At the turn of the 20th century, floods, fires, and waste plagued the United States. Industries burned through resources and blew toxins into the air, with few restrictions. States and federal governments were only beginning to approach questions of the environment and did so in piecemeal ways.

In 1907, responding to the need to improve transportation, President Theodore Roosevelt tasked the Inland Waterways Commission with studying how to better manage rivers. The commissioners recognized a need for interstate coordination in this effort. Two in particular—Gifford Pinchot and William John “WJ” McGee—went further. They asked Roosevelt to invite all the country’s governors to Washington to discuss the pressing issues of water and natural resources.

Roosevelt complied, inviting the governors of all the states and territories, along with representatives from hundreds of civic, economic, and media organizations, to the White House. The resulting Conference of Governors, beginning on May 13, 1908, and lasting three days, offered a glimpse of political and economic collaboration that extended beyond normal boundaries of party, state, industry, and even time. The conference represents a not-so-distant precedent for today’s need to extend our political thinking beyond narrow parameters.

According to the New York Times, the Conference of Governors’ unprecedented composition and purpose promised “history-making possibilities.” The paper reported 44 governors attending, though the published proceedings identified 36. Alongside them, four at-large members were invited to “represent the public,” which appears to have meant ensuring the discussion integrated economic concerns: steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, railroad executive James J. Hill, labor leader John Mitchell, and Democratic mainstay William Jennings Bryan. Finally, 500-some representatives from myriad organizations—trade associations, unions, publications, and the like—joined as observers.

At the opening dinner, the attendees dined with Supreme Court Justices, members of the Cabinet and Congress, and other prominent officials in the White House’s state dining room while the United States Marine Band played.

Despite the night’s pomp, the tone of the following day’s conference was serious, even somber. According to Roosevelt’s opening address, “Conservation as a National Duty,” nothing less than the “continuance of the Nation” was at stake. During the 50-minute speech, interrupted by frequent nonpartisan applause, the president asserted the importance of cooperative planning and for elevating community rights over individuals’ pursuit of riches. “In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit,” Roosevelt said. “The time has come for a change.”

Others shared this view. The following day, railroad executive James J. Hill spoke on “The Natural Wealth of the Land and Its Conservation.” Hill spent most of his allotted time offering chilling statistics of shrinking forests, diminishing ores, and declining soil fertility. He argued that these statistics represented not only a bleak economic future but also a potentially violent political one, borne out of desperation and poverty.

Hill believed that if industry leaders understood the dire resource situation, they would manage resources more carefully. Espousing a key element of Progressive conservation doctrine—that of applying sound business principles to resource management—he compared the nation to a corporation and the leaders gathered as a board of directors. The “board” needed to consider the resource wealth available and marshal it responsibly, he suggested, looking toward long-term investments over near-term profits, or they would ruin “a national patrimony that can never be restored.”

As the conference concluded, the governors approved a slate of resolutions and presented them to President Roosevelt. The declaration reiterated the themes of resources as foundational wealth, the importance of planning, and the need to cooperate. Its final line announced the governors’ intent plainly: “Let us conserve the foundations of our prosperity.”

By the end of the three days, the governors were also eager to discuss collaborating on other matters, such as extradition laws and divorce standards. They resolved to meet regularly thereafter. That commitment eventually turned into the National Governors Association, which now meets twice a year.

Another effect of the summit was that Roosevelt appointed the National Conservation Commission, which would inventory the nation’s resources. The commission produced a three-volume report that appeared in February 1909 and featured a detailed accounting of the nation’s dwindling stocks of various resources, including estimated dates for when they would be exhausted.

These achievements were all the more striking because the Progressive Era was no harmonious nonpartisan moment. Progressives saw themselves in a battle between good and evil on behalf of “the people” versus “the interests.” Muckraking journalists took down corruption from city halls to corporate boardrooms. Roosevelt used the power of government to tame big business. One of the biggest victims was James J. Hill himself: Roosevelt ordered the investigation that led to the 1904 Northern Securities Co. v. United States case that broke up Hill’s holding company. Roosevelt also invited his political rival Bryan to the conference.

Still, the participants overcame these differences and set their eyes on the nation’s shared future. As Secretary of State Elihu Root urged in his address to the group, they performed their duties not only for their parochial interests but also for “the common good.” Pinchot later wrote that the Conference of Governors “a conception of the land they lived in that was brand new,” and suggested history might remember the conference as one of history’s turning points. More measured historians have called it one of the “climactic moments” of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Today, Roosevelt’s concerns about the risks to the “continuance of the Nation” have transformed into warnings about global catastrophes. Twenty-first-century environmental concerns extend past accounting stocks of national resources. Now, researchers aim to identify thresholds of global ecological viability. Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for instance, have investigated planetary boundaries to determine the requirements for sustaining life. Our worries encompass the globe and question whether the planet can maintain its resilient capabilities.

Meanwhile, the “common good” is more elusive than ever. While pulses of reform have appeared—the rise of regional planning in the interwar period, the emergence of land-use planning for conservation and urban development in the 1960s and 1970s—coming together over future shared interests feels like a faraway ambition. Imagine a similar conference today, in which Joe Biden invited Gretchen Whitmer, Ron DeSantis, and Elon Musk to share a stage. Commitments to base politics and baser instincts would produce only vitriol and communicate only enmity.

In our hyper-partisan moment, looking beyond short-term advantage has become a dwindling resource. The 1908 Conference of Governors may not have been the grand historical turning point Pinchot imagined, but it can be a touchstone. A common focus and commitment beyond party, nation, personal interest, and the present has been possible and must be again for the good of the planet and all its people. As the stakes have risen beyond a nation’s supply of resources, so must the solutions and the seriousness with which policymakers, industrial leaders, and civic organizations approach the future.

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In the early 1840s, where the steps of the Library of Congress now stand, a group of American abolitionists gathered in a modest boardinghouse to plot the destruction of slavery.

The house belonged to a relatively obscure Washingtonian, a widow named Ann Sprigg. In those days, boardinghouses like Sprigg’s were fixtures of the capital landscape—where congressmen, senators, government officials, and the like tended to live during legislative sessions. Quarters were often cramped. Men rented a room—or just a bed, or even half of a bed—and communed in shared bathrooms and living spaces, with the day’s debates sometimes carrying over to the dinner table. Many houses developed reputations as being favored by certain factions, turning them into political clubs as much as living quarters.

In 1841, Ann Sprigg’s house came to be known as the “abolition house.” Three anti-slavery Whig congressmen—Seth M. Gates, a New Yorker, William Slade, a Vermonter, and Joshua Giddings, an Ohioan—moved in alongside two prominent abolitionists, Theodore Dwight Weld and Joshua Leavitt. Leavitt—a New Yorker from a landowning family who shared a Sprigg House bed with Weld—quickly set about convincing the representatives to work alongside the wider abolition movement as an anti-slavery lobby. The group became the brain trust behind the first significant congressional campaign to combat slavery from the nation’s capital.

The brain trust’s goal was straightforward: to develop a caucus within the legislature, a lobby to influence the legislature, or at the very least an argument that would challenge the power of slavery and slaveholders in the American government. But it was also radical, representing a major sea change in American history, and ultimately a turning point in slavery’s demise. Up until this point, the anti-slavery movement had largely eschewed politics. Led by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, the early abolitionists focused strictly on changing hearts and minds—what they called “moralsuasion”—not changing votes. Garrison once even burned copies of the U.S. Constitution (which he called “a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell!”) on stage—a flaming, charred reflection of the fact that he preferred challenging slaveholder power from outside the halls of power.

By the time the brain trust moved into the Sprigg House, however, the movement had started to splinter, with more abolitionists taking up the banner of political activism. A year prior, one group of abolitionists broke with Garrison by forming their own political party. Known as the Liberty Party, it was the first ever expressly anti-slavery party in American history, though it never registered more than a blip on the national political radar. As a result, many anti-slavery Whigs like Giddings and Slade opted to remain Whigs, where they could challenge slavery within the existing two-party structure.

This shift within the anti-slavery movement was partly a result of recognizing that as of the late 1830s and early 1840s, slavery’s defenders clearly had the upper hand, especially in the United States Congress. In fact, so great was slaveholder influence in the nation’s capital that in 1836 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a series of resolutions that became known as the “Gag Rule.” At the time, constituents would send petitions to their legislators to read on the house floor; the Gag Rule barred the reading of the many anti-slavery petitions congressmen received, which left slavery virtually unchallenged in Congress.

Carroll Row, which included Ann Spriggs’ boarding house, was located at the site of present-day Library of Congress. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The first task of the boarders in the Sprigg House was to repeal the Gag Rule. Weld and Leavitt helped prepare anti-slavery speeches and advised the congressmen on strategy, forming what Giddings described as an informal “select committee.” They soon found a key ally in president-turned-congressman John Quincy Adams. Though Adams never lived in the Sprigg House, he spent hours there conferring with the boarders. Finally, on December 3, 1844, thanks in no small part to plans hatched at the Sprigg House, Congress repealed the Gag Rule, galvanizing anti-slavery politicians across the country. Many of them later became “Conscience Whigs,” a faction within the Whig Party that opposed slavery, in opposition to their rivals, the pro-slavery “Cotton Whigs.”

While not as radical as many of his “Conscience Whig” colleagues Abraham Lincoln was himself an anti-slavery Whig, and this is perhaps what drew him to the Sprigg House when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1847 as a little-known congressman from Illinois. For the next two years, it was where he slept, ate, and debated his fellow boarders on the major political topics of the day, including the Mexican-American War, the annexation of Texas, and the possible expansion of slavery into the West. Though the other members of the brain trust had moved on by then, Lincoln’s fellow Midwesterner in the House, Giddings, still lodged there, and the two most certainly dined together when in session.

Lincoln spent only a single term in Congress, but his time at the Sprigg House was clearly a formative experience, if not also a fond memory for him. When he returned to Washington more than a decade later, this time as president of a fractured nation, he looked in on Ann Sprigg, who had since moved houses and fallen on hard times. When Lincoln learned that she needed help, he got this “most estimable widow lady” a job working as a clerk in the Treasury Department, a position that allowed her to support her family through the war.

Ann Sprigg died in 1870, and her boardinghouse—and the entire block of row houses on which it stood—was demolished in 1887 to build the Library of Congress. Since then, the story of this old D.C. boarding house and the woman who ran it has been largely forgotten. The history of the anti-slavery movement has often focused on bigger, more prominent figures and emphasized the work of activists based in New England or New York and not necessarily a slaveholding city like Washington, D.C.

Yet for the better part of a decade, Ann Sprigg’s abolition house formed the nucleus of a new political attack against slavery. It was there at the dining room table that anti-slavery politicos put together a strategy for combatting slavery within the halls of Congress, a change that thrust anti-slavery activism away from the fringe and placed it right in the heart of American politics.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that while Joshua Leavitt came from a wealthy family, he was not personally wealthy.

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This particular dude is Ian MacKaye: hardcore punk demigod. And 2704 N. 4th Street, the red bungalow, is the magical and storied abode that housed MacKaye and his fellow punk divinities—the Dischord house, a symbol for what D.C. hardcore was, what it is, and how it is remembered. Hardcore music was innovative, aggressive, and uncontrollable, and it mirrored the way young people felt about the world around them during the 1980s. It provided a refuge from the demands of Reagan’s America and the power brokers of D.C., and an ethos that refuted compulsory capitalism and consumption.

And for the D.C. hardcore scene, the suburbs were the figurative enemy and ally, rolled into one.

It was October of 1981 when MacKaye and his friend Jeff Nelson, 19-year-old musicians, moved into the Lyon Park house. Their newly formed record label, Dischord, was headquartered in a bedroom off the kitchen, but still maintained a mailing address in D.C., at MacKaye’s parents’ house, just in case. It was a label borne from a presumptuousness perhaps only afforded to white, middle-class teenagers: a desire to record and press their own music. The kids had a band, Teen Idles, and they wanted to make hardcore punk. Their songs lasted no longer than one minute and 30 seconds and included anti-consumerist screeds like “Fiorucci Nightmare” and anti-mainstream punk diatribes like “Fleeting Fury.”

Hardcore was not simply a reaction to mainstream popular music. Hardcore was a reaction to mainstream punk, circa 1980. Punk’s roots lay in the underground, antiestablishment alternative “proto-punk” sound of American bands of the late 1960s like the MC5, the Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges, whose lyrics and music were intentionally and emphatically avant-garde, inaccessible, and bordering on the edge of cacophonous discordance. Punk’s first wave followed in the early to mid-1970s, anchored in New York City. Bands like Suicide, New York Dolls, Television, the Dictators, and (of course) the Ramones made rock songs quicker, harder, and dirtier, solidifying punk’s combative, crude sound and advancing the scene’s commitment to the disaffected, marginalized, and discontented. Rebellion, confrontation, and emotion were vital. Technical skill, an expression of musical elitism, was not. Punk wrenched the production of music from the few and put it in the (sometimes maladroit) hands of the many.

By 1975, when the next wave, British punk, emerged—Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Vibrators—punk’s sound and attitude had become solidified and familiar in the American music scene, too. It was time for a further rebellion—hardcore—to take a sledgehammer to it.

Hardcore amplified and re-envisioned punk’s original elements: volume, speed, brevity, simplicity, and intensity. The instrumentation remained modest and accessible—drums, bass, guitar, and vocals—and the level of musicianship persisted as rudimentary. The proud sociopolitical message: musical dissonance was social dissonance.

Hardcore flourished in the D.C. area, where the style attracted a small, fiercely dedicated, and wholly discontented audience of youth. The Dischord house’s sleepy Virginia location was fundamental to hardcore’ essence. Suburbia was a symbol of everything D.C. hardcore stood against—privilege, conspicuous consumption, and the proverbial white picket fence—but it was this exact privilege that allowed Dischord to flourish.

Hardcore was a primarily white, middle-class music and scene. MacKaye and Nelson’s band Teen Idles emerged out of Wilson High School in upper-middle-class Northwest D.C. MacKaye, the bass guitarist and backup singer, came from a family of writers active in the civil rights movement; Nelson, the drummer, grew up primarily overseas, the son of a State Department worker. But MacKaye and Nelson did not fit the cookie-cutter model for children of the Washington power elite. People in D.C.’s first wave punk scene mockingly labeled the Idles “teeny-punks”. But Teen Idles turned the joke around, ultimately adopting the disparagement “Georgetown punks” as a rallying cry.

More than only the sound of D.C. hardcore, MacKaye, along with others in the scene, refigured what it meant to be young by embracing straightedge, a moral and social code known for its abstention from drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous sex—a credo that was a reaction to the vice-laden punk scene and the D.C. yuppie moneyed contingent. It advanced a response to Reagan-era conservatism by constructing an alternative, communal D.C. identity that gave its followers a way to negotiate the often-hostile waters of their city.

The suburban house was an unexpected, but ultimately fitting, element of the effort. It was, at least in part, a practicality. MacKaye and his bandmates were teenagers, after all, and the house checked all the necessary boxes. With a rent of just $525 a month, it was affordable (MacKaye worked at a movie theater and at a Haagen-Dazs in Georgetown, and also delivered newspapers before dawn, while Nelson had a job at the 7-Eleven across the street); it was safe (friends could take the bus or Metro to get there, and bands’ musical equipment wouldn’t get stolen); and it was detached, creating an accessible and neighbor-sensitive space to practice noisy music. It was also the first place most of these teens lived outside their parents’ homes.

Teen Idles pooled funds from playing shows to produce its first—and only—album, Minor Disturbance, and MacKaye, Nelson, and bandmate Nathan Strajcek created Dischord in 1981. The record label was intended to be the embodiment of a sacred tenet of hardcore, Do-It-Yourself (DIY)—a way to release albums that no other label would touch, and to stand against the monolithic capitalism of the music industry. Dischord had no contracts with bands, no lawyers, no demands for saleability, and no merchandising. It documented the sound and the scene of D.C. at a time when nobody else would, and made sure that the rest of the country—even the rest of the world—could hear the dissonant fury.

But just as Dischord, the label, was not just about the functional, neither was the house. It became the spiritual epicenter of D.C. hardcore, a group home and safe space for bands. Its basement served as a practice room, a social space, and a business center. Band members and friends sat around gluing together record sleeves and folding lyric sheets. Nelson hand-drew album covers; others salvaged cardboard from the 7-Eleven’s dumpster to make shipping containers for Dischord’s records. Band members and fans decorated the boxes and hand-wrote mailing addresses, distributing their 7-inch records through mail order or direct sales to record stores. Dischord House was always intended as a place to create music and forge the scene, and never as a vehicle for making money. MacKaye and Nelson were wary of commodifying and ultimately neutering the oppositional sting of hardcore.

The Dischord label grew and evolved to parallel the D.C. hardcore scene itself. When Teen Idles broke up, MacKaye and Nelson formed the seminal band Minor Threat, and Dischord released all of the group’s albums. Dischord backed No Policy by State of Alert, fronted by MacKaye’s best friend Henry Garfield, soon to become famous as Henry Rollins, lead singer of Black Flag. The label released albums by nearly all the titans of D.C. hardcore: Teen Idles, State of Alert, Minor Threat, Government Issue, Youth Brigade, Faith, and Void.

Hardcore, as it was originally conceived, had gasped its last breath by the mid-1980s, a product of its particular time and place. As with rock ‘n’ roll before it, hardcore has gained a kind of respectability it never officially wanted. The city that once tried to ignore it has come to embrace, if not fetishize, the scene. There have been hardcore art exhibitions at museums and galleries, archives formed at universities, documentaries, oral histories.

Dischord is an institution today—the record label (now operating in an unmarked space beneath the 7-Eleven) and the house, a living memorial to D.C. hardcore. Inside, steep and creaky steps lead to suite of small bedrooms, filled with meticulously stacked, organized, and labelled master copies of all Dischords’ releases; fan letters written to MacKaye in folders categorized by year; photographs of friends, shows, and bands; ledgers with hand-scrawled mail-in orders, dating back to the label’s first release; VHS tapes of shows; and a LP collection that would blow the minds of most punk fans. The low-hanging ceiling of the cramped basement is a reminder of band rehearsals of days past, as does a bass amp from the Teen Idles years, guitars from Fugazi, and a vintage skateboard allegedly still used by MacKaye.

But if any part of the house epitomizes what Dischord represents for hardcore, it’s the bungalow’s oft-photographed porch, with its peeling paint, iconic since its appearance on the cover of the classic Minor Threat album, Salad Days. Punk fans still make yearly pilgrimages to this porch, surreptitiously sneaking through the front gate to snap a photo for their band’s webpage, their Instagram page, a punk Reddit thread, a Bernie Sanders meme, a hashtag. They go because the Dischord house still personifies all that is D.C. hardcore: a physical structure that literally housed the youth that played and listened to this music, but also a revolution.

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Slave dealers bought enslaved individuals whom owners deemed surplus and warehoused them at pens in the District of Columbia until they had assembled a full shipment for removal southward. Half a mile west of the U.S. Capitol, and just south of the National Mall, sat William H. Williams’ notorious private slave jail, known as the Yellow House.

By the mid-1830s, the Yellow House was one more piece of the machinery that controlled slave society. Whip-wielding owners, overseers, slave patrollers, slave catchers with vicious dogs, local militias, and a generally vigilant white population, who routinely asked to see the passes of enslaved people whom they encountered on the roads, all conspired against a freedom seeker’s chances of a successful flight. Private and public jails lent further institutional support to slavery, even in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Some slave owners visiting or conducting business in Washington detained their bondpeople in the Yellow House for safekeeping, temporarily, for a 25-cent per day fee. But mostly it was a place for assembling enslaved people in the Chesapeake who faced imminent removal to the Lower South and permanent separation from friends, family, and kin. Abolitionist and poet John Greenleaf Whittier condemned “the dreadful amount of human agony and suffering” endemic to the jail.

The most graphic, terrifying descriptions of the Yellow House come to us from its most famous prisoner, the kidnapped Solomon Northup, who recounted his experiences there in Twelve Years a Slave. Northup, a free Black man from the North, was lured to Washington in 1841 by two white men’s false promises of lucrative employment. While in the capital, the men drugged their mark into unconsciousness, and Northup awoke enchained in the Yellow House’s basement dungeon. He vividly described the scene when his captor, slave trader James H. Birch, arrived, gave Northup a fictive history as a runaway slave from Georgia, and informed him that he would be sold. When Northup protested, Birch administered a severe thrashing with a paddle and, when that broke, a rope.

Northup, like most who passed through the Yellow House’s iron gate, was destined for sale in the Deep South. A few of William H. Williams’ captives attempted to evade that fate. In October 1840, Williams’ younger brother and partner in the slave trade, Thomas, purchased an enslaved man named John at Sinclair’s Tavern in Loudoun County, Virginia, for $600. Twenty years old, less than five feet tall, but referred to by the National Intelligencer as “stout made,” John escaped from Williams’ clutches while still in Virginia, but he was eventually apprehended in Maryland and retrieved by someone under William H. Williams’ employ. Despite his efforts to resist, John, like thousands of other enslaved people who ended up in the Williamses’ possession, was conveyed to the New Orleans slave market for auction to the highest bidder.

For the Williams brothers, every man, woman, and child they bought and sold were commodities in which they speculated. Their entire business was based on assuming the risk that they could buy low in the Chesapeake and sell high in the slave markets of the Old South. Occasionally, they even tried to profit by betting on people fleeing their owners. In 1842, Thomas Williams purchased two escapees from Auguste Reggio of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. According to Williams’ agreement, “It is … understood that … Enoch and John are sold as runaway slaves & are now absent.” Nevertheless, Williams was so confident that the police state of the Old South would soon apprehend them that he paid $650 apiece for two absconded men he might never see. In an undeniable gamble, the slave dealer wagered that they would both be recovered and fetch a far more handsome price in the New Orleans slave market than what he had paid for them.

Despite the odds against them, certain enslaved individuals who fell into the Williams brothers’ orbit determined to resist the system that oppressed them. In 1850, William H. Williams placed advertisements in the Baltimore Sun to alert the public to five enslaved people who had evaded his grasp. In May, Williams offered a $400 reward: $100 apiece for 26-year-old James; 25-year-old Sam, who was missing a front tooth; 20-year-old George; and the ailing Gusta, described as “ruptured,” likely indicating that he was suffering from a hernia.

In August, Williams again sought public assistance, this time in the recovery of “my MAN JOE,” a six-foot-tall 26-year-old who had been recently purchased from a doctor in Fauquier County, Virginia. Joe absconded near Fredericksburg and was heading, according to Williams’ prognostications, for Pennsylvania by way of Winchester, Virginia, where he had a grandmother and other relatives. Neither runaway ad mentioned whether the escapee had fled while in transit to Williams’ Washington slave pen or from the Yellow House itself.

One dramatic escape attempt from the Yellow House was documented in 1842 by Seth M. Gates, an antislavery New York Whig in the U.S. House of Representatives. Writing as an anonymous “Member of Congress” in the pages of the New York Evangelist, Gates described an unnamed “smart and active” woman deposited in Williams’ private prison who, the evening prior to her scheduled departure from Washington for sale in the Deep South, “darted past her keeper,” broke jail, “and ran for her life.”

She headed southwest down Maryland Avenue, straight toward the Long Bridge that spanned the Potomac and led to that portion of the District of Columbia ceded by Virginia. “It [was] not a great distance from the prison to the long bridge,” Gates observed, and on the opposite side of the river lay the Custis estate and its “extensive forests and woodlands” where she could hide.

Her flight took the keeper of Williams’ jail, Joshua Staples, by surprise. By the time he secured the other prisoners and set off in pursuit, she had a sizeable head start. Also working in her favor, “no bloodhounds were at hand” to track her, and the late hour meant that Staples had no horses available. A small band of men at his immediate disposal would have to overtake her on foot.

Although they “raised the hue and cry on her pathway” to summon the public’s aid, the woman breezed past the bewildered citizens of Washington who streamed out of their homes, struggling to comprehend the cause of all the commotion along the avenue. Realizing the scene unfolding before their eyes, residents greeted this act of protest in starkly different ways. Those who were antislavery prayed for her successful escape, while others supported the status quo by joining the “motley mass in pursuit.”

Fleet of foot and with everything to lose, the woman put still more distance between her and her would-be captors. In this contest of “speed and endurance, between the slave and the slave catchers,” Gates related, the runaway was winning. She reached the end of Maryland Avenue and made it onto the Long Bridge, just three-fourths of a mile from the Custis woods on the other side.

Yet just as Staples and his men set foot on the bridge, they caught sight of three white men at the opposite end, “slowly advancing from the Virginia side.” Staples called out to them to seize her. Dutifully, they arranged themselves three abreast, blocking the width of the narrow walkway. In Gates’s telling, the woman “looked wildly and anxiously around, to see if there was no other hope of escape,” but her prospects for success had suddenly evaporated. As her pursuers rapidly approached, their “noisy shout[s]” and threats filling the air, she vaulted over the side of the bridge and plunged into “the deep loamy water of the Potomac.” Gates assumed that she had committed suicide.

The unnamed woman who leaped from the bridge would not have been the first enslaved person imprisoned in the Yellow House to engage in a willful act of self-destruction. Whittier, the abolitionist, mentioned that among the “secret horrors of the prison house” were the occasional suicides of enslaved inmates devoid of all hope. One man in 1838 sliced his own throat rather than submit to sale. The presumed, tragic death of the woman who fled down Maryland Avenue, Gates concluded, offered “a fresh admonition to the slave dealer, of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes” as it testified to “the unconquerable love of liberty the heart of the slave may inherit.”

In antebellum Washington, D.C., African Americans were smothered by a Southern police state that treated them as property and demanded that they labor for the profit of others. Thousands upon thousands were swept up in the domestic slave trade, their lives stolen for forced labor in the Deep South. But a few, like the woman who fled the Yellow House, courageously transformed Washington’s public streets into a site of protest and affirmed their personhood in the face of oppression. Now, more than a century and a half later, echoes of that struggle can still be heard.

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It was not a city I thought I’d first move to in my 40s, after 13 years in New York City and a peripatetic decade in academia. Washington is a good town for nerds but tough on freaks, and I have thought of myself as a freak since high school, which wasn’t cured by coming out as a lesbian many years ago. Washington has no shortage of queers, with or without Republicans in charge. But its tidiness extends to its queer life. I never quite got past the floundering stage of when you move to a brand-new town.

One place where I did find myself in Washington, if only for less than an hour at a time, was at Meeps, a vintage store near the bottom of a sharp slope dropping off from the Adams Morgan neighborhood, across the street from a community center and a few doors up from a gay diner. I lived on the same street, a little over half a mile away, and if two things held true—i.e., if I was feeling a little down but was also recently blessed with a payday—I took myself down the hill to go shopping.

Meeps meant a lot to me because I could indulge my passion for clothes, and for clothing history, without catching any cross glances for also being a butch lesbian who is sometimes more or less indistinguishable from a man. This store and the people who work there made me love the way I look.

I wear men’s shirts, ties, vests, sweaters, and jackets. Meeps, which in March closed shop for the time being due to the pandemic, has a sublime collection of men’s vintage, which is hard to find, and carried enough in small sizes to keep me coming back. The finds were often incredible. About two years ago the owner, Cathy Chen, must have come into a serious cache of ’70s pastel-colored ruffle tuxedo shirts. Since every self-respecting butch dandy needs a ruffle tux, I instantly got one in mint green. But more and more colors kept appearing in the months afterward: sherbet orange, sky blue, yellow, pink.

At one point I even saw a tailcoat. I tried it on and miraculously I could have been Astaire, it fit so well. But one of the staff actually talked me out of pulling out my wallet: “It’s beautiful, it looks great on you, but where are you going to wear it?” He was right. I saved my $100 and later bought a sharp 1960s iridescent blue damask smoking jacket whose label said it was hand-tailored by one Charley Chang at the Hong Kong Hilton. I’ve worn it in public exactly once, but it makes me feel like five-part harmony.

The space is tiny and well kept, but the fitting rooms are spaces enclosed by curtains pinned together with binder clips and clothespins. Like a lot of butches, I find fitting rooms difficult. For many years I avoided them altogether, because of the weird combination of gender segregation, body ambivalence, and surveillance they represent. I’ve thankfully gotten past that unease, but still I think it’s all to the credit of the Meeps staff that I always felt like I had a right to see how clothes—elegant, fabulous clothes—looked on my body. If a beautiful garment turned out to fit perfectly, I would parade around the store, one glance over the shoulder into the mirror in the corner, another in the mirror hanging above the bored-boyfriend settee. The staff would enumerate the ways the garment flattered, if in fact it did. If it was borderline, they would never push me to buy it. It was certainly a transactional relationship, but I’m sure they were sincere.

I think most people with experience as a woman know that this is extremely rare. I do have the advantage of having a slender frame, which is easier to fit and which, of course, is more accepted in a culture that shames people with bodies less normative than mine. But preferring to dress against gender expectations is deeply unsettling to many people, including, possibly, one’s own self. I’ve been harassed and assaulted on the street for looking like a man. So finding a public space that is not explicitly queer but is still explicitly affirming gives a warm feeling.

Toward the beginning of the novel Stone Butch Blues, the gender warrior Leslie Feinberg’s main character, 11 years old, finds her father’s starched-stiff shirts and ties and his two suits, one blue and one gray, which he’s told her is all a man needs. She begins to dress her butch body: “I put on the suit coat and looked in the mirror. A sound came from my throat, sort of a gasp. I liked the little girl looking back at me.” She catches a glimpse of how good it feels to express who she is freely, without judgment—but only briefly, as she’s made to feel the weight of her transgression in the coming scenes. Clothes sometimes hide who we are in our bodies. Other times, they expose it, sometimes painfully. Sometimes they protect it. And rarely, all too rarely it seems, they liberate it.

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Worldwide, rates of depression increased by 15 percent between 2005 and 2015, according to the World Health Organization. Almost everyone has been touched by depression, if not their own then that of a friend or family member. As depression becomes our new normal, the question of how to diagnose, prevent, and treat it becomes ever more urgent, said a panel of experts at a Zócalo/UCLA event titled “Is Depression a 21st-Century Epidemic?”

Before a full audience at the House of Sweden in Washington DC, the event began with a question from moderator Amy Ellis Nutt, former science writer for The Washington Post, that underscored the complexity of the task of treating the disease: “How can we truly assess the rate of depression in the US or the world without an adequate definition of what depression is?

In fact, depression, which spans emotions ranging from sadness, to the inability to work, to thoughts of suicide, may not be one disease, said psychiatrist Nelson Freimer, who is director of the UCLA Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics. “We really have to start thinking of depression as a group of illnesses which have many features in common,” he said. But Freimer cautioned this fact should not deter us from determining what forms depression takes are so we can understand and treat them.

One theme of the evening was that current limits to diagnosis and care should not define the sort of research done on depression. When half of American counties have no psychologists, new modes of treatment are necessary. Shelli Avenevoli, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) said we need to start thinking about options for treating people without using an on-site therapist or doctor.

The NIMH, she said, is looking into using telehealth—or video—so that mental health professionals can reach people in remote emergency rooms, or even do family therapy to rural homes.

Indeed, the treatment of the future—whether it is targeted drugs or new innovations in therapy—may not involve much one-on-one therapy at all, panelists suggested.

Michelle Craske, director of UCLA’s Anxiety and Depression Research Center, said that increasing access to mental health care, while important, would not be enough to address the problem of depression. “When you think of the rates of depression and anxiety and related conditions, and especially among youth, it’s almost impossible to think we’ll ever have enough clinicians to do the job,” she said.

A further complication is that current treatments for depression—whether drugs or therapy—only put the condition in remission about half the time. That’s why some scientists, in search of more effective treatment, are trying to determine which genes are involved in different underlying causes of depression.

Freimer noted that the field of cancer therapy has undergone a revolution over the last 20 years so that patients are now pre-screened to see which drugs are likely to be most effective. He said he hoped for something similar to happen in depression treatment.

The other big change underway in the treatment of depression is a shift towards trying to make sufferers feel more joyous (as opposed to making them less miserable). As the controversial drug ketamine has been used to successfully treat some people whose depression has resisted standard medicines, researchers have realized that positive moods and negative moods are “not on a continuum,” said Craske, because the brain circuits for negative emotions are different from the ones for positive emotions. “There’s a shift in the field away from negative and towards positive,” she said.

As the evening went on, panelists suggested that the outlook for depression is not as bleak as it currently seems. A multidisciplinary effort by UCLA is studying 100,000 people to find underlying genetic and environmental causes for depression. Included in this project, called the Depression Grand Challenge, is a program available to UCLA’s 44,000 students, of whom one in five experiences depression during the school year. Students can use an online screening tool that connects them to resources ranging from online therapy, to student coaches, and even to emergency teams. Some 6,000 students have used the program and gotten help where they needed it. And professionals have met with 650 students expressing suicidal thoughts, according to Craske.

When it came to the question of whether modern life is making us depressed, the panelists’ verdict was cautious.

A member of the audience, who said he works in technology, asked whether technology was worsening mental health problems. The panel agreed that it’s likely that technology—which enables such stressors as online bullying, social isolation, distraction, and withdrawal—is bringing depression to the surface in people who are at risk for it. But technology also offers enormous opportunities for outreach and, prevention. Craske said it was an “amazing way to get treatment to people who otherwise could not get it.”

Avenevoli agreed, “The reality is that we are not going to change the culture of technology. So how do we leverage it for treatment?”

The post While Modern Life May Exacerbate Depression, It May Also Give Us the Tools to Treat It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many might be surprised to learn, therefore, that at one particularly precarious point in the city’s history during the War of 1812, Congress seriously debated abandoning the site and moving the capital to another location. Rooted in the ideological and regional disputes of the time, the moment highlighted the deep symbolic value Americans placed on Washington long before it evolved into a showplace of American culture, learning, and history as well as a stage for marches, protests, and rallies.

Disputes over the physical form and development of what would become Washington, D.C. began almost immediately after President George Washington chose the site for the city in 1791, with opposing political camps hoping that the new capital might be molded to reflect their particular visions for the new nation. Two major political parties had congealed in Congress during Washington’s administration: the Federalist Party, which envisioned a strong federal government at the helm of an increasingly powerful American nation, and the Democratic-Republicans (also referred to as the Republicans or Jeffersonians, after their leader Thomas Jefferson), who believed in a smaller and weaker national government, one lacking both the power and the funds to tyrannize Americans as the British government had prior to the Revolution.

George Washington never belonged to either of these parties, but his political beliefs leaned toward those of the Federalists—and the architect he chose to plan the new capital, the French-born Revolutionary War veteran Pierre Charles L’Enfant, delivered a grand and impressive city plan that reflected a Federalist perspective on U.S. power, prestige, and government authority. L’Enfant’s design placed the President’s Mansion and the Capitol Building atop existing hills, allowing each to loom over sections of the city. It featured long, uncommonly wide avenues, emphasizing the breadth and grandeur of the cityscape. It called for individual states to erect “statues, columns, obelisks, or any other ornaments” to commemorate Revolutionary War heroes. And, in terms of sheer size, L’Enfant’s capital dwarfed the footprints of other American cities, spreading across an area more than six times the 1.5 square miles at the southern tip of Manhattan that made up New York in 1800.

Unfortunately for the Federalists, the infant republic lacked the means to build on such a grand scale. In 1800, President John Adams and Congress moved into half-finished and just barely functional versions of the White House and Capitol Building. Summing up the state of the capital, Connecticut Congressman John Cotton Smith remarked that “instead of recognizing the avenues and streets, portrayed on the plan of the city, not one was visible, unless we except a road with two buildings on each side of it, called the New Jersey Avenue. The Pennsylvania Avenue, leading, as laid down on paper, from the Capitol to the Presidential Mansion, was then nearly the whole distance a deep morass, covered with alder bushes.”

After Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans swept to power in the election of 1800, they followed through on their small-government convictions and left responsibility for further construction and development of the enormous city to the local residents. Over the next three decades, Jeffersonians confined federal government support for projects in the city almost exclusively to the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Calls for assistance from the locals, whose tiny tax base could not begin to support management and development of a city the size of Washington, went largely unheeded.

It was this context into which British troops marched during the War of 1812, which had started when the United States attacked British Canada in the hopes of resolving ongoing disputes with the British Empire over interference with Native Americans, and over British naval policies that affected the United States during the Napoleonic Wars. But in August 1814, after easily defeating American soldiers and militiamen at Bladensburg, Maryland, British marines captured the otherwise undefended American capital. Happily repaying the Americans for the burning of the Canadian capital of York (now Toronto) earlier in the war, British troops set fire to the public buildings in Washington. The White House, the Capitol Building, the executive office buildings, and the Navy Yard all burned.

The U.S. Capitol after it was burned by the invading British during the War of 1812. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Although their homes and private businesses had been spared by a summer storm that prevented the fires from spreading, weary Washington residents suddenly found themselves facing another—possibly even greater—threat to their livelihoods. Almost immediately, members of the House of Representatives, who had been burned out of their chambers, began debating the removal of the federal government from the District of Columbia. On September 26th, meeting in the largest building still standing in Washington, a converted hotel that housed the Patent Office and the U.S. Post Office, Congress began to debate the future of the capital. Congressman Jonathan Fisk, a Democratic-Republican from New York, first proposed the formation of a committee to “inquire into the expediency of removing the Seat of Government.”

Largely hailing from the Northern states, proponents of removal argued that Washington had been proven insufficiently defensible and that a safer location should be found for the government. They also decried the inconveniences of cramming themselves together in too small a building and the indignity of what one member referred to as “making laws among ruins.” These latter complaints might have been remedied by temporary relocation of the government while the Capitol Building was reconstructed. But supporters of Washington feared that, once out of the District, Congress might never choose to return. These fears must have been exacerbated when advocates for removal raised longstanding complaints about Washington that stemmed from both its lack of development and from its location in the South, several days’ travel beyond the Northern cities that housed most of America’s banking and financial interests. Congressman Fisk noted, for example, that Congress would benefit from being “where they could have better opportunity to call into action the resources of the nation.”

Defenders of the Potomac capital asked what message departure would send to the American people and to their British enemies. Would they double the victory already won by the British by abandoning the site of their capital altogether? Would they leave behind the local residents of the District, many of whom had invested in land and businesses there? And what precedent would be set if the capital were moved? Nathaniel Macon, a Democratic-Republican from North Carolina, warned that, “if the Seat of Government was once set on wheels, there was no saying where it would stop.” Was Congress prepared to perpetually fight over the location of the capital?

On October 15, after three weeks of debate and two successful procedural votes to continue discussion of the motion, the issue was settled when the House voted 83 to 74 against removal. While views on the proper size of the city and the government’s role in its development had long been party battles, the subject of removal proved to be more tied to regional geography. Not surprisingly, Congressional delegations from those states nearest to the District, including Southern states, voted most overwhelmingly against removal, while congressmen from the North favored it. Delegations from states west of the Appalachians largely split their votes.

For their part, local residents banded together during and after this close call in Congress to ensure that the government remained in Washington. Even as the House debated removal, District banks offered $500,000 in credit to Congress to fund reconstruction, and the following February, Congress took them up on their offer. Also, recognizing that the cramped accommodations at the former Patent Office upset Congress, local residents formed a joint stock company which eventually spent $25,000—several hundred thousand dollars in today’s terms—to construct a temporary meeting place for Congress. Over the four years that Congress met in what came to be called the Old Brick Capitol, from 1815 to 1819, the federal government paid the Company a mere $6,600 in rent.

Although the locals didn’t come close to recouping their investment, their actions helped to reaffirm the District as the permanent home for the government. With the removal bill defeated and the reconstruction of the public buildings begun, Congress closed for good the question of the location of the capital city. National politicians, local residents, and all Americans now could return to debating every other aspect of the city’s form, function, and funding. By the 1830s, Jacksonian Era politicians had begun to leave behind the Jeffersonian insistence that the District fend for itself on matters of funding and development. And over the next two centuries, the city not only grew into but also, in many ways, lived up to and even surpassed the grand plans laid down by Washington and L’Enfant.

The post The Washingtonians Who Fought to Keep Their City as the Nation’s Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California is trapped—caught in the dangerous space between two menacingly authoritarian regimes that want to fight each other.

One regime is headquartered in Beijing, and the other is about to take power in Washington D.C. But when viewed from the Golden State, it’s striking how much they have in common.

Both are fervently nationalist, full of military men, and so bellicose they are spooking neighbors and allies. Both, while nodding to public opinion, express open contempt for human rights and undermine faith in elections and the free press. Both promote hatred of minorities (anti-Tibetan and anti-Uighur stances in China; anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim stances in the U.S.).

And both regimes are captained by swaggering men (President Xi Jinping in China; President-elect Donald Trump in U.S.) who tend to their own cults of personality and pose as corruption fighters while using their power to enrich their own families.

Most frighteningly for Californians, both regimes seem to see advantage in escalating conflict with the other. Both leaders have encouraged hatred of the other’s citizens (Xi has embraced ultranationalists who compare American treatment of the Chinese to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, while Trump has called China a “deceitful culture”). The incoming American administration is threatening to raise tariffs and label China a currency manipulator, actions that would likely start a trade war. The Chinese administration is provoking confrontations in the South China Sea while the new American strongman embraces Taiwan—actions that could start a real war.

All this leaves California with the enormous challenge of navigating U.S.-China tensions in a way that protects our people, our economy, and our values. And that will require tricky diplomacy that doesn’t take sides, for we need to maintain relations with both regimes. After all, we live under the laws of the United States, but are irretrievably linked to China, a vital partner in the trade, culture, technology and education sectors that distinguish California in the world.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California. Our public universities rely both on federal funds from D.C. and top-dollar, out-of-state tuition fees from Chinese students to subsidize the education of Californians. So any Trump restrictions on foreign visitors—or retaliatory Chinese limits on overseas study and travel—could blow up the University of California’s business model. It also would damage the University of Southern California, the city of L.A.’s largest private sector employer, which heavily recruits Chinese students.

Our state’s signature industries—Silicon Valley and Hollywood—depend on consumers who live under both regimes. And our most promising ventures—from virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies to major developments (like the San Francisco Shipyards in Hunter’s Point, to just name one)—rely on our ability to bring together manufacturers, investors and technologists from China and the U.S. In a trade war, both regimes could decimate innovation and development with restrictions on foreign investments.

And with both regimes so quick to escalate nationalist rhetoric, it’s quite possible that both Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans in California could become targets of bigotry and hate crimes. Our housing market relies on Chinese buyers, who spend an estimated $9 billion a year on homes here. A backlash against Chinese investors buying homes (and using them only part of the year) could produce discrimination and hurt our housing market, which in turn would damage the already underfunded public schools our taxes support.

How then can California handle such a conflict?

First, by protecting our people (especially Californians of Chinese ancestry) and our institutional connections to China with the same fervor the California government is rallying to protect our undocumented immigrants against Trump’s threats of mass deportations. This California diplomacy will be especially hard given the hyper-sensitivity of the autocrats in Beijing and D.C. to the slightest of slights; just as Trump lashes out at Saturday Night Live parodies, Xi and his loyalists see the Kung Fu Panda films as American warfare against them.

And, second, by reminding both regimes—in friendly but firm ways—that we are opposed to conflict because the U.S. and China need each other more than they appear willing to acknowledge.

Californians who doubt this would do well to consult John Pomfret’s masterful new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. Pomfret, an American journalist long posted in China, employs telling details (the tea thrown into Boston Harbor was from Xiamen; an 1860s California attorney general campaigned against Chinese prostitutes while importing his own) to show how profoundly the two countries have shaped one other’s development, and just how vital their relationship has become to the world.

“The two nations have feuded fiercely and frequently, yet, irresistibly and inevitably, they are drawn back to one another,” he writes. “The result is two powers locked in an entangling embrace that neither can quit.”

California’s role in this difficult period should be to tell the story of its own deep ties to China, while serving as a model for a productive relationship, argues Matt Sheehan, author of the forthcoming book Chinafornia: Working with Chinese Investors, Immigrants and Ideas on U.S. Soil.

Sheehan, who also publishes the weekly Chinafornia Newsletter and provides communications consulting for Chinese and U.S. companies, says now is an important time for California officials and businesses to seek out areas of productive cooperation with Chinese counterparts, especially in areas like manufacturing and fighting climate change.

“I think of California as a living laboratory for a more practical, productive version of U.S.-China relations,” he says.

But not all collaborations with China would be helpful. Our technologies companies shouldn’t be aiding the U.S. surveillance state or assisting the Chinese government in suppressing human rights, as Facebook is reportedly doing by developing a newsfeed that would empower censors.

We also shouldn’t play to anti-Chinese prejudice, like some California unions have done in opposing trade agreements and advancing union organizing. One noxious—if ridiculous—example is a current push by the hotel workers’ union to block the sale of the Westin Hotel in Long Beach (where the union has an organizing campaign) to Chinese interests on grounds that it’s so close to that city’s port that Chinese ownership would threaten national security.

One possible model for California’s strategy going forward might be Anson Burlingame, whom President Lincoln dispatched to Beijing to represent the U.S. during the Civil War. Burlingame’s approach, as described by Pomfret, was to commiserate with the Chinese (we have our terrible rebellion with the South, you with the Taipings) as a basis for collaboration. His work ultimately produced the Burlingame Treaty, which banned discrimination against Chinese workers in America, welcomed Chinese students to U.S. educational institutions, and opened the way for Chinese immigrants to become American citizens.

Today, Burlingame’s accomplishments are mostly forgotten, but his name belongs to a highly desirable suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region boasting one of America’s most prosperous populations of Chinese Americans.

The post How California Can Survive the U.S.-China War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Forget all that talk about the wisdom of voters, and the great American people. We are the problem, with our shrill, hyperbolic, extremist, intolerant, and polarized ways of engaging in politics over the past two decades.

I can recall in the late ’90s being totally befuddled by how some of my friends, perfectly sensible people when the subject wasn’t politics, would go apoplectic at the mere mention of Bill Clinton.

Our president, I can recall a Michigan banker friend named John telling me, was a socialist, a dishonorable man intent on destroying America. John would practically start shaking when discussing Clinton and the need for the cretin to be removed from office. I couldn’t understand where all this vitriol came from. To what water cooler did he retreat to where such views were the norm? (A clue: I think it was from him that I first heard of Fox News).

Sure, Clinton had his personal weaknesses (almost clichés for a politico, though, which in other eras would not likely have led to impeachment proceedings). But as far as I could see, the president was overseeing a massive economic boom (deregulating John’s banking industry along the way), taking on Democratic unions to push for free trade agreements, balancing the federal budget, and deploying U.S. forces overseas, when required, in places like Kosovo and Iraq. How did all that make Bill Clinton a crazed socialist?

I was equally perplexed by the irrational level of contempt and vitriol leftist friends and colleagues felt towards George W. Bush late in his first term, and throughout his second term. The man was a fascist, they’d say, amid wishful talk of impeachment. I, too, disagreed with much of what Bush did, and worried about that administration’s competence, but the criticism among impassioned liberals, congregating online at a new crop of progressive websites and watching MSNBC and Jon Stewart, was absurdly over the top.

The facts, once again, were becoming awfully elastic and selectively parsed. Take the war in Iraq. Within a couple of years of the 2003 invasion, Democrats talked about the war as a secretive, despicable Bush plot. Never mind that plenty of Democrats supported the initial decision to go to war, and that there had been little daylight between the Clinton national security team’s assessment of Saddam Hussein’s behavior, capabilities, and intentions, and the assessment of the Bush team.

What was becoming clear, however, is that we Americans—specifically the more politically engaged among us—have been losing our ability to respectfully and constructively disagree with governing leaders of a different party, not to mention with each other. Instead of opposing certain policies of a president we don’t see eye to eye with, we jump to questioning that president’s legitimacy to even hold the office, to represent us.

Of course, this psychosis has been most pronounced during President Barack Obama’s administration, when plenty of Republicans have repeatedly questioned the president’s birthplace and religion. And, once again, the extremist rhetoric portraying him as a feckless socialist seems far removed from facts, when you consider how he responded to the financial crisis by shoring up banking institutions without taking them over, embraced a moderate market-based approach to healthcare reform (instead of a single-payer approach), and ratcheted up the drone campaigns against terrorists in countries like Yemen and Pakistan. There’s plenty to disagree with Obama on, and I understand conservatives’ ire at Obamacare and some of his progressive social agenda. But isn’t there a way to oppose the president without ridiculing the man, questioning his patriotism, and denying his legitimacy as a twice-elected leader of the free world?

The anecdotal sense that we have become a far more polarized society was borne out last year by the largest political survey ever conducted by the Pew Research Center. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats are further apart ideologically than at any point in recent history; that the two parties no longer overlapped in any meaningful way; that, in 20 years, the share of Americans expressing consistently across-the-board conservative or liberal positions had doubled, as had the percentage of Republicans and Democrats holding “very unfavorable” views of the other party. The study also found that more and more of us are hiding out in our hardened ideological silos, increasingly segregated from fellow citizens and media that don’t share our worldview. And by worldview, we no longer seem to be talking solely about one’s interpretation of objective facts, but one’s subjective choice of facts.

My list of causes for this would include the end of the Cold War (the daily threat of nuclear extinction didn’t allow for self-destructive partisanship); the balkanization of media, aided by the advent of the Internet; the takeover of politics by the fundraising-industrial complex (it’s much easier to raise money if you’re screaming that you’re fighting a danger to the republic rather than a well-meaning, if misguided, friend from the other side of the aisle); and the poisoning of the idea that Washington is a permanent home where our representatives should live, mingle, and learn to get along.

Choose your favorite polarizing culprits from that list, or add others to it, but there is no denying that we’ve landed at an ugly moment on the eve of the 2016 vote. Recent primaries have featured early “silly seasons” when voters have flirted with absurd candidacies before sobering up. But now the silly season is threatening to spill over into the actual voting process.

Let’s stipulate the obvious: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders are beyond the pale. In a more serious time, they never would have been considered credible candidates in a national election. Only in silos of same-thinking dogmatism is this not obvious. Trump, in particular, has masterfully capitalized on the cultural moment, turning into a fascist demagogue before our eyes, exhorting people to channel their anger with the status quo and “Make America Great Again” by bullying foreigners and minorities, those “others” who are to blame for all our woes. His candidacy embodies and fulfills the hysterical tenor of our political discourse. He is our political Frankenstein. If we elect Donald Trump president, half the country’s cries that our president is a fascist unfit for office will—for once—be no exaggeration.

The Republicans don’t have a monopoly on a lack of seriousness. Sanders is not leading in the polls, but the fact that so many Democrats treat him as a legitimate choice is alarming. When the self-avowed Socialist (again, real life is catching up with our once exaggerated epithets) was asked in a recent debate how high he’d like to raise income tax rates if elected, he vaguely joked that they wouldn’t go higher than 90 percent. Hillary Clinton is in a different league, credibility-wise, but our debased political culture is forcing her into some intellectually dishonest contortions. So, for instance, she had to come out against President Obama’s Asian trade pact (which she championed and negotiated as Secretary of State) because the “base” these days won’t tolerate any deviance from its dogma or overlap between the parties. It all boils down to “us” versus “them.”

There is that old aphorism (often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but of uncertain origins) that, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. We must have a reckoning with ourselves, as voters and citizens. It’s great fun to sit back and mock, or demonize, these presidential candidates, but they aren’t the underlying problem. We are.

The post Don’t Blame The Candidates—Blame Yourself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Seinfeld must have appreciated that Washington think tanks now find themselves in the spotlight, as The New York Times and other news outlets are taking a close look at the links between them and their funders, particularly foreign ones, raising the specter that they are just another form of influence-peddling organizations in disguise. I don’t think this is the case. I hope not, for my sake (I work at a think tank) and for the sake of our democracy. Most of the think tanks singled out have such diverse and competing funding bases that it’s hard to imagine them being overly swayed by any single donor. Still I confess that I’m glad that these reports have put the very important issue of institutional transparency back on our radars.

But the media attention also raised the larger Seinfeldian question of what exactly is a think tank and what is its role in our political system? It’s a question to which I have given a lot of thought, trying to come up with a better definition than Seinfeld’s crisp description. A few years ago, I was directing a growing program at a think tank—albeit one that is also a living presidential memorial and operates a bit differently than others—and I wanted to figure out how we could be more effective in our daily work. I called up colleagues at other organizations, including many I’d never met before, a few journalists, and a handful of policymakers to get a sense of when and how think tanks can impact policy issues. The results were enlightening, and I eventually wrote them down in a short book on think tank strategy.

In their most basic form, think tanks are part of the information flow in a democratic society, conducting research and analysis, and disseminating their findings and recommendations through publications and live gatherings that allow busy policymakers, advocates, journalists, and average citizens to hear diverse perspectives on important public issues. At their best they do even more, framing old issues in new ways and occasionally even coming up with actionable ideas to address some of the challenges and opportunities facing society. Harried policymakers–from cabinet secretaries to members of Congress and their staffs to civil servants implementing legislation–rarely have time to step back from the demands of the moment to conduct research and take a longer view on their portfolios. The best think tanks help break this inertia by injecting some long-term thinking and reassessments into Washington’s bloodstream.

The best think tanks also serve as hubs to bring together diverse groups that may not always speak with each other—politicians, civil servants, advocates, academics, journalists, and average citizens engaged with a particular subject. And some serve as conduits between universities, where a great deal of sophisticated but inaccessible research is done, and the larger public debate. Indeed, think tanks have proliferated in part because traditional academics often withdraw into abstract intramural scholarly debates divorced from day-to-day decision-making. The findings of scholarly research, too, are increasingly disseminated through niche publications that are hard for outsiders to use. Think tanks thus mind the gap between academia and Washington, providing a platform for researchers eager to see their work applied outside the ivory tower (which is looking more and more like an impregnable silo these days).

And much of the best work of think tanks involves building coalitions around new ideas. For instance, the Center for Global Development (one of the think tanks featured in The New York Times for accepting funding from the Norwegian government) was successful at creating a partnership among several institutions a few years ago to encourage research and production of vaccines for deadly diseases that mostly affect children in the developing world. Since drug companies had few market incentives to pursue these vaccines, the CGD worked with Harvard University, stakeholders from the governments of donor nations, and the World Bank to develop a blueprint for an advanced market commitment, in which governments guaranteed that they would buy the vaccines if produced. Today this work has led to the production of millions of doses of vaccines to save the lives of children around the world.

For a somewhat more modest project, I was involved in a very practical study a few years ago at the Wilson Center on how to leverage risk management tools to make the U.S.-Mexico border both more secure and more competitive. In the end, we involved two Mexican think tanks and the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council in producing two studies, which engaged key national, state, and local policymakers, business leaders, and civil society representatives on both sides of the border to come up with a blueprint for intelligent border management. Today, many of the ideas have become common practice, make the border more secure and improving the economy at the same time.

There are hundreds of other examples of think tank ideas that have effectively found their way into policy, largely because they have built coalitions of thinkers and doers, often drawing on the resources and knowledge in academia while engaging key stakeholders. The Brookings Institution, for example, has had a major impact in stimulating practical innovations to make U.S. cities better managed and more resilient; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has helped extend the earned income tax credit to almost half of all U.S. states because of its work with state governments and local organizations; and the Heritage Foundation played a decisive role in laying the conceptual and organizational bases for the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 attacks. Similarly, the Rand Corporation, a venerable think tank that was first established as an outfit within the Air Force and later spun off, conducted the background study that convinced the Department of Defense to abandon its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and include gays and lesbians as full members of the U.S. armed forces.

And think tanks are probably even more effective in helping frame issues so that policymakers and the public think about them differently–or examine them for the first time. The work of both the Carnegie Endowment and the Kennan Institute on Russia-U.S. relations has been critical to help us better understand the Putin enigma; research on global attitudes at the Pew Center and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs helps us understand what people in the United States and around the world think about one another; the Baker Institute in Houston has produced some of the most insightful work on energy futures.

Some critics have decried the rise of partisan and ideological agendas in think tanks, but the concern seems overwrought. Decision-making in our country is based on a contest of competing interests and opinions in the marketplace of ideas. It is healthy for political parties and interest groups to have their own affiliated research groups that can flesh out proposed policy prescriptions, whatever their political orientation, with more care and consideration than frontline politicians could ever do. The more well thought-out, competing voices in the debates over our nation’s future course, the better. And, as with any marketplace, it is the responsibility of consumers–in this case, journalists and policymakers–to be informed shoppers, to know the leanings of the organizations that they use as sources of information, and to demand transparency regarding their sources of funding and purpose. And think tanks would be wise to err on the side of disclosure to help this marketplace function well.

At the same time, in today’s hyper-partisan environment, Washington is also in need of a set of think tanks not driven by strong partisan or ideological agendas that can convene diverse points of view in a neutral, trusted setting. There has never been a greater need for organizations that can inject a measure of reason and rationality into otherwise polarized debates, bridging and brokering partisan divides, marshaling facts and dispassionate analysis. Indeed, in Washington, as Seinfeld would put it, there has never been a greater need for “a tank … to think in.”

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