One of the complicated things I’ve been thinking about since the election is that, in an era of such high stakes, it has sometimes felt hard to speak the truth. A candidate may have flaws, but do you really want to undermine that candidate against a fascist monster? An issue may deserving facing, but facing it fully might splinter a coalition that needs to hold together for the greater good. A contradiction may sit at the heart of a political movement, but maybe, just maybe, we can face that contradiction later.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing always. It’s called being strategic. But it can also be catastrophic. Maybe one of the advantages of the political earthquake that was last Tuesday is that now there is no reason not to clearly, plainly tell the truth.

These are, as I called them right after the election, rebuilding years. And part of what I hope happens is that we rebuild from the foundation of radical, fearless honesty.

I think there are hard truths to face about whether the Democratic Party ultimately is a party for donors and consultants or for regular people. There are hard truths to face about what it means to be a movement for justice and humanity that ignores and abets a grave moral crisis in Gaza. There are hard truths to face about a movement that wants people to live and behave in new ways but doesn’t evince much interest in showing people how to get there. There are hard truths to face about whether there is space among the woke for the still-waking.

I could go on, but I want to hear from you. Tell me an uncomfortable truth you believe the pro-democracy movement needs to face in this time. Something that maybe you held back on saying when it was less convenient. But something that must be said if the pro-democracy struggle is to be won.

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Image: “Truth, Time and History,” by Francisco de Goya

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Hey, folks! Anand here. Happy (?) weekend!

What a time we live in. I’m still processing it all, as are many of you, I’m sure.

To process, I read. And so, in what has become a Saturday ritual for our subscribers, here are some readings we commend to you.

These “Weekend Reads” aren’t just a collection of links. They’re carefully curated to stretch and challenge you, and to help you consider what you otherwise might not. They are a perk for our supporting subscribers, who make what we do possible.

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A theme of this week’s reads is the real changes that can and must be made, in the short and long term. In the readings below, you will hear about how blue states can protect the vulnerable, how the Democratic party must decide whether it serves the donor class or the people, how a real opposition can build political power and more. And, as we’ve discussed several times this week, legacy news organizations need to recognize their flaws and radically change their role, but podcasts, short- and long-form video influencers, and independent newsletters like this one — along with their readers, listeners, and viewers — need to start building the media of the future.

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But first, we’ve been asking the most thoughtful people we know to reexamine their presuppositions, abandon their priors, and imagine what a renewed, revamped fight for democracy in the challenging years ahead might look like. One of the thinkers we talked to this week — the writer Heather McGhee — has an unmatched ability to diagnose political ills and suggest a cure:

I think this is why in late-stage capitalism, in an era of astounding inequality, clear populist messages continue to win the day. An anti-status quo message; throw the bums out. Politics will keep whipsawing this country back and forth until there is a fundamental political realignment and the Democrats get more coherent on the class agenda so that they are not co-opted by phony populism.

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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Readings

When were the Democrats woke?

I don’t think we’re that far apart as it may seem. But the thing I’m sitting with is, we do need to be able to speak to Americans in the mood that they’re in. And the mood that they’re in today is one of change, one of wanting to understand the cultural changes that are happening in the country around race and gender and sexuality. And also their pocketbooks, their pocketbooks are empty; things cost too much. And so we need to do all of the things. I think what I’m frustrated with is there’s been all this talk this past week about how Democrats need to abandon the “woke” part of their party and very little talk about abandoning the billionaires who are part of their party, who are harming our ability to speak in terms of class warriors and not just cultural warriors.  [Waleed’s Substack]

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Someone asked me a kind, knowing question the other day: How’s your spirit?

He was asking for, you know, reasons.

I thought I would pass on the question to you, ten days since the political earthquake, and as we go into another weekend.

How’s your spirit?

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A defining feature of our age of increasing oligarchy is the widespread, and widely believed, idea that people who cause problems should be tasked with solving them.

Not only is having caused a social problem no longer viewed as a disqualification for joining the solving brigade in many circles. It is viewed as the qualification itself.

Looking for a firefighter? Who knows more about fires, their ins and outs, than an arsonist! Hired! Looking to protect hens? Talk to foxes. How they know about hens!

This is the logic that allowed billionaire tech bros to pillage the common good and the information architecture of the society, and then cosplay as democracy saviors — whether Mark Zuckerberg on the Democratic side or Elon Musk for the Republicans.

This is the logic that allows slash-and-burn industrialists to reinvent themselves as philanthropists. Sure, they might have yanked inequality wider by offshoring jobs and skipping out on their taxes and raiding pensions. But wouldn’t you want someone who knows how to do things like that in charge of making the victims’ lives easier? Why do you want to harm those victims by depriving them of an arsonist’s fire know-how?

Well, this arsonist-to-firefighter logic, which I have spoken about for some years now, appears to have found its culmination in the still-forming new Trump administration.

If one principle would seem to be guiding Trump, it is this: This administration will not be staffed by people who are not personally culpable for causing the ills they will now be tasked with solving. If you haven’t befouled, you’re not invited to the clean-up.

So only a man who has regularly voted against environmental legislation can be head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Only a woman who has trafficked in conspiracy theories can be in charge of synthesizing facts as director of national intelligence. Only a congressman who has faced investigation for sex crimes can run the Department of Justice. Only a man involved in the disastrous and inhumane immigration policies of the first Trump administration can take on the border now.

And, of course, only an oligarch who has made a fortune from government largesse can sweep into town with a mission to take on and slash government waste.

The Trump team claims to be besieged with job applications. But applicants be warned: if you want to be part of the solution, you’ve got to be part of the problem.

As Gandhi did not say, Be the problem you want to pretend to solve in the world.

The Ink, I hope, will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. In this dark moment, I want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do. And I 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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It has been something of a week. But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Bluesky (where you can find me these days also), “It’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism. We have to sustain each other. Making joy isn’t denial, it’s how we will survive.”

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So tell me something joyful, life-giving, surprising (in a good way), hilarious, or beautiful that has happened to you since last Tuesday.

These open forums are for our subscribers, and, as such, we expect people to be generous and open, to listen and to share. This is not for anyone with an internet connection. This is your space.

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In the fall of 2017, the first year of the first Trump presidency, former President Barack Obama convened a summit. Held in his hometown of Chicago, its purpose was to surface ideas about how American democracy might transcend that darkness.

I gave the opening speech at that summit, and today I thought I might share the text with you — fully seven years down the road. I do so with trepidation, because, unlike my wife, most things don’t age well.

But I’m going to share it anyway, because, when I happened upon it a couple days ago, I was struck by how much the work ahead remains the same as it seemed to then.

The speech was about three illusions that seem to obstruct our progress, and in many ways, it seems to me, we are still afflicted with them. In fact, they point to the reasons why so many Americans yet again bought what Donald Trump was selling, and why those who sought to defend democracy were unable to convince them otherwise.

First, the illusion that the world can be transformed one starfish at a time. Second, the illusion that you can change the world without changing people. And, third, the illusion that you can change the world without being rooted in it.

The speech suggested three fundamental tenets of a pro-democracy movement that could beat the opposition and seize the age — tenets that also seem to apply now:

We need bold systemic change, not tweaks

We need an expansionary wokeness, not a closed one

We need to root in physical community, not online algorithms

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October 31, 2017

I want to discuss why change is so urgent today. Why meaningful change, nonetheless, remains elusive for many change-makers. And how this season of tempests gives change-making fresh promise.

First, the urgency.

With an assist from Lou Reed, we live in an age of “magic and loss.”

Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic — Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss — of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.

Our technology promises the magic of constant connectedness. Yet we feel loss in being atomized on separate screens, trapped in filter bubbles of belief, bobbing in a sharing economy in which the technologists seem to own all the shares.

Our societies have experienced the magic that occurs when pluralism flourishes and the marginalized assume their proper powers. But loss stalks those victories, as millions revolt against change and supremacies resurface.

The losses threaten the magic. We need to invent new systems, new economies, new ways of life to seize the magic while redressing the loss. That is change’s burden today, and why change cannot wait.

Despite this urgency, many of our most visible, celebrated attempts at change keep failing to alleviate the present inequalities and resentments. In my reporting, I’ve found that real change escapes many change-makers because powerful illusions guide their projects.

First, the illusion that the world can be transformed one starfish at a time. Second, the illusion that you can change the world without changing people. And, third, the illusion that you can change the world without being rooted in it.

The starfish illusion is captured in a popular parable. Two friends see thousands of starfish on the beach. One picks up a few and throws them back into the ocean. The other, staring at the multitudes, asks: What difference does it make? The thrower replies, “It makes a difference to that one.”

In the usual telling, the thrower is a hero, making the small, doable change. The other guy is a Grinch.

But I think the Grinch is misunderstood. I imagine he was just getting started with his questions: Why are the starfish being beached? Will these few rescues distract us from actual solutions?

What if the thrower is complicit — a fisherman who dredges the seabed or an oilman whose work worsens climate change — or even just a consumer of mussels or oil? Now it gets real. The thrower is making a difference to that one, yes. But he is also part of the problem.

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Many of today’s most prominent attempts to change the world are afflicted by this uneasy duality.

It’s a bank that recklessly speculates, helps cause a financial crisis that costs multitudes their small business, pays a fine for it, and then is celebrated widely in change-making circles for a program mentoring small-business owners.

It’s a tutoring program for poor kids in a place like Bridgeport, Connecticut, that attracts affluent volunteers from Greenwich, who would revolt if you proposed to help those same children by funding public schools equally, not by local taxes. It’s a belief in changing the world, so long as it costs you nothing.

The starfish illusion focuses change-makers on the difference they make to those they choose to help. Yet they risk avoiding the causes of the disease and remedies that would actually cure it. And they avoid these things in part because facing them could implicate powerful people, or perhaps even themselves. They lack the self-awareness and self-skepticism that genuine change requires.

The second illusion is that world-changing doesn’t require changing people — or people changing.

As our society fractures, some change-makers are drawn to visions of progress that don’t bother with suasion. I’m thinking especially of those of us who live in what we regard as the America of the future and who think of ourselves as “woke” — aware of injustice, committed to pluralism, willing to fight for it.

As wokeness has percolated from black resistance into the cultural mainstream, it seems at times to have become a test you must pass to engage with the enlightened, not a gospel the enlightened aspire to spread. Either you buy our whole program, use all the right terms, and expertly check your privilege, or you’re irredeemable.

Is there space among the woke for the still-waking?

Today, there are millions who are ambivalent between the politics of inclusion and the politics of exclusion — not quite woke, not quite hateful.

Men unprepared by their upbringing to know their place in an equal world. White people unready for a new day in which Americanness no longer means whiteness. People anxious about change’s pace, about the death of certainties.

The woke have a choice about how to deal with the ambivalent. Do you focus on building a fortress to protect yourselves from them? Or a road to help them cross the mountain?

A common answer to this question is that the people angry at losing status don’t deserve any help. They’ve been helped.

I understand this response. It is hardly the fault of the rest of us that those wielding unearned privilege bristle at surrendering it. But it is our problem. The burden of citizenship is committing to your fellow citizens and accepting that what is not your fault may be your problem. And that, amid great change, it is in all of our interest to help people see who they will be on the other side of the mountaintop.

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When we accept these duties, we may begin to notice the ways in which our very different pains rhyme. The African-American retiree in Brooklyn who fears gentrification is whitening her borough beyond recognition probably votes differently from the white foreman in Arizona who fears immigration is browning his state. Yet their worries echo.

When we learn to detect such resonances, we gain the understanding of other people that is required to win them over, and not simply to resist them.

It isn’t enough to be right about the world you want to live in. You gotta sell it, even to those you fear.

Finally, there is the illusion that you can change the world without being rooted in it.

Many of today’s most venerated world changers rarely attend local community meetings. They remain better-connected to other privileged world-changers than to any plot of earth — citizens of the globe who risk being what British Prime Minister Theresa May has called “citizens of nowhere.”

This is understandable. When you seek to change the world at large, its struggles don’t accuse you.

When you seek change at home, you have to deal with all you have voted for, done and not done, and quietly benefited from.

The creep of business thinking into change-making fuels this escapist citizenship.

Many change makers no longer ask what they owe a community, but where they can find the highest marginal impact. I wonder if the values of optimization and effectiveness have caused some change-makers to forget the value of loyalty.

Frida Kahlo once asked, “If we are not our colors, aromas, our people, what are we? Nothing.” And you don’t love your mother, or country, because she’s quantifiably, McKinsey-certified as the best — I hope not — but because she is yours. This kind of love mustn’t be spreadsheeted out of the work of change.

When leaders fail to belong in this way, communities are starved of leadership, and leaders of what you learn from being part of community. We might not have had such a fearsome backlash against trade and immigration if more of us had been locally enmeshed and listening.

Striking roots doesn’t mean ignoring large, systemic problems — or merely tossing starfish. In fact, when rooted, you observe how systems actually affect people.

President Obama’s aunt once said, “If everyone is family, no one is family.” She told him that in Kenya, not long after he had laid roots in Chicago. He went to work in this community, and married Michelle Robinson, a daughter of the South Side. Raised a citizen of the world, he became a citizen of particular earth. Rooting put him on the path to leading the free world.

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I have spoken of illusions today because it has seldom been more important to see.

The starfish illusion keeps our eyes on those few we can rescue. But real change is systemic and self-implicating, urging us to see our role in vast, complex problems.

The woke illusion tells us to circle the wagons. But real change is missionary, seeking to expand the circle.

The global illusion tempts us to be thinly everywhere, not thickly somewhere. But real change is rooted and comes through bargaining with your fellow citizens as equals.

These days, I find myself filled with a strange kind of hope. When times grow dark, the eyes adjust. What I see stirring in the shadows is people realizing that they have neglected their communities in an age of magic and loss. All around, I see people awakening to citizenship.

For decades, we imagined democracy to be a supermarket, where you popped in whenever you needed something. Now we remember that democracy is a farm, where you reap what you sow.

For decades, we thought of citizenship as a possession. Now we remember that it is something you do, not something you hold.

For decades, we told ourselves it was better to solve problems privately, outside the pathways of citizenship, because politics was broken. Now we remember that a country is only as good as its politics, and that political decay is not an excuse to flee but a reason to dive in.

This moment makes it plain that we need a new age of reform, not just a flurry of initiatives. That the best defense against hatred is offense — an evangelism of love. That changing the whole wide world must never be a refuge from tending to our own places.

Look within. Reach across. Anchor down.

Great good has been known to rise from seasons like this. Let us seek it. Let us seize it.

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Here is a paradox of the 2024 election result: Democrats advanced what they believed to be a profoundly inclusive platform, but they read to many voters as an out-of-touch, elitist party. Meanwhile, Republicans advanced a flagrantly exclusionary agenda, almost exclusively favorably to the richest and most powerful Americans, and they read to many voters as a populist movement friendly to the working class.

There is no point in fact-checking what people perceive. Elections are not math tests. There are no “right answers.” What people hear is all that matters, not what you intended to say.

Some of this paradox is explained, I think, by an underappreciated difference between platform and posture. There is the matter of what you stand for, and the rather different issue of how you stand. We all have that friend who believes all the right and beautiful and just things, but wouldn’t help you in a pinch. We all also have that friend or relative or neighbor who believes awful things but would be the first person to offer to help us move.

For reasons we will still be examining for some time, Democrats have somehow ended up in a situation where their platform is all about openness, but their stance reads to many voters as closed. It feels — and whether rightly or wrongly is beside the point — like a judgmental movement for inclusion and equity. Republicans have, at the same time, chosen a platform devoted to closings — of the border, of the gates of citizenship, of the generosity of the safety net, of fundamental freedoms — but their stance reads to many voters as open, inviting, come-as-you-are. It feels to many like a nonjudgmental movement for exclusion.

Please don’t misread this on purpose. It is not an endorsement of the right’s methods. But I think we need to be straightforward about this paradox. It is a scandal to allow the most exclusionary platform in modern American history to be read as openhearted to so many. It is a scandal that so many of the very people it would degrade feel attracted to the cause.

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Part of what’s going on here, I think, is the Republicans embracing an ethic that I first heard from progressive community organizers: Meet people where they are.

This is the organizer’s code, the idea behind all other ideas. But when I wrote my book The Persuaders, many of the organizers on the left whom I profiled were sounding an alarm through my book about their own movements turning away from this ethic. They worried about their movements seeming to have prerequisites to join. Linda Sarsour, the progressive activist, described her own movement as being like a prison where you have to enter one gate and have that gate close behind you to cross the next gate. You had to know the right terms, never mess up, not have questions about the right approach to advancing social justice for marginalized groups, and, frankly, silence concerns you might have about the best strategy.

That Republicans have ended up with more of a “meet people where they are” ethic is beyond ironic. Again, I’m speaking of posture, not policy; stance, not substance. But they have managed to create the sense of an open invitation to join this movement of closings. There is a thirst for converts, rather than a suspicion that they may not be aligned with you on every last issue. There is an understanding that a lot of politics is actually about vibes and having your cause be an aspirational brand people want to join; and the Republicans made inroads with many nontraditional voter groups this time around by having the MAGA hat function as a status symbol, allowing people to flex and separate themselves from other members of their own communities, showing people that they are winners who didn’t need the Democrats’ offers of help.

But what turbocharges these differences in stance is a gigantic media ecology on the right that functions as a voter radicalization funnel. Meeting people where they are means that you pull people into that funnel at its very wide end. As they enter, they are merely annoyed by things around them — upset about inflation, frustrated at not being able to own a home, feeling destabilized by the rising status of women and people of color, unsure of their role. And the funnel — consisting of traditional media, newer media like podcasts and video talk shows, social media, and YouTube content — slowly pulls them from annoyance with questions toward ever more radical and pungent certitude. It doesn’t require them to be at the pointy end of the funnel at the beginning. The point of the funnel is to pull in everyone. The movement is self-confident enough to think that it can turn anyone bothered by a pea under their mattress, whether valid or invalid, utterly racist or genuinely born of pain, into a believer.

The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world. It needs to take lost and lonely boys and men and move them toward a sense of how to be in a gender-equal world. It needs to invite people to see their own story in the story of a pluralist America of the future. It needs to be longer on invitation, shorter on blame. It needs to meet you where you are, and be confident enough to move you, over years even, toward greater consciousness.

There is simply no such media ecology right now, no such organizing infrastructure at the scale required. People who want to build things like this get no help from those who could help them. People sit around and fret about Tuesday but don’t have the vision to help build the mental infrastructure for a different future.

Let’s change that.

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What would you like to see or hear in media that you aren’t seeing or hearing now? What do you think that organizing mental infrastructure needs to look like? Let us know in the comments.

I hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. On this dark day, I want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do. And I 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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The only thing that could have taken me out of the country during Election Day was my grandfather’s 100th birthday. My Nanu, who lives in New Delhi, India, was hitting a century, and I was going to be there. I took my son along. My grandfather is, like me, consumed with politics and the news, and he kept asking me what was going to happen. Meaning, in the U.S. election, whose results ramify around the world.

A day or two before Tuesday, I showed him a photograph of Vice President Kamala Harris and me together. His sight is greatly diminished, so I asked him whether he could make out who the man was and who the woman was. He first identified me, perhaps because of the prematurely gray hair he and I share. And then I pointed to her. Who is that? I asked. He looked and looked harder.

“The president to be,” he said finally.

Except that it wasn’t to be.

My nine-year-old boy and my sister and I woke up before dawn on Wednesday, India time, to watch the results. When the truth of the night began to reveal itself through glimpses of county-level data and friend-group-chat emojis and a steadily rightward-drifting needle, we fell into a depression. My parents were soon in the house, too. The whole house, having just celebrated Nanu’s centennial with epic joy the day before, now fell into the doldrums.

Something I began to notice in the hours since is that the presence of my son took on a new significance to me. The simple sight of him; the feel of hugging him; the little thrill of making him laugh. In times like these we are entering, I began to think, the distinction between the things you can control and the things you cannot widens. You can choose the kind of family life you have, what your dinner table smells and sounds like, what your children feel in their bones when they are stressed or confident or doing that audition. In times like these we are entering, the more remote things feel harder to control. You may resist and fight and march and protest; you may speak out; indeed, many of us must in the times that are coming. But I kept looking over at my son and sometimes just holding him and thinking, This I know how to do; this I can make good; this I can choose and shape.

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I’m curious if this is happening to some of you. Not only your children, although maybe also that. But a sense of looking more closely at the things close to you where you can act and choose and shape and guide, when other things feel like they’re slipping out of reach. Maybe it’s the community garden you belong to. Maybe it’s your church choir. Maybe it’s the neighborhood business you’ve been thinking of starting. Maybe it’s the refugee program you’ve been putting off volunteering with. Maybe it’s the friends you love and aspire to gather for dinner but never find the time, because life. Maybe in times like these we are entering, you will find the time to have them over for dinner. Because these are the things we can control.

In times like these we are entering, when it will become harder to have systems that are kind, interpersonal kindness will matter more. It shouldn’t have to, but it will. Having each other’s backs will matter more. Checking in on your friends will matter more. Letting people sleep on your couch will matter more. Cooking for people who are sick will matter more. We should not be in a situation where the burden of care shifts so radically from the center to the edges, from a coordinated system to an ad hoc network, but it is where we are headed. And we will all be called on in the times ahead to be for each other what, in a better time, the system would be.

If you have a spare moment today, text or, better yet, call someone you care about and don’t reach out to enough. And just tell them you will be there in the days that are coming. That’s it. That’s the assignment.

I hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. On this dark day, I want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do. And I 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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It’s already happening.

Within hours of the presidential election being called for Donald Trump, the recriminations began, the I-told-you-sos surfaced, and out came analyses of what went wrong that just so happened to confirm everything the analyst already thought.

In the coming days, expect everyone with an ax to grind or consulting practice to sell to offer a slick PowerPoint of what went wrong. Expect to drown in post-mortems.

It will largely be a process of people showing how smart they are by grafting their priors onto the present. Of course, to an extent, such a process is healthy. You can’t move on without knowing what you are moving on from.

But may I be idealistic and naïve enough to suggest that we move quickly past the post-mortem phase, toward what I would call the “pre-vita,” pre-birth, phase?

The less interesting question right now is what one campaign did wrong. The more interesting question is what a pro-democracy opposition can use these years ahead to create.

Because these will be the rebuilding years. Sports teams have such years when they lose and lose badly. And there is a kind of freedom in the rebuilding year. You know it’s a rebuilding year, so there is a certain amount of space and time. You’re not expected to turn around and win the title, because you acknowledge that you’re broken. Your work is not winning, not at first. It is rebuilding to put yourself in a condition such that you might win again.

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The typical, inevitable post-mortem phase will traffic in the usual, surface-level conclusions, most of which are just a rehashing of pre-existing battles. She should have tacked to the center. The problem is that she tacked to the center. She should have taken inflation more seriously. She should have had bolder policy ideas. It was Gaza. It was misogyny. And on and on and on.

But in the pre-vita work we ought to be embarking on, the questions we ask will be bigger and bolder: What kind of pro-democracy can actually compete with neo-fascist authoritarianism? Without any attachment to the current forms and expressions, what would the organizing infrastructure of such a movement look like? What would be the coalitional culture of such a movement, and how would disagreements be hashed out?

What would talent development in the movement look like? How would such a movement pursue bold policy while also meeting people where they are? How would it ensure a deep connection to everyday people and avoid being hijacked by elite priorities removed from most voters? How would such a movement be funded, knowing all the tradeoffs inherent in who you take money from and how it’s raised?

In age of populist upheaval, what would its relationship to the existing power structure be? How would it convey, and live, a seriousness about changing things while catering to the more status-quoist members of its anti-fascist front?

How would such a movement compete with the reptile-brain, emotional appeals typical of fascists? How would it show up in people’s lives outside of electoral cycles? How would such a movement escape the low trust levels that presently plague so many of our institutions?

How would such a movement be candid about American history and the country’s problems and unfinished business without reading to too many voters as unpatriotic? How could it pursue ahead-of-the-curve issues without coming across as unconcerned with meat-and-potatoes, right-now anxieties?

In an era of precipitous racial and demographic and gender change, how would such a movement defend the idea of freedom and justice for all, while devoting itself to helping people cope with changes that leave them feeling unsettled? How could such a movement compassionately and shrewdly take on the burden of psychological change management for white communities and men in particular, not in the name of coddling them but in the name of widening the appetite for future progress?

How can we articulate and pursue social progress in ways that make people discomfited by the changes feeling invited in rather than blamed?

How could a vigorous pro-democracy movement more candidly confront the genuine fear people have of chaos, disorder, the sense of entropy, whether in their cities or on their national frontiers? And how could meeting those fears where they are be married to real idealism about who belongs and who has rights?

What kind of media ecosystem could a new pro-democracy movement, rising from these ashes, build? How could the tired schism between “real journalists,” on one hand, and “influencers,” on the other, give way to a modern approach that combines independent voices as well as ideologically sympathetic meaning-making?

What should the power base of such a movement be? The working class and unions? Academia, nonprofits, and the philanthropic sector? How should tensions and conflicts of interest among these various factions of the movement be dealt with?

I could go on. But these are questions that go beyond whether they hired the right person in Philadelphia or whether that ad buy was too late. They are questions about what could and should be born. After the post-mortem, may it be time for the pre-vita.

Today many of us mourn. Tomorrow (metaphorically speaking) we get back to work.

Welcome to the rebuilding years.

The Ink, I hope, will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. On this dark day, I want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do. And I 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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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

It is a shattering result. The return of Donald Trump feels like the end of something, more than a reversion. The end of a certain idea of America, the end of an era, the end of so much hope and faith and belief. The end of a complex of institutions and ideas.

For many of you, the result will break your trust in America and in the people around you. You may be tempted to turn away. That is entirely understandable. For some, it might be the right choice for right now.

But for those who, as ever, believe in America, the work remains. It becomes all the more urgent. It doesn’t go away just because a carnival barker wants to be a king.

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What is important now is to find the right way forward, to lend the love and support the people around you will need in the coming days and weeks and years, and to give yourself that love, too. And not to lose hope.

How can we go on right now? Where can we locate hope? Can the grueling years ahead also be a time of rethinking and rebuilding, so that another country from this becomes possible again?

On these questions there is no better voice we can bring you right now than Rebecca Solnit. We encourage you to visit her Facebook page and her books, and revisit the conversations we’ve had with her this year.

And read this special message from her below in the wake of Tuesday’s result.

The fight for the future continues. We hope on.

The Ink, I hope, will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. On this dark day, I want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do. And I 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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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.

1. That was a very strong closing argument from Kamala Harris. Framing the threat of fascism as not an abstraction but a distraction from a focus on your problems. Promising to move us away from the chaos and division of these years and heal families and communities.

2. She very deftly pitted who he is against who we are and dared people to show that their country is much better than he is.

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3. She pulled off the bank shot: saying we have to save a democracy, yes, but save it for a reason, which is to make your life better. It is a complicated maneuver, and she did it well tonight.

4. She invited men to stand up for the women in their lives.

5. She talked about the border, but then quickly and rightly pivoted to the fact that we are nation of immigrants, a fact we should celebrate.

6. Her reclaiming of freedom and patriotism is a coup, the good kind of coup. The crowd’s embrace of patriotism and “U.S.A.!” chants tonight shows how much that message has been transmitted and left an imprint.

7. There was something raw and personal when she talked about how she just is irked by unfairness. It just doesn’t sit right with her. It felt like a statement of motivation that was much richer than the generic fact of being a middle-class kid. It got somewhere visceral.

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8. We are all so exhausted by fascist threat mitigation that we forget all the awesome stuff we could be doing instead. So her section on building houses also served as a reminder that building in general, creating, dreaming, can again become our focus when he is finally gone from our lives.

9. She is, on a deeper level, attempting a rebranding of the Democratic Party away from big program creation, dating back to FDR, and reorienting it around quality of life improvement. Don’t talk about the programs you want to create. Talk about the pain points you want to solve.

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10. Many of the best arguments of recent years are weaving together now. Trump’s narrow, hateful vision isn’t who we are. His project is all about him, not your problems. The soul of the nation is good and can be reclaimed. The divisions can end. Let’s build stuff instead of fight.

11. Most powerfully, she invoked American history from end to end, and vowed that a country founded in defiance of a petty tyrant must refuse to submit to another.

Watch the full speech here:

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Two things have grown increasingly clear: Donald Trump is a fascist, and he is winning the support of most American men. But it doesn’t have to be like this. There is a way out.

Yesterday, a breathtaking report arrived in The New York Times. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, warned in the starkest terms that Trump is a fascist with a real authoritarian vision and confirmed the murmurs about Trump being jealous not to have had the kind of generals Hitler did.

What Kelly is doing is the opposite of gaslighting, acknowledging as a former insider what many of us have long been saying: that Trump is a fascist, saying and doing fashy things. Winkingly encouraging violence. Goading on and praising insurrectionists. Dehumanizing Others. Calling for the use of the military against civilian opponents. Promising a second term centered on vendettas and retribution. Peddling racial supremacy. Pledging to be a dictator on day one. Telling violent allies to stand back and stand by. Vowing that if you vote for him, you won’t have to vote again — and that if you don’t, it will be a bloodbath.

The distressing thing is that a majority of American men are looking at all of this and saying, “Yeah, let’s do that.” We are dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death.

To be clear, a majority of American men have voted Republican in most presidential cycles for a very long time. What is happening now is not Vice President Kamala Harris failing to win over men. What is happening is that the Republican Party being taken over by fascists has turned out not to be a dealbreaker for a majority of men.

The Democrats’ — and small-D democracy’s — men problem has engendered all sorts of discussion and debate and some amount of understandable frustration. As the writer Charlotte Clymer put it a few days ago, “Can someone please explain to me what exactly it is that young men want to hear from VP Harris that she’s not already saying? And please be specific.”

The problem has also triggered unusual organizing efforts, such as the writer and social media maven Liz Plank’s efforts to use social events where men chat up women to highlight Project 2025’s dangers to all Americans’ sexual liberty, including men’s.

What, if anything, can the Harris campaign do about this problem in the final days? Is there, as Clymer asks, any language that can be spoken that hasn’t? Any outreach that can be done that hasn’t? Any policies that could be rolled out that haven’t?

In recent days, the Harris campaign has tackled the problem head-on, announcing new policies and messages aimed at Black voters and Latino voters in particular.

But if the material dimension of the problem has gotten adequate attention, the affective dimension of the problem has not.

If you spend time traveling this country and talking to people and reporting on communities, if you have the lens of a cultural observer and not only a policy enthusiast, what becomes clear is that, when it comes to men and their enthusiasm for fascism now, the affective dimension may be the dominant one.

Which is to say, a lot of men have been persuaded — brainwashed may be a better word — that the future is something that should terrify them. That the future mocks them, thumbs their nose at them. That it will silence them, constrict them, devalue them, censor them, starve them, obviate them, reduce them to jokes.

Now, suspend for a moment your quibbling about whether any of these feelings are true. In a democracy, feelings very quickly become facts. Part of the deal of living in a self-governing society is accepting that your neighbor’s feelings become your reality. The burden of citizenship is accepting that what is not your fault — and may not even be real — often becomes your problem.

A lot of what a lot of men are going through right now is simply the inner experience of the old line, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

And one of the great sweeping mistakes of our era has been assuming that, because certain kinds of change are morally correct, they go down easy. Because certain destinations are good destinations socially and ethically and arc-of-moral-universe-wise, any experience of discomfort with the journey is a private problem to be suffered alone and given little outside help.

So now here we are in a country that is changing a lot, has changed a lot — indeed, has, over the past few generations, done more to change the status and rights and dignity of women than hundreds of prior generations did. And we have done the right things while failing to manage social and psychological change — failing to manage the minds and hearts of those who experience these worthy changes as headwinds.

This seems to me central to the story of how a majority of men could do what populations bewildered by change and anxious about the future and their place in it have done: support fascism, support dictatorship, support tyranny to smash it all.

Vice President Harris is a prosecutor. She has delivered many a closing argument. She knows what closing arguments involve. In court, they are actually a rare chance where you get to speak on the level of affective. In the rest of a crimianl proceeding, it’s just the facts. Just the evidence. But in the closing argument, you can make meaning. You can tell a story. You can move people.

Because this is the only country I have, I am determined that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, and the wider pro-democracy movement she represents uses these last days to address part of a closing argument to American men. Not only to roll out policy to them, though policy is vital. Also to speak to them on the level of the gut.

Yes, change is scary. Yes, it sometimes feels like you don’t know how to be these days. Don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s tempting to shake things up when you’re scared. When you feel attacked by the future itself.

But don’t. Because men worthy of the word don’t outsource the care and protection of their families to dictators. Men worthy of the word don’t depend for their self-esteem on the crushing and marginalizing of Others. Men worthy of the word don’t need women to be locked in the fourteenth century legally to feel whole. Men worthy of the word don’t hand over the keys to the future to billionaires who pull the strings.

However one might reject their premises, some fraction of the mass of American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need to feel seen and heard and recognized in their stress and anxiety and sense of dislocation in the future that is coming. And they need to be invited into a contrary story of progress. Saving the country from tyranny needs to become aspirational for men. Not a lecture.

They need to remember, and become excited to say, that real men reject fascism.

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Every so often, a video of mine so triggers the right that I start getting called names and accused of being a lesbian, which is an honor, really, but that’s another story.

This isn’t the insult you think it is. I would be absolutely honored to be a lesbian.

What follows is some of the discussion I had on “Morning Joe” this morning that touches on something critical: How the threat Donald Trump and J.D. Vance represent is not just about the economy, or the erosion of norms, or even the curtailment of specific freedoms by some abstraction of fascism.

It’s about the erasure of the institutions you’ve depended on all of your life, that make your future malleable, your plans possible, and let you live as you’ve dreamed. In their place, they promise nothing but the chaos of a failed state.

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A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

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I think if you think about some of the great presidents we’ve had in this country, obviously they were interested in winning and losing, but it wasn’t necessarily the sum total of their being or understanding of the world.

They were interested in policy. They were interested in the country. They had a certain feeling for history.

I think Donald Trump is someone so small, so limited in a way that winning and losing is really the only thing he understands. There’s this kind of thing that his father supposedly said to him.

There’s two kinds of people in the world, you know, killers and losers, killer being a good thing in this moral landscape.

And so you can imagine the 2020 loss was a trauma for Donald Trump, because it’s the only kind of meaning he has, is to have ratings higher than the other person.

And his ratings were lower, the ultimate rating in this country, which is votes.

And then J.D. Vance, I actually met J.D. Vance the first time here. We were both on the same day — this is 2016. I thought he was charming, kind, interesting, with a different worldview. We spoke, messaged a little bit after that, and he became what I think the founders a couple hundred years ago used to call men of ambition.

Ambition didn’t used to be a good word the way it is now. It used to mean people who have such a design on power, that there’s nothing they won’t say, do, become to have power. This is a person who is now willing to throw out constitutional democracy.

He studied at Yale Law School, where I believe they actually have courses on the Constitution. He’s willing to throw out everything he took time to study, to be that kind of man of dark ambition.

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And I think what’s really important now is for people across this country who may not be diehard for Kamala Harris or diehard for Donald Trump, but who love the country, who have been blessed by the many gifts of this country to say this country is what it is.

It has given you whatever it’s given you because of institutions, institutions you take for granted, prospects of a peaceful transfer of power that you take for granted so you can go live your life. You can go start that restaurant. You can go do that job. You can go drive your kid to that college.

You can do all those things in a way that you cannot in Somalia because the institutions are just working in the background. You don’t even have to think about them very often. You have to vote every so often and then they work.

And what is at stake now is you possibly not being able to do all those things you’ve done all your life, not be able to chase your dreams, not be able to make your plans, because what works in the background is not going to be working in the background in a Trump administration politics, government persecution would become your life. This would become the the full drama of our country.

That’s what happens in these countries that go in that illiberal, unconstitutional direction, and what they are proposing is not just you know an abstraction of fascism it is a kind of political project where politics would eat our dreams, eat your plans, and I don’t think most Americans want that.

Watch the full conversation below:

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Video courtesy “Morning Joe”/MSNBC

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Did you watch that interview on Fox News? I did. And maybe you saw what I saw.

What I saw was an extended metaphor for the condition of the country itself.

A woman, a person of color, representing a new generation and a kind of voice that hasn’t always been heard in American life, but more and more is being heard now, trying to speak — and a barrel-chested, pomade-glazed relic of the “Mad Men” era, interrupting her and interrupting her some more and interrupting her some more still, and then adding to his interruption some interruptions, and then also interrupting.

Fox News’s Bret Baier wasn’t just trying to stop Vice President Kamala Harris’s words. He seemed offended at the notion that her vocal cords actually make sounds. He invited her voice on his show and was upset that it had a volume.

I doubt there is any woman, any person of color, in this country who has not been in a meeting and experienced this kind of bulldozing. And some of them watch Fox News and still don’t like being interrupted.

Last night’s interruptionism, elevated almost to an art form, is a metaphor for the state of the country because a minority of Americans like Baier, an encrusted old guard, wants to interrupt the future itself. But the future will not be interrupted.

They don’t want to hear voices not their own. But those voices are growing louder.

They think the country will be lost when more people speak. But we know the country will actually come more fully than ever into its own when we all speak.

And we’re not done speaking.

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

America, meet abyss; abyss, America.

In a little under three weeks, America will conclude a referendum on fascism.

I would love to say something more subtle. But there isn’t anything subtle to say.

There is a carnival barker wannabe autocrat, increasingly unhinged and unraveling, at the top of the Republican Party’s ticket. More disturbingly, there are tens of millions of our fellow citizens who, having been abundantly exposed to his madness, are all in.

Just today, I read in The New York Times that Olivia Troye, once the homeland security adviser to Donald Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, is so concerned about her own and others’ basic safety in a second Trump presidency that she is shopping around for foreign countries that would grant her a backup citizenship.

What we are witnessing is, as The Ink has tried to say early and clearly and often, is fascism, with all the elements of racial supremacy, the threat of state violence and encouragement of private violence, and the pillaging of democracy for a dear leader.

We learned about it in school. Elsewhere. We were taught it was the kind of thing that only happens elsewhere. Now it’s very here.

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The good news is that we have the power to beat it back. If we choose to exercise it.

The other day, CNN, to its credit, aired a screenshot of Merriam-Webster’s definition of fascism:

We in the media still struggle at times to find the language to be clear about all this. We describe what Trump is doing and offering as “extraordinary” and “unusual” and “unprecedented.” But often, as a profession, we have struggled to call it by its name.

Fascism.

It’s a word that needs to be said again and again, and a word that needs to be spread.

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Today, I’m unlocking for all of you, subscribers and non-, all of the below posts from our archives, in which we explored this word and its connection to the moment.

Share them with your friends and those in your lives who are on the fence about a candidate — or about voting itself. Help them plainly see the fate we must avoid.

And here, a note of thanks for supporting independent media that is free to call things by their name. Our promise to you is, whatever happens in November or beyond, The Ink will go on calling things what they are.

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Friends, I got to talk about this morning’s essay, “Kamala Harris’s last mile,” today on “Morning Joe.”

Check out some of that conversation here. Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

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And ICYMI:

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Eighty-six days ago, Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate no one expected, not even her. Since then, she has gotten her coalition in formation, galvanized a party that felt more loyal than alive, and rewritten the odds.

Still, three Tuesdays from the Tuesday that will decide America’s course for a generation, there remains unfinished business.

To win decisively in November and crush American fascism, Harris must — more than she or her party have in some time — tap into and channel the most powerful force in American life today: rage at the establishment, mistrust of a rigged system, cynicism about the hope of anything ever changing, the defection from belief itself.

In this brief race, a paradoxical contest has formed.

Harris is running against white nationalism, but she is doing very well with white voters with college degrees; they are essential to her path to victory. Meanwhile, she is seeing defections from voters of color, especially Black and Latino men, a risk the campaign has taken on head on this week with new waves of outreach.

She is running as someone whose name and appearance reminds you that she was born outside of the American power elite. And yet she has put together an A.O.C.-to-Dick Cheney coalition of leaders, united the pro-democracy American establishment, and raised more money than basically anyone.

She is a fresh face in a party that took the risk of switching nominees, but she is struggling to sell some voters on being a change agent.

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For all of the vice president’s success thus far, it is important to name the greatest risk to her candidacy, in the hope of avoiding it: In the homestretch, Democrats cannot let themselves be defined as the Whole Foods party — a party that speaks convincingly to upscale and educated and socially conscious and politically engaged and often-voting Americans, but doesn’t similarly rouse working-class voters of various stripes and more disaffected, jaded, demoralized voters.

In the last mile of this election, so many of the remaining pool of undecided voters — or, more importantly, people undecided about voting — have simply lost faith that anyone will change anything for the better in their lifetime.

It is beyond ironic, beyond ridiculous even, that some people who feel this way, millions of them, are attracted to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, two pillars of the establishment who are running for president on a platform that would only make the richest and most powerful Americans more rich and more powerful.

But it is happening, and it must be stopped.

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I have written four books (so far), and three of them, in different ways, were about this rage and cynicism and frustration toward the system. One was about white guys drifting out of the system and toward white nationalism; another was about fury toward the billionaire class in a new gilded age; another still was about overcoming common resistance to the idea that electoral politics would ever change anything.

And what these reporting experiences tell me is that that many of the people the Harris campaign is most struggling to win over and activate right now are tired, cynical, jaded, not feeling it — for a reason.

They are the once-bitten, twice-shy voters. They are democracy’s jilted lovers. They are people who maybe once gave their heart to democracy but democracy neglected and neglected them and now it’s coming back around saying, Take me back! Defend me! And they don’t feel what they used to feel.

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The last mile in this election is the people who no longer believe.

For this group, it’s not going to be enough to use the fascism word, which connects better with educated groups and engaged voters. It’s not going to be enough to offer policy, which presumes a faith in the system. It’s not going to be enough to warn of the threat to democracy, for democracy has felt threatened, and absent, for too long.

Here’s what will not work. Scolding people. Lecturing them. Condescending to people who have lost faith, who no longer believe.

Telling them they’re being lazy or dumb or unstrategic.

Yes, of course, this election should be a straightforward choice. But do not underestimate the psychic effect of being asked to believe again and again and not seeing your life change. Sometimes booing can be its own way of voting.

Voters are always trying to tell you something, one way or another, by voting for you or voting for the other person or simply not voting.

Voters of color telling a historic, trailblazing woman of color candidate that they’re not feeling it aren’t being dumb; they’re trying to tell us something. Men being unmoved by the threat of fascism aren’t being lazy; they’re trying to tell us something.

And, more than we’d like to admit, what they’re trying to tell us is that sales pitches in general, however meritorious-sounding, don’t land, because nothing has worked.

I remember encountering many voters like this when reporting on deep canvassing in Arizona. The canvassers informed and reasoned earnestly; often the answers coming back from the other side of the threshold were full of, as one canvasser put it to me, a dangerous mix of disinformation and truth. Wars, financial crises, pandemics, bad weather, housing crises, floods, fires, education that didn’t deliver what it promised — these voters swam in reasons not to believe.

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What we need in this homestretch is curiosity. Curiosity about the defections, curiosity about those with whom the sales pitch isn’t landing.

Not to be mad at them, but actually to be curious.

From everything I’ve listened to and heard over these years and in this cycle, here is some of what I think needs to happen still.

Harris needs to tell a big story, a whole story, about what has happened to America, naming and acknowledging why so many feel as they do, and explaining how, together, we can get out of this condition, and, then, what America will look and feel and be like when we do.

It needs to be a populist story, backed by populist policy. It’s not just about beating Trump. It’s about beating a colluding elite of the rich and powerful that have rigged America, rigged the economy, rigged your workplace, rigged the information ecosystem, and made your life harder. And she needs to tell us, especially the distrusting, how exactly she will break it.

She needs to summon the distrusting back into belief. Doing so will require more than telling the usual story of being a middle-class kid, just like you. She needs to show people who have lost faith that she sees why. That both parties have failed them, one more than the other, but both, really.

And she needs to invite them into a vision of what American can be that is so compelling that they forget they are supposed to be cynical.

With men, in particular, she must stop the bleeding. The defection and disaffection of millions of men is profoundly alarming. Many men are resisting standing up for democracy. They are more drawn to the phony masculinity of Trump and Vance than the generous kind incarnated by Tim Walz. But, again, we have to be curious.

Men cannot be lectured to return to the fold. Voting for Harris, voting for democracy itself, has to be made aspirational. Men who have struggled in recent years to feel like the providers they aspire to be, because of housing costs and food costs and economic precarity — these men must be recognized head on. Harris did that this week with her outreach to Black men on the economy. It must be done more and more and more.

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This outreach must be backed by policy. At her best, Harris has embraced big ideas that would change the landscape of the country, from housing construction to the care economy. Go further. Be sweeping. Propose the kind of simple-to-understand, sweeping, universal policies that make people thirst for the future.

And, finally, be everywhere, all at once. It has been a relief to see Harris saturate the airwaves in recent days, after an earlier reticence.

There is so much reason not to believe in America in 2024. If you want people to believe again, especially the people who are right now still on the fence, you need to tell them a story that not only persuades them but all but rewires their brain. You need to help them make new meaning of what they have seen and heard and felt.

This will require being everywhere all at once, in their heads and hearts, morning, noon, and night. It doesn’t matter if every interview isn’t perfect. Show them your power, your life force, the life force that proposes to smash obstacles and change their lives. Do whatever media most helps you reach them. It doesn’t need to be the old guard. But people are looking for whether you are unafraid, because if you are, it might give you what it takes to help them.

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Last month, I got to see my brilliant friend Jon Batiste play at Radio City Music Hall. My kids were dancing in the aisle. He took us through all of the genres and the things.

But one moment was truly unforgettable.

For minutes that felt like a lifetime but that you also didn’t want to end, Jon expanded on his viral TV riff on Beethoven’s Für Elise.

This week, thankfully for the world, he released a version of it to everyone. It’s a preview of an album that will drop soon.

But today, right now, right here, you can listen to “Für Elise-Batiste” below.

This song is a rare piece of art in this moment that has the potential to represent all of a country that rarely feels like an “all” anymore. It is Black and it is white. It is classical and it is gospel and it is the blues. It is melancholy and it is hopeful. It is German and it is New Orleans. It shows how little it takes to make the sounds of some of us sound like the sounds of others of us. It makes a case, to my mind, for an all.

Listen.

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

This week I am in Paris on work. Just before noon today, I heard air raid sirens. And it is a measure of the moment we live in that I genuinely wondered if it was just a drill.

It was, thankfully.

But in my conversations here in recent days, as I know is happening back home as well, the thought cannot be escaped: Are these wars that engulf us now moving beyond the tranquilizing illusion of “proxiness”? When do we name what this is?

I wanted to re-share, therefore, this essential conversation with the veteran foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins. In particular, chew on his idea of “proxy war plus.”

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.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; author photo by James Hill

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Hey everyone! Anand here. Happy Saturday!

As always, we’re excited to bring you this weekend roundup of things we’ve been reading and thinking about this week — some of the best writing on the internet that we could find.

But before we send you away to others, we wanted to pull up this essay right here at The Ink, in case you missed it, making the case for immigrants making America great.

As we do each weekend for The Ink’s paid subscribers, below we present a few of the most interesting, challenging, and surprising pieces we’ve found in the course of our reading and research over the week. We’ve got an incredibly thorough account in Cell of Covid-19’s undoubtedly zoonotic origins that would — in a less misinformed world — finally set the record straight, a brutal condemnation of J.D. Vance’s racist lies from a very unexpected source in the conservative movement, a debunking of the supposedly sacrificial origins of animal crackers, and more. We hope these inspire, inform, and even entertain you this weekend.

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

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Readings

A condemnation of Vance’s lies, from an unlikely source

​​Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else. [The Dispatch]

What should be the last word on Covid-19 origins

Multiple lines of evidence are consistent with the infection of wildlife animals with SARS-CoV-2 in the Huanan market. Animal carts, a cage, a garbage cart, and a hair/feather removal machine from a wildlife stall

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

By popular demand, today we launch an experiment with Substack’s “voiceover” feature. If you’re the kind of person who likes audiobooks read by the author, try the essay out above.

There appears to be some confusion about what immigrants eat. As a son of immigrants and a native Ohioan, I want to help to clear up this confusion.

From far-right demagogues, we hear suggestions that immigrants prey on dogs and cats, smacking their foreign-born chops on 100 percent, all-American pets.

This week, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, doubled down on his petivore allegations, while admitting that he was lying, he was asked to respond to another claim, this by the conspiracy theorist and Trump groupie Laura Loomer, who said that, if Vice President Kamala Harris were elected, the White House “will smell like curry.” This is presumably because Harris is descended from immigrants on both sides of her family, from two notably flavor-blessed countries — India and Jamaica.

Vance, as ever caught between the rock of white nationalism and the hard place of having a brown wife and children, answered with the culinary equivalent of having a Black friend: “I make a mean chicken curry.” Only the “mean” part was convincing.

So here, at the highest levels of politics, were questions of what immigrants eat. Your pet dog? A cat near you? Stinky curries?

This is, of course, classic, straightforward Othering, straight out of the white nationalist and authoritarian playbooks. The far right is always a little scared, because the number of people who are more interested in hating others than seeking a better life for their families is not a majority. To win elections, you have to rouse a lot of people into anxieties about fantasies built on lies premised on smoke and mirrors.

With apologies to Kendrick Lamar, the right wants people to think: “They not like us.” And eating is so visceral, so quotidian, so central that it is a fertile place to sow these seeds of dehumanizing, of justifying your proposed “cleanse.” If you have spent time in certain parts of the world, you know that food can be serious political business, and the matter of what people eat and what people smell being cooked and allegations of impurity and different ideas of clean and dirty and holy — these can get people killed.

Because of these high stakes, it’s dangerous to lie about what immigrants eat. So I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections about what immigrants do eat.

For one thing, immigrants tend to eat the spices and flavors that everyone else eventually adopts and capitalizes on financially and before long cannot seem to keep out of their cookbooks and restaurants and home pantries. You know how suddenly gochujang is in all these recipes you see? Yeah, immigrants eat that. That’s how you know about it! You know how fish sauce seems to be in everything now? Immigrants! As the critic Navneet Alang once wrote:

We are living in the age of the global pantry, when a succession of food media-approved, often white figures have made an array of international ingredients approachable and even desirable to the North American mainstream — the same mainstream that, a decade ago, would have labeled these foods as obscure at best and off-putting at worst. This phenomenon is why you now see dukkah on avocado toast, kimchi in grain bowls, and sambal served with fried Brussels sprouts. It’s a kind of polyglot internationalism presented under the New American umbrella, with the techniques and raw materials of non-Western cuisines used to wake up the staid, predictable flavors of familiar Americana.

If you want to know what immigrants eat, in other words, look at what fancy restaurants serve some years after immigrants arrive and stink up the place: “squash tahini…with burrata, sumac-galangal dressing, pickles, and dukkah,” to cite one of the prestige dishes Alang mentions; or “a ‘Turkish-ish’ breakfast of vegetables, a sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented labneh”; or “a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs.”

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What do immigrants eat? They eat what others will eat when they stop being scared and recognize the commercial opportunity.

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And while it is common to use the fear of foreign flavors to gin up fear of immigrants themselves, sometimes it backfires because the flavors are so good. When Trump promised a taco truck on every corner if immigrants were allowed to flow in, many Americans begged for a corner near them to be granted one of the early trucks.

Indeed, there may be no better case for the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-everything society America is becoming than the flavors. Yes, pluralism is hard. But, damn, it’s tasty. America, if you want our spices, be prepared for our flavor.

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And what else do America’s immigrants eat?

Does swallowing their pride count? Because so many immigrants know that, to rise in this country, you must first fall. Computer programmers over there become gas station clerks over here, trading C++ for 87 octane, because they are chasing a star no one else can yet see. Graduated doctors redo medical school to prove themselves in a place on the cutting edge of research. People with bustling multi-generational homes and layers of care and support abandon their kin and go it alone here because they dream. People who were somebody in their faraway town or village — known entities, trusted, grandmother-verified — leave the social capital of there for the anonymity of here, on the faith that there are different rewards to be reaped in being seen with fresh eyes by people who will not say, “But you don’t come from a business family…”

What do immigrants eat? As little as they can sometimes, the cheapest rice and beans sometimes, the cheapest rice and lentils sometimes, the cheapest ground meat they can find, food bought in bulk at Costco or somewhere like it — food that does the caloric minimum to fuel them for tomorrow, so that one day their descendants can eat like kings. Immigrants often have special powers of eating one thing and tasting in their mind’s mouth another: even as they chew the gruel, they taste future greatness.

I am a son of immigrants from India. I’ll tell you what we ate growing up. Sometimes we ate unfussy Western food, like penne with tomato sauce, because my mother wanted to prepare us for the new world my parents had brought us into — and because she didn’t mind the freedoms she had gained as a woman in America to spend less time in the kitchen, less time toasting coriander and cumin seeds and crushing them and making a tadka and on and on and on. But on other nights she went to those lengths and made us Indian food — Punjabi, in the tradition of her people; or Tamil, in the tradition of my father’s people; or from some other place in that vast republic of tastes. She went to this effort because she wanted us not only to be at ease where we were but also to carry certain things onward. And sometimes, when she didn’t feel like cooking, when we all felt like a change of scene, we went out. And we usually found ourselves eating food made by immigrants, in restaurants owned by immigrants: restaurants that were modest and little-known, but someone’s wildest dream.

So the question we should ask is not: What do immigrants eat? It’s: What would America eat, and be, without immigrants?

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

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Photo: Cavan Images/Getty; Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty

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There appears to be some confusion about what immigrants eat. As a son of immigrants and a native Ohioan, I want to help to clear up this confusion.

From far-right demagogues, we hear suggestions that immigrants prey on dogs and cats, smacking their foreign-born chops on 100 percent, all-American pets.

This week, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, doubled down on his petivore allegations, while admitting that he was lying, he was asked to respond to another claim, this by the conspiracy theorist and Trump groupie Laura Loomer, who said that, if Vice President Kamala Harris were elected, the White House “will smell like curry.” This is presumably because Harris is descended from immigrants on both sides of her family, from two notably flavor-blessed countries — India and Jamaica.

Vance, as ever caught between the rock of white nationalism and the hard place of having a brown wife and children, answered with the culinary equivalent of having a Black friend: “I make a mean chicken curry.” Only the “mean” part was convincing.

So here, at the highest levels of politics, were questions of what immigrants eat. Your pet dog? A cat near you? Stinky curries?

This is, of course, classic, straightforward Othering, straight out of the white nationalist and authoritarian playbooks. The far right is always a little scared, because the number of people who are more interested in hating others than seeking a better life for their families is not a majority. To win elections, you have to rouse a lot of people into anxieties about fantasies built on lies premised on smoke and mirrors.

With apologies to Kendrick Lamar, the right wants people to think: “They not like us.” And eating is so visceral, so quotidian, so central that it is a fertile place to sow these seeds of dehumanizing, of justifying your proposed “cleanse.” If you have spent time in certain parts of the world, you know that food can be serious political business, and the matter of what people eat and what people smell being cooked and allegations of impurity and different ideas of clean and dirty and holy — these can get people killed.

Because of these high stakes, it’s dangerous to lie about what immigrants eat. So I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections about what immigrants do eat.

For one thing, immigrants tend to eat the spices and flavors that everyone else eventually adopts and capitalizes on financially and before long cannot seem to keep out of their cookbooks and restaurants and home pantries. You know how suddenly gochujang is in all these recipes you see? Yeah, immigrants eat that. That’s how you know about it! You know how fish sauce seems to be in everything now? Immigrants! As the critic Navneet Alang once wrote:

We are living in the age of the global pantry, when a succession of food media-approved, often white figures have made an array of international ingredients approachable and even desirable to the North American mainstream — the same mainstream that, a decade ago, would have labeled these foods as obscure at best and off-putting at worst. This phenomenon is why you now see dukkah on avocado toast, kimchi in grain bowls, and sambal served with fried Brussels sprouts. It’s a kind of polyglot internationalism presented under the New American umbrella, with the techniques and raw materials of non-Western cuisines used to wake up the staid, predictable flavors of familiar Americana.

If you want to know what immigrants eat, in other words, look at what fancy restaurants serve some years after immigrants arrive and stink up the place: “squash tahini…with burrata, sumac-galangal dressing, pickles, and dukkah,” to cite one of the prestige dishes Alang mentions; or “a ‘Turkish-ish’ breakfast of vegetables, a sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented labneh”; or “a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs.”

Share

What do immigrants eat? They eat what others will eat when they stop being scared and recognize the commercial opportunity.

Leave a comment

And while it is common to use the fear of foreign flavors to gin up fear of immigrants themselves, sometimes it backfires because the flavors are so good. When Trump promised a taco truck on every corner if immigrants were allowed to flow in, many Americans begged for a corner near them to be granted one of the early trucks.

Indeed, there may be no better case for the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-everything society America is becoming than the flavors. Yes, pluralism is hard. But, damn, it’s tasty. America, if you want our spices, be prepared for our flavor.

Share

And what else do America’s immigrants eat?

Does swallowing their pride count? Because so many immigrants know that, to rise in this country, you must first fall. Computer programmers over there become gas station clerks over here, trading C++ for 87 octane, because they are chasing a star no one else can yet see. Graduated doctors redo medical school to prove themselves in a place on the cutting edge of research. People with bustling multi-generational homes and layers of care and support abandon their kin and go it alone here because they dream. People who were somebody in their faraway town or village — known entities, trusted, grandmother-verified — leave the social capital of there for the anonymity of here, on the faith that there are different rewards to be reaped in being seen with fresh eyes by people who will not say, “But you don’t come from a business family…”

What do immigrants eat? As little as they can sometimes, the cheapest rice and beans sometimes, the cheapest rice and lentils sometimes, the cheapest ground meat they can find, food bought in bulk at Costco or somewhere like it — food that does the caloric minimum to fuel them for tomorrow, so that one day their descendants can eat like kings. Immigrants often have special powers of eating one thing and tasting in their mind’s mouth another: even as they chew the gruel, they taste future greatness.

I am a son of immigrants from India. I’ll tell you what we ate growing up. Sometimes we ate unfussy Western food, like penne with tomato sauce, because my mother wanted to prepare us for the new world my parents had brought us into — and because she didn’t mind the freedoms she had gained as a woman in America to spend less time in the kitchen, less time toasting coriander and cumin seeds and crushing them and making a tadka and on and on and on. But on other nights she went to those lengths and made us Indian food — Punjabi, in the tradition of her people; or Tamil, in the tradition of my father’s people; or from some other place in that vast republic of tastes. She went to this effort because she wanted us not only to be at ease where we were but also to carry certain things onward. And sometimes, when she didn’t feel like cooking, when we all felt like a change of scene, we went out. And we usually found ourselves eating food made by immigrants, in restaurants owned by immigrants: restaurants that were modest and little-known, but someone’s wildest dream.

So the question we should ask is not: What do immigrants eat? It’s: What would America eat, and be, without immigrants?

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

Subscribe now

Photo: Cavan Images/Getty; Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

The first thing she does is stride across the stage. She is moving quickly, for a reason. At events like these, there is typically someone with a clipboard and a headset holding you backstage behind a curtain. They tell you the exact moment when you can walk out. Both candidates will be let loose at the same time. For her to achieve her first objective, she has to walk faster than him, so that she is in his space when, remarkably, for the first time, the two meet.

He seems to avoid her. He has barely made it to his own podium by this point, but she has already crossed her podium and the space between them and now stands behind his podium, on his turf. “Kamala Harris,” she says, in case he needs a refresher. I cannot recall a presidential candidate saying their own name to their adversary like that. It strikes me that that was how she would have introduced herself in courtrooms.

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This first move is Aggression Meets Manners. She is trying to own him, with courtesy. She returns to her podium. And the first thing she does now, because she knows she has to, given how it is for women in her situation, is smile. A big, generous, probably rehearsed smile, because you really have to.

There were miles to go from there. But already in that double instant, you had it all. The full range of who she had to be, and who she would be: dominant, alpha, power-conscious, on one hand; joyous, easygoing, a little above it, having a blast, on the other.

Last night Vice President Kamala Harris faced the impossible, contradictory demands women face in politics and in all of public life, and she said, “Yes-and-and-and-and.”

She had to thread the smallest of needles, starting with that mix of aggressive and mannered, then being joyful and tough, gracious and angry, and contemptuous and hopeful, and incredulous and credible, pugnacious and nurturing, pitying and alarmed.

In one sense, there are very few women in the world who will have had the precise experience the vice president did last night. But I doubt there are many women who have not felt themselves forced to thread that needle and win by being all the things.

Last night Kamala Harris was all the things.

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What came back to me as I watched was Gloria’s monologue in the “Barbie” movie, delivered for the ages by America Ferrera.

It is literally impossible to be a woman…

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas…

It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

These incentives and pressures are not fair, but they exist. Last night, as much as any political leader in memory, Harris thrived at being all the things at once — all the things a single person should not have to be.

When she did aggression, she did aggression. “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” she said. (And you have to give him credit: he knows TV, and he knows a good line, and that one he gave a grudging nod of admiration. I see what you did there.) She said to him that dictators “would eat you for lunch.” She told him his crowds were walking out out of exhaustion and boredom, the form of impotence he cares about the most. She told that she had to clean up his mess.

Ordinarily, this kind of emasculation should only be done in a licensed clinical setting.

What I’ve learned reporting on politics is that voters may say they care about this issue or that issue most, but what they’re often looking for is a gut check on whether the candidate in question has the fight in them to thwart the obstacles that face their family. They know how immovable the obstacles are, because they just spent their day failing to defeat them. Can a candidate do for them what they can’t do for themselves?

The strength, force, alphaness Harris showed last night will satisfy many on that score. But look at what she mixed it with.

Her facial expressions worked harder than Charlie Chaplin’s back when there was no sound. The mics may have been muted, but they forgot to press the button to silence her face. Eyebrows up, eyebrows down. Hand on chin, hand down. Eyes enlarged, eyes narrowed. Skepticism, sadness, eagerness to but in, exasperation, wonder — she might cycle through all of this during one of Donald Trump’s answers. Can one’s side-eye be nominated for an Emmy? Though Harris often looked right at him when she spoke, when Harris spoke, he looked straight ahead, with his resting fascism face.

Sometimes she listened, letting him wild. Sometimes seemed like a predator on the savannah, ready to pounce as he meandered. Sometimes, many times, she planted bait for him, with the exterminator’s faith that the pest will eventually come for his nibble. He gobbled instead. Every one of her traps he found, true to biology, and gobbled. The thing about bait is you don’t know it’s bait. Otherwise, you wouldn’t fill up on it. Bait ruins dinner, because by dinner you’re dead.

What a small needle! In addition all this, Harris sought to show, not tell but show, that the multiracial democracy America is becoming will be fun. One shouldn’t have to convince people that freedom is better than tyranny and the thriving of all better than the thriving of some, but here we are. You have to show people that what they are being manipulated to fear isn’t scary. And Harris carried herself, amid everything else she needed to be doing, with a joy that embodies the kind of future she promises.

The most important new thing I saw her do was prebunking. Pre-, not de-. Debunking is waiting for someone to lie and then hitting back with the truth. It doesn’t work in politics as much you would hope it would in an age saturated by lies. But prebunking works better. Prebunking is explaining to people how they are being (or, better yet, will be) manipulated, what the motive is, how the con works, how the lie will be crafted and how it will function, and, for extra credit, who benefits from it and how. In the age of Trump, too many of his opponents have been all debunk, no prebunk.

But in last night’s debate, again and again, Harris rose to the meta level and explained Trump’s ways in advance so as to inoculate against their infectiousness. “I’m going to tell you all, in this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” she said in the first minutes. In another moment, she prebunked any professions Trump might make to be admired by foreign autocrats for his strength: “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”

Trump is a challenge for anyone, because he is a weird mix of super dangerous and a joke. With the “Barbie” monologue in mind, think of how much harder this challenge grows for a woman running against him. Play up his danger, and you risk being seen as shrill, or weak, or scared, or hysterical. Belittle him, and you risk coming off as a bitch, a ballbreaker, a nag, a witch. It was remarkable, then, to see Harris’s comfort last night in treating Trump as both of these things at once, a danger and a clown.

She loves her a Venn diagram, and in the debate she seemed to find the lens-shaped intersection of what supremely dangerous wannabe autocrats and semi-retired, narcissistic, imploding clowns have in common: They are not thinking about you.

It became her message: He is not thinking about you. He is not capable of doing so. You may believe that is because he wants to be a dictator, and dictators, by definition, don’t worry much about what people need or want or say. You may believe it’s because he is a decent conservative like yourself with some pretty good ideas but just runs his mouth too much. No matter. She is trying to assemble an Ocasio-Cortez-to-Cheney coalition of people who believe that, whatever he may be thinking about, it’s not you.

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At the end, she tried to speak to the breadth of a big country that feels today like it’s made of factions and rumps and tribes and slices and segments but that still is a country, a country full of wonder and promise, still, and she promised to be president even of the people who do not wish her well.

“As a prosecutor,” Harris said, “I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I ever asked them: ‘Are you OK?’ And that’s the kind of president we need right now.”

It was a simple line, but strangely healing after these years. Years in which we have not been OK, because everything we have is at risk and all we could have is, too.

“Are you OK?” A little better this morning.

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Since we realize that, like us, you’re always looking for answers, earlier this week we asked you to post the most important questions you’d been wrestling with — the questions you thought we might be able to tackle here at The Ink.

All of your questions were great — thought-provoking in the best way, and we are very grateful for the effort everyone put…

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Last year, a guy I don’t know made a YouTube video criticizing my criticism of billionaires like Elon Musk. This was how Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report began:

Over at the televised mental institution known as MSNBC, there’s this guy. We’ve played some videos of him before. It’s hard to believe he’s a real person. He appears to be a villain from Gotham City. Batman is looking for this guy. He’s hanging out with Two-Face and the Riddler and the Penguin. And [looking over to his production staff] give me one more — Bane. [Again he looks at his staff.] Give me one more — Joker. Give me one more — Poison Ivy. Thank you. His name is Anand Giridharadas, something like that. And he is very upset that billionaires exist. And I wonder, if he had the power as a Gotham villain, what he would do to billionaires.

I bring this up because Dave Rubin now needs our thoughts and prayers. I know Ink readers will join me in pulling for him as he grapples with the fallout of revelations that he got mixed up (unwittingly, he claims) with a Russian propaganda operation, according to a new federal indictment.

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Because I am not, in fact, an evil supervillain, I honestly wish Dave Rubin nothing but the best. Or, to put it in terms he might understand, я желаю ему только лучшего.

The new allegations laid out by the Justice Department are staggering. The AP reports:

They have millions of followers online. They have been major players in right-wing political discourse since Donald Trump was president. And they worked unknowingly for a company that was a front for a Russian influence operation, U.S. prosecutors say.

An indictment filed Wednesday alleges a media company linked to six conservative influencers — including well-known personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson — was secretly funded by Russian state media employees to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine.

In my book The Persuaders, the opening chapter was about an earlier attempt by the Russians to manipulate American public opinion and influence our political culture. I spent a lot of time with the actual content these foreign content creators created. And it gave me an understanding of the project that informs how I see this new indictment.

Here’s the thing: The actual influencing achieved by the Russians is the sideshow. What is important about this story is the following things it tells us — about us.

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1. You are being manipulated to hate your neighbors. You are being manipulated to be more inflammatory. You are being manipulated to write off other people. You are being manipulated to think divisions are unbridgeable. You are being manipulated to hate people. To be clear, Americans have shown themselves to be very good at behaving in these ways on their own. But foreign propaganda operations are very interested in moving you ever more in this direction.

2. The Russians have so many things they could do to another nation-state. Vladimir Putin must receive binders full of choices that would make Mitt Romney jealous. That they are continually doing this — promoting inflammatory social media content as their weapon of war — is the real revelation. Their results are besides the point. The point is that this is what a hostile foreign nation has concluded most makes the Untied States vulnerable: when we talk and think in this cynical, hateful, dismissive, contemptuous, all-or-nothing, victim-complexed manner.

3. Be wary of the purported truth teller who is telling you truths no one else will. This has become a big move of the age. It works very well online. It travels. You whip up this sense that others are lying to you, and then you cast yourself as the lighthouse of reality in a sea of cons. Vaccines, Ukraine, Tim Walz’s past, etc. If these indictments teach us anything, it’s that we should, at long last, have some skepticism of this kind of pose. The flow of information in the United States, contrary to what these self-styled free speech martyrs would say, is robust. There is all manner of highly reputable news organizations putting out real, vetted information. Don’t fall for charlatans offering you facts in the lining of their trench coats like some $40 “real” Rolexes.

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4. We are less divided than we seem. As I keep stressing, I don’t want to overstate the effect of these Russian operations. It’s a drop in the ocean. But it is the case that many of the most prominent voices out there inflaming our conversations are doing so, even if unknowingly, at a foreign power’s nudging. This suggests that we may have an impression of our discourse, of our state of relationship with each other, that is not entirely accurate. There is no foreign propaganda operation that I know of, at least, that has highlighted the work of the churches engaging in dialogue processes in recent years to bridge racial divisions, or highlighted workplaces that have changed to make women feel more heard, or highlighted white Americans who have delved into racial topics and evolved as a result, or highlighted families that have navigated division but grown even closer. These things are happening every day. Russia just doesn’t feel the need to hype them.

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The other night, at 2 a.m., I was standing near the bar at a party called Hotties for Harris, thinking about corporate tax policy.

Just kidding. That didn’t happen.

But now it must.

The vibes have been extraordinary, as everyone has been saying. The Democrats threw a convention that exhilarated supporters.

As this newsletter has long argued, Democrats have …

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

The party was a party.

Attending the 2024 Democratic National Convention as one’s first convention, as I did, is like going to Taylor Swift as your first concert. You risk coming away with the impression that that is how concerts are.

But there were enough people around to disabuse me of that notion. From the most detached journalist to the most fervent stan, there was a sense on everyone’s lips that this one was different, felt like its own thing.

One anecdotal data point: A veteran Chicago-based organizer I spoke to told me that, just a few weeks ago, before the Great Candidate Swap, friends at the DNC had asked her to bring her college-age son to the convention — along with, as she put it, “like seven of his friends.” A month can be a lifetime.

In an earlier email this morning, we recapped my coverage this week. But I also wanted to share with you this final reflection on the bigger themes I observed and what they mean for what is coming.

A special note of thanks here to our subscribers. It is your support that allowed me to go to Chicago this week and report. You literally make this work possible.

As a one-off, we’re opening this post to all readers to let you see the kind of posts you get when you subscribe. Will you support this work by subscribing today?

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The great progressive-moderate synthesis

When Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, stood up to speak yesterday, the audience leapt its feet, roared as loudly as it had at virtually any moment until then, and would not stop its ovation for two minutes. Warren, a steely force who is not given to emotional displays, was moved to the point of shaken, her face flushed, her eyes welling, sort of aghast to be so loved by the whole room. She ran a whole presidential campaign; she knows she has supporters out there. That she was surprised beyond measure at the level of consensus fervor for her suggests that she was seeing something she hadn’t before.

Here’s what I think she was seeing: A remarkable and improbable progressive-moderate synthesis/truce/shotgun-marriage that hasn’t been discussed enough.

If you go back to the 2020 primary, there was a real progressive vs. moderate split. Warren had an early surge, and then Bernie Sanders had a strong run in the opening primaries, and it seemed as though the unthinkable might happen in American politics — a socialist atop the Democratic Party. And then, in a moment that still gives progressives palpitations, several of the moderates quickly and concertedly dropped out and coalesced around Biden, seemingly in the hope of preventing a Sanders victory, above all. Meanwhile, relations within the progressive wing, between Warren people and Sanders people, were fraught, too, with Sanders backers mad that Warren dropped out with endorsing him.

All of that now feels like a lifetime ago. Today, progressives and moderates have found a generative working arrangement that is neither consensus nor war. Differences are tolerated and worked around. Mutual respect is paid. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can say that she and Biden wouldn’t be in the same party in many countries and condemn his policies on Israel and Gaza while enthusiastically endorsing him and now Harris. Biden, for his part, embraced an aggressive approach to climate change that probably wouldn’t have come to pass without Ocasio-Cortez’s bold, energetic vision in the Green New Deal.

This was not the relationship between progressives and moderates under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. And it was not inevitable. Biden’s first chief of staff, Ron Klain, did remarkable work, starting with the basic paying of respect, to forge it. Progressive leaders showed maturity in continuing to demand more and be morally unsatisfied, while also being grown-ups and making deals. Moderates allowed themselves to be moved by where the shifting energy of where the party was and made peace with a shifting Overton window.

What progressives and moderates have achieved isn’t consensus. It’s the mutual giving of wide berth. Having the maturity and mutual respect to allow each to be in their lane and not needing the other to be like you. There is almost a recognition when you talk privately to lawmakers of a sense in each faction of the need for each other. Moderates are more likely today to speak of progressives as the more idealistic, if in their view naive, incarnation of Democrat, and progressives can grudgingly admit to moderates’ sometimes greater attunement to what the public is ready for today.

Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday night was a relatively centrist speech, aimed at the moderate voters who were tuning in en masse. There was a lot for progressives to cheer in the speech, but also, frankly, a lot for them NOT to cheer. And they didn’t protest, as they once might have. They gave her a wide berth. And they appear to trust — as the Biden administration gives them good reason to — that Harris will be responsive to them in office.

The campaign, the creators, and the press

In one sense, the entire purpose of a political convention is media. You gather in one city, bring everyone who’s everyone in your party there, pack the place with supporters, and invite the media to broadcast to the world your messages, your symbols, your ideas, your enthusiasm. In the United Center arena, directly opposite the stage were the skyboxes given over to all the major news channels. Thousands of journalists were granted credentials, and you saw reporters from Japan to the Netherlands setting up outside in the parking lot, broadcasting to faraway citizens, whose lives, like it or not, will be altered by America’s choice.

Relations between the press that covers politics and political campaigns that need-loathe the press are never easy. But this time around, they were especially fraught because the campaign is conducting an affair out in the open. The kind of affair where you’re flagrantly dining out in restaurants, not furtively meeting in hotel rooms.

The affair is with the so-called “creators.”

The creators are independent citizen reporters and social media explainers and streamers and YouTubers (and, you could argue, newsletter writers like me, though I was credentialed as a journalist). The campaign put old-school journalists up in the cheap seats and rolled out a literal blue carpet for creators, opened a lounge for them with food and drink, and generally was seen as bending over backwards to make these new media folks, these influencers, comfortable.

Personally, I don’t have the problem with this that some old-school journalists do. But I also see on the horizon a growing rift between the Democratic Party and the traditional press that I think needs to be repaired and dealt with rather than ignored and left to fester. The affair isn’t the solution here. It’s time for the press and campaign to do couples therapy.

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Relations are bad for many reasons. The press is angry that the campaign doesn’t seem to want to make Harris available for interviews. The campaign looks at the kind of bullshit questions the press too often asks, as in the well-publicized tarmac moment not long ago, questions hyperfocused on tit-for-tat reactions to Trump and silly clickbait, and feels it’s serving its own interest more than the public’s. Enter the creators, who are the hot new item the campaign can have a dalliance with. They are happy with whatever access they get, they reach millions of people, they don’t have inflated, moralistic expectations of what they are owed, etc. The press feels like the spouse and kids and play dates and lunchbox making and lawn mowing at home; the creators feel like deliverance from all of that.

I’m not going to adjudicate this conflict, but let me say that I think there is a lot of validity in the sense of hurt on both sides. I also think there are dangerous attitudes at play. The media need to realize that a lot of how a lot of it has covered these serious times and the rising threat of authoritarianism is flawed. That is real. Campaigns are right to be wary. And the campaign needs to realize that a streamer or a YouTuber, no matter how compelling their work (and I think their work can be incredibly compelling), is not the same as the press. You know this. You know the role that bona fide, big-time, old-line news organizations have played in investigating Trump and leading to the felonies that the campaign now touts; you know how they cover things like wars and insurrections in a way that individuals like me never could; you know that professionally honed skepticism may not feel good but is ultimately good for you, keeping you honest, and good for democracy.

As someone who is in many ways a very old-school journalist and also kind of, sort of a new media creator, I encourage repair. And a healthy amount of introspection.

It’s not all about her

There are so many comparisons being made now. To Barack Obama in 2008, which both fits and doesn’t. To Hillary Clinton in 2016, which both fits and doesn’t. But I keep thinking about something Senator Brian Schatz told The Ink this week: “The difference between this and any other convention is that I think it’s the three dimensional embodiment of ‘Not me, us.’ It was Bernie’s slogan, but it’s now it’s real…[T]his doesn’t feel like it’s a cult of personality — this feels like a movement. A movement is faith in strangers.”

This rang true at the DNC. For all the enthusiasm in the air, and it was an astonishing level of enthusiasm, it wasn’t fixated on Harris herself. Even though a Shepard Fairey poster has now been made of her, she is not her Fairey poster, a solemn and stirring icon and object of adulation and projection, in the way Obama was turned into. Even though her election would make history on three dimensions, the trailblazing aspect is something she never mentions. If Hillary Clinton rallies were full of reassurances about being “with her,” the direction of concern seems to flow in the other direction with Harris. She worked at McDonald’s; she gets you. As Barack Obama said in his speech this week, Donald Trump isn’t losing sleep over your problems, but Kamala Harris will. She is not the nation’s messiah, in this telling; she is its Momala, a comparison her stepchildren explicitly made.

The merit of this dynamic, as Schatz notes, is that it leaves space for movement. It allows energy to develop laterally, among supporters, instead of having it all be directed up at the Leader. It is less prone to sugar highs and sugar crashes.

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Please all, please none

Harris’s acceptance speech was a moderate one. It was short on dramatic language about climate change and long on talk about securing the border and ensuring the supremacy of the U.S. military. Many liberals and progressives in the room had to shudder at some of that. But what is preventing a revolt, in addition to the great synthesis described above, is that there are plenty of other indications that Harris intends to pick the right fights when needed.

Consider, for example, the selection of The Chicks as the national anthem singers. This is a frontally provocative pick, a thumb in the nose of the right wing that chased the then-Dixie Chicks out of town. Or Harris’s selection of Walz, who was hardly a palatable-to-all choice with his quickly contagious “weird” takedowns. Or her embrace of YIMBY housing policy to tear down oppressive local zoning codes. Or her support for a tax on the unrealized capital gains of some of the wealthiest households.

Harris, in other words, seems interested in a delicate balance of claiming the mushy middle when the politics of the issue, which is to say where the broad mass of people are on the issue, demands it — while not simply lapsing into being a mushy centrist. That, at least, is the hope. It remains to tell.

Progressive patriotism

The chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A.!” were irrepressible this week. A new progressive patriotism is rising among Democrats, with some of the old hangups dissipating.

Too many progressives, having misplaced their dictionary, confuse patriotism with nationalism and thus think the former ugly. But it’s not the same, and it’s not ugly.

Will Bunch, a veteran Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who wrote some of the best dispatches from the convention, wrote this:

The political party that’s been battered and bloodied in America’s culture wars since the end of the 1960s by not even really knowing how to fight them finally decided to stop worrying about churning out policy papers and pleasing newspaper nitpickers, and instead start playing to win — and on their terms. Backed by a pulsating soundtrack that jumped from the soul of Stevie Wonder to Lil Jon’s hip-hop to the Texas Americana of The Chicks, Democrats in Chicago successfully argued that their culture — a middle class full of hardworking Black and brown folks and strong women, seeking only the freedom to make their own life choices — is America’s culture. And that fighting for things like reproductive rights or against climate change should not be pigeonholed as progressive but embraced as patriotic.

What took them so long?!

And yet, liberals and progressives being who they are, with their profound responsibility complex, it wasn’t a chest-thumping patriotism. Even as the chants throbbed through the hall, several speakers spoke in a language of civic repair. You couldn’t imagine the right’s patriotism, which really is often nationalism, taking this form. But it was welcome to hear calls for returning to our neighbors, rekindling affections, re-tying severed communal bonds.

As Barack Obama put it:

As much as any policy or program, I believe that’s what we yearn for: a return to an America where we work together and look out for each other. A restoration of what Lincoln called, on the eve of civil war, our “bonds of affection.”

They’re baaaaack!!!

Speaking of which, the Obamas appear to be back. In recent years, they have been focused on projects in content creation and foundation- and library-building and book writing and touring, and the Biden White House, for its part, understandably wanted to show that a former vice president was his own leader.

But with Harris’s ascension, the Obamas have very much returned to the political sphere. David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, is now at the top of the Harris effort. The echoes of hope are being explicitly called out. Oprah is once again involved.

When Michelle Obama said, “Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it? You know, we’re feeling it here in this arena, but it’s spreading across this country we love. A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long,” some took it as a dig at Biden. A more generous interpretation might be that Bidenism was, by choice, not an evocative approach but a sober one, focused on being a counterpoint to Trump’s pyrotechnics. That worked in 2020. By 2024 it was leaving latent much of the potential energy that we now know was there, ready for a reason to be fired up. 2024 is not 2008, but the Obama-era politics of story and sentiment and cultural participation and movement do appear to be baaaaack.

Selective liberation

The protests over Gaza hovered over Chicago but didn’t become the conflagration some predicted. Still, they raised questions for Democrats — questions that the party leadership didn’t seem eager to grapple with.

But the dilemma raised by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his essay in Vanity Fair this week will grow increasingly unavoidable. At the heart of it is this: The 2024 Democratic Party’s program is perhaps among the most inclusive political programs in human history: committed to the liberation of all people, all groups, all kinds, from every oppression.

But this is also the party currently in charge of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and the Democrats’ standard-bearer is not just a candidate but also the sitting vice president, and this party remains steadfastly committed to sending bombs to arm a country, Israel, whose conduct is, even in the eyes of many of its own citizens, as immoral as it is self-sabotaging.

Harris spoke eloquently and helpfully of Israel’s rights and, equally, of the rights of Palestinians this week. But the underlying reality remains unchanged. Over time, the cognitive dissonance of the selective liberation on offer from the Democratic Party will grow more unsettling and problematic. This is not just a problem of managing a small group of protestors in Chicago. It’s a problem of being philosophically coherent and of not letting joyful unity abet barbarism.

Saving democracy for a reason

With this convention, the Democratic Party seemed to move decisively beyond the Biden-era focus on defending democracy as a paramount and existential purpose. To be clear, the Biden approach proved effective in its moment, winning not only the 2020 election but also showing strength in subsequent midterms.

But there was always the problem that the democracy pitch could ring hollow to certain voters: those upset who were about prices that were too damn high and felt the democracy pitch to be worthy but a trace remote; those who do not live and breathe politics every day and felt the democracy threat talk, incorrectly, to be overblown; those who do not perceive America, based on their life experience, to be an especially realized democracy and therefore weren’t sure what was being saved.

The Biden approach was reflective of someone who came up during the Cold War and had a stark, democracy-or-tyranny view of the world. But what is emerging now is an approach more of saving democracy both as an end in itself — and as the means to other ends. So many of the pitches at the convention spoke of saving democracy not as some self-evident truth, but because…

Because then you can choose the policies that will allow you to go build, create, do. Because then you can have Thanksgiving dinner again without it devolving into conflictual madness. Because then you can get the healthcare you need. Because then we can get these prices under control. Because then we can build again.

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Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Kamala Harris choosing Tim Walz as her running mate struck me as unusually momentous from the moment it was announced. In the intervening weeks, the effects of this selection have felt as much cultural as electoral. But it wasn’t until I watched the hunter-coach-soldier-father-teacher speak last night that I made sense of it.

He is cementing the Democrats’ reclamation of five vital words.

Freedom. Patriotism. Family. Masculinity. Normalcy.

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In my lifetime, these words have largely belonged to the right. Now, this ownership wasn’t deserved. On the contrary, so much of what the right actually stood for undermined these concepts it claimed so ardently and successfully.

It thwarted the freedom to vote and get an abortion and breathe clean air. It tarnished America’s standing in the world with fraudulent wars and the undermining of global institutions. It made it harder to tend to families — let alone plan for one — with its cruel and extreme policies. It undermined men’s sense of themselves with bad trade deals and nonexistent adjustment assistance. It was a movement that thrived on turning once-regular people into cruel and conspiracy-addled relatives and neighbors and friends, pumping them full of fake fears.

And yet its claims to these words persisted, assisted — if we are honest — by a lack of skill and will on the left at laying a counterclaim.

Attempts were made. Barack Obama preached an only-in-America-is-my-story-even-possible vision of patriotism. Pete Buttigieg spoke of reclaiming freedom. Guys like The Rock showcased a vigorous but loving form of masculinity. A wave of women leaders nationwide gave moving speeches about reproductive rights as central to family values, not antithetical to them.

But it hasn’t quite congealed the way it did this week. My sense of the meaning of the 2024 Democratic National Convention is that, at long last, these five vital words have officially been reclaimed.

Freedom. Patriotism. Family. Masculinity. Normalcy.

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This reclamation is, first and foremost, the doing of Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign. These are themes she embraces, and they are threaded throughout every speech and banner at the DNC. And it is being dramatically reinforced and reinvigorated by Harris’s selection of Tim Walz, whose credibility stems as much from what he represents as what he’s accomplished.

When Walz talks about freedom, he does so as a man who looks like him is especially well-positioned to do. The right has been waging a decades-long identity war, trying to persuade white people and men and rural people and older people and others that their very way of life is under violent assault. And it is all the more powerful to have someone who incarnates what they are targeting stand up and say, “No.” And who further says with a beaming smile, “We’re going to be OK. Would you like some of the apple I just sliced up?”

Walz is the picture of a man stirred up to be jealous of his liberties, wary of a government coming to take them away. And he is! He is wary of the government, as he says, coming into your medical exam room to make decisions for you. He speaks with passion about keeping the government out of our bedrooms. He frames freedom as leaving other people alone and having the right to be left alone, following what he calls the golden rule of minding your own damn business. This is shrewd political work from an apparently folksy man, reclaiming a stolen word and giving it a common-sense aura, and updating it for the multiracial democracy that we are becoming, telling people that a diverse society endures by letting people who are different live and let live.

It’s much the same when he speaks of patriotism. “We’re all here tonight for a beautiful, simple reason. We love this country,” he said last night. And it’s not just him. One of the defining features of this 2024 DNC was the Democrats finally, finally embracing patriotism, without an iota of embarrassment. Earnest chants of U-S-A broke out throughout the week, except that it was not people bloodthirsty to invade some foreign country but people determined to usher in a society that serves all. Patriotism has eluded the left, for a host of reasons, not least people wrongly thinking it is cringe to profess love of country or somehow the same as nationalism. (It’s not. Look it up.) Harris has encouraged this taking back of patriotism with her repeated and effective lines about loving the country and working relentlessly to perfect it.

And family. My god. Last night, as Walz spoke and paid tribute to his daughter and son and wife, referring to them as his entire world, and his son, Gus, stood up, overcome with feeling, and pointed fervently at him and yelled, “That’s my dad!” — well, it just felt so reassuring to see a family so normal, so unremarkable, that actually, you know, loves each other. President Biden’s love of his family, a family that has been through hell, is notable, too. Harris’s story of her blended family, and her husband’s ex-wife bothering to tell the media what a great figure Harris is in their family, only strengthens the sense that these are solid family people, up against a movement that is waging an attack on a family’s right to plan, demeaning people who don’t have children but do have cats, scheming to unravel millions of people’s marriages by revoking constitutional protections. The right will still try, but it was hard to watch this year’s DNC and think, These people don’t believe in the institution of family!

Where Walz personally shines brightest is in his powerful reframing of masculinity. I’ve been hearing people call his version “tonic masculinity,” in contrast to the toxic kind. In politics, it is not enough to be against, and in recent years progressive forces have been better at articulating what needs to change about masculinity, what needs to be purged and banished and, yes, locked up, than what needs to be born. Meanwhile, Walz stands as a living counterpoint to the backlash masculinity of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and others. Core elements of his life — the military, hunting, coaching football, midwestern roots — make it harder to dismiss him as an effete coastal elite coming for your traditional way of life. Bringing out his old football team was a particularly inspired flourish. Images matter in politics. Here was a bunch of middle-aged white guys — a demographic that Democrats struggle with — applauding their coach-turned-vice presidential nominee. This, too, is being a man: standing up to bullies, standing up for others, not being afraid of a future where women and people of color also have say and power.

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And yesterday Walz only used his signature word, “weird,” once. But it is he who put that word on the map as a way to frame American fascism in 2024. It spread across the left and fueled debate and possibly got him selected. And that label, applied to right, implies an opposite one. Democrats, who have allowed themselves for too long to be dismissed as fringey or out of touch with regular people or interested in niche causes or identity politics issues that didn’t have broad support, were reclaiming normalcy itself. Of the right’s vision, Walz said last night, “It’s an agenda nobody asked for.”

Freedom. Patriotism. Family. Masculinity. Normalcy.

These reclaimings are, I think, the deep story of this entire convention, made manifest in the life and self-presentation of Governor Walz — and I am sure they will be at the heart of Harris’s acceptance speech tonight.

None of this is without risk, however. A party that increasingly cloaks itself in language of this kind can risk becoming hostile to those who raise legitimate challenges to the country’s idea of itself, who strain the current imagination of normal, who do not feel loved by America.

In recent hours, there has been a great deal of drama and pain around the convention, involving whether a Palestinian-American will be permitted to speak onstage in Chicago — home to one of the country’s largest Palestinian populations, in a convention for a party that contains profound internal schisms over Gaza. In a moving essay this week, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates bemoaned the “one major omission of the party that claims diversity as its strength.”

With these reclaimings, Democrats have pulled off something remarkable, and long overdue. They have laid their claim to the heart, the center, of the country. They have refused to be marginalized. Their challenge will be to resist being lulled by this middleness into moderation. It will be to remember to stand for big, real things and remember people who still live along the edges.

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Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

“When they go low, we go high.” It was an inspiring mantra. It is a mantra that explains how Barack and Michelle Obama were able to rise to the political heights they were, ever retaining their dignity even in the face of withering, baseless attacks.

But I always felt it wasn’t a mantra for how America should cope with rising fascism. It was a personal mantra for personal life. How you should conduct yourself with a meanie in school, perhaps.

For all the admiration of Michelle Obama out there, this line in recent years has become something many Democrats quietly hiss at. They don’t like it anymore. They feel as though it actually captured something about how Democrats fight, which is to say, sometimes, not fight. And they want the mantra revised, or even overthrown.

Last night, the Obamas revised the mantra.

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Michelle Obama came out swinging, ripping Trump so many new ones that a slice of him would fit right in on J.D. Vance’s Philly cheesesteak. There were so many good lines in there, but I thought these, among her subtlest, were absolutely vicious at the same time.

Most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.

If we bankrupt a business — if we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No.

We don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No.

We put our heads down. We get to work.

But it was Barack Obama who most decisively shook off the “going high” mantra, with the most consequential hand gestures (and brief glimpse down at those hands) in the history of party conventions.

Two more brief notes on the Obamas.

In Michelle’s talk, interestingly, she engaged in something we have discussed more than once in this newsletter: prebunking.

Vice President Kamala Harris, as she runs for president, has the advantage of drafting behind the Obamas, who came before and who have experienced what she will as a Black woman in a racially fraught moment.

Last night, Michelle Obama made use of her experiences to warn people of what would befall Harris — and to be more prepared for it than anyone could have been when it was the Obamas’ go-around.

Now, unfortunately, we know what comes next. We know folks are going to do everything they can to distort her truth. My husband and I sadly know a little something about this…

So if they lie about her, and they will, we’ve got to do something.

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And, finally, in Barack Obama’s speech, there was another stretch that I thought was significant because its target wasn’t Trump or the extreme right. He turned the lens on us, on our collective culture, on how our own choices have created a society ripe for enterprisingly cynical power grabbers. And he reminded Americans that we all need to change to beat back these forces.

We live in a time of such confusion and rancor, with a culture that puts a premium on things that don’t last: money, fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves, and then we wonder why we feel so alone. We don’t trust each other as much because we don’t take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other. 

He also had wise words about the need for what I call civic grace: the need to have a little patience with people for whom change is coming fast, who struggle to cope or keep up but are fundamentally decent:

To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices. And that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process. 

After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize that the world is moving fast, that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us. That’s how we can build a true Democratic majority, one that can get things done.

As we’ve written before, the addition of Tim Walz to the ticket — as a relatable exemplar to those who might otherwise struggle to adapt — is one step on this path forward together. Showing people a vision of just how fun and inviting that future can be to everyone is another. The cliché hedge to say here would be that this type of change always takes time. But in just a few short weeks, the Democrats have decisively shown that, actually, they are capable of adapting and moving much faster than we ever thought possible. Hopefully, they can keep this momentum going.

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More from our DNC 2024 coverage

With his travel plans stymied by foul weather, Anand gathered his thoughts on what (and who) is behind the recent changes in Democratic campaign strategy.

After some delays, Anand makes a pre-dawn pit stop to talk at MSNBC en route to Chicago and recaps some highlights from day one.

With his feet on Chicagoan ground, Anand peels back the curtain on the parts of the DNC that aren’t televised.

What a zoomer-organized DNC afterparty tells us about the direction of the party as a whole.

Other readings

New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly draws the DNC.

Vox explains the subtext behind Michelle Obama’s statement that “hope is making a comeback” under Harris’s candidacy. President Biden might not like to hear it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

And in other news, Joyce Vance warns us not to look away from ongoing voter suppression efforts in Georgia while Judd Legum at Popular Information breaks down how fact-checking is undermined by the desire to appear neutral to both sides.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice put together this comprehensive thread with all the highlights of the evening—including this ruthless and effective montage of Trump and Vance being dangerously weird. And @InternetHippo provides a Macchiavellian reading of a recent Nancy Pelosi tweet:

For a less trite take on this situation, check out Jay Caspian Kang’s close reading of Pelosi’s recent memoir over at The New Yorker.

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Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Last night was absolutely electric. Perhaps the best way to capture what happened in the United Center arena is to tick off the emotions you could sense around you: nostalgia for 2008, relief at hearing truths told, hope making its “comeback” — as former First Lady Michelle Obama put it, safety in being defended and watched over by genuinely empathetic people, and, above all, a sense that the future could be fun.

Before getting into any of the speeches and highlights from the televised portion of the evening, I wanted to share some thoughts from my notebook on the significance of fun in politics — and how an afterparty I stayed way too late at foretells the political style Gen Z will bring to the Democratic Party.

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Throwing a better party

I like to think that the word “party” has at least two meanings for a reason. A political party, yes. And, like, a party party — with drinks, hats, music, something to eat…you know: vibes.

In recent years, sections of the broad political left often lamented it had somehow gotten bad at throwing the better party. Sure, it was articulating a more humane vision for the future; it was in favor of democracy — which is a big achievement these days, congrats(!); it was serious about life-improving policy.

But if we were being honest, were the Democrats clearly and objectively the more fun party? Not necessarily (or maybe at all). There could be elements of gatekeeping and hairsplitting and judgeyness and perfectionism and purity that got in the way of good vibes. There was the constant warning of a treacherous future, which is true but, again, Not Very Fun.

Then there was last night.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.