Why Obama Writes

The power of writing, according to the forty-fourth president

This article is the second in a series. Read part one here.

Long before he found politics, Barack Obama found writing. These days, the world knows Obama as an audaciously hopeful (and popular) former head of state, but as Craig Fehrman explained in Literary Hub, “Obama-the-writer came before Obama-the-candidate.” At every stage of Obama’s improbable journey, the act of writing has helped him make sense of the world around him — and understand where his story fits.

Over the past year, I’ve occasionally sought refuge in old profiles and articles about Obama and his presidency. I do so not to wallow in hope-and-change nostalgia or pretend that the present reality isn’t really happening, but rather to find a little perspective and do a little processing.

As I wrote in May, for many millennials, our coming of age tracked the political trajectory of the Illinois state senator who burst onto the national scene in Boston in 2004. Throughout the Obama era, a lot of us did a lot of figuring out about who we are and what matters to us and how we think about the world. Reflecting on Obama’s story is thus a lens through which we can reflect on our own. It’s a way to process how we ended up wherever we are now, doing whatever it is we’re doing, valuing and believing whatever we’ve come to value and believe. And in my case, at least, diving into the Obama archives is way to consider my own story through the story of someone I admire as a president and as a person — and as a writer.

Figuring out his ‘organizing story’

In the White House, Obama read 10 letters a day from Americans who wrote to him. “If you listen hard enough,” he told Jeanne Marie Laskas, “everybody’s got a sacred story. An organizing story, of who they are and what their place in the world is.” When it comes to discerning and defining one’s own organizing story, a lot of the process is old-fashioned trial and error. You live your life, and hopefully you learn as you go. If you’re lucky, though, you stumble across a tool that helps you figure things out — and maybe makes your world a little clearer.

Different people employ different tools. In recent years, as I’ve attempted to process some of my experiences and challenges and values, writing has been my tool of choice. This written self-exploration was both the foundation of my book, Reframe the Day, and the reason I began writing the book in the first place. When I finished proofreading the manuscript for the final time, in a moment of clarity (or perhaps delirium), I suddenly realized that I’d written much of the book in the first-person plural because I was writing for myself as much as for anyone else. I was writing to discover my organizing story.

Well before he first shared his story with a national television audience, writing served a similar purpose for Barack Obama. As next month’s publication of A Promised Land, the first installment of his post-presidential memoirs, suggests, it still does. Despite the countless articles and speeches he’s written and the millions of books he’s sold — despite the fact that his words have shaped America’s organizing story — Obama knows that writing is more than just a tool for telling stories. It’s also a tool for figuring out what those stories are.

As a young man, Obama had some figuring out to do. Aspiring, in part, to become a novelist, he wrote short stories that served as written explorations of his own identity. “Writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my life — race, class, family,” he told Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. “And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole.”

The fictional forays that facilitated this sorting may not have been published, but that didn’t matter. They served their purpose. The process of writing them helped Obama make sense of his organizing story. The process provided clarity and understanding. The product was secondary.

The same was true for Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. When the book was first published, it “got good reviews yet sold only modestly,” Michelle Obama recounted in her own bestselling memoir, Becoming. “But that was ok. The important thing was that Barack had managed to process his life story, snapping together the disparate pieces of his Afro-Kansan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Chicagoan identity, writing himself into a sort of wholeness this way.”

That process wasn’t easy. “One of the things Obama loved about writing was the way it forced him to clarify what he thought and felt about something,” Craig Fehrman observed. The key word in that sentence is “forced.” The act of writing forces clarity. It forces the writer to take ideas, inclinations, and instincts, and shape them into something more substantive — something real. Or, failing that, it forces the writer to accept that the passing thoughts and fleeting inspirations bouncing around in their brain might not have much substance to them once they emerge from the subconscious — and that such an outcome, while disappointing, can be just as valuable for how it enables the writer to move on.

Writing for the process, not just the product

Other than rage or contempt, it’s rare for Twitter to accurately convey human emotion. But last month, when Obama tweeted that “there’s no feeling like finishing a book, and I’m proud of this one,” his relief was almost palpable.

A Promised Land will be more than just a former commander-in-chief making sense of his thoughts. It’s a way to “safeguard his legacy,” as The New York Times put it, and to defend his record. It’s also a story with an enormous audience. No book, even one written by the most admired man in the world, would get an initial print run of three million copies if it were just a cobbled-together collection of diary entries. (Maybe that’s not true. I, for one, would happily buy a scanned PDF of the yellow legal pads on which Obama handwrites his first drafts.)

In any event, it’s impossible to imagine Obama publishing a book that doesn’t meet his own literary and storytelling standards. But it’s equally impossible to imagine him dedicating so much time to the frustrating, occasionally excruciating, pursuit of writing if he didn’t derive clarity and fulfillment from the pursuit itself.

Picture him in the early 1990s. After graduating from Harvard Law School, “he takes his law degree back to Chicago, where everyone wants a piece of the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review,” as Robert Draper describes in GQ. “Obama has his pick of law firms.” He doesn’t have to write the memoir that ends up tormenting him to the point that his publisher “terminates his [book] contract for failing to meet his deadline.” But he writes it anyway.

Two decades later, Obama has a team of speechwriters working for him. He doesn’t have to spend late nights in the White House writing and rewriting his remarks. But he does anyway.

After leaving office, ex-presidents are perpetually in demand, especially in today’s era of celebrity politicians. Obama doesn’t have to write a good book — or even a coherent book — for it to be a bestseller. But even as leaked accounts suggest that crafting his latest book is proving just as difficult as the first one, he tries to write another book anyway.

At every stage, he keeps writing, even though he struggles with the insidious force that Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance.” Even though he seems to find writing, like politics, an exhausting and maddening endeavor. Even though the person who’s been called America’s “author-in-chief” and “writer-in-chief” has more than a few demands for his time.

The presidency, for those who take it seriously, is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Yet Obama has reserved some of his choicest complaining for a different job. “Writing is just so hard. Painful,” he told Jeanne Marie Laskas. “It’s work. It’s like having homework all the time.” This burden is inseparable from the process of writing. Yet the process is why Obama writes.

Surfacing the subconscious

No writer knows precisely where a particular piece of writing will take them. This article was supposed to be a quick follow-up to a piece I published in May. I planned to spend no more than a couple paragraphs highlighting Obama’s passion for writing. A “quick follow-up” and a “couple paragraphs” turned into dozens of hours reading old magazine profiles and writing two full drafts by hand in an attempt to synthesize my own experience with the anecdotes and ideas I encountered. I didn’t know that this article was the one I actually wanted to write — until I started writing.

The clarity that comes from writing depends on nothing but the act of sitting down and starting. That makes writing one of the few aspects of life for which at least some success is guaranteed. To meet demand for A Promised Land, The New York Times reported that Obama’s publisher would print a million copies in Germany and have them delivered to the United States in “three ships, outfitted with 112 shipping containers.”

My book, meanwhile, required precisely three fewer ocean liners to accommodate demand. I would’ve loved an initial printing of three million copies of Reframe the Day, but that’s not why I wrote the book. I wrote it to make sense of the world. To process my thoughts. To figure out what I think, and to test what I think I think. To bring some order to my conscious mind and dredge up whatever’s lurking in the depths below. To piece together my organizing story.

By the time I finished the first draft of the manuscript that eventually became Reframe the Day, I had already achieved what I set out to achieve: a better understanding of who I am, of what matters to me, of how the world works, and of where my story might fit. That outcome had nothing to do with sales or reviews, and everything to do with clarity and self-discovery.

That is why I write. That is also, I believe, why Obama writes. And that is something I discovered through writing.

This article, “Why Obama Writes”, was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium.

How Do Republicans Get Away With It?

Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” sheds light on the GOP’s head-spinning double standards

How do they get away with it?

We asked that question in 2016 when Republicans took the unprecedented step of refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, and chose instead to leave a vacant seat on the nation’s highest court for nearly a year.

We asked that question in 2017 when Republicans, who spent the entire Obama presidency hyperventilating that the federal deficit would drive America toward socialist collapse, took power and immediately passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy without giving a second thought to how they’d pay for it.

We’ve been asking that question for years, trying to understand how Republican politicians manage to keep a straight face as they righteously proclaim themselves warriors for limited government and individual liberty while lecturing women about what they can and cannot do with their bodies and allowing agents of the state to kill American citizens with impunity.

How do they get away with it? We’re asking that question yet again, as Republicans tie themselves in torturous rhetorical knots attempting to justify filling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat before November 3rd.

The “we” here isn’t just Democrats. The “we” is anyone who believes that democracy depends on individuals and institutions operating in good faith. And when not just a politician but an entire political party abandons even the pretense of acting in good faith, we have to wonder: How do they get away with it?

We could ask Republican politicians, but it doesn’t really matter what they say. They don’t actually believe the craven excuses they make to explain away their blatant hypocrisy and double standards. Their behavior is predicated entirely on consolidating and maintaining political power. The only thing they truly believe is that they can get away with it.

One of the lessons of modern American politics seems to be that they can. Many Americans, and not just Republican voters, have come to expect more decency, more productivity, more decorum, more common sense, more responsibility, more willingness to compromise — just more, period — from Democrats than Republicans.

Nearly four years into the Trump presidency, it’s long past cliché to ask, Can you imagine what Republicans would have done if Barack Obama did that? (To be anyone but a #MAGA Republican these days is to constantly live the head-exploding emoji: 🤯.) But this thought exercise, as overused and depressing as it is, is a vivid reminder of the gaping discrepancy between what’s expected of Democrats, and what we’ve come to expect of the vessel for the Trump personality cult that used to be called the Grand Old Party.

How do Republicans get away with it?

In part, it’s their pure, unrestrained shamelessness. As it turns out, our system of norms, traditions, and precedents is largely self-regulating, leaving us vulnerable to demagogues and nihilists who are immune to the feelings that most human beings call “shame” or “guilt.” As demonstrated by the career trajectory of cynic-in-chief Mitch McConnell, an inability to feel shame can get you really far in American politics. (The tradition of white men using shamelessness to fail upward isn’t limited to the United States — just look at the UK government.)

Other factors help explain how Republican politicians get away with it. Many tech platforms and news outlets have a dangerously deep-seated (and often profit-driven) fear of appearing biased against conservative views. Republicans have manipulated this fear masterfully. They also have a built-in advantage, in that it’s a lot easier to succeed as an anti-government party making government dysfunctional and distrusted than as a pro-government party trying to make government work.

But there’s a much more fundamental issue at play. In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson provides a crucial and clarifying piece of the puzzle. Caste describes the history and shape-shifting evolution of America’s race-based hierarchy. As she discusses how the outcome of the 2016 presidential election “was the culmination of forces that had been building for decades,” Wilkerson writes:

In a caste context, the two main political parties bear the advantages and burdens of the castes they most attract and with which they are associated. At times, the stigma and double standard attached to disfavored minorities have accrued to the Democrats, while the privilege and latitude accorded the dominant caste has accrued to the Republicans, who have come to be seen as proxies for white America.

In many ways, it’s that simple. Over the past half-century, “as white support has intensified for Republicans,” Wilkerson writes, the GOP has come to be “seen as the party of an anxious but powerful dominant-caste electorate.” In America’s collective consciousness, Republicans are now associated with the dominant caste. This status gives them enormous leeway to say and do things that would never be tolerated of society’s subordinate groups.

That helps explain some of the behavior of Republican politicians and power-brokers, such as “the unforgiving scrutiny and obstructions faced by Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and before them John Kerry and Al Gore,” as Wilkerson writes. But it also helps explain why so many other American entities and institutions, and the people within them, expect more, and tolerate less, from Democrats. Reporters. Media executives. Democratic politicians. Judges. CEOs. Political analysts. Lobbyists. Pundits. Voters. Nonvoters. It’s just not Republicans who have internalized the biases and double standards of America’s racial caste structure.

Republicans, in turn, have taken all the latitude and unearned credibility that comes with their dominant-caste affiliation and exploited it to the fullest to entrench their power. They’ve rewritten laws and packed courts. They’ve rewarded their supporters and disenfranchised their opponents. And now they’ve dragged the United States — the country whose values and story they love much more in theory than in practice — to the brink of illiberalism. All to preserve white minority rule. All to preserve the dominance of the dominant caste.

What should we make of this? As the GOP’s infuriating and entirely predictable response to Justice Ginsburg’s passing makes clear, the fight over when to fill her seat on the Supreme Court is not actually a fight about legal authority or precedent. It’s not even a fight about double standards. It’s a fight about power. It’s a fight about dominance.

In this case, it’s not just that Republicans don’t believe their own arguments. It’s that they know you don’t believe them either. That’s the point. “Make no mistake: It is degrading when people lie to you openly and obviously,” Lili Loofbourow writes in Slate. These lies are “calculated insults to your intelligence and to your citizenship and to your country.” Sure, Republicans are saying, we’re stealing another Supreme Court seat. What are you going to do about it?

Today, the party of the dominant caste holds power but senses that power slipping away. The party’s members and supporters will do anything to avoid that outcome, so of course they won’t hesitate to steal another Supreme Court seat if that’s what it takes.

Nor will they try to do so subtly, or with any pretense of legitimacy. No, they’ll steal it brazenly and openly. This brazenness, this flaunting of dominance, this refusal to play by the same rules they impose on others, this rejection of the very norms and standards that their own predecessors constructed (often as a means of preserving this same dominance), is part of the act. Taunting and demeaning those who would dare question their power and authority is itself a way of asserting that power and authority.

And we know this because these are the same tactics that have been honed and deployed for centuries to maintain white supremacy.

Republicans, as Loofbourow puts it, have “turned good faith into a sucker’s failing in a sucker’s game.” This White House, this Republican Senate majority, these Republican enablers in Congress and in boardrooms and in positions of power across the country are determined — no, they are desperate — to preserve the dominance of the dominant caste.

They will do whatever it takes.

This article, “How Do Republicans Get Away With It?”, was originally published on Medium.

Remembering John Lewis, America’s Pilot Light

Two stories about a man who always kept the faith.

“Without a doubt the greatest living American.”

YouTube comments are not usually where one finds a meaningful analysis of American history. Or a compelling argument. Or really anything of substance. But there, underneath a decidedly non-HD video of Congressman John Lewis giving a speech to what I think was a health care advocacy organization, was a line that said it all: “Without a doubt the greatest living American.”

I came across that comment sometime in early 2012, during one of those magical nights when the Internet manages to do exactly what the tech CEOs promise: deliver connection and inspiration, even joy. I was living in a studio apartment in Washington, DC, and working on Capitol Hill while taking graduate school classes in the evenings. I don’t recall what sequence of links led me to that video, which in turn led me down a beautiful online rabbit hole of John Lewis speeches. What I do recall is thinking, as I watched speech after speech, Why aren’t these the most-viewed videos on the Internet?

Here, I thought to myself, is Congressman John Lewis, a witness to and shaper of history, a leader of the civil rights movement, a friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

Here is the “Conscience of the Congress,” the youngest speaker at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Here is the man who had his skull fractured during the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama — the bridge that still bears the name of a Klansman but that will someday be named for John Lewis — on the day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

Here is this crusader for justice, this soft-spoken man with the voice that could boom. Here he is with his humility and his deeply earned assuredness and his steadfast conviction, having long since surrendered to what he called the “Spirit of History.”

Here, on YouTube, is John Lewis, the John Lewis, sharing his stories, his passion, his determination, his faith, his lifelong commitment to the struggle for, as he succinctly put it, “freedom, equality, basic human rights.” Sharing it with a small group here, a small group there, saying “‘no’ to hate but ‘yes’ to almost every invitation that landed in his box,” as Michele L. Norris wrote in the Washington Post. Sharing it all with the world, as he’d done selflessly and unrelentingly for decades.

A few months after this inspiring evening on YouTube, the same grad school curriculum I’d occasionally neglected so I could spend a night watching John Lewis speeches online called for me to write a paper about leadership. I emailed Lewis’s Washington, DC office and explained my situation as a Hill staffer and part-time graduate student. I asked if the congressman might consider sitting for an interview for my assignment.

A lot of offices would’ve declined a request like this. Given Congressman Lewis’s stature and renown, and the fact that I had zero ties to Georgia’s fifth congressional district, this was even more of a long shot. If I were lucky, I thought, maybe I’d get an email with some pre-written answers (which, to be clear, would’ve been more than adequate for my assignment).

But no. Just a few weeks later, I found myself sitting down with John Lewis in his office with a majestic view of the U.S. Capitol, the same U.S. Capitol he might have seen in the distance as he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 and called on 250,000 people on the National Mall to “get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete.”

Nearly half a century later, on a steamy summer day in Washington, I was sitting down with John Lewis.

***

Many people have spoken of what made John Lewis such a remarkable person. It was more than his accomplishments, though those accomplishments were monumental. It was more than his bravery and courage, though the fear he faced down and the pain he endured are unimaginable to most of us. It was more than his willingness to get in “good trouble,” more than his lifelong dedication to the struggle, though that willingness and that dedication changed the world.

What made John Lewis remarkable, even beyond all of that, was his character. His decency. His kindness. His compassion. His presence. Not “presence” in the sense of fame or stature or prestige, though he had those things. Not the type of “presence” that is often used to describe the “proximity to power” feeling that emanates from a lot of political figures, though he was undoubtedly a powerful political figure.

The magnetism and beauty of John Lewis’s presence came from something much deeper, much more real, much more genuine. It seemed to come directly from his heart. It seemed to come from the fact that, in the words of Dr. King, he had been to the mountaintop, and he wanted to share with you what he’d seen. And somehow, no matter who you were, he was interested in what you’d seen along your journey, too.

This was “presence” in the most literal sense: the ability to be present in the moment. When John Lewis spoke with you, when he shook hands with you, when he smiled at you, you knew he saw you. He heard you. You mattered to him. Not as a political asset, but as a human being.

Wherever John Lewis was, when he was there, he was there. And on that day in July 2012 in the Cannon House Office Building, even though he had no reason to be there, he was there. All of him was there. That decency. That kindness. That compassion. That presence. The deliberateness and care with which he acted and spoke and gestured and chose his words. The focus and attention he somehow always made available for the person in front of him.

When I interviewed John Lewis about leadership, there was no question I could ask that he hadn’t answered thousands of times before. He had no need to engage with me, to share his wisdom and presence with me. But he did anyway.

A good leader, he told me, “must be a headlight, not a tail light.” A good leader must be there for the long term. You “can’t be a firecracker leader and shoot off and be gone,” he said. “You must keep burning.” Leaders get their hands dirty, Lewis told me. They get in the ring. “A leader must not call on his followers to do anything he’s not prepared to do,” Lewis said.

I asked him, of all the leaders he’d known and worked with throughout his life, a list that included presidents from Kennedy to Johnson to Obama, who had he learned the most from? Lewis didn’t hesitate. “Dr. King,” he said. “Dr. King inspired me to get in trouble.”

John Lewis and I ended our meeting with a quick photo before he moved to the next item on his busy schedule. That’s how a lot of political meetings end. But this conversation was unlike any other conversation I’ve had with a politician. It was unlike pretty much any conversation I’ve had with another person, for that matter.

Just think of the last time you had a conversation with anyone — let alone an elected official — who was truly present for you. In our world of too many distractions and too much to do, when was the last time you were truly present for someone else, especially for someone you didn’t need to help or listen to? I say that not to issue a blanket indictment of us but rather to celebrate John Lewis and his extraordinary presence. After all he had seen, done, achieved, witnessed, endured — after all of that, he still kept showing up for the human being in front of him.

I’ve never forgotten what John Lewis said that day. But I learned as much about leadership from what he did as from what he said.

***

Beyond their impact on culture and society, beyond the wisdom and progress they impart to the world, heroes and historical figures influence each of us in unique ways. Even if we don’t know them personally, we all have our own relationships with people we admire. The volume of tributes to John Lewis throughout his life and in the weeks since his passing reflects just how many people admire him, just how many people have their own special bond with this icon who they knew, marched with, read about, heard speak, saw around town, saw on YouTube, studied, loved.

Many of these tributes have been both genuine and genuinely moving. Some tributes, though, reflect the contradictions and hypocrisies at the heart of the American story. Some tributes have come from those whose beliefs, whose campaign contributions, whose votes in Congress, whose Supreme Court nominees, whose support for racist policies opposed everything John Lewis stood for. Everything he fought for. Everything he marched for. Everything he was arrested 40 times for. Everything he was beaten nearly to death for.

John Lewis knew these contradictions and hypocrisies well. He knew that “truth never did stop the concocters of racist ideas,” as Ibram X. Kendi writes in Stamped from the Beginning. As vividly and acutely as anyone, John Lewis had seen these racist ideas, been subjected to them, watched them mutate and transform over time, suffered their violent and unjust consequences. He probably wouldn’t have been surprised to hear eulogies from those who, as Joel Anderson wrote recently in Slate, “shamelessly celebrate the life of Lewis only to work assiduously to thwart his life’s work.”

John Lewis had seen and experienced too much along his journey to be surprised when a congressional colleague who posed for a picture with him one day endorsed racist voter suppression laws the next. Or when, as Ari Berman describes in Give Us the Ballot, on the very day in 2013 that the Supreme Court laid the groundwork to dismantle some of the most critical provisions of the Voting Rights Act precisely because they had been so effective, “a few hundred yards away at the U.S. Capitol, Congress unveiled a new statue of the civil rights leader Rosa Parks.” As if statues, but not voting rights, might be the solution to centuries of racial subjugation and discrimination. “The actual American history” of race, Kendi writes in Stamped from the Beginning, is one “of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism.”

John Lewis navigated these contradictions and hypocrisies all his life. As he wrote in his 1998 memoir, Walking with the Wind, “I don’t think that many political leaders are genuinely concerned about the problems of the poor, of blacks, of Hispanics, of the people in the inner cities. Yes, all politicians love people in general. They love humanity. But many of them are very uncomfortable with people in particular — especially up close.”

Lewis knew that the reverse could also be true for the politicians and powerful people who sought his friendship and association. They could like him — even love him — in person, as an individual, in particular. And they could do so while dismissing, demonizing, and disenfranchising people in general. Entire groups of people. Black people. Latinx people. Indigenous people. People whose background or love or faith or sexual orientation or bank account or bad luck made them appear different in the eyes of a white power structure. People whose exclusion from the system protected the system. People whose segregation from power served those in power just fine.

Part of what made John Lewis different, as a politician and as a human being, was that he loved people in general and in particular. He loved humanity, and he loved human beings. He knew the risks of this love. He knew he might be heralded for his immense capacity for forgiveness by some of those who chose to interpret that forgiveness as forgetfulness. Those who might benefit from a photo with John Lewis, who might enjoy a statue of Rosa Parks on the grounds of the Capitol, but whose political careers might depend on disenfranchising Black voters and pretending not to see the systemic injustices against which Lewis and Parks fought.

In spite of these glaring contradictions, these infuriating hypocrisies, Lewis remained defiant. “I assume that your word is good until you show me otherwise,” he wrote in Walking with the Wind. “I refuse to be suspicious until I have reason to be. Yes, this sets me up to be burned now and then, but the alternative is to be constantly skeptical and distanced. I’d rather be occasionally burned but able to connect than always safe but distant.”

This ability to connect, this refusal to become bitter, this determination to keep his eyes on the prize, fortified him for decades of struggle. And it made him, as Adam Serwer argued in The Atlantic, far more than just an “icon” of civil rights. “This understates who they were,” Serwer wrote of Lewis, C. T. Vivian, and their partners in the movement. “They were the leaders of an incomplete revolution that remade American society.”

While they “would not have seen themselves this way,” Serwer wrote, “in their imagination and compassion, in their sincere belief in the ideals of the [Declaration of Independence], they surpassed their predecessors.”

***

In March 2016, four years after I first came across that insightful YouTube comment about John Lewis, I was working as a speechwriter for Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. Senator Coons and his team had invited Congressman Lewis to spend a day in Wilmington, Del., and knowing that this would be a special day, I’d done everything I could think of to be there for it.

The morning of Lewis’s visit, we gathered with Senator Coons at the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Amtrak station in Wilmington to await the congressman’s arrival. From there, my colleagues and I followed him and Senator Coons as they traveled from event to event, taking pictures, tweeting highlights, trying to observe and absorb it all.

The weather was gray and dreary, but the day itself was joyful because everywhere Lewis went he brought joy. It’s not necessarily that he was constantly radiating happiness himself; he just seemed to transform everyone he encountered. I’ll never forget the smile on the face of the Amtrak conductor who ran over to shake Lewis’s hand before the train continued its journey north. Throughout the day, I saw John Lewis lift the spirits of person after person with the same kindness, the same presence, the same fundamental goodness that I’d been so lucky to experience in our meeting four years earlier.

At one point, I asked Lewis’s chief of staff if this were typical. “It’s like this everywhere we go,” he replied, with a smile that conveyed a profound mix of compassion, respect, and gratitude for his boss.

The final item on the agenda that day was a public town hall meeting that would be aired live on a local radio station. It had already been a long day. I was exhausted, and all I’d had to do was stand around and take photos. When we arrived at the hall where the event would take place, there were a couple hundred people milling about. The room had that distinct aura of small talk mixed with anticipation. As we walked in, Lewis was a few steps ahead of Senator Coons and the rest of the group, and he paused when he entered the room.

The song playing on the loudspeakers at that moment was “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams. That, I knew, was John Lewis’s song. And I knew that “Happy” was his song because I, like so many others, had watched Lewis dance to it in a video his office shared in 2014 to commemorate the International Day of Happiness. It’s a joyful video. It begins with Lewis smiling and dancing. Following some gentle prodding from his staff, he layers some of his own singing on top. “This is my song,” Lewis says, partially to the camera and partially to himself. “Nothing can bring me down!”

Walking into that Delaware ballroom just as “Happy” was playing was one of those moments of pure coincidence that feels impossibly perfect. When I noticed the song, I walked up to Lewis. “Congressman, they’re playing your song!” I exclaimed. He paused and smiled. “They’re playing my song,” he replied quietly, his tone one of simple contentment.

It was a tiny moment. A fleeting and unremarkable moment on the scale of that day, that year, that long and epic journey of John Lewis’s life. But it said so much. Despite everything he had been through, despite the exhaustion he must have been feeling that day, despite the weight of the expectations of people in that room who all came to see and hear from him, despite all the distance he had marched and all the marching he had yet to do — despite it all, John Lewis paused to take in the moment. To be present. To savor the little bit of joy we all feel if our song comes on when we’re not expecting it.

The world can feel hopeless and overwhelming, and its challenges and obstacles can appear insurmountable. But John Lewis seemed to have things figured out. Fight for what you believe in. Show up for other people. Find moments of joy along the way. And always keep the faith, even if you grow tired and weary.

After the event wrapped up, I walked with Senator Coons, Congressman Lewis, and the rest of the group to take a few more pictures before Lewis returned to Washington, DC. Perhaps in a reflection of the digital era in which we live, I had that YouTube comment echoing in my head. Without a doubt, the greatest living American.

I reached over to shake Lewis’s hand and thank him. “Come by the office in DC,” he said earnestly, shaking my hand and smiling.

***

“I am not without passion,” Lewis wrote in Walking with the Wind, describing his determination to attend school as a child. “In fact, I have a very strong sense of passion. But my passion plays itself out in a deep, patient way. When I care about something, when I commit to it, I am prepared to take the long, hard road, knowing it may not happen today or tomorrow, but ultimately, eventually, it will happen. That’s what faith is all about. That’s the definition of commitment — patience and persistence.”

The passage continued with an image Lewis would later share with me in his office. “People who are like fireworks,” he wrote, “popping off right and left with lots of sound and sizzle, can capture a crowd, capture a lot of attention for a time, but I always have to ask, where will they be at the end? Some battles are long and hard, and you have to have staying power. Firecrackers go off in a flash, then leave nothing but ashes. I prefer a pilot light — the flame is nothing flashy, but once it is lit, it doesn’t go out. It burns steadily, and it burns forever.”

John Lewis was America’s pilot light. Not just for civil rights, though that would have been enough. He was our pilot light for justice. For righteousness. For decency. For kindness. For compassion. For grace. For goodness.

Without a doubt, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.

This article, “Remembering John Lewis, America’s Pilot Light,” was originally published on Medium. (If that link doesn’t work, try this one.)

Most Individuals Are Good People with Good Intentions. Is That Good Enough?

Most of us mean well and try to do the right thing in our daily lives. That calls for more radical thinking, not less.

This article is the sixth in an eight-part series. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, and part five here.

In the fall of 2017, after spending the better part of a decade working on or around Capitol Hill, I left politics and entered a different line of work in a different culture on a different continent. In making this professional transition from public to private sector, from the business of government to the business of business (a fairly common transition for creatures of the system like me), I thought my political perspective would shift further toward that doctrinaire beliefs in trade-offs and tough choices that I adopted and espoused as a serious and responsible progressive.

Much to my surprise, it didn’t. In fact, my worldview has moved entirely in the opposite direction. As this series reflects, I’ve begun to rethink many of the rules I’d previously accepted. I’ve begun to wonder where they came from and why I absorbed them so seamlessly. I’ve begun to doubt whether it’s possible to overcome the most fundamental challenges facing the United States today with the same ways of thinking that helped create them in the first place.

These challenges can feel insurmountable. Our economy works better and better for a lucky few, and worse and worse for everyone else. Our planet continues to break records for how quickly and how irreversibly it’s succumbing to the carbon and pollution we pump into it, while we continue to break records for how quickly and how irreversibly we’re consuming it. Meanwhile, the American political system is increasingly broken and dysfunctional, moving closer toward white minority rule with every election. We’re trending in the direction of a fledgling autocracy rife with corruption, sustained by tax cuts and government support for the rich, and propped up with divisive, bigoted appeals to racial resentments and xenophobic insecurities.

Given that trajectory, it’s no surprise that for a long time I found it preferable to reassure myself that our problems, from dysfunctional and demagogic politics to wealth and health disparities, from rising income inequality to declining social mobility, are short-term and surface-level, rather than structural or systemic. Depending on the day, I might have managed to convince myself that many of our present woes can be resolved at the ballot box in November. (And, to be clear, there’s zero doubt that defeating Donald Trump is the most important item on America’s 2020 political to-do list.)

Yet while the Trump presidency has exposed and accelerated the systemic shortcomings I’ve discussed in this series, neither Trump nor his administration is the source of the problem. The Trump era, in all its shameless corruption and racist pandering, is just the most obscene manifestation of trends in the Republican party and in broader American society that have been underway for decades. From the erosion of voting rights and access to democracy, to the tidal waves of money in politics and growing corporate determination of public policy, to the unapologetic destruction of governing norms that has characterized the careers of congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell, these trends won’t be reversed with one election.

That’s why, on other days, I might have preferred to dull my anxieties about the future with soothing assumptions about the system of the present. We’re living in an age of unprecedented human prosperity, so surely all we need to do is tweak a few regulations here or implement a new framework there, right?

Long before the Trump administration’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus crisis upended our national trajectory, those self-assurances were starting to ring pretty hollow. The meritocratic class is deeply entrenched. The scam of false choices is accepted as fact. Thanks to relentless obstruction, funding cuts, and the success of the campaign to undermine it, the federal government is increasingly dysfunctional, treated as a problem to be solved rather than a solver of problems.

***

Even so, in my journeys through various segments of “the system,” so many of the people I’ve encountered — corporate types, academics, entrepreneurs, managers, nonprofit workers, artists, innovators, you name it — mean well. Not all of them, but a lot of them. They care about climate change. They’re worried about political uncertainty. They’re appalled by rises in homelessness and child poverty. They know that soaring income inequality is neither moral nor sustainable. They want their country to be more equal. They want more people to have access to health care. They want other people’s kids to be able to go to college. They want to do the right thing in their daily lives, and they often do.

That was basically my experience in government, too, at least on an individual level. When I worked in DC, I got along with a lot of Republican staffers and Democratic staffers, with Republican members and Democratic members, with advocates for medical research funding and lobbyists for big pharmaceutical companies. I didn’t always probe too deeply on sensitive political topics (and surely in some cases that that lack of probing was why we got along), but I’m willing to bet that even if we disagreed on certain policies, we could at least build a human relationship through common values, shared experiences, and mutual goals for ourselves and the people we cared about.

You might be thinking, then, that I’m about to make the type of argument we often hear from people (like me) for whom the system has worked pretty well: that we simply need to restore civility to Washington so Republicans and Democrats can unite around shared values and work out their disagreements over cigars.

But this is no nostalgic cry for the supposed glory days of American politics where compromise and pragmatism reigned and the middle class thrived and democracy and capitalism “worked” the way they were supposed to. Despite any superficial civility, the stability of that system was explicitly premised on racism and segregation. That era was decidedly uncivil, and the middle class decidedly inaccessible, for those whom law and culture deemed unwelcome. Today’s challenges would be far less daunting if solving them were simply a matter of returning to the mythical old days, when right and wrong were clear and solving problems meant rooting out the bad guys and getting the good guys in a room together to iron out their differences.

As has often been the case in our history, the fundamental issue isn’t just malevolent forces or an inability to find common ground or an unwillingness to compromise. The fundamental challenge lies in the fact that our political and economic systems are still broken even though most people see that brokenness clearly. Even though they have good intentions. Even though they usually try to do the right thing in their daily lives.

How is it that so many people mean so well, and are so aware that the status quo is unsustainable, and yet so many aspects of our political and economic systems remain broken and seem to be getting worse? How can it be that most Americans going about their day-to-day lives are working hard and trying to do the right thing, and yet those at the top do better and better while everyone else falls further behind?

This is, of course, what makes it a systemic problem. And it calls for more radical thinking, not less. We need more radical thinking not in spite of good people with good intentions, but because of them. We need more radical thinking precisely because in their individual lives, many people already mean well and think they’re doing the right things. Even some of those at the top, whose behavior and decisions sustain a system that protects their wins and minimizes their losses. Even some of those who are thriving because of rules that have made life so difficult for so many others.

***

That said, not everyone means well. There are plenty of powerful people and organizations with truly selfish or malicious intent. Some of them have played an outsize role in creating the dysfunctional rules we adhere to today. We shouldn’t dismiss the fact that certain individuals (like McConnell) and certain organizations (like the Republican party, its propaganda TV network, and its well-funded supporters) bear enormous responsibility for creating this broken status quo.

Yes, some individuals and institutions violated the law to build the present system. Others just used their money and influence to change the law when it didn’t suit them. Or found workarounds to it. Or obstructed its enforcement. Or prevented it from keeping pace with a complex and rapidly evolving society. A great deal of harm has been done, and a great deal of money has been made, by people who know how to be on the wrong side of the spirit of the law but the right side of the letter. So, yes, without a doubt, American politics is replete with bad actors operating in bad faith.

Yet our broken political and economic systems weren’t singlehandedly built or sustained by malicious individuals or nefarious entities. The behaviors and decisions that got us here are not part of a conspiracy. The system has been corrupted, but the people perpetuating the corruption are rarely guilty of the brazen, Rudy-goes-to-Ukraine type of behavior. More often than not, they are responding to incentives and looking out for themselves and people they know. That’s what human beings do.

Despite today’s headlines, I still choose to believe that the world is generally composed of well-meaning individuals. That means, for better or for worse (and for a lot of people, it’s worse), that we are where we are in spite of the fact that most people, most of the time, have good intentions.

Even if most of us genuinely want our country to be more equal, in other words, the system as it is means well-off families and successful businesses won’t be asked to pay more in taxes to achieve it. Even if we really do want more people to have access to health care, the system as it is already gives us good health insurance through our employers. Even if we mean what we say about wanting other people’s children to be able to go to college, the existing perks of legacy admissions and competitively low acceptance rates and multi-billion-dollar endowments have already helped us and will probably help our kids.

Even if we want people sleeping outside the subway station to be able to afford a home, the system as it is means we can make sure that home doesn’t get built in our backyard. Even if we don’t believe our employer is willing to do the right thing for our community or our country, the system tells us that it’s fine to keep the high-paying job that gives us good benefits and a sense of professional satisfaction. Even if we believe intuitively that the government has an obligation to help struggling families find a place to live or support someone facing medical bankruptcy or prepare the nation’s public health infrastructure for a global pandemic, the system also tells us that we simply can’t afford it. That we can only do so much. That we need to lower our expectations. That what happens to other people isn’t our fault.

Well-meaning individuals alone do not make a healthy collective. As human history shows over and over and over again, good people can create and sustain broken systems. Every one of us can mean well and care about people left behind and intend to help out those who are struggling. We can genuinely, sincerely feel these things, and nothing will change. The grooves of “the way things are” are too deeply etched in the inertia of global supply chains and political power and capital flows and short-term thinking and self-perpetuating networks of legacies and connections and friends of friends.

***

A few months ago, following Donald Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a New York Times headline summed up succinctly how much change the system is capable of making on its own. Despite any personal misgivings they feel — and some of those misgivings, I believe, are authentic — “C.E.O.s have come to accept the president, in spite of his populist views and governance-by-Twitter style,” the headline read. “Tax cuts and a record stock market speak volumes.”

Of course they do. “More than 60 percent of the tax savings” from Trump’s tax cut, NPR reported in December, “went to people in the top 20 percent of the income ladder.” Meanwhile, as Patricia Cohen has noted in The New York Times, “84 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belong to the wealthiest 10 percent of households.” Tax cuts and a record stock market speak volumes directly to their intended audience. The people and institutions for whom the system works can hear shrinking taxes and growing markets loud and clear — so loud and clear, in fact, that they can choose not to hear the sounds of racist travel bans or human rights abuses on the southern border.

That is the inertia of the system. Even if most people mean well, even if they have good intentions, there’s too much invested in the status quo, and too many people comfortable with the way things are, for meaningful and systemic change to bubble up — or trickle down — on its own.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the sixth in an eight-part series. Part seven will be published in the coming weeks.

The One-Sided Campaign to Make Government Dysfunctional and Distrusted

Only the powerful benefit from a government that’s broken. And it’s easier to break it than to make it work.

This article is the fifth in an eight-part series. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.

Conservatives are traditionally associated with ideas like trickle-down economics and tough fiscal choices and the human rights of corporations. But it’s not just those on the right who have built and benefited from America’s broken political and economic systems.

That’s why, in this quest to explore the evolution of my politics and worldview, I’ve thus far made little reference to political party. A lot of well-meaning liberals, wittingly or unwittingly, accept the myths of false choices, meritocracy, and unfettered free markets. A lot of well-meaning liberals share an inherent skepticism, even disdain, for both the notion of structural change and the ability of the government to help deliver it.

For a long time, I did, too. Even though I began my career as a progressive Democrat working on Capitol Hill for progressive Democrats, some part of me always assumed that government was an obstacle to be overcome — an inefficient impediment to innovation and individual liberty.

The reasons why I internalized such a worldview are neither secret nor surprising. For decades, Americans have been subjected to an unsubtle and relentless ideological campaign that celebrates the achievements of the individual and the private sector, disparages the notion of public action, and seeks to starve the government of resources, expertise, and the faith of those it governs. And this is the point where it becomes impossible to continue without delving into partisan politics, because the source of this anti-government crusade is the Republican party.

This campaign is more than rhetorical, but its success, like many stories that shape how we see the world, is rooted in rhetoric. For one example of how effective it’s been, consider how Americans talk about innovation and entrepreneurship. As University College London economist Mariana Mazzucato demonstrates, government-funded research and development have made possible many of the technological and entrepreneurial innovations we celebrate today, from smartphones to electric cars to GPS. Pointing to Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing narrative of scrappy change-the-world-on-our-own startups, Mazzucato tells WIRED’s João Medeiros, “History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive collective effort — not just from a narrow group of young white men in California. And if we want to solve the world’s biggest problems, we better understand that.”

That’s not how we understand it, of course. The iPhone has become a case study in individual ingenuity, business leadership, and risk taking. Google and Tesla have become shining examples of free markets allocating capital efficiently and allowing entrepreneurs to thrive. Yet many of the innovations we celebrate today — including those of Apple and Google and Tesla, along others — wouldn’t have happened without some level of government support.

For another example, take fracking, which is heralded by many on the right (and even some on the left) as proof that an unencumbered private sector can make the United States energy independent. The technology behind fracking, as Michael Lewis writes in The Fifth Risk, “was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE [Department of Energy].” Meanwhile, Lewis adds, “every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE.” This “narrative of innovation that omit[s] the role of the state,” Medeiros writes in WIRED, is not just inaccurate. It is “exactly what corporations had been deploying as they lobbied for lax regulation and low taxation.”

All of the stories we tell about innovation and entrepreneurship support the comforting notion that in the United States, success requires nothing more than a good idea and a strong work ethic. But they also prop up another narrative that has proven far more destructive.

When we lionize individual innovators while negating the public investments that made their innovations possible, we paint a misleading picture of how progress happens and how society should be structured to encourage more of it. The same thing happens when we write the government out of the story in countless other ways, from how public universities educate and train the workforce that powers big companies, to how environmental regulations free consumers to eat and drink without wondering whether what they’re eating and drinking will make them sick. We lose sight of the fact that government can actually play a positive and valuable role in society. Meanwhile, we never hesitate to point the finger at government when it errs. Sometimes the blame is deserved, but even when it is not, we only hear about what government did (or failed to do) when something goes wrong.

These arguments — that government is an enemy of innovation, that it’s incapable of working efficiently, that it’s always bureaucratic and bloated and broken — are not facts. They’re stories, just as the scam of false choices is a story. Sometimes these stories are true. Often they’re not. Yet we’re told them so much that eventually we stop questioning them. We internalize them. We start to repeat them ourselves. Before long, it is simply accepted as fact that the government cannot work, when, in reality, it never had a chance.

Government is not broken because it is inherently defective. Government is broken because it has been privatized, demonized, and defunded for four decades in a row. But that’s not the story we hear.

***

The anti-government campaign that turned these stories into facts is inherently self-fulfilling and inherently one-sided. It’s much easier to obstruct government action than it is to make it succeed. (To some extent, it was designed that way.) That makes it easier to keep the government from functioning effectively. Making it dysfunctional, in turn, makes it unpopular and distrusted.

The more unpopular and the more distrusted government is, the easier it becomes to convince people that government is broken and needs to be defunded and dismantled. That conviction, in turn, create a social and political permission structure for cutting funding, eliminating regulations, and outsourcing the basic functions of government to private entities.

The longer this cycle continues, the more unpopular and under-resourced government becomes. The more it loses the funding and faith of the people, the less it’s able to do its job — such as, say, passing and enforcing laws and regulations that would break up anti-competitive monopolies or prevent environmental pollution or fight fraud in financial markets. The less effectively government functions, the more easily it can be manipulated by those who can afford to manipulate it, or those who prefer to ignore it.

Conveniently (but not coincidentally), that suits a number of constituencies perfectly fine. One is the people with the means to pay for private replacements of inefficient public services. Another is those whose businesses or bank accounts benefit from having a government that is incapable of enforcing laws or regulating industries or investigating white collar crime. (There’s some significant overlap between these two groups.) Louis Menand puts it simply in The New Yorker: “Politicians repeat it, and people nod their heads. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.”

Who, or what, do we have to thank for this self-destructive status quo? Let’s not “both-sides” this next part. Of two parties that make up America’s two-party system, in recent years only one party has even attempted to use the government to make our economic system fairer and more equitable. Only one party has consistently promoted fiscal responsibility during its time in the White House. Only one party has sought to expand access to the democratic process to bring new voices and perspectives into the system — voices and perspectives that might be willing to challenge the way things are — rather than suppress it to preserve an increasingly narrow and increasingly undemocratic hold on power.

Only one party has sought to make government work better, not defund it and starve it and throw sand in its gears until it stops working and loses the faith of those it is supposed to serve. As Menand writes, “The claim that government programs always backfire was Reagan’s campaign calling card — even though he did not eliminate a single major spending program during the eight years he was in office — and it has become one of the most dangerous canards in American politics.”

Without question, the modern Republican party is the source of the most egregious examples of bad-faith arguments about tough choices and condescending finger-wagging about economic trade-offs. It is the GOP, to pick but one recent example, whose leaders issue stern warnings about socialism and runaway spending when they’re out of power, and pass a $1.5 trillion-dollar tax cut as soon as they’re back in control. It is also Republicans who, having provided this massive handout to big companies and wealthy individuals, pivot almost instantaneously to proposing Social Security and Medicare cuts to pay for it. (“We’ve got to try to figure out how to spend less,” one GOP congressman told CNBC, presumably without any hint of irony or self-awareness, shortly after the tax cuts were signed into law.)

The Trump tax cuts may be an exceptionally shameless example of self-interest (and blatant corruption) masquerading as fiscal responsibility. The Republican response may be an exceptionally hypocritical example of the party’s platform of slashing taxes for the wealthy on one day and then on the next adopting the holier-than-thou persona of the adults in the room willing to make “tough choices” to cut assistance to seniors and take health care away from low-income families. But these efforts aren’t new. In ways big and small, they’ve been happening for decades, part of this generation-long ideological crusade to undermine the role and effectiveness of government in everyday life.

While this campaign did indeed emerge from the political right, it’s not as if hasn’t infected the worldview of some on the left, too. In Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas describes the “political liberals who are philosophically committed to government, to the public solution of public problems, but who have absorbed, like secondhand smoke, the right’s contempt for public action.” That’s part of what makes these anti-government efforts so insidious. If anyone hears “public bad, private good” enough, they might start to absorb it — especially if the people repeating it over and over have built a system that’s serving them pretty well.

Last November, before Mike Bloomberg announced his campaign for president, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie observed that “Bloomberg’s potential entry into the race — and Tom Steyer’s ongoing presence — shows that they’re not just giving an opinion. They want assurance that the Democratic nominee won’t be too disruptive. They want a restoration of the pre-Trump status quo, not a revolution. They want a veto of sorts, a formal way to say that Democrats can only go so far with their plans and policies.” (In case it isn’t clear, the “they” here is “America’s billionaires.”)

Republicans may have led the charge to defund government, to stop it from functioning effectively, to make the very concept of “government” toxic. But many on the left have been complicit in perpetuating the stories that define government as the problem, not the potential solution. Many on the left have been willing to adopt and embrace the dogma of tough choices and trade-offs. Many on the left have allowed our collective understanding of the possible to be narrowed to the parameters defined by the GOP’s ideological campaign.

Many on the left have made the same reckless bargain as those on the right, assuming that they can get the short-term political boost that comes from demonizing and voting to defund government, all while expecting that it will somehow still function when they need it (such as, to pick one example, in a global pandemic). Many on the left have conceded that anything that might upset the political and economic status quo is radical and misguided. Many on the left have taken for granted, like I did, that they can fix what’s wrong with the system without disrupting its core pillars, or without making any of our own allies uncomfortable.

Whether it’s the idea that Americans have to choose between growing the economy and growing the social safety net, or the idea that government is innately dysfunctional and inefficient, our broken political and economic systems are propped up and sustained through stories like this. These stories are misleading or incomplete at best, and self-serving and corrupt at worst. They’re stories told through the lens of meritocracy and free markets and innovation and entrepreneurship. Stories that train us to see government as an obstacle to progress, rather than a force for it.

The ultimate responsibility for this decades-long shrinking of our thinking lies largely at the feet of the Republican party. But it wouldn’t have lasted this long without buy-in from voters, institutions, and elites of every political persuasion.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the fifth in an eight-part series. Read part six here.

The Scam of False Choices Has Radically Narrowed America’s Understanding of What Is Possible

Why should we have to choose between taking care of the economy and taking care of other people?

This article is the fourth in an eight-part series. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

When I entered the world of American politics as a young Hill staffer at the end of 2009, I did so as someone for whom the fundamentals of “the system” had worked very well. That primed me to embrace the system’s other aspects, too. I accepted what serious and responsible people said about the inefficiencies of government and the importance of “helping people help themselves.” I absorbed that political change happened best from within the system, guided by whatever party leaders, pundits, and legions of lobbyists and consultants determined was both acceptable and possible.

I internalized the trade-offs and choices that defined the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. — like the idea that governing responsibly requires choosing between free markets and affordable health care. Or choosing between entrepreneurship and the environment. Or choosing between protecting consumers and promoting GDP. I may have come to Capitol Hill with hopes of major social progress, but my understanding of the possible quickly shrank to deficit-neutral tweaks enacted through public-private partnerships with near-term time horizons.

I wasn’t alone in lowering my expectations this way. In Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It, Steven Brill describes what he calls “one of the most amazing phenomena” of the past half-century: “the broad acceptance of the nonsensical idea, spread by those at the top, that America cannot afford to invest in effective job training, housing assistance, infrastructure, or other basics of a functioning government.” For decades, the notion that “tough choices have to be made because resources are so limited,” as Brill puts it, has dominated our political and economic decision-making, managing to capture even young progressives like me.

This idea — what Brill calls the “austerity refrain” — is a satisfying and righteous one to hold, especially for those doing the finger-wagging and lecturing about trade-offs and tough choices. But it’s often a scam, even if those perpetuating it genuinely believe in what they’re selling. The scam, to be clear, isn’t capitalism. The scam isn’t the idea that governments can’t print money endlessly or spend with reckless abandon. (Some economic principles seem to have stood the test of time.)

The scam is the finger-wagging and lecturing itself. The scam is the patronizing rhetoric about trade-offs and tough choices. The scam is the “austerity refrain.” The scam is the broad acceptance of the idea that America can’t strengthen unemployment insurance or expand access to health care or make housing more accessible or invest in scientific research or make public education more equitable because we can’t afford it. The scam is the zero-sum thinking that says we have to choose between taking care of the economy and taking care of other people. The scam is accepting the false trade-offs that narrow the concept of the possible to the small sliver of action that also serves short-term profits and political fortunes.

How do we know it’s a scam? Other nations offer plenty of counterfactuals. In a recent New York Times essay entitled “Finland Is a Capitalist Paradise,” Anu Partanen and Trevor Corson describe how Finland has managed to build a thriving private sector that coexists with thriving public services. Decades ago, Partanen and Corson write, instead of seeking to crush labor unions or drive tax rates to zero, Finnish business leaders came to the realization that “it would be in their own long-term interests to accept steep progressive tax hikes. The taxes would help pay for new government programs to keep workers healthy and productive — and this would build a more beneficial labor market.” These efforts have grown into “the universal taxpayer-funded services of Finland today, including public health care, public day care and education, paid parental leaves, unemployment insurance and the like.”

Despite the headline, Finland isn’t paradise (nowhere is). We can be assured that Finns don’t live perfect lives (no one does). Finland, like every other country, faces challenges and makes choices and accepts trade-offs. The argument here is not that if America makes exactly the same choices and trade-offs as Finland, then all will be well. (By nearly every measure, from geography and demographics to the size and complexity of the national economy, the United States is a very different country from Finland.) What this example offers is proof that there are other ways to make choices and trade-offs than the ones Americans been instructed to accept as gospel. Proof that the “rules” of the U.S. system aren’t actual rules, because a rule is not a rule if there’s an instance in which it doesn’t hold. The way things are is not the way they have to be.

We don’t even have to look beyond the United States to see that. Let’s consider one of America’s most significant challenges. The National Center for Children in Poverty estimates that one in five American children lives in a family whose income falls below the poverty line (which, the Center notes, “has been shown to underestimate the needs of families”). It would be difficult, one hopes, to find anyone who argues in favor of child poverty, so reducing it seems like a worthy investment that should garner bipartisan support. Immediate progress wouldn’t be that difficult, either. Recently, a special report in The Economist cited Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, who suggests that “even a universal child credit — a small amount of cash given for each child each month — ‘probably comes close to cutting child poverty in half just on its own.’”

A small amount of money to get children out of poverty. That’s not particularly radical. Or, at least, it’s no more radical than the support the government already provides for some other children, like those whose college savings accounts are tax-free.

Or take the nationwide scarcity of affordable housing. “It is not that the government does not spend enough to help Americans pay for housing,” Steven Brill notes in Tailspin. “The problem is that the government spends approximately 75 percent of its housing assistance dollars on middle-class and wealthy homeowners — by allowing interest on mortgages to be tax-deductible.” In other words, the government is already giving a lot of taxpayer money to a lot of people to help them buy a lot of homes, including quite a few big and expensive ones. Would it be any more radical to expand government housing benefits to more people — like those who are down on their luck and need a little help to get into a safe place of their own?

Or consider the broader narrative to which many serious and responsible people have long adhered: that America doesn’t have the resources to fight child poverty and promote affordable housing and take on a whole host of social and economic challenges at the same time. As Matthew Stewart points out in The Atlantic, federal tax breaks — all those deductions and exemptions that make the U.S. tax code so complicated — “exceeded $900 billion in 2013. That’s more than the cost of Medicare, more than the cost of Medicaid, more than the cost of all other federal safety-net programs put together.” Those tax breaks aren’t evenly distributed, of course: “51 percent of those handouts went to the top quintile of earners,” Stewart writes, “and 39 percent to the top decile.”

If the government spending money to improve human welfare is the definition of “radical” or “socialist,” the United States is already radically socialist — at least for those powerful enough to secure that public support. Many of the world’s biggest companies fit that description. In 2018, for instance, thanks to the Trump tax cuts, American firms paid $91 billion less in taxes compared to the previous year. In 2019, the largest six banks alone saved $18 billion on their taxes. Could that money have gone anywhere else? Anywhere at all? Well, as Eric Levitz noted in New York earlier this year, citing research from the Century Foundation, “if that money had instead gone to America’s neediest families, there would be 3.2 million fewer American children living in poverty.”

More than three million children lifted out of poverty! Sorry, kids, but times are tough, and we had to make the difficult choice to cut our own taxes instead. But if you work hard, you too can live the American Dream! We are already spending the money that serious and responsible people say we can’t afford to spend. The government is already providing the type of support we just know will sap individual motivation and make people dependent on public handouts for life. We are already making compromises and trade-offs.

It’s only when we talk about spending that money on different people — those who aren’t winners right now, or those whose historical disadvantages haven’t given them the same head start that others received — that we suddenly get all flustered and concerned about big government and runaway debt. It’s only when we talk about policies that might threaten the profits of big businesses that we assume the patronizing job of lecturing about the hard times and tough choices that we, the responsible ones, have to make for the good of the nation. It’s only when the compromises and trade-offs begin to threaten more powerful constituencies that we find a way to avoid having to make any compromise or trade-off at all.

***

These critiques reflect a way of thinking that entrenched interests in America have assured us is naïve and unrealistic. It’s a way of thinking that makes many of them uncomfortable, leading to dire warnings of “radicalism” and “socialism” — sometimes even “radical socialism” — and a strong insistence that we should settle instead for some complacent tinkering with the status quo. A few years ago, I might have dismissed claims like the ones in this article as radical and self-defeating. As they read this, some of my friends on the Hill may be thinking, He’s only lived in Europe for a couple of years, and now he’s gushing about the Nordic countries like Bernie!

This seems like a good place to add a few caveats. This article isn’t an argument against compromise or pragmatism. It’s not a call to action for a socialist revolution. I don’t think businesses are enemies of the people. I don’t think politicians are wholly owned by corporations or donors. I don’t think our constitutional order needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch (nor would it matter if I did, because it’s not going anywhere).

Unlike some on the left, I don’t think debt or deficits are irrelevant. I still believe that free markets — real free markets that impose costs for externalities and promote robust competition, not the “free markets” of today — are an enormous force for good. I want hard work and merit and personal responsibility to matter as much as the rhetoric says they do. In spite of what I’ve written, I’m still confident that the private sector, not the government, should be doing as much of the job creating, resource allocating, and innovating as it can responsibly do. On the whole, in fact, I want the government to interfere in my life, and the lives of others, as little as possible.

In other words, I believe in capitalism. But what America has right now is not capitalism. We have a low-tax welfare state for the companies and individuals lucky enough to afford it, and what Scott Galloway calls a “Hunger Games economy” for everybody else. I believe in the idea of meritocracy. But what we have right now is not meritocracy. We have a self-reinforcing and self-stratifying system for protecting the lucky and punishing the not-so-lucky, masquerading as a beacon of opportunity, grit, and self-reliance.

In the United States, the public policy goals that are considered radical are considered radical only because we have accepted a radically shrunken notion of what is possible. The choices made every day by every one of us — where to allocate our time, money, attention, and effort — are just that: choices. The same is true for companies. The same is true for communities. And the same is true for nations. America’s political and economic systems are as entrenched as they are not because they have to be, but because we have allowed economic doctrine, political ideology, and financial self-interest to convince us that we don’t have any other choice. That we can’t do better than this. That this is just the way things have to be.

I am a capitalist in the middle of a profound rethink in terms of how I see and understand the world. A capitalist beginning to question the false choices and self-serving trade-offs that the political status quo has been perpetuating for decades. A capitalist hoping to help nudge the Overton window away from a place where we’re convinced that we can either regulate financial markets or create jobs. We can do both. We don’t have to choose between fighting childhood poverty, expanding affordable housing, building a thriving economy, and achieving any number of other public policy goals. We can do them all, if we choose.

To get there, we don’t have to blow up the entire system. But we do have to blow up the stories that sustain the system. The stories that rationalize why the successful succeeded and why the unsuccessful came up short. The stories that provide convenient cover for why the system works for some but not for others. The stories that define “radical” as anything that might make the comfortable a little less comfortable. The stories that make us susceptible to the scam of false choices.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the fourth in an eight-part series. Read part five here.

It’s Not Just the 1 Percent. The Meritocratic Class Helps Keep “The System” in Place

For all its flaws, the system still works pretty well for some people. Like me.

This article is the third in an eight-part series. Read part one here and part two here.

Even in this age of economic inequality and political turmoil, “the way things are” serves some Americans exceptionally well. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be that way.

In Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It, journalist Steven Brill describes one such cohort. Between 2009 and 2012, he notes, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the top 1 percent of American earners saw their incomes rise by nearly a third. Over the same time frame, incomes “crept up a barely noticeable .4 percent” — that’s zero-point-four, to be clear — “for the bottom 99 percent.” This trend has continued over the past decade. “In 2016 the incomes of the highest 1 percent of American earners were 225 percent higher in real terms than they had been in 1979,” The Economist recently pointed out. “For the middle-class, the growth was 41 percent.”

These types of statistics make their way into today’s political conversation more than they used to. That’s progress. The fact that we talk a lot about income inequality reflects hard work by advocates and organizers whose concerns have been marginalized and dismissed for too long. But there are a number of trends that these numbers don’t fully capture.

Take racial wealth disparities, which stretch deeper into American history than the Declaration of Independence. As Trymaine Lee observes in The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, today “the median family wealth for white people is $171,000, compared with just $17,600 for black people.” One group of people doesn’t end up with ten times the median wealth of another group overnight. This race-based disparity is as structural as it gets. It’s “perhaps the most glaring legacy of American slavery and the violent economic dispossession that followed,” Lee writes.

Nor do the income numbers Brill cites reflect declining opportunity between generations. If you were born in 1940, the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found, you had a 90 percent chance of earning more by age 30 than your parents did at the same age (a measure the researchers call “absolute income mobility”). For those born in the 1980s, though, that number drops to 50 percent. “One of the defining features of the ‘American Dream’ is the ideal that children have a higher standard of living than their parents,” the authors write. But “absolute mobility has declined sharply in America over the past half-century primarily because of the growth in inequality.” In fact, millennials “are likely to be the first generation in modern economic history to end up worse off than their parents,” Annie Lowrey notes in The Atlantic.

There’s another systemic trend that’s easily overlooked in the conversation about the soaring incomes of America’s wealthiest individuals. While we often point to those at the head of the income pack as the source of the problem, we spend significantly less time talking about the next tier of people for whom the system is also working well — perhaps not quite as well as the top fraction, but still very, very well.

The people in this tier are employed by some of America’s biggest companies and most powerful organizations. They are people who work in tech, consulting, finance, and academia. People who have studied and networked their way through the best schools in the world. People who take Ubers and might work in Uber headquarters, for instance, but rarely people who drive for Uber. People who are senators and members of Congress, and people who work for them. People who report the news, manage the media, and opine on current events.

These are people who are very concerned about societal challenges, but who are also very serious and responsible about which policies are and are not acceptable for solving them. People who didn’t write our current political and economic rules but who have nonetheless benefited from them, even if “the way things are” sometimes makes them uncomfortable or anxious or depressed. People who work hard and who, as individuals, generally try to do the right thing in their day-to-day lives. These are people like me. And maybe people like you.

In a powerful cover story published in The Atlantic in June 2018, Matthew Stewart calls this group of people — those with incomes below the top 0.1 percent but above the bottom 90 percent — “the new American aristocracy.” This cohort has also been called the meritocratic class. The professional class. Economic elites. In terms of wealth, “as a group” this 9.9 percent “owns substantially more wealth than do the other two combined,” Stewart notes. In terms of income, this group has done well, too. “From 1979 to 2018, middle-income families’ incomes rose 23.1 percent, adjusted for inflation,” The New York Times reported last October. “Professional families’ incomes, by contrast, rose 68.3 percent.”

But what defines and separates the meritocratic class from the rest of America is more than just income. It’s also our connections. Our networks. Our opportunities. Our stability. Our chance to be heard. Our understanding of how the system works. Our fallback options that allow us to take risks and make mistakes. Our ability to pay for private-sector substitutes when underfunded government services prove inadequate or nonexistent. Today, “a more telling index of class is access to opportunity — one’s sense of how to begin to begin, one’s social sphere,” Nathan Heller writes in The New Yorker. “The true mark of class vulnerability today isn’t the capacity to run out of money but the capacity to run out of options.”

In most cases, to be part of this group is not necessarily to have done anything malicious or mean-spirited. Human beings respond to incentives, and the existing incentives — the existing rules of the system — strongly encourage us to keep doing what we’ve been doing by rewarding the choices we make. In our day-to-day beliefs and behaviors, we largely mean well. When we think beyond our daily lives, we’re worried — genuinely worried, I believe — about the challenges of this era.

Yet even as we see with growing clarity that the system that has served us so well is leaving so many others behind, our behavior perpetuates it. Our culture of hard work and achievement celebrates our ability to thrive in it. Consciously or not, we become increasingly determined to protect it, or at least increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of altering it in meaningful ways. How we think and understand the world — how and why things are the way they are — is reinforced in decision after decision, year after year, generation after generation. “For the upper middle classes,” Richard V. Reeves writes in The New York Times, “regardless of their professed political preferences, zoning, wealth, tax deductions and educational opportunity reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle.” As our techniques for navigating the system prove increasingly successful, our place within the system — and our interest in the system’s preservation — becomes increasingly entrenched.

We didn’t create this state of affairs ourselves. But it serves us well, so we largely accept it. (“Would one person rejecting it change anything?” we wonder, perhaps accurately.) We may not even see the system working for us in the background, propping us up and keeping things the way they are. Whatever the case, our acceptance of the political and economic status quo makes us, as Stewart writes in The Atlantic, “the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.” We know it, too. “We feel it in our gut,” author and New York University business professor Scott Galloway writes. “We witness immense prosperity, but little progress. A shrinking middle class, depressed teens, and fractured alliances. Still, we continue to look away. As a species, we’re easier to fool than convinced we’ve been fooled. We refuse to face the truth.”

And yet. We may be doing just fine, but we’re still not at the very, very top of the economic pecking order. That makes it easier to convince ourselves that we’re not part of the problem. “One of the delusions of our meritocratic class,” Stewart writes, is “to assume that if our actions are individually blameless” — and they often are — “then the sum of our actions will be good for society.” It’s what he calls “one of the founding myths of America’s meritocracy: that our success has nothing to do with other people’s failure.”

This myth is part of what makes the pillars of the system so difficult to dislodge. The very concept of meritocracy rests on the assumption that hard work will lead to success. But in the United States, that formula doesn’t work for everybody. Even when it does work, it does so far better for some than for others. As Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits, author of The Meritocracy Trap, tells Vox’s Sean Illing, that makes the idea of meritocracy simply “a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.” The belief in meritocracy enables today’s winners — the people for whom the system works — to feel better about our own success. The easier it becomes to preserve that understanding, the more entrenched the system becomes.

Again, at an individual level, this way of thinking is not maliciously intended, nor is it part of some grand plan. None of us — or very few of us, at least — wakes up every day determined to preserve our privilege by kicking out the rungs of other people’s ladders of opportunity. We don’t consciously put on blinders to other people’s struggles before we walk out the door each morning. It just happens. We work hard and look out for ourselves as individuals, just as American capitalism taught us to. We look out for our families. We look out for our friends. We look out for people we know.

We genuinely care about bigger, community- and society-level challenges, but we usually don’t see that the little things we do every day — even the well-meaning ones that any person might do, like helping a friend’s friend get their resume to the right person, or moving to a different neighborhood with higher property values and better public schools — perpetuate and prop up the thoroughly broken system that created those challenges in the first place.

We don’t notice how, over time, the myth of meritocracy clouds our thinking and narrows our understanding of the world. Because we work hard and the system works for us, we become convinced that there’s a causal link between the two. We begin to believe that the system works for us because we work hard. If it worked for us, it can work for anyone. And once we accept that the fundamentals of the system are sound, it’s easy to accept all the other aspects of the system that sustain it — the zero-sum thinking, the false choices, the wisdom of the serious and responsible people.

These aren’t conscious decisions. They just happen. That’s how systems work.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the third in an eight-part series. Read part four here.

The Trade-Offs and Tough Choices of the Serious and Responsible People

Not everyone gets an equal say in determining “the way things are.”

This article is the second in an eight-part series. Read part one here.

Last May, Gideon Resnick and Maxwell Tani wrote in The Daily Beast about the political evolution of Brian Fallon, a former press secretary to Hillary Clinton and a longtime Senate spokesman for Chuck Schumer. The reporters observed that in the years since Trump’s election, Fallon had “self-radicalized and become a resistance leader,” helming a progressive advocacy group pressuring Democrats to be more ruthless in their opposition to Republican judicial nominees.

Fallon’s aggressive tactics and willingness to challenge allies as well as enemies surprised many in Washington. They also quickly began to irritate the staffers and party insiders who’d long been his colleagues and comrades-in-arms. What made his political and tactical transformation so jarring, Resnick and Tani reported, was that Fallon hadn’t always been an advocate on the party’s fringe or a guy who built a dedicated following on liberal Twitter. He was “once a fixture of the Democratic Party’s institution” — a product and proponent of working within the system. “For years, Fallon and other operatives of his age functioned under the idea that politicians needed to work within the realm of the possible,” they wrote. In that world, “those who drifted outside of those constraints were deemed hopelessly naïve at best, and irritating idealists at [worst].”

Fallon isn’t the only former Democratic aide for whom events of recent years have prompted a bit of a rethink. As a young staffer who arrived on Capitol Hill just out of college at the end of 2009, I had quickly adopted a similar “that’s just the way things are” framing of the world. Even though I considered myself an idealist, I generally saw those working outside the accepted boundaries of the system as naïve and irritating — counterproductive, even, in that their efforts risked undermining our shared goals. Sure, none of America’s most significant progressive advancements had ever succeeded solely by working within “the system,” but that was a different era, right?

By the time I went to work on Capitol Hill, everybody knew that times had changed, and the system now functioned the way it was supposed to. Everybody knew that the Founders had designed a constitutional order based on compromise and checks and balances, and working within the accepted constraints was the only way to achieve anything. Everybody knew that radical advocacy made it harder to get things done. Everybody knew that if an idea wouldn’t bring both Democrats and Republicans to the table, it wasn’t worth pursuing, even if one party was operating in bad faith and systematically denying the existence of the negotiating table in the first place.

No one sat me down and told me explicitly that Serious and Responsible People had agreed to these basic operating tenets. Everybody just knew them. Everybody accepted and understood them as the way things are. This understanding wasn’t unanimous, of course, but the rules of the status quo had the buy-in (literally, in some cases) of enough politicians, pundits, and power players in both parties that for most people the scope of the possible had long since narrowed to only the most minor and incremental reforms. (Seen in that light, the 2010 passage of Wall Street reform and the Affordable Care Act are even more monumental accomplishments.) The consensus of the serious and responsible people was not to be questioned.

I don’t think I realized it at the time, but as a young Hill staffer who’d studied computer science in college and feared I might never fit in as a politics and government guy, I really wanted to think of myself as a serious and responsible person in Washington. I was progressive, sure, but I trusted that the system was moving inexorably toward achieving the goals I believed in, from expanding access to health care to fighting climate change. The system had never let me down, after all. I equated trust in the system that had worked for me with faith that it could work for anybody else.

This identity — as one of the serious and responsible progressives — was comforting and simplifying. It enabled me to go about my life without worrying as much about those who were struggling, since I knew that the system would take care of them (as long as they worked hard and did their part). It allowed me to justify my own professional status as something I earned through merit and effort. And in my acceptance of “the way things are,” and my cynical dismissiveness of those who refused to accept it as the only way, I acquired a very pleasant sense of self-righteousness and all-knowingness (an attitude encountered by many people who have interacted with young Hill staffers of either party).

Meanwhile, consciously or not, my political worldview narrowed to a Bill Clinton-era liberalism in which balancing the budget was as fundamental a moral responsibility as helping those in need. Shrinking the deficit was as important a priority as expanding access to health insurance. Propping up businesses that had made themselves too big to fail was as critical to the health of the economy as raising workers’ wages and lowering the cost of living. Giving people a “hand up,” to paraphrase the patronizing rhetoric of personal responsibility, was more appropriate than giving them a handout. I took Clinton’s urging not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I interpreted it to mean that it wasn’t even worth fighting for the perfect in the first place.

My we-know-best worldview didn’t emerge from thin air. Over decades, the perspectives of serious and responsible people have been honed, shaped, skewed, and replicated by a range of forces and interest groups, from corporate lobbies and anti-government ideologues to conservative economists and well-off individuals seeking to retroactively justify their successes and others’ failures. These relentless efforts, which we’ll discuss later in this series, have served the interests of their lead proponents extremely well.

But they have also dramatically narrowed our collective understanding of what society can be and shrunk our expectations of what government can achieve. The rules of “the way things are” have infused the thinking of America’s political and economic decision-makers with the doctrinaire belief that we can have economic growth or strong social protections, but not both. We can lower the unemployment rate before the next election, or we can attempt to address structural injustices stretching back generations, but not both. We can fire up the engines of entrepreneurship and economic prosperity, or we can make sure more workers have decent health care and retirement benefits, but certainly not both. We can have a dynamic economy or dynamic social mobility, but… you get the idea.

Over the years, this way of thinking has contributed to a widespread belief among generations of staffers and operatives like me — not to mention voters and other participants in American democracy — that being serious and responsible means accepting these rules. It means recognizing that the way the system works now, honed by free markets and guided by the entrepreneurial wisdom of the private sector, is the best it will ever be.

Once that understanding is in place, it becomes the mandate of serious and responsible policymakers not to upset the system, and instead to preserve its upsides while rationalizing its downsides. Serious and responsible policymakers find serious-and-responsible-sounding ways to explain why big ideas cannot be realized or why special interests cannot be challenged. Serious and responsible policymakers know “yes” is impossible (everyone knows that), so they find serious-and-responsible-sounding ways — often couched in rhetoric about “trade-offs” and “tough choices” — to get to “no.”

As a young and idealistic staffer on Capitol Hill, I quickly learned that serious and responsible people work within the system. Therefore, so would I.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the second in an eight-part series. Read part three here.

I Used to Think Political and Economic Progress Would Emerge from “The System.” Not Anymore

The first article in an eight-part series exploring how one former political staffer’s thinking has evolved.

I’ve always been a work-within-the-system person. That’s probably because the system has always worked for me. Healthy childhood. Stable home. Supportive family. Strong education. Secure financial situation. The only world I’ve experienced is one in which I can strive, stumble, flail, fail, change plans, and keep landing on my feet. A world in which opportunities are there for me to seize if I’m willing to put in the time and effort. A world in which most things have gone pretty well, most of the time. A world that tracks pretty closely to the formula of American meritocracy: hard work equals success.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that as a white guy with a trajectory like that, I’d graduate from a liberal arts college and go to work in government with a conviction that change happens best from inside “the system.”

Like many millennials, I entered the working world in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The Great Recession was as clear an example as any that America’s political and economic doctrines were on shaky ground, if not thoroughly discredited. The crisis decimated retirement savings, forced families out of their homes, and doomed an entire generation to lower earnings. Naturally, of course, many of the big financial players who created the mess were helped back on their feet and promptly returned to earning record profits while opposing new regulations and undermining the existing ones that were put in place to keep such a crisis from happening again. (Government should never interfere in the free market, they said… until they needed the helping hand.)

At the time, it was pretty clear that the conventional rules and expectations of American politics and the U.S. economy — “the system,” in other words — were very much not working. Yet I also noted with great happiness and pride that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. Two years earlier, a Democratic majority had swept into Congress on a platform of ethics reforms, led by the first female speaker of the House. Despite the system’s momentary brokenness, it seemed to be self-correcting just as it was supposed to. Just as the rhetoric of American progress said it would. The arc of the political and economic universe was well on its way toward bending back in the right direction.

At the end of 2009, with the conviction that national progress would be tough but ultimately inevitable, I went to work on Capitol Hill. There, as a young Democratic staffer, I rapidly absorbed more rules of the system. These “rules” are not actually rules but rather widely accepted assumptions that constrain America’s public policy debates by dictating what is possible and what is not. These assumptions will sound familiar to anyone even mildly engaged in the political conversation over the past forty years. Assumptions such as: Tax cuts create growth. Tax hikes crush growth. The federal government’s first priority, naturally, is to maximize economic growth. Success shall be measured by GDP and the S&P.

Like someone who had just discovered an old band for the first time, I listened to all of the greatest hits on repeat until I learned the lyrics by heart. Businesses are job creators, first and foremost, so the government should disrupt their welfare as little as possible. With limited exceptions, regulating or restraining corporate behavior threatens economic prosperity and individual liberty. Debts and deficits are morally irresponsible, except when they’re deemed investments in America’s future — such as tax cuts for large companies and people whose financial success demonstrates that they know how to use resources responsibly.

These are all classics, but the title track — the song that we all grow up singing, even if we don’t know the band — is the one that says the United States is a meritocracy, a land of opportunity for all. Here, anyone willing to work hard can thrive. Here, individual success is self-made, a reflection not of good fortune but rather of individual effort and determination. Here, individual failure follows not from bad luck or structural inequities, but rather from poor work ethic or a lack of personal responsibility.

As a young Hill staffer, I absorbed all of this conventional wisdom through talking points, op-ed columns, cable news soundbites, and the political rhetoric and decision-making of both parties. I rapidly adopted the slightly cynical outlook and condescending self-righteousness of someone who had just learned how things really work. I was (and remain) a Democrat, but unlike all those radical liberals on the outside whose advocacy and agitation were making our work on the inside more difficult, I understood the trade-offs and tough choices that had made the United States a global superpower.

Sure, my thinking seemed to go, we can invest in public health programs and clean energy research, but we’re going to have to spend money on it, and you know that money has to come from somewhere.… If we’re serious about fiscal responsibility, we have to be open to bending the cost curve on Medicare and Social Security. I don’t like it either, but governing responsibly means making tough choices.… It would be great if people didn’t have so much student loan or credit card debt, but maybe they shouldn’t have spent all that money in the first place, you know? … Yeah, I want new funding to fight homelessness and improve public transportation as much as you do, but you know we have to pay for it, right? We can’t just spend money we don’t have. We’re capitalists, remember?

I wrote righteous floor speeches in support of Obamacare for the congressman I worked for, but I also adopted the belief that unions were enemies of economic progress. I wanted to make sure every worker had a chance to earn a decent living, but I also shared in the conviction that technology companies disrupting stagnant industries could do no wrong. I never wavered in condemning GOP efforts to cut federal funding for women’s health and family planning, but I also preached that Congress should privatize the U.S. Postal Service. I didn’t necessarily blame anyone for being down on their luck and needing help from the government, but I also generally assumed success in America was the result of hard work.

It’s not as if I suddenly became a doctrinaire libertarian or wanted to work for the House Freedom Caucus or began advocating for trickle-down economics. I just subtly shifted my views to make it clear that even though I was a progressive (“especially on social issues,” I would note), I, too, understood the power of free markets and recognized the importance of hard work and fiscal responsibility.

Where did this way of thinking come from? Why did I absorb this mindset so readily? As I’ve thought more about the countless societal, cultural, and technological factors at play, three stand out. One is the rise and subsequent entrenchment of the “meritocratic” or “professional” class — creatures of the system, like me, for whom the system has worked exceedingly well. Another is the scam of false choices, the self-serving notion that has taught generations of Americans that we can have a strong economy or a strong social safety net, but not both. The third factor is a decades-long effort to make the federal government dysfunctional and distrusted.

In this series of articles, I’ll review these trends in turn. Then, I’ll explore why my understanding of America’s political and economic rules has shifted so radically — or at least “radically” compared to what the conventional wisdom deems acceptable. Before we get there, though, we need to talk about the Serious and Responsible People whose Serious and Responsible Thinking lulled me, like so many of my fellow institutionalists, into a comfortable sense of complacency with the status quo.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the first in an eight-part series. Read part two here.

If Barack Obama had run again in 2016, would you have voted for him?

I’m pretty sure I would have. The reasons why say a lot about our politics and our democracy

As unpleasant as it may be, pretend it’s the summer of 2016. Despite having clinched the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton has been forced to drop out of the presidential race a few weeks before the party’s convention in Philadelphia. As party leader, President Barack Obama is pondering his next step. He’s confident Bernie Sanders can’t defeat Donald Trump. Obama knows how difficult the job of president is and understands the risks of a Trump victory, but he also recognizes the importance of his country’s tradition of limiting presidents to two terms in office.

After weighing the trade-offs, at the Democratic National Convention that year Obama announces he’ll stand for a third term. Somehow, having found a workaround to the twenty-second amendment to the U.S. Constitution, he ends up on the ballot.

A few months later, you show up at your polling place. You support the Democratic platform and oppose Trump, but you’re uneasy about casting a vote to undermine one of America’s most celebrated traditions. What do you do? Do you vote to give a third term to a president for only the second time in the history of the country? Or do you refuse, making a small but righteous stand in defense of precedent and the Constitution?

***

The opening line of the twenty-second amendment is unambiguous: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Of all America’s founding anecdotes, few exemplify our commitment to tradition as strongly as the two-term precedent established by George Washington’s decision to step down in 1796. The fact that the twenty-second amendment was not even proposed until 1944, nearly a century and a half after Washington left office, underscores how the rule of law in American democracy has long been supplemented and supported by unwritten understandings.

For many of us, the chaos of the last few years has served as a glaring reminder of the importance of these democratic traditions — and the immense discretion our system gives individual leaders to uphold, bend, or disregard them. We claim to revere these norms. Yet during the 2016 campaign countless participants in American democracy, from regular voters to prominent political figures, were willing to condone near-daily norm-shattering from the Trump campaign.

The world doesn’t need any more hot takes on the last election (though I’ve offered mine). From racial resentment to tribal loyalty to economic self-interest, it’s easy to list reasons why people voted for Donald Trump. But why didn’t the reasons to vote against him carry more weight? I don’t think it was naive to have hoped for stronger resistance to his candidacy from “traditional” GOP voters, not just the #NeverTrump types.

In the privacy of the voting booth, these conservatives could’ve quietly rejected Trump’s shameless disregard for the political norms they used to champion. Even if they strongly supported the Republican party platform and were terrified by the prospect of a Clinton victory, one might’ve expected that the “at least he’ll put the right people on the Supreme Court” bargain wouldn’t legitimize a candidate so contemptuous of longstanding democratic traditions.

During the GOP primary fight, plenty of Republicans noted Trump’s unique threat to American democracy. Many of the people who voted for Trump knew the history of how democracies die, to quote the title of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s recent book. They understood that our democracy has long been sustained by both legal constraints and adherence to norms. In 2016, they knew all of this, and yet they acquiesced to it. They voted for it. To this day, they enable it. How do they justify it?

***

How our political system as a whole supported the rise of Donald Trump is a decades-long discussion. But how individual human beings responded to it is something I, as an individual human being myself, might be able to better understand. If a beloved Democratic figure were willingly subverting an American precedent previously considered sacrosanct, how would I respond? Returning to the thought experiment with which we began, would I have voted to give President Obama four more years?

If I’m being honest, the answer is probably yes. And despite this scenario’s hypothetical, counterfactual nature, that answer reveals (to me, at least) three lessons about our politics today. If American democracy is to return to its foundation of norms, laws, and institutions, it’s critical that we take these lessons to heart — just as many of those seeking to undermine the system already have.

The first lesson: More than we like to admit, democratic norms are fragile, and nearly all of us are capable of violating them under the right circumstances. These norms rely entirely on the compliance and buy-in of individual human beings. If someone in a position of power chooses not to comply, and if that person manages to earn and sustain enough public support, there’s little anyone can do about it.

If Obama decided to stand for a third term in 2016, he’d have faced howls of outrage from Republicans and pundits, scorn from plenty in his own party, and possibly even opposition from the courts. But with enough public and institutional support, it seems decently likely that his name could have made it to the ballot — and that he could have won.

The second lesson is that political inertia is incredibly strong, often much stronger than the shame of public condemnation and outrage. During the 2016 campaign, for instance, the “system,” from voters to politicians to pundits, came to accept that Donald Trump wouldn’t release his tax returns and that Merrick Garland wouldn’t make it to the Supreme Court.

In each case, opponents protested righteously. The indignation was often bipartisan. But the system didn’t know how to respond when then-candidate Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proved impervious to shame long enough for the collective consciousness to normalize their behavior. In the aforementioned thought experiment, if Obama were sufficiently resistant to public and even judicial critique, and if he managed to get himself on the ballot and reelected, it’s likely the system eventually would have accepted it and moved on, too.

The third lesson is simple, and it remains the hardest for me to accept. We’re way more willing to condone conduct from our side than we are from the other side. This statement seems obvious, but sometimes it’s worth restating the obvious, if only to stop ourselves from overcomplicating it.

In 2016, I was regularly appalled by the Trump campaign’s dismissal of democratic traditions. But I probably would’ve been willing to bury my own hesitation about an unconstitutional third Obama term if it had been the alternative to Trump. We’ll tolerate conduct from our side that we’d rightly shun otherwise, especially if we can justify it as an undemocratic means to a more democratic end.

Remember Tim Tebow? Before he joined the Denver Broncos in 2010, I loathed Tebow in the way our culture gives us permission to despise public figures we’ve never met. I mocked him in the usual way that many football fans did. But then he was drafted by the Broncos, my team. Suddenly, I was thinking that maybe this guy wasn’t so bad.

By the time he led the Broncos to a strange and stunning playoff appearance the following season, I was all in. I didn’t always like the way he played or conducted himself off the field, but now he wasn’t just some quarterback — he was our quarterback, and we were winning. Loyalty to team and tribe is hardwired into us. It can be overcome, but its strength shouldn’t be underestimated.

***

At this point, it’s worth a reminder that this article is a thought experiment, not an exercise in falsely equating today’s Republican and Democratic parties. It’s not a means of legitimizing the moral compromises of Trump’s enablers in Congress. It’s not a justification for the hypocrisy of those who celebrate or ignore conduct from Trump for which they surely would’ve impeached his predecessor.

Democrats aren’t innocent of norm-breaking conduct, but today the GOP’s disrespect for precedent and its complicity in the unethical and sometimes illegal conduct that put Trump in the White House has no equivalent on the left. On matters from ethics to transparency to national security, the double-standard between the forty-fourth and forty-fifth presidents is gaping.

In many ways, we don’t have to contemplate a third Obama term to consider the consequences of undermining democratic norms because these consequences are thrust into the public eye every day. It should also go without saying that Barack Obama was never going to run again, no matter how intriguing anyone might have found Obama’s Third Term: Follow The Secret Path To President Obama’s Third Term. (Fear not — it’s still available on Amazon.)

Other than a few Twitter trolls and fringe commentators, no one — least of all the outgoing president himself — ever seriously suggested it. Even so, the “what if?” question is still worth considering for what it reveals about the vulnerabilities of our political system.

The degree to which this system can, or should, rely on unwritten norms has been a matter of debate throughout U.S. history. The introduction and adoption of the twenty-second amendment to the Constitution followed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to run for a third (and then a fourth) term in the White House.

There were indeed compelling reasons for America not to change presidents during World War II. It’s possible no leader but FDR could have rallied the United States out of the Great Depression and to victory in war. But while Roosevelt wasn’t the first sitting president to try, he was the first to succeed in defying one of America’s founding precedents. It was an anti-democratic act in support of a war for democracy. How do we reconcile these competing narratives?

Democracy is messy, complicated, and unpredictable. We like to think there’s always a clear right and wrong, and sometimes there is. For me, Trump’s nomination presented as stark a choice as any rational person could imagine. But it’s not always so clear.

I consider myself a reader of history and defender of norms and traditions. Yet had the choice in the summer of 2016 been either a constitutional first term of corruption and norm-breaking Trumpism, or an unconstitutional third term of the integrity and thoughtfulness of President Obama, I probably would’ve chosen the latter. I think a lot of people — not just progressives — would have, too.

The messaging of both campaigns aside, that wasn’t the choice voters faced. But considering how I might’ve responded to the prospect of a third Obama term makes our present situation just a tiny bit easier for me to understand. It reminds me just how fragile our norms are. It helps me grasp at a visceral, emotional level why people who profess a commitment to the traditions of American government might not just vote reluctantly for Donald Trump, but eventually find themselves enthusiastic defenders of his presidency.

From altering the Census to politicizing the Federal Reserve to refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, the Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms seems set to continue. If we’re to resist these undemocratic efforts, every ounce of understanding is critical.

Norms are fragile and subjective. Political inertia is powerful. And hypocrisy is inseparable from politics. For better or worse, these facts are just that — facts — of our system today. But so far, only one political party has figured this out.

This column was originally published on Medium.

America’s unspoken fault line

Why is luck a prerequisite for success?

There’s a fundamental fault line in the United States that we hardly ever talk about: the degree to which luck alters the trajectory of our lives. How much do we acknowledge the impact of fortune on individual success? How much do we attribute blame to individual failure? Whether we recognize or reject the role of randomness and happenstance on personal success is literally a “fault” line in American society.

Consider a telling incident during the 2012 presidential campaign. At a July rally in Roanoke, Virginia, President Barack Obama told a crowd of supporters, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” He continued: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Perhaps realizing he’d just unwrapped a Christmas-in-July gift for his opponent, Obama clarified his thoughts a few sentences later. “The point is,” he concluded, “is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” That clarification didn’t matter, of course. The Romney campaign and its supporters took full advantage of the “you didn’t build that” comment, replaying it in campaign ads and condemning it repeatedly in stump speeches. (I remember driving in northern Colorado later that summer for a congressional campaign and passing a farm with a huge wooden sign reading, “MY FARM. I BUILT IT.”)

Lost in the back-and-forth following Obama’s comments was his core point: None of us gets where we are on our own. No one builds a profitable business or graduates from college or publishes a bestselling book or develops a new medical treatment without an ecosystem that makes that success possible, from global networks of technology and infrastructure to supportive teachers, an educated workforce, and a stable political environment. Hard work and hustle don’t guarantee success on their own.

But Obama could have taken this point even further. Success, no matter how we define it, requires more than individual and collective effort. Whether we achieve success often hinges on pure luck. To a degree greater than most of us like to admit, the trajectories of our lives are impacted every day in nearly every way by fortune. By happenstance. By events and encounters beyond anyone’s control. By being in the right place at the right time (and being there with the right people and the right resources), or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By having the stability and security to take risks, or having to spend all our energy just trying to survive. By being forgiven for mistakes, or facing life-altering consequences for them. By meeting someone who opens doors for us, or meeting someone whose presence in our lives hurts us. By getting sick at the wrong time, or by being lucky enough not to end up in the emergency room when we don’t have the time or money to spare.

Even before we’re born, every human being plays the same nature and nurture lotteries. Whether we end up with a debilitating mental illness or grow up in an unstable household or get hit by a metaphorical (or literal) bus, whether we’re born into a society that celebrates or penalizes us for our race or religion or gender, whether we meet the right mentor at the right time or get caught up in the criminal justice system at the wrong time, whether we enter the workforce at the peak an economic boom or in the depths of a recession, whether we’re given space to learn from our mistakes or condemned for them… In the lottery of life, we don’t choose our numbers. Nor do we control whether they’ll be winners.

Take any person who conventional metrics (money, health, status, family, career) deem successful. Say it’s Jeff Bezos. One way to write Bezos’s story is that he had an idea and worked tirelessly to turn that idea into one of the biggest companies in the world. But another way to write it is to say that Jeff Bezos was born into a family that could afford to send him to Princeton and invest nearly $250,000 in Amazon; he entered the professional world at a time when the (government-funded) internet was sufficiently developed to support e-commerce but not so developed that the cost of entry was too great or the market already saturated; and he just happened not to face a debilitating illness or a personal tragedy that knocked him off course during the crucial years he was growing his company (such as the helicopter crash he survived in 2003).

Both narratives are true. Jeff Bezos did work diligently to build Amazon into the behemoth it is today. He did seize opportunities that others might not have seen. He did take risks that others might not have taken. But he also got extraordinarily lucky with extraordinary frequency along the way, just as any successful person does. Of the things in his control, he did many of them well. The things outside his control just happened to go mind-bogglingly well for him, too.

The role of fortune in personal success is one that politicians should know well, even if they don’t recognize it or choose to acknowledge it. Political success requires an almost unfathomable amount of luck. It’s easy to look back at the career of a successful elected official and create a reverse narrative of someone who “always knew they’d be a senator” and who mapped, and then followed precisely, a path to power. (The traditional timeline begins by running for student body president in grade school.) Campaigns and reporters tell these stories all the time.

While these narratives may not be entirely false, they’re rarely entirely true because they almost always overlook the role of luck and happenstance in determining that trajectory. For every aspiring politician who succeeds, there are countless people with nearly identical ambitions, plans, and backstories who don’t. A candidate ends up in elected office through a balance of hard work and a lot of luck — a balance that often tips heavily toward the fortune end of the spectrum. Only in hindsight can one look back on a successful political career and argue that it was planned or arranged intentionally. Even Lyndon B. Johnson, who was as great a schemer and plotter as anyone in American history, wouldn’t have ended up in the Oval Office without an unexpected turn of events entirely out of his control.

In politics, as in life, what separates those we deem victorious from those we consider failures is often as simple as a few votes or a lucky break here and there. In politics, as in life, success is often about being in the right place at the right time, and having the resources to seize an opportunity when it presents itself. In politics, as in life, failure often owes more to a random and unpredictable stroke of bad luck at an inopportune time than a moral failing or malicious undertaking.

Yet as the response to Obama’s 2012 comments showed, the American narrative says exactly the opposite. Our collective bias towards intentionality tells us that all successes (especially our own) are individual successes, and all failures (especially others’) are individual failures. We put individual effort on a pedestal while disregarding entirely the elements of luck or coincidence. We celebrate successful outcomes and criticize unsuccessful ones while using the clarity of hindsight to cherry-pick the moments that fit our narrative. We have a seemingly unbeatable addiction to the illusion of meritocracy.

This addiction shapes public policy in hugely destructive ways. No child chooses to grow up in a particular neighborhood, but public policy says your zip code controls the quality of your education. No one chooses the color of their skin, but public policy says your race will determine how the criminal justice system treats you if you end up in it (and often whether you end up in it at all). No one chooses to have a relative in the hospital fighting an incurable illness, but if you do, public policy says that whether your family has health insurance and a healthy savings account will dictate whether you spend your nights studying for college entrance exams or working a second job.

The American dream is incredibly empowering. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that the idea that diligence equals success has bettered the lives of millions of people by giving them purpose, hope, and a genuine sense of agency. One could argue that our basic political narrative — the idea that anyone in the United States, immigrant or native-born, can achieve prosperity by working hard and following the rules — built a foundation upon which America the global superpower emerged. This narrative has never been true for everyone, of course, but it was true for enough people for long enough that it became gospel.

Today, that gospel is under attack, bringing into stark relief a societal divide that has always existed but is rarely acknowledged. On one side of this fault line is a worldview that worships the all-powerful (and thus all-responsible) individual. In this version of reality, individual success is due purely to merit, and individual failure can be traced directly to personal mistakes and moral failings. If you get sick, that’s on you. If you can’t find a job, you need to work harder. If you have to choose between paying for child care or paying rent, well, maybe you shouldn’t have gotten yourself into that situation in the first place. At some point, this worldview assumes, history was reset, a color- and gender-blind society was born, and structural inequities and biases were resolved. We freed markets, healed racism, eliminated sexism, and generally atoned for our past sins. We’re all starting from the same line now, so if you don’t take the opportunity to better yourself, that’s on you.

But there’s another way to see the world. Contrary to the both sides-ism of the political media, this other way is not just the mirror image of that individual-first mentality. It’s not the left to that one’s right. It’s simply the “both-and” to that one’s “either-or.” This worldview, commanded almost entirely by the American left today, does believe in agency and liberty. It does encourage individual tenacity and hard work. It does emphasize personal responsibility. It holds all of these beliefs, while also acknowledging that there’s more to the story.

This worldview recognizes the role of luck and fortune in our successes and our failures. It considers both hard work and happenstance in its judgments. Whether a minor inconvenience or a life-altering tragedy, this worldview accepts that factors outside any one person’s control determine far more of our trajectory than we assume. Whether stemming from systemic injustice or just plain bad luck, this worldview recognizes that we’re not all born at the same starting line. Nor are we running the same race along the same course with the same obstacles and shortcuts. Acknowledging the role of randomness doesn’t undermine personal responsibility or negate the value of hard work. It doesn’t make us prisoners of fate or encourage selfishness and apathy. It simply places success and failure in their proper context. Success requires a lot of things to go right, and failure doesn’t require much to go wrong.

To mix some time-worn political metaphors, the first worldview says pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and then pull up the ladder behind you when you get to a secure place so someone else doesn’t take it from you. The second perspective says try your best with the bootstraps, but if the straps are faulty or the laces break or the soles get knocked off, we’ll have a safety net waiting for you at the bottom. You won’t be able to stay there forever, but we’ll give you some time and stability to fix your boots or try a different pair.

Politicians who subscribe to the first worldview have built a society in which public health benefits are contingent on getting a job, even as many people are forced to stop working precisely because they’ve gotten sick. A society in which men have restricted access to abortion services and contraception when they themselves have zero chance of getting pregnant unexpectedly. A society in which housing assistance and drug treatment are nearly impossible to access, yet homelessness and addiction are treated as moral failings punishable as crimes rather than tragedies treatable by a stronger social safety net. A society in which people who need a helping hand are micromanaged and intentionally humiliated. A society in which poverty traps are nearly inescapable and wealth gaps nearly insurmountable without a strong dose of luck.

The second worldview, on the other hand, calls for public policy built on humility and driven by empathy. Public policy that celebrates cleverness and rewards hard work, but doesn’t demand an uninterrupted string of good luck as a prerequisite for success. Public policy that reflects an understanding that we’re all better off when more of us are better off, and we’re all more free to pursue an American dream when more of us are free from the impediments to it. Public policy that sees someone asking for help not as a threat to our status or an attempt to “game” the system, but as our own story if our lives had gone just a little differently. Public policy that sees a single mom depending on public assistance to raise her kids, or someone sleeping on the streets, or a refugee family desperately seeking asylum, and recognizes that, to paraphrase the famous line, there but for the grace of God go any one of us.

The defining divide in American society today is the degree to which we’re willing to reckon with and appreciate the role of luck. Building a public policy infrastructure that recognizes the unpredictability of life doesn’t undermine hard work or discourage individual effort. It doesn’t absolve anyone of personal responsibility. It simply forces us to see each other with compassion instead of contempt, and to seek justice instead of judgment.

Perhaps we’re not serious about creating a society in which anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can actually succeed. Perhaps that idea is just a comforting thought for those of us who’ve already made it. Perhaps it’s just a useful rhetorical tool for an entrenched elite that clings to power by selling an image of a society free from institutional bias. But if the American dream is to mean what we say it means — if we’re to create a society in which anyone truly can become president or build the biggest company in the world — luck can’t be a prerequisite for success.

This column was originally published on Medium.

How do you unite the party of Ocasio-Cortez and Manchin? Ask Nancy Pelosi

The Pelosi model is the path forward for Democrats

Perhaps inevitably, since Election Day the Politico-Axios axis of short-termism and palace intrigue has been consumed with the “race” for speaker of the House. It’s not really a race, though. Nancy Pelosi says she has the votes, and unlike her GOP colleagues who’ve tried their hand at the speakership in recent years, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t lose many votes — certainly not ones this consequential. As incoming Democratic caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries told the New York Times last month, “No one’s a better vote-counter than Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi.”

Yet despite her lengthy track record of bringing Democrats together when it counts (see: the Affordable Care Act), today’s political headlines suggest a new influx of progressive voices will make party unity next to impossible. After all, every pundit and political analyst knows Democrats are hopelessly divided, with their liberal and moderate wings just barely strung together by a few rapidly fraying threads. Progressive victories are “roiling the Democratic Party,” suggested Reuters in August. A “Democratic House Divided,” cried the New York Times just a week after Election Day. In July, Axios warned that Democratic momentum was so strong that the party could somehow be swamped by its own “progressive ‘Blue Wave.’”

As New York Times columnist David Leonhardt pointed out in May, the “Democrats in disarray” narrative has had far more staying power than the evidence suggests it should. But the lingering question remains: As Democrats enter what’s sure to be a long and exhausting primary process, is there any way for them stay united through 2020 and beyond?

Yes. It’s simply a matter of following Nancy Pelosi’s lead — not just as the next speaker of the House, but as an example for how to unite a big-tent party that includes members from New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, from 85-year-old Dianne Feinstein to 29-year-old Abby Finkenauer.

Pelosi’s leadership formula is deceptively straightforward. She recognizes the different circumstances of different districts and members. She identifies the broad principles that members of her caucus share. She focuses relentlessly on the issues that reflect those core values. These steps take care of most of the caucus. And then she goes to work negotiating and compromising with the rest.

From 2007-2011, then-Speaker Pelosi led a House majority nearly as politically and ideologically diverse as the incoming one. The comparison to today’s party (and world) isn’t exact, but the record from her first stint with the speaker’s gavel shows what a supposedly hopelessly divided group of politicians can accomplish: Health insurance reform more progressive than the Affordable Care Act. Cap-and-trade legislation to fight climate change. Wall Street reforms that created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A nearly trillion-dollar stimulus bill to combat the financial crisis. It was, as Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine in March, “the most aggressive spate of liberal reforms since the Great Society.”

Pelosi’s leadership hasn’t been without faults, of course — most prominently her failure to prepare a successor and bring new voices into power earlier in her tenure. But whether as speaker or minority leader, when it comes to holding together a complex and restive caucus, there’s no one better.

This list of attributes and accomplishments is not to tout Pelosi’s credentials for the speakership (which are self-evident), but to point out that it’s nothing new for the Democratic umbrella to encompass a mix of left-leaning liberals, pro-business New Democrats, and socially conservative Blue Dogs. Democrats have always been old and young, from districts rural, urban, and suburban. Some have been in Congress for decades; others have been new to elected office. The Pelosi model channels these divergent perspectives into consensus by building a foundation of unifying principles, and working out the details later.

It’s a model of ends, not means; of fundamental principles, not specific policy prescriptions. Domestically, these core commitments include a broad agreement that all Americans have the right to affordable health care. That a decent job with a livable wage is a matter of dignity, not just economic security. That business, while driving growth, can also thrive alongside higher taxes and more stringent regulations. That income inequality is a toxic force that corporate interests won’t naturally sort out on their own. That government can play a constructive role in building a free and prosperous society.

On the international stage, Democrats believe that climate change is a real and urgent threat. That welcoming immigrants and refugees is a matter of both economics and values. That the United States can and must play a positive role beyond its borders through diplomacy and foreign assistance. That moral leadership on the world stage matters. That reckless military intervention is, well, reckless, but that America’s armed services can and do make the world a safer place.

These aren’t controversial positions among Democrats, though there’s plenty of disagreement within the party — let alone America as a whole — about how to realize them. Pelosi, for one, knows supporting Medicare-for-All doesn’t define a Democrat, but supporting universal health care does. She knows voting Democratic doesn’t mean endorsing a Green New Deal, but it does mean working urgently to tackle climate change. She knows Democrats aren’t necessarily devoted to a universal basic income, but they are devoted to reducing income inequality.

Principles represent the vision; legislation represents the art of the possible. Effective political leadership demands both. “We don’t twist arms,” Pelosi told National Journal in 2015. “We build consensus in our caucus. That’s what we have always done.” That’s the Nancy Pelosi model: Align on core principles, and figure out everything else as needed.

It’s a model worthy of the rest of the party, too, no matter who Democrats nominate for the presidency. Guided by core principles, there’s more than enough agreement to bring together progressives and centrists whose disagreements are said to be irreconcilable. There’s more than enough common ground to survive gritty debates, even bitter fights, behind closed doors and in the national spotlight. There’s more than enough of a shared vision to emerge from a long and drawn-out Democratic primary with momentum and unity. The Nancy Pelosi model is the path forward for the Democratic party.

This column was originally published on Medium.

The do-over delusion of Trump and Brexit

Sometimes the best option is the least bad one

It’s been a rocky few years for both sides of the transatlantic “special relationship.”

In the United Kingdom, Brexit has proven an unmitigated disaster. The campaign divided the country in two, and the months since the vote have seen only squabbling, grandstanding, and a refusal to confront the real and obvious consequences of leaving the European Union. Hard-right Brexiteers and the conspiracy-minded “European Research Group” have dragged the Conservative party further into political fantasyland, while the not-so-loyal opposition of Jeremy Corbyn seems solely focused on winning the next election. It says something about the severity of the leadership vacuum that Theresa May, for all of her mistakes and inability to stand firmly for much of anything, has been one of the few members of any party to approach the Brexit process somewhat responsibly.

Across the Atlantic, the United States has a president who is clearly unfit for the office. Donald Trump is impulsive and incurious. He appears almost entirely driven by vanity, insecurity, and deep resentment of those whose presence threatens him, such as women, people of color, and federal investigators. He’s corrupt. He’s a serial liar, spewing more than 6,000 “false or misleading claims” since his inauguration, according to the Washington Post. He has no concept of moral leadership, as his pathetic capitulation to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince reflects. As The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson wrote in August, “were he not President, Donald Trump himself would almost certainly be facing [criminal] charges.”

The head-shaking dysfunction wrought by Trump and Brexit has prompted growing support for the president to be removed from office (especially among Democrats), and for a second referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU. America’s midterm elections delivered an enormous blue rebuke to the Trump presidency and his enablers in Congress. Meanwhile, nearly 700,000 people marched in London in support of a People’s Vote earlier this fall. Recent polls suggest that if they had the chance to vote again, 54 percent would choose to remain in the EU.

There are, of course, key differences between America’s presidential elections, which have occurred regularly since 1789, and a remarkable one-off referendum. But among the many parallels that do exist, two stand out: Millions of people want a do-over. And by nearly every objective measure, from national security to economic well-being to citizen welfare to the promotion of democratic values like human rights and the rule of law, they have the facts on their side. It’s abundantly clear that the United States would be better off without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and the U.K. would be better off remaining in the EU.

So why not take the same capital-D-Democratic momentum that turned a blue wave into a Democratic House majority, and channel it into a campaign for impeachment? Why not seize the opportunity presented by Tory infighting and chaotic Brexit negotiations to push for a second referendum?

Because with Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, Congress can reassert itself as a consequential branch of government, investigating and exposing much of the president’s wrongdoing and snuffing out his worst impulses — without the all-consuming and paralyzing spectacle of impeachment hearings.

Because with Brexit negotiations slowly inching away from a cliff and towards a muddling compromise that averts a nightmarish “no-deal” scenario, the U.K. can focus on confronting the mindbogglingly complex process of extracting itself from the EU — rather than waste further oxygen fighting the lies and fear-mongering innuendo of hardcore Brexiteers like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Because the same grievances that made the Trump and Leave campaigns successful the first time will make their undoing even more divisive and disastrous.

And, most critically, because as it stands right now neither impeachment nor a second vote are going to happen. With the U.S. Senate still controlled by a cynical and uncompromising Republican majority leader, and with most GOP elected officials in constant fear of a Trump-induced Twitter primary, impeachment isn’t happening. With the U.K. still led by a prime minister who triggered the Article 50 withdrawal process without a plan in place, and with May’s cabinet and party still largely dominated by Euroskeptics more interested in taking her job than helping her do her job, a second referendum isn’t happening. (Ironically, in two years America will get a second referendum on its Trumpian mistake, while Theresa May routinely faces threats of “impeachment” by members of her own party.)

As uninspiring as it sounds, when it comes to Trump and Brexit, “bad” and “slightly less bad” are the only options on the table. Every ounce of political capital and organizing energy that goes towards the fantastical scenarios of impeachment or a second referendum is an ounce not used to make these bad situations slightly less bad.

These circumstances could change. It’s hard to imagine what congressional Republicans won’t tolerate from Donald Trump, but the special counsel’s investigation could expose corruption or coordination with the Russian government so intolerable that even the GOP base turns on him. Parliament could defeat May’s unpopular Brexit deal, forcing the country to choose between a catastrophic no-deal and a divisive second referendum — and dragging all but the most hardheaded Leavers behind another vote. But we’re not there yet.

“Do less harm” and “Slog ahead with the cards as they’ve been dealt” aren’t nearly as satisfying rallying cries as “Not my president!” or “People’s Vote!” The least bad option doesn’t poll particularly well. It doesn’t address the long-term challenges of, say, an American judiciary stacked with Trump-selected judges, or a Britain trapped behind trade barriers with its European partners. It doesn’t punish anyone for the unethical and, in some cases, illegal activities that may have swung both of these 2016 elections. In an ideal world, the least bad option is almost certainly the wrong choice.

But as history reminds us time and time again, we’re not in an ideal world. Unlike campaigning, governing is defined by complexities and trade-offs. The ideal is always worth fighting for, but democracy only works if the pursuit of the ideal eventually yields to acceptance of the attainable, at least in the short term. No matter how misguided, irrational, or unfair an election or an entire system may be, sometimes the best we can do is accept a disappointing result and use it to chart the least bad path forward. There’s no “Edit-Undo” in the political process.

This argument is a frustrating one, particularly because accepting it means accepting that the opposing sides are playing for different stakes. Many who support impeaching Donald Trump also believe government can be a force for good in society. As destructive as his presidency has been, it’s hard to imagine anything more destructive to government than making articles of impeachment the defining plank of the opposition party platform. For better or worse, those who believe in government have a responsibility to fight for a functional one, even when — especially when — the other side isn’t playing fair.

Similarly, many of those advocating strenuously for a second referendum believe it’s vital to preserve economic and cultural ties between the U.K. and the European Union. Nothing would be more detrimental to that worthy goal than Britain crashing out of the EU without any agreement. For better or worse, those who believe in a strong British relationship with the rest of the continent have a responsibility to fight for the least bad option, even when — especially when — the other side isn’t playing fair.

As European Council president Donald Tusk noted recently regarding May’s proposal, “We have always said Brexit is a lose-lose situation and these negotiations were always about damage control.” The same is true for the Trump presidency. It’s a lose-lose situation in which the debate, at least until 2020, is about controlling and averting the damage we still can, not wringing our hands over the damage already done. That reality is complicated and uninspiring. But so is governing.

This column was originally published in Medium.

If the GOP keeps the House

Winners write the rules and rewrite history

Conventional wisdom changes quickly in Washington. There was no single point when the likelihood that Democrats would take control of the House of Representatives in a “blue wave” evolved from inconceivable to nearly inevitable, but it happened fast. Too fast, it seems, and mixed with too much hoping and too much assuming for our collective expectation to process all the reasons it might not.

If Republicans keep the House on November 6th, the conventional wisdom will be shocked. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Lost in the rapid shift from an impossible Democratic majority to an almost inescapable one are some of the same structural barriers that have helped keep the House so solidly red since 2012: systematic efforts to restrict access to the ballot box and to craft congressional maps that favor Republican candidates.

GOP-led efforts to suppress the vote and draw districts in their favor have been so ruthlessly effective that no matter how tidal the blue wave turns out to be, it’s possible it was never going to be big enough.

To be clear, the odds do favor a Democratic takeover of the House. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives the party an 85 percent chance of winning control. The Economist says the likelihood is closer to three-in-four. Politico recently wrote — almost as an afterthought — that “everything would have to break their way for Republicans to eke out a victory.” These predictions have led to regular it’s-already-over headlines like “the GOP House is crumbling” (Politico), Republican “chances of victory slip” (Bloomberg), and “GOP gloom: Republicans predict House majority will be swept away” (Washington Examiner).

But neither these predictions nor the ultimate outcome should blind us to the structural barriers standing between Nancy Pelosi and the Speaker’s gavel. This isn’t a partisan assessment. It’s a simple reflection of math and power.

To have even the slimmest chance of a slim majority, Democrats have to win the national House vote by a landslide — somewhere between seven and 11 points. A July analysis by The Economist found, for instance, that while “the likelihood of a Democratic majority in the popular vote is a remarkable 99.9 percent,” the party still has a 30 percent chance of being stuck in the minority next year. The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman sees similar odds.

Part of this discrepancy can be explained by the fact that left-leaning voters tend “to live more tightly bunched together in cities,” as The Economist put it. But that explanation only carries so much water — and not nearly enough to contain a wave.

Start with gerrymandering. A March report from the Brennan Center for Justice took a state-by-state look at the impact of gerrymandering on the 2018 midterms. In Ohio and Michigan, the report found that “even if Democrats match their exceptional performance in 2006 and 2008 — the best Democratic years in two decades in both those states — they are not projected to win a single additional seat under the current maps” because of how precisely the districts are drawn to favor Republican victories. That pattern doesn’t have to hold in every state across the country to have a devastating impact. It just has to hold in enough states at the same time.

There’s more than one way for elected officials to choose their own voters, and the power to draw district lines is amplified by the power to choose who’s even allowed to vote. The GOP has done its very best to make voting as difficult as possible — if not impossible — for huge swathes of minority, low-income, and young Americans.

Since the 2010 midterms, according to a (different) report from the Brennan Center, 23 states have put in place discriminatory roadblocks to the ballot box. Among them, the Center notes, “13 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place… 11 have laws making it harder for citizens to register, six cut back on early voting days and hours, and three made it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.”

This wave of disenfranchisement efforts was given a mighty boost by the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing new waves of voter suppression in states from North Carolina to Florida to Texas. There’s little doubt, as the Brennan Center notes, that these post-Shelby County laws account for why “four million more people were purged from the rolls between the federal elections of 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.” These efforts continue today — look no further than Georgia, North Dakota, and Arizona.

Blocking access to the ballot box and redrawing district lines to favor one party aren’t new to this election cycle — they’re depressingly American traditions. That’s because voter suppression works. So does gerrymandering. If the House stays red, it’ll be at least in part because of those two factors. And if the House does flip, it’ll be in spite of these undemocratic obstacles.

Plenty of caveats are in order, of course. Democrats have their own track record of gerrymandering, and malicious intent by the other side isn’t the only reason they face an electoral disadvantage this cycle. Countless other factors will help determine what happens in November, from individual campaign strategy and candidate selection to ads and analytics. External forces, like foreign interference and disinformation on social media, also affect the outcome. More than anything, voter turnout matters enormously.

Blaming all of the Democratic party’s woes on voter suppression and gerrymandering would thus be misleading. So why point them out at all? Why are these arguments anything but a preemptive attempt to define the narrative and find an excuse for Democrats to come up short in the midterms?

Because it would be just as misleading — and deeply harmful to our democracy — to ignore them.

If we bake into our collective consciousness the fact that Republicans will inevitably press forward with their decades-long crusade to restrict voting rights — if we simply assume that’s what the party in power gets to do — we’ll continue to see racist voter suppression laws as normal and acceptable, instead of the grave injustice they are.

If we see national turning points like the Shelby County decision and consequential disenfranchisement campaigns as a natural outcome of GOP election victories — instead of an appalling reflection of structural inequity that demands congressional action — it will remain all too easy to overlook these insidious and systematic efforts, allowing them to grow even more institutionalized.

If we conclude that the party that happens to win more state legislatures in Census years has somehow been given a mandate to control at least one chamber of Congress for the next decade, that party might just decide it’s easier to change the Census (as the Trump administration is doing) instead of its policies.

If we’ve learned anything from the Trump era, it’s that rules — both written and unwritten ones — matter to a democracy. If we normalize the rewriting of the rules to empower a clever minority to cling to power against the will of the majority, we can still have candidates and campaigns and even some voting — but we won’t have much of a democracy.

If the GOP keeps the House this fall, the party will proclaim a renewed mandate for Trumpism, doubling down on its authoritarian trajectory and tried-and-true politics of division and fear. Liberal Democrats will say the party moved too far to the middle. Moderate Democrats will say the party moved too far to the left. The Democratic party faithful will say leadership and party officials missed their opportunity. Democratic officials will say the faithful didn’t do enough to get out the vote.

The media, with its love of the short-term political horserace and obsession with identifying winners and losers, will report breathlessly on how Republican tacticians skillfully and deliberately crafted a victorious strategy that snatched a nearly impossible victory from the jaws of sure defeat. Pundits and consultants, meanwhile, will look back at the campaign with the benefit of selective hindsight and point to the explanations that fit their existing beliefs and biases (and business models).

Perhaps none of these analyses will be entirely wrong. But on their own, they surely won’t be right. Lost in all of this post-election squabbling and rush to define the historical narrative will be a glaring but mostly unmentioned part of the truth: The game was rigged from the beginning.

Who’s allowed to vote matters. How the lines are drawn matters. The way the rules are written — and who gets to write them — matters.

No matter what happens this November, if we fail to see and account for all the ways the rules are written to predetermine the outcome, we’re less likely to raise the popular awareness and collective will to fix it next time. And we’re more likely to learn the wrong lessons from this election cycle.

This isn’t an excuse for not strengthening the Democratic party. It’s not an argument against optimism, or for giving up hope, or for not doing everything humanly possible to get out the vote over the next few weeks. It’s certainly not a prediction, because anyone who claims to know what will happen in November 2018 hasn’t learned the lessons of November 2016. It’s simply an argument for calibrating our expectations based today’s facts rather than tomorrow’s headlines.

Winners write the rules to keep winning, and then they rewrite history to justify it.

No matter who the winners prove to be this fall, we should all take these lessons to heart now, before the conventional wisdom shifts and the retrospective prognosticating begins again on November 7th. Every post-election analysis that doesn’t factor in structural barriers like voter suppression and gerrymandering will be willfully overlooking part of the story.

This column was originally published on Medium.

John McCain’s final act of service

Even in his passing, he helped us imagine something better

It was a fitting culmination to a life of service.

For a few short moments, John McCain’s passing shattered the divisiveness of American politics and gave us a glimpse of something greater. His death reminded us how much better we can be than what we’ve become. It showed us the tremendous good any politician, or any individual, can achieve over a lifetime. And it helped us reimagine, however briefly, a nation rooted in values like integrity, kindness, heart, and humility.

As the news of McCain’s death broke on Saturday, the American discourse shifted slightly. The shift was fleeting but still real, impermanent but still impactful.

This shift was reflected in the outpouring of tributes from family and friends, opponents and allies, world leaders and everyday people. Beyond the admiration and respect for McCain the person, one found in these tributes even more profound themes: an acknowledgement that the senior senator from Arizona embodied something missing in the United States today. An aspiration to reclaim the moral high ground to which McCain so often led the way. A yearning to no longer be tethered obsessively to the petty smallness and meaningless squabbles of partisan politics.

In those short moments reflecting on McCain’s life and legacy, it was possible not to care about what Donald Trump had said or done. It was possible to ignore the gaping disconnect between John McCain’s vision of America and the president’s. It was possible to make real, if momentarily, the tired rhetoric of “country before party” by paying tribute to someone who actually lived it more often than not.

In honoring McCain, Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity found something to agree on. So did Hillary Clinton and Trey Gowdy. Even Mitch McConnell and Elizabeth Warren came together, at least for 280 characters, to praise the legacy of someone who refused to believe we can’t be better tomorrow than we are today.

There was still plenty of scorn and outrage and partisanship to go around, of course. Lingering questions persist of how a nation should mourn when the role of the nation’s mourner-in-chief remains vacant. But for a moment, it was possible to disregard all of that “malarkey,” in the words of McCain’s dear friend Joe Biden, in favor of something greater.

In his death, as so often in his life, John McCain helped us imagine. The unity that followed his passing offered a glimpse not necessarily of the United States without Trump, but of a country capable of taking on the complex forces and toxic strains of thought that preceded this president and will persist long after he leaves the White House. A country capable of reckoning with its sins and shortcomings. A country that often falls short of its ideals and fails to live its values, but nonetheless struggles mightily to become a better version of itself.

John McCain was a human being, with all of our frailties and flaws. In many ways, his imperfect life echoed America’s own: visionary and aspirational, full of contradictions, constantly in pursuit of self-improvement, prone to mistakes but capable of remarkable greatness. A truly heroic person recognizes his successes but devotes himself to his struggles. So it was for John McCain, and so it should be for the nation he served for so long.

In the days to come, will our public discourse return to what it was last Friday? Probably. Is it a tragedy that it takes the death of a once-in-a-lifetime public servant to provide a short respite to the toxicity of our discourse? Certainly. Have the partisan fissures in our politics been healed by one icon’s passing? Of course not.

But is there also immense value in a timely, if brief, reminder of what truly matters? The flicker of aspirational patriotism that McCain’s death inspired in newspapers, tweets, and email inboxes today suggests there is.

Just as he did so many times in life, in death John McCain showed us, yet again, what it means to pursue something great. He helped us imagine, yet again, that America can be better. It is a fitting conclusion to a life of leadership, patriotism, and service.

This column was originally published on Medium.

Bearing witness to an American atrocity

“Never again” is never guaranteed

Like any government action, there are many ways to measure the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that has cruelly and forcibly separated more than 2,300 children, including infants and toddlers, from their parents. Does the policy command public support? (No.) Does it stem from congressional action? (No.) Does it make the United States safer? (No.)

The most basic measure of any government policy — particularly in a country built on human enslavement — has to be whether it’s grounded in human decency. Does it protect human beings from violence and harm? Does it keep them safe from oppression and persecution? Does it leverage the state’s monopoly on violence to serve the public, or does it do so to serve a political agenda? Policymaking is complicated, but these questions are not.

There’s little doubt that by these crucial measures, the Trump administration’s immigration policy is an abject failure and a stain on America’s moral conscience. To subject families fleeing violence and persecution to further violence and persecution is, as Alex Wagner wrote in The Atlantic, to “extinguish the idea of America.” To rip children from their parents and shatter families into disconnected units — some of them too young to form a sentence, let alone a compelling legal argument — is to write a new chapter in a long and brutal legacy of bigotry and dehumanization.

Grounding a nation’s rules and laws in basic human decency isn’t a matter of doing the right thing because it feels good. Generations of memorable calls to summon the better angels of our nature, to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice, to ask what we can do for our country — these aren’t just rhetoric. They’re values lived through policies rooted in compassion and understanding, in giving each other the benefit of the doubt, in building a society that makes us better versions of ourselves.

These policies are the anchors that keep human beings — the tribalistic, zero-sum, us-versus-them creatures we are — from drifting into darkness. We know that people are capable of great kindness. But history shows us that individual kindness doesn’t always override the impulse of the majority tribe. We ground public policy in human decency because the cruelty of dehumanization is far too easy.

When we think of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, or Rwanda or Bosnia in the 1990s, or America throughout centuries of slavery and genocide against indigenous peoples, we reassure ourselves that we’ve learned from history. We rightly recommit ourselves to a policy of “never again.” But the horror being systematically implemented on the southern border of the United States is a reminder that “never again” is never guaranteed. It’s a reminder that while the world as a whole is likely safer and kinder and more humane now than any time in human history, no society is immune to wickedness.

Today, the echoes of darker times are unmistakable. Warehouses full of caged human beings. Families torn apart, sometimes irreparably, to provoke fear and to rally political support. Tent cities for children. Denials of asylum for survivors of gang violence and domestic abuse. Cruelty masquerading as the rule of law or the word of God. Angry screams about an impending “infestation” to justify the quiet construction of the infrastructure of atrocity.

Reflections of a tragic past haunt us for a reason.

This ugly reality owes to more than just the rage of Donald Trump and the resentment of Stephen Miller. Their cruelty and xenophobia may be the catalyst (“Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” one Trump adviser told Vanity Fair), but making it real means mobilizing vast federal agencies. It means quietly awarding lucrative contracts that create new economic incentives and solidify family separation as a powerful interest group.

It means cultivating a sense of righteous compliance that empowers federal officials to joke that the cries of children screaming for their parents are an “orchestra” missing a “conductor.” It means cultivating a conviction that America is under attack that liberates individual actors to keep asylum-seekers locked in chain-link cages, and to prevent crying siblings from hugging. This combination of fear and lies, of impunity and bureaucracy, is how atrocities happen.

But they only succeed when well-meaning people look the other way. When we find ourselves overwhelmed. When we succumb to apathy and exhaustion.

What can we do? Exactly what scholars, storytellers, and survivors have done throughout human history. We fight to expose the human tragedy our government is perpetuating. We refuse to ignore it or let it become normal. We resist the temptation to close the browser, or file these stories under “out of sight, out of mind.” We reject the comforting conviction that it can’t be that bad — that this chapter of systematic dehumanization is sure to end differently — in favor of an awareness that America has a long history of leveraging the loss of humanity for political gain.

We support the journalists and truth-seekers whose work has brought inhumanity into the light and kept it there, taking the small policy changes and bureaucratic tweaks that might otherwise be overlooked and showing how together they form a Trojan horse of cruelty. And we urge these same journalists to continue to cover the human impact of future government policies, even if that coverage comes at the expense of the political horse race. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick put it recently, “It’s all too much, and we still have to care.”

We bear witness to dehumanization, and we fight it with relentless humanity.

Earlier this month, Stephen Miller — the latest in a long line of resentful white men with a chip on his shoulder to stumble into a position of power — told The New York Times that the “message” of these cruel directives “is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

This is wrong. The real message is twofold: no society is ever truly free from the threat of humanity’s worst impulses. But those impulses, and those who would enable them, can be defeated.

This column was originally published on Medium.

Before Trump, America normalized a broken Congress

How did our expectations for Congress sink so low?

By now, the moral cowardice of congressional Republicans in the face of Trumpism has been well established. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s pathetic attempt to dodge a straightforward question about the Trump administration’s lies (a “mindless sycophant,” Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson called McCarthy) is just the latest example of the unwillingness of the GOP to operate the legislative branch as an independent body of government.

But easily overlooked in the head-spinning chaos that’s seen the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower become the tribe of Trump and Hannity is another fact of life that predates Trumpism: the abysmally low expectations for what counts as success in Congress. Before the American political machine learned to normalize Donald Trump, it learned to normalize congressional dysfunction. Electing Democratic majorities this November won’t just check the Trump administration — it might also check the relentless slide into irrelevancy of the United States Congress.

It’s easy to forget that the legislative process used to involve both legislating and procedure. In late 2015, alluding to the absence of both that had come to define the House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan told NPR that “what this place [the House] always used to do is try to predetermine everything, down to like the amendment. And I don’t think the speaker’s office should have that kind of power.”

Yet today power remains even more concentrated within the speaker’s office, allowing one individual to control the agenda of an institution designed to reflect the will of the people. Bills with strong bipartisan and popular support, like permanent protections for Dreamers, don’t get a vote if they don’t align with the speaker’s political agenda. Meanwhile, if he feels like skipping the pesky process of debate or the burden of transparency, he simply deposits his bills straight on the floor. The House of Representatives has become a political charade.

The Senate isn’t far behind. As Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sought to push through the GOP’s massive tax cut late last year, for instance, some lobbyists got access to last-minute amendments before Democrats did. Meanwhile, Republican aides scribbled other tweaks to the bill in the margins of a printed copy in an attempt to rush the bill through with as little oversight as possible. As adherence to rules and precedent evaporates, so do the remaining pretenses of public service.

Both Ryan and McConnell assumed their powerful leadership roles with solemn vows to maintain “regular order.” That is, at least, until they found it more convenient to cast aside those rules and norms when they proved inconvenient. One imagines this isn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind. But for a party that fundamentally doesn’t believe in government, what better way to demonstrate its worthlessness than to sabotage one of its core institutions? America’s constitutional order offers few backstops for such cynicism and shamelessness.

There are plenty of reasons why Gallup’s congressional approval ratings have hovered around 20 percent for nearly a decade: Failing to maintain existing programs with broad public support. Failing to follow any semblance of regular order. Failing to repair bills with obvious flaws. Failing to attempt to address new national challenges. Failing even to keep the government itself open for more than a few months at a time.

As it is with any number of norm-breaking Trumpist pronouncements, the steps that marked the devolution of Congress into a political traffic jam first struck us as unprecedented and potentially catastrophic failures that must never be repeated. Then they happened again to less fanfare. And again and again, eventually reaching the present reality, where government shutdowns are somewhat regular occurrences and few people even pretend the U.S. Congress is capable of doing its job. Rather than being shocked by its failures, we’re shocked by its successes. Some days, we’re even shocked by its avoidance of failures. And thus is the bar lowered further, and the brokenness of Congress normalized.

What makes these failures even worse — and even more likely to continue — is that most are measured not by their long-term impact on the democratic process but instead in immediate wins and losses. Both the media and the American people have been complicit in chasing the fleeting satisfaction of short-term scandal and outrage at the cost of obscuring deeper congressional dysfunction. Passing a week-long continuing resolution along party lines might make CNN’s shutdown countdown disappear, but hitting the snooze button on national responsibilities only postpones the inevitable reckoning.

Just because an institution is broken doesn’t mean it’s incapable of unexpected jolts of progress, even in the Trump era. In early 2017, by large bipartisan margins, the House and Senate passed strong sanctions against Russia, forcing Trump’s reluctant signature on a bill he’d loudly opposed. Just last month, the House approved a criminal justice reform effort that’s both thoroughly insufficient in fighting mass incarceration and thoroughly impressive for garnering such a large bipartisan majority.

The bipartisan partnership between Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia that led to the latter bill follows a long tradition of unlikely across-the-aisle friendships generating unlikely results. My former boss, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, works tirelessly to build relationships with his Republican colleagues not just because it preserves an element of decorum in a politics increasingly devoid of it, but also because personal relationships provide some much-needed grease for the gears of the legislative process.

There are plenty of examples of individual members of Congress dismayed by gridlock and a lack of productivity and determined to build relationships with the other party. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I’d argue most members, and certainly most of their staff, are hardworking and well-meaning people who came to Capitol Hill for what many Americans would consider the “right” reason: service to their constituents and country. But meaningful friendships and good intentions alone aren’t enough. One of the core vulnerabilities of our democratic system is that it only takes a few bad faith actors in powerful positions to poison an institution.

The past few years have given America plenty of reasons to take the speaker’s gavel from the GOP’s undeserving hands. No one knows quite what Democratic majorities would mean for the Trump administration or Congress itself. But if Republicans keep control of the House and Senate this fall, we know exactly what to expect: a nonexistent legislative process in which shameless rhetoric, disingenuous messaging, and capitulation to Trump drown out the very notion of Congress as a separate and coequal branch of government.

Electing Democratic majorities in the 2018 midterms is crucial to restraining an out-of-control White House. But a hidden benefit of putting in charge the party that believes in the concept of government is the potential to restore Congress as a functional institution capable of solving — or at least making a good faith effort to solve — national challenges. That sliver of hope for progress is just one more reason, as if we needed one, to work tenaciously for a Democratic wave in November.

This column was originally published on Medium.

An electoral wake-up call in New Hampshire

History often hinges on just a few votes

It’s often said that in the United States, every vote counts, but some votes count more than others. In the 2016 presidential election, the 77,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that nudged Donald Trump into the White House counted for quite a lot. But the presidential race wasn’t the only election that year in which a tiny sliver of votes was enormously consequential.

Every year in races across the country, small margins of victory are quickly forgotten because elections, by definition, have only one winner. Their binary nature doesn’t just make it easy to overlook the impact of shockingly small margins. It also obscures just how often history hinges on good fortune and a few key votes.

Take New Hampshire. Barely a thousand votes separated winner from loser in the state’s 2016 U.S. Senate race. That small fraction, though, helped determine the balance of power in the Senate and quite possibly saved the Affordable Care Act. And if Democrats somehow retake the Senate this November, it seems likely they’ll do so with a bare majority — a majority that might have remained a minority but for 1,000 votes in one of the least-populous states in the country two years earlier. It’s a stark reminder of both the precariousness of electoral outcomes and the fact that in politics, these outcomes are clear-cut only in hindsight.

Outside the Granite State, few political observers pay regular attention to first-term senator Maggie Hassan. That’s understandable. She’s 94th in seniority, a reliable vote for the minority party, and giving little indication of seeking the White House in 2020. But Hassan’s role starts to look more significant in the context of how few votes separate her party from the majority — and how much that party’s minority status has allowed an out-of-control president to run roughshod over the norms of American democracy. And her election victory looks a lot different when you consider how close she came to losing it.

In 2016, Hassan, previously a two-term governor, challenged sitting GOP senator Kelly Ayotte in a race that drew national attention, owing in large part to Ayotte’s national profile and her inability to decide how she felt about Trump. Nearly three-quarters of a million people voted in the New Hampshire Senate race. Of those 738,620 votes, Hassan eked out a win by a margin of 1,017 votes — 0.14 percent of all votes cast, and less than one-tenth of one percent of the state’s voting age population at the time.

New Hampshire is not a big state. But its votes in the Senate are just as big as those of Texas or California or Florida. If Ayotte, who had been a fairly reliable GOP vote, is in the Senate last year instead of Hassan, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act probably doesn’t hinge on John McCain’s thumbs-down or Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski’s heroic opposition — because the law is already gone. By that metric, a thousand votes in New Hampshire mark the difference between life and death for some Americans who depend on Obamacare.

This November, it’s possible that a “blue wave” does indeed crash over America, depositing huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. It’s also possible that Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts have so rigged the electoral map that the GOP easily retains control of both chambers. There are, of course, plenty of other ways Democrats could come up short, from poor candidates and shoddy campaigns to low turnout. And when it comes to calibrating expectations for Democratic victories in November, we shouldn’t forget just how steep the hill is (or how much interest the media has in making the meaningless appear meaningful).

But it seems likely that control of both houses of Congress will come down to a small number of seats, and that those seats themselves will be decided by a relatively small number of votes. While a single rank-and-file member of the House of Representatives doesn’t affect the chamber as much as an individual senator, the difference between a one-seat Democratic majority and a one-seat Republican majority is just as consequential. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the 2018 midterms on the future of American democracy. That means every race — every vote — matters this fall.

Close races with highly leveraged outcomes exist at every level of government. Last year, control of a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates — and with it control of the entire chamber — rested on a single vote. As the Washington Post reported, when a “judicial panel declared a tie… officials picked a name out of a bowl to determine a winner,” giving control to Republicans. But the Post later found that “more than two dozen voters — enough to swing the outcome of that race — cast ballots in the wrong district, because of errors by local elections officials.” Any one of those twenty-six votes, out of the roughly 23,000 cast, could have kept control of the House of Delegates from being determined by pure chance.

Not every midterm race will be this close; gerrymandering by both parties and America’s political self-sorting will see to that. But plenty could be, which is why ongoing efforts to fight voter disenfranchisement and mobilize a new generation of voters are so critical. Whether it’s a state-level seat in Virginia, a U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire, or control of the White House itself, a remarkably small number of votes can change the course of history and the lives of people who live many miles, or many time zones, away.

It’s no exaggeration to suggest the Affordable Care Act was saved by a thousand votes in New Hampshire. The margins may be just as small this November, but the stakes are even greater.

This column was originally published on Medium.

Don’t overthink Trump

It’s tempting to project strategy where none exists

To paraphrase Marco Rubio, let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Donald Trump has any idea what he’s doing. He has no idea what he’s doing.

Trump’s reckless decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal is a reminder that there’s little more to this president than meets the eye. There’s no strategic plan. There’s no “Trump doctrine.” There are no long-term goals, policy-wise or otherwise, other than undoing his predecessor’s legacy. There aren’t really even short-term goals, unless you count the impulsive decisions driven by what the president sees on television.

This description of Trump is neither new nor much in dispute. Even some of his most fervent supporters describe him and try to communicate with him in ways that acknowledge this basic understanding. Yet the narrative of the Trump presidency continues to feature complex, even sophisticated, explanations for why the president does what he does — as if the clearest, most logical explanation were just too simple to be true.

On the day Trump announced his decision on the Iran deal, for example, the New York Times’ David Sanger and David Kirkpatrick wrote that Trump, along with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Israel, ultimately opposed the nuclear agreement because it “legitimized and normalized Iran’s clerical government” and didn’t address other aspects of the Iranian regime’s behavior, from its human rights abuses to its ballistic missile tests.

The same day, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s decision “had effectively been made last October, when he declared that Iran was not in compliance with the deal and called on European allies to negotiate better terms.” Later that week, the AP wrote that “the Trump administration had been actively preparing for a pullout since January” because “it was as clear then as now that the president would not be swayed to accept even a toughened-up version of the accord.”

While the rhetoric of Trump’s announcement and the comments of his advisers suggest there’s some truth to these analyses, neither captures the whole truth of how, or when, the one person ultimately responsible for making this decision actually made it.

Given his affection for strongmen and autocrats from Egypt to the Philippines to Turkey to Russia, does anyone really imagine that Trump cares deeply about the Iranian government’s human rights record? Does anyone really think that Trump — who called the nuclear agreement the “the worst deal ever negotiated” during the campaign — actually waited until last October, or even this past January, to decide to pull the plug? Does any aspect of Trump’s behavior as a candidate or a president really suggest this decision was made as part of a careful strategy — that he would ever truly consider keeping in place something the Post rightly called “one of President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievements?”

As The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser tweeted, “Trump pulling out of the Iran deal he called ‘the worst deal ever’ is not a surprise. The surprise is that so many smart people thought they could convince him otherwise.” That Trump thinks the agreement is “the worst deal ever” is not surprise either, nor is it even remotely difficult to explain. He doesn’t like Barack Obama. The Iran deal is part of Obama’s legacy. Therefore, it’s the worst deal ever. Despite the coverage of Trump’s decision, there’s little evidence his analysis went much beyond that.

All politicians — all people — have egos and insecurities and personal quirks that affect their decisions and worldview. Good leaders recognize these tendencies and seek to offset them; great leaders hire teams of rivals and build systems to counteract their biases and blind spots. Trump, on the other hand, thrives in a world of bias and willful blindness. Among modern presidents, he’s unique in making decisions not in spite of but because of his human shortcomings.

Deliberating? Compiling facts? Assessing evidence? Seeking opposing views? Considering second- and third-degree consequences? The hallmarks of good decision-making differ from person to person and situation to situation, but an effective process usually channels at least some of these tactics into reaching a desired outcome. With Trump, the process is reversed. The outcome is predetermined by his vanities or impulses, and the deliberation is projected after the fact as part of a well-crafted, but largely fictional, narrative.

Trump and his team have applied the same backwards formula to plenty of other policy issues, from U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement to the litany of Obama-era rules the Trump administration has repealed or walked back. It’s true that Trump’s worldview has left him relatively consistent on a few issues, like trade. It’s also true that many of the people in his orbit have more complex motives, and a more nuanced worldview, than their boss. But the man himself is pretty transparent. So why do we continue to cloak his decisions in rationality?

In a much-discussed column published shortly after the FBI raided the offices of Michael Cohen, The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson makes a compelling case for the “end stage of the Trump presidency.” Reflecting on his experience reporting on the Iraq war and the financial crisis, Davidson sees parallels in an impending collapse of Trump’s corrupt house of crimes. “This doesn’t feel like a prophecy,” Davidson writes. “It feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth.”

That same perspective readily applies not just to Trump’s presidency but to Trump himself. The reality of who Trump is as a politician and policymaker has been staring us in the face for years. Describing Trump’s rhetoric and decisions as driven by personal resentments and television-generated impulses is, as Davidson put it, a simple statement of the apparent truth.

Overthinking his decision-making and overcomplicating his worldview creates a false veneer of legitimacy that makes it easier to accept the unacceptable. Projecting thoughtful, policy-driven explanations onto Trump’s decisions helps rationalize what he’s doing. These explanations might offer some comfort (It’s not that bad — he’s practically a regular GOP president!), but they also provide an excuse not to confront the more obvious, and terrifying, reality. They’re a dangerous crutch, lulling us into thinking someone, somewhere — maybe even Trump — has a plan.

In a recent piece in Vanity Fair, journalist Peter Hamby offers some advice to American political journalists covering the scandal-laden chaos of the White House. “The simplest explanations are usually the best ones,” Hamby suggests. “Trump is the embodiment of Occam’s razor. If it’s rumored to have happened… it probably did.” The burden is on Trump to convince us that it didn’t.

There’s a broader lesson there. As with any elected official, the burden is on Trump to convince us that he has a strategy, that he’s acting in good faith, and that he’s making decisions for any reason other than perceived slights or personal resentments.

The Trump era is challenging enough as is. Let’s not assign complexities where none exist. Let’s not project rationality or strategy onto what’s more easily and more accurately explained by vanity and impulse. Let’s not assume there’s anything below the surface when overwhelming evidence on the surface suggests there isn’t much water there at all.

Trump’s operating rationale, if you can call it that, is simple and predictable. The longer he’s in office, the more urgent it becomes to recognize it for what it is — and what it isn’t.

This column was originally published on Medium.

The humor of James Comey

The former FBI director’s memoir captures the absurdity of the Trump era

James Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, opens with an amusing anecdote. It’s February 2017, and the then-FBI director is in a black SUV headed to Capitol Hill for a classified briefing on Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. The mood in the car is somber and serious. Comey and the FBI’s new congressional affairs head are riding in silence. In an attempt to inject some levity into the situation, Comey remarks, “How great is this? We’re in the shit!” Extending his arms to demonstrate the depth of the shit, he adds, “We’re waist deep in the shit! Where else would you want to be?”

Given the seriousness of the issues at stake and the lingering criticisms of Comey’s actions during the 2016 campaign (not to mention the decision to release a revealing memoir in the middle of an ongoing investigation for which Comey is a key witness), why does this story merit even a passing chuckle?

Because it’s a spot-on assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency and a valuable lesson in how to endure it. We are all in the shit. America is waist-deep in a moral and political morass, trying to keep from sinking further into a constitutional crisis. Whatever the author’s mistakes and shortcomings, A Higher Loyalty brilliantly diagnoses the absurdity of this situation and offers a worthy prescription for coping with it.

In Comey’s telling, the first two presidents he served shared his awareness of the occasional ridiculousness of the world and his appreciation for using humor to process it. George W. Bush, for instance, “understood that humor was essential to the high-stress, high-stakes business we were in. We could be talking with deadly seriousness about terrorism one minute and filling the Oval Office with laughter the next.” Balancing seriousness and levity was, Comey writes, “the only way to get through the job — to intentionally inject some fun and joy into it.”

Comey’s observations capture the mundane and the monumental in a dryly funny, and intensely human, way. Paninis? They “take forever,” at least in the FBI cafeteria. Hard choices? Well, “there’s a certain freedom in being totally screwed.” Avoiding Trump’s gaze by standing in a dark blue suit against similarly-colored curtains in the Blue Room of the White House? What luck, since “I didn’t have suits that blend in the Green or Red Rooms.” Appearing to share a cheek kiss with President Trump on national TV? Made worse by overhearing the score of an NFL playoff game, which Comey had DVR-ed, while sneaking out of the White House.

As Michiko Kakutani describes him in The New York Times, citing a phrase of writer Saul Bellow, Comey is a “first-class noticer,” an astute observer of details large and small. Coupled with his front-row seat to history, Comey is a particularly effective witness to the mannerisms and quirks of the current president.

Trump’s speaking style? An “oral jigsaw-puzzle contest with a shot clock.” His hands? “Smaller than mine,” but to be fair, “not… unusually so.” His attempts to impress Comey with a handwritten dinner menu? As Comey recounts matter-of-factly, “‘They write these things out one at a time, by hand,’ [Trump] marveled. … ‘A calligrapher,’ I replied, nodding. He looked quizzical. ‘They write them by hand,’ he repeated.”

The brevity of today’s news cycle and the slowly escalating, norm-shifting preposterousness of the Trump era can make it easy to forget just how absurd America’s president and its politics have become. Nothing exemplifies that reality better than the so-called Steele dossier, and Trump’s response to it. The president, for example, proclaims his innocence to Comey by insisting, “I’m a germaphobe!” Comey actually laughs out loud. “I decided not to tell him,” Comey writes, “that the activity alleged did not seem to require either an overnight stay or even being in close proximity to the participants.”

On another occasion, when Trump says to Comey that “it bothered him if there was even a one percent chance his wife Melania thought it was true,” Comey tells the reader, “I immediately began wondering why his wife would think there was any chance — even a small one — that he had been with prostitutes urinating on each other in Moscow.” His somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis continues: “For all my flaws, there is a zero percent chance — literally absolute zero — that Patrice [Comey’s wife] would credit an allegation that I was with hookers peeing on each other in Moscow.”

Those are pretty amusing lines coming from a six-foot-eight former director of the FBI whose prior public image might be described as serious and stoic. But why are these anecdotes anything more than petty jabs at the president’s expense?

They matter for two reasons — one profound and one practical. First, the profound. These stories are just a few brush strokes in a broader portrait of Trump painted by countless people who have interacted or worked with him. Taken together, they describe, with devastating consistency, a person controlled by his obsessions, insecurities, and lack of self-awareness. These characteristics — the things that make Trump seem a caricature of himself — impact far more than one man’s fragile ego.

The absurdity Comey so effectively captures is a reminder of the humanness of government and power. There’s no “Committee to Save America.” There’s no benevolent grown-up working in the background to make sure nothing too terrible happens. In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Comey describes his own decision-making as that of “a deeply flawed human surrounded by other flawed humans.” That, in a nutshell, is how any institution designed and led by human beings actually works — a reality not limited to the current White House.

The second reason Comey’s stories matter is more practical. They make us laugh. They help us keep things in perspective. In doing so, they help us summon the strength to endure.

Comey’s memoir is a lot of things. It’s well-written. It’s earnest and self-serving. It’s been cherry-picked for tidbits of gossip by reporters and pundits interested only in conflict, clicks, and Hillary Clinton’s emails. And as Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes has written, it deals with issues far more serious than the length of Trump’s tie or the size of his hands.

But it’s also funny, human, and at least somewhat self-deprecating in a way that’s rare in American politics today. In some ways, it’s only fitting that a solemn and self-righteous former law enforcement official would be the guy to remind us that while the stakes are indeed quite high, we also need to laugh a little to keep things in perspective.

We’re waist deep in a dangerous and absurd time in American history. Finding a little humor from time to time reminds us that, for as deep as it may be, at least we’re in it together.

Note: The quotations from Comey’s memoir are excerpted from the audiobook version, which explains any discrepancies in punctuation or formatting.

This column was originally published on Medium.