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.

On June 25, 1983, two distinct marches set out from Mexico City’s Monumento a Los Niños Héroes. One was a traditional march, with a serious tone in line with the established patterns for Mexican leftist marches. The other included not only queer Mexicans but also sex workers and punk-like chavos banda, who laughed, danced, and wreaked fun havoc—or, in Mexican parlance, engaged in desmadre. This second march also included a stop at the U.S. Embassy to burn Ronald Reagan in effigy to protest U.S. interventions in Central America.

The two contingents were at odds. In 1984, they even came to blows, pushing and shoving each other at the marches’ end point, the Hemiciclo a Benito Juárez.

Many contemporary queer Mexicans don’t know this history, yet it is more important than ever today. In 1983, queer Mexicans faced turbulent times, grappling with the effects of the crushing 1982 debt crisis, early news of the AIDS epidemic, and fallout from U.S. interventionism in Central America. Today, queer people face a parallel conjuncture: economic recession, contentious politics, and a War on Drugs that has increased violence against women and LGBTQ Mexicans, and now COVID-19.

In both historical moments, economic and political crises fractured the queer community. Why? Because queer activists are shaped by class and other factors. Around the world, they wrestle with economics, politics, and with what those things have to do with sexual and gender identity. When economic crises accentuate class-based tensions, it plays out as conflict over how to be queer and how to fight for queer liberation.

As in many other parts of the world, publicly visible queer activism in Mexico began in the 1970s. While same-sex acts had been technically legal in Mexico since the late 19th century, individuals who identified as jotos, vestidas, lesbianas, homosexuales, travestis, mujercitos, and bisexuales (terms that refer to people who engaged in same-sex acts and/or questioned gender expectations, and do not map perfectly to today’s LGBTQ categories in the United States) faced ostracization from family and friends and harassment, arrest, and extortion by police via public decency laws.

In the face of this, Mexico City queers of the mid-20th century created class-based, largely hidden social lives. Wealthy gays gathered in private homes or in clubs with expensive entry fees. Some searched out hookups with poor gay men in bars or on street corners, slumming in what they called the “guetos lumpen” or “lumpen ghettos.” Poor homosexuales, especially the vestidas or cross-dressing men, engaged in sex work.

Though “hidden,” these queer social spaces were never fully out of sight—interested people could go to the right public spaces, department stores, restaurants, and clubs, look the part, and ask the right questions to find others like them. The Mexico City police knew where to find them too, and subjected gay and/or cross-dressing men to verbal harassment and razzias (raids) at bars. Murders in the community went uninvestigated.

So, in the early 1970s, inspired by the 1968 student movement as well as the recent rises of feminism, anti-imperialism, and the civil rights movement, Mexico City’s queer people began to organize. But just as past gay social life had been class-stratified, so was early organizing. Cosmopolitan middle- and upper-class queers traveled to New York City in 1969 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots and to Europe to meet members of the French front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire. Inspired, they returned to Mexico and formed the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de México (Homosexual Liberation Front of Mexico, or FLH).

The FLH operated within the confines of homes, largely in the form of reading groups. Many knew from experience in other kinds of political organizing that the police and military often targeted activists to squash dissent. Some worried further that taking their queer activism public would alienate them from their comrades in other activist circles, who often saw homosexuality as irrelevant to political organizing—or worse, bourgeois and anti-revolutionary.

Eventually, a group of frustrated ex-FLH members got fed up with secrecy. In 1978, they branched off to create the Frente Homosexual de Acción Revolucionaria (The Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action, FHAR) and joined a march celebrating the Cuban Revolution—marking the first time an openly queer contingent marched for change on Mexico City streets. The following year FHAR joined forces with Lambda, a Trotskyist gay liberation group, and the lesbian-feminist Oikabeth to organize Mexico City’s first marcha de orgullo homosexual—or gay pride march.

Poster from the First Marcha de Orgullo Homosexual. Courtesy of Colectivo Sol.

At first, the three groups worked together to push back against police raids. They wrote letters to officials and op-eds to counter criminalizing and negative portrayals of queer individuals, and they talked with newspaper reporters about using respectful terminology. They marched to uphold their constitutional rights to expression and assembly. They also collaborated with activists demanding justice for the desaparecidos (the hundreds of activists and allies kidnapped, tortured, and secretly incarcerated or murdered during the Mexican government’s Dirty War from 1964 to 1982). The activists’ queer identities intersected with their activities as unionized laborers, student activists, party militants, and members of other political organizations.

Yet as the economy plummeted in the early 1980s, class-based tensions surfaced. The activists argued about the meaning of homosexuality, the role of travestis (cross dressers) in the movement, the appropriation of homophobic slurs, and how best to present their movement in the world and demand respect for their rights. When middle-class LAMBDA ran candidates for legislative bodies, others critiqued them as assimilationist. When working-class-aligned activists—whose coalitions included sex workers and chavos banda—appropriated slurs and expressed their queerness flamboyantly, they put themselves at odds with lesbian groups, who argued that cross-dressing gay men and transvestites made a ridicule of cis-women. These tensions divided the march into two fractions.

Debates over assimilation and respectability still haunt queer organizations. Today, there remains a divide over capitalism, assimilation, and “selling out” at Mexican Pride. Mexico City hosts two Pride marches. The first is larger, and the kind you see around the world: filled with floats sponsored by LGBTQ organizations, NGOs, government offices, and multi-national companies such as Visa and General Electric. The second is much smaller, and its participants are leftist queer activists.

The movement is splintered. As in the U.S., the mainstream face of Mexican queer activism focuses on “sexual diversity” and has focused its attention on marriage, representation within government institutions, and the creation of gay-themed consumer products such as Levi’s’ Pride collection. Meanwhile, a smaller group of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist queer Mexicans organize around ideas of “corporeal and sexual dissidence,” seeking specially to address violence against trans individuals. This violence has been exacerbated by the increasing visibility of separatist feminists, some lesbian, who reject transwomen with a discourse that resembles that of the country’s elite right-wing party. On the surface these can seem like simple disagreements about respectability politics, but as in the 1980s, the factions fall along class politics as many transwomen in vulnerable situations are working-class.

These divisions are not uniquely Mexican. Around the world, many queer activists are tired of the pandering by multi-national corporations who sponsor floats but prop up destructive business and war efforts. These activists reject mainstream Pride and argue for organizing around efforts that prioritize trans individuals and working-class queers.

It’s important to remember that the queer movement emerged out of precisely these coalitions—solidarity between middle-class and working-class queer activists and with other groups fighting for liberation such as workers, immigrants, and oppressed racial groups. In 1979, Mexican queer activists chanted, “Nobody is free until we are all free!” That spirit must animate today’s queer activists.

The post A Tale of Two Pride Marches appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But that choice was accompanied by a healthy skepticism of the role of money in the halls of government. As the years went by, recurrent scandals prompted rounds of reform, fostering an intricate system of rules to promote ethical conduct.

The result is a daunting interface between private and public life, the line marked by financial investigation, disclosure, and divestiture. Still, from the early 20th century, U.S. presidents began to routinely call on leaders from business and industry to head key agencies of the government. And despite nagging public suspicion, the moguls drafted into service were consistently free of accusations—let alone outright findings—of corruption or misconduct.

Keep in mind, the sort of corruption threatened by the rich and powerful is quite distinct from the more garden-variety graft usually associated with public officials—bribery, principally; or undue allegiance to one political party or another. Such concerns were addressed in the late 19th century by the institution of the civil service, when federal employees were subjected for the first time to entrance exams, and protected from political removal. It marked the advent of a new kind of entity: the career civil servant.

Reckoning with the threat posed by wealthy appointees—that they might place their private interests ahead of the public’s, using their positions to help their friends or augment their fortunes—came later, and required more elaborate safeguards.

It was the onset of the first World War and the attendant task of retooling the nation’s industrial economy for wartime production that brought a surge of business executives into the government. Drafted by President Woodrow Wilson, starting in 1917, they signed on for service in new government bureaus at the nominal salary of a dollar a year.

First among these wartime stalwarts was Bernard Baruch, a financier and speculator known in his day as “the lone wolf of Wall Street.” Appointed head of the new War Industries Board, Baruch recruited a bevy of his tycoon chums and together they put the peacetime economy on footing to produce uniforms, tanks, and ammunition.

Another Wilson appointee was Herbert Hoover. A mining executive then based in London, Hoover emerged on the public stage by leading humanitarian war relief efforts for neutral Belgium. Calling Hoover back to the U.S., Wilson named him Food Administrator, and charged him with limiting domestic consumption and keeping the U.S. Army and its allies fed in the field.

Both of these men—and the dozens of other businessmen drafted to assist them—performed capably. Though these appointments came at the height of the Progressive Era, and the wary view of wealth that went with it, the American public came to accept these appointments as legitimate without audible objection.

Skip forward a decade, to 1929, and wealthy office-holders had become a routine feature in the federal government. More than that, it was a non-partisan phenomenon. Bernard Baruch had become the titular head and chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party, while Hoover, after a brief dalliance with the Democrats, won the presidency as a Republican. When Hoover became president, he decided to continue the dollar-a-year tradition, donating his salary to charity.

During Hoover’s tenure the crisis was not war but the Great Depression, and he again turned to men of wealth. One of Hoover’s principal innovations was to launch the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which would channel bailout funds to foundering banks and railroads. Selected to lead the new agency was Charles Dawes, a Chicago banker with a history of moonlighting for the government—he was the nation’s first Comptroller of the Currency, under President William McKinley, and later elected vice president with Calvin Coolidge. In 1925 he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his adroit management of postwar international debts.

Dawes immersed himself in launching the RFC until the bank owned by his family, the Central Republic Bank of Chicago, began to founder. Despite Hoover’s protest, in June 1932 Dawes resigned his post and rushed home to wrestle with panicked creditors. Soon after, now against Dawes’ private protest (he feared, rightly, political blowback), Central Republic was named recipient of the largest loan yet issued by the RFC. Though the bank ultimately closed, the bailout made for an orderly transition and the loans were repaid. But public resentment over what appeared to be an in-house deal damaged the reputation of Hoover and of the relief agency.

Here was just the sort of misconduct that critics had feared from the outset—men of wealth protecting their personal interests. But the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt later that year seemed to clear the air.

Roosevelt was more sparing in his reliance on the men of industry and finance—and yes, all were men—but utilize them he did, especially when faced with a new World War. As the crisis loomed, like President Wilson before him, Roosevelt called on the dollar-a-year crowd. Leading this troop of civilians was Bill Knudsen, then-president of General Motors. An expert in mass production, Knudsen was appointed in 1940 chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, at a salary of $1 a year.

As production ramped up, Knudsen brought with him executives from car companies, AT&T, and U.S. Steel. New Deal bureaucrats and labor activists denounced the appointments, but despite all the procurement contracts, all the millions spent, there was hardly a whiff of scandal.

By 1942, when Knudsen was awarded with a formal commission as Lieutenant General in the Army, the worst his critics could say was that he had been too slow in converting from peaceful industrial production to a war footing. “We are beginning to pay a heavy price for leaving the mobilization of industry in the hands of business men,” the Nation warned in 1942. Steel makers, in particular, were fighting expanded production “as a menace to monopolistic practices and stable prices,” argued an editorial. It was “Dollar-a-Year Sabotage,” The New Republic headlined.

But those criticisms were drowned out by the din of factory production, the great outpouring of armament that yielded an “arsenal of democracy,” as Knudsen phrased it, that carried the Allies to victory. “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production,” Knudsen remarked later. For all the fears of conflicted interest, the businessmen had proved their worth.

The dollar-a-year appointment routine went out with World War II, but presidents continued to tap the moneyed elite for advice and expertise, a practice that became the source of a growing thicket of regulations designed to forestall malfeasance. Roosevelt broke first ground here, in 1937, with an order barring purchase or sale of stock by government employees “for speculative purpose.” Later, his War Production Administration required its dollar-a-year men to disclose financial holdings and undergo background checks.

From there, safeguards advanced by stages. John F. Kennedy, during his aspirational 1960 campaign, called for a new standard, by which “no officer or employee of the executive branch shall use his official position for financial profit or personal gain.” Upon his election, he followed up with an executive order barring any “use of public office for private gain,” and then lobbied Congress for parallel laws. The result was new criminal statutes covering bribery and conflict of interest.

Lyndon Johnson was never an exemplar of disinterested politics, but early scandal in his administration, involving influence peddling by Johnson intimate Bobby Baker, a businessman and Democratic party organizer, prompted a new round of rulemaking. Each federal agency should have its own ethics code, Johnson ordered, and all presidential appointees were now required to file financial disclosure statements. In the 1970s, the fallout from the Watergate scandal, together with the troubles of presidential chum and advisor Burt Lance, prompted a new round of reform from President Jimmy Carter.

As with so many things, the status of ethics in an administration tends to reflect the character of the chief executive, regardless of the rules in place at the time. Consider the following exchange, in 1934, between Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and presidential aide Ray Moley, prior to Kennedy’s appointment at the SEC.

As recounted by Joe Kennedy biographer David Nasaw, Kennedy warned Roosevelt that he had “done plenty of things that people could find fault with.” At that point, Moley interjected: “Joe, I know you want this job. But if there is anything in your business career that could injure the president, this is the time to spill it.”

Kennedy’s reaction was quick and sharp. “With a burst of profanity he defied anyone to question his devotion to public interest or to point to a single shady act in his whole life. The president did not need to worry about that, he said. What was more, he would give his critics—and here again the profanity flowed freely—an administration of the SEC that would be a credit to his country, the president, himself and his family.”

After an exchange like that, codes and rules might seem superfluous. To outsiders, the Kennedy appointment appeared rash; “setting a wolf to guard a flock of sheep,” one critic charged. But Roosevelt was unfazed. Asked why he’d named such a notorious crook as Kennedy, Roosevelt quipped, “Takes one to catch one.” In the event, while nobody ever proposed Joe Kennedy for sainthood, he was never accused of misconduct or self-dealing while presiding at the SEC.

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“I wanted to change the discussion in America,” said Putnam. “I want us to focus more directly—all of us—on poor kids.”

Putnam said that while his childhood in Port Clinton wasn’t perfect—there was racism and sexism—he “remembered the place as largely classless.” Rich kids and poor kids attended the same churches and played on the same sports teams. And ultimately, in interviewing his classmates over half a century later, Putnam discovered that “we had lived the American dream.” Eighty percent of his class did better economically and educationally than their parents had. His two black classmates, who faced serious prejudice in Port Clinton, also “experienced unbelievable upward mobility.” They earned graduate degrees and had successful careers despite the fact that their parents had only third-grade educations.

Putnam has spent much of his career focusing on “how powerful community can be.” Going back to his hometown, he realized that at the root of this interest was how deeply he felt community there.

Today, the kids of Port Clinton aren’t rich in that same kind of community. The town has been hit hard by deindustrialization; the people who might have worked in factories are instead leading lives that are “so desolate and so alone and so without prospects” that Putnam found it hard to believe that this was the same town he grew up in.

But this is not the story for all Americans. “Things are getting better and better for the kids in the upper third of American society,” said Putnam—the children of college-educated Americans. But when it comes to children from the lower third of American society, whose parents haven’t gotten past high school, “their lives are getting worse and worse.” The gap is growing between these two groups in everything from participation in extracurricular activities and summer camp attendance to test scores, school quality, and mentoring.

The whole country is going to suffer for this, said Putnam. And it’s not just about economics. It’s about American principles, too. “It just isn’t fair,” Putnam said. “It violates the core commitments of our country going back to the beginning.”

And although America is divided both politically and by growing inequality, the one thing we’re not divided over, said Putnam, is that 95 percent of us think that everybody should get a fair start in life.

People are slowly beginning to recognize that we’re turning into a different country—a segregated country, said Putnam, less in terms of race or religion than class. Rich folks are marrying other rich folks; poor folks are marrying other poor folks, if they marry at all.

Larson asked Putnam why he seems to have “intentionally set out not to have villains” in his discussion of inequality in America today. Why not bring into this discussion the powerful political influences that are keeping us from closing the opportunity gap that poor kids face?

Putnam said that one way of creating political change is creating villains. Another is trying to persuade people to see a problem your way. “I’m trying to persuade lots of people in America who don’t know think of themselves as being worried about inequality that they should worry about inequality, for the sake of their own kids’ future and for the sake of the country,” he said. “I’m not trying to preach to the choir. I’m trying to preach to the unconverted.”

What, asked Larson, is your message to politicians?

Putnam said that he’s spoken with many of the presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle; Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have both mentioned his book. (Bush liked the first five chapters, about the problem; he didn’t like the sixth, about possible solutions.)

“I want to get everybody arguing about how we fix this problem,” said Putnam. “That’s my main purpose.” America addresses tough issues through argument. He added that the opportunity gap is a “purple problem.” Some aspects—the economic decline of the American working class—are better understood through a blue, liberal lens. Others—the collapse of the working-class family—are better seen through a red, conservative lens.

What, asked Larson, can we do as individuals to address this problem?

Putnam said that individuals should “support candidates, nationally and locally, who are able to answer the question, ‘What are you going to do about the opportunity gap?’” But they can also help the kids in their communities. “Poor kids are alone,” he said. Every institution—families, churches, schools—has failed them. They don’t trust anyone. They need adults in their lives—and we can be those adults by serving as mentors.

In the audience question-and-answer session, Putnam was asked what—besides politics—can create greater change at the community level.

He said that a seemingly trivial issue—the growing gap in participation in extracurricular activities like band and sports—is a very big problem. These activities teach kids “soft skills” like cooperation, grit, determination, and delayed gratification. The reason for this gap is that these activities are increasingly “pay to play,” with fees that go up to thousands of dollars. Yes, there are waivers in many schools, but these waivers come with a social cost; no kid wants the stigma of having a waiver. Putnam advised audience members to call their school board and urge them to end waivers, and fund these activities.

At the event’s conclusion, Larson quoted President Lyndon B. Johnson talking about his war on poverty, and asserting that before he was through, no people or community in America would “‘be able to ignore poverty in our midst.’” You’re trying to do the same for the opportunity gap, Larson told Putnam.

The post The Loneliness of America’s Poor Kids appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the 2016 presidential election cranking up, soon the airwaves will swell with candidates’ ideas for how to remedy the woes of America’s poor. What should we do about economic disadvantage—particularly in a country that holds the concept of equality as a democratic principle in such high regard?

As a preview for Zócalo’s fifth annual book prize event “Can Democracy Exist Without Equality?”, we asked scholars: What effects could increasing inequality have on democracy in America?

The post Is Rising Inequality Slowly Poisoning Our Democracy? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was one unit within a 1-square-mile section of apartments informally called “The Jungle.” The area included apartment buildings with whimsical names like Coco Capri and The Islander and boasted swimming pools, large living spaces, courtyards with palm trees and birds of paradise. There were scenic views of the Santa Monica Mountains, the glimmering Hollywood sign, the white dome of Griffith Observatory, and the homes perched atop Baldwin Hills.

I was 7 years old then and didn’t notice the shady goings-on in the alley beneath my bedroom window. Nor did I really care about the thwap-thwap-thwapping coming from that helicopter that circled over our neighborhood. I had other things to do: playing with a new baby brother, watching the Family Film Festival on KTLA, and gobbling canisters of these new things called Pringles.

But by 1982, I was in seventh grade, and had developed angst and the ambition to be a writer. I wrote in my journal every night, and began to see my parents, to see me, and also, note my surroundings.

The police helicopter was looking for someone and we didn’t hardly hear the television. (My journal, August 1982)

I started visiting the homes of church friends. I noted the differences between our apartment living and their more comfortable house living. Lawns. Washers and dryers in laundry rooms in the house. Driveways. Someone mentioned that Ray Charles lived in one of those houses up the hill from mine and … Huh? Those giant things were houses …? One family lived in …? And Ray Charles? The singer? Ray Charles is black. You mean black people, one family of black people, lived in those giant houses way up on that hill …?

Pop-pop-pop. Somebody shooting again. Crawl over to the television or the stereo, twist the knob until the sounds of Dance Fever or Earth, Wind & Fire overtook the noise of angry men in the twisty, dead-end streets below us.

But then, nothing—not Deney Terio, not Philip Bailey—competed with the ghetto birds. Helicopters, lots of them, often pulled my gaze away from those houses. Cops in the sky. Almost always at night, the police helicopters roared by with bright lights that ripped through bedroom curtains and past the squeezed-shut eyelids of men, women, and children. And they’d come so low, I imagined feeling the chop of the blades against my numb cheeks. My stomach vibrated with the rumbling, and my heart skipped and I forgot to breathe as sirens wailed so loud and so close and swirling blue and red lights reflected off my bedroom’s yellow and green floral wallpaper and I prayed for it to be over.

And it was over … until pop-pop-pop or a woman screamed or glass broke in the darkness. In the early ’80s, the breaks between quiet and violence shortened as more young men began to hang around the neighborhood—they lounged on car hoods, blocked the sidewalks, and huddled on the balconies of the front units. We walked quicker now from our car to our apartment. My siblings and I no longer met the eyes of kids we weren’t allowed to play with. And then, the owner of our apartment complex erected wrought-iron security gates. Drugs and gangs—and the Los Angeles Police Department—had finally hijacked Santo Tomas Drive.

Today at the Crenshaw Shopping Center a man got robbed for $100,000. I got a blue denim mini skirt and a plaid shirt that buttons to the sides. See ya! (My journal, September 1982)

I only got asked once in my life if I was a gang member. A girl at junior high school asked: “Where you from? What set you claim?” I gawked at the question because did she not see me? Did I look like I was a Blood or a Crip? Thirteen years old, wearing thick glasses, rummage-sale green Chemin de Fer jeans, and a plaid shirt that buttoned on the side. Honor roll student but bad at math. Played hand-bells at church. Had a crush on Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. But she asked. And I told her that I didn’t claim anything. She believed me and didn’t hurt me.

Unlike the countless boys and men in the Jungle who got hurt, or worse. Every week, I heard tales of so-and-so was shot, or so-and-so was jumped. Bullets peppered concrete and tree trunks. Gunshots became birdsong. The nuts who lived in the apartment beneath us shot at each other every other new moon. What the hell?

I started looking up at those houses on the hill more and more. Did those people, the ones who looked like me, have their sleep interrupted by police helicopters, gang noise, and domestic drama that spilled into courtyards and alleys? Did the kids in those neighborhoods play with each other? Did their birds of paradise look ashy like ours? And how did you get to live in houses like that anyway?

We drove up there sometimes—my mom’s best friend lived in an apartment in Baldwin Hills. Black people watered those lawns and painted eaves, washed nice cars, smiled and waved at each other as they walked dogs. Smelled like fresh grass up there, honeysuckle and barbecue smoke. So quiet. So … clean. Mom and Dad deserve to live up here, I thought. They worked hard. And our apartment was clean. We got good grades. We went to church every Saturday. I was no different from my friends LeToia and Gigi and all the rest. Sure, their parents had suffixes and prefixes before and after their names. And they wore Gunne Sax dresses to church, and went on vacations that required climbing aboard airplanes.

What was my family not doing that kept us from being up on that hill?

I wanted up that hill. Not because I was ashamed (although high school is a time in every child’s life, no matter their socio-economics, that they are ashamed of something). No. I wanted up that hill because of the order that hill promised. I was, and continue to be, a child of order.

… the helicopter woke me up this morning. (My journal, September 1982)

My family moved out of the Jungle in 1985—I was 15 and my sister was 13, and we had started to attract the attention of neighborhood thugs. At 7, my little brother was still too young and too protected to be “jumped in” by gangs, and my older brother had graduated from college. Mom and Dad had successfully shielded us—but for how long? Gang violence and police abuse had worsened, and the apartment complex’s security gate door no longer locked.

For three years, we lived in a pistachio-green house off Central Avenue, a neighborhood of taquerias, chickens roaming the block, Iglesias Pentacostales. Then, in 1989, Dad landed a great promotion, and like Weezy and George Jefferson, our family moved into a deluxe apartment (well, not deluxe but the nicest place we’d lived) in drama-free and relatively safe downtown Los Angeles.

My last April at UC Santa Cruz, I watched televised coverage of my former neighbors looting and fighting. Watched palm tree fronds catch fire. Watched the National Guard setting up sandbags in the parking lot of the Sports Arena. Awed, I could only shake my head and hope for the best.

“The best” has happened in some ways: gang injunctions and better community policing. Slumlords have been forced to improve living conditions in those apartments between Crenshaw and La Brea. Businesses like Cinemark Theaters and Sears bring money into the area. A fancy meal at Post and Beam makes you forget, for a moment, the still-abandoned Santa Barbara Plaza across the street. Crenshaw Boulevard will get its own Metro rail line. And the city of Los Angeles now refers to “The Jungle” as “Baldwin Village.” There’s even an official blue sign just like those hanging in Los Feliz and Silver Lake.

For several years now, rumors that “They” (an always amorphous group that includes business leaders, politicians, and the Yeti) will tear down the Jungle have drifted around. Parts of me say that’s cool, because too much craziness happens there. Equal parts of me worry—the parts that remember being a member of the tribe of “Those People” (the ones in Those Apartments).

We weren’t all thugs, felons, and addicts. We were teachers, warehouse workers, gardeners, administrative assistants, taxpayers, and voters … on a budget. And today, the economics of that area have worsened—the median household income is $36,500, with almost a third of families living at poverty level. And both black and Latino gangs continue to survive despite injunctions. So tear down the Jungle and then what? Those residents who don’t gangbang, who work hard, who obey the laws, would move where?

Today, I still live in Los Angeles, specifically, in Windsor Hills, one of the wealthiest African-American areas in the country. I don’t live in one of those hillside homes that I grew up looking at, but I am just a mile away. My 10-year-old daughter is living the urban-suburban life I had always wondered about as a kid. Walking dogs on clean streets. Waving to neighbors you know by name. The smell of freshly cut grass and orange blossoms.

Alas, living in the city still means police helicopters and sirens sometimes waking us at 1:00 in the morning. But no one has asked my girl if she bangs. She knows crime because I write novels that feature an LAPD homicide detective. In my daughter’s world, people die because they are old or sick or their cars crashed or their planes fell from the sky. She knows that Mom grew up in the Jungle because we pass it nearly every day, and she sees that I always look over there, every single time, to glimpse my childhood home.

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So, during the first week of October 2011, I loaded up a backpack with camping supplies, camera, and a field recorder and jumped on a subway to downtown LA. The scene at the Occupy encampment in City Hall Park was overwhelming–so many people, so many signs, so many agendas–and the atmosphere was chaotic and excited. Trying to make sense of it, I snapped pictures of every sign hung around the tents and trees, mentally inventorying the different shades of political sentiment: populist, anti-capitalist, Ron Paulist, completely incoherent.

I could see the thing was largely a mess, but I also found it exciting. I’ve taken part in anti-war demonstrations, a G-8 counter-summit, and protests on the Puget Sound organized by Port Militarization Resistance, an anti-war group. Occupy represented what was best about all of them. It was an unanticipated, largely spontaneous gathering of strangers working together to shape the national conversation by raising issues of social and economic justice. Like 1968, 1919, or 1848, the year 2011 was a watershed. (It will be a point of reference for the next generation of unruly proles, lefty do-gooders, and déclassé middle-class brats like myself.) The Middle East had an Arab Spring, and Occupy promised an American Autumn.

After surveying the occupation I found myself at the welcome tent trying to get the attention of a staffer. I had a list of questions: Who was organizing everything? How could I get involved? What were the big ideas? The volunteer on duty, a 30-ish, well-dressed woman, was of little help. No, I was told, there was no legal support team. No, the working groups weren’t seeking new members.

Did they think I was a spook? I have been a summit-hopper and an anti-war protester. I know that oftentimes activists shy away from revealing too much information to strangers. But this was not that. Nor did it seem like genuine disorganization or cluelessness. Instead, these people seemed like semi-professional activists who just didn’t want me involved. Factions were already forming.

As with any broad movement, there was tension from the start. Dozens of organizations had gotten involved, and many of them were trying to take the helm. I doubt these competing groups had any intention of subverting the overall movement, but many came with habits and mindsets that were in conflict. For example, anarchists had been a driving force behind Occupy Wall Street in New York, but, by the time the demonstrations arrived in Los Angeles, a determined group of non-anarchists had already set up social media accounts, made arrangements with city hall, and begun to direct the Occupy General Assemblies. (In L.A., James Lafferty, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles, became one of the most prominent non-anarchist leaders and, yes, head of a legal support team that volunteers had told me didn’t exist.)

Still, a peaceful anarchist sensibility pervaded Occupy L.A., and it reflected itself in the way food and resources were distributed, how decisions were made, and how Occupy dealt with the police. Anarchists introduced innovations like “twinkle fingers” (a way of holding your hands up or down and rippling your fingers to indicate approval or disapproval), consensus (a mode of decision-making that requires general unanimity–or at least lack of opposition), and the “people’s mic” (in which the crowd, when listening to a speaker who has no electronic sound equipment, repeats his or her words to amplify them). In my first week at Occupy, I saw one well-known anarchist leading a workshop on these methods. The energy was palpable, and Occupy gained national attention. We inspired a lot of people, and we thought we were changing the world–getting more people engaged and bringing about a more politically and economically just society.

But all efforts atrophy. Even as the media attention increased, the number of anarchists–the people who’d come up with the most creative ideas and formed the initial spine of Occupy–decreased. As more self-appointed leaders emerged to greet the politicians and newscasters, I noticed a national trend toward the theater of activism–let’s march in protest!–and away from direct action.

Today, nearly one year later, we have Occupy organizers all over the country plugging away with the same old ritual of marches and meetings, futilely expecting a return to the initial energy and prominence. Just look at Occupy L.A. General assemblies are still taking place. Last I checked, the Twitter feed @OccupyLA counted upwards of 10,000 posts over the course of 10 months. That’s 1,000 tweets a month, or more than 30 a day. The alternate Twitter feed, @OWSLosAngeles, has sent out about 8,000 posts. Much of the content consists of links to articles from Huffington Post and the Nation--or e-invitations to a hundred different varieties of Occupy: Occupy Patriarchy, Occupy Capitalism, Occupy Santiago. But who can keep up with that? Who wants to?

Tweeting is up; strategy is down. This is what happens when a movement substitutes Twitter followers for people on the street–and substitutes people on the street for people on the move, people actually doing something. Occupy caught everyone’s attention, but then it didn’t know what to do with it. It demanded to be heard, but then, when the world said, “OK, you have my attention–what’s up?” it didn’t know what else to say. The initial message about economic injustice, about wealth going to only a sliver of the population, never developed. All Occupy did, in every major city, day after day, was keep occupying. No wonder such efforts produced a quickly diminishing rate of returns. We fetishized the process. But process is a corollary to–not a replacement for–the content of our politics. Occupy had become a moment, not a movement.

In the final scene of Mondo cane (A Dog’s World), a sensationalistic Italian documentary from 1962, several elders of the Mekeo tribe in Papua New Guinea wait at a dirt landing strip cleared from a lush hilltop. Nearby is a control tower constructed of bamboo and a replica of a Cesna airplane, also made of bamboo. The narrator informs us that this tableau is part of a religious ritual intended to attract airplanes full of wealth and power, a ritual that arose after wartime planes full of cargo stopped landing in the area and members of the tribe were left wondering why the prosperous times had ended. “They wait, motionless, searching the sky,” the narrator says.

Now, I have no idea whether Mondo cane depicted the Mekeo tribe in a way that might be called “honest” (that’s a discussion I’ll leave to countless others), but as a metaphor the scene is powerful. Such “cargo cults,” as they are called, were seen among a number of pre-industrial tribes in the Pacific, tribes that supposedly tried to replicate certain conditions in order to win back the vessels that had brought so many welcome goods to the area. With the waning of Occupy’s influence, we are now witnessing the phenomenon of cargo cult activism.

If Occupy is to move forward it must look at the interests of tomorrow, not at what worked to get it 15 minutes of fame yesterday. Rather than return to the same hackneyed marches, all of us who want to make change should think critically about what it is we want and how we’re going to get there. Our superstitions, our cults of cargo, only stand in the way.

Daniel Cairns is a law student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.

*Photo courtesy of craigdietrich.

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