breaks down, then all bets are off. And that I’ve seen. I saw that in Baghdad, I saw that in Kabul. I’ve seen those movies, and that scares the hell out of me when I hear that kind of thing.

I am hopeful we can get through all that. But again, whenever I hear people saying they want to sweep it all away, whether it’s American institutions or whether it’s Republicans they want to sweep away or the Democrats they want to sweep away, I just want to say, just be careful. Just be aware of what you wish for and be damn sure about what you want to put in its place, because once you tear those institutions down, they’re terribly difficult to build back up.

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Dexter Filkins has reported around the world for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications, and is the author of The Forever War.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

I’ve heard one refrain as much as any other since Election Day. It goes something like this: I cannot even begin to imagine what is going through the minds of half of the country.

For some, like Ed Warren, a frustrated Democrat writing in Persuasion, this bafflement is a spur to curiosity:

Democrats have shown a lack of empathy towards their own constituents. They have consistently failed to listen to average voters while simultaneously judging them. It is a toxic combination that has so undermined the Democratic brand that it led to a resounding victory for Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans across the country.

Meanwhile, for the writer Roxane Gay, writing in The New York Times, there is danger in trying to empathize with and cater to madness:

We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently.

Today I’m excited to bring you a deep dive into the question of what happens when a country loses the ability to talk to itself, and to understand how others are thinking. Should the seeming incomprehensibility of others strengthen our resolve to live in a reality all our own? Or should we continue to practice humility about what we may not be seeing, even when we’re pretty sure what we’re seeing is a fascist nightmare?

To help us think about these questions, we spoke with the Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist Ian Williams. He has been examining the nature of human encounters for much of his writing career. In his 2024 CBC Massey Lectures (available as a book titled What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation In Our Time), he looks into the language of human relationships, beginning what he calls a “conversation about conversations,” an investigation of how we relate — or fail to relate — to one another through speech in our fractious times, and how our relationships might be repaired.

Williams’s concerns will be familiar to readers of this newsletter. The crisis of conversation, he writes, is part of the larger crisis of democracy:

[W]e need to address the deterioration of civic and civil discourse. On the civic side, we speak to each other as if we have all become two-dimensional profiles, without history, family, or feelings. On the civil side, our leaders speak to us, goad us, with incendiary rhetoric. We fall for it. Their inflammatory language combined with the usual hot air we expect of politicians combined with stressed, seething citizens is enough friction to cause wildfires across democracies.

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Even as social media has eased access to the public conversation, Williams argues, it has flattened its context; as an ever-increasing diversity of voices enters the public sphere and the civic conversation, we’re in many ways less prepared than ever to manage the shifts in conversation and consciousness that have followed. But there’s no alternative if democracy is to endure:

There is a greater danger in not having the conversation about the state of our world, by which I mean the state of our lives, than in having it. If we don’t talk, we risk imagining each other in ways that are self-serving; we use each other as props to confirm our treasured biases, to invent malice, and to scapegoat for social problems. Conversations act as a corrective to our assumptions and delusions.

I have been saying that we need to talk to each other, and I equally mean that we need to listen to each other. 

We present an excerpt from the book below, along with a short conversation with Williams, who told us about the distinction between conversation and conversion, what he’s learned from Claudia Rankine, and how in this era we can actually have the political conversations we desperately need.

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So this newsletter is concerned with political communication and often with the question of persuasion, which in the schema you lay out in the lecture and book isn’t really “conversation” but an attempt at “conversion.” I wonder what you make of techniques like deep canvassing, which aims to change minds through serious conversation.

I know that there are times when persuasion is necessary, that political and social advancement depends on having people change their minds. Deep canvassing is definitely better than knocking on someone’s door and offering them a button as an incentive to vote for your candidate. It takes an interest in the voter. Or pretends to, I don’t know. And that’s my contention with persuasion: conversation becomes an instrument to extract what you want from your partner. It presumes that you are right without hearing your partner’s reasons. It already has rebuttals and defenses against their opinions. 

I had a friend who was outside gardening when a canvasser came to his gate with a big smile and asked, Can we count on your vote in the upcoming election? My friend asked, Which party?

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Hello, friends! I was so moved by your comments and thoughts this week that I wanted to jump on here and respond. I tried to cover it all: the meaning of Trump’s appointments, the battle between hope and despair, the need for a new media, the silence of the Dems, messaging and truth, the state of our spirits, and, finally, a pep talk on remembering that…

Read more

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Hello, friends! I was so moved by your comments and thoughts this week that I wanted to jump on here and respond. I tried to cover it all: the meaning of Trump’s appointments, the battle between hope and despair, the need for a new media, the silence of the Dems, messaging and truth, the state of our spirits, and, finally, a pep talk on remembering that…

Read more

This post was originally published on The.Ink.