President Biden should drop out of the presidential race, but not because he is too old or too infirm.

He should drop out because he is not criminal enough to win.

The United States has broken bad—just look at our guns, our drugs, our major corporations—and a good and decent man no longer seems up to the job of running the country. We want our leaders to be scary because the world is scary. We’re looking for someone more cunning, more brutal, willing to violate the law or Constitution to serve and protect us.

This, not age, is the real story behind the reaction to the first presidential debate. Donald Trump broadcast his criminal id, lied constantly, defended his lawless January 6 coup, and suggested he would commit new crimes against the republic. For this, he was judged the winner. Meanwhile, Joe Biden played the kindly forgetful grandfather standing up for the rule of law and democracy—and created a political crisis that has many in his own party seeking to drive him from the race.

This post-debate reaction is hardly surprising. Criminality is politically powerful. Trump surged in his fundraising and maintained his lead in the polls after a New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal from voters his liaison with a porn star. Now, Democrats are encouraging Biden to behave more like Trump, by raising his voice, demonizing doubters, and talking as tough as Clint Eastwood’s convict in Escape from Alcatraz.

Some Americans remain puzzled that Americans would elect a criminal, or anyone who behaved like one. But the only real puzzle is why anyone is puzzled.

Criminal daring has always been useful to democratic leaders. Writing during the French Revolution—that violent and criminal launch of the modern republic—the Marquis de Sade, who spent much of his life in prison, observed, “It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system.” From France to Brazil and beyond, human beings vote for politicians whom they suspect of crime and corruption.

There are three reasons for this. One reason is that the criminal or corrupt may be better than the alternatives. (Ask Louisianans about “voting for the crook” Edwin Edwards for governor over the former Klansman David Duke). Another reason is that being a president or prime minister requires dealing with foreign leaders who are criminals (see Putin, Vladimir).

Another, less discussed reason is representative: We humans want to see ourselves in our politicians, and we humans are a crooked species.

“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms,” Émile Durkheim wrote in his 1897 classic Suicide: A Study in Sociology. “We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization logically imply it.”

Americans may not read much Durkheim, but our profoundly punitive country rivals dictatorships and autocracies in its fervor to lock up its people. So, it’s perfectly natural for huge percentages of Americans to want to see a convicted felon in the Oval Office.

Today, after generations of mass incarceration, one in three American adults has a criminal record. For context, that’s the same percentage of working-age adults who have four-year college degrees. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University once determined that if all the Americans who had been arrested held hands, they would circle the globe three times.

If such comparisons don’t grab you, here’s something more political. In raw numbers, about 80 million Americans have a criminal record of some sort. Back in 2020, Joe Biden received just over 81 million voters in the November presidential election. As of spring 2024, 80.7 million Americans were registered as either Democrats or Republicans. Criminality and party membership are similarly common American experiences.

Which is why the Democrats should make sure they replace “good and decent” Biden with a convicted felon.

I mean, why give Trump the honor of making history as the first-ever convict in the Oval Office?

Alas, by this logic, my fellow Californian, Vice President Kamala Harris, won’t be Biden’s replacement. As a prosecutor with deep law enforcement experience, she’s the wrong fit for a country this crooked.

The good news is that other distinguished Californians boast criminal records. The actor Danny Trejo, an Angeleno, has developed a devoted following after spending his young adulthood in most of the great state prisons, including San Quentin, Folsom, Soledad, Vacaville, and Susanville. But Trejo is 80, and not nearly as well known as the best choice to take on the Biden mantle:

Snoop Dogg.

Born in Long Beach, Snoop (aka Calvin Broadus), 52, would bring clear convictions to the campaign: for cocaine possession in 1990, for gun possession during a 1993 traffic stop, and for charges of drug and gun possession in 2007. Snoop was also tried and acquitted of murder in 1996, an experience that more presidents should have, since the job is about making life-and-death decisions.

What makes Snoop the best choice, among the one-third of Americans with criminal histories, is just how expertly he’s mined his record to produce one of the most diverse and enduring careers in 21st-century entertainment. He’s a rapper, record producer, actor, tastemaker (with a taste for cannabis), comic, poet, author, and game show host. In 2022, demonstrating more mainstream credibility than any living politician, he headlined the Super Bowl halftime show.

And choosing a VP would be a no-brainer. Snoop and his friend and business partner, fellow ex-con Martha Stewart, have worked together on everything from TV shows to a line of handbags. Together, the two would make an unbeatable and utterly indecent presidential ticket.

Democratic elites, who include a lot of lawyers, might feel uncomfortable with someone with Snoop’s past in the White House. But that’s only because they fail to appreciate just how much the federal courts have changed the job.

Just this year, the Supreme Court made two rulings that blew the door wide open for criminal presidents. First, the court ignored the plain text of the 14th Amendment to determine that even a person who had committed the crime of insurrection against the country couldn’t be thrown off the ballot by a state. Then, earlier this month, the Court’s six-member conservative majority found that presidents have near-total immunity for crimes they commit in office.

If both the people and the highest court in the land want a crook in the White House, who dares stand in their way?

The post Dump Biden. Run Snoop appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Please don’t save democracy.

If you’re a politician—stop promising to save it.

Please! Stop even trying.

Because you can’t. Democracy isn’t something you save. The sooner we stop talking about saving democracy, the better off democracy will be.

Our mindless recitation of “saving democracy”—everyone from President Biden to Sacha Baron Cohen has pledged to come to its rescue—demonstrates how little we understand about the governing systems that organize our lives.

To start, the words “democracy” and “save” don’t fit together.

Democracy is not a penalty shot that can be saved by a goalkeeper. Democracy is not a dollar that can be saved by putting it in the bank. Democracy is not a file that you can save in Microsoft Word.

Democracy is not even the migrant whom you save from drowning in the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande.

It’s easy to get confused about democracy’s meaning because we use the word “democracy” promiscuously. We use the word to refer to things we see in politics or government with which we agree. We use it to describe the status quo in countries that think of themselves as democracies.

We also use “democracy” to refer to our post-World War II liberal order, supposedly superior to all other systems, even though that order often protects military and corporate powers that undermine democracy. We use “democracy” to mean elections, even though many countries with autocracies stage elections. In the United States, we use “democracy” to refer to our 18th-century constitutional system—even though that system is profoundly anti-democratic, especially when it comes to the unbalanced representation in the Senate and our peculiar Electoral College.

After 18 years of reporting on and convening events about democracy around the world, I have found a better, more useful definition of democracy. Democracy is best understood as four words: Everyday people governing themselves.

When you think about democracy this way, you quickly realize that democracy isn’t something you save. It’s something you do—on your own and with other people. When people in your neighborhood or your city or your nation are doing the work of governing—deliberating, making decisions, implementing policies—you are in a democracy.

Thus, democracy is, quite literally, work—and very much a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton famously observed in his book Orthodoxy that democracy is like writing love letters or blowing one’s nose—one of those things that “we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.”

So when you judge whether a particular place or institution counts as democratic, consider democracy to be a spectrum, with “everyday people governing themselves” as its most democratic pole.

Soon, you’ll recognize that most democracy exists at the local level, in the smaller entities where it’s easier for everyday people to get together and govern. As Mahatma Gandhi wrote days before his assassination: “True democracy cannot be worked by 20 men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.”

Unfortunately, when asked whether they live in a democracy, people today don’t think of their village, precinct, or city, but of their nation-state. They usually answer the question based on whether their national leaders are fairly elected, and whether they seem respectful of the country’s constitutional norms.

The word “democracy” has become a synonym for a safe destination, the political-economic equivalent of a comfortable sofa where we can lie down, relax, and breathe. From this sofa conception flows the idea that democracy can be “saved”—from authoritarians or foreign powers or misinformation or anything else that might tear us from our sofas.

This sofa perspective is also why relatively peaceful and rich nation-states can call themselves democracies even though they are governed by small numbers of officials, technocrats, interest group leaders, or super-rich businesspeople. In our planet’s largest so-called democracies, everyday people don’t get to decide much. They can only vote, occasionally, in elections dominated by the same power entities running the country.

But real democracy is not a sofa. It is not cushy. Democracy, at least democracy on the spectrum of “everyday people governing themselves,” is not about voting for one powerful person. It’s about decentralizing decision-making power and handing it to regular people.

For this reason, President Biden’s pledges to preserve and protect democracy—coming from an officeholder with the power to govern by executive order and take military action around the world, without public notice or deliberation—will never be broadly credible.

The task of democracy requires us to get up off our couches. This is the sort of work that involves faith and competition, and thus resembles a religion or a sport as much as a system of government. Democracy is maintained through practice; you lose it when you stop showing up. If people stop going to Mass, saying the rosary, and listening to the Pope, Catholicism dies. If people stop throwing balls at rounded bats, there is no baseball.

So, if you value democracy, practice it—wherever you can. Let the kids in your local Little League vote to choose the all-stars, instead of the coaches or parents. Let workers and customers make the big decisions at your company. Create assemblies of everyday ls that write the local ordinances in your city or school district.

And please don’t waste another moment hoping your leaders will save democracy. Get out there and do it yourself.

The post Stop Trying to ‘Save’ Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those who criticize President Biden as “too old” or “slow” or “confused” might learn something from the very similar treatment of the Roman emperor Claudius.

Claudius, who ruled from 41 to 54 CE, was the most effective and successful member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, apart from Augustus. He was also the only emperor mocked as weak-willed and feeble. Claudius grew up a sickly, unattractive child with a limp and a speech impediment. His own family teased and derided him, in his early years and beyond. Like other Romans, they saw his physical imperfections as weakness, and cause for disdain. They kept him out of the public eye, encouraged him to study history, and did not allow him to hold any civic  or military office.

Caligula, Claudius’ nephew, attained the imperial throne at age 24. In order to stress his Julio-Claudian family ties, Caligula appointed Claudius to an honorific post as co-consul in 37 CE.  Yet Caligula followed the family’s view of Claudius as weak, and did everything he could to ridicule his aging uncle. Caligula made Claudius the butt of jokes at dinner. He even required him to pay 8 million sesterces to serve as a priest in the imperial cult, forcing him to sell off property to pay the exorbitant fee.refused to appoint his uncle to any public office of note.

Claudius survived Caligula’s acts of degradation by feigning indifference. When Caligula pushed Claudius into a river, robes and all, out of anger that the older man took part in a senatorial delegation in Germany, Claudius played dumb to avoid provoking further retaliation. Nor did Claudius complain when Caligula humiliated him by making him the last consul consulted on all opinions in the senate. Again, he pretended not to notice the slight.

Claudius had no part in the brutal assassination of Caligula, a mere four years into the young emperor’s reign, at the hands of a praetorian guard infuriated by his cruelty and erratic behavior. In the midst of this palace coup, Claudius, the last of the Julio-Claudian family, feared for his life. He ran and hid in a bedroom in the palace. When a praetorian guard found him and proclaimed him emperor, Claudius quickly promised 15,000 sesterces to each man to win his loyalty.

Thus Claudius lived to take up the throne, at age 50. His policies provided the Romans with much-needed military and administrative reforms. He famously expanded citizenship to provincials, and sought out talented outsiders who could serve Roman institutions. In Lyon in Gaul, modern France, for example, Claudius advanced provincial elites to become members in the senate in Rome. Locals in Lyon appreciated Claudius’ actions on their behalf, and immortalized a speech he offered in their defense by casting it in a bronze which survives to this day. Claudius’ efforts to open the senate to new members set a pattern for greater inclusion that would invigorate the body for centuries to come.

Claudius is celebrated today for his infrastructure reform and building projects; he funded a new port for the city of Rome in Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber River. He planted new cities and colonies, such as the settlement that is now known as Cologne, Germany. Claudius also supported the successful expansion of Roman rule into Britain, and personally went to Gaul to claim victory there.

Roman coin depicting Emperor Claudius (left). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Despite his many successes, he faced heavy criticism. Roman elites fumed because Claudius expanded the imperial bureaucracy to include freedmen—former slaves who had earned freedom, but not equality, in Roman society. The decision, like Claudius’ support of provincial citizens, demonstrated a canny awareness of the value of incorporating new and talented men into the state. But entrenched elites, who worried about enabling powerful decision-makers from outside the upper class who owed loyalty only to the emperor, ridiculed the new functionaries as lacking in culture, and as being motivated only by economic gain. The biographer Suetonius, for instance, disparaged Claudius for giving out magistracies and punishments in accord with freedmen’s recommendations. Like other Roman elites, he complained that the emperor was too easily swayed by his servants, and did not have the strength of character to make up his own mind.

Looking back on these accusations today, what stands out is the personal mockery that accompanied them—from contemporaries and from later Roman historians—because Claudius did not live up to expectations for physically fit, manly, headstrong emperors. The Romans defined virtue in terms of masculine ideals; the term “virtue” means literally the quality of being a man, requiring physical strength and vigor. Critics usually blamed Roman emperors for military disasters or avarice. They targeted Claudius instead for physical and mental weakness.

Biden’s predicament is similar. Like Claudius, the president can boast many achievements—recovery from the pandemic, building a global coalition in support of Ukraine, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and pushing through historic legislation to rebuild infrastructure and respond to climate change. Yet, like Claudius, he is mocked for lacking the swagger and virility of a younger man.

Members of Biden’s own party openly acknowledge his age, 81, as their primary concern. They worry he will not be up to the physical demands of the presidency, and that he may not finish his term. Ironically, Biden’s likely Republican challenger, Donald Trump, is 77—also elderly. He, too, may not finish out his years in office. Yet Trump’s aggressive bluster and virulent anger, along with his wide girth, make him appear more virile. Voters equate an angry demeanor with a more manly, youthful leader, and do not weigh the advantages of experience and wisdom in a president.

Claudius reminds us that it’s foolish to dismiss a leader’s political skills and wise actions based on superficial observations of physicality and virility. It has taken centuries for historians to reevaluate Claudius’ rule, and to appreciate his administration’s forward-looking policies. Hopefully American voters will be quicker to realize that human virtues and moral strength do not require the appearance of youth.

The post Worried About Biden’s Age? Consider Claudius appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Come back, Kamala. Come back.

Back to California, where you might have a future.

Away from Washington, D.C., where they will never give you a fair shake.

You’re politically trapped. You’re the unpopular vice president of an unpopular president. As a team, the two of you are headed to a catastrophic election defeat, even though your likely opponent is an insurrectionist ex-president held legally liable for rape and facing multiple criminal indictments.

Two-thirds of Democrats, and anyone who can read swing state polls, want your boss, Joe Biden, not to run for re-election, and instead open the door for a campaign that could produce a more electable nominee. But everyone knows Biden, 81, will run anyway.

What’s more appalling is that you are getting much of the blame for much of this. Biden’s many allies in politics and media suggest he can’t drop out because the nomination would go to you.

They note that you do worse in presidential polls than him. But they leave unmentioned the truth that you’re unpopular because your job as vice president is to represent him, and he’s given you peanuts to work with. He and his administration have never articulated a clear vision or direction for the country, or a second term. Biden’s team has bungled crises, like the Afghanistan withdrawal, and broken promises to reverse toxic Trump policies like rights-violating immigration restrictions and inflation-inducing trade protections.

You’ve loyally represented Biden on those issues, and gotten nothing but criticism for it. Your critics claim that you’ve failed to articulate convincing defenses for Biden’s misbegotten policies, especially on immigration. The real problem is that his policies—which include mass deportation and denial of asylum requests—are indefensible.

It’s time for you to face reality: If you remain on the ticket as Biden’s vice president, there’s no way out. If Biden loses, you’ll take the blame.

If Biden somehow wins, you won’t get a lick of credit: The credit will all go to Trump’s awfulness. You’d still be confined to a second term of representing an elderly, visionless president, leaving you too weak to make a plausible presidential bid yourself in 2028.

Sometimes the best way forward is to step back. You should announce, as soon as possible, that you will not be the Democratic nominee for vice president next year.

You do this by being blunt. Try this: “This country will sustain irreparable damage if Donald Trump becomes president again. And I don’t want to do anything that will help him. While I’ve done a much better job as vice president than what the media say, the polls show I’m unpopular with the public, and the president already has an uphill fight to win re-election. So, I have informed him I will not run for vice president. Now, he can pick a new running mate and reset this campaign.”

This will make you look selfless—you’re giving up a high office because you want to protect the country. You’ll win extensive praise, especially from Democrats desperate for a stronger ticket. Who knows? You might create pressure on Biden to reconsider his own decision to run.

And while you’d be closing a door in D.C., you’d be opening a bigger one here in California.

That’s because you’d be returning to a state that will soon need a new governor. Gavin Newsom is termed out in 2026, so his seat will be open.

If you ran for the job, you’d be the overwhelming favorite.

Some people will suggest it’s too early to think about the 2026 governor’s race. But the campaign is already well underway. Three state elected officials have already declared their candidacies. None of them should worry you. Two, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and Controller Betty Yee, have little name recognition. The third, State Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond, seems to be running to demonstrate his complete lack of self-awareness. He is known mostly for administrative incompetence and pandemic-era failures in education.

Two other politicians—Attorney General Rob Bonta and State Senate leader Toni Atkins—may jump in, but they can’t match you in star power or fundraising. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass could be a formidable governor, but she seems unlikely to run.

I suspect Californians would welcome you as governor—you’re more decisive and focused than Newsom. As governor, you’d set the agenda and decide the budget. With a legislature dominated by your fellow Democrats, you could get far more done than you’d ever manage as president in a polarized Washington.

And the job is much bigger and better than your current one. California governors enjoy great executive authority, so much so that their office has effectively become a second American presidency. You’d still be an international figure, but without having to abide an octogenarian president.

And, you could build a record that would make you a far stronger candidate for president later on, if that’s something you wish for your future.

Plus, you’d enjoy California weather.

Doesn’t that all sound much better than another thankless vice-presidential campaign, and perhaps another four years in the rain and misery of Washington?

Come back, Kamala. Before Christmas if you can.

The post Come Home, Kamala appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the Joe-mocracy survives.

My fellow Americans, too many of you fail to understand the true nature of government in the United States, here in the third decade of the 21^st century. Since 2020, our country has not been governed by its people or by its representative institutions.

Instead, we’ve become a Joe-mocracy. That is, we are governed by people named Joe.

But not by all Joes. The American Joe-mocracy is an avuncular autocracy, led by two elderly Joes from two different mid-Atlantic states that, taken together, have a half-million fewer residents than San Diego County.

One is Delaware’s Joe Biden, 80, current occupant of the presidency, a job with more power than even a responsible God would want to bear. The other is Joe Manchin, 75, of West Virginia, who occupies the pivotal and powerful center in a divided Senate.

Over the past two years, virtually all of the significant governing by U.S. elected officials—on major legislation from infrastructure to inflation—was achieved by compromise between the two Joes. And since this is a country of partisan extremists that abhors compromise, the Joe-mocracy succeeded mostly in uniting the left and right in frustration.

Given all that anger—and the unpopularity of the Joes—it appeared that the Joe-mocracy would fall from power after November’s elections. But improbably, the elections provided an unexpected endorsement of the Joe-mocratic status quo. For the next two years, the Senate remains divided, under the narrow Democratic control that Manchin exploits.

The House, now barely in GOP hands, remains so split that, to achieve anything at all, the likely Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield—a city with five times more people than any West Virginia or Delaware municipality—will have to negotiate with the Joes.

This triumph of the Joe-mocracy is a huge political upset. Because the Joes in question so embody the cultural meaning of the name.

America is supposed to be an exceptional place, and yet the name Joe—as I well know—is unexceptional. Average Joe, Joe Citizen, Joe Blow, Joe Schmo, Joe Sixpack. Indeed Joe, once a common name, has become less common; I know not a single Joe among my children’s friends—it’s all Liams and Lucases these days.

Nothing about Joe says “national leadership.” That’s why, early in the Democratic primaries, I thought that Biden never would get elected president. We’d never elected a Joe before, and this one seemed too tired, too old, too mediocre to win high office in a country that, in leaders, responded to talk of great hope and exalted dreams.

But when Biden won anyway, I realized that country was a thing of the past.  We no longer live in a dreamy, aspirational nation. We are as tired and old and mediocre as the Joes in charge.

As the United States becomes less dynamic, its politics have grown rigid and inflexible. The UCLA scholar of American politics and policy Lynn Vavreck and colleagues, in new research on the 2020 election, identify the problem as “calcification.” One of its by-products, they say, is that “within parties, people are more alike than ever.” Our sameness makes Americans boring.

Which is why it makes sense that a couple of boring Joes are running the country.

Let’s be fair: the Joe-mocracy can claim some victories. Manchin and Biden got through a huge stimulus and major investments in infrastructure and climate change. The Joe-mocracy also has quietly cemented official American consensus on issues that once were hot-buttons, like same-sex marriage.

But the Joe-mocracy offers no clear vision of the future, because the Joes in charge are stuck in the past. To a degree that is shockingly underappreciated, the Joe-mocracy has resembled a second Trump term, with the continuation of their predecessor’s worst policies—violations of immigrant rights, protectionism, inflationary spending, and pointless fights with European allies. The Joe-mocracy’s best policies—like tax credits and cash supports that cut child poverty in half—are expiring. And in a very old and tired way, the Joes have given up on major American problems, especially our gun violence.

The Joes talk a big game about democracy at international conferences, but they don’t always practice democracy at home. The Joe-mocrats failed to protect voting rights, centralized more power in the federal government, and ignored innovations in democratic deliberation that are sweeping the world.

The Joe-mocracy has taken on China, but won few allies overseas for that effort. China may be a dictatorship, but the Politburo Standing Committee is a team of seven communists. America is ruled by just two Joes.

And if they can stay healthy and alive, those Joes will have another two years in power before they face difficult elections in 2024. They’d probably both be wise to retire, and hand power to people with different first names in 2025.

Because Joe-America can’t remain a Joe-mocracy much longer, right?

The post In America, the Joe-mocracy Rules 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 can go, you know,” my colleague replied.

“I would have to cancel class.”

“Don’t cancel class. Teach the inauguration with your cell phone. Your students will love it.”

I did, and I’ve never regretted it.

In our digital age, presidential inaugurations create opportunities to teach and learn intimately together. They bring urgency to the study of history and politics, by connecting the past to the present. They demonstrate how the disquieting power of patriotism, and the way we experience patriotic ritual through media technologies, might be used to mask gross inequities in America’s unraveling social fabric.

Since 2009, I have taught the inauguration every four years as a history-in-the-making event, traveling to Washington, D.C., for both of Obama’s inaugurals and for Donald Trump’s in 2017. I initially taught the event to students in two introductory political science courses. In 2013, I taught it in a digital storytelling course, and in 2017, in two introductory U.S. history courses.

This year, I am teaching the inauguration in an Asian American history course and a historiography seminar. Only this time, heeding COVID-19 restrictions, I am at home today, and will be engaging with students through browser windows. And I am engaging not just with an inauguration, but with the January storming of the Capitol by a violent mob.

How, I’ve been wondering, would I incorporate these events into my teaching?

In planning, I thought about how students and I are likely to remember this insurrection. I also thought about how social media shapes today’s political and historical events.

Back in 2009, instructional technologists at the community college where I then taught helped me set up a learning activity that modeled the Obama campaign’s groundbreaking use of social media to connect voters and candidate. I asked students to watch coverage of the inauguration at home and to communicate with one another and me via email, text messages, Facebook posts, and online class discussion boards. I encouraged them to think about how the processes were creating a sense of community and to consider the long-term potential of these communities to bring about changes they wanted to see in the world during their lifetimes. My hope was that students would build their reflections into an ongoing “vision for the world” project they completed over the term.

Back then, like most teachers, I was occasionally frustrated by the fact that students were using their phones and laptops in class to chat with friends and surf the internet. I sometimes threatened to confiscate the devices, until the 2009 inauguration helped shift my perspective. I started to realize that I could help students and others learn to use the devices to do much more than combat boredom. Community builds through sharing stories, ideas, and thoughts. How do these processes work?

I purchased a Blackberry Curve smart phone and learned how to use it to send and receive emails and text messages as well as take pictures and create short videos.

Obama’s first inauguration on January 20, 2009, drew an estimated 1.8 million people, the largest public event ever at the National Mall. After riding a crowded Metro train and walking for nearly two hours, I made it to the closest available public viewing spot of the Capitol dais where the president, first lady, and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would stand for the swearing-in.

I stood with my friend Jenny and my husband, Jim, craning my neck to see a Jumbotron screen some distance away. Aretha Franklin began singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

A red light on the Blackberry Curve blinked. I was receiving a text message from a student.

“Hi Himanee! I’m so excited for you! Where are you standing? Can you see anything?”

“Just a lot of heads, but I can hear Aretha singing. Where are you?”

“Watching TV. What’s going on now?”

Outgoing President George W. Bush appeared. A ripple of boos erupted. The Blackberry blinked again.

“Do you think it’s appropriate to boo g.w. bush?” another student asked via text.

“Well, not really. How about you?”

“It is their right to display their feelings towards the outgoing president but personally I would not boo him. Did you?”

During the course of the day and into that evening, I received about a dozen text messages and 20 emails, and students posted nearly 200 comments on online course discussion boards. They asked whether I had seen protests; whether there were rules regarding the use of religious texts (such as the Bible that had belonged to Lincoln that Obama used in taking the oath of office and in the voicing of prayers); and how I felt as an ethnic minority being at the inauguration. Some who were unhappy with the election results expressed fatigue over hearing Obama’s name over and over again.

These voices braided together captured a history we co-created. Underlying the messages were questions of credibility: Was the crowd I was standing in like the one they saw on TV? Where did race and religion fit in a secular America? And did people who did not like the new president fit into this America? In this sense, I learned the students were not passive observers but rather—with the help of technology—active participants.

My own combination of being on site while participating with my students online also taught me a few striking lessons.

In 2008, I had imagined a sort of kinship with Obama, at least in part because Obama’s campaign had created this sense of relationship through its relentless use of the same communicative tools I was now using to teach. I saw him as his campaign portrayed him to me: as a community organizer, a basketball player, the first “hip-hop president,” a person who was about the same age as me and was non-white, like me.

At the inauguration, a different Obama surfaced: a flag-loving commander-in-chief of armed forces in a geopolitically powerful America. American flags lined the Capitol as well as the steps leading down to reflecting pools and the Mall pathways, and the firing of a cannon followed after Obama took the oath of office.

I asked myself if this was my vision for America. Or was my vision the crowd of people around me—the people huddled in coats, stomping their feet to stay warm; the small child holding the hands of his parents and chanting “Obama! Obama!”?

I learned later that even though the inauguration was a public event, a select group of people had better seats. Members of Congress receive color-coded “tickets” that they typically distribute to their monied supporters, staff, and campaign volunteers. The public viewing areas begin where the ticketed spots end.

This deeper understanding of the inaugural made me want to keep using it as a classroom tool. Nearly four years later, in fall 2012, I was an assistant professor at SUNY Empire State College in upstate New York, teaching digital storytelling. My students were learning online and using the tools that once had been distractions for multiple uses.

My class began one day after the inauguration and was fully online, so I took a different approach. First, my co-teacher and I initiated a collective story using a platform called StoryTimed. We began the story—my colleague from her home in Buffalo, and me in D.C, a few days before the inauguration. Then we let the students take over. I also expanded the definition of classroom to include my entire social network of friends and colleagues via Facebook and Twitter. And, finally, an undergraduate whom I invited to participate added a steady stream of comments to my Facebook event and posted updates I sent her by text when the internet lines jammed in D.C. Unable to immediately access the digital conversation, I immersed myself in what was happening around me.

As with 2009, flags and military salutes etched the edges of the ceremony’s narrative. These images evoked 20th-century political scientist Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined community, where people who do not know each other imagine the nation into being through a tacit agreement to imbue shared symbols with meaning. That idea carries a sinister warning, Anderson argues, in that it can lead masses of people into a blind love for the nation and its representative symbols— flags, artillery, the president—and a forgetting of the often violent and inequitable underpinnings of that nation’s existence. In 2013, I stood in a mostly African American and mostly women crowd—a group of college students, teachers, and community organizers. We did not know each other, but we came together, singing “Amazing Grace” and repeating lines that flashed across a Jumbotron screen about the nation’s potential to heal. When Obama and his family appeared, we cheered with joy.

Crowd exiting a Metro station and trying to get to the Mall in 2013. Courtesy of the author.

“Here come Malia and Sasha,” I said in a message posted to Facebook. “This is a very loved family. You can feel it. It’s like we know them ourselves!”

“Here comes the President!!!” posted my student.

“Obama looks like he’s loving this moment. He was just announced and when he broke out into a grin, the crowd exploded,” I replied.

I left feeling as if I had attended a spiritual gathering, with a renewed consciousness of the power that community could wield. I just hoped it would not blind me or anyone else to the deep inequities that remain in America’s social fabric.

Well in advance of the 2016 election, I arranged to teach the 2017 inauguration to two U.S. history classes. My plan this time was to start the conversations on election night and to sustain them in the days leading up to and following the inaugural ceremonies, in hopes that students would find continual connections between past and present, and would reflect on how both could help them find future ways to participate in civic life.

Students dug into the history of the Electoral College, wrote essays exploring the post-Civil War Reconstruction and its relationship to the nation’s present divisiveness, and engaged in discussions with me throughout the long night in which Donald Trump emerged victorious.

For the week of the inauguration, I asked them to view and discuss online virtual exhibits at the Smithsonian’s history museums while I shared discoveries I made while visiting in person. We conversed via Twitter and Facebook not only about the inauguration but also about the Women’s March that took place the day after. Many students participated in women’s marches in their communities, and shared pictures and comments.

Students were curious about the size of the crowd and whether it was as racially and ethnically mixed as those at Obama’s ceremonies. They also asked me if I had seen any protests or violence and urged me to stay safe. The Trump supporters I did encounter, however, were congenial. We talked on the Metro and in lines at security gates before entering the Mall about the weather, the festivities, and “the rich people” who had tickets. Around me, the gathering was sparse and mostly white, reflecting the differences between the nation that Trump supporters were imagining into being and myself. Students quoted snippets of Trump’s short speech and expressed wishes for the nation’s divisiveness to end. After the ceremony, I lingered by a Jumbotron screen, watching the Obamas depart the White House in a military helicopter. As the helicopter flew over the Mall, I impulsively started running with a few others toward it, arms in the air, waving good-bye.

The 2021 inauguration is expected to be a limited live event with heavy security. The National Mall has been closed, and only members of Congress will be present. Trump has said he will not attend Biden’s inauguration, the first departing president to deny his successor such a courtesy in 152 years.

Classes started again this week. On Tuesday, I asked students to take part in a dialogue being hosted by my college on the historic significance of Kamala Harris’s election. Today, I plan to teach the inauguration by asking students to join me at https://bideninaugural.org, where the event will be livestreamed. We will converse together on in-class discussion boards, and I plan to ask them to reflect on how to write the history of this inauguration for the generation to follow.

In preparation, I’ve been thinking a lot about something I expect to see on the livestream: the face masks we’ve all been asked to wear in public to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

In this tense moment, perhaps the mask might emerge as a new symbol of a new kind of nation. Wearing a mask is like making a sacrifice. It’s done to protect others from contracting the coronavirus, should you be carrying it. It is a call to work together to help the world heal.

The post How to Teach an American Inauguration appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Harris herself called attention to this in her acceptance speech. “When [my mother] came here from India at the age of 19, maybe she didn’t quite imagine this moment,” said Harris, clad in suffragist white that historic night in Wilmington, Delaware. “So, I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women—Black women, Asian, white, Latina, and Native American women, throughout our nation’s history, who have paved the way for this moment tonight.”

The momentum that brings Harris to the White House has been building globally for over a decade; it just hasn’t been spotlighted. Moreover, the success of what I call the “Feminism ReBoot”—a new approach to feminism rooted in collaboration and supported by new forms of digital connections—has both been inspired by and inspired successes around the world. Like the roots of a powerful tree of change, local feminist networks have been reaching out to sister movements across the globe to create robust transnational feminist networks that build on the momentum of one another. We can trace the roots and branches of #MeToo in the U.S. to feminist movements such as #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria, #MyStealthyFreedom in Iran, and #NudeBloggersofEgypt.

Notably, women’s movements in Guatemala and Chile have seen major milestones in the last two years alone, as feminist groups have come together to propel change and enact legislation in order to provide more rights to survivors of sexual violence. In February 2016, a Guatemalan court prosecuted two former members of the military for harrowing acts of sexual violence committed decades ago. In a historic ruling for rape survivors in Guatemala, two male suspects were found guilty of crimes against humanity for sexually abusing 15 Indigenous women and sentenced to a combined 360 years in prison. This victory encouraged more women to come forward and denounce their abusers.

Today, numerous women’s groups across Latin America are also working on changing restrictive abortion laws. In August 2017, a Chilean women’s movement known as Mujeres en Marcha Chile advocated for the passage of a new law that legalizes abortion under certain circumstances. This law was a major victory for women who have been pushing for abortion rights for decades, and it signaled that the door was now open for further reform. This month, Argentina followed suit with official approval to legalize abortion—a battle that a group of intergenerational and intersectional feminists has been waging for decades. Pumping fists clad in green handkerchiefs, activists took to the streets demanding reproductive choice, having organized through social media and underground networks.

Transnational feminist networks across the globe passed along strategies of success from Latin America to Asia. In India, a number of concerted movements and organizations fighting everyday sexual harassment and laws that target women’s morality came to a head in 2012, when the violent gang rape of Jyoti Singh on a bus resulted in her death. The outrage over this incident brought Indian women together to strategize for larger change. They began by organizing to bring down politicians who had been involved in sexual harassment. Over the next five years, the climate of India’s Supreme Court changed significantly, in no small part thanks to these efforts.

On September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court voted unanimously to repeal Section #377, a colonial-era law that criminalized homosexuality. The decision was met with absolute jubilation in India and served as inspiration to many activists around the world suffering from battlefield fatigue in the push for sexual and gender rights.

In South Korea over the past five years, women’s movements have been slowly gaining strength. #MeToo infused these movements with a new energy, and they have served as catalysts for large-scale reforms. The 2016 murder of a Korean woman exiting the bathroom at the Gangnam metro station inspired women to take to the streets in protest of sexual violence and assault. While these protests invited significant backlash, resulting in numerous women losing their jobs and being ostracized from their communities, they also inspired many more women to speak out and join in ongoing protests.  

Notably, in January 2018, Seo Ji-Hyeon, a well-known prosecutor, went public with the accusation that a former Ministry of Justice official groped her at a funeral in 2010. It became a watershed moment––between January and April 2018, hundreds of other women came forward with their stories. In March 2018, presidential candidate and Governor Ahn Hee-Jung resigned after he was accused of raping his secretary. Later that month, thousands came out for a marathon protest during which 193 women spoke for 2,018 minutes straight about their experiences with sexual assault. The event was significant in its magnitude as well as its location; it took place in the same area where, in 2017, thousands gathered for a mass candlelight demonstration against the now ousted president. South Koreans know the power of protest. And in April 2018, Korean President Moon-Jae addressed the #MeToo movement by publicly calling for a societal shift, specifically within corporate culture.

In the Middle East and North Africa, countries where women’s rights are thought to be limited, feminist organizing, and the transnational feminist networks, have had significant successes. Consider Nigeria. After the extremist group Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls in April 2014, Nigerian activists took to social media, launching the #BringBackOurGirls campaign to bring worldwide attention to the plight of these girls and advocate for their release. The campaign was so successful in raising awareness that people across the globe, including Michelle Obama and the Pope, spoke out against the kidnappings. Through transnational collaborations, more than half of the girls have been returned, and Boko Haram, which could have been a major threat throughout the continent, has been contained.

In Tunisia, many women experienced physical and sexual assault, arrest, and even exile because of their prominent role in the Arab Spring. Nonetheless, they persisted and opened a new dialogue on women’s rights while also working toward regime change. Tunisian activists’ success has inspired a domino effect throughout the region. And while the changes feminists have been pushing for in part via social media and transnational collaboration have been incremental, the climate is shifting.

While we do not yet know the longer-term results of these movements, what all of them have in common is their fierce commitment to inclusive collaboration and to embracing and harnessing the power of intersectionality. Success inspires success, and their strategies and unrelenting activism have without a doubt moved the needle. In our globally networked world, women can quickly and easily hear about the victories of other women both at home and in faraway countries. Inspiration goes viral—the momentum of one movement leads to another.

Here in the U.S., these transnational women’s movements also inspired—and were inspired by—the Women’s March, which began as an American response to the election of Trump but quickly became global. In January 2017, millions of women marched in major cities on every continent. The anniversary marches have drawn millions, from Paris and Delhi to Nairobi, Cape Town, and Tbilisi, as organizers called on marchers to bring their #PowertothePolls. These marches—led by women of color—involved women who previously had not felt willing or able to engage with political processes, and increased the visibility of women’s political action.

The tidal waves of feminist activism, drawn from around the world, helped President-elect Joe Biden understand the power of choosing not just a woman, but a woman of color as his running mate. The election of Harris, a Black, Brown woman who is the daughter of immigrants, is a victory for the global struggle for a new, more inclusive and intersectional feminism.

While today we are witnessing the rise of autocracy and patriarchy around the world, looking closer, we can also see resistance to these forces growing and apathy decreasing. There was higher voter turnout in the U.S. this year than ever before, and a significant inspiration was Harris herself. And while we have to acknowledge the failures and slippage of resistance, we can also celebrate the power of the momentum that is pushing back, and how networked this power becomes across oceans and divides.

As the roots of Harris’s victory are important to acknowledge, so too are the branches that her win has already sprouted around the world. While Harris drew strength from global movements, her win has also inspired weary activists around the world to keep calling for progress. Their successes will only be amplified by social media—and will lay the groundwork for further reform for women around the world, and for generations to come.

The post The Global Women’s Movements That Helped Kamala Harris Rise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This column is not an endorsement of the vice presidential nominee. But you can ignore all the anxiety on the left about her shifting positions. And you can dismiss the never-ending racist and sexist conspiracies from the right about her origins. You can feel confident that she’ll perform well in the campaign ahead.

Because her heart is from the right place.

Could there be there any better preparation for running a country as insane as the United States than a political career in a state as crazy as California?

Lord knows, you shouldn’t trust Kamala Harris—she is both a politician and a lawyer, two professions that deserve every jaundiced ounce of your skepticism. But you should trust the Golden State that made her—as a classroom for dealing with the widest variety of people, and as a proving ground for navigating the endless complications of 21st-century life.

Let’s say you were put in charge of producing an American vice president, which is to say someone who could step in as president and make all the tricky and difficult decisions that high office requires.

Where better to raise her than the Berkeley of the late 1960s and 1970s? Just by moving around the city, you would expose her—as Kamala Harris’s mother did—to all kinds of people, rich and poor, activists and academics, those with brilliant ideas for changing the world, and others who were off-their-rockers. You would make hers a mixed-race family, and her parents would be immigrant scholars from places on opposite ends of the world—say Jamaica and India—so she would understand America in that deep way that only new arrivals do.

You would have her live in an integrated community with renters and homeowners and the middle-class and the working-class. You’d have her attend a newly integrated elementary school, learn piano and ballet from real artists, and clean test tubes in the university labs while going to Hindu temple and learning hymns at the 23rd Avenue Church of God.

Maybe the vice president you were training would live in a foreign city for a few years (in Kamala’s case, Montreal), and attend college in our nation’s capital. But when she came back for law school, you’d send her to a place like UC Hastings. There, stuck between the powerful people of San Francisco City Hall and the state Supreme Court, and the desperate and destitute of the Tenderloin, she’d get constant reminders that official decisions have consequences.

You’d have her start as a prosecutor first in Alameda County and then back in San Francisco, so she could see the horrors that ensue when societies and families fail. And you’d assign her to the most wrenching cases, involving domestic violence, sex crimes, and the abuse of children, so she could understand the depths of human vulnerability.

To steel her for America’s nasty politics, you’d have her launch her electoral career in San Francisco, with the toughest political culture of any city in the state. You would not give her an open seat, but rather force her to beat an incumbent district attorney—her former boss—in a tricky, three-person race.

You’d have her stay close to the powerful and local political machine, learning (and borrowing donors) from its greatest practitioner, Willie Brown, while also forcing her to figure out how to separate herself from the insiders and interests, and how to collaborate with reformers. You would hope the experience would teach her to survive in a political arena of attacks and corruption—and it would. One San Francisco political strategist compared Harris to Tim Robbins’s character in The Shawshank Redemption, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”

And once she’d triumphed in California’s Sodom, San Francisco, you’d send her down to its Gomorrah, Los Angeles. You’d have her run for state attorney general against a very popular district attorney, a Los Angeles Republican named Steve Cooley, who had locked up the endorsements of all the state’s law enforcement organizations. And because a Republican who wins Los Angeles wins statewide, you’d have her all but move to a city where almost no one knew her name and send her into neighborhoods deeply suspicious of outsiders and prosecutors. You’d make her find a way to beat the hometown boy on his home turf.

You’d send her, victorious, to Sacramento, where she would work with the most experienced governor in history, Jerry Brown, one of a group of geriatrics—Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi—who dominated politics. And she would study these elders, learn how they got things done quietly, and figure out how to seize some of the power they held. Her work as attorney general would also force her to learn the whole nation-state of California, with its hyper-complicated regions that are bigger than most states.

Then you’d have her run again, statewide, for the U.S. Senate. And to make it challenging, you’d put her in a strange top-two system that would have her competing not against a hapless Republican—but rather against another popular Democrat, from the state’s largest ethnic group.

And in surveys just a few months before the November election, you’d have Kamala Harris—the leading Black politician in a state with a small and declining Black population—losing Latino votes by 25 points to Loretta Sanchez. But then she and her team would go quietly to the border, to Imperial County’s primarily Latino community, and test every message of hers they could. And wouldn’t you know it? By November, she would have figured out how to be more popular with Latinos than her opponent.

Through all of this, she would taste every flavor of California crazy, while retaining her powerful calm, and her sense of humor.

Of course, so many varied and challenging experiences would make her cautious, and disciplined about protecting herself from attacks. And in a polarized time, such caution—even coming from, by voting record, the second most progressive person in the U.S. Senate—would sometimes look like moderation. This would be quite a distinguishing trick, at least in California. Most people here like to sound progressive but are actually quite moderate, while she would manage to look like a moderate while being quite progressive.

But the appearance of moderation would draw its own attacks, from progressive partisans, and end her presidential campaign before it got started. Of course, abandoning her presidential campaign—a first defeat—would allow her to regroup, to forge new alliances and address weaknesses, and win the vice presidential nomination.

And she would be ready for whatever came next. California, after preparing her for nearly all her life, had already made sure of it.

The post Don’t Trust Kamala Harris; Trust the California That Made Her appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the promising question behind the news that Karen Bass is a top contender to be the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

Bass is best known as a consensus-building and uncommonly kind politician who has served South L.A. in the State Assembly (including time as speaker) and in Congress over the past two decades. But far more important than her political career is Bass’ role in a larger story about South L.A.’s transformation over the past 30 years—and about what true leadership looks like in the 21st century.

South L.A., with 850,000 people covering 50 square miles, is the size of San Francisco; it’s also the last great working-class place in coastal California. And at the heart of its complicated story of improvement is Community Coalition.

Bass and other neighborhood activists helped start Community Coalition in 1990 amid the crack-cocaine epidemic. Since then, CoCo’s staff and many members have built it—through painstaking, block-to-block work that rarely gets media notice—into one of California’s most successful institutions.

From afar, CoCo might seem unfocused. It works on an incredibly broad array of issues, from trash clean-up to college access to drug treatment. But that’s because it organizes around the varied concerns of South L.A.’s diverse residents, not a poll-tested political agenda. The wonderful paradox of CoCo is that its focus on street-level organizing has made the organization extraordinarily successful in developing leaders for the city, the region, and the nation.

CoCo’s leadership development philosophy seems contrarian these days: You rise not via self-promotion and sloganeering, but by empowering your neighbors, and learning how to follow their lead. Bass and her unflashy, collaborative style embody this approach, but she is just one of hundreds of CoCo alumni in Southern California governments, non-profits, civic institutions, and business organizations. Among these leaders are Marqueece Harris-Dawson, now a powerful L.A. city councilmember, and Alberto Retana, a CoCo organizer who, after a stint in the Obama administration, returned to serve as CoCo’s president and CEO.

“Regardless of who’s in office and regardless of the conditions that oppress us,” Retana said in an online commemoration of CoCo’s 30th birthday this year, “we too must step up for South L.A. and keep fighting!”

Bass was a physician’s assistant and clinical instructor at USC’s medical school when she gathered neighborhood activists in a living room 30 years ago. These South L.A. residents were desperate to address crack cocaine’s toll on their community, from addiction to police abuse. So they started CoCo—originally Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment—in the belief that the people of South L.A. needed to be involved in creating solutions for such problems.

That premise still defines Community Coalition’s mission to “elevate the voices of our members, shift power to the community, and tackle the root causes of poverty, crime and violence.” And it informs CoCo’s three main methods—organizing, advocacy, and providing community services.

Flexibility and practicality distinguish CoCo among local institutions old and new. In its early efforts with the crack epidemic, CoCo tried multiple tactics before identifying liquor stores as the nexus of crime and drugs. After the 1992 Civil Unrest, which caused historic damage in South L.A., CoCo worked to prevent more than 150 liquor stores that had been destroyed from being rebuilt; many were replaced with housing, grocery stores, or laundromats.

From there, CoCo branched out—to almost everything. CoCo developed a successful youth organizing program, led efforts to help children stay with families instead of being forced into foster care, and originated the model for youth services that is now called “Summer Night Lights.” And CoCo was integral in successful battles to build more schools and provide more college prep classes in South L.A. and across California.

CoCo’s work often builds on itself. After CoCo started to organize the King Estates neighborhood with a focus on changing city nuisance abatement policy, residents also suggested revitalizing Martin Luther King Jr. Park. So CoCo started an Easter egg hunt in the park, which evolved into a music festival, Power Fest, a popular South L.A. event.

After Bass departed CoCo leadership in 2004 to enter politics, the group formed even more coalitions and further increased its reach. CoCo has sought to remake the justice system, protect immigrants, address structural racism, and enhance neighborhood power over land use and economic development.

Such work led CoCo into ballot measure politics, both locally and statewide. The organization was a major supporter of Proposition 30, a statewide tax hike in 2012. It organized to pass the criminal justice reform measures Propositions 47 and 57—and for the even more difficult work of implementing them. More recently, CoCo has gone national as a training resource for community work, with a new center to bring people from all over America to L.A. for fellowships in organizing.

In all of this, CoCo has been operating in a South L.A. that is undergoing rapid demographic change, with Black people leaving and Latinos arriving. The organization has taken great care to balance Black and Latino representation among its leaders, organizers, and even attendees at community meetings. USC sociologist Manuel Pastor has credited CoCo as one of the local multi-racial organizations making South L.A. a model of “ethnic sedimentation,” where racial and ethnic groups collaborate and build productively on each other’s histories, rather than of “ethnic succession,” where conflict arises as a new group replaces an old one.

The notion of South L.A. as a national model may surprise Americans who still associate the area with gangs and riots. But no place could be more relevant to a country that finds itself near rock bottom. Over the past 30 years, crime in South L.A. declined by more than two-thirds, health care access expanded, education improved, and transportation, arts, and food options exploded. Is there any doubt that the United States could benefit right now from emulating Community Coalition’s devotion to cultivating new leaders and building unity from the ground up?

If Joe Biden picks Bass as his running mate, CoCo organizers, past and present, could well be leaders in a new administration. Given their track record, the prospect of a South L.A. vice presidency might offer Americans something that is hard to find these days:

Hope.

The post Why South L.A. Has Earned the Vice Presidency appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.