Chicago is abuzz.

The city is full of earnest young politicos with lanyards around their necks having intense conversations about some issue they spy on the horizon in 2026; elected officials with their identifying lapel pins being whisked into and out of hotels, into and out of black sedans; groups of Chicago police and U.S. Secret Service and others standing in clusters on the streets and gathered en masse outside the United Center, where the Democratic National Convention’s main festivities are occurring.

As we wait for Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and the Obamas to speak tonight, a few notes from Section 300, where we journalists are packed into arena seats and are nibbling on Legacy Burgers and crinkle-cut fries. They fall into the categories of “The Public Convention and the Private One”; “The Rise of the Creators”; and some texts I just got from prominent figures at the convention about what they are witnessing, including Senator Brian Schatz and Waleed Shahid of the Uncommitted movement.

1. The Public Convention and the Private One

I have never attended a political convention in person before. So I had no idea what actually happens here besides the evening speeches I have been watching on TV since I was a young boy. Fortunately, an organizer friend texted me shortly after I landed to explain everything:

Oh yeah the whole thing is side events

The convention itself is a shitshow

I did not know about the side events, although I probably should have guessed that all these people, gathered in one place, weren’t waiting around all day for the nighttime show. In fact, many people I talked to today skip the evening events altogether. What they’re here for is the Private Convention.

The Private Convention is the side events: panel discussions, lunches, cocktail parties, after parties, fundraising confabs, data presentations, trainings, workshops, and more. These events are spread across the city, and many of them serve a completely different purpose from the rest of the convention.

While the convention that you and I know from television is about conveying speeches to the great mass of Americans, the private convention is about the thousands of institutions that make up the broad political left meeting, strategizing, making plans and preparing contingencies.

I got to attend one of the events of the Private Convention today, and it was completely different from the big public show.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

After some delays, we bring you Anand’s dispatch en route to Chicago (with a pit stop at MSNBC), some reflections on Biden’s keynote, and other highlights from what we’re reading about last night’s primetime slate.

4:30 a.m. — I wake up painfully early today, because democracy. There was a whole lot of morning ahead: a television hit on “Morning Joe” and then a flight to Chicago, where, of course, the Democratic Party is convening.

5 a.m. — A car ride through a beautifully, eerily empty New York City to 30 Rock, where I was on from the top of the show, at 6 a.m.

I was there to talk about this essay from yesterday, about the new political style ascendant in the era of Kamala Harris. What I usually do is type out (or copy/paste) some highlights from the piece I’m talking about, to have on the table in front of me. Even the solidly middle-aged need our teleprompters. As you can see below, my phone is not yet sold on the concept of Mobisuasion! (Check out the political group Way to Win’s fascinating research on that idea here.)

5:30 a.m. — Get mic’d up quickly by MSNBC’s C.J., who will always cheer you up, get some coffee down the hatch, and then some more.

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6 a.m. — Now I’m set with Mika and Willie — and, seconds before air time, as usual, Joe. He loves a good last-minute entrance.

We talk on air about the first night of the convention last night and about President Biden’s wistful capstone of a speech. When the control room cuts to video clips from last night, we talk among ourselves around the table, out of viewers’ earshot. Sometimes the conversations you can’t hear are the ones I wish you could.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

So my flight was canceled. Here I was, all ready to go to the DNC, leather jacket in tow, and the flights started vanishing due to terrible weather. I will be heading west soon, but first I wanted to jot some notes on the real meaning what I believe we will be witnessing this week, which is the rise of a new political style taking over leadership of the Democratic Party.

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The great political story of 2024 is President Biden’s decision to stand aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. It is a story of selflessness, of a generational transition in the rise of Harris, and of a woman who has at times struggled to command the narrative coming into her own in a way that has energized the party, turned the race upside down, and roused deadened souls.

But this story, as dramatic as it is, may obscure the deeper story, which is less about the transition from one leader to another and more about the ascendance of a new political style at the top of the Democratic Party. We are witnessing the rise of what I’m calling the Brat Pack, and with it a new approach that elevates attention over restraint, storytelling over self-explanatory policy mindedness, fight picking over always taking the high road, and thrilling the base over diluting for moderates.

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For years, I have reported on a quiet civil war within the Democratic Party. If I had to sum up the schism, I would say that one side was defined by sobriety, risk aversion, a focus on doing the work rather than talking about it, staying high-minded, and refusing to compete for attention with a carnival barker. The other side was more interested in risk-taking, storytelling as a paramount goal, speaking to emotion, making people feel things and want to sing from the rooftops, grabbing and holding attention. In recent years, the former camp has been firmly in command.

But the other faction was lurking around all along. Perhaps they were deputies rather than principals, and they went with the dominant approach despite their yearning to try something new. Often they were earlier in their careers, and they told themselves that they were putting in their time, and one day they would usher in the new ways.

My best, most distilled understanding of what has happened in the transition to a Kamala Harris campaign is that the civil war has turned. Harris may have inherited much of Biden’s campaign apparatus and its players, but many at the top are new — Harris’s people. And in the giant threadbare temporary startup that is a presidential campaign, the faction that long wanted a different, fresher way seems to be winning.

With apologies to the earlier incarnation, I’ll call them the Brat Pack, after the campaign’s embrace of a pop star’s embrace of Harris. I believe their rise is the most underrated story of this race, and the real subtext of what we’re about to see at the convention this week. And so in what follows I wanted to break down some of the defining features of the new Brat Pack approach — the new style and orientation that is taking over the Democratic Party.

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There are several elements we can point to as part of the Brat Pack way, and close readers of The Ink over these years will have heard us champion some of them.

STORYTELLING. The Brat Pack approach emphasizes storytelling over the idea that good policies and good results should be self-explanatory. We are seeing a shift from a view of “The work should speak for itself” to “Nothing speaks for itself. You’ve got to tell the story.” I often detected in my conversations with high-level Democrats a contempt for story. It took different forms. In 2019, I wrote about Bernie Sanders’s near-refusal to tell his own personal family story, even though it would have helped him tremendously, as many of his staffers believed and argued to him. The Biden administration was huge on tangible accomplishments and improvements in inflation numbers and relatively less interested in touting these things in ways that broke through — which you can blame on the media, but when you’re blaming the media, you’re losing. My best-faith understanding of this way is that it comes from a sense that voters should be treated with respect, as reasoning creatures who will appreciate actual achievements and will reward you for what the documented progress actually is. The Brat Pack is moving away from this “nose to the grindstone” approach. Sometimes you’ve got to rise from the grindstone and sing for all to hear.

ATTENTION. The Brat Pack stresses attention. Its approach reflects an overriding interest in commanding it. Too many of us in the media and in politics and in book publishing and many of the other worlds I know best are still living in the past. Stuck in a world in which Walter Cronkite told millions of people what they needed to know and how to think. We have not adjusted to a new media world whose fundamental quality is fragmentation and whose most precious resource, therefore, is human attention. The until-now-dominant approach didn’t see the pursuit of attention as an end in itself. Sure, you wanted people to know about your policies and vision, but you wouldn’t necessarily contort yourself to make people notice. You wouldn’t make weird videos, try weird stuff. You wouldn’t experiment, as I have long urged President Biden to do, with reviving FDR’s Fireside Chats for the twenty-first century. You wouldn’t take the risk of doing a stunt or being hyper-reactive for the sake of commanding notice. There was a sneering at the attention-seizers. When someone like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rose on the strength of her attentional intelligence, some dismissed her and others struggled to emulate her, showing the distance between the mainstream and her. Under Harris, the Brat Pack is showing a complete break from the old approach. The new style centers the pursuit of attention, embraces memes, is willing to try weird things, and, above all, understands that you win when people cannot look away. We are finally not having Trump’s conversation.

EMOTION. One of the most interesting debates I’ve had in recent years, with people who think deeply about fighting authoritarianism, is about whether pro-democracy movements can and should seek to compete with autocrats’ skill at catering to the emotions. My former New York Times colleague Roger Cohen and I had a spirited back-and-forth about this not long ago, after he wrote about fascism’s power to “get the blood up” and democracy’s relative dullness, its almost purposeful dullness. Roger channeled a view that has been very influential in general, including at the highest levels of the Democratic Party: that you don’t want to become like the fascists in fighting the fascists (which, fair enough), and (here I get more skeptical) that this means carrying yourself as the sober counter to their electric pursuit of sentiment. This is where I, along with many of the people lurking in the wings whom I’ve been reporting on, disagree. I believe it is totally possible to make people feel big feels for the democratic cause, and I don’t think it’s dangerous. But the vibes faction wasn’t in charge all these years. And now, in the rise of the Brat Pack, they are. If I understand them right, they believe at bottom that you can, and indeed must, seek to compete with fascists for the emotional life of people, that you must take an organizer’s approach to helping people process a bewildering age and the dislocations of change and the resentments that come with progress and the pain of capitalist predation. The new style recognizes emotional labor, if you will, as vital to political work. That is why Harris and Governor Tim Walz are constantly talking about “joy.” That is why the campaign has embraced the notion of the centrality of vibes, not just policy. The Brat Pack doesn’t have any disdain for emotion.

CULTURE. The Brat Pack wants to play in the culture. A constant lament of organizers and activists and electoral campaigners on the broad left in recent years has been the lack of savvy engagement in the culture. The right has its MAGA hats. Where were the left’s hats? The right has racist songs about small towns. What anthems have risen to the fore and held the nation in thrall to represent values of pluralism, multi-racial democracy, and freedom? For some years now, Democrats have been absent from the culture of the nation in a way that makes no sense given the party’s near-monopoly on top-tier artists who side with them. In the rise of the Brat Pack, you’re seeing a total shift. Memes are back, and there is a willingness to engage with them, in spite of the risk of backfiring or losing a little dignity. There is a Beyoncé anthem that makes the campaign’s rallying cry of “freedom” something that can be felt in the body, not just known in the mind. You can imagine prior generations of Democratic campaigns that would have tried to rein in Vice President Harris’s laugh because of right-wing attacks on it, or told Governor Walz to stop his hilarious habit of doing a Broadway-style leg kick on stage. But this is no longer that kind of Democratic campaign. Something, once again, has shifted. There is on the upswing a view that if you can leap from politics into the culture, always take that deal.

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GOING LOW. The Brat Pack is worried about going high when they go low. Former first lady Michelle Obama has said she was misunderstood when she said, “When they go low, we go high.” She said she never meant it as a call for unilateral disarmament. But that notion of going high and staying high, even in the face of true depredation from the extreme right, has felt like the dominant approach in recent years — and often a very frustrating one. Many Democrats in recent years have been hesitant to punch back, wary of name-calling, averse to impugning motives and tarring genuinely un-American policies as un-American. As Senator Chris Murphy told me some time ago, “Democrats, we believe in subtleties. We don’t believe in good and evil. We believe in relativity. That needs to change.” Well, it’s a’changing right now. The Brat Pack is breaking from Michelle Obama’s famous phrase. It is not interested in going high no matter what. It is not interested in staying above the fray. It has finally embraced the kind of rapid reaction to Trump’s madness that has long been called for. And the tone of the Harris campaign’s statements is breathtakingly fresh, a true and very notable break from the “go high” way. See, for example, this absolute queen shit:

MOBISUASION. Perhaps the most politically significant element of the Brat Pack’s way is the rise of what one of its leading gurus, Anat Shenker-Osorio, calls “mobisuasion.” This is the theory that Democrats should not seek to persuade by diluting their offerings to reach out to the middle, the moderates, the centrists, whatever. Rather, they should seek to “animate the base to persuade the middle.” You mobilize your own people, your core supporters, offering them things that genuinely excite them, and you trust that their excitement will be infectious, creating a contagion that eventually touches their more conservatives relatives and neighbors and friends. Anat, who is no stranger to Ink readers, is perhaps the person who has recently experienced the biggest shift from “excellent advice not being listened to” to “excellent advice now steering the whole ship.” She is the philosopher-queen of the Brat Pack, and in some sense what we are seeing now is the triumph of her and her allies’ approach, at last. You don’t have to know whether the people running the Harris campaign are listening to Anat’s methods to know that they clearly are.

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In theory, Mobisuasion sounds great, right? But it hasn’t really been embraced at the highest levels in recent years. Instead, what has dominated is a fetish for courting Ohio-Diner Americans — white-working-class, moderate or even right-leaning voters who tend to think Democrats are communists and God haters. Memo: Those people often fail to come around, despite the attention lavished on them, and in the meantime, the courting of them, and the dilution it requires, depresses the hell out of your base, and nobody is left very happy. The Brat Pack, thanks to Anat’s long campaign of persuasion to change how Democrats seek to persuade, is embracing mobisuasion. If you look closely, you will notice that this campaign is the first in memory seemingly not to worry a lot about the Ohio-Diner American vote. Which is not to say they are not courting it. But they are not tempering the message for white-working-class voters. They are inviting them to come aboard the joy train. It is a campaign that is not centered on reassuring the people the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called the “white moderate.” In selecting Walz as her running mate, Harris instead seemed to choose an approach of showing many white-working-class voters that they can be who they are and be part of a pluralist future and be allies. They can join the future. The future won’t stop for them.

RECLAIMING. The Brat Pack is helping Harris reclaim the mistakenly forsaken frames of patriotism and freedom. As two insightful recent reports in The Times have observed, Harris has embraced the language of freedom typically heard from Republicans and embraced the language of patriotism also claimed by the right — finding her own progressive incarnations of these ideas. These twin embraces have been championed by voices like Anat’s in recent years, but they have struggled to come to pass for a few reasons. One is that elements of the progressive left are deeply uncomfortable with patriotism and with a frame of freedom, finding them right-wingy and cringe. Another is that more moderate elements of the left sometimes do talk in this way but end up adopting Republican frames in the process that undermine Democrats’ goals. It’s not helpful to talk about patriotism if you’re going to use that to support draconian counterterrorism policies; it’s not helpful to talk up freedom if you’re going to use that to undercut universal healthcare. What is happening now, and perhaps reflects the Brat Pack’s way, is an interest in claiming patriotism but making it one’s own, a progressive patriotism for a multiracial democracy that is still in the works, a way of talking about American democracy that doesn’t erase what’s wrong nor skip over all that’s right. In many ways, it is a way of talking about patriotism that grows out of communities of color and stretches back to the Civil Rights Movement, where Dr. King found ingenious ways of honoring the American founding fathers and documents while invoking them to summon the nation to resolve unfinished business:

When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir…Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom…

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These are the elements of change as I see them. Admittedly, it’s early days. And I can only see what I see from the outside, observing the results of the work. I am not privy to the mechanics of how a new crop of strategists is overturning the old ways. And, of course, many of the people driving these changes have been in campaigns all along. This is not a question of old staff being replaced by new staff. It is, from what I gather from people close to the process, a matter of old ideas being replaced by new ones, and the new ideas being carried out by a team of old and new hands, some of whom have long been waiting for this day to come.

Beyond the specific elements, a final word about what they add up to. The Brat Pack is pushing the Democratic Party in a more dice-rolling direction. Take the risk, try the weird thing, shock people a little, channel your inner Bonnie Raitt and let’s give ’em something to talk about. It is the rise, perhaps, of a more fearless Democratic Party: fearless about how it communicates and crafts statements, fearless about not pandering to the white moderate, fearless in picking a vice presidential nominee based on chemistry rather than electoral calculus, fearless about hitting back and even being deservedly vicious, fearless about making jokes about Walz’s inability to eat spices and trusting that people will appreciate the playful ribbing rather than believe, with Ben Shapiro, that whiteness is under attack, fearless in shaking things up on the assumption that the old ways won’t beat fascism.

Yes, we have a new candidate in Harris. But don’t sleep on the deeper shift. A new political style is on the rise. The Brat Pack has a plan to defeat Trump. Will it work?

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Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

It’s being discussed more and more, but I truly think one of the most powerful and still underrated forces in the election is going to be the joy and relief millions feel watching Coach Walz and imagining that their dads and uncles and neighbors could wake up from their hatred.

An argument against hatred and extremism and misogyny and resentment is powerful. But a living embodiment of someone who could have gone that way but didn’t — this is a force all its own.

It’s very hard to rebut and fact-check and out-argue and deprogram these men who fell prey to Rupert Murdoch’s profit lust.

But when you see an older white guy who is just happy and can’t wait for the future — wow. It is going to burrow deep into many people with lost relatives.

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It’s going to make people feel rage at what was stolen from them. And it’s going to show them, not tell them but show, what might yet be possible. There are years that could still be reclaimed.

Yes, the Trump tax cuts were bad. The immigration policy a catastrophe. The Covid policy a calamity. But this — this is unfathomable in scale. Millions of our people were turned into grist for the Murdoch mill, and broken, and from the shards of them a movement was made.

It’s one of these phenomena that underlie politics but isn’t often discussed when discussing politics. But trust me: people feel as strongly about this as about monetary policy or tax cuts. Their kinfolk were stolen by billionaires. Their minds, their hearts, their loving selves.

Dads who lovingly braided their daughters’ hair and practiced spelling bee words with them now malign their freedoms and the people they love and the families they have made. They were stolen. People want their families back. And this is going to become a theme of this campaign.

We are neighbors. We are family. We are each other’s people. Damn the thieves. We must depose them and find each other again. And now we glimpse how.

Perhaps the key emotion of 2008 was people’s desire to prove, and believe, that their country could transcend its racism. That was a force more powerful than any policy question. I wonder if the deeper force in this race is going to become this sense of reclaiming our neighbors.

Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

This week, I was interviewed by the very smart Kai Wright of WNYC for his show “Notes from America.” We talked a lot about the momentous events of the last two weeks. But I wanted to share this part from the end, where I try to imagine how Vice President Kamala Harris might weave a narrative, drawing on her biography, that frames an honest, hopeful story of America.

The full episode is here.

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Two stories about America

It’s really interesting having someone who is biracial being specifically Indian and Black. Here’s why it’s interesting. I think, in a way, these are two of the most powerful stories in the history of this country merged together in one person.

In a way, the Black American story is a story of this country having these great ideals that it lied about and wasn’t true about to lots and lots of people from the beginning. Then the Black story is a story of people unloved by America loving America enough over and over and over again to make it better, to fight, to change the law, change people’s hearts, and perfecting a union slowly over time.

Indian Americans generally are only in this country in large numbers because right after that tradition of Black resistance led to the Civil Rights Act in 1964, immigration was opened up in the same kind of spirit.

It was only from white countries largely before it was opened up to the whole world on the back of the Civil Rights gains fought for by Black movements and immigration was opened up.

A lot of Indian Americans came here. Almost every Indian American who’s here is here because of that law change in 1965. The Indian American story, by virtue of having a different story and being on the back of those Civil Rights gains, has been a story of extraordinary fortune in this country, of being allowed to come to a country as guests at first and become American and find fortune and find the opportunity to redefine and remake yourselves and create things.

These are both true stories about America. America has blood at the root. America has hypocrisy at the root. America has gotten better every generation, thanks to resistance and activism and fighting, and America is a country made of the entire world, made of people from everywhere who find their dreams realized here. Both those stories are true. They’re really important to say at the same time.

Kamala Harris’ identity in being a Black woman who is also the daughter of an Indian immigrant embodies both of that. The rendition I just gave you there, I think, could be very central to a narrative that she tells here that is honest and hopeful.

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Let’s Walz.

Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have made her decision, and it’s Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Dashing off some quick thoughts from the road on what I think this choice already tells us.

1. DISCIPLINE: Harris is running a disciplined and deliberated and concerted campaign. Sadly for us journalists, there were no leaks. She watched potential nominees audition in public, and she allowed herself to be affected by what she saw and learned, going with someone she reportedly knows less well than others — but who charmed the country in recent weeks.

2. ATTENTION: Finally, a Democratic candidate who takes attention seriously. Donald Trump and leaders of his ilk, like authoritarians throughout history, know the importance of commanding attention and making people pay heed to their every move and utterance. But Democrats have preferred to put their heads down and “do the work.” Which is all fine and good, except that attention is everything in today’s media environment. Choosing Walz tells me that the campaign took seriously the ability of a communicator to break through the national cacophony. And even the process of revealing the pick showed attentional skill.

3. WEIRDNESS: Walz commanded so much attention largely because of his message of framing MAGA Republicans as “weird.” But it’s worth paying attention to what he actually says on this point, rather than what others say inspired by him. He makes clear that MAGA Republican leaders should be called “weird” but that regular voters should never be. Those, he says often, are his own relatives and neighbors and friends. This is a crucial distinction for Democrats to make to avoid showing contempt for any voter.

4. VIBES: This is a vibes election. Maybe all elections are vibes election. But this one’s got more vibes than Oscar Isaac. There were more spreadsheety reasons to go with other candidates — Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro could help with a crucial state, etc. But Harris clearly understands that what she has had going for her in recent days is vibes — excellent vibes. Making people feel things matters. You can’t achieve a lot if people are left feeling cold. This is a vindication of the view that vibes are everything in a divided and exhausted country grasping for hope.

5. COALITION: A signature philosophy and practice and achievement of the Biden presidency was coalitionism — the idea that coalition isn’t just a noun but a way of life. President Biden saw himself as a coalition coordinator of a coalition spanning AOC and Joe Manchin. He accorded respect to every part of this coalition, which sometimes meant reining in his ambition (sadly) and sometimes meant being moved on Israel and Gaza by those more critical of Israel. The choice of Walz suggests a doubling down on coalitionism. Progressives found a lot to love in Walz, because of his realization of free breakfast and lunch for kids in Minnesota, among other things. But he is also someone who repeatedly won a moderate district in his state and kind of looks like a Republican, and he constantly talks about his deep human connections to red America. This is a coalitional choice that will stave off infighting and hold people together.

6. TRANSLATOR: Walz is, at best, a translator of powerful progressive ideals into common sense Americana. He makes free school lunches and breakfasts sound like common sense. He makes abortion rights sound like common sense. This is partly because he is an older white man who people are less inclined to fear as a radical. But it’s also because he has real skills. Watch for this ability in the campaign.

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Today Donald Trump sought to question Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, much as he rose to political prominence doubting Barack Obama’s origins.

He mused that she had always cast herself as Indian, until one day, suddenly, magically, she turned Black. Well, this is false, first of all. And dumb. Harris went to Howard University, an historically Black college, and has identified as both Indian and Black all her life. She had the unusual childhood situation of being raised by an Indian mother who, having divorced Harris’s Black father, nevertheless invested great effort and intention in exposing Harris and her sister, Maya, to the Black community and Black tradition and thought, as Harris writes in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.

Since Trump, who is of German and Scottish heritage, cannot seem to hold in his head the notion of people with more than one heritage, we’re offering this primer. It’s an essay from our archives, from 2020, on Vice President Harris’s layers of identity, viewed through the lens of caste — of the divisions and hierarchies that have haunted both the Black and Indian sides of her lineage.

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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The many layers of Kamala Harris’ identity

Kamala Harris is the first woman of color on a major-party presidential ticket. She is, in fact, you might say, a woman of two colors: Black, owing to her Jamaican father; and brown, owing to her Indian mother. And each of those lineages comes with its own histories and complications and inheritances related to caste.

Harris almost certainly wouldn’t exist if her maternal grandfather had not been an improbably progressive upper-caste Indian, a defier of caste. A Brahmin civil servant in newly independent India, P.V. Gopalan might have been expected, as The Los Angeles Times notes, to hew to the convention that “destined Brahmin offspring for arranged marriages and comfortable careers in academia, government service or the priesthood — if they were men. Women were not expected to work at all.” Instead, all four of his children traveled untraditional roads. His son married a Mexican woman. A daughter became a doctor and never married. Another daughter became an information scientist and didn’t have children. And Shyamala, the senator’s late mother, pulled off a caste-defiance hat trick of Things a Well-Born Indian Woman is Not Supposed To Do: leaving the country alone as a 19-year-old woman; pursuing a master’s degree as said woman; and not only failing to marry an Indian man but marrying a Black man — a brave act given anti-Black racism among Indians.

So Harris descends from privilege in the Indian system of caste, but only came to be born because of the rejection of the rules of that privilege. And her father’s background implicates other systems of — and questions about — caste. Donald Harris was Black and Jamaican. He and Shyamala met during their work for the civil rights movement. So it was the battle against the American caste regime that brought them together. Yet because of her father’s foreign provenance, Harris has long been met with (rather unfair) questions about the authenticity of her Blackness. “What does it mean to call Kamala Harris ‘black’ in an American context?” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams has tweeted. “People keep saying, ‘Well, she looks black.’ Always good to keep in mind that ‘race’ has never strictly been about how someone looks. My blue eyed children would qualify for reparations and Harris would not.” His ground for this latter claim is that Harris cannot trace an ancestor back to American slavery. (There have also been unsubstantiated suggestions that Harris’ ancestors include an enslaver — suggestions that are intended to cast her bona fides as a survivor of the American caste system into doubt, suggestions that seem utterly unfamiliar with hemispheric history.) But whether or not Kamala Harris’ future critics would recognize her and her sister as Black, their mother had no doubt. As Harris writes in her memoir, Shyamala “understood very well she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident black women.”

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At that, Shyamala couldn’t be accused of failing. And as Harris grew into a trailblazing public official and a political superstar, the ghost of caste hovered. At every step of her career, she defied America’s racial caste system and other hierarchies, accumulating a pile of firsts: first woman elected district attorney of San Francisco; first woman, first African-American, and first person of South Asian origin elected as attorney general of California; first United States senator of South Asian descent (and only the second African-American woman). But, like Barack Obama’s ascent to power, Harris’ successes also illustrated the limitations of singular defiers of caste regimes. As the writer Casey Gerald has said of his own transcendence of caste, rising to great heights from a hard-up African-American community in Dallas, “The American dream relies on stories like mine…to distract from the American reality: There is a conveyor belt that sends most young people, especially from neighborhoods like mine, from nothing to nowhere, while the chosen few are randomly picked off and celebrated.”

There is also the issue of what is expected of those from disfavored castes in exchange for the chance to defy caste systems. A lot of us would have wanted an angrier Barack Obama when it came to the abuses that led to the 2008 financial crisis, but, given how many white Americans react to Black anger, that man would probably have remained a professor in Chicago. Those of disfavored castes permitted to rise within caste systems must often navigate an extra expectation to prove that they will not rock the caste boat. Which is hardly to excuse Senator Harris’ controversial record as a prosecutor — a record that, for certain progressives, puts her beyond the pale. She did what prosecutors do — put people in jail — and she did it within the caste regime that is, in Michelle Alexander’s phrase, “the new Jim Crow.” For many of Harris’ critics, it is especially disheartening that a pioneering woman of color — of those two colors — rose to power through, among other things, jailing Black and brown people. It is a reminder that representation matters, and that structure matters as well, and advances in representation can bring about advances in structure or can crowd them out and stave them off. It is progressive to diversify the rooms where it happens, but diversifying those rooms doesn’t necessarily, on its own, make them progressive.

Harris’ selection, and the question of its relationship to deeper change, made me think of a book published 20 years ago, “The Karma of Brown Folk.” In it Vijay Prashad retells the forgotten history of solidarity between South Asian and Black peoples, and reveals how it was buried under the more recent phenomenon of holding South Asians up as “model minorities,” weaponized to serve anti-Blackness and status quo-ism. “Kamala Harris’ choice is calculated, so carefully calibrated, that it does not strum the chords of Afro-Asian solidarity that have echoed in the United States throughout its history,” Prashad told me this week. “She has been chosen in the midst of a new uprising for Black Lives, a concern for women’s rights, a concern for very correct issues that — for the Democrats — will stand in for substantial and necessary change, including to the prison-industrial complex. Harris’ parents — one Jamaican, one Indian — will be the reason for excitement, not her record, not the agenda proposed by Biden. This is sadly the cynicism of identity politics.” He added: “The historic movement of Harris’ selection would be a caricature of what it could be if the Biden-Harris ticket does not break with the Democratic-Republican consensus on ‘tough on crime,’ which means — in this conjuncture — ‘tough on Black and Brown folk.’”

Alicia Garza, who helped seed the Black Lives Matter movement, was more hopeful. “Representation is important — it is essential that the ticket reflects what America looks like,” she wrote in Glamour. “But representation cannot be the total substance of our support: We must match representation both in symbol and in substance. Women and Black people, and other communities that have been left out and left behind, must be in positions of leadership. When they do lead, it is also important that this leadership lift up those who have been kept down after generations of rigged rules left us without the things we need to live well.”

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And so here we have Kamala Harris, who is descended, in one branch of her family, from high-caste people who rejected caste; who was conceived because two people of different backgrounds came together to fight racial caste in America; whose mother knew she would have to be twice as tough to survive that American caste system of anti-Blackness and who nonetheless still confronts questions about her Blackness; who herself has triumphed over the American caste system again and again, and who has, all the while, been trailed by questions of whether she is sufficiently committed to dismantling that caste system, in all of its tentacular devastation, not just to personally transcending it; and who, on the day of her anointment as vice-presidential nominee, called to mind yet another ghost of caste haunting this moment and all of us.

Her debut on the ticket was on August 12, the three-year anniversary of the white-supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Remember,” former Vice President Joe Biden said yesterday from a school in Delaware, “what it felt like to see those neo-Nazis — close your eyes — and those Klansmen, white supremacists coming out of fields, carrying lighted torches, faces contorted, bulging veins, pouring into the streets of a historic American city, spewing the same anti-Semitic bile we heard in Hitler’s Germany in the ’30s.” And so we saw a woman who represented the defiance and the persistence of caste in two different societies, being introduced to the nation on the grim anniversary of the moment when that third infamous caste system, Nazi Germany’s, echoed so loudly and ominously in America, and inspired the president of the United States to praise some of the “very fine people” among those neo-Nazis.

The anniversary gave a further layer to the moment. Here was a subject of the Indian and American caste systems, with her complicated relationships to both, running to eject from office a man whose decades-ago predecessor marshaled a Jim Crow army to defeat white supremacy in Europe and who now, unworthy heir that he is, seems to take inspiration from the fascist enemy America helped beat.

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Hello, friends! I’m on an airplane as I write this. And one measure of the excitement in the country is that, as Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her first rally since the dramatic events of recent days, virtually every in-seat television screen I could see was set to a live feed of her in Wisconsin.

What follows are some very first-draft notes on what struck me in her debut, focusing on the way in which she has truly absorbed modern messaging practices that too many of her fellow Democrats ignore.

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Vice President Kamala Harris’ debut rally was outstanding, drawing on so many lessons of persuasion that others neglect.

She very pointedly took the fight to Trump at the beginning, carving the contrast narrative of a prosecutor versus a felon, a fighter for justice versus a perpetrator of injustice. But then she pivoted and made clear that beating Trump isn’t enough. Nor is saving democracy.

It’s about, she said, the ability to fight for you, for your family. This is what the Harvard scholar Daniel Ziblatt calls the “bank shot” to save democracy: we have to save democracy and defeat a fascist, but not only for its own sake, but also to have the tools to make your life better tangibly.

When it came to talking about policy, she kind of didn’t! Which is terrific! As Anat Shenker-Osorio, the messaging guru, says, sell the brownie, not the recipe. Policy is a recipe. She spoke instead of the human end states of policy. Having childcare, being able to live and thrive and rise. Brownies are yum.

Harris also did a great job of framing the two visions as forward versus backward, past versus future, but then, again, she made it about us. You have the choice between going forward and backward. You decide what kind of place we are. Simple, sharp, clear, empowering of us.

On a more superficial but no less important level, she was having fun up there. She would rather be up there than anywhere else. Too often, movements for progress don’t embody the joy they promise to usher in with policy. She is showing that freedom is more fun than tyranny.

The pro-democracy movement has in recent years somehow allowed the fascists to throw the better party. To be the exuberant, joyous ones. To be energetic. She is reminding us that you can’t just appeal to the head; you have to throw a cookout that people want to be at. Period.

We might have seen a catchphrase be born in real time: “We’re not going back.” Has it all: the “we,” the adamant refusal, the calling out of retrograde nostalgia.

So a few core themes become clear: She and Trump are foils who have lived opposite lives. He and his extremist and rich friends aren’t focused on your life, but Dems are. There is a choice between taking on the future and going back to the past, and it’s ours to make.

It’s one speech, and it’s early days. But in recent years, a lot of very cutting-edge new thinking in messaging, such as that practiced by Shenker-Osorio, has come to light, and too many Democrats have ignored it. Today’s rally marked a break. This is how you speak and win today.

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With deliberate mispronunciation of Vice President Kamala Harris’ name again in the news and on the Republican agenda, we’re bringing back this great essay on the difference between mispronunciation and dispronunciation from our archives. You’ll want to keep it handy over the coming months.

My name is Anand. It means happiness, bliss, contentment. If you’re interested in experiencing these feelings, may I suggest a name other than Anand when coming of age in the United States of America.

The other day, when Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, referred to his colleague of many years as “Kamala-mala-mala, I don’t know, whatever!”, I immediately recognized him. All my life, perhaps like you, I have run up against the unwillingness and inability of many Americans to say my name correctly.

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The unwillingness and the inability are connected but distinct. In the Perdue case, it was unwillingness flying under the cover of inability. The “I don’t know, whatever!” part was a pretense of personal limitation to soften the blow of “mala-mala,” which was pure middle-school mockery.

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The obvious word for what Perdue did is “mispronunciation.” But I would like to correct that. The proper term is “dispronunciation.” Consider that misinformation is information that merely happens to be false, whereas disinformation is false information purposely spread. Similarly, mispronunciation is people trying too feebly and in vain to say our names — and dispronunciation is people saying our names incorrectly on purpose, as if to remind us whose country this really is.

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This weekend, the news emerged that Noam Chomsky, the 95-year-old titan of the left, had suffered a decline in his health and, as Bev Stohl, his former assistant at MIT, put it, it was “unlikely he will return to the public eye.”

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact Chomsky’s work has had. Beyond the total transformation of his academic field (he’s widely acknowledged as the father of modern linguistics and the main force behind the cognitive turn in the sciences), his political impact has been immeasurable. As a writer, activist, analyst and critic of power, and likely the most visible left public intellectual of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, his work has defined the terms of countless debates and he’s been a tireless advocate for — and guide on the path to — a better future.

Our thoughts are with Chomsky, and we expect that he’s on many of your minds as well. So this week we’re opening up this long excerpt from a great conversation Anand had with him four years ago, focusing on his interesting and not necessarily intuitive leftist case for supporting Biden against Trump in the 2020 election, the power of movements to shape politics, and a ton of other still timely matters, including what he thinks about the question of his own legacy. We think you’ll find it insightful, poignant, and —above all — motivating.

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“Real politics is constant activism”: A conversation with Noam Chomsky

There’s this discussion on the left about whether it’s important at this moment to be quiet about a lot of the usual issues and just focus on getting rid of Trump. Or, on the other side of the argument, that this is exactly the time to raise all those other types of issues and to be tough on Biden. How do you understand that debate?

Well, there is a traditional left position, which has been pretty much forgotten, unfortunately, but it’s the one I think we should adhere to. That’s the position that real politics is constant activism. It’s quite different from the establishment position, which says politics means focus, laser-like, on the quadrennial extravaganza, then go home and let your superiors take over.

The left position has always been: You’re working all the time, and every once in a while there’s an event called an election. This should take you away from real politics for 10 or 15 minutes. Then you go back to work.

At this moment, the difference between the candidates is a chasm. There has never been a greater difference. It should be obvious to anyone who’s not living under a rock. So the traditional left position says, “Take the 15 minutes, push the lever, go back to work.”

Now, the activist left has not been making the choice that you mentioned. It’s been doing both.

Take Biden’s campaign positions. Farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in memory on things like climate. It’s far better than anything that preceded it. Not because Biden had a personal conversion or the DNC had some great insight, but because they’re being hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and others. The climate program, a $2 trillion commitment to dealing with the extreme threat of environmental catastrophe, was largely written by the Sunrise Movement and strongly endorsed by the leading activists on climate change, the ones who managed to get the Green New Deal on the legislative agenda. That’s real politics.

This is interesting coming from you. Your support for Biden is more than merely grudging. You actually seem to think that the platform is surprisingly good given who he is and given where we are.

This is not support for Biden. It is support for the activists who have been at work constantly, creating the background within the party in which the shifts took place, and who have followed Sanders in actually entering the campaign and influencing it. Support for them. Support for real politics.

The left position is you rarely support anyone. You vote against the worst. You keep the pressure and activism going.

So given this popular ferment you’re talking about, a question about a leader. I wonder whether you think a figure like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could ever become president in this country.

Well, if you’d asked me 10 years ago whether someone like Bernie Sanders could be the most popular political figure in the country, I would’ve said you’re out of your mind. But it in fact happened in 2016 and it’s continued to create a significant movement. There are real possibilities. I think if you take a look at the United States in the 1920s, and you asked, Could there ever be a labor movement?, you would’ve sounded crazy. How could there be? It had been crushed.

But it changed. Human life is not predictable. Depends on choices and will, which are unpredictable. So right now, for example, we’re in the process of formation of a Progressive International. It’s based on the Sanders movement in the United States and Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 movement in Europe, which is a transnational European movement seeking to preserve and strengthen what makes sense in the European Union and to overcome its very serious flaws.

If you ask now whether it’s a prospect, it would be very hard. If you take a look at it objectively, you look at where power is distributed in the world, you’ve got the Progressive International made up of these forces, and then you have a “reactionary international” being crafted in the White House with Trump running it. Quasi-dictators like Bolsonaro, a Trump clone, are part of it. The Middle Eastern dictators, family dictators of the Gulf states. Sisi’s Egypt, the worst dictatorship in Egyptian history. Israel, which is moving so far to the right you can barely see it, is part of it. Modi’s India, trying to destroy Indian democracy, turn it into a fundamentalist Hindu quasi-dictatorship. Orban in Hungary.

You compare those forces, and it looks like, How could this even be a struggle? But that’s the wrong measure. There are people, and they make a difference.

We can go back to my favorite philosopher, David Hume. His Of the First Principles of Government, a political tract in the late 18th century, starts off by saying that we should understand that power is in the hands of the governed. Those who are governed, they’re the ones who have the power. Whatever kind of state it is, militaristic or more democratic, as England was becoming. The masters rule only by consent. And if consent is withdrawn, they lose. Their rule is very fragile.

I should say that today’s masters of the universe, as they modestly call themselves, understand this very well. Every January in Davos, the Switzerland ski resort, the great and powerful gather to go skiing, enjoy themselves, and congratulate each other on how wonderful they are. Top CEOs and media figures and entertainment figures and so on.

But this year was different. The theme was different. The theme was: We’re in trouble. The peasants are coming with their pitchforks. As they would prefer to put it, we’re facing “reputational risks.” They’re coming after us. Our control is fragile. We have to provide a different message. So the message at Davos was: Yes, we realize we’ve done wrong things during this whole neoliberal period. You, the general population, have suffered. We understand that. We’re overcoming our mistakes. We’re now going to be committed to you, the stakeholders and working-class communities, we’re really committed to your welfare. We’re becoming deeply humanitarian. We regret our mistakes. You can put your faith in us. We’ll take over and work for your benefit.

Do you think people are seeing through that neoliberal two-step of making money at the expense of the community and donating table scraps to the people they’ve hurt?

There’s a split. There are some who see through it. There’s some caught up in it. Take the United States. Maybe the greatest social movement to develop in American history, the Black Lives Matter-inspired movement. It’s all over the place. Has the kind of public support that no activist movement ever had. Martin Luther King, at the peak of his popularity, had never reached two-thirds public support for what he was doing. That reflects something.

Can you say why you think that is? Why has it succeeded at being such a persuasive movement?

Because of the changes in consciousness that have taken place over the past several years. They manifest themselves in many ways.

They manifest themselves in the climate strike last year, for example. Mostly young people, very dedicated. The Sunrise Movement succeeded. Got to the point of occupying congressional offices. Getting the support of a couple of the young congressional representatives who came in on the Sanders wave, especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Picked up support from Ed Markey, Massachusetts senator who’s been deeply concerned with the environment. Managed to put the Green New Deal on the legislative agenda.

It’s not a small point. We can debate what form it should take, but some form of Green New Deal is absolutely essential for the survival of organized human society. That’s part of it. There are many other things.

Right now, for example, Senator Tom Cotton is pushing legislation to remove federal aid from any school that makes use of The New York Times‘ 1619 series, the series which seriously reviewed the 400 years of vicious repression of Black Americans. The fact that that series appeared is already a great substantial sign of the change in awareness and consciousness. Couple of years ago, that would’ve been inconceivable. Now it’s getting to the point where the right wing wants to make sure to crush the threat of civilized society before it grows.

How do you think the left could do a better job in terms of the language it uses, the political appeals it makes, at reaching a broader group of people who are not hardcore? It often feels like Republicans are very gifted at making people vote for things that are not good for them and Democrats struggle to make people vote for things that would be very, very good for them.

Well, actually, the Sanders movement was remarkably successful. And it’s something that has broken with over 100 years of American political history. To bring a candidate to near nomination without any support from the media, from big donors, from the corporate sector. Nothing like that’s happened before. Could it do more? I think so.

Not to make a big fuss about it, but I’ve been mildly critical of Sanders’ presenting himself as a socialist. He’s not a socialist in my opinion. He’s a New Deal Democrat. A mild social democrat. His policies would not have surprised Eisenhower very much. It’s a sign of the shift to the right, of both parties, during the neoliberal period, that his positions are considered revolutionary.

What’s the point of calling himself socialist? That’s a scary word in the United States. The U.S. is an unusual society. In every other country in the world, a socialist is kind of like a Democrat. Somebody’s a socialist, fine. You can be a communist and be right in the political system. The United States is an extreme, business-run society with a very rigid set of controls. So words like socialist are scare words. Means the gulag. Communist, you can’t even mention.

All right, those are realities about the United States. We should do something about them. But you’re not going to unravel them in time for an election, OK? So, in my view, it’s a dubious stand to take.

You mentioned the 1619 Project. One of the things that it seems to bring out in its detractors is this fear that, if you tell the truth about the origins of the country and 400 years of repression, you’re stealing the grounds for their patriotism. You’re taking away their sense that their country is right and good.

You have advocated for so long for a brutal honesty about the United States, about empire, about how capitalism works. I wonder, how do you think about having an honest view about your country and still finding love for your country?

Depends which America you’re talking about.

Are you talking about John Calhoun? Talking about the people who instigated the most vicious system of slavery in human history? Is that the United States? Or are you talking about the abolitionists?

Are you talking about Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, which regarded wage labor as different from slavery only in that it was temporary, because being dependent on another person is an intolerable attack on human rights and dignity? That’s one America. The other America is the robber barons, the slave owners, the people who destroyed Tulsa when a Black community was successful.

In the 1980s, there were the Reaganites who wanted to devastate and destroy and murder and slaughter in central America, who supported Apartheid until the last second. That’s one America. There’s another America of the people who dedicated themselves to go help and support the victims of our atrocities.

There’s the SNCC workers, and there’s Bull Connor.

There’s two different Americas. So which one do you want?

Over the last couple years, I’ve traveled around the country a lot and met a lot of people who agree with you about the need for big, structural transformation. But many also feel impatient, like “What can I do tomorrow?” These are people who recognize that there are no personal solutions, there are only political solutions. But they want to do something now. What do you say to people who are with you on the need to address these issues at the deepest level, but desire some kind of immediate way of getting involved?

Well, we have no shortage of immediate ways of getting involved. But immediate changes are another story. There’s kind of an instant gratification culture. I worked for Bernie Sanders, he didn’t win. I’m going home. That’s not the way political change takes place. It takes place step by step, small changes to bigger ones, and so on.

The absence of a continued left tradition in the United States is very harmful in this respect. Everything starts new. Things begin, they’re important, they dissipate.

Serious organizers in poor communities understand that the first thing they have to do is break through the sense of hopelessness. And there are ways of doing that.

Take the antiwar movement, Vietnam. I myself got involved in it in 1961, when Kennedy started escalating the war. Nobody was interested. It looked totally hopeless. The first talks that were given were literally in somebody’s living room. Couple of neighbors. Or a church with half a dozen people.

Within a couple of years, there was a mass popular movement. Way too late, but it did develop, and it had an impact. It’s very possible, as Dan Ellsberg and others have argued, that it prevented Nixon from using nuclear weapons. That’s how things change.

When you look at a centrist, neoliberal Democrat like Joe Biden, with the platform that you talked about, starting the campaign by saying that, under him, nothing fundamentally would change for the plutocrats, is your understanding of a person like that that they do not want to make these kinds of changes, they don’t want America to work in the ways you’re describing? Or that they have a kind of cautious realism about what is possible?

I’m not much interested in his personality. I don’t have any opinion. I’m interested in how things get done. And the way things get done is not by Biden having a religious conversion and saying, “Oh, we’ve got to really work on the climate.” That’s not what happened. The DNC probably hates the program, but they have no choice, because their popular base is not only demanding it, but is working constantly, hard, to force them to do it. That’s politics. Not the personality of leaders. I don’t know what’s in his mind. I don’t care, frankly.

You’re perhaps most known for this phrase “manufacturing consent,” which was about mass media. As you’ve watched the rise of social media, I wonder how you think social media has altered the power equations of the country. In what ways do you see it diffusing power? In what ways has it concentrated power further?

Social media, like most technologies, are pretty neutral. What matters is how you use them. You can use a hammer to build a house; you can use a hammer to smash somebody’s head in.

Social media are being used in very different ways. They’re used to organize activists, set up demonstrations, to give people the opportunity to interact, think, develop opinions, deliberate. But they can also be used to drive people into bubbles in which you hear only the same thing over and over. Your prejudices get reinforced, and you hate everybody else. They can be used either way. And they are being used both ways.

So the question comes back to us: How are we going to use the technology that’s available? It doesn’t care. We can use it any way we like. The net effect of social media probably, by and large, I suspect, has been mostly negative. Doesn’t have to be, but I think that’s the way it’s turned out.

So, for example, a lot of young people now get their news from Facebook. What’s Facebook giving you? Facebook doesn’t have reporters in the field.

The book Manufacturing Consent, which you mentioned, has often been misunderstood. It’s not saying the media don’t tell you the truth. In fact, much of the book is devoted to defense of the media. Reporters tell the truth. They’re serious, they’re courageous, they’re honest. They do it within a framework which restricts and constrains and shapes what they’re doing. But if you want to know what’s going on in the world, it’s much better to read The New York Times in the morning than to look at what filters its way down to Facebook.

Because of the pandemic and the related crises, the issues you have spent your life talking about are really at the fore of the discourse today. They’re in politics; they’re in activism; they’re unavoidable.

I know it’s probably not the kind of question you love, but I wonder about how you think about your legacy — what you feel you’ve tried to do and where you think we are.

I don’t really think about a legacy. What I’m interested in is the people who are doing things. Mostly their names will never be known. I’m sure you can’t tell me, or I can’t tell you, the names of the kids who sat in at the lunch counter in Greensboro. These are the people who carry things forward. If there’s a legacy of people who try to do what they can to stimulate it, it’s theirs. The ones I most respect in the world, I can’t remember their names. People in refugee camps in Laos. The peasants in southern Colombia trying to stave off paramilitary attacks and protect themselves from corporations that want to destroy their water supply with gold mines. People in Kurdish areas in Turkey.

I’ll give you an example. At the peak of the Turkish repression of the Kurds, it was very vicious. It was worst in the 1990s. It was strongly supported by Clinton. He was pouring arms in the worse the oppression got. I happened to be there at the tail end of it. I gave a talk.

You were not allowed to speak Kurdish. It was a crime. You could disappear and never be seen again. I was cautious in the talk not to arouse too much ire of the security people.

At the end of my talk, four kids came up holding a big book and gave it to me. It was a Kurdish-Turkish dictionary. They were saying, “We’re going to struggle on.” I don’t know what happened to them. But it’s people like that all over the world whom you can really respect. They’re the ones who matter for any legacy that emerges.

Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

For subscribers: if you’d like to read the full interview, and Anand’s other conversation with Noam Chomsky, focusing on the fight against fascism and his hopes for the future, just click on the links below.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Today on The Ink podcast, our conversation with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. She began her career as an antitrust researcher and reporter, eventually becoming a lawyer and public servant and along the way publishing a groundbreaking paper that turned 40 years of conservative thinking on antitrust on its head.

Named by President Biden to lead…

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Today on The Ink podcast, our conversation with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. She began her career as an antitrust researcher and reporter, eventually becoming a lawyer and public servant and along the way publishing a groundbreaking paper that turned 40 years of conservative thinking on antitrust on its head.

Named by President Biden to lead…

Read more

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

This morning I got to take part in a conversation I won’t soon forget — the kind of extended conversation that I wish could happen more often on television news.

On “Morning Joe,” Mara Gay, Frank Bruni, Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, and I had a spirited, challenging, and respectful conversation about the campus protests.

And it grew tributaries, as the best conversations do, and also became about the civil rights movement, the American founders, violence versus discomfort, and more.

I’m including it here in full because I think it’s important for all of us to reflect on.

And a note of gratitude for supporting this newsletter and my work. Thank you for standing up for the kind of independent media you want to exist in the world.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

This is a story about one voter in one divided state, and how the pro-democracy movement should not despair but rather buck up and get to work, because a lot of people’s seemingly dangerous convictions are more shallow than we think.

So I meet this charming Egyptian-American man in North Carolina yesterday. He tells me he is likely voting for Trump. He sees my face change.

He was under the impression, because of disinformation, that President Biden is a living corpse, unable to string words together or function.

By chance, the person he was speaking to has met Biden and could personally attest that this is not true, also drawing on other sources.

To my shock, as soon as I presented what I had seen, he changed his tune. Oh, I didn’t know that, he said. I reminded him that hundreds of people work for presidents, doing the actual policy making. That reassured him further. He was really listening.

Now we got into Trump. I asked him if he knew that the Muslim ban was part of how Trump had begun. He said that, as an American citizen, it didn’t really apply to him.

But I explained that it was a war on people like him, and he started to get offended at the thought.

I mentioned Trump’s professions to be a dictator on day one. He hadn’t been focused on that, but he now made it clear that he really did not like the idea of anybody being a dictator. He is from Egypt. He knows dictators.

He was somewhat focused on his own safety because of his citizenship. So I mentioned that Trump had floated stripping citizenship from people, a profound break with American law.

This freaked him out. He cannot do that! No one can do that!

I often believe there’s a substrate set of issues beneath the loud ones. He now got to his: his fear around LGBT stuff as it’s being taught in schools, he said.

I’m a conservative, he said.

I responded that this issue of what is taught in schools has to be resolved in a democracy. Him and me and all of you arguing and figuring it out together.

But Trump wants to decide everything for himself. Trump doesn’t want him making that choice.

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This, again, struck him.

And I have no doubt that he was more open than most people. But he didn’t like the idea of this being decided behind his back, which is what dictatorship is.

The conversation circled back to Biden. I told him that, apart from policy, Biden is a decent person, a person of family, as I suspected the man himself saw himself as. He is a good father and a good grandfather. The man said that this was an important thing.

I mentioned that Trump had been, let’s say, not that. Also, he was a New York Democrat for a long time, and pro-choice. The man was utterly shocked by this! A Democrat! Really? There is proof? There is, I said.

So all the stuff about quoting the Bible and saying he’s Christian? the man asked. Is that not real? I mean, it’s real that he says that, but it’s all lies. He is always lying.

This is not good, the man said. He really didn’t like this idea of bandying around spiritual books if you don’t believe in them.

By the end of the conversation, the man was asking if he could look up some videos where I’ve talked about this more so he could learn more.

He said he really hadn’t thought a lot about these things, and he didn’t like what he was hearing about Trump.

I asked him to promise to keep an open mind and try to learn more. If Trump wins in November’s election, there may be no more November elections, I said. He said that he had actually heard this and it was scary.

I tell you this because: We overly despair. We think fascism is rising because millions of people have deeply thought through it. In fact, lots of people are ambling into it because they are victims of disinformation, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this, and have convictions all over the place.

The grave threat to American democracy is also, on the scale of millions of individuals, a strong opinion, lightly held.

When we exaggerate in our mind the depth of other’s convictions, we give up on democracy and persuasion. This was a particularly easy conversation. But I think there are millions more people like this man than we realize. We need to help them sense make.

Let’s get to work.

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Yesterday we ran part one of my conversation with the writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit. That part of the conversation focused on the fight for progress and the need for a left that is joyous, inviting, and expansionary, not angry, Puritanical, and closed.

It sparked a lot of discussion online! Which is always a good thing. In case you missed it, here is that conversation.

Now, today, on to part two. Below is a conversation about what’s really going on in the minds of those drawn to fascism today, what a positive and life-giving climate movement looks like, and why it’s OK to take time to smell the roses — and even grow them! — in bleak times, while fighting the many fights that need fighting.

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I want to switch gears and ask you about what’s going on with people on the right rather than the left. I underlined this phrase when I was rereading one of your books yesterday: “the emotions and perceptions that underlie our political positions and engagements.” I love that phrase because it captures so much of how I think about politics. 

And I think not a lot of people actually think about politics like that, that there are two layers: the positions and engagements, and then the emotions and perceptions below, which is so obvious, but a lot of people in politics really think that people are actually exercised about the border, actually exercised about critical race theory in schools or whatever. But my view is that something deeper is going on with people, particularly in moments like this.

When you look not at elites on the right, but at the regular people who are attracted to American fascism today, there is this pretty significant minority of Americans staring American fascism in the face and saying, “Let’s try that, let’s try that again.” When you look at the level of hatred around issues of trans rights, or the border, what do you think are the underlying fears and anxieties — the pre-political kind of fears and anxieties — that help explain why the country is in such a dangerous place politically?

One thing I think about a lot, thanks to the internet, is that hate and anger and that kind of self-righteous indignation are the easiest emotions to stir up. I think of them as cheap emotions. 

Love, dedication, and solidarity require more skillful rhetoric, among other things. And they don’t create the mob ready to rip the other limb from limb. They create more complex, more self-aware responses. 

Anger really narrows down perception and closes minds. And I think that demagogues on the right have always used it. There’s always been a bogeyman: the KKK was talking about blacks, Catholics, and Jews a hundred plus years ago. The right has always told its key audience in this country, which is the white Christian former majority, that they’re under threat, whether it’s by communists, or left-wing people with progressive ideas, or feminazis.

I think that they’re being manipulated, and what’s startling to me about the base of the right is how eager they are to be manipulated, like dogs that will chase any stick you throw for them. This week it’s Islamofascists or Muslim terrorists. Next week it’ll be trans kids. And then we’ve been going to immigrants since at least the 1990s as this terrible threat.

And of course — I speak as a granddaughter of refugees and great-granddaughter of more refugees on the other side — we were always treated as outsiders, whether it was Irish Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century, or eastern European Jews in the early 20th, or non-white people in more recent decades. Xenophobia is a really easy thing to manipulate, as is racism.

So it feels like on the right are people who are willing to be manipulated this way. And I just wonder if some of them are like, “Wait, the worst threat right now is immigrants? Wasn’t it just trans people? Before that, wasn’t it Black people with the big Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020?”

I feel like that’s part of it. And then they’re also manipulated by being told that their way of life is threatened and that everybody despises them, which is also a very classic kind of demagogic propaganda tactic.

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Paul Waldman of The Washington Post wrote a really powerful essay a few years ago saying that Democrats, liberals are constantly being told that if we could just show more respect to the right, they wouldn’t hate and want to harm us so much. But the truth is that it’s not us telling them that — it’s their own leaders and there’s nothing we can do to stop that.

And that’s an incredibly valuable framework. What’s interesting, though, is that I think it’s mostly backlash that people who felt that a white Protestant majority country was their country, and who also feel very frightened of being in a much more diverse country in which white Protestants and all their heteronormative whatever are not going to be the dominant culture. They’re still fairly dominant, but they’re not the only game in town. They’re not. 

And then I think another piece of it is Fox News and other propaganda outlets. It seems likely that if Rupert Murdoch had never come to this country and if the internet hadn’t created all these extremely effective avenues for spreading hate and disinformation, and for radicalizing people, we might be in a really different country.

I want to push on this idea — I agree with you, obviously, that this is all very ginned up and sold to people and amplified by these outlets — but based on reporting I’ve done over the years in some of these communities, part of me also thinks that there’s a truth in the idea that we are actually asking for a lot of change in people’s lives in this era. And rightfully so. These are changes that I deeply and desperately believe in.

But if you start to add up the amount of progress/change in daily life and families that are the result of gender progress and new ideas of the roles of men and women, if you think about racial change as you grew up in a 80 percent white country, never thinking about being white or about race, and then suddenly you’re in a kind of country that is very race conscious and the demographics are changing, dealing with people you didn’t deal with in your childhood…

If you think about how we suddenly start trading with China at the beginning of this century and suddenly all these jobs that people used to do in your town don’t exist anymore and there’s a new thing and there’s not really a lot of help. Or climate change means the things you ate, maybe you shouldn’t be eating anymore, the thing you drove, maybe you shouldn’t be driving anymore.

Maybe you feel like a bad person. You can go down the list. I don’t think it’s just propaganda. I think in many ways you and I subscribe to a vision of progress that actually is asking for a lot of people to have a new sense of themselves, to have a different sense of how they fit into the order of things around them. 

And I don’t think we necessarily have a plan for those people. We have a declared end state, but it’s just sort of like, please figure it out and report for duty. And I don’t know, I think it’s actually a pretty tough challenge. I’ve seen it in other countries. It’s a tough challenge when you expect very large numbers of people to kind of affectively fit differently into the world and come up with that for themselves. And it’s almost like there’s something laissez faire in doing these big social changes and then just saying, “OK, figure out how to be a man now in a new conception.” Can you reflect on what we are asking of people in this era?

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Rebecca Solnit is one of our preeminent thinkers about change. How we make it, how we live with it, how people cope with despair at the lack of it, where people locate hope that it may once again grow possible. She is a writer and an activist and a philosopher — and, for so many change makers, a beacon of evidence-based hope.

In this moment full of panic and despair, she was who I needed to talk to. So I’m thrilled to bring you part one of an extraordinary conversation we just had.

I wish neither to spoil it nor to boil it down, and I would ask that you just trust me on this one. But this first installment is about the fight for progress, what our movements get right, what they get wrong, why they must learn to celebrate their own victories and grow more inclusive, how we should think and talk about America as a country, and so much more.

I sort of asked Rebecca to sort me out about a lot of the things I have been struggling with myself these days. She didn’t disappoint.

Part one of this conversation runs today, the second part tomorrow. And then, before long, we will be doing a thematically separate conversation with her on the subjects of technology, artificial intelligence, and more.

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I wanted to start with the election, and ask you to look at the position of the Biden campaign, thinking about all of your work on the relationship of movement to establishment power. I think Biden’s very interesting because you could make a case, a very Hope in the Dark case, that he was moved drastically on climate and on economics by progressive movements. On Israel and Gaza, it’s fair to say he has been much harder for movements to move.

How would you reflect on the Biden presidency and campaign and role in history, relative to movements and this idea of pressure?

One thing I have taken to saying a lot is that amnesia leads to despair and it also leads to powerlessness. People don’t trace the trajectory of change. For example, you can look at marriage equality as something the Supreme Court kindly handed down and see it as being about power reposing in an elite minority.

Or you can see marriage equality as the outcome of both the feminist demand that marriage be a freely negotiated relationship between equals, which makes same-sex marriage more imaginable, and the bravery of millions of queer people coming out of the closet telling their friends and family, “This is who I am.”

So that the Supreme Court decides this is normal and acceptable because normal and acceptable has become a radically different thing by 2015. I’m leaving aside the question of what the Supreme Court is now. 

And on the Biden campaign, I just saw, actually, the New York Times Pitchbot guy joking about Biden being forced to adopt the Sunrise Movement’s platform or something like that. He usually pokes at the right; here he was trying to poke at the left, and he actually did get this one right. 

You can look at the Inflation Reduction Act as something handed down by the Senate, but there’s a wonderful documentary film called To the End that traces the birth of the Sunrise Movement, their launching of the Green New Deal, its introduction in Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in particular, the way the Green New Deal really shapes Biden’s climate platform, which becomes Build Back Better, which becomes the Inflation Reduction Act, in its sadly whittled-down version thanks to Joe Manchin.

The short-term version of the story is the Senate gives us something. The long-term version is young people organizing, achieving something remarkable over a four-year period of time. And I think that a lot of American hopelessness, despair, cynicism, and defeatism is so tied to the inability to trace the arc of change.

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Martin Luther King famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I think it bends in a lot of different directions, but to see it bend at all, you have to see across broad swaths of time. And people aren’t very good at doing that right now. They tend to forget what happened last month, last year, let alone what’s happened over 10 or 20 or 50 years.

It feels like — and you’ve written about this — that acknowledging victory is just something alien to the personalities of so many people who are otherwise really incredible fighters for a better future. What is it that makes so many people — people who you and I know and admire — so reluctant to acknowledge victory, the victories of their own movements?

I don’t fully understand it because I am all for celebrating them, but I do feel like there’s something deeply puritanical in the left and progressive movements that I also think is pretty wrongheaded. There’s a weird sense that somehow being grumpy and negative is a form of solidarity with the oppressed.

And then you go and look at actually oppressed people: the Zapatistas, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, people facing climate change head-on in the small Pacific Island nations, and they’re not grumpy and defeatist. And I don’t think anybody in a gulag, in a famine, feels like, “Someone is sitting on their nice sofa at home in the United States feeling grumpy and that’s very helpful.”

Also, there’s a whole equation between being serious and radical with being tough in a very masculine mode that doesn’t invite in a lot of good cheer and celebration. And there’s a kind of absolutist idea that doesn’t accept imperfect and interim victories, even though that’s probably all we’ll ever get because the total revolution, paradise on earth, is not in my view going to happen.

And it’s funny, because I often see a kind of moving-the-goalposts thing where if I say something positive has happened, the response will be, “Well, but what about this? We just won this victory, but we need to also do that.” People will dilute the victory by pointing to something that isn’t a victory, that should be a victory.

It’s very weird to me as a habit, and something I think more and more is how people come into the left because they care about justice, they care about the environment, they care about human rights, and a lot of what happens to them is that they learn to model their behavior on the behavior of people who are already there.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

I watched President Biden’s State of the Union address with great anticipation, and I’m sure many of you did, too. I don’t have a grand essay or anything, but I thought I’d open my notebook, so to speak, and share some of my early reactions this morning.

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1. He framed the uniqueness of the moment in a way that makes clear his own personal sense of purpose and mission. By starting with the idea that democracy hasn’t been this imperiled at home since Lincoln and this imperiled abroad since F.D.R., except that now both things are happening at the same time, he made the stakes plain. And presidents, like all of us, settle into a sense of purpose if they are lucky. And he has found his. This is his cause, whether it polls well or not. He wants to be the guy who stood up to capital-P Putinism abroad and lower-case-P putinism at home in America.

2. He focused relentlessly on costs and quality of life. This is perhaps a hint of a bigger shift in the making for Democrats. You’re seeing a party that is realizing that people sometimes find big, sweeping policy ambition abstract-sounding and expensive-sounding, especially when they are stressed, even when those policies would drastically improve their lives. It’s just political reality. Smart Democrats are learning to move away from promoting policies in terms of giant new programs and instead to promote them as improvements to basic quality of life, reductions in cost, medicine for your stress. This is human-scale policy making, built on an anthropological understanding of the pain points in people’s lives, and framed through relieving those pain points rather than selling big programs.

3. He made use of his age to be a kind of grandfather of the nation.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

People move.

It’s the craziest thing, but sometimes people are in one location, and then they are in another location. Sometimes that location is another country. This seems to make certain people very, very angry, including people who themselves have moved.

Today far-right extremists in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement are trying to turn migration into their new cause célèbre — a crisis that demands autocratic solution. The need the border as their Reichstag fire.

What they ignore, of course, is the connection between the situation with migrants on the border and in many American cities, on one hand, and, on the other, and the legacy of American foreign policy.

“We are here because you were there,” the Sri Lankan-British thinker Ambalavaner Sivanandan once said, making a similar connection between migration to the United Kingdom and the legacy of British colonialism.

Understanding this connection is a first step toward solving the immigration system.

One figure in American public life who doesn’t shy away from making this connection is Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat who has worked extensively on the border issue as well as on foreign policy questions through his service on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

As Castro sees it, foreign policy not only starts at home, but also ends up right back where it started. The United States can’t maintain leadership on human rights worldwide without practicing it at home, nor can it intervene abroad without expecting migrants from a destabilized world.

We spoke to Congressman Castro the other day about the reality of the situation at the U.S.’s southern border, whether Democrats are foolish to assume good faith in attempting compromise with Republicans, the likelihood of a ceasefire and ultimate end to the Israel-Gaza conflict, and what gives him hope amid so much darkness.

On the border

You’ve talked a lot about how what we do at home affects the world, and what we do in the world affects what happens at home. Can you talk about those two ideas as they relate to the border and other issues?

On the asylum issue, there’s been this talk of shutting down the border, along with the invasion rhetoric and the replacement rhetoric. It makes it hard for the United States to be a leader among nations in the world and to press other nations to take desperate populations who are fleeing violence and oppression and starvation if we ourselves become so harsh and draconian on the issue. So the world is watching how the United States handles its border situation.

As I talk to ambassadors and others, they’ll make the point (though hardly ever directly): “Hey, if you guys aren’t willing to take people, then why are we going to take people?” Or they’ll ask: “If you’re not willing to uphold international asylum laws, then why would you think that other countries are going to do that?” So it matters what we do. It makes a big difference how we handle these issues at home.

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And then turning to our own history: I don’t think we’ve ever fully reckoned with the United States’ role in Central and South America in the 1970s and 1980s, the rogue leaders that we supported. We supported uprisings in different parts of Central America that caused instability and serious migration decades ago that we’re still reckoning with.

Sometimes we act as though we are completely independent of what is happening in those places. I think we have not taken on these challenges of migration. We have tried tactics. I don’t know that we’ve necessarily tried overarching strategies. You’ve got to help these countries really build up their economies so that they can have better control over security and the safety of their people.

I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but there’s this phrase associated with arguments about migration in Britain and the legacy of colonialism in the places from which many of the migrants came: “We are here because you were there.”

Yeah, I hadn’t heard that, but it makes sense, thinking about history. What we did in Central America for decades had a profound impact on their societies, on the stability of their societies, on the migration, on the economy, on all of it. And in a lot of the debate, we don’t even talk about that. It just gets glanced over. Everything is treated as though nothing existed until today.

I think a lot of Americans are, frankly, bewildered about what the actual situation on the border is, given all the conflicting information and posturing and ideology and games. Can you give me your sense of what is actually happening on the border right now?

Well, I think it’s true that, in recent months, we’ve had more people coming to present for asylum at the U.S./Mexico border, but that has ebbed some recently. What’s really heated the politics up is not the reality at the border, it’s the heated rhetoric by Republicans who have decided that they’re going all in on invasion and replacement rhetoric, and that’s what’s fundamentally different about what we’re seeing now. 

We have dealt with high numbers of asylum seekers at the border before and immigrants at the border, but Republicans now are labeling this as an invasion and talking about how these asylum seekers, most of them Black and brown people, are being used to replace white Americans in the United States, and I think that is what has really fueled the controversy lately.

Do you think there’s any truth to the notion that, institutionally, the government has lost control of the border in terms of an immigration system that it is able to administer its own goals and ends?

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

We shouldn’t be having a defensive conversation about immigration that starts with the story of border chaos.

We should have our own conversation from first principles: This is an extraordinary country. It’s extraordinary for many reasons. Among the reasons it is extraordinary: it is a country built of the world, from the world, from every part of the world.

I have had the fortune, as a journalist, as a foreign correspondent, to visit dozens of countries. And I’ve enjoyed all these countries I’ve been to, but I’ve actually never been to any other country that truly aspired to be a country made of the world.

When you’re in France — there are immigrants in France, but it is not like the United States. It is not a country made of the world. It is a country centered on Frenchness.

A lot of countries in the world — people may not know this — don’t even have birthright citizenship. If you live there, if you’re born there, even if your parents are from there, you still don’t necessarily become a citizen.

Eric Liu, a friend of mine, a Chinese-American, wrote in a memoir called A Chinaman’s Chance about how his family’s been in China thousands and thousands of years. His parents left, came to America. He said if he wanted to go back and become Chinese, he couldn’t. 5,000 years of loyal living in China, one or two generations in the United States.

Becoming Chinese is not a thing. Becoming Indian is not a thing. Becoming American is something that we do to a million people every year. We’ve done it under Republicans, under Democrats.

My family came here 47 years ago. I think we’ve had a pretty good run of contribution to this country — perhaps except my own.

So I think we need to not just react to Whac-A-Mole crises ginned up by fascists, but actually own this notion that our blood is better with the blood of many people in it. Our country is better when more people are here.

We have built everything we can because we have every kind of idea, every kind of contribution mixing together, and people who don’t have a heart, people who are miserly, or people who are cynically trying to raise money off of hatred don’t belong in the American story.

The above was adapted from my remarks on Morning Joe earlier today. The full clip is here.

Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

What annoys you? Please don’t answer your spouse or your kids or your friend Denise. That is beyond the scope of this newsletter.

But if there is something in your community that annoys (or angers or terrifies) you, or something in your state, or something in your country — and if there isn’t, we want to know what you eat for breakfast — the first step toward changing it is organizing.

Organizing is rallying your fellow citizens around a common cause so they can actually change those annoying things. It often means educating people about an issue they may not have thought a ton about. It tends to require getting people to care about something when they already have a million other things going on. It takes assembling enough people into some kind of collective so that their voices, in concert, cannot be ignored the way individual cries can be.

Organizing is different from (but intersects with) much activism, because the former is more interested in building long-term, trust-based relationships with community members rather than seizing attention and creating a moment. It is different from (but intersects with) electoral campaigning, because, at its best, organizing isn’t about asking people to do one thing in the short term (vote, or donate); it’s about walking with people as they try to figure out the world, and nurturing their political awareness.

When I wrote my book The Persuaders, I devoted much of the last chapter to the work of one of the country’s great sages of organizing, George Goehl. He’s a veteran organizer, a major figure in the essential work of deep canvassing, and a dedicated teacher of organizers and developer of organizing efforts across the country.

This week, he’s released a short book, Fundamentals of Community Organizing, that collects what he’s learned over the thirty years he’s been involved in turning demands into action to make real change. That experience is condensed into a series of principles meant to get you started in the craft of organizing.

If this sounds inspiring and you want to learn more about the essential craft of organizing, we encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. And if you’re ready to get more involved, get on the list to attend a Fundamentals of Organizing training so Goehl and his team can let you know about upcoming events in your area.

And today, below, in the latest installment of GET BUSY, The Ink’s series on practical actions you can take to improve democracy, we have some tips from George himself.

By George Goehl

We preserve and strengthen democracy not through worrying about it, or by going it alone as so many of us are taught, but by practicing it. The uniquely American form of doing this is community organizing, a methodology that has been used for generations to bring people together, build power, fight back, and often win. 

Organizing is a craft. Like with any craft, there are fundamental skills and concepts you need to know to do the thing well. I wrote this little book (it’s 50 pages), Fundamentals of Community Organizing, to spell out a few dozen fundamentals that have helped me bring people together, go toe-to-toe with some of the biggest bullies in the world, and win. These principles have the power to change lives, including your own. I hope you get a copy and join the conversation we are having here. 

And now, a preview of the book and a few of the “fundamentals” I share, including “Start where people are at,” “All organizing is reorganizing,” and “Cutting an issue”:

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Start where people are at

Starting where people are is the most essential organizer’s superpower. It is not in our nature to do this. We tend to start where we are — with what we want and what we believe. When we instead meet people where they are, new openings emerge, expanding who we can organize and make meaning with.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

There are all kinds of people in this world, but none rarer than one who identifies with both Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny.

Yet that was Donald Trump this week. Trump has long identified with Putin, of course, calling him a “genius” and opining, against all domestic evidence, that “the smartest one gets to the top.” More importantly, Trump has done everything in his power to make the world safer for Putin, to make the world his oyster. But when Navalny, Putin’s nemesis as leader of the Russian pro-democracy opposition, died in prison this week, Trump found himself stirred by the story of a great martyr — because Navalny reminded him of…him.

What is happening to Trump, according to Trump, is “a form of Navalny,” as he put it in a Fox News town hall with Laura Ingraham. The death of the Russian dissident had apparently made Trump “more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” as he wrote on Truth Social, meaning, of course, what is happening to him: his personal troubles, the hundreds of millions of dollars in legal judgments he owes, the dozens of criminal indictments he is fighting: “I’m the leading candidate, I got indicted four times, I have eight or nine trials…all because of the fact that I’m in politics.”

Trump’s simultaneous identification with the Russian tyrant and the pro-democratic leader he muzzled and killed is less strange than it seems, because it is important to Trump’s project that he be both invulnerable strongman and persecuted martyr. He is a master at performing the Victim King.

For someone who has vowed to be a dictator on day one of his second term, Trump is uncommonly given to shows of vulnerability. They are coming for him, he is encircled, he is bogged down, the powerful are out to get him. At the simplest level, he is attempting to reverse the traditional flow of concern in a democracy: he wants you to worry about him instead of expecting him to worry about you. But he has also cleverly turned this exhortation to worry about him into a kind of proxy shield for his supporters: by worrying about him, you ultimately are worrying about yourself. “They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom — it’s very simple,” Trump has said. “Never going to let it happen. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you. And in the end, they’re not after me; they’re after you. And I just happen to be standing in the way. It’s my honor to do so.”

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This kind of appeal has been crucial to aspiring autocrats, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has explained in an Ink interview: “This victimhood is really important because it elicits a protectiveness. So you go to Trump rallies, and people will say, ‘He’s been through so much, we’ve got to be there to support him’ — even to the point of being an army that sacks the Capitol.”

It is clear enough what’s in this for him. Nice job if you can get tens of millions of people who have much less than you to worry after you and even risk their bodies and livelihoods for you when you wouldn’t risk those things for yourself, and certainly wouldn’t risk anything for them. But what is in it for them? What does it do for people to feel part of the Victim King’s court, even in the face of all the evidence of how little he intends to do to improve your life?

One answer is that being in his air is reward enough. That the hunger he feeds isn’t for a better life or for the solutions to problems on the border or with your ability to pay your bills, but for feeling slightly better about yourself in an age of change — this era of expansion of the “we” in “we the people” — that maybe makes you feel anxious, insecure, less-than, silenced by others simply gaining voice, oppressed by greater equality, forced to adjust to the harsh fact of other people’s existence.

The Victim King complex of the aspiring autocrat is therefore mirrored in his followers. He seeks absolute power by performing weakness, and the followers turn their feelings of weakness into a sense of strength lent to them by their dear leader. “Even if one is the most miserable, the poorest, the least respected member of a group, there is compensation for one’s miserable condition in feeling ‘I am a part of the most wonderful group in the world. I, who in reality am a worm, become a giant through belonging to the group,” Erich Fromm, the German-American social psychologist, wrote in a 1973 book. He had a name for this way of being.

He called it “group narcissism.”

Photos by Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images; Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

A foreign correspondent returning home can become a kind of therapist of the national soul, giving the place an unvarnished look tainted neither by familiarity nor hostility. Having covered the world, the returned foreign correspondent can see their own country with the distance of an adversary, though minus the enmity; with the loving concern of a native, minus the blinders.

That’s why I had a strong urge to speak to Dexter Filkins in recent days, as America’s global crises piled up. There was the multiplication of American entanglements in the Middle East — the war in Israel and Gaza as well as spasms of violence in Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and beyond, which raised the question of whether America should understand itself to be in active warfare in the region, in particular with Iran, instead of hiding behind the idea of fighting proxy battles. There was the issue of the southern border of the United States, which Filkins has reported on after his long years in the Middle East. And, affecting America’s response to all of the above, there was the corrosion of democratic institutions at home, a corrosion Filkins has witnessed in far-off places.

I was eager to ask Filkins, a veteran correspondent for The New Yorker and other publications, and author of The Forever War, the essential account of the post-9/11 era of shadowy perpetual warfare, to turn his foreign correspondent’s lens on America. We talked about the roots of our political crises, how to understand what’s really going on at the southern border, and whether America has the resilience to repair the damage done to its democracy. 

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”? 

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

You say you care about memory. But you want to ban history books.

You say you care about memory. But you don’t know slavery’s cause.

You say you care about memory. But with Holocaust survivors still alive, you embrace neo-Nazis.

You say you care about memory. But you know of no insurrection on January 6, 2021.

You say you care about memory. But you’ve forgotten what you said about Trump back when you thought you could stop him.

You say you care about memory. But the 14th Amendment appears to have slipped your mind.

You say you care about memory. But you think the problem with the Republican Party began with Trump.

You say you care about memory. But you’ve forgotten all the jobs never created when your party was in charge.

You say you care about memory. But you keep erasing your old positions on abortion from your website.

You say you care about memory. But you didn’t recognize the border plan you asked for when you got it.

You say you care about memory. But you seem to keep misplacing your belief in freedom.

You say you care about memory. But you erase most of what Dr. King believed when you celebrate his life.

You say you care about memory. But you keep taking credit for infrastructure spending you actually opposed.

You say you care about memory. But when your Great Leader insults your wife or father or name or face, you forget.

You say you care about memory. But your party used to be against dictators in Moscow, not for them.

You say you care about memory. But you only ever remember your constituents who happen to be billionaires.

You say you care about memory. But can you can never seem to locate your courage.

You say you care about memory. But you forget your erstwhile conviction about democracy.

You say you care about memory. Your narrow, heartless cause will soon become one.

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Anand recently had a live conversation with members of Indivisible about his book The Persuaders. From the talk the following essay is adapted. It is about not losing sight of the head-spinning progress that is behind this era of backlash — and the difficult imperative of helping to usher disoriented people into new times.

On the far side of change

We sometimes forget we have made astonishing, head-spinning progress in recent decades. And because of that progress, life is very disorienting for lots of people.

Here and around the world, we have changed more in the status of women in the last 50 years than in the previous 50,000 years, I would guess. We have done more in the last 60 years to become true to our founding commitments around racial equality, the words that were never lived up to at the beginning — more in the last 60 years than in the previous 340.

We have done more to build a kind of multiracial democracy where people from every corner of the planet Earth are living together and building extraordinary things together — things that often their cousins and ancestors in other parts of the world never got a chance to create because they weren’t collaborating with people from every other place in the world.

And because of that extraordinary progress toward a bigger “we,” it is not strange but normal, predictable, and foreseeable that it’s destabilizing to many. Managing people through the loss of status, the loss of what was undeserved, turns out to be one of the hardest problems humans face. When you are accustomed to privilege, the famous old saying goes, equality feels like oppression.

Corporations have something called “change management.” But we don’t know how to do that for whole societies. We do progress and expect people to remake themselves on their own time. It’s very laissez-faire.

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Consider that we have completely changed the meaning of being a man and what you can do and not do as a man in the last 20, 30, 40 years. Thank god. But let’s be honest: We have done a better job of dismantling some of the old stories and practices and structures of masculinity that needed dismantling than we have of teaching men new ways to be men. The result is a vacuum, and certain podcast charlatans are very deft at getting in there and pied-piping men into new misogynistic visions to fill the void.

This is all too often how it goes: We are better at the dismantling than the re-mantling. (And, understandably, some think this is just fine. Why should we fuss over people whom we’ve been fussing over for so long? At last, the fussing time is over.)

We’ve seen a similar dynamic on race. Consider the enormous legal and structural progress that has been won — those America loved least unrequitedly loving America enough to bother toiling to change it — and think about this: How many white people of a certain age knew about whiteness as a concept when they were growing up, talked about whiteness, wrestled with whiteness, engaged seriously with the problem of race?

But I bet every white person reading this has had to face those ideas, one way or another, like it or dislike it. We forget how much we have been living through. We forget how many battles have been won.

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This is why I sometimes feel more hope about our present political situation than events would seem to warrant. The context of this moment is that we have realized a great deal of social progress in recent decades, fought for by movements determined to give ever more of us a say in making the future. And a lot of that progress necessarily requires millions of people to acquire a whole new sense of self, a whole new sense of how they relate to others, a whole new source and definition of their esteem.

If you are a white guy and a coal miner in West Virginia, this vision of progress is, in a sense, asking you to step out of the definition of masculinity you were raised in and inhabit some new one. It is perhaps asking you to step out of a certain obliviousness to or denial of race and demanding that you engage with it, even if it feels remote to you where you live. It is asking you to leave the industry that gave you and your dad and your granddad meaning and purpose and status in society and suggesting that we maybe not even have that industry in the future to save the earth, which might feel like trading abstract gain for concrete loss.

By the way, I happen to support all of those changes. For my taste, they cannot happen fast enough. But we sometimes don’t acknowledge that, Yeah, it’s a lot. We’re asking people a lot — rightfully asking people a lot.

And when we see people unsettled by it, discombobulated, a lot of them are just trying to get their heads around all that a new era is asking of them. And the authoritarians are getting to them earlier and more effectively than pro-democratic movements. And so people who start out as merely disoriented by change are radicalized into fanatics.

Say you’re a 65-year-old white guy in Arizona, not particularly interested in politics or immigration and the border. But you go to Walgreens to refill your prescriptions, and you have more pills every year because you’re getting up there in years. It’s kind of a ritual for you. You get your pills. You chat with the ladies who work there. You stay a little longer than you need to because you’re lonely and don’t have people to talk to.

Over the years, some of the people you chat with stop working there. They’re aging out. They’re replaced by younger, Spanish-speaking clerks, in keeping with Arizona’s changing demographics. Perhaps you can’t communicate with them or feel you can’t.

What I learned from on-the-ground organizers in Arizona and elsewhere working on this issue is that such an incident on its own does not make someone a hardcore anti-border person or a MAGA Republican. Just that sadness about the loss of that ritual does not make you a cruel person. Wishing the older white ladies were back doesn’t make you heartless. It’s a normal thing I’ve described so far. Change is always hard.

Think of that guy as being at Stage One in a political version of what companies call the customer journey. The extreme right has a full suite of offerings for him to move through a radicalization funnel — to explain that moment, to give him a story of how Biden did this, Obama did that, and so on. How it’s all part of a grand conspiracy that suddenly explains this issue and every issue.

And the right has its churches and other in-real-life thick networks that help with this funneling. They have their own propagandistic media to help. They have Fox News. They have their billionaire backers who, in this very era of widening inclusion, have weaponized people’s sense of status threat and fear of each other to consolidate more and more wealth and power at the top, in their own hands.

And so people just experience normal life stuff like, Huh, my kid’s textbook tells a different story about Jefferson than the one I grew up with; I feel unsettled by that — again, that alone, in its embryonic form, is normal. Not a bad person for feeling that.

And then the right has a conveyor belt to take you from that discomfort all the way to, “I am going to war with critical race theory.”

I don’t believe many of the people who claim to be worried about CRT — I’m setting aside the minority of hardcore activists and speaking of millions of more mainstream people — actually understand what CRT is enough to be sincerely worried about it.

Instead, I think they have the universal dread of every parent who’s ever been a parent that one day your kids are going to grow up and leave you, which they will. That once they come out of that body, they’re never going back in, that every day is a further separation, that they will one day think different thoughts than you think. And the whole purpose of their life is to become separated from your life. And it’s the great joy and the great fear of any parent — a fear heightened in times of rapid change. That gets weaponized by the right into Your kids are being brainwashed — whether it’s about history or race or their gender or sexuality. But what is the underlying emotion? The underlying emotion is more interesting, and we can speak to that if we understand it.

Similarly, the underlying emotion behind the border panic is more interesting than the actual situation on the border. Why do people feel so invaded? Why do people feel in such little control of their environment? What is making racism so easy to activate?

The missing piece of the puzzle in our battle against today’s authoritarian threat is a serious, concerted effort to help millions of people — not the hardcore fanatics of MAGA, but the next tranche of voters who are in play for fascism, who are fash-curious — help them navigate the age. It is organizing not for the faint of heart.

Yet this, to me, is the central undertaking for a pro-democracy movement in this country, if we are to have one worthy of the name: to be deeply, persistently engaged in the psychological process through which millions of Americans are trying to figure out these changes, figure out the era, find new identities in a changing country, and ultimately come to see themselves in a way they like to see on the far side of change.

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“Anger,” Krista Tippett has wisely said, “is often what pain looks like when it shows itself in public.” The worse the anger, the more important the addressing of pain — but also the harder to do, because sympathy for the pain is undercut by the anger.

This is grueling work that many rightly feel they shouldn’t have to do. But in my years of writing about people living through epic change, I’ve taken up the mantra that the burden of citizenship is accepting that what is not your fault may be your problem.

If I’m honest, I think the pro-democracy cause is almost not even engaged in the kind of work I describe — in this process of ushering people in to the vision of progress we seek. The hopeful point is that we could choose to begin this work now. But the hour is late and the work couldn’t be more urgent if we are to save the country and realize what it was promised to be.

Anand’s most recent book is The Persuaders.

Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.

This week we’ve talked a lot about the power of labor and mass movements to create change, and we’ve heard from a lot of you about your own desires to get involved in movements — to find a way to work together in your communities to take political action with real effects. On that note, in coming weeks we’re going to be bringing you ideas for IRL actions. Stay tuned.

In that spirit, we have some great weekend reads for you today. About the power of engaged people, from principled individual stands against power to large-scale collective actions. About teachers taking on book banners in Florida, about labor’s renewed ability to put real pressure on corporations and government, about grassroots efforts against the German right, and about how local environmental and racial justice advocates in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” have banded together to fight industrial expansion.

And being in the business we’re in, we’ve been reading about what it will take for journalists to stop shooting themselves in the collective foot in a misguided quest for balance — and start telling the stories that need to be told.

For our subscribers, we’ve pulled together a collection of links on these topics and others that we think will be well worth your time this weekend. Thanks as always for reading The Ink and continuing to support us (and if you’re not a paid subscriber already, we encourage you to join us).

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A teacher says no to Florida book bans

“Why did so many people comply with authoritarian regimes? And what I always want my students to learn from my class is that the only morally legitimate response is disobedience. As always, the best way to teach is through example.” [Perspectives on History]

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

In polarized societies, we all become bubble dwellers. That means we don’t just disagree with people on the other side. We fall out of knowledge of the other side. We lose our instinct for knowing how others think, knowing what drives them.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the percentage of Ink readers who vote Republican is…small. (But welcome!) But so many of us have Republicans (and stalwart independents) in our lives, our families, our workplaces and neighborhoods.

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I’m curious: As the 2024 campaign heats up, what are you hearing from people you know and even trust and love on the right? What are they talking about, grappling about, maybe even commiserating with you about? What are you picking up in everyday life that may be different from the national political conversation?

We want to know!

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Hello, friends! I’m hopping on here to invite the supporting subscribers who keep The Ink going to a live conversation I’m having this afternoon, hosted by Indivisible.

It will be at 4 p.m. ET, 1 p.m. PT, and it promises to be a great conversation. The event is for Indivisible members, but they are very kindly welcoming Ink subscribers, too.

Join us if you can. Details below for our beloved supporting subscribers. Become one today if you haven’t yet taken the plunge!

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

If there’s one thing it’s clear the right has figured out better than the left, it’s how to communicate in the language of symbols. The MAGA hat, the thin blue line, and the “Let’s Go Brandon” bumper sticker are clear, concise signals of political sentiment, and — more significantly for our purposes here today — they’ve become widely understood as equally clear signs of allegiance to the Republican Party.

There’s simply no parallel on the political left. If you walk by a house flying the Ukrainian flag, or notice a neighbor’s UAW button, or see someone in line at the grocery store wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, you can be pretty certain they’re not losing too much sleep over the Republican primary results — but you probably wouldn’t take for granted they care much for the Democrats, either.

There’s a big asymmetry. And that’s a big problem in a two-party system where one of the parties is trying to undo democracy itself.

To get some insight into why this is so, we turned again to Anat Shenker-Osorio, our in-house political communications expert and messaging guru. She walks us through how movements use symbols to build group identity and unite constituencies worldwide, and the dynamics that have stood in the way of the political left being able to do that here at home.

Anat talks more about how political campaigns and activists around the world have tailored messaging to make real change each week on her excellent podcast, Words to Win By, now in its third season. Episode 3 airs on January 30.

Why we think what people like us think

As we’ve touched on previously, social proof  — where people think the thing they think people like them think — is real. It’s one of the most persuasive tools in our arsenal. It’s the reason why the MAGA hat is so important and effective, and, conversely, why the green bandana has been so effective in Argentina and across Latin America. We used it in the abortion rights campaign in Argentina, and we used it in Mexico, we used it in Colombia.

It’s a very important symbol, and it’s so important because it comes out of Argentine history; the story of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers who began protesting the disappearance of their relatives by the dictatorship during the “Dirty War” (and are still out there). They all wear the white handkerchief. 

So these young women working for reproductive rights were like, “The handkerchief, that’s a symbol of women standing up to the most masculine, macho, brutal, scary thing. We’re going to put on handkerchiefs. We’re going to take that story of our grandmothers, and we’re going to make them green instead of white because we want people to understand it’s for something else.” 

That original handkerchief had written on it, in Spanish, “Sex education so we can decide, contraception so we don’t need to abort, legal abortion so we will not die.” Three phrases on it, arranged in a little triangle.

And if you were in Argentina, if you were in Bueno Aires specifically during the year of this campaign, in 2018, it felt like there was no 20-year-old woman who was not wearing that scarf. That was the shit — it was like the iPhone 13 is coming out, you need to be in line. That scarf was practically impossible to get, it was so popular. People wanted it. And it became a symbol of the movement for reproductive rights throughout Latin America.

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Why symbols matter, and where they’re missing

The thing is, people need to see, “Oh, that’s what my kind of a person thinks.” Humans are social creatures. We’re tribal. We want to find cues in our environment that tell us what our category subscribes to.

So while I think there is some symbology on the movement side of the left, there isn’t enough. On the Democratic side, I think it’s very hard to maintain. You just can’t maintain symbology when the movement won’t carry it — like they literally will not wear a Democratic Party hat, won’t do it. 

But if you go to labor actions — I mean, look at the resurgence of labor, right? We ended 2023 with something like 400 separate labor actions in one year alone. We haven’t seen this in 40 years. Bread and roses.

Like, the labor movement sings. The labor movement has songs, the labor movement has T-shirts, the labor movement has signs. It even has iconic silly things, like that goofy rat that you see at picket lines. 

The labor movement has iconic markings even down to things that you only notice if you’re in deep. Like the swag will have the union label. You know, you won’t get a shirt made, or get a mug made, or get a hat made that doesn’t have that tag that says, “This was made in a union shop.” For people inside of the movement, it is an identity.

What’s ironic is that once upon a time, working class identity and Democratic Party identity were the same. That’s why Nixon needed the Southern strategy, to break that apart, those identities based on Herbert Hoover on the one hand sending people to shoot strikers, and then FDR on the other who was obviously very into the working class. 

We used to play identity politics, and it worked very well for us. We get accused of doing it now, but we don’t, and that’s what’s ironic about it. It’s just really asymmetrical.

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Aspiring autocrats have one thing going for them: they understand the politics of passion; they know how to make people feel. As the journalist Roger Cohen said in an interview with The Ink last year, “The appeal of nationalism, of scapegoating, and of identifying an enemy is very powerful. It creates a tribal form of allegiance and it gets the blood up.”

One of the unresolved questions of the era is whether pro-democracy leaders and movements can, in their own way, “get the blood up.” Can those who defend the rule of law and pluralism and economic justice and human rights not only articulate those ideas but also appeal to the more basic human needs to belong, to have anxieties soothed, to have fears answered, to feel hope, or just to feel something at the end of bleak and tedious days?

One of the strange dynamics of the Trump era is that, as the right has become, more and more, a movement of passion more than reason, of emotional appeal more than policy solutions, the political left has, as if to be symmetrical, drifted the other way.

Today’s electoral left is highly cerebral. It is suspicious of the politics of passion. It doesn’t do emotional appeals. It doesn’t have much of a role for music, for the body, for in-person communing in public spaces, for catchy slogans, for arresting visuals. The more Trump becomes a carnival barker, the more it seems leaders on the left embrace coming across like the inoffensive heads of state one sees in many European capitals — people who are working very hard not to be interesting, who seem to associate life force in politics with danger. Today’s left seeks to appeal to human beings through a small sliver of all the ways in which human beings take in the world.

If this were an age defined by big policy questions and little else, that would be one thing. But it is an age defined by Big Feelings. By anxiety and fear and future dread and a great confusion among millions of people about who they will be on the far side of head-spinning change. By the emotional crises of men unsettled by a future of gender equality, and of white people unsettled by a future of racial equality, and of young people who know deep down that their parents love them but wonder why they have left them a burning, doomed planet. By the dour vibes of people who know that, on paper, the economy is good, but who cannot shake the feeling that the American dream is a lie. All around us, people are lost, not sure how to make sense of their place in a world of upheaval. In an era such as this, leaving the politics of emotion, of passion, to aspiring autocrats is a dangerous abdication.

Which is why I wanted to talk to Ruth Ben-Ghiat this week. A professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, and the author of the Lucid newsletter and of the book Strongmen, Ben-Ghiat is an expert on how autocrats build power, why people come to support (and feel for!) them, and how societies have resisted and emerged from authoritarian rule. We talked about why it’s been difficult to get Americans to come together to defend democracy, why pro-democracy leaders are so suspicious of the politics of passion, and what history tells us about defeating autocratic forces.

How do you account for the lack of a pro-democracy movement in the United States, given the very real stakes that people seem to agree on?

Perhaps it shouldn’t be this way, but it comes from lack of experience facing a national, state, and local authoritarian threat of this magnitude. Of course we’ve had plenty of experience in our country fighting repression, and I’ve been a bit puzzled why the lessons of the civil rights movement are not being featured more. 

But I think that the idea of a pro-democracy movement — the way that foreign countries conceive of it — is a little bit alien at the national level in America.

Obviously, there are a bunch of sub-movements that are strong: Black Lives Matter, a resurgent labor movement that’s winning victory after victory. Why do these somehow fail to coalesce?

I think about this a lot. Versus Poland or Chile, we are a huge, huge country. There are small pro-democracy movements inside the states, but to scale that up nationally is quite difficult, given the size of the United States. 

The other problem is the bipartisan system. In the cases I’m looking at, recent elections internationally, we had a whole spate of victories against sitting autocrats or far-right populist parties. The winning formula — and this goes back to Chile, which I wrote about for The Atlantic in September — is that you have a wide coalition and all the parties come together. For example, in Italy in 2019, all the other parties, even though they didn’t like each other, banded together and maneuvered so that Matteo Salvini of the League party couldn’t become prime minister.

But we don’t have all these parties. And the Liz Cheneys, the Adam Kinzingers, the Mitt Romneys, these people who perhaps no longer see themselves in the Republican Party, they don’t seem to be talking about banding together in this emergency and voting Democrat. They have nowhere to go. There’s a fossilization, an intractable character to our system, which is not helpful right now.

What would an actual pro-democracy movement, adequate to the task, look like in the U.S.? And what would it take to build?

Strongmen specialize in finding weaknesses, loopholes in our democratic system and exploiting them. So the first order of resistance is suing against voter repression and protecting democracy; that shores up the existing system. But that defensive stance is not enough. It’s not enough to be anti-Trump. To get people mobilized at a national level, and get them excited, you have to have positive content. And we should have that in principles of foundational justice, principles of multiracial democracy, equity, social justice, climate justice, solidarity.

And that connects very well with the resurgent labor movement. And our civil rights heritage. I feel like we have all the pieces there. We have all the values, and in some cases, as in the labor movement, they’ve translated into successes.

Now, we know we can do it, because in 2017 more than 400 organizations came together for the Women’s March. There was a huge umbrella constructed, and that’s what made that march the largest movement up until its time in history, to be surpassed only by the Black Lives Matter movement. So we have the numbers, we have the interest. We are part of this global renaissance of nonviolent protests that’s happening now. But the pieces are not coming together. 

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Do we not actually care about this as much as we say we care?

I think people care. Some people are very engaged locally, and, as we know, with the precinct strategy dreamed up by Steve Bannon, there are so many assaults on so many levels that people can only do maybe one or two things properly.

Then there is the question of whether it can become a regular ritual. That’s what happened in Tel Aviv, with those giant protests, obviously pre-October 7th. And there are lots of lessons to be learned from those protests. Where they were sustained over a long period of time, they grew. And they involved what we call the pillars of society. You had CEOs, you even had Mossad — not the most progressive organization in the world — giving its employees time off to protest. So you had the buy-in. And so, every week, people came out. And it became a ritual. 

Now Israel is a very, very social country. It’s also tiny. So how do we construct something that would involve people here on a weekly basis? And where? The thing about small countries is that people can travel easily to the capital. Like in Poland recently; everyone converged on Warsaw. How would that work here? It’s challenging. 

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Often it seems the left in this country takes things that should be inviting and joyous, and after processing them politically, makes them less fun, less joyous. And the right takes things that would be utterly dystopian for many, many people, and is able to build a fun, inviting, joyous movement. That inversion I find very puzzling. Can you talk about that?

Autocrats like Trump are able to use emotions. Now they’re negative emotions, right? Grievance, fear, vengeance. But they’re very good movement builders. And Trump is a movement builder. You’ve said this, too. (Clip below.) That’s really important. 

Autocrats create these communities of belonging, these tribes. And in Trump’s case, he even gave them apparel, he gave them slogans. This is what the fascists did. This is what Meloni’s doing, the neo-fascist prime minister in Italy. 

Liberal democrats have been afraid, in some ways, of passionate politics. And they also have a visual identity crisis. They don’t have snappy slogans, they don’t have snappy symbols and avatars, and visual icons. They need an update to excite people.

I don’t know if it’s just an update. It seems to me, many on the left, in America at least, really are not interested in the things you just mentioned, or even look down on them. Can you talk about why there is this contempt for what seems quite obviously useful in politics?

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This post was originally published on The.Ink.

Today, in honor of Dr. King’s birthday, I wanted to share a video I once made with Vice TV, deconstructing the faux-claiming of his legacy by those who would betray it. Tell me what you think in the comments.

And, in case you missed it, check out this week’s interview with Daniel Ziblatt, our new advice column on messaging with Anat Shenker-Osorio, and the latest Weekend Reads.

This post was originally published on The.Ink.