On August 15, 1947, my father George Mayer celebrated India’s freedom from 300 years of British colonial rule by flying kites with his friends off Howrah Bridge, over the Hooghly River in Kolkata.

Kites in India are made by delicately attaching colorful tissue paper to dry reeds using lehi, a glue made from boiled white flour. Thin kite strings are made with strong cotton fiber called manja, wrapped tightly around a decorated spindle reel or laddi. As kids taking part in a neighborhood kite fight, we would coat the first few yards of manja with powdered glass, making it easier to “cut” an enemy kite by slicing through their line. We’d send the vanquished kite floating across rooftops, chased by throngs of children.

Once a kite is airborne, flying it requires farsightedness and a complete disregard for the skin on your hands. I learned the art of kite flying alongside my sisters at the hands of our Chowrungee-born father. The skill lies in maintaining a delicate balance between tension and slack. When an enemy kite approaches, go taut to signal engagement and draw it in. Once your foe is in striking range, slack off to force an attack. Then pounce! Reel in the encrusted manja to slice the enemy’s string—a clean cut across its jugular.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, former South Carolina governor and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna are Indian Americans at the top of American politics today. They fly different political kites—a mix of colorful stances cutting across the political aisle, engaged in different parts of our government. But they all are the children and grandchildren of people born under British colonial rule who fought for India’s freedom.

Their not-so-distant ancestors in all probability joined my father in flying kites on that August day in 1947. I would guess that they also joined him in passing along treasured lessons about maneuvering kites, steadfastness and drive, democracy and progressivism. This shared political heritage, imbibed from freedom fighter grandparents, inarguably shapes these Indian American political superstars’ visions for America today, even as they vary.

Kamala Harris has spoken of long morning walks on the beach in Chennai with her maternal grandfather, Painganadu Venkataraman “P. V.” Gopalan, “where he would discuss the importance of fighting for equality and fighting corruption.” They talked about principles of democracy, freedom, and equality. Those walks “really planted something in my mind and created a commitment in me,” she recalled in a recent post online. It “led me where I am today.”

Gopalan’s overt support shaped more than Harris’ politics. In the late 1950s, it would have been unheard of for a young Tamil woman to make her own way in the West, as Harris’ mother did when she emigrated to the United States to study medicine. Shyamala Gopalan Harris lived other taboos, too: marrying outside her caste, raising her daughters as a divorced mother. In that era, a father’s acceptance made all the difference—none of this would have been possible without it.

Gopalan was about 15 years older than my father. Both men would have been in the prime of their lives during the final throes of the British Empire. Gopalan was from Thulasendrapuram, a tiny village in the southern Indian rice-growing region of Thanjavur, a place that has witnessed political upheaval for millennia. Some of India’s most beautifully preserved ancient and medieval temples stand in this deeply spiritual place; many remain active sites of worship.

Most people in Thanjavur are Hindu Tamils, but they exist in relative harmony with neighbors sharing many religious traditions. The Church of Our Lady of Vailankanni, a Christian pilgrimage site renowned for miraculous feats of healing spanning hundreds of years, lies just 40 miles east of Gopalan’s village, toward the Bay of Bengal. The ancient Brihadeeshwara Temple also contains ancient Buddhist relics.  When I listen to Kamala Harris speak of her mother, “a brown woman with an accent,” I think about how Shyamala embarked on her “unlikely journey” from this place steeped in respect for different belief systems.

Nikki Haley’s life story is similarly familiar. Haley’s paternal grandfather served in the British colonial army, she writes in her autobiography, and her mother, Raj Randhawa, “lived in a large six-story house in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion,” in Amritsar, Punjab. Nearby was Jallianwala Bagh, a garden and popular gathering place with a deep, open well that quenched the thirst of locals, travelers, and pilgrims.

The garden is surrounded by high walls and densely packed housing tenements, with only one narrow passage for access. It was also the site of a notorious massacre on April 13, 1919. On that day, a crowd of around 10,000 gathered, some to protest a draconian British law criminalizing anti-government sentiment, many for the start of the spring festival of baisakhi. An overzealous British officer, nervous about the gathering, commanded his troops to seal the gate and open fire on the unarmed crowd. Hundreds were shot dead. Others perished when they jumped into the well to avoid the hail of bullets.

Gunshot marks on the walls of Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India from the massacre on April 13, 1919. Photo by Moira Shourie.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was a grotesque event that marked a turning point in India’s struggle against the British. Laying bare the empire’s barbaric means of subjugation, it galvanized the freedom movement and inspired Mahatma Gandhi to launch the Non-Cooperation Movement that exhorted Indians to lay down their tools and not contribute to the economy in a universal labor strike.

I have stood in that garden and pushed my way through its narrow gate—as has Haley, who visited the grounds in 2014 to honor those who died. Despite pressures from hardline populists, Haley has been steadfast in removing symbols of Confederate power, perhaps because they echo the violence that plagued her own mother’s life in Amritsar. I wonder how else this ghastly episode of colonial violence might have shaped Haley’s views on democracy and how people rise up to fight for it.

India’s struggle for independence also molded Ro Khanna’s grandfather Amarnath Vidyalankar. Active in Gandhi’s Quit India Movement, which accelerated Britain’s formal retreat from India, Vidyalankar endured two stints in jail for his actions. He sought to uplift Harijans or untouchables—people at the bottom of the caste system—and founded schools in rural regions for farmers and their families.

He also went on to serve as personal secretary to Lala Lajpat Rai, a key architect of India’s independence who traveled to the U.S. to meet civil rights leaders in 1916. I grew up next door to Lajpat Bhawan, the headquarters of Rai’s Servants of the People Society, formed to instill a sense of public service through wellness and employment programs. My sisters and I went there to buy freshly ground spices, enjoy the street food stalls in the fairs or melas they hosted, and to watch daily outdoor yoga classes where retirees practiced laughter therapy.

Working in such close proximity to Lala Lajpat Rai, I can’t help but believe Khanna’s grandfather imbibed the notion that extreme wealth should benefit the larger community. Today, Khanna represents one of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts—Silicon Valley, home to tech companies that have a combined market capitalization of over $14 trillion—but he also champions progressive causes like affordable childcare and free public college. Khanna’s politics are likely influenced by his grandfather’s ideals.

Freedom and democracy are not distant concepts to this generation of Indian American politicians, but a living legacy passed down by loved ones who sowed the seeds with their own hands. Harris, Haley, and Khanna understand that a striking kite stands out in a crowded sky. They also understand that a good kite flier must be sharp and ready to cut their losses, must be resilient and able to try and try again, must be able to maneuver around other kites, and must adapt to changing conditions. Much like a good politician.

Harris, Haley, and Khanna are an inter-generational string—manja—giving flight to their versions of these principles of democracy. They should fly their kite not only in celebration but as a banner of freedom, soaring through unknowable skies.

The post How the Shared Heritage of Harris, Haley, and Khanna Shapes Their Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear Arnold,

I’m enjoying your new Netflix action series, FUBAR. You’re funny and convincing as a retiring CIA agent who is pulled back into a very messed-up intelligence conflict because he didn’t realize his daughter is also a secret agent.

You also may not realize that, in real life, the door just opened for you to be pulled back into the FUBAR (“F’ed Up Beyond All Recognition”) of our national politics. I’m writing to ask you to walk through that door immediately, and run for president for the good of our country and our world.

You’ve long said that you would run for president, if it weren’t for two facts: that you were born an Austrian citizen, and that Article II, Sec. 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that “no Person except a natural born Citizen… shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The article hasn’t changed, but American devotion to the Constitution and its provisions on presidential eligibility has.

For the destruction of this rule and so many other norms, Donald Trump is responsible. Incredibly, he has inspired leading Democrats and Republicans to take the position that being constitutionally ineligible to serve as president is no longer a barrier to running for president.

A new consensus has emerged: Voters have the right to choose whomever they want as president, no matter what the Constitution says.

This is the product of Trump’s own ineligibility for the presidency. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment bars any officer of the U.S. who took a constitutional oath and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”—as Trump did after losing the 2020 election—from holding any other government office. Leading constitutional scholars, from right and left, have delved into the law and history and affirmed that Trump isn’t eligible.

But being constitutionally ineligible hasn’t stopped Trump from running from office or taking the lead in the Republican polls. And it hasn’t stopped Trump from remaining on the ballot in every state, including the two states where he has been ruled ineligible (Colorado, by a court, and Maine, by the secretary of state). With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to decide the question of eligibility nationwide, and its conservative majority all but certain to keep Trump on the ballot, state actions have not taken effect.

Arnold, this makes it clear that you can run. Who could object without looking like a hypocrite?

The courts can’t, once they’ve blessed Trump’s unconstitutional run. And Trump certainly can’t, given both his own ineligibility and his repeated promises to “terminate” the U.S. Constitution itself, as he pursues dictatorial power in a new term.

You should be able to jump into the Republican primaries posthaste. If that doesn’t pan out, you’d be the perfect presidential candidate on the bipartisan No Labels ticket.

Why do you need to run? It’s simple. Because Trump must be stopped. And no one will stop him.

The media won’t stop him, because they need in the race to draw audiences to keep their desperate enterprises afloat. Democrats won’t stop him because they want to run against him—he’s the weakest and most beatable of the Republican presidential contenders in a general election. As California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, explaining why Trump remains on the state ballot, “In California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”

The Republican Party would do better in the elections with a non-Trump candidate, but party leaders don’t want to risk losing Trump supporters. And Trump’s Republican challengers, fearful of his deranged base, are simply too scared to challenge him aggressively, even in debates when he’s not present.

You, on the other hand, have challenged him openly for years. And he hasn’t been able to lay a glove on you in response. That’s because you’re not a normal politician—you’re an entertainer both more popular than Trump (FUBAR is among the most watched shows on Netflix) and more skilled at parrying media attacks. (I know this firsthand, from covering you and writing two books about you.) You’re as famous as he is, but more respected. You’re that rare political figure who can make Trump look small.

In entering the race, you should emphasize that Republicans and Democrats, by allowing Trump to stay on the ballot, have all but rubber-stamped the notion that voters should get to choose whomever they want as president, Constitution be damned. You might also say that we should embrace this new American era of democratic openness. After all, the U.S. has long limited voter choice to just two parties, routinely striking smaller parties and their candidates from ballots.

And when your opponents refer to that Article II requirement that candidates be natural born, you should make two arguments. First: Despite the accident of your Austrian birth, you’ve always felt American in your heart and soul—a “natural born” American, in the vernacular of our times. Second: If the Biden vs. Trump matchup is the best that native-born citizens can do, then it’s high time to open the race to foreign-born contenders.

But you shouldn’t just run to stop Trump. You should run to win.

As I was reminded while interviewing you this summer, you have huge visions of the future—for massive improvements in education, for the restoration of health of a country whose people are dying younger, and for a complete revamping of American infrastructure to realize our greatest dreams in economy, technology, and environment. By contrast, the tired President Biden hasn’t offered a detailed second-term agenda, much less a vision. And Trump talks endlessly about the past, about history, about grievance, about the 2020 election.

By offering your ideas, you can show the poverty of Trump and Biden’s campaigns, and how America can escape its current malaise by dreaming big about the future. “When you don’t have a vision of the future, it’s easier to look back,” you wrote in 2023. “When you don’t have a vision, today doesn’t have much meaning because you don’t know why you’re here doing what you’re doing right now, and tomorrow is downright scary.”

Now, I know that running for president is hard, and let’s face it, you’re 76 years old. But you’re still younger than Trump and Biden.

I know that running for president when the Constitution still says you can’t might look crazy and illegitimate. But the recall that elected you in California was also called crazy and illegitimate.

I know that your friends, family, and co-stars won’t want you leaving them to jump into politics again.

But is anything more important than using your power to try to save our FUBAR country?

The post Run, Arnold, Run! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The death of Dianne Feinstein isn’t just the end of a pathbreaking life. Or a generational shift in power in the U.S. Senate.

It’s the severing of a crucial link holding California and the United States together.

In her half-century in public office, Feinstein played many roles and came to mean many different things to Californians, especially those in her hometown of San Francisco. But for the Golden State as a whole, her most important job was an unofficial one: She was California’s ambassador to the American government.

This job was challenging, and it became more so during the 30 years she spent in Washington, D.C. In that period, California, always an exception, grew rapidly apart from the rest of the country.

Over Feinstein’s tenure in the Senate, the Golden State became a more progressive and democratic place, even as much of America turned inward, into conservative populism and right-wing nationalism. As everyday Californians demanded more freedom, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court curbed rights. And as our state government grew more aggressive and embraced experimentation, the federal government became stagnant and dysfunctional.

In this era of accelerating polarization and side-taking, Feinstein was an outlier. She played for both sides.

She believed deeply in California, and its increasingly liberal values on LGBTQ issues, on women’s rights, on gun control, on protecting the environment, on advancing democracy. But she also believed deeply in the American system of government, in the anti-democratic U.S. institutions, including a Senate that all too often frustrated attempts to realize those values.

She didn’t just reconcile the contradictions of representing her state and her country. She built her career on doing just that. How? One answer, as her closest friends would tell you, was sheer brains. She embodied the famous observation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great chronicler of the phoniness of American ambition: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

The other answer was her legendary stubbornness, which was her real superpower. You’d have to be stubborn to commute across a large country for 30 years, to serve a state in a hostile national capital. You’d have to be stubborn to serve as a human bridge between two shores moving away from each other.

It helped that Feinstein was a wealthy woman with a talent for holding a party. California’s unofficial embassy in Washington was her home—in her early Senate years, a five-story townhouse in Kalorama, and later, a very ambassadorial $10 million estate.

As a diplomat, she knew her job was to talk to opponents and enemies, and so many of the guests were Republicans. She took the bullet for Californians and played nice with Chuck Grassley and Mitch McConnell and all manner of right-wing pols whose existence turned the stomachs of her voters back in the Bay Area.

It was no accident that the Republican to whom she grew closest was Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. Collins’ vote could swing the Senate, and decide whether Feinstein could get California the budget items and policy carveouts it needed. Is it any wonder that Feinstein organized an engagement party for the Maine senator, or gifted her a painting that hangs prominently in Collins’ office?

Feinstein practiced diplomacy with American enemies and rivals; she had the closest ties with important Chinese figures of anyone in Washington, keeping open lines of communication in the world’s most important relationship. Feinstein also employed her diplomatic skills to keep the fractious Democratic coalition—which included California’s all-too-few allies—together. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton met at her home to reconcile after the 2008 primaries.

But it became harder to be a diplomat as Washington grew angrier and more conservative. The Bush years saw the undoing of what should have been her legacy. The assault weapons ban she had pushed to passage in 1994 expired in 2004, despite all her efforts to renew it. And the cruel Trump years made her longstanding bipartisan efforts to reform immigration and prevent the government from using torture seem daft. The U.S. government, which she loyally served, had become a monster, capable of building concentration camps for migrant children.

A bitter irony, left unmentioned in the obituaries, is that her major enduring legislative legacy was the empty desert she preserved, via the California Desert Protection Act. Politically, her devotion to diplomacy, and her personal embrace of Republicans like Lindsey Graham, came to seem at best out-of-touch, and at worst, dangerous. Her friend Sen. Collins approved the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices that would revoke women’s reproductive rights and block reasonable gun controls.

In 2018, the California Democratic Party, tired of Feinstein’s diplomacy and bipartisan conciliation, endorsed a combative opponent, Kevin de León, against her. “California Democrats are hungry for new leadership that will fight for California values from the front lines, not equivocate on the sidelines,” De León declared.

Feinstein won the election anyway, but her base of support collapsed. As she showed more signs of age, liberal groups and former allies called for her resignation.

At her death, she was the most unpopular Democratic politician in California.

Ultimately, Feinstein’s ambassadorship failed because California and the American government had simply moved too far apart. As a result, we live in a new Cold War, between our state and our nation, which Feinstein tried to prevent.

We also live in an era of daily mass killings with the assault weapons Dianne Feinstein couldn’t permanently ban. We live in a surveillance state that Feinstein sought to limit. We deport, without due process, unauthorized immigrants Dianne Feinstein wanted to integrate into American life. We now barrel toward war in East Asia while barely talking to a China that Dianne Feinstein had on speed dial.

It’s telling that Feinstein’s replacement, chosen by our culture-warmongering governor, is a hardnosed labor and political operative with experience in partisan battles. And it’s unsurprising that the leading candidates running to fill her seat are three of the most polarizing members of the House of Representatives.

These would-be Feinstein successors have recently issued statements praising her, but they won’t try to fill her shoes. No one wants to play Feinstein’s role anymore.

Rest in peace, dear Dianne, our last ambassador.

The post Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Former president Jimmy Carter, who will be 99 this Sunday, October 1, was only 46 when he first popped up on the national political radar. After declaring in his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter followed through by increasing the number of Black people on state boards and commissions from three to 53, boosting Black employment in state jobs by 25%, and hanging a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol.

Media-wise, such moves secured Carter’s place within an emerging cohort of racially enlightened “New South” governors, including South Carolina’s John C. West and Florida’s Reubin Askew, who were also elected in 1970. Liberal optimists hailed their victories as the undoing of the Republican “Southern strategy” of relying on racially coded appeals to win over once-reliably Democratic white voters angered by their old party’s pro-civil rights stance. By the time Carter won the presidency in 1976, he personified a vision of a risen, racially redeemed South that captured the American imagination in the final decades of the 20th century.

Yet this sunny perception of Carter’s journey to the presidency obscured the reality of how he had managed to take the all-important first step.

Regardless of his actions after becoming Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter had captured that office in 1970 not by thwarting the Southern strategy but by following it very nearly to the letter in repeated campaign appeals to racial and class prejudice. Once they got him where he wanted to be, he quickly disavowed such tactics, which, in his mind, amounted to nothing more than purely pragmatic nods to political reality necessary to achieving his more idealistic aims.

The apparent incongruity between the method Carter employed to become governor and the measures he implemented in office can be traced in part to the way he reacted to the contrasting racial attitudes of his parents. Despite having myriad interactions with Black people as a landlord, grocer, and financier, Carter’s father Earl was no less adamant about their inferiority to whites than any but a tiny handful of his white contemporaries. Ironically, one of these rare exceptions was his wife Lillian, whose sympathy for Black neighbors and readiness to invite them into her home might have prompted more than quiet disapproval, had her husband been a less prominent figure in the community.

Young Jimmy’s awareness of the peculiarity of his mother’s racial views—and the near-ubiquity of his father’s—shaped the distinct blend of realism and idealism that defined his early political career. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his post as a naval engineer, to assume control of the family’s agribusiness enterprises. His budding political aspirations surfaced when he assumed his father’s old seat on the county school board in 1955, only a year after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. With thousands of white Southerners scurrying to join the defiantly segregationist White Citizens’ Councils, Carter stood out as the only white man in Plains to decline membership in the Sumter County chapter. Later, when the congregation of the Plains Baptist Church, where Carter was a deacon, overwhelmingly rejected the idea of allowing Black people to worship there, his family cast three of only six dissenting votes.

Still, despite his efforts to improve Sumter County schools, Carter made no overt effort to encourage compliance with Brown. In his 1992 book, Turning Point, the best he could say for himself as a candidate for state senate 30 years earlier was that he had been “at least moderate” on segregation.

Carter’s first run for statewide office began with his belated entry into the 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary against former governor Ellis Arnall, a racial moderate of longer standing, and the unrepentant segregationist Lester Maddox. Maddox won, courtesy of his strong appeal with blue collar whites, and with Arnall capturing the bulk of the Black and more affluent white vote, Carter came in a disappointing third. Still, the stinging defeat educated him to a stark reality: Racial moderation was not yet a winning strategy in Georgia politics. Nor would it be in the 1968 presidential race, when race-baiting virtuoso George Wallace easily outdistanced both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in Georgia.

Carter took the lessons of both these campaigns to heart when he again sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1970. This time, his chief opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had once declared himself “a segregationist but not a damn fool” and generally lived up to his own billing by presiding over Georgia’s grudging but relatively orderly retreat from segregation between 1963 and 1966. Sanders was a senior partner in a high-powered Atlanta law firm, with a smooth, urbane persona. Dubbing him “Cufflinks Carl,” and playing to both racial and class resentments, Carter’s ads portrayed Sanders hobnobbing in air-conditioned comfort with his closet liberal country club pals while the good working folk of Georgia, including a certain peanut farmer from Plains, sweated and strived to make ends meet.

In a naked appeal to Wallace supporters, Carter opposed bussing and defended the rights of white Georgians to preserve racial homogeneity in their neighborhoods. His campaign circulated photos of Black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team showering Sanders with champagne, and spread word that he had furtively attended the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. While Carter’s racial machinations won him the endorsement of outspoken segregationist politico Roy V. Harris, more than eight in 10 Black voters opted for Sanders, who barely made it into a runoff election, where Carter bested him by 20% before trouncing his Republican opponent in the general election.

As governor, Carter melded his idealism with a more practical-minded engineer’s approach to problem-solving in an ambitious plan to rid state government of corruption, mismanagement, and waste, although when he announced his presidential candidacy near the end of 1974, he was still better known and appreciated for his efforts to do right by Black Georgians.

His carefully cultivated personal ties to influential ministers and civil rights leaders only bolstered Carter’s standing among Black voters. Yet he knew that his success depended on winning substantial support from Southern whites as well.  To this end, he revamped his old Southern strategy, playing this time to regional rather than racial antagonisms. One of his campaign ads noted that after suffering years of ostracism and indiscriminate stereotyping as rednecks and hillbillies, “only a Southerner can understand what Jimmy Carter as President can mean.” Boasting an improbable duo of advocates in George Wallace and Martin Luther King Sr., Carter picked up more than half the electoral votes he needed to defeat Gerald Ford by carrying all of the old Confederate and border states except Virginia.

Still, despite his earnest courtship, Carter failed to win over a majority of white voters in the South, leaving him all the more indebted to the close to 90% support he enjoyed among Black voters in the region. As the ultimate political realists, they seemed to accept Carter’s pandering to Wallace voters in 1970 as merely a situational concession to political reality necessary to achieving the racially equitable and humane ends he secured upon taking office. Ironically enough, historically high Black participation in a presidential election had been critical to putting a white Southerner in the White House. Meanwhile, reeling from the military failure in Vietnam and the moral failures of the Watergate affair, white voters above the Mason-Dixon line also proved surprisingly receptive to the drawling Carter’s disarming smile, downhome folksiness, and earnest assurances that he would bring honesty and humility back to the White House.

Though he had not been above a bit of political charade along the way, once in office Carter appeared to revert to the somber, moralizing Southern Baptist he had always been at heart. With the economy faltering in the face of soaring inflation, he sermonized from his bully pulpit about Americans’ addictive consumerism and their habit of defining themselves not “by what one does, but what one has.” To hardly anyone’s surprise, his gospel of restraint seemed downright heretical to a generation who saw instant gratification and unbridled acquisitiveness as their birthright. Carter’s habit of foregrounding “pain” over “gain” in laying out the ramifications of his decisions led his vice president, Walter Mondale, to observe that “the worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.” Somewhat akin to Henry Clay, once in office Carter seemed to signal that he would “rather be right than [continue to] be president.”

Beyond the substantial economic challenges he faced, the crowning blow to his prospects of retaining that office was his failed—and now, reportedly, sabotaged—effort to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis; the abortive desert rescue mission with its abandoned, sand-clogged helicopters became for many a metaphor for his failed and inept presidency. He was easily out- distanced in 1980 by Republican Ronald Reagan, whose vows of a military buildup and gospel of permanent plenty played far better than Carter’s calls for sacrifice and self-denial. So much for securing the Camp David Accords, bailing out Social Security, deregulating the airlines, preserving the Alaskan wilds, and a number of other stellar accomplishments.

Yet, despite his overwhelming rejection at the hands of American voters, Carter left Washington in 1981 at age 56 with his idealism not only intact but less encumbered by political constraints. His boundless energy also demanded an outlet. By 2002, he had already gained such a reputation as a global peacemaker, humanitarian, and champion of human rights, that awarding him the Nobel Prize for Peace was less a question of “if” than “when.”  With his moral certitude now reaffirmed, he seemed even less concerned with the political consequences of his forthright manner, as he indicated in 2007 by likening Israeli practices in the West Bank to a form of apartheid. Unmoved by the ensuing outcry, Carter soldiered on in his one-man war on human suffering and injustice, even inquiring about his ongoing Guinea worm eradication project after entering hospice care in February 2023.

As the longest-lived of all U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter hardly stands out as the only one of them who ever sacrificed principle to political expediency. He has no rival among them, however, in dedicating himself upon leaving that office to a higher, more transcendent ideal of human service and remaining faithful to it even as the end of his days draws nigh.

The post Jimmy Carter’s Pragmatic Path to Power appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Leave it to Joan Didion. In her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” published in 1967, she identified a kind of slippage in our culture, the breakdown of collective narrative. “The center was not holding,” she famously begins, before moving on to details: “casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.” It’s a set of images to which I find myself returning here in the summer of 2022, when the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade; the findings of a House Select Committee, empaneled to investigate the attack on the Capitol, is regarded by a considerable percentage of the populace as “fake news”; and a series of mass shootings, culminating in the July 4 ambush of an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, have turned our communities and schools, once more, into killing floors.

What we’re seeing is not a matter of disagreement or debate. Rather, it’s an expression of the collapse of society’s public narrative: the fragmentation of the commons, if such a term can still be said to apply. How do we come together in a landscape where fiction is now regarded as fact and fact dismissed as mere opinion?

At one time, we relied—or imagined that we did—on public narratives to uphold the center. The point of America, its measure (so to speak), has been to be progressive: to include more people, to extend more rights. I believed this as firmly as anything I ever believed about this tragic country.

I now believe that we are lost.

What Didion foresaw—“we could no longer overlook the vacuum,” she writes, “no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed”—has become the way we live, manipulated by news that is not news and feeds that amplify ignorance. It’s taken barely 60 years to move from “We shall overcome” to “You will not replace us.” This is how our narrative has unraveled. This is how we have lost our way.

I’m pointing the finger here, yes, I am, at the anti-vaxxers, at the homophobes and anti-trans haters, the election deniers, the traitors who stormed the Capitol. Very fine people on both sides; all lives matter—I, for one, can’t imagine finding common ground with replacement theory supremacists, or, for that matter, advocates of the Big Lie, that the 2020 election was stolen, spread by the former president and his followers. But I’m also wondering about the future of the country, whether there even is one, whether this is a goal we continue to share?

There’s a meme I keep encountering, citing Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this does not appear to be anything Goebbels ever said. Still, let’s stay with it for a moment because it’s also instructive. Certainly, Goebbels could have made such a statement; it aligns with pretty much all he thought. This meme, I should say, is intended as a corrective, a critique of those who have been taken in. At the same time, it also highlights a larger danger: the fact that all of us, given the right circumstances, can be duped.

The same was true in Didion’s era also, when many of the prevailing public narratives were authoritarian and divisive. I think of the quotas faced by Jewish students, among others, at American universities, which extended into the 1960s; the redlining and housing covenants that prevailed across the country; the restriction or outright non-existence of women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights.

Yet in the era of social media—which now comes framed as discourse in its own right—the progress of the last decades feels illusory, if not outright moot. “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Elon Musk tweeted on March 26, shortly before making a $41.4 billion offer to buy the company. (He’s now headed to court to get out of the deal.) Musk is overstating, of course; less than a quarter of U.S. adults use the platform—or about the number who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

On my feeds, I can see the algorithm working: Trends are tailored to my searches and my predilections, intended to magnify, and encourage, my opinions and beliefs. The public narrative, in other words, has now become a private narrative, self-selected. Nothing is considered or thought through. Rather, it’s a self-fulfilling set of echoes, less conversation than monologue in overlapping snippets of text or images, sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the face of this, I find myself turning away from public narrative. I look for solidarity or consolation in the private narratives of others—literature mostly. Why? Because in books and essays, I find a more fundamental humanity (which is not the same thing as a sense of peace). So many writers have lived through what we’re facing, and worse. Some survived and some did not. But in staring down their circumstances directly, with grace and clarity, they offer a model of how I want to think and to behave.

And so, I look to George Orwell, who admonishes in his essay “Inside the Whale” that for people raised like us, in a country built on rule of law, “such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.” It’s a reminder of the dangers we are facing, a reminder that we need to stay aware. Or I consider Anne Frank, writing from the Achterhuis: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

When my children were little, I liked to imagine—as the artist Wallace Berman did before me—that one might make revolution a single household at a time. Although I still believe that change begins at home, this, too, cuts both ways. The ecstatic social revolution Didion was critiquing, what did it teach us? That utopia and dystopia are intertwined.

Many days now, I don’t know what to do with this. Many days, it makes me want to retreat. Retreat, however, is just another word for surrender, and surrender comes at far too high a cost. “[W]hat was the point,” James Baldwin asks in The Fire Next Time, “the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved to me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet answered. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too.”

I don’t believe in the judgment trumpet. It’s not an emblem of my faith. But what I do believe in is the question Baldwin raises: How to live responsibly, not only for one’s own future but also that of everybody else. I am not an altruist, and I am filled with anger, but what else can I do?

We do not get to choose the times we live in, only how we respond.

The post When the Public Narrative Fails appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am an advocate for radically tolerating political disagreement, even if that disagreement strikes us as unmoored from facts or common sense. One reason is that dissent makes democracy more intelligent. While many believe that vaccine skeptics misunderstand the relevant science and threaten public health, their opposition to vaccines nevertheless draws attention to chronic problems within our medical system: financial conflicts of interest, racism and sexism, and other legitimate reasons for mistrust. People should have their voices heard because politics shapes the things citizens care about, not just the things they know.

Tolerating disagreement also ensures the practice of democracy. Otherwise, we may find ourselves handing off ever more political control to experts and bureaucrats. Political truths can motivate fanaticism. Whether it is “follow the science” or “commonsense conservatism,” the belief that policy must actualize one’s own view of reality divides the world into “enlightened” good guys and ignorant enemies who just need to go away.

But what about beliefs that seem harmful and intolerant? You might question, as the political philosopher Jonathan Marks does, whether a zealous belief in the idea “that all men are created equal” is so problematic. Why not divide the political world into citizens who believe in equality and harmfully ignorant people to be ignored? The trouble is that doing so makes actually achieving equality more difficult.

Marks’ challenge to divide ourselves around equality makes me think of the great 20th century Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance,” or at least the meme version of it. This edition of the paradox holds that tolerating the openly intolerant leads to the destruction of tolerant people and tolerance. While the meme depicts the literal Nazis, it is less clear who else it should apply to. Should it extend to dangerous misinformation from right-wing politicians?

Popper’s actual writing departs from its depiction on social media. He argued for the suppression of intolerant ideas only if those speaking them were not willing to engage in rational argument, if their followers “answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.” The philosopher’s tolerance was less about combating internalized prejudice than the willingness to practice democracy.

The underlying issue when it comes to tolerance in the public square is the tension between liberalism and democracy. Although liberalism is often equated with leftism, liberal philosophy is far more encompassing. Right-wing liberals champion property and business rights, while left liberals see inclusion and equal outcomes as more important.

Liberalism often conflicts with democracy, because each proposes a different way to protect rights and ensure equality. Democratic solutions seek to broaden public participation and diversify the representation of interests in the policy process, while liberalism’s answer is to protect rights by guarding them from legislative debate. The U.S. Supreme Court, for instance, is thought to be a more reliable steward of the rights of Americans to free speech, abortion, and firearms, because justices are presumed to be far wiser, more virtuous, and less “political” than voters and representatives.

Such liberal guardianship is dominant in left-wing politics. Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi has advocated for a constitutional amendment establishing a “Department of Anti-Racism,” an expert body with the power to review and veto legislation that seems poised to exacerbate racially unequal outcomes. For instance, if new zoning laws in New York City seemed likely to decrease rates of Black homeownership, this agency could intervene to prevent their passing.

“No-platforming,” the effort to prevent controversial speakers from presenting their views, seems far removed from judicial and expert bodies, but it guards rights in a similar way. Take Charles Murray, whose book The Bell Curve partly attributed the racial achievement gap to genetic inheritance. When a student club invited him to Middlebury College in 2017, the chants and yells of protestors prevented him from publicly speaking. A group of students justified this in light of Murray’s views not merely being factually dubious but also “[denying] the basic equality” of audience members. No-platforming posits that some ideas harm people’s rights, even if not directly inciting violence or the loss of political freedoms, and that an audience knowledgeable about these harms can prevent people from speaking in order to momentarily safeguard equality.

Karl Popper would find Kendi’s proposal, no-platforming, and perhaps even the Supreme Court inconsistent with open societies. They all rely on the idea that people with certain authoritative knowledge ought to be allowed to constrain democratic practices, whether in legislatures or briefly within an auditorium. They presume that some matters are too important to be decided, or even discussed, by unenlightened citizens and their representatives.

The work of German American philosopher Herbert Marcuse offers another, more contextual way of looking at the question. He argued that “the function and value of tolerance depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced.”

Abstract tolerance is a good thing, contended Marcuse, but it falls short in practice. The first reason was that citizens are “manipulated and indoctrinated” and lack “authentic information” and the ability to think “autonomously.” The second reason was that media, educational, and other social institutions are hopelessly monopolized by conservative thought, blocking change. Because tolerance really just “[served] the cause of oppression” in the absence of equality, Marcuse advocated “new and rigid restrictions” and “the withdrawal of toleration of speech” to restore “freedom of thought.”

While there is no doubt that citizens ought to be more often challenged to rethink the status quo, Marcuse proposed an extreme version of liberal guardianship: an “educational dictatorship,” a class of people, namely Marcuse and those who agreed with him, who can think rationally and autonomously.

Despite the democratic deficits of such a regime, it is strikingly close to what we hear from establishment voices today. After all, the presumption that some people disagree only because they are misinformed, if not completely deluded, is at the core of our current political predicament. Just consider the public controversy over how schools should teach students about race. One side claims that parental concerns over the influence of “critical race theory” on education are steeped in myth and misinformation, while the other side accuses schools of peddling “indoctrination in ahistorical nonsense.”

Such statements fail to account for a very important historical fact: it has often taken civil disobedience, from groups of citizens drawing attention to a state of affairs they believe is no longer tolerable, to break the monopolistic grip of status quo thinking. Whether it is via teachers introducing challenging ideas into the classroom or via parents pushing against school boards and teachers’ unions appearing to overstep their authority, disobedience drives political change. But liberal guardianship seeks to establish new monopolies, rather than to promote productive disagreement. That’s the dynamic in media and higher education today, where “no-platforming” is aimed at out-of-fashion political thought.

Still, no-platforming is appealing in part because political progress in addressing inequality is so frustratingly slow. Charles Murray’s racial ideas rightfully feel menacing, because they might justify even less representation of Black people in politics and higher education. Liberal guardianship looks attractive when democracy is dysfunctional, as a way to compensate for the persistence of social inequalities, not to mention ineffectual governance. Perhaps those shouting down their opponents hope that loudly opposing problematic utterances within social media and on college campuses will lead to chronic diversity issues finally being resolved. But it hasn’t worked that way.

We are seeing, right now, that liberal “thought guardianship” leads to a winnowing in the range of acceptable opinions. Each side becomes fanaticized around their own notion of justice, and public conversation becomes narrowly focused on policing the boundaries of heresy. The problem of institutions falling short of realizing equal treatment gets blurred with the issue of too many citizens thinking and saying the wrong things.

The political philosopher Robert Talisse, a Vanderbilt professor, articulates a similar concern. A consequence of ongoing political polarization is people’s partisan identities becoming core to their sense of self. In turn, they demand more conformity of belief from friends and allies.

One could call this “intolerance creep.” Efforts that begin with no-platforming more obvious opponents of equality like Charles Murray later target potential allies. For instance, geoscience professor Dorian Abbot’s recent disinvitation from speaking at MIT was not because he opposed addressing diversity problems at universities but because he believes that affirmative action is the wrong tool to use.

One problem with intolerance creep is that a range of views on equality are compatible with democracy. Philosophical debates about equality of opportunity, outcomes, status, and capabilities have persisted for centuries, with no signs of forthcoming agreement. But when citizens embrace their own version as Truth, partial allies become political enemies. The variegated, “big tent” coalitions that traditionally helped to end harmful and discriminatory politics are rendered impossible. Polarized politics leads to gridlock, not victory.

How can we avoid intolerance creep? Consider the starkly polarized debate over trans rights. Progressives’ political goal seems clear: equal treatment. Yet the conversation is dominated by ontological claims. “Trans men are men” and “Trans women are women,” insists the ACLU when issues like restroom access arise, while opponents chant “sex is real” in response. Each side is only further fanaticized by the belief that “science” vindicates their own position, as if we could just get citizens to accept certain facts, certain truths, then the thorny policy disagreements will disappear.

Some parts of the debate are not spectacularly complicated, even if they are contentious. For instance, which currently sex-segregated spaces should allow trans people entrance without intrusive forms of questioning? In other cases, discerning equal treatment is less clear-cut. Controversy over sports participation and hormone treatments for minors are beset with overlapping dilemmas and trade-offs concerning autonomy and fairness, largely obscured by competing ontological claims. For instance, a “sex realist” approach gets natal women kicked out of the Olympics, while extending transition rights to teens would mean being willing to use governmental authority to revoke parental custody. Again, politics is a matter of caring, not knowing.

This might seem like a pedantic distinction, but it’s important. As Popper wrote, “‘Equality before the law’ is not a fact but a political demand based upon a moral decision, and it is quite independent of the theory—which is probably false—that ‘all men are born equal.’” Citizens need not believe anything specific about the nature of equality or that transwomen are women. They only need to be willing to listen to people’s reasons for caring about an issue, to share their own experiences, and to make policy compromises and concessions. And studies of political canvassing show that this kind of democratic talk actually works for trans rights issues.

This looked to be the approach Nancy Kelley hoped to take when appointed chief executive of Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ human rights organization. “We don’t have to convert everybody to our way of understanding gender,” Kelley said in an interview, “for the experience of trans people’s lives to be more positive, and for them to have lower levels of hate crime, better access to health services and more inclusive schools and workplaces, we don’t need people to agree on what constitutes womanhood.”

A society that tolerates political disagreement invariably tolerates some risk of harmfully intolerant beliefs. But dissent isn’t just some abstract democratic value. As a buffer against intolerance creep, it helps ensure progress against harmful policies. We tolerate some of the opinions that strike us as distasteful because it pays off later.

So, we should resist the impulse to demand conformity in order to compensate for current democratic deficiencies. People whose speech directly promotes or inspires violence should be prevented from entering politics, but extending that intolerance to those who simply see equality differently deprives us of potential allies. As uncomfortable as it may be to talk to people whose beliefs fall short of our own, it is a discomfort that I hope more of us can learn to live with.

The post Why Tolerate Intolerance? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In conversation with Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks, Brownstein, who is a senior editor at the Atlantic and senior political analyst at CNN, explored the complexities of the early 1970s, and the era’s relationship to the mainstream social engagement of pop culture today.

The discussion, titled “How Did Politics and Pop Culture Become One?,” captured a moment of change, as the entertainment industry as a whole struggled to appeal to a new, younger audience in the early ’70s. For Brownstein, the year 1974, in particular, became a pop-cultural crucible, as mainstream music, film, and television were simultaneously at a peak of creative output and sociopolitical critique. Musicians Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and the Eagles each released career-defining albums, while an open, collaborative atmosphere flourished in Laurel Canyon, and politically incisive films like Chinatown hit theaters. And it was the only year that the socially engaged TV series All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and M*A*S*H were on television at the same time.

Those iconic works were able to reach audiences because of the rise of the Baby Boomers, who represented an oncoming tide whose sheer size overwhelmed the older audiences to which media had previously catered. This new generation was demographically more diverse, steeped in 1960s progressivism and the Civil Rights Movement, and had the economic clout to drive industries to cater to their zeitgeist.

It was a marked change from the 1960s, Brownstein explained, when film and television “steadfastly ignored all the changes that were happening around them.” Take Walter Cronkite: Brownstein pointed out that the broadcast titan “would spend half an hour every night documenting all the new fissures opening in American life, and then the CBS prime-time [programming], and the other networks would spend the next three-and-a-half hours trying to erase them from viewers’ minds.”

But the dial moved in the ’70s, as attitudes that had been considered radical or countercultural in the years leading up to them—including equal rights for Black people, gay people and women—were given new visibility through this shift in mainstream entertainment.

It was that same transformation, Brownstein argued, that inspired a stark cultural divide that laid the foundation for a divisive partisanship that has characterized American politics ever since. Over the course of his career, Brownstein observed how this led to the American political scene becoming dominating by the “culture wars.” If the 1960s was the “big bang” that laid the foundation for this transformation, he said, it was the 1970s where that change was reinforced by a growing rift between conservative politics and the entertainment industries.

“The early ’70s was a collision between this massive younger generation that was bringing its set of new cultural and social attitudes into society, and an older generation that was, by and large, really unnerved by those changes,” he said. Conservative politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan learned they could win elections by appealing to the older electorate’s fear of cultural change. At the same time, the entertainment industry faced a drastically opposite economic incentive to reach a younger, more progressive audience. The powerful creative energy ascendant in Los Angeles that resulted produced a kind of “golden hour,” he said. He recounted that the various artists he interviewed described a newly open, expressive, and collaborative atmosphere, with a distinctive sensation that creative and radical forces were suddenly beginning to coalesce.

But that bubble burst “once it was clear that fundamental revolution was not coming to the country,” said Bronstein. In turn, movies and television reverted to less-challenging work. Because the increasing representation of Black, female, and other marginalized voices in the early ’70s had been mostly limited to on-screen talent, rather than in executive roles, they, too, had less power to push back against this tide.

Still, said Bronstein, the baseline had undeniably shifted, as the increasing visibility and attention to diversity made mainstream the progressive attitudes that had grown through the 1960s, which have been maintained and expanded.

That unique moment in 1970s L.A. both prefigures, and allowed for our own, Brownstein argued. He pointed to a lineup of socially critical films like Judas and the Black Messiah and Nomadland, which stand in the running for Academy Awards, and studios bend to audiences’ demand for far greater racial and gender diversity and equal representation as creators, producers, stories and talent. And as certain reactionary politicians stoke fear of change across large swaths of the nation at the same time.

Now, as then, Brownstein places his bets on pop culture. Pop culture is an indicator of social attitudes ten years on, he said, speculating that a decade from now, ideas that may now seem radical will gain greater airtime and wider acceptance. “You can mobilize voters, on a short-term basis, by promising to stop change. But you can’t actually stop the change,” he said.

The post How 1970s Pop Culture Cemented Today’s Partisan Divisions appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Joe Biden won the state by running up huge totals in metropolitan counties that have been among the most popular destinations for African Americans migrating to Georgia in recent decades. Not long after that triumph, New York Times columnist Charles Blow, having himself relocated from the Big Apple to Atlanta, urged Black Northerners to move south to enhance Black political power, and inspire similar political earthquakes across the region.

The election results, and Blow’s widely discussed invitation, represent the latest chapter in a long and circular story about domestic migration and its impact on the dynamics of American politics.

Between 1900 and 1940, 2 million Black people abandoned the South. They were pushed by extreme poverty and racial persecution, and pulled initially by the prospect of filling jobs in northern and midwestern cities left vacant by World War I-era disruption of European immigration. Not only were these migrants leaving the South, where they couldn’t vote, for larger cities where they could, but also, they would be casting their ballots in states where the electoral vote payload was more substantial. Northbound Black Southerners not only contributed to the shift of the majority of Black voters into the Democratic column in the 1936 presidential election, but by sheer numbers alone, they helped to push the party into a more sympathetic stance on civil rights.

Slow and grudging as it was, the Democratic Party’s move to combat racial discrimination in the South ultimately led to a mass exodus of white Southerners in 1964. Between the turn of the century and the mid-1960s, more than 10 million southern whites, seeking higher-wage factory jobs in and around cities like Detroit or Akron, headed north. By and large, these white migrants did not appear to divest themselves of the racism, religious fundamentalism, and suspicion of new ideas that had been imbued in them back home. As both voters and organizers, they would contribute to Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s surprisingly strong showings in northern presidential primaries in 1964 and 1968. They also helped to infuse elements of the traditionally Democratic northern white working-class with a newfound conservatism that left them ripe for Republican plucking.

By the end of the 1960s, however, those northward migrations, by Blacks and whites alike, started to reverse themselves.

Once a magnet for southern émigrés, the northern manufacturing states were then beset by a devastating combination of obsolescent technology, rising foreign competition, and continuing union pressure on wages. The resulting “Rust Belt,” stretching from Michigan to Connecticut, began to hemorrhage jobs and people to the more inviting meteorological and economic environs of the “Sun Belt.”

Predictably, Florida was the biggest beneficiary of the Rust Belt exodus, followed by Georgia and North Carolina, both of which gained nearly 12,000 new residents from the decaying Industrial North in 1973-74 alone. The first, predominantly white wave of northern newcomers seemed to find the region’s political climate strikingly attuned to their own priorities and values. So much so that worried liberals were soon warning that, ironically enough, a second Yankee invasion was rapidly enhancing the staunchly conservative South’s influence on national politics to the point of fueling the ominous rise of a far-right “Southern Rim.”

Northern population losses became the South’s political gain, as its share of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House rose from just below 50 percent in 1968 to 63 percent after the 2010 census. Population increases also translated into a net gain of 29 congressional seats.

Yet, by the early 1970s, white Republicans weren’t the only ones heading South. That decade saw the once unthinkable reversal of the migration patterns of Black Americans (4.5 million whom had fled the South since 1940 alone). With the demise of Jim Crow and an accompanying surge in economic opportunity, net migration by Black Americans to urban and metropolitan areas in the South swung positive and stayed that way.

Of the roughly 347,000 new Black residents gained by net migration in the entire South between 1995 and 2000, Georgia accounted for nearly 40 percent. These new Black Georgians, like their counterparts in other states, were younger, more affluent, and better educated than the resident Black population overall, meaning they were also more likely candidates for political mobilization.

Accordingly, since the year 2000, the Black share of Georgia’s eligible voter population has grown by 5 percent, while the white share has shrunk by 11 percent. During the same period, the state’s growing Latino and Asian populations saw their portion of the electorate increase by more than 200 percent.

The political implications of these demographic shifts became strikingly apparent in 2018 when African American Democrat Stacey Abrams came within slightly more than 50,000 votes of defeating her GOP gubernatorial runoff opponent, Brian Kemp. The core of Abrams’s support was the Atlanta suburbs, where people of color accounted for more than 46 percent of the population, as opposed to a national suburban average of 28 percent.

Alanna Madden, of the moving consultant firm, MoveBuddha, has offered a timely and gratifyingly precise new analysis of interstate moving patterns during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It shows that Georgia’s most popular destinations for in-migrants between March and November were the four largest suburban Atlanta counties: Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Cobb. Among them, only Cobb, at 49 percent, fell short of a majority nonwhite population. Together, these counties accounted for half of Joe Biden’s vote gains over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing in Georgia.

Madden acknowledges that much of the credit for the Democratic victories here belongs to the massive effort by Stacey Abrams and others to curb voter suppression and expand minority registration. Even so, based on data amassed by MoveBuddha, Madden ventures that recent in-migrants may have been critical to the breakthroughs as well. Her detailed analysis of survey information from 4,474 households who moved to Georgia during this period shows that 75 percent came from traditionally Democratic counties in other states. The data also show that a corresponding share of the new arrivals settled in Georgia counties with a recent history of voting Democratic as well.

The Democratic bastions of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco were the top five cities contributing to the outsider influx into Georgia. But even many of those coming from red states like Texas and Florida hailed from Democratic enclaves like Houston and West Palm Beach. Overall, 15 of the top 20 municipal destinations for all of Georgia’s newcomers were in counties that went for Biden in November 2020.

In-migration has been tied to Democratic advances in metropolitan counties in other southern states as well. For some time, a large stream of new arrivals from outside the South has emptied into the cities and large suburban counties of Texas, which attracted more than 82,000 former Californians in 2019 alone. This inflow helped Democrats pick up 14 seats in the legislature in 2018. One of the nation’s hottest destinations for domestic in-migrants is Williamson County, just north of Austin, which has gained some 160,000 new residents in the last decade. The county went to Donald Trump by nearly a 10-point margin in 2016, but flipped to Biden four years later, while Trump’s statewide margin shrank from 9 percent to 4 percent, as well.

North Carolina has also been a magnet for in-migrants, many from predominantly Democratic areas in other states, which have provided 4 in 5 of its new residents over the last five years.

Current in-migration patterns in these states may augur well for the Democrats in future national elections. But in-migration also stands to intensify internal political conflicts as the cities and suburbs become not only more Democratic and diverse, but also richer and more powerful in the bargain.

In Georgia, the MoveBuddha analysis reveals some striking imbalances in political clout between counties that benefit from in-migration and those not attractive to newcomers. Just seven of the 11 metropolitan counties boasting the 20 most popular localities for in-migrants gave Biden 242,000 more votes than the state’s 152 remaining counties combined.

Meanwhile, though Georgia’s 129 Trump counties may show up on an election map as a menacing ocean of red threatening to overwhelm 30 islands of Biden blue, the reverse is actually closer to reality. The 80 percent of Georgia’s counties that went for Trump may be home to 70 percent of its white voters, but many of those counties are in economic decline and steadily losing residents to Biden counties, which already account for 55 percent of Georgia’s registered electorate.

Such imbalances can readily ignite bitter resentment among those who find themselves losing ground both politically and economically—and trigger a defiant, knee-jerk rejection of any proposed changes in law or policy, no matter how minute.

For example, the recent, striking swerve to the right among North Carolina’s Republican legislator represents more than a xenophobic reaction to an influx of Latino immigrants. It also reflects a backlash against a domestic invasion of young, diverse, highly educated, and more liberally disposed professionals drawn to dynamic metropolitan areas like Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triad, where President Biden ran up huge margins in November.

With in-migration likewise fueling the concentration of political firepower in the dynamic cities and suburbs of Texas and North Carolina, these states may ultimately follow Georgia into the blue column in national politics. But within the respective states, the potentially transformative political effects of such an influx stand to be delayed or blunted to some extent by the chronic overrepresentation of sparsely populated and deeply conservative rural counties so common to southern legislatures.

Meanwhile, an ongoing procession of newcomers into metropolitan areas promises to leave these already embattled rural counties at an even greater economic and demographic deficit. As a result, the struggle for partisan advantage within the increasingly polarized political interiors of these states is likely to be both bitter and intensely competitive for some time to come, regardless of what their exterior colors in presidential contests might suggest.

The post How Domestic Migration Keeps Changing American Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Twitter Live yesterday, journalist Dan Morain, author of the new biography Kamala’s Way, and Kimberly Peeler-Allen, co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization building the collective political power of Black women, visited Zócalo to discuss these topics and more in a wide-ranging conversation on the vice president.

Harris’s path from Oakland to the White House is a “California story,” said Morain, who has long covered California politics. He framed her career against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, the desegregation of schools, and the notoriously progressive political landscape of San Francisco.

“I’m not sure she could have risen in another state,” he added. “I do think that California increasingly is open to people who don’t look like me, who aren’t all white guys, and that’s great. Certainly, in 2010, when she ran for attorney general it was very close, but she won. I’m not sure she would have won in Texas. I’m not sure she would have won in New York or in any other states.”

During the discussion, Morain and Peeler-Allen also explored Harris’s campaign strategies for District Attorney, Attorney General, and the Senate, and what they reveal about Harris’s politics and evolution over time. “The DA and the Attorney General, they have to enforce the law—a U.S. Senator is not constrained that way, so she could be perhaps more herself,” Morain said. They also speculated what a future presidential run by Harris might look like, with Morain predicting her experiences from the 2020 campaign will help her shape a stronger campaign the next time she runs, whether that’s in four years or eight.

Before closing out the conversation, Morain offered a more personal insight into Harris. “One of the things I learned,” he said, in the course of reporting his book, “is she would reach out to people—in instances where they were in pain, where they were near the end of life, and just hold their hand in ways that the public would never know.”

Quoted with Dan Morain:

“When I think about [Kamala Harris], I think about transition. She’s a transitional figure in California, and I think that nationally she also is a transitional figure. Whether she becomes president is a whole other question … but what is going on in California will be going on in much of the rest of the country. We are a majority-minority state, have been for a long time—we’re a state of immigrants and a nation of immigrants, and I think we’re better for it.”

The post What Does Kamala Harris’s Rise Say About America?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump explained, “you have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

Trump didn’t have any actual proof of election fraud—at least not any that would stand up in a court of law. Trump instead offered his supporters conspiracy instead of proof, urging them to “show strength” by believing him and taking action against their shared enemies.

Such rhetoric was not new or unusual for our outgoing president. To the contrary, this approach is at the heart of his political career, the most telling moment of which occurred almost exactly four years before the mayhem of his final week in office.

On January 11, 2017—nine days before his inauguration, and five days after the U.S. government released a report accusing Russia of attempting to “influence” the 2016 election in his favor—Trump held his first news conference as president-elect. Surrounded by an audience of family and employees who provided a laugh-track for his performance, the president-elect stood next to a table overladen with manila folders and assured the nation that he had separated himself from his business empire: “These papers are just some of the many documents that I’ve signed, turning over complete and total control to my sons.”

Trump promised that the papers proved that he and his businesses wouldn’t profit off the presidency, but when reporters asked to examine the evidence, the folders and papers appeared blank. Not for the first time nor the last, Trump had offered props instead of proof.

Such theatrics are baffling to scholars of serious presidential rhetoric, who expect presidents to provide credible evidence to support their claims. But Trump makes more sense when you think of him not as president, but as demagogue. Trump is a new kind of demagogue—part entertainer and part authoritarian, he is a demagogue of the spectacle.

French critical theorist Guy Debord coined the phrase “society of the spectacle” in 1967, using the term “spectacle” to denote a moment in history when representation had replaced direct experience as our epistemology—as our way of knowing. Earlier in the 20th century, he explained, we knew things because we experienced them directly (and one’s sphere of information and influence was necessarily very small). But by the second half of the 20th century, we had expanded our sphere of information to such an extent that we knew things only because we learned about them from media sources—most, if not all, of our knowledge had become mediated by others.

What was worse, to Debord, was that this new knowledge was commodified. It was a part of the capitalist system of production and distribution, which meant that it was always only partial knowledge. What was “true” was limited to what would sell.

This is the essence of Trump’s epistemology: “Truth” is merely what he can sell.

Debord was talking about television and newspapers and magazines. Fifty years later, the spectacle has expanded into our computers and our phones, following us everywhere and erasing all private, non-spectacular space. The spectacle’s dangerous demagogue has used the power of social media and the tactics of weaponized rhetoric and propaganda to set the nation’s agenda, confuse political debate, and marshal supporters to defend their positions and overwhelm opposition. Trump plays the spectacle for what it is. He is its creature, its essential qualities.

If we put Trump’s demagoguery into a spectacle frame, we ask different questions than if we judge him based on whether or not he is a good president, offering good arguments and solid proof for his positions or doing what’s best for the country and its people. As a spectacular demagogue, Trump uses strategies that he thinks will make great or compelling TV and dominate the news cycle. He asks: What will attract attention? What will divide people into teams to cheer for (or boo against) the story’s main character, me? What kinds of plots will distract from other stories? Just like any other brand or app or electronic device, Trump has engineered his demagoguery to gain and keep our attention.

Trump read the rhetorical landscape better than anyone else during the 2016 election. He saw that the nation’s crisis levels of distrust, polarization, and frustration made Americans vulnerable to demagoguery. So Trump used rhetorical strategies like ad hominem attacks, threats, and conspiracy theory to attack our public sphere, attacking America. Those strategies are authoritarian. Trump’s rhetoric is a kind of force; it’s based on authoritarian compliance-gaining rather than on democratic persuasion.

Like an authoritarian P. T. Barnum, a con man who used hyperbole to profit off of our curiosity, Trump has used stagecraft, suspense, and outrage to keep us all engaged and on tilt, and thus to dominate our public sphere—no small feat in an attention economy like ours. The showman’s rhetorical strategy is a legerdemain—a sleight of hand. Part of Trump’s success was that he dominated the conversation by saying things so outrageous that we could not look away and had to respond. It’s no surprise that almost exactly a year before Trump’s first news conference as president-elect, he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that he enjoyed being compared to P. T. Barnum. “We need P. T. Barnum, a little bit,” Trump said, “because we have to build up the image of our country.”

Yet while Trump wanted our attention, he did not want our scrutiny. Like any showman or other dangerous demagogue, Trump didn’t want to be held accountable for his words or actions.  He didn’t want us to examine his rhetoric—or his folders—too carefully. Trump would trivialize concerns about his rhetoric as mere “political correctness” or “women trying to control how men speak” or “so unimportant.” Of course, he would also say, “I have the best words.”

He always claimed that he was just telling it like it is, but he never allowed us to examine his “proofs.” He promised us that he’s “really smart” and a “genius,” but he didn’t release his high school or college transcripts. He claimed that he was “really rich,” but he didn’t release his tax records. When Congressional Democrats asked to see documents or hear testimony for oversight purposes, he refused. He never told us why he made an emergency visit to Walter Reed hospital in 2019; when he contracted coronavirus, he never told us when he last tested negative for COVID-19 or when he first tested positive. Who knows what else he hasn’t told us?

Like a good showman, Trump has developed a repertoire of tricks to prevent the audience from seeing reality. Non-disclosure agreements, lawsuits, retribution, and humiliation silence would-be whistleblowers from telling the nation what they know about his authoritarian circus. Trump’s 21st century version of P. T. Barnum doesn’t mind resorting to force to make sure that his preferred view of “truth” will sell.

We are especially attracted to characters like Trump during times of great transition when we feel alienated and confused, and reality can be more easily distorted. Part of the showman’s strategy is to confound the public so that audiences are more likely to be misled, making it that much easier to sell their “truth.”

Voters ultimately held America’s authoritarian P. T. Barnum accountable by voting him out of office, denying him a second term. A record 81 million Americans voted for President-elect Joe Biden, but Trump is still trying to deny reality, still using his props to sell Americans on his version of “truth.”

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